utobiography it might be called,” Woolf mused as she conjured a book titled first “The Moths/or the life of anybody,” later The Waves.1 As “books continue each other” (RO 80), I The Waves (1931) culminates Woolf’s middle series of self-portraits: To the Lighthouse (1927), Orlando (1928), and A Room of One’s Own (1929). With related diary entries, letters, drafts, and essays, these comprise what I shall broadly consider as The Waves’ genetic text.2 To call these works self-portraits presumes a special notion of the genre such as Woolf implies in framing this “abstract mystical eyeless book: a playpoem” as her or “anybody” ’s “life” (D 3:203, 7 November 1928). Loosed from objectivist notions of a singular, discrete individual, Woolf’s self-portraiture abandons conventional ideas of resemblance between image and object (the subject as bounded identifiable entity; a recognizable body; its observable doings) to explore a more expansive and abstract concept of being, akin to Clarissa Dalloway’s “transcendental theory” of a life, a self, that spreads “ever so far” beyond the organism’s spatial and temporal bounds (MD 152–53, 9). By the same token, once we grasp that, as Derrida observes, an artist can designate “just about anything a self-portrait, not only any drawing … but anything that happens to me, anything by which I can be affected or let myself be affected” (as Clarissa does by claiming “odd affinities” with people, places, trees, barns), conventional criteria of resemblance fail. We cannot be sure by “observing the work alone,” apart from extrinsic visual or verbal clues, whether the artist is drawing the artist drawing the artist “or something else—or even [the artist] as something else, as other.”3Or rather, given the gap between any life, any self, and its any and every representation, perhaps the one thing we can be sure of is that the artist is drawing the artist as something else, as other. Consider the seed of The Waves. On finishing the draft of To the Lighthouse, Woolf glimpsed what would become The Waves’ signal icon and reflected “how it is not oneself but something in the universe that one’s left with. It is this that is frightening & exciting. … One sees a fin passing far out.”4 A year later she remembers this apparition (an impersonal condition: “one sees,” not a unique event: I saw) and underscores its auto/biographical import: “‘Rarely rarely comest thou, spirit of delight.’ That was I singing this time last year; & sang so poignantly that I have never forgotten it, or my vision of a fin rising on a wide blank sea. No biographer could possibly guess this important fact about my life in the late summer of 1926; yet biographers pretend they know people.”5 After completing Orlando and A Room of One’s Own, Woolf prepared to “attack this angular shape in my mind. … the Moths will be very sharply cornered”; on finishing The Waves she exulted, “I have netted that fin in the waste of waters which appeared to me over the marshes out of my window at Rodmell” (D 3:219, 28 March 1929, 4:10,7 February 1931).
What makes this apparition so “important” an auto/biographical “fact,” years before it is “netted” in a work of art? What does it tell us about the “life” of a singing self thrice vanished—first into the remembering diarist, then into “one” (a pronoun that extends this singular vision to “anybody”), finally eclipsed (“not oneself”) by “something in the universe”?6 What is at stake in the transformation of an experience so private that (absent the diary entry) no biographer could guess it into “the life of anybody”? This chapter pursues these questions through the autobiographical trajectory from Orlando to The Waves by foregrounding two key features of these self-portraits as something other or more than oneself: woman and freedom. Each work depicts a woman artist entering the freedom arduously won by Lily Briscoe, who, defying the dictate “women can’t paint, can’t write,” approaches her canvas as “an unborn soul,” “reft of body,” “drawn out of gossip,” “living,” “community … into the presence of this formidable ancient enemy … this other thing, this truth, this reality” (TL 159, 158). As Orlando evolves over centuries from callow scribbler to renowned English poet, s/he parodies and transcends the contingencies of gender while figuring the quest to capture truth, essence, life, body in words as (seriously enough) a wild goose chase. A Room of One’s Own relates England’s changing political economy of gender to its literary history and prophesies that in another century women writers will “put on the body” that the poet Judith Shakespeare “has so often laid down” (RO 114). In The Waves—a self-portrait as that fin whose elemental shape recalls the triangle Lily abstracts from “mother and father and child in the garden” to signal the difference of being—Woolf strives to bring Room’s prophecy to birth before its time.7
In highlighting the terms woman and freedom in the works leading up to The Waves, I seek to reconcile the tension between aesthetics and politics registered in the novel’s curiously split reception. Formally the most original, ambitious, and adventurous of Woolf’s books, The Waves has been widely acclaimed a “masterpiece” (however challenging or “elitist”) on the one hand; avoided, dismissed, judged an “aesthetic failure,” a mere “warehouse” of materials and ideas, on the other.8 Even some admirers regard it as a modernist paragon of “mere” aestheticism, politically ineffective compared with realism.9 Others rebut such dismissals by emphasizing the novel’s engagement with gender or with “the submerged mind of empire.”10 I agree that The Waves is a masterpiece; but I question both the label of “mere” aestheticism and attempts to assimilate this “eyeless, mystical” book to political concerns, which tend to reify what its abstract form strips bare of substance. I propose instead that aesthetics converges with politics in the figure of the [woman] in The Waves—the subject as [woman], under erasure, there yet not there; bracketed in recognition of her vanishing, yet preserved in recognition of her status as bodily, natural, historical origin of this work of art. Approaching The Waves through its complex genesis, I frame it as a [woman] artist’s modernist “story of the world from the beginning”: a work of art that bodies forth the freedom manifest in creative genius by radically rethinking being, nature/physics, meaning, story, event, time, subjectivity, even grammar as rule, canon, law (Wh I 6, 9). As such, I argue, The Waves pursues a feminist politics’ furthest goal: its own demolition (not to be confused with antifeminist projects toward the same end).
The feminist politics that produces The Waves is ultimately not an identity politics, marked by self/other oppositions and attendant scapegoat dynamics, but seeks women’s freedom from identity and its politics.11 It recognizes the importance of economic, political, and social freedoms to the conditions of aesthetic creation and fights for these freedoms, or rights, through strategies of resistance to the restrictive social identity “woman,” constructed and imposed from without (as in Charles Tansley’s mantra “women can’t paint, can’t write”).12 Yet it also seeks a greater freedom—a freedom that surpasses contingencies of politics and of identity—even as a woman artist’s actualization of such freedom in a world in which it is said that women can’t paint or write is implicitly political. In quest of this greater freedom, Woolf’s autobiographical artist-figures play strategically with and against identity: Lily defies the identity Tansley predicates on her sex; Orlando calls some of her “many thousand” selves; Room’s speaker creates a persona of four legendary Maries in the spirit of an anonymous, androgynous Shakespeare; and The Waves ventriloquizes a [woman]’s vision through six lyric voices that tell a “life of anybody” (O 309).
The creative freedom that Woolf’s self-portraits of 1927–1931 explore is allied with genius in ways not strictly governed by the history of women’s contingent rights. If, as Room argues, Jane Austen could realize her gift as fully and freely as Shakespeare could his, then creative freedom intersects unevenly with political, social, and economic rights. Art may sometimes, and somewhat, reflect contingent rights or the lack thereof—as, Woolf finds, in the cases of “Judith Shakespeare,” Margaret Cavendish, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Margaret Oliphant, Charlotte Brontë—but not always, necessarily, or neatly. Yet that Austen required no utopia to write as freely as Shakespeare does not invalidate Room’s socioeconomic critique of English literary history. Rather, it supports Woolf’s argument that, while Judith Shakespeare could have written her brother’s plays (for she too had genius), “it would have been extremely odd” had she done so, given sixteenth-century Englishwomen’s economic, political, and social subjection (RO 46).
Freedom is already a key word for Lily Briscoe, who when she paints feels “cut loose” from contingent “ties” to experience life’s “intensity & freedom,” as it is in the Kantian aesthetics of Bloomsbury that she brings to life (TLhd 280). In chapter 1 we considered the disinterestedness of Kantian aesthetics, revived in Bloomsbury’s “significant form.” Here I shall argue that Kant’s aesthetic theory helps elucidate the alliance of the terms woman, freedom, and genius in Woolf’s texts.13 For Kant, as we saw in chapter 1, the imagination’s freedom exists in the noumenal realm, beyond nature’s sensible, phenomenal realm and beyond human ken. Through the imaginative freedom that the artist exercises in creating “another nature … out of the material that actual nature gives it,” art creates a bridge between nature and the supersensible realm of freedom. In contemplating a work of art—“something different which surpasses nature,” which has a “completeness” not found in nature and which occasions thought to which “no concept can be fully adequate”—“we feel our freedom.”14 Whereas moral reason submits its judgments to moral law, and science submits its concepts to nature’s law, art manifests a freedom subject to no rule but purposive in itself, for it is genius, or “nature in the subject”—an inborn gift that makes the artist one of “nature’s favorites”—that alone “gives the rule to art” (CJ §46–49, esp. 150, 152, 162, CPJ 186, 188, 195–96). Thus, of the three “pure ideas of reason”—God, freedom, immortality—only freedom “proves its objective reality” by its effects in nature (CJ §91 327, CPJ 338). So Bernard paints human beings as neither “slaves” suffering “incessantly unrecorded petty blows on our bent backs” nor “sheep … following a master” but “creators” whose “force” transforms “chaos” into thought and art, “part of the illumined and everlasting road” (W146).
By freedom, Kant writes, a human being actualizes “that worth which he alone can give to himself … not as a link in nature’s chain but in the freedom of his faculty of desire” (CJ §86 293, CPJ 309). The masculine pronoun is accidental: we might just as well say, by freedom a human being actualizes “that worth which she alone can give to herself … in the freedom of her faculty of desire,” where the pronoun “she” represents the human being as such.15 Genius, moreover, is not a static attribute of the artist but a potential that the artist must struggle to realize: in this sense, freedom has its contingencies, as Kant notes in speaking of the artist’s “slow and even painful” labor to give inspiration material form (CJ §48 156, CPJ 191). In the case of The Waves, these contingencies include the question of whether, and how far, a woman can represent—and be understood to represent—being as such; how far a woman—branded economically, politically, and socially with an identity that Monique Wittig names the “mark of gender,” by contrast with the masculine identity generally taken as neutral, unmarked, universal—can aspire to represent the universal.16 The oscillation between the marked pronoun she and the universal one in The Waves’ genetic text rhetorically projects a free subject [woman] out of gender’s contingency. The [woman] in The Waves wrests freedom from gender (an “ontological impossibility,” as Wittig points out [66]) to actualize her genius in lyric prose that approaches poetry—the genre ranked highest by Kant (as by Woolf in Room) because it owes most to genius, least to rule; it “strengthens the mind by making it feel” itself “free, spontaneous, and independent of natural determination”; and it “plays with illusion” undeceived (CJ §53 170–71, CPJ 203–4).
The politics of The Waves is inseparable from its aesthetics insofar as it seeks to actualize genius, “nature in the subject,” in a woman’s body—thereby demonstrating not one woman’s genius but women’s equal, unremarkable likelihood of possessing inborn genius; and women’s equal, unremarkable freedom to move from particular to universal, from “she” to “one.” If this project seems dated to us, it had hovered in Woolf’s future at least since 1920, when (as we saw in chapter 3) she publicly challenged her dear Bloomsbury friend Desmond MacCarthy’s smug conviction that education could little compensate for women’s inborn intellectual inferiority. Anticipating A Room of One’s Own, Woolf invites MacCarthy to survey the history of English women writers to measure how immensely women have advanced in “intellectual power” with increasing access to education; and she contemplates with equanimity the thought of being herself compared with men—including, presumably, her elder and rival Bennett and MacCarthy himself, a brilliant conversationalist who never managed to write anything of moment.17
By keeping the body in the picture alongside genius and freedom, Woolf forestalls both the expulsion of politics from aesthetics implied by the judgment “mere” aestheticism and, equally, the displacing of aesthetic by political judgment. The female body is the site where aesthetics and politics converge: the locus of genius, “nature in the subject,” and the target of the scapegoat dynamic that perpetually reproduces masculine domination.18 In exploring the movement from she to [she]/one—from woman as particular to woman as universal—Woolf leaves open the question of whether its creator’s sexed body and/or gender-inflected history necessarily register in the work of art, and if so, as an essential or a merely contingent feature, and in what sort of relation to the universal. Is [she] the purely political remainder of a historical she become one, or does [she] register the sexed body as a dimension of that nature-in-the-subject that is genius? Or, to take Room’s formulation, how exactly does a woman writing “as a woman who has forgotten that she is a woman” write (RO 93)? If, by actualizing genius in a woman’s body, [she] exposes masculine privilege, gives the lie to essentialized constructions of genius and freedom, does [she] also disclose within the universal a corresponding [he]? Is [she] or [he] a merely accidental historical residue of the universal, or something more? What light do Woolf’s depictions of women as creative subjects, freed from their traditional role as representation’s objects in British aestheticism, cast on relations between embodied subjects (of either sex) and genius, freedom, art?
This chapter traces Woolf’s exploration of the creative freedom won by Lily Briscoe (“so joyous in her freedom”), practiced as radical fantasy in Orlando, analyzed under the aegis of its socioeconomic conditions in Room, and pursued to the limit of her imagination in The Waves (TLhd 138). Throughout this long adventure Woolf keeps the sexed body in the picture even when the artist is “reft of body”—like Lily, like Woolf’s anonymous, androgynous Shakespeare, like the [woman] in The Waves. On the watch for the ways Woolf draws the woman artist drawing the woman artist “as something else, as other” in these works, we turn first to Orlando.
Orlando and The Oak Tree: A Fantasia of Freedom
I feel the need of an escapade after these serious poetic experimental books. … I want to kick up my heels & be off.
—Woolf, Diary, 14 March 1927
Woolf’s wish to kick up her heels and let her imagination race free launched an auto/biographical fantasia of a writing self in quest of poetry. The ostensible subject of Orlando: A Biography—“the longest and most charming love-letter in literature”—is the writer and poet Vita Sackville-West, Woolf’s intimate friend from 1923 and sometime lover between 1925 and 1928.19 But there is a good deal of Woolf in Orlando too, particularly in the liberating theories of being, identity, biography, autobiography, and poetry that she infuses into Vita’s aristocratic family history to create a character unbounded by sex, gender, even the ordinary human life span.20 In Orlando Woolf sets out “to tell a persons life from the year 1500 to 1928. Changing its sex. taking different aspects of the character in different Centuries. the theory being that character goes on underground before we are born; & leaves something afterwards also” (Oh 2). She endows the androgynous Orlando with birth, wealth, rank, beauty, and that “rarer gift” glamour, which the Russian princess Sasha likens to “a million candles” burning without Orlando’s having to light “a single one” (O 124). Yet Orlando aspires to be not society’s favorite but nature’s—a poet. The impressive circumstantial identity of this heir to 365 bedrooms pales beside Orlando’s “ineffable hope” to be “by birth a writer, rather than an aristocrat”; to belong to the “sacred race” of poets “rather than to the noble.”21
In pursuit of poetry, Orlando encounters gossiping, avaricious, social-climbing poets from Nick Greene to Alexander Pope, who, whatever their gifts, talk less of poetry than worldly gloire (or as Greene has it, “Glawr”). Indeed Orlando takes up the pen at sixteen in the Elizabethan period, ambitious to be “the first poet of his race,” and she is crowned with laurels at thirty-six several centuries later—a utopian avatar of the [woman] poet who, Woolf predicts at the end of Room, will be born in “another hundred years” (O 104; RO 94). But Orlando’s abiding role model remains Shakespeare, here portrayed as a genius whose imagination flourishes in obscurity; and Orlando’s quest leads beyond literary prizes and the glory of a “name” toward freedom—from identity, gender, class, and every certainty, and on to the radical freedom and “terror” of “the present moment” (O 321–22).
Orlando famously begins with a pronoun: “He—for there could be no doubt of his sex.” Emulating the barbaric, racist masculinity of his savagely imperial “fathers,” “who had struck many heads of many colours off many shoulders,” this Elizabethan boy “lunge[s] and plunge[s] and slice[s]” with his blade at a “head of a Moor” hung with others from the attic rafters (O 13). Having introduced his subject by parodying the violence that attends the formation and performance of identity, the biographer now undercuts contingencies of gender, class, race, nation, historical moment, age—all the self/other dynamics by which identity is formed and sustained—with a scene of writing.22 Orlando drops his sword to hack about with his pen on “Aethelbert: A Tragedy in Five Acts,” the latest of his “no more perhaps than twenty tragedies and a dozen histories and a score of sonnets,” all bearing “the name of some mythological personage at a crisis of his career” and all failures—as, now, he throws down his pen in despair on catching sight of “the thing itself,” in this case, a laurel bush whose precise shade of green eludes his net of words (O 16, 24, 76, 17).
Notwithstanding the biographer’s conviction regarding the masculine pronoun (yet what rouses doubt more surely than denying doubt’s possibility?), Orlando resembles that pronoun scarcely more than the laurel does “Aethelbert.” As the laurel bush to the word “green,” Orlando to the pronoun, the material world to language, the sexed body to gender. From the outset, gender is metaphor, poetry, fiction—a complex of figural meanings shaped by convention and attached to sexed bodies no more permanently or securely than clothes.23 Bodies, meanwhile, stand aloof from language even when subjected to material investigation. If Queen Elizabeth—“who knew a man when she saw one, though not, it is said, in the usual way”—encourages confidence in the biographer’s pronoun, the women who perch on Orlando’s lap, “guessing that something out of the common lay hid beneath his duffle cloak” and “quite as eager to come at the truth of the matter as Orlando himself,” parody the gulf between conceptual and carnal knowledge (O 26, 29). So too Orlando, bedazzled by a Russian “figure” flying by on the ice, can only guess at its sex (“alas, a boy it must be—no woman could skate with such speed and vigour”), even as amorous metaphors (“a melon, a pineapple, an olive tree, an emerald, and a fox in the snow”) bubble up involuntarily in his mind (O37). On the discovery that this “person” is “a woman,” Orlando’s own body broadcasts a lover’s signs (“Orlando stared; trembled; turned hot and cold; longed to hurl himself through the summer air; to crush acorns beneath his feet; to toss his arms with the beech trees and oaks”) (O 37–38). Yet even now something about Sasha seems “hidden,” “concealed,” keeping open the question not just of Sasha’s sex but of what difference sex should make and why in this lesbian “love-letter” of a novel (O 47).
By aligning the sexed body with the laurel bush beyond the reach of language, Orlando sets the stage for its parody of gender, brought to the fore by Orlando’s mysterious sex-change between his ambassadorship to Constantinople and her running away with the gypsies—an adventure that, like the expatriate Flush’s Italian days, dismantles the English aristocrat’s presumptive superiority. As the “woman” the biographer ceremoniously declares her to be, Orlando suffers the contingent bonds of gender, from skirts (“plaguy things to have about one’s heels,” she thinks, “giving her legs a kick”) to the forswearing of swearing and other masculine privileges; from lawsuits challenging her right to her property to gender’s mysterious power over bodies, as when a sailor nearly plummets from a mast on sighting an inch of the very same leg so admired by Elizabethan eyes (O 137, 154). As Orlando assiduously learns to playact the femininity that now befalls her (“La! … how you frighten me!” she cries as the cross-dressing Archduchess Harriet drops her gown to reveal “a tall gentleman in black”), she is “horrified to perceive how low an opinion she was forming of the other sex, the manly, to which it had once been her pride to belong”; “‘what fools they make of us—what fools we are!’” she laments, “censuring both sexes equally, as if she belonged to neither; and indeed, … she seemed to vacillate; she was man; she was woman; she knew the secrets, shared the weaknesses of each,” until, “uncertain whether she was alive or dead, man or woman, Duke or nonentity,” she repairs to “her country seat, where, pending the legal judgment, she had the Law’s permission to reside in a state of incognito or incognita, as the case might turn out to be” (O 178, 158, 168).
Whatever quandaries Orlando’s sex causes sailors, language, the Law—whatever its consequences for her social identity—the biographer insists that Orlando’s essence remains unchanged: “Orlando had become a woman—there is no denying it. But in every other respect, Orlando remained precisely as he had been. The change of sex, though it altered their future, did nothing whatever to alter their identity,” “their faces,” or (the masculine pronoun persisting in the face of facts) “his memory—but in future we must, for convention’s sake, say ‘her’ for ‘his’ and ‘she’ for ‘he’” (O 138). If, as Gertrude Stein says, “I am I because my little dog knows me,” Orlando is Orlando because his/her elkhound Canute nearly knocks him/her down in joy at his/her return (recalling Argos greeting the disguised Odysseus). Although momentarily tripped up by linguistic gender, the staff knows Orlando too, Mrs. Grimsditch gasping, “Milord! Milady! Milady! Milord!” (O 169).
Even with identity (in the sense of essence) preserved and the pronouns tamed, sex eludes gender, as Orlando and her lover Shel discover. Each is so astonished “that a woman could be as tolerant and free-spoken as a man, and a man as strange and subtle as a woman,” that each forms “an awful suspicion”—“You’re a woman, Shel!”; “You’re a man, Orlando!”—which drives them “to the proof” in scenes of “protestation and demonstration” unknown “since the world began.”24 Although Orlando thanks Shel for making her “a real woman, at last” (as if the category were purely relational), the biographer is silent on this “proof,” undermined, in any case, by their frequent need to reverify it, as if gender were a psycholinguistic condition that sex cannot finally cure (O 253). And, of course, a socioeconomic condition, for even after Orlando’s sex is adjudicated by the court—“’The lawsuits are settled. … My sex … is pronounced indisputably, and beyond the shadow of a doubt (what was I telling you a moment ago, Shel?) Female”—the fact that her estates (much diminished after the lawsuits) are “tailed and entailed upon the heirs male of my body” leaves unclear whether a hypothetical daughter could inherit as Orlando evidently has (O 254–55).
In any case, Orlando’s sex seems attested in the realm of nature (though her gender remains fluid) when she gives birth to “a very fine boy” on “Thursday, March the 20th, at three o’clock in the morning,” an event the biographer swathes in such rhapsodic verbiage that a reader might almost miss it—the more so as this baby, like the sex change, alters Orlando’s “future” not at all, by contrast with the nineteenth century when the “life of the average woman” was little more than a “succession of childbirths” (O 295, 229). Yet this event does not cancel Orlando’s history (“She had been a gloomy boy … and sometimes she had tried prose and sometimes she had tried the drama. Yet through all these changes she had remained, she reflected, fundamentally the same”) (O 237). Nor does it impede the biographer’s rather self-contradictory theory that, “Different though the sexes are,” every human being “vacillat[es] from one sex to the other … and often it is only the clothes that keep the male or female likeness, while underneath the sex is the very opposite of what it is above,” producing such familiar “complications and confusions” as Orlando’s cross-dressing adventures with the London prostitutes (O 189).
But if nothing can be predicated on gender, neither can the body, however its sex is adjudicated, limit or determine a life or self that (to return to Clarissa’s theory) spreads “ever so far” beyond it. Orlando indeed resembles the laurel bush more closely than any pronoun. Abandoning “Aethelbert,” Orlando walks his estate and ties his “floating heart” to an ancient oak tree that flourishes at its high point overlooking forty English counties. Its roots become “the earth’s spine beneath him,” “the back of a great horse he was riding,” “the deck of a tumbling ship,” until “all the fertility … of a summer’s evening” seems “woven web-like about his body” (O 19). Hung in a tree, moved by “spiced and amorous gales every evening,” Orlando’s heart signals a life, a self, that overspills the body’s bounds in time and space through sensation, thought, experience, metaphor, memory, history, and human connections into unbounded phenomenal and invisible worlds, illustrating Orlando’s “theory … that character goes on underground before we are born; & leaves something afterwards also.”
The affinity of Orlando’s body with the oak tree’s roots, “running out like ribs from a spine this way and that beneath her,” highlights the autobiographical status of “The Oak Tree,” the one slender manuscript of Orlando’s bloated juvenilia that survives and “the only monosyllabic title in the lot” (O 77, 324). Orlando labors over this poem through the centuries until, in the late-Victorian period, she finally publishes it at Sir Nicholas Greene’s urging (“Really Orlando did not know what he meant. She had always carried her manuscripts about with her in the bosom of her dress,” O 280). But by the time it goes into seven printings and wins prizes and critical acclaim—its author compared to “Milton (save for his blindness)” and given “a cheque for two hundred guineas”—Orlando cares nothing for Fame and Glawr (O 324). While she still hopes to belong to the sacred race of poets, it is not Milton who inspires her but the “rather fat, rather shabby” old poet Orlando once glimpsed as a boy, who sat in dingy ruff and hodden brown at the servants’ table, “rolling some thought up and down, to and fro in his mind,” then writing “half-a-dozen lines”: “Was this a poet? Was he writing poetry? ‘Tell me,’ [Orlando] wanted to say, ‘everything in the whole world’—for he had the wildest, most absurd, extravagant ideas about poets and poetry—but how speak to a man who does not see you? who sees ogres, satyrs, perhaps the depths of the sea instead?” (O 21–22).
Orlando’s centuries-old memory of a poet she only belatedly guesses must have been “‘Sh—p—re’ (for when we speak names we deeply reverence to ourselves we never speak them whole)” illuminates the stakes for women of the book’s dismantling of gender: poetry, genius, the freedom of imaginative creation (O 313). Orlando’s Shakespeare dwells not in “the world of men and women” but in a “dark, ample and free” obscurity that “lets the mind take its way unimpeded.”25 While Greene deplores the Elizabethan playwrights’ freewheeling methods (“Their poetry was scribbled down on the backs of washing bills held to the heads of printer’s devils at the street door. Thus Hamlet went to press; thus Lear; thus Othello. No wonder, as Greene said, that these plays show the faults they do”), Orlando remembers being swept along with Sasha on a tide of “all the riff-raff of the London streets” to the Globe, where the world suffers the “strangest transformation”: Othello’s cries seem “torn from the depths of [Orlando’s] heart. The frenzy of the Moor seemed to him his own frenzy, and when the Moor suffocated the woman in her bed it was Sasha he killed with his own hands.”26 While Nick Greene chases Fame and Glawr, Orlando muses on “the delight of having no name … like a wave which returns to the deep body of the sea”; on “how obscurity rids the mind of the irk of envy and spite” and “sets running in the veins the free waters of generosity and magnanimity”; and how Shakespeare, like “all great poets,” wrote as the cathedral builders built—“anonymously, needing no thanking or naming.”27
Orlando’s enduring memory of Shakespeare inspires her to make good Milton’s “blindness”—here, a masculine mark of gender, an imbalance in the naturally androgynous creative imagination that Woolf theorizes in Room—by uncoupling poetry from gender. As Room will exhort women poets to “look past Milton’s bogey” and “the world of men and women” to see “reality; and the sky, too, and the trees or whatever it may be in themselves,” The Oak Tree rewrites Milton’s Eden, that garden of masculine universalism wherein dwell “He for God only, she for God in him.”28 Can it be accidental that the oak tree is sexually dimorphous, its male and female flowers mirroring the androgynous or “gunandros” poet (Oh 228 verso)? In any case, with Shakespeare as her model Orlando seeks not to invert Milton’s hierarchy of “He” over “She” but to escape that metaphysical garden altogether by figuring in language a wilder, freer nature, bodied forth in the laurel bush (“the thing itself”), the oak tree, and Orlando’s own fantastically free body; and further, in his/her “many thousand” selves and in the be-laureled little red book The Oak Tree. Parodying an old wish that his body might be granted “a grave among laurels,” Orlando would bury The Oak Tree by the oak tree as a rather incongruous “tribute” to the land and a “return” of its gifts, except that she forgets her trowel and anyhow finds such “symbolical celebrations” “silly” (O 17, 104, 324).
Orlando, who has “no traffic with the usual God,” rewrites Genesis and Paradise Lost as “a faith of her own,” elucidated in her chapel as she repents her spiritual flaws, especially “The letter S”—“the serpent in the Poet’s Eden”:
there were still too many of these sinful reptiles in the first stanzas of “The Oak Tree.” But ‘S’ was nothing … compared with the termination ‘ing.’ The present participle is the Devil himself. … To evade such temptations is the first duty of the poet … for … poetry can adulterate and destroy more surely than lust or gunpowder. … A silly song of Shakespeare’s has done more for the poor and the wicked than all the preachers and philanthropists in the world. … Thoughts are divine. Thus … she was back in the confines of her own religion … and was rapidly acquiring the intolerance of belief. (O 172–74)
The biblical scapegoating of women for sexuality and sin vanishes from Orlando’s Eden, as do sexual hierarchy and even sexual difference for almost all practical purposes. Orlando and Shelmerdine embrace polymorphous androgyny and the end of gender in each other, proved as we saw by their joyful if inconclusive “demonstration[s],” unwritten “since the world began” (O 252). Playing with illusion undeceived, Virginia’s “love-letter” to Vita strips bodies and poetic language down to mute materiality, disengaging sexual desire from sexual difference in an Edenic elsewhere in which laughter banishes divine law, oedipal protagonists, heterosexual plots and paradigms, and, not least, transcendent truth claims.29
In fact, “The Oak Tree,” that slender manuscript that gets slenderer the longer Orlando works on it, rewrites Milton’s Eden as a quest for “Life” (Vita) that never finds its goal or, rather, arrives, after centuries of searching, at the discovery that life (Latin: vita) has and can have no linguistic equivalent. “Life, life, what art thou?” sings Orlando at her worktable, echoed by the bored biographer, who (with a shot across Lawrence’s bow) longs for her to stop writing and “think, at least, of a gamekeeper.” A bird answers “Life, Life, Life!” moths “Laughter, Laughter!” until, “having asked them all and grown no wiser” in the quest “to wrap up in a book something so hard, so rare, one could swear it was life’s meaning,” they inform the expectant reader: “Alas, we don’t know” (O 268–71). With this revelation of truth’s utter illusoriness, Orlando pronounces “The Oak Tree” “Done!”—“only just in time” to prevent its “extinction” by incessant pruning (O 271). Its new Eden is an homage not to Milton but to a Shakespeare who signals freedom from gender, identity, class, every conviction, conclusion, fixed meaning—in Kant’s terms, poetry’s freedom to play with illusion undeceived. The boy who wishes Shakespeare to tell him “everything” matures into a [woman] poet who understands that genius is not knowledge but the imagination’s pure freedom, elusive of concepts and conclusions.30
This revelation casts the supreme genius Shakespeare not as an obstructing presence whose words leave nothing more to say but as a benignly enabling exemplar of the poet’s passion to transmute the present moment into language, as in the shock of Othello’s words on Orlando’s ear. While Sir Nicholas Greene pursues his antiquarian poetics, doles out honors for work “Done!” and makes Orlando feel that “one must never, never say what one thought. … one must always, always write like somebody else,” Shakespeare inspires Orlando, with her far more modest gifts, to capture her own “present moment” (O 285). From Shakespeare Orlando learns that writing’s possibility renews itself every moment as time and the world unfold past every act of writing, always beyond reach of language. Long after The Oak Tree appears, Orlando remains “Haunted!” as in childhood: “There flies the wild goose. … always I fling after it words like nets. … And sometimes there’s an inch of silver—six words—in the bottom of the net. But never the great fish who lives in the coral groves” (O 313). Orlando follows Orlando’s Shakespeare in the impossible quest to net in language the world’s green, the great fish, the wild goose, the thing itself, the present moment; and Orlando dramatizes this poet’s succession when Orlando revisits her estate and—seeing roped-off antique chairs “holding their arms out … for Shakespeare it might be … who never came”—unhooks the rope and sits down herself.31
Orlando’s tour de force ending evokes both the radical freedom and the annihilating “terror” of the present moment, whose contingency is redeemed only by the artist’s power to create another nature (O 322). Exposed to “the shock of time” as present rushes into past, Orlando’s “body quiver[s] and tingle[s] as if suddenly stood naked in a hard frost.” “Braced and strung up by the present moment,” she feels “strangely afraid, as if every time the gulf of time gaped and let a second through some unknown danger might come with it” (O 320–21). When a clock strikes in a carpenter’s shop, time “hurtle[s] through her like a meteor, so hot that no fingers can hold it”; the sight of the carpenter’s nailless thumb makes her faint. As she closes her eyes, she glimpses “something” that “one trembles to pin through the body with a name and call beauty, for it has no body, is as a shadow and without substance or quality of its own, yet has the power to change whatever it adds itself to” (O321–22). This mothlike “shadow” (a foreshadow of The Waves and a figure of the aesthetic dimension) enables Orlando to compose the overwhelming moment into “something tolerable, comprehensible,” and so to feel, “I can begin to live again. … I am about to understand. …” (O 322, latter ellipsis Woolf’s).
Here the biographer observes that Orlando is “now a very indifferent witness to the truth of what was before her,” her eyes fixed (like Shakespeare’s) on a magical inward pool in which “everything was partly something else, and each gained an odd moving power from this union of itself and something not itself, so that with this mixture of truth and falsehood her mind became like a forest in which things moved; lights and shadows changed, and one thing became another” (O 322–23). Her consciousness once more sutured to the sensible world by thought, memory, language, her imagination infusing things in themselves with that transforming “something,” Orlando “forg[ets] the time” and muses on “the secret transaction” that is poetry, “the thing itself—a voice answering a voice”; her “stammering answer … to the old crooning song of the woods, and the farms and the brown horses standing at the gate”; a “secret,” “slow” speech “like the intercourse of lovers.”32 As Orlando’s last words (“Thursday, the eleventh of October, Nineteen Hundred and Twenty-eight”—its English publication date) deliver its first readers literally (and the rest of us symbolically) to the present moment, time’s ferocious, uncapturable flight metamorphoses into the soaring goose that spells not just truth’s impossibility but the freedom we feel in this wild bird’s flight out of its natural body into “another nature” made by human art (O 329).
Originating in moments when “something useless, sudden, violent; something that costs a life” shatters certainty, Orlando’s life drawing is as unfinishable and inexhaustible as Shakespeare’s (O 287). As Orlando’s freedom to be—and to love—man and woman rewrites the story of the world, her play with illusion gestures beyond every plot: “She had formed here in solitude … a spirit capable of resistance,” observes the biographer. “‘I will write,’ she had said, ‘what I enjoy writing’; and so had scratched out twenty-six volumes” (O 175). Yet “for all her travels and adventures and profound thinkings,” Orlando remains “in process of fabrication. What the future might bring, Heaven only knew. Change was incessant… High battlements of thought; habits that had seemed durable as stone went down like shadows at the touch of another mind and left a naked sky and fresh stars twinkling” (O 175–76). Flinging herself on the oak tree’s knoll, “the back of a great horse” that she spurs on in pursuit of a wild goose that flies faster than words, Orlando beholds in her mind’s eye the changing skies over Constantinople—“another nature,” like the sky over Milton’s Sion—and the truth not that the world must change but that it is always changing, always different from what we think.
Freedom of Body, Freedom of Mind in A Room of One’s Own
As a matter of hard fact, the theory that poetical genius bloweth where it listeth, and equally in poor and rich, holds little truth. … [W]e may prate of democracy, but actually, a poor child in England has little more hope than had the son of an Athenian slave to be emancipated into that intellectual freedom of which great writings are born.
—Arthur Quiller-Couch, The Art of Writing, cited in A Room of One’s Own
It is the freedom of it that remains overwhelming. One has been liberated; set free—one finishes Antony & Cleopatra feeling that.
—Woolf, Women & Fiction
One must have been something of a firebrand to say to oneself, … Literature is open to everybody. … Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.
—Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
[Mary Carmichael] was no “genius”. … But … she had … mastered the first great lesson; she wrote as a woman, but as a woman who has forgotten that she is a woman, so that her pages were full of that unconscious sexual quality which comes only when sex is unconscious of itself.
—Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
The October that Orlando appeared, Woolf gave the “talks to girls” that inspired A Room of One’s Own (L 4:102, 28 October 1929). Her now world-famous advice to the students of Newnham and Girton, the women’s colleges at Cambridge, plunges the fantastic Orlando into an historical world in which women, it seems, are poor because men, it seems, are angry. As Orlando is Shakespeare’s utopian sister, Judith Shakespeare is his realist sister, blocked from realizing her genius by the political economy of gender. As Orlando debunks essentialist justifications of women’s exclusion from education, self-governance, and the public sphere, Room envisions the future of women’s writing in light of advances in Englishwomen’s legal rights and the creative freedom they underwrite. In 1928, with “two colleges for women in existence since … 1866,” married women’s property rights established in 1880, suffrage won “a whole nine years ago,” and economists urging a lower birth rate (“You must, of course, go on bearing children, but, so they say, in twos and threes, not in tens and twelves”), women writers at last have more than a “‘dog’s chance … to be emancipated into that intellectual freedom of which great writings are born’” (RO 112–113, 108, citing Quiller-Couch). If, as Woolf contends, “Intellectual freedom depends upon material things” and “Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom,” in 1928 a woman can earn five hundred pounds a year by her wits, have a room with a lock, and, like Orlando, pursue poetry, the “original” and “supreme” literary genre (RO 108, 66).
Woolf is alive not just to the freedom newly possible for women but to its continued limitation, as the multiple persona she fashions after the old Scots ballad “Mary Hamilton” attests: “Here then was I (call me Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael or by any name you please—it is not a matter of any importance).”33 In the ballad these three Maries survive the eponymous fourth, who bears a child by the queen’s consort, casts it into the sea, and sings the last verses on her way to be hanged for this crime. As the lecturer Mary Beton, Woolf tracks the historical conditions of women’s lives; consults Fernham’s headmistress, Mary Seton, on their causes; contemplates the “safety and prosperity of the one sex” and “the poverty and insecurity of the other”; and projects the future of Shakespeare’s sister through the contemporary novelist Mary Carmichael (RO 24). As Mary Carmichael, Woolf places her own writing and its future on the line. And, though unnamed, Mary Hamilton too sur-vives (from Latin super above, beyond + vivere to live)—lives further and longer, beyond the original ballad—in Room. In the ballad it is she who names the other three Maries in the act of memorializing herself: “Last night there was four Maries,” she sings as she climbs the scaffold. “The night there’ll be but three;/There was Mary Seton, and Mary Beton,/And Mary Carmichael, and me.”34 When Woolf tells the students, “call me Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael, or by any name you please,” her “me” echoes Mary Hamilton’s “me,” as her “or” evokes that unspoken but (to her audience) familiar name.35
How does Woolf’s “me” revive Mary Hamilton’s? Jane Marcus suggests that Woolf “speaks for” both Mary Hamilton and Judith Shakespeare, William’s (imaginary yet accurately historical, if not historically accurate) sister in Room’s speculative biography.36 No less gifted, “adventurous,” “imaginative,” “agog to see the world” than her brother, Judith fled a hateful arranged marriage to London, where men guffawed at her until Nick Greene (him again) “took pity on her” and got her pregnant (as William did Ann Hathaway), so that, to end “the torture her gift had put her to,” she took her life “one winter’s night and lies buried at some cross-roads” by “the Elephant and Castle” (RO 47–49). Like Judith Shakespeare, Mary Hamilton, whose song sounds behind Woolf’s guess that the ballad-maker Anon “was often a woman,” possesses a “poet’s heart … caught and tangled in a woman’s body,” and her life ends violently after she bears a child outside masculine law (RO 48–49). In speaking for these dead women poets, Woolf draws herself “as” a living body who resurrects history’s lost Mary Hamiltons and Judith Shakespeares, and in particular terms. The woman’s body in Room is at once a vessel of poetic genius, “nature in the subject,” and a reproductive body sacrificed to and by laws that place sexuality and childbearing no less than cultural life under masculine legal, economic, and social control. It is a body subject not simply to the natural law of human reproduction but to the fatality of maternity in a political economy of gender that sets nature (the female reproductive body) at war with nature (genius). It is the body of a woman poet who can scarcely be said to have been forced to choose between procreation and creative labor, since human sexuality conjoins with man-made economy, law, and culture less to force a choice than to deprive her of choice.
There are other bodies in the woman poet’s grave, for the children (who alter their mothers’ futures as Orlando’s child does not) also die. “Ye need nae weep for me,” sings Mary Hamilton, “Ye need nae weep for me; / For had I not slain mine own sweet babe, / This death I wadna dee.” If it seems incongruous to link the quasi-virginal, childless Woolf to this suffering maternal body, we remember how Vanessa sought to soothe their incestuous half brother George Duckworth’s concerns about the propriety of the unmarried Virginia’s sharing her Bloomsbury abode with men by reminding him coolly that “after all the Foundling Hospital was handy”—a modern escape hatch, before reliable contraception and abortion, from the fatality of female sexuality in a culture of man-made laws.37 But given Mary’s terms of endearment for her babe, these solutions would not lay the ghosts under Room’s floorboards. If contraception, abortion, and foundling hospitals help women survive their sexuality in an economy that keeps women poor and/or subject to masculine rule, they do nothing to alter that economy (again, a problem Orlando’s wealth finesses).
Woolf, in short, does not throw out the baby with the bathwater, the female reproductive body with man-forged manacles on women’s freedom of mind. When Mary Beton and Mary Seton deplore their mothers’ failure to make fortunes in trade to endow their futures, as their fathers have from time immemorial endowed those of their brothers, they confront the fact that had Mrs. Seton and her like “gone into business at the age of fifteen, there would have been—that was the snag in the argument—no Mary. What … did Mary think of that?” (RO 22):
There … was the October night, calm and lovely, with a star or two caught in the yellowing trees. Was she ready to resign her share of it and her memories (for they had been a happy family …) of … Scotland … in order that Fernham might have been endowed with fifty thousand pounds …? For, to endow a college would necessitate the suppression of families altogether. Making a fortune and bearing thirteen children—no human being could stand it. … If Mrs. Seton, I said, had been making money, what sort of memories would you have had … But it is useless to ask … because you would never have come into existence at all. Moreover, it is equally useless to ask what might have happened if Mrs. Seton and her mother and her mother before her had amassed great wealth and laid it under the foundations of college and library, because, in the first place, to earn money was impossible for them, and in the second, … the law denied them the right to possess what money they earned. (RO 22)
Mrs. Seton’s dilemma that is not one—her choice between making babies or making money, colleges, libraries, wine cellars, and poetry, except that, of course, she has no choice—excavates the deeper, structural problem: the political economy of gender. Why didn’t Judith Shakespeare write her brother’s plays? because she was female, hence, poor, and subject not just to the world’s indifference (like Keats) but to its hostility. And why are women poor? because women bear children in an economy whose violent appropriation of female labor to masculine control they are too busy and poor to protest. Thus Woolf pictures her audience “pointing to the streets and squares and forests of the globe swarming with black and white and coffee-coloured inhabitants,” saying, “we have had other work on our hands. Without our doing, those seas would be unsailed and those fertile lands a desert. We have borne and bred and washed and taught … one thousand six hundred and twenty-three million human beings … and that, allowing that some had help, takes time” (RO 112).
Not content merely to have survived, Mary Beton discloses the structural binaries this economy produces: men, its sovereign subjects v. women, its circulating objects; wealth/poverty; education/ignorance; Stock Exchange/unpaid maternal labor. Although Room defers these issues in order to keep women’s writing at center stage, the body stays in the picture. The deep question Maries Beton and Seton would pose to “an inscrutable society” that makes children the price of genius in a woman’s body sounds insistently through the text: Lady Winchelsea and Margaret of Newcastle were childless; “four more incongruous characters could not have met” than Jane Austen, the two Brontës, and George Eliot, “Save for the possibly relevant fact that not one of them had a child” (RO 24, 66). Unable to solve the problems she articulates, Mary Beton, like a good academic adviser, tosses out topics for the students to pursue: Elizabethan women’s education, literacy, privacy, fertility, “what, in short, they did from eight in the morning till eight at night”; “the history of men’s opposition to women’s emancipation,” “more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself” though its author would need protective bars of “solid gold”; bolder still, an anthropology of chastity, that “fetish invented by certain societies for unknown reasons,” which to “bring … to the light of day demands courage of the rarest” (RO 46, 55, 49–50).
For Judith Shakespeare to “have lived a free life in London in the sixteenth century … might well have killed her”; any work she did get done “would have been twisted and deformed” as well as “unsigned” (RO 50). Mary Beton tracks women’s increasing access over the centuries to the education, discipline in the art, time to labor, peace, and the freedom of body and mind necessary “to write a work of genius”—“almost always a feat of prodigious difficulty” (RO 51). That by 1800 Jane Austen could express her gift as fully and freely as Shakespeare—without fear, bitterness, hatred, protest, preaching—seems to Mary a “miracle”; Charlotte Brontë, she judges, had “more genius” but felt with resentment “how enormously her genius would have profited” had she had three hundred pounds a year and freedom to travel, meet everyone, experience the world (RO 68–70). As for Mary Beton herself in the year 1929, she is not poor only by a fluke: an aunt’s 1919 fall from her horse in Bombay has endowed her freedom “to think for oneself” (RO 106). For, notwithstanding women’s growing economic independence, merely earning one’s living does not in itself ensure “freedom of mind” (RO 99). Before that fortunate fall, young Mary knew hard work, low pay, penury, and, worse, “the poison of fear and bitterness” from “doing work that one did not wish to do … like a slave, flattering and fawning.”38 Meanwhile,
the thought of that one gift which it was death to hide—a small one but dear to the possessor—perishing and with it myself, my soul … became like a rust eating away the bloom of the spring, destroying the tree at its heart. However, as I say, my aunt died; and whenever I change a ten-shilling note a little of that … fear and bitterness go. … by degrees … modified … into pity and toleration; and then … the greatest release of all came, which is freedom to think of things in themselves. … Indeed, my aunt’s legacy unveiled the sky to me and substituted for the large and imposing figure of a gentleman, which Milton recommended for my perpetual adoration, a view of the open sky. (RO 37–39)
It is too seldom remarked that Milton’s gentleman in the sky is the patriarchal god, made in man’s image and historically invoked to authorize the economy of gender that keeps women poets poor, pregnant, thwarted, and/or dead—“destroying the tree” (that recurring symbol of freedom, reality, poetry, and the poet herself) “at its heart.” What unveils the sky—“things in themselves”—to Mary, what emancipates her from being a “slave” to dull necessity into “that intellectual freedom of which great writings are born,” is the small inheritance that exempts her from the rule that women are poor.
Woolf is often attacked for saying, in effect, that for women writers it is not enough to be nature’s favorite; one must also be one’s aunt’s. Failing that, it is not enough to earn five hundred a year; you must earn it “by your wits,” like Aphra Behn, that bold pioneer of women’s “freedom of the mind, or rather [its] possibility.”39 It is true that Woolf’s woman writer is no better than she should be. The locale of Aunt Mary’s fall emphasizes that, in her modest degree, Mary Beton lives (like her brothers, fathers, uncles, sons) on the “slave” labor of others in Britain’s imperial and class economy. Once Mary “ceases to speak,” Woolf does not flinch at the Darwinian suggestion that her ambitions for women’s writing may lead “to the murder of one’s aunts” and even urges her young listeners to get “By hook or by crook” enough money to travel, idle, “contemplate the future or the past of the world,” dream over books, “loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream,” and to write travel, adventure, research, scholarship, history, biography, criticism, philosophy, and science—all fodder for future fiction and poetry (RO 105, 108, 109). Indeed, to be good writers women must renounce excessive virtue; why else does Woolf insist that “good writers, even if they show every variety of human depravity, are still good human beings”; and that women’s writing benefits not women only but “the world at large” because writers “live more than other people in the presence of … reality” and help “the rest of us” to know it (RO 109–10)? No more a paragon of virtue than her male compeer, Woolf’s woman writer, with her hook-or-crook methods and possible “depravity,” is redeemed by what she reveals of “reality.”
In the matter of what the world calls “depravity,” Room practices what it preaches. Mary Beton evokes the obscenity trial of Radclyffe Hall’s Well of Loneliness on 9 November 1928, at which Woolf stood ready to testify in the book’s defense, when she lectures on Mary Carmichael’s Life’s Adventure, published “this very month of October”—like the similarly depraved Orlando, which escaped censorship and trial.40 Mary Beton first compares reading this “last volume in a very long series” by Englishwomen writers to “being out at sea in an open boat” (evoking The Voyage Out) and then considers how Mary Carmichael has struggled against tradition, breaking sentence and sequence to say something new (evoking Jacob’s Room, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse) (RO 80–81). Then
I turned the page and read … I am sorry to break off so abruptly. … Do you promise me that behind that red curtain … Sir Chartres Biron is not concealed? We are all women, you assure me? Then I may tell you that the very next words I read were these—“Chloe liked Olivia” … perhaps for the first time in literature. Cleopatra did not like Octavia. And how completely Antony and Cleopatra would have been altered had she done so! As it is … the whole thing is simplified, conventionalised, if one dared say it, absurdly. Cleopatra’s only feeling about Octavia is one of jealousy. Is she taller than I am? How does she do her hair? The play, perhaps, required no more. But how interesting it would have been if the relationship between the two women had been more complicated. (RO 82, first ellipsis Woolf’s)
Mary Beton’s comic precaution in case Sir Chartres Biron—the Chief Magistrate for the Well of Loneliness trial, who on November 16 ordered it seized and destroyed—might be lurking in the drapery flaunts a certain affinity between Hall’s book and “Mary Carmichael’s” Orlando, even as this scene anticipates Luce Irigaray’s image of women as the “goods”—objects of exchange in an economy of masculine subjects—getting together in a lesbian economy that eludes and mocks masculine control of women’s bodies and minds.41 Mary Beton also recalls the escapades with prostitutes that Orlando’s biographer glides over in silence: given time, she predicts, Mary Carmichael will depict “the courtesan, the harlot and the lady with the pug dog … as they are”—once she has struggled free of “that self-consciousness in the presence of ‘sin’ which is the legacy of our sexual barbarity,” thrown off “the shoddy old fetters of class” (RO 88). While English literature has been immeasurably “impoverished” by the strictures on women’s bodies and minds, the newly autonomous Mary—providing she “knows how to write”—can begin to repair those losses if she abandons a false and suffocating virtue for courage to “face … the world of reality” (RO 83–84, 114).
Mary Carmichael, though “no genius,” not only treats characters and relationships that Shakespeare leaves untouched (as Chloe/Olivia’s emergence from the matrix of Cleopatra/Octavia proves) but (like Shakespeare and Orlando) can explore the present moment’s “caves” and “chamber[s] … where nobody has yet been” with a freedom that “women of far greater gift lacked even half a century ago” and coin into language the “feeling that is actually being made and torn out of us at the moment.”42 As for poetry, self-portraiture again undergirds Woolf’s belief that the dead poet Judith Shakespeare “still lives … in you and in me, and in many other women” and her prophecy that she will soon be “knocking [the novel form] into shape for herself when she has the free use of her limbs” and inventing “some new vehicle, not necessarily in verse, for the poetry in her,” as yet “still denied outlet.”43 Already “Fear and hatred” born of oppression have almost vanished from Mary’s writing, felt only in “a slight exaggeration of the joy of freedom” as her “sensibility”—“wide, eager and free”—“respond[s] to an almost imperceptible touch on it,” “feast[ing] like a plant newly stood in the air on every sight and sound” and bringing “buried things to light” (RO 92). No longer an economic “slave,” Mary can write relatively unencumbered by impediments and grievances contingent on sex—in Kant’s terms, by the “interest” that contaminates the free play of imagination and understanding requisite to “pure” aesthetic judgment (CJ §13 58–59, CPJ 107–8).
Indeed, Mary Carmichael has already “mastered the first great lesson; she wrote as a woman, but as a woman who has forgotten that she is a woman, so that her pages were full of that curious sexual quality which comes only when sex is unconscious of itself” (RO 93). At stake in this lesson is a disinterestedness that does not obliterate sex but renders it “unconscious of itself.”44 Insofar as “woman” signals a curtailment of human freedom—as in Charlotte Brontë’s self-portrait as Jane Eyre—Mary does not write as a “woman.” Nor does she write like a man, since the “curious sexual quality” her writing exudes evidently differs from the dark bar of grievance the male professor’s baleful I casts over his page; differs too from the androgynous Shakespeare’s writing, as Chloe and Olivia demonstrate. If sex “unconscious of itself” signifies a living body and mind unburdened by grievances that bespeak “interest” and compromise freedom, does Mary’s writing, like Orlando’s baby, express sex as a pure fact of nature, apart from social law? In that case, is genius, “nature in the subject,” inflected by sex as nature in the subject—sex as prior to the political economy of gender, unmarked by “interest”? If so, this “curious sexual quality” of writing, whether by Shakespeare, Austen, Proust, or Mary Carmichael, would not compromise the freedom art actualizes or the disinterested play of imagination and understanding by which, in Kant’s terms, aesthetic judgments posit “subjective universal validity”—as if, in a figure from Orlando and Room, “one had gone to the top of the world and seen it laid out, very majestically, beneath” (CJ §8 49, CPJ 100, RO 93, my emphasis).
In drawing herself as Mary Carmichael, Woolf claims freedom of mind on her own behalf no less than her audience’s. As her aunt’s legacy underwrites Mary Beton’s creative labor, so Woolf—who as a professional writer had just begun (in 1926, at the age of 44) to earn five hundred a year and more by her wits—was conscious of having “bought my freedom” to write The Waves by declining a two-thousand-pound commission: “A queer thought that I have actually paid for the power to go to Rodmell & only think of The Waves.”45 When Mary Beton closes Mary Carmichael’s book saying, “give her a room of her own and five hundred a year, let her speak her mind … and she will write a better book one of these days. She will be a poet … in another hundred years’ time,” Woolf is thinking toward the lyric prose of The Waves (RO 94). Not for nothing does she urge Mary Carmichael to “catch those unrecorded gestures, those unsaid or half-said words, which form themselves, no more palpably than the shadows of moths on the ceiling, when women are alone, unlit by the capricious and coloured light of the other sex” as she approaches the novel as yet titled The Moths.46 Enjoining Mary to “illumine your own soul with its profundities and its shallows,” Woolf moves toward her own “Autobiography” of the soul or psyche, that moth whose wings cast angular shadows on the ceiling of the mundane world, as her anonymous, androgynous Shakespeare elucidates the sense in which The Waves is “the life of anybody.”47 Above an angry roar of bishops, deans, doctors, professors, patriarchs, and pedagogues, she exhorts Mary, “Think only of the jump, … as if I had put the whole of my money on her back; and she went over it like a bird” (RO 94). So Woolf will overleap the “naturalist-novelist”’s world of men and women to contemplate things in themselves and declare jubilantly, on finishing The Waves, “I felt the pressure of the form—the splendour & the greatness—as—perhaps, I have never felt them. … I have taken my fence” (RO 88, D 3:298, 28 March 1930).
In her “peroration” Woolf prophesies that in a hundred years, if “we” (like Shakespeare, Orlando, Mary Carmichael) “have the habit of freedom and … see human beings … in relation to reality; and the sky, too, and the trees or whatever it may be in themselves … if we face the fact … that we go alone and that our relation is to the world of reality and not only to the world of men and women, then … Shakespeare’s sister will put on the body which she has so often laid down” (RO 113–14). But if Judith Shakespeare “lives in you and me”—if in Room the body so often laid down (Mary Hamilton’s, Judith Shakespeare’s) is reborn as Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael, Woolf’s audience (“you”) and herself (“me”)—why must a century pass before “she will be a poet” (RO 94)? Even as Woolf claims “the free use of her limbs” to invent a new form for the “poetry in her,” she keeps the woman poet’s realist body in the picture: sexual, maternal, still subject to the political economy of gender, not yet transparent to the freedom that poetry, the highest genre, makes felt. But Woolf—herself a “firebrand” in claiming “the habit of freedom”—cannot wait a century. Without denying the social struggles that remain before women poets can truly put on freedom’s body, she strives to break history’s “lock” on her mind’s force; to put on freedom’s body to create the [woman] who writes the children of The Waves (RO 76).
Another Nature: Abstract Form, Modern Physics, and the Garden of The Waves
I dont want a Lavinia or a Penelope: I want ‘She.’
—Woolf, Diary, 28 May 1929
I am telling myself the story of the world from the beginning.
—Woolf, The Waves: The Two Holograph Drafts
With intermittent shocks, sudden as the springs of a tiger, life emerges heaving its dark crest from the sea. … it is to this we are bound, as bodies to wild horses.
—Rhoda, in Woolf, The Waves
I see far out a waste of water. A fin turns. … Now … when a pretty woman enters … I shall say to myself, Look where she comes against a waste of waters. A meaningless observation, but to me, solemn, slate-coloured, with a fatal sound of ruining worlds and waters falling to destruction.
—Bernard, in Woolf, The Waves
In observing that Mary Carmichael’s writing betrays her former oppression only by a slightly exaggerated “joy of freedom,” does Woolf frame this joy as an asset or a liability (RO 92)? Does this excess joy inspire art, or does it risk a new kind of contingency: the kind of “interest” that compromises freedom; an agenda, personal or social, that taints the “purposiveness without purpose” essential to “pure” aesthetic judgments (CJ §22 78–79, CPJ 125)? The oscillation between the marked pronoun she and the unmarked one in The Waves’ genetic text suggests that Woolf felt this risk and—paradoxically—practiced writing “as a woman who has forgotten that she is a woman” to banish it. Wittig observes that, whereas the pronoun she marks women as aberration from the normative he, I speaks dominion over the world, and one parlays I into the voice of the universal, the human.48 Woolf sets out to unmark she, to free it for representativeness, normativity, universality.
Thus, two months after she/“One” first sights the fin (“One sees a fin passing far out”), Woolf preserves her autobiographical subject’s feminine origin but abstracts it from any particular mind: “I am now & then haunted by some semi mystic very profound life of a woman, which shall all be told on one occasion; & time shall be utterly obliterated; future shall somehow blossom out of the past. One incident—say the fall of a flower—might contain it. My theory being that the actual event practically does not exist—nor time either” (D 3:118, 23 November 1926). Later she imagines “a new kind of play” starring “Woman”: “Woman thinks: …/He does./Organ Plays./She writes./They say:/She sings:/ Night speaks:/They miss” (D 3:128, 21 February 1927, ellipsis Woolf’s). Again, she poses “A man & a woman … sitting at table talking” only to foreground the woman: “It is to be a love story: she is finally to let the last great moth in. … she might talk, or think, about the age of the earth: the death of humanity: then moths keep on coming. Perhaps the man could be left absolutely dim” (D 3:139, 18 June 1927; emphases added). Returning to The Moths/The Waves after Orlando and Room, Woolf again abstracts her “I” into a neutral “mind thinking” while insisting that this abstract mind should be a [woman’s]:
I am not trying to tell a story. … A mind thinking. … Autobiography it might be called. … One must get the sense that this is the beginning: this the middle; that the climax—when she opens the window & the moth comes in. I shall have the two different currents—the moths flying along; the flower upright in the centre; a perpetual crumbling & renewing of the plant. In its leaves she might see things happen. But who is she? I am very anxious that she should have no name. I dont want a Lavinia or a Penelope: I want ‘She.’ (D 3:229–30, 28 May 1929, my emphases)
In specifying who this abstract, nameless, autobiographical “She” is not, Woolf removes her from literary tradition’s “capricious” light: she doesn’t “want” a woman like Virgil’s Lavinia, a pawn in Aeneas’s empire-building, Shakespeare’s violated Lavinia, writing her story in sand with bloody stumps, or Homer’s Penelope, stuck at home during life’s adventure. Instead, the grammatically impossible yet perfectly comprehensible “I want ‘She’” momentarily gives English a new rule (if Caesar non est supra Grammaticos, poets are another matter). To “want ‘She’” is to want woman as subject not object, woman as free; to want [woman] in the abstract, as not women’s but freedom’s representative—woman as “oneself,” She (not He) writ large as One.
Woolf continues to abstract this [She] from personality, time, event, and gender without relinquishing her sex:
The beginning. Well, all sorts of characters are to be there. Then the person who is at the table can call out any one of them at any moment; & build up by that person the mood, tell a story; … Childhood; but it must not be my childhood; … unreality; things oddly proportioned. Then another person or figure must be selected. … The Moth must come in: the beautiful single moth. … She might have a book—one book to read in—another to write in—old letters. … there must be great freedom from “reality.” (D 3:236, 23 June 1929; emphases added except “my”)
Here she seems to slip in unawares, as if Woolf were indeed writing as a woman who has forgotten that she is a woman. Yet Woolf has not done with remembering, to judge by this explicit unsexing of the thinking subject ten days later:
The lonely mind, mans or womans, it does not matter which, & in this early light the form was inscrutable, the power that crystallises, collecting, rather at random, what would otherwise be lost & from many fragments attempting to make a whole: here brooding over the napkin and the glass, thought
I am telling myself the story of the world from the beginning. I am not concerned with the single life, but with lives together. I am trying to find, in the folds of the past, … such fragments as time having broken the perfect vessel still keeps safe[.] The perfect vessel? But … it was only when … the violence of the shock was over that one could understand, or really live.49
Scarcely has Woolf forged this abstract I/one, this representative sufferer of the brokenness of being, than a formal problem “cries out at once to be solved. Who thinks it? And am I outside the thinker? One wants some device which is not a trick” (D 3:257, 25 September 1929). Here Woolf writes as a woman (“am I outside the thinker?”) who has forgotten she’s a woman (“One wants some device”). Her solution is to refract the lonely mind through the “playpoem”’s mixed chorus, the six I’s—not characters but voices, translucent to being and to each other—who soliloquize one by one.50 Although these voices attach to sexed bodies in a gendered social world, no hierarchy of being obtains among them.51 Each speaks its subjective dominion over the world; meanwhile, the lonely mind’s I (“I am telling myself …”) disappears in the impersonal omniscient voice of the lyric interludes, which transcribes and attributes each speaker’s words.
In this subliming of she into one and thence into the lonely mind’s omniscient voice, the subject of the genetic text both registers and surmounts freedom’s contingency. It is as if, in the interest of disinterestedness, Woolf labors to master freedom’s “first great lesson”: to write as a woman who has forgotten that she is a woman, or perhaps (a century ahead of her time by Room’s prophetic reckoning) to write as a woman who has forgotten that she is a woman might write, despite remembering. In other words, the [woman] in The Waves is still there, in the one and the omniscient voice: as woman unmarked and/or as woman simulating the condition of being unmarked. The oscillating She/one, further, registers an oscillating temporality, the prophetic future that this work of art strives to embody symbolically in the present. Evoking Kant’s concept of genius as that aspect of “nature in the subject” that “give[s] the rule to art,” [she]—sexual difference as nature not culture, or nature and culture, insofar as culture enables her to cultivate her art in freedom—actualizes herself as nature’s favorite; manifests freedom’s “objective reality” by creating “another nature,” this work of art.
In creating the [woman] of The Waves (she as one), Woolf creates “another nature” that throws a bridge from the realm of nature (or physics) to the realm of freedom; a new story of the world that rethinks being, nature, time, subjectivity, and indeed event and the story itself from the beginning in light of modern physics. Telling “the story of the world,” [she] throws off the gender-bound law inscribed in Genesis to create a rival representation of nature, which Woolf labors through successive drafts to sign in the white ink of Kantian disinterestedness. In a passage later cut, the draft’s thinking mind animates the suppressed maternal aspect of the waters over which the Western father-god broods to bring forth the world, figuring “waves that were of many mothers, & again of many mothers, & behind them many more, endlessly sinking and falling, … each holding up … a child” (Wh I:9–10). The draft, that is, “forgets” the legislating deity of a story of the world that symbolically exiles women from material and cultural creativity, replacing that solitary, singular, monotheistic origin and author with a feminized figure of the manifold, inexhaustibly proliferating creativity that sounds through The Waves’ voices. But in inverting the original myth’s gender hierarchy, does this figure perhaps betray a slightly excessive “joy of freedom”—sign, in effect, she, not [she]? The final text, in any case, forgets Genesis and gender altogether: “In the beginning, there was the nursery, with windows opening on to a garden, and beyond that the sea” (W 239). Disentangling ontology not from sex but from gender as contingent hierarchy, The Waves privileges neither sex as creator, witness, or namer at the world’s origin.
Yet [She] persists, there and not there, in the waves, no longer mothers, that recur through the interludes; in the opening figure (first simile, then metaphor) of day dawning “as if the arm of a woman couched beneath the horizon had raised a lamp,” which refigures the Western father-god’s “Let there be light”; and in her phantasmal Self-Portrait as “Woman Writing at Elvedon—this other nature’s spectral author, free to create the children or to nail them “like stoats to the stable door”; or so they fear, fleeing her gaze as if to escape into the real, the thing itself no writing can capture (W 7, 17). Most strikingly, [she] persists in the forgetting of sexual hierarchy in this transfigured Garden and Fall. Whereas in Eden death is not natural but metaphysical, “caused” by a sequence of events within a logic of divine law, transgression, and punishment, in The Waves nothing separates death and decay from the life that feeds on them: thus the draft’s “lonely mind” sees “the snail slime, the sticky fluid in the hollow stalk & the [thin] rat heaving with maggots … in the hearts of those … unfortunate children” (Wh I:6). No story, no authority, domesticates nature’s violence or mitigates death’s horror; no telos redeems human suffering. The Fall is a fall into being that has always already happened; the garden in which the children wake is a stage for a “playpoem” of pure being, where (as in Orlando’s Eden) no mother or father, divine or human, walks.
Not a mother but “Old Mrs. Constable”—a nurse remote from the originary authority with which Lily invests Mrs. Ramsay—presides over the children’s first consciousness, their apprehension of ontological separateness. She “‘lifted her sponge and warmth poured over us,’ said Bernard. ‘We became clothed in this changing, this feeling garment of flesh’” (W 124). The sensations of this “garment of flesh” mediate between being and language; like the birds of the interludes, pecking at snail shells, the children have their being in nature, their bodies part of “the thing itself” that language can fashion into “anything” (TL 193). Thus Louis imagines himself a “stalk,” camouflaged, “unseen,” “green as a yew tree,” with “hair … made of leaves,” “rooted to the middle of the earth,” until “an eyebeam” strikes him and Jinny, chasing butterflies, calls him to the human, sexual, social world: “‘I am a boy in a grey flannel suit. … She has kissed me. All is shattered’” (W 12–13). The kiss that destroys Louis’s primordial fantasy and awakens Susan to lonely “anguish” arises not from sexual desire or transgression but from Jinny’s fear of his absented state: “‘ “Is he dead?” I thought, and kissed you’” (W 13). In this version of the Fall it is not sin that causes desire, suffering, death; rather, “eyebeam” and kiss materialize the desire inherent in the “anguish” of ontological difference, the shattered “perfect vessel.” Originating outside cultural law in this garden, this kiss—of life not death—engenders sorrow but not hierarchy, jealousy but not gender.
In place of the ancient deity of Genesis, school and church authorities with feet of clay preside over a travesty of the real, natural world. Susan “‘would bury the whole school; the gymnasium; the classroom; the dining-room that always smells of meat, and the chapel’” (W 44). As the mystic Rhoda—pure psyche, a bodiless “small butterfly”—voices the soul, Dr. Crane’s sermon (like Reverend Bax’s in The Voyage Out) “‘mince[s] the dance of the white butterflies … to powder’”; “‘The words of authority are corrupted by those who speak them,’” Neville says; they “‘fall cold on my head like paving-stones, while the gilt cross heaves on his waistcoat’” (W 22, 36, 35). Dr. Crane’s Christian tradition transforms history’s chaos into a teleological “procession” that “erects” Louis, the Australian poet-clerk modeled on the St. Louis poet-clerk T. S. Eliot: “‘by his authority, his crucifix, … I recover my continuity. … I become a figure in the procession, a spoke in the huge wheel that turning, at last erects me.’”52 Yet even Louis glimpses the metaphysical violence of the tradition that upraises him: “‘How majestic is their order, how beautiful their obedience!’” he marvels of Dr. Crane’s schoolboys. “‘But they also leave butterflies trembling with their wings pinched off’” (W 47).
Against schoolroom and church, the children’s garden world is a liminal space between nature and culture: on the one hand, laid with “paving-stones,” the tradition that (as in Jacob’s Room) soon occludes the children’s transparent consciousness; on the other, scene of a nature (or physics) that eludes the gardener’s hand, in which Woolf grounds this “story of the world from the beginning” (or metaphysics). Whereas Eden’s father-god binds sexuality to sin, sorrow, and death through a narrative that opposes female desire to divine authority, the children of The Waves awaken in a nature inherently violent. No authority shapes their suffering into a story of sexual hierarchy, divine law, female transgression, and death as punishment at the hands of divine justice; here suffering arises not from desire framed as sin but from the originary shattering of the “perfect vessel”—from difference as such.
As metaphysics precedes the “other nature” of Genesis, the new physics of the novel’s modernist moment informs the other nature of The Waves—in which “the actual event practically does not exist—nor time either”—as well as its abstract form and the narrative procedures that displace the Newtonian either/or logic of common sense with the both/and logic of the quantum universe. One critic proposes that the “crucial problem” facing the reader of The Waves is to find “a way to think that seems definite and common-sensical, rather than abstract, imagistic, philosophically ‘distant’ from—what? Life as we know it?”53 To read The Waves in light of quantum physics is to find a ground and logic in nature for the challenge to common sense posed by its abstract form; and indeed to confront the limits of nineteenth-century realism. The discoveries of the new physics—the wave/particle paradox, the uncertainty principle, the dissolution of the subject/object duality, the phenomenon of entities mutually interacting at a distance without apparent physical mediation, governed by probability waves—contradict the common sense not just of Newtonian physics but even of Einstein’s relativistic universe.54 The quantum universe in fact exposes what we ordinarily think of as “common sense” as quite unnatural, revealing the real, profound ungroundedness and illusoriness of substance, identity, event, and time.55 As unfathomable as the nature that impels abstract art in Wörringer’s theory, the strange nature disclosed by particle physics illuminates both The Waves’ depiction of being as radically ungrounded, accidental, insubstantial, and the ephemeral voices that trace the border between a commonsensical but unreal world of bounded bodies and an intuited, mysterious but real world of things or (nonthings) in themselves. If The Waves seems distant from “life as we know it,” it seeks to capture something of life, or (in Room’s word) “reality,” as it is, beyond what our “definite and commonsensical” thinking can know of it.
Three features of The Waves’ story or non-story of the world—the wave, the “perfect vessel,” and the both/and logic that challenges either/or common sense—find analogues in quantum physics. The 1927 Davisson-Germer experiment demonstrated that the motion of electrons is governed simultaneously by wave functions and Newtonian mechanics, proving that, just as “an elementary particle is not an independently existing, unanalyzable entity” but “a set of relationships,” the physical world “is not a structure … of independently existing unanalyzable entities” but “a web” of aspects that change “with their relationship to the whole.”56 It is not that there might not be a “substantive physical world” but that “there definitely is not” one, for the probability wave “describes not one world but an infinity of worlds”; of this “stupendously infinite superspace,” the sensible world is but “a single, three-dimensional element” in which what is not “there” conditions what is.57 As if to reveal freedom’s “objective reality” by its effects in nature, The Waves allies its experimental form—and its metaphysical positing of “another nature” beyond illusions of substance, time, event—with the unseen reality disclosed by quantum physics.
How, then, describe the “real” world? The Copenhagen interpretation regards as “real” only the actual path that the electron selects from the wave function’s infinity of possible paths: possibility perpetually collapses into event to create the world we perceive. Bernard’s intuition that “‘We have destroyed something by our presence … a world perhaps’” fits with this view that a throw of the dice does indeed abolish chance, canceling other possible worlds (W 232). The (Aristotelian) “Many Worlds” interpretation regards as “real” all the worlds given by the wave function; the universe perpetually “split[s] into a stupendous number of branches,” only one of which we perceive.58 So Bernard doubts the truth of story (“‘a mistake, … a convenience, a lie’”); regrets the myriad thoughts that “‘slip through [his] fingers’” whenever he makes a sentence; finds “‘nothing one can fish up in a spoon; nothing one can call an event’” when he casts his net of words; and feels himself “‘not one person’” but “‘many people,’” “‘many Bernards’” (W 255–56, 276, 260).
So too Rhoda, the figural quintessence of The Waves’ poetics of indeterminacy, haunts the borderland between being and nonbeing, rendering the vexed question of her suicide redundant: a possibility that cannot be fixed as an event—definite, scrutinizable, incontrovertible—in the ordinary sense appropriate to the realist novel or even the modernist-realist Mrs. Dalloway. Rather, Rhoda’s life and death seem inseparable, insubstantial reflections in an ephemeral stream of language that tracks a continual becoming and dissolution of body, being, and time. Thus she remembers arriving, “holding an envelope in my hand,” carrying “a message,” at a “cadaverous, awful … grey puddle in the courtyard” to find that
“I could not cross it. Identity failed me. We are nothing, I said, and fell. I was blown like a feather. I was wafted down tunnels. Then very gingerly, I pushed my foot across. … I returned very painfully, drawing myself back into my body over the grey, cadaverous space of the puddle. This is life then to which I am committed.”59
The “life” that emerges “sudden as the springs of a tiger, … heaving its dark crest from the sea,” and that binds The Waves’ voices like “bodies to wild horses,” is inseparable from death not only for Rhoda but for Percival, the questing knight, fertility god, and wounded fisher-king whose life/death tears the veil of illusory appearances (W 64). An Apollonian figure of ambition and action who exerts violent force over an unreal world, Percival is at the same time an antithetical Dionysus who enables the six friends to “‘see India’”: “‘who makes us aware that these attempts to say, “I am this, I am that” … are false’,” and that “‘these roaring waters … upon which we build our crazy platforms are more stable than the wild, the weak and inconsequent cries that we utter … Speech is false’” (W 135, 137–38). The six worship Percival in a primal “communion” that intimates the “perfect vessel” and so partakes of death: “savage,” “ruthless,” they seem to “dance in a circle,” “flames leap[ing] over their painted faces, over the leopard skins and the bleeding limbs which they have torn from the living body”—their hatred, as Jinny says, “‘almost indistinguishable from our love’” (W 126, 140, 138). Through their (imaginary) breaking of the vessel that is Percival’s body, the six transcend their confining boundaries. On the silent, radiant Percival, nothing in himself, they project their longing for wholeness, for death, for the “perfect vessel” whose fragments they are: “‘They throw violets. They deck the beloved with garlands and with laurel leaves’” (W 140).
Metaphorically partaking of their god at the celebratory dinner, the six voices momentarily create a “‘globe whose walls are made of Percival, of youth and beauty and something so deep sunk within us that we shall perhaps never make this moment out of one man again’” (W 145). This metaphysical breaking and consuming of the vessel that is the god’s body binds Percival’s life to his deferred death, his fall from a horse that is nothing more or less than a fall from “‘this curious steed, life.’”60 Abstract, arbitrary, accidental, unheroic, Percival’s death, like his life, illuminates the world for the living, who like Clarissa feast on death to reconcile themselves to life. Grappling with “‘what death has done to my world’,” Bernard sees in the midst of desolation something “‘abstract, facing me eyeless at the end of the avenue, in the sky’” and asks, “‘ “Is this the utmost you can do? … Then we have triumphed” ’” (W 153, 154).
For Rhoda, bound so precariously to existence, Percival’s death brings a stark “gift”—a hunger for “publicity and violence,” a desire to “fling [her]self fearlessly into trams, into omnibuses” in quest of the real:
“‘Like’ and ‘like’ and ‘like’—but what is the thing that lies beneath the semblance of the thing? Now that lightning has gashed the tree and the flowering branch has fallen and Percival, by his death, has made me this gift, let me see the thing. There is a square; there is an oblong. The players take the square and place it upon the oblong. They place it very accurately; they make a perfect dwelling-place. Very little is left outside. The structure is now visible; what is inchoate is here stated; we are not so various or so mean; we have made oblongs and stood them upon squares. This is our triumph; this is our consolation.” (W 159, 163)
Not stories but structures console, Rhoda says: oblongs on squares, angular shapes, a fin in a waste of waters, the perpetual “fight” that is life against the vanquisher death, abstracted from particular forms and set, in The Waves, against the infinite void. Human endeavor and authority find no ground in The Waves’ abstract cosmos: “‘how strange it seems to set against the whirling abysses of infinite space a little figure with a golden teapot on his head. Soon one recovers a belief in figures: but not at once in what they put on their heads’” (W 227). Bernard reflects that “‘the earth is only a pebble flicked off accidentally from the face of the sun and that there is no life anywhere in the abysses of space’” (W 225). “‘Listen,’” Louis says, “‘to the world moving through abysses of infinite space. It roars; the lighted strip of history is past and our Kings and Queens; we are gone; our civilisation; the Nile; and all life. Our separate drops are dissolved; we are extinct, lost in the abysses of time, in the darkness’” (W 225). Imagining annihilation, Bernard hears “‘for one moment the howling winds of darkness as we passed beyond life,’” then recalls himself: “‘I rise; “Fight, … fight!” ’” Neville urges, “‘Oppose ourselves to this illimitable chaos, … this formless imbecility.’” From his post with Rhoda by the cold urn, Louis observes them saying, “‘My face shall be cut against the black of infinite space’” (W 225–26). Jinny exults, “‘We have triumphed over the abysses of space, with rouge, with powder, with flimsy pocket-handkerchiefs’” (W 228). Bernard feels “‘the huge blackness of what is outside us, of what we are not. The wind, the rush of wheels became the roar of time, and we rushed—where? And who were we? We were extinguished for a moment, went out like sparks in burnt paper and the blackness roared. Past time, past history we went. For me this lasts but one second’”; as always, “‘I jumped up, I said “Fight.” … It is the effort and the struggle, it is the perpetual warfare, it is the shattering and piecing together—this is the daily battle, defeat or victory, the absorbing pursuit.’”61
In its quest for a “reality” beyond the accidental and momentary meanings with which each character invests the abstract condition they share, The Waves counterposes oblongs upon squares, a fin in a waste of waters, to the story—inevitably false, incomplete, arbitrary in its belief in time and event. Bernard says, “‘I have made up thousands of stories; I have filled innumerable notebooks with phrases to be used when I have found the true story, the one story to which all these phrases refer. But I have never yet found that story. And I begin to ask, Are there stories? … why impose my arbitrary design?’” (W 187–88). Elaborating Woolf’s 1926 self-portrait, he sees
“far out a waste of water. A fin turns. This bare visual impression is unattached to any line of reason, it springs up as one might see the fin of a porpoise on the horizon. Visual impressions often communicate thus briefly statements that we shall in time to come uncover and coax into words. I note under F., therefore, ‘Fin in a waste of waters.’ I, who am perpetually making notes in the margin of my mind for some final statement, make this mark, waiting for some winter’s evening.
“Now I shall go and lunch somewhere … and when a pretty woman enters … I shall say to myself, Look where she comes against a waste of waters. A meaningless observation, but to me, solemn, slate-coloured, with a fatal sound of ruining worlds and waters falling to destruction.” (W 189)
The fin has been taken to mark the “end of writing”—“division, difference and death.”62 But it would seem equally to signal the beginning of writing: the thing itself before it has been made anything; the abstract life force that human endeavor transforms into oblongs on squares, perfect dwelling-places—and its absence the ebb of life. Thus at his deadly school Bernard remembers, “‘Nothing, nothing, nothing broke with its fin that leaden waste of waters’”; when he dines with Neville and a silence descends, broken by a few words, it is “‘as if a fin rose in the wastes of silence; and then the fin, the thought, sinks back into the depths spreading round it a little ripple of satisfaction, content’”; approaching his own death, he calls to a self who no longer comes: “‘Now there is nothing. No fin breaks the waste of this immeasurable sea. Life has destroyed me’” (W 245, 273, 284).
The voices of the eyeless, mystical, abstract Waves, in which neither time nor event exists, perpetually sense other worlds beyond the phenomenal one and—aware that they partly create the world they do perceive—utter thoughts unfathomable to common sense, yet quite at home in the irreducibly strange “‘dwelling-place’” that quantum physics reveals to be our own.63 The Waves captures moments of being within this nature in which all forms are insubstantial abstractions, every representation a dwelling-place founded on nothingness, and the perfect vessel a figure of an unfathomable cosmos, real yet absolutely unknowable. As one physicist puts it, what we ordinarily regard as “separate objects have interacted at some time in the past with other objects” in “an indivisible whole. Perhaps in such a world the concept of an independently existing reality can retain some meaning, but it will be an altered meaning and one remote from everyday experience.”64 So discrete events and enduring separate objects vanish from the “constant idea” behind Woolf’s modernist autobiography, the “semi mystic very profound life of a woman” that is also a “life of anybody”: “that behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we—I mean all human beings—are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art. … It proves that one’s life is not confined to one’s body and what one says and does” (MB 72–73).
The “silver-grey flickering moth-wing quiver of words” that is The Waves tracks a “life,” an autobiographical subjectivity, that eludes the bounds of body, identity, time, event, not just in the mystic Rhoda and the poet Louis (“conspirators” by “the cold urn”) but in everyday life, as when Bernard hears “‘deep below’” his ordered hours and days a “‘rushing stream of broken dreams, nursery rhymes, street cries, half-finished sentences and sights—elm trees, willow trees, gardeners sweeping, women writing’”; hears, as it were, a stream of being that carries things known and unknown, present and absent, remembered and forgotten—a figure of all time captured and stilled in the linguistic vessel of this work of art, this other nature (W 215, 141, 255). This unseen being, this life unconfined to one’s body, recasts metaphysics in the image of a nature of infinite interpenetrating energies wherein, since every observation is an interaction, “subject and object and the nature of reality” are fundamentally inseparable (TL 23).
The both/and quantum logic of Woolf’s modernist autobiography—her self-portraits as “something else, something other”—keep “she” and “one,” “she” as “one,” simultaneously in play.65 As for freedom’s “first great lesson,” the genetic text quests for a voice that is female not in what it says (“many mothers”) nor in style or rhythm, since these are conventional and imitable (à la Molly Bloom), but simply in itself: a unique event, precipitated by infinite throws of the dice from infinite possibilities, yet an irreducible actuality; an autobiographical voice that tells no story but contemplates a world inseparable from its contemplation, in doing so creating another nature; a voice heard by another as “hers.”66 Bernard, summing up, finds story false and discursive language useless: he needs “‘nothing consecutive but a bark, a groan’”; “‘a little language such as lovers use, words of one syllable such as children speak. … I need a howl: a cry. … I need no words’” (W 251, 295). There is nothing of sex or gender in this longing for a voice expressive beyond words. But in its abstract form, The Waves is, or strives to be, that cry; and we seem to glimpse the [woman] in The Waves in the “sea-green woman” whose cry lifts the stranded Rhoda after Percival’s death and carries her back to the waves. In the concert hall Rhoda says,
“we cluster like maggots on the back of something that will carry us on. … [W]e settle down, like walruses stranded on rocks, like heavy bodies incapable of waddling to the sea, hoping for a wave to lift us, but we are too heavy, and too much dry shingle lies between us and the sea. … Then … the sea-green woman comes to our rescue. She sucks in her lips, assumes an air of intensity, inflates herself and hurls herself precisely at the right moment as if she saw an apple and her voice was the arrow into the note, ‘Ah!’
“An axe has split the tree to the core; the core is warm; sound quivers within the bark. ‘Ah,’ cried a woman to her lover, leaning from her window in Venice, ‘Ah, Ah!’ she cried, and again she cries ‘Ah!’ She has provided us with a cry. But only a cry. And what is a cry? Then the beetle-shaped men come with their violins; wait; count; nod; down come their bows. And there is ripple and laughter like the dance of olive trees and their myriad-tongued grey leaves when a seafarer, biting a twig between his lips where the many-backed steep hills come down, leaps on shore.” (W 162–63)
In this virtuosic Self-Portrait as Sea-Green Woman, “She” is the signature in white—or green—ink of nature’s favorite, one who in her freedom turned the “sledgehammer blows” of being into these words never heard in nature—this voice of another nature, whose existence intimates freedom’s reality.67 “She” is the natural, bodily origin of the unbodied cry, the “Ah” that pulses through these words that belong to “one” and no one—the voice of a being split to the core to release a song of herself beyond phenomenal sound—a song of oneself, inseparable from “the singing of the real world, as one is driven by loneliness & silence from the habitable world … bound on an adventure.”68
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