Who ISN'T Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Virginia Woolf

Even her picture's a little scary: the face of a woman born to be a ghost.

"There was a star riding through clouds one night, and I said to the star, 'Consume me'." (Waves)

     How to describe Virginia Woolf? Once upon a time, beneath the shadow of war in a kingdom by the sea, an extraordinary woman was born. Bounded by illness to one shore and ill intent to another, she was chained six ways to earth from birth. "Become silence, let us bury you," said her demons, and those who would ward her soul could offer her only a letter more: "Become silenced, let us bury you," an offer that perhaps to them seemed an improvement. Faced with her fate, she became instead a ringing sword, cut through her bindings, and buried herself in history. Though one should remember fairytales are not histories, and in life and truth Woolf valued silence. In silence, thoughts and emotions too deep in the heart to be drawn up through the throat into speech can be heard, and it is because Woolf listened that she rang out so powerfully, every blow of her sword-soul struck resoundingly from one heart to another. Those thoughts she heard, too, were often women's thoughts, those hearts women's hearts.


"The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like their anonymity." (Room ch. 6)

     Virginia Woolf was born in January of 1882. She walked the world 59 years, and then she filled her pockets with stones and walked into a river in March of 1941. For a majority of that span, she wrote.

"...she need not think of anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of - to think; well not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others...and this self having shed its attachments was free for the strangest adventures." (Lighthouse ch. 1)

     She drew on silences and secrets and the buried and blasted things of her world, which was Britain, translating the experiences she associated with women, class, war, and the subtle movements of life into prose. She was concerned with the idea of Art as transmogrifying and elevating, with ideas of enlightenment and the ineffable sacredness of passing moments often associated with transcendentalism. And she was concerned with the world she lived in, and her place in it, and the place of other women like her. A warrior herself - against the depression and mania that haunted her, against a society that disregarded her - she did not glorify war and wrote often against it, directly, in condemnations public and private, and indirectly, by uplifting the everyday and bending all her fearsome brilliance to the illumination of how deep and rich even "ordinary" lives can become.


"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. Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself." (House ch. 13)

     For feminism's purposes - and it is no stretch to say the name of Virginia Woolf might be found etched into a cornerstone of feminist criticism and the women's rights movement - you would perhaps be best obliged to seek out Three Guineas, an acidic satirical essay detailing her response to a gentleman asking (rhetorically, the unfortunate fellow) how best to prevent war and coupling this intended no-brainer to a request for a donation of three guineas to his society for doing so. Over the course of that essay, she lays bare to the bone the failures and frustrations of British society in terms of women's independence and education and then splits that bone to tear into the marrow: Woolf asserts in no uncertain terms that it is the structures of a patriarchal society, the obsessions with dominance and military honor and intellect without empathy, that breed not only war but the very same fascism against which that war is being made. Like the beast her name evokes she is everywhere, biting and tearing at every tendon by which society brings painful pressure against femininity and humanity, and when she is done only the clean white ruins of illusion remain.


"As a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman, my country is the whole world." (Guineas ch. 3)

     With a fluidity of thought, sharpness of wit, and depth of passion that will be as timeless as literature and our appreciation for the beauty of a mind in motion, Woolf pierces to the heart of ideas about how we shape our world and are shaped in turn, about what's meaningful within those confines. She touches the silences of the human heart with a kindness and eye to beautification that Midas might have envied, and she speaks a truth to power that resonates - horribly and with an awful volume- as much in 2017 as it did in the years leading up to World War II. She's a wonderful writer in addition to her talents in the art of thinking and feeling, so I feel safe in recommending that her works are just as approachable as they are of import, and in an age where the crumbling, crushing things she lashed out against are so prevalent and so dangerous, perhaps it can be hoped that modern readers will draw the blade she buried. Perhaps we may yet hope for new Pendragons stepping out from the mists of drowned Avalon, once more bringing sharpness to bear against national shadows, once more giving those darknesses something to be afraid of.

"I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman." (Room ch. 3)

Works Cited

   
     Wikipedia Contributors. "Virginia Woolf." Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia,  

               the Free Encyclopedia. 19 Sept. 2017. Web. 19 Sept. 2017.

     Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf. New York: Vintage, 1999. Print.
     Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. Adelaide: eBooks@Adelaide, 2015. EPUB file.
     Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One's Own. Adelaide:  eBooks@Adelaide, 2016. EPUB file.
     Woolf, Virginia. The Waves. Adelaide: eBooks@Adelaide, 2015. EPUB file.
     Woolf, Virginia. A Haunted House and other short stories. Adelaide: eBooks@Adelaide, 
               2015. EPUB file.

     Woolf, Virginia. Three Guineas. Adelaide: eBooks@Adelaide, 2015. EPUB file.