Woolfian Boundaries - Clemson University

Rhoda in Th e Waves, “and must press my hand against the wall to draw myself back.” Th is
ambivalence on Woolf’s part is directly addressed by the thought-provoking conjunction
of the essays of Elizabeth Wright and Amber Regis. Wright, for example, argues that
Woolf was “keenly aware of life’s dramatic dimensions and of the self as performance,”
and recognised in role-playing and the ability to play the part of another “a means of delving
into diff erent worlds.” Regis analyses Woolf’s thinking on the biographical subject
in both the highly theatrical Orlando and her essays on biographical discourse. Orlando,
Regis observes, is a text that “breaks down the limits that order our understandings of biographical
practice and identities,” so that “discreet and stable categories are disrupted, and
fi xed notions of gender and sexuality are fractured, dispersed, and reduced to absurdity.”
Woolf yet ultimately turned away from the anarchy of this kind of modernist biographical
subject, Regis argues, to “the expedient re-imposition of ‘Woolfi an boundaries’ around
the self and between genres.” Wendy Parkins’s discussion of the performance of Nicole
Kidman as Virginia Woolf in the fi lm version of Michael Cunningham’s Th e Hours off ers
an intriguing coda here. Examining the media focus on the physical aspects of Kidman’s
performance (her reproduction of her hand-writing as well as the famous nose), Parkins
strongly critiques the twenty-fi rst-century cultural assumptions that limit the boundaries
of both Kidman and Woolf’s celebrity embodiment.
Th e body, bodily experience, and clothing are recurrent themes in Woolf criticism, and
here Susan Reid, Alyda Faber, and Randi Koppen illuminate these themes in new ways.
Discussing D. H. Lawrence’s and Virginia Woolf’s quarrels with and yet attraction to the
implicitly sexless fi gure of the “Angel in the House,” Reid explores the challenges posed by
each to conventional boundaries of sex and gender, and to the institutions of heterosexuality
and motherhood. Reid’s discussion focuses attention on modernist masculinities in relation
to Lawrence’s representation of a working-class embodiment of this powerful cultural myth
in Mrs. Morel and compares this to Woolf’s representation of Mrs. Ramsay. Whilst the “angels”
and their protégés die, however, neither Lawrence nor Woolf solves the diffi culties of
“telling the truth” about bodily and sexual experience. Faber’s essay draws fascinating parallels
between Woolf’s “shock-receiving capacity” (something Woolf recognises as central to her
role as a writer) and theologian Franz Rosenzweig’s understanding of revelation as a “shock
of love,” exploring Woolf’s active desire for responsiveness to what is beautiful, unlovable,
unwanted, and utterly strange within herself, others, and the world. It is Woolf’s response
to “the shocks of love,” to the risk of making loving connections with what is unlovable in
others, Faber argues, that makes Woolf so vital as person and as a writer. Koppen’s essay
examines Woolf’s scathing critique of male sartorial display in Th ree Guineas, and considers
the work of psychologist J. S. Flügel as a signifi cant point of reference for Woolf’s arguments
about clothing in relation to progressive political thought, fascism, and the creation of the
modern subject. Arguing that Woolf radically revises Flügel’s progressive theories from a
feminist perspective, Koppen makes a powerful case for Woolf’s sophisticated engagement
with the complexity of the signifying systems of language, bodies, and dress, and of the operation
of the conscious and unconscious mind in her analysis of power.
Woolf’s participation in the revival of interest in seventeenth-century writers and
philosophers in the fi rst decades of the twentieth century, and in the aligning of metaphysical
aesthetics with the project of modernism promoted by critics such as T. S. Eliot,
is traced in the two essays by Jim Stewart and Katie Macnamara. Identifying the 1921
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