Woolfian Boundaries - Clemson University

88 WOOLFIAN BOUNDARIES
his gaze a sexual force of nature, so that in the aquarium, “squadrons of silvery fi sh…ogled
her…quivering their tails straight out” (387).
Th us, Woolf almost depicts two Zoos herself, one where the infantilised bears are for
Katharine a cause for concern, and one where the male sexual gaze fi nds the animals both a
fi tting backdrop and an enlivening stimulus to the fetishisation of inhuman woman. From a
writer who would barbedly describe women as “the most discussed animal in the universe”
(AROO 34), we might expect an overt backlash against this male use of animal imagery to
limit women. Indeed, the patriarchal restriction of Katharine is later explicitly envisaged as
that of a Zoo animal, when, under an attack from her father about her decision not to marry
William, she is described as looking “for a moment like a wild animal caged in a civilized
dwelling-place” (501). In the Zoo scene itself, although the exact extent of the narrator’s
sympathy is ambiguous, there is undeniable irony in the presentation of Denham’s steamy
poetic fallacy. Furthermore, when we see William “tempting some small reluctant animal to
descend from an upper perch to partake of half an apple” (388), a retaliatory inversion of the
Eve myth is striking. However, the image here is still of man controlling the woman/animal.
Moreover, it engenders a peculiar exchange in which Katharine remarks that “William isn’t
kind to animals.… He doesn’t know what they like and what they don’t like.” William snaps
at his rival, “I take it you’re well versed in these matters, Denham,” gathering the reply, “It’s
mainly a question of knowing how to stroke them” (388). Th ese two men are quite clearly
not disputing their ability to charm and caress the animal in the cage, but the woman who
stands between them. Th e indelicacy of this situation is underlined by the embarrassment of
Cassandra, who, “in obedience to her new-found feminine susceptibility” (388), asks for directions
to the reptile house. However, the metaphor comes from Katharine; there is clearly
something in William’s inability to know what she likes which frustrates her. She defends
it when he challenges her about the propriety of her remarks, replying, “it’s true. You never
see what anyone feels” (390), where the jump from ape to human self is complete. Woolf is
thus detecting and mocking the repressive discourse of animality in relation to women, but
is also toying with retaining it in order to explore Katharine’s desires.
However, this complexity of engagement with the Zoo appears to be abandoned by
Woolf in the years after this novel. Increasingly, the image of the Zoo animal becomes essentially
asexual, in a way which threatens to more clearly etch the often drawn caricature of
Woolf in terrifi ed fl ight from sexuality. In eff ect, it is rather as if Woolf notes only Night and
Day’s bun-eating bears. Indeed, in her 1921 address to the Bloomsbury Memoir Club, she
spoke of an elderly visitor to Hyde Park Gate for tea and buns who, when suddenly roused,
was liable to spout “two columns of tea not unmixed with sultanas through his nostrils;
after which he would relapse into a drowsy ursine stupor” (MOB 142). What renders this
old man ursine, the drowsy consumption of tea and buns, is evidently a quintessentially human
activity. However, the passive, bun-stuff ed Zoo bear, reassuringly stripped of all hint of
animality, is such an attractive image for Woolf that it threatens to become her only truth
about bears. Characterising David Garnett in a letter as a “surly devil,” she describes herself
rebuking him, after which he weakly “rolled over like a sulky bear” (L3 120).
Th e eff ective eradication of all hints of “animality” in such images is shared by her
characters. In Th e Voyage Out, for example, Rachel does not attempt to “defend her belief
that human beings were as various as the beasts at the zoo, which had stripes and manes,
and horns and humps” (376-77). Th ere is no suggestion of threat attached to these beasts,