Woolfian Boundaries - Clemson University

92 WOOLFIAN BOUNDARIES
refuses to site it in the “real” or Zoo animal, as Garnett did and by extension other modernists,
perhaps most obviously D. H. Lawrence, repeatedly attempted. Th is is crucially
not a restriction on Woolf’s discourse; rather her early and close consideration of the real
Zoological Gardens, and not an unconsidered apprehension of the metaphorical Zoo, allowed
her more squarely to face the animal outside of the cage in later works from Flush
to Th e Waves and Between the Acts. Woolf had learned what Garnett never would, that the
boundary between human and animal is more than a Zoo railing or a repressive society,
and that whether metaphorical animality is celebrated or repressed, it does not reside in
any real (non-human) animal.
Notes
1. Th ese observations intersect with and ratify Jane Goldman’s feeling that we must “rethink our analysis
of [Woolf’s] engagement with oppositions” (19), contrary to an increasingly received notion of her as a
“deconstructor of binary opposites par excellence” (16).
2. I would like to acknowledge my gratitude to Michael Palmer, Archivist at the Zoological Society of London,
for his assistance in this research.
3. Th ese usages, in their emphasis on the face, also almost anticipate Emmanuel Levinas’s ambiguous declaration
that “one cannot entirely refuse the face of an animal” (169).
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