Woolfian Boundaries - Clemson University

tercentenary celebrations of Andrew Marvell in Hull as an important catalyst for Woolf’s
renewed interest in Marvell, Stewart demonstrates how Woolf incorporated Marvellian
lyrics into her writing, challenging gendered assumptions of his verse as she rewrote him,
investing her hybrids of his work with a feminist politics at odds with the contemporary
appraisals of Marvell by Eliot. Macnamara explores Leonard and Virginia’s diff erent engagements
with Montaigne, tracing in particular the infl uence of his concept of the essay
form on Woolf’s own essayistic techniques. Th e preservation of contradiction that Woolf
fi nds in Montaigne’s work, Macnamara argues, and her celebration of his aim to “allow
opposites free play in the living essay form,” is key to her resistance of defi nitive categories
and conclusions throughout her writing. Emily Kopley’s paper investigates how Woolf
found new uses for old literary forms in incorporating into Mrs Dalloway the type of
“providential” patterning scholars have identifi ed in works like Paradise Lost and Robinson
Crusoe. Th e crucial noon-midnight antithesis Woolf works with in the novel thereby indicates
a fascination with Christian ideas which other speakers on the “Bordering Religion”
panel at the conference corroborated.
A number of contributors revisit Woolf’s intersection with the working classes, broadening
a critical tradition that has often focused upon “Th e Leaning Tower” as a defi nitive
expression of Woolf’s political sentiments. Lara Feigel and Helen Southworth’s papers,
for example, destabilise geographical links between London as centre and Birmingham
as periphery through the work of John Hampson Simpson, author of Saturday Night at
the Greyhound. Radically reshaping narratives about Woolf and the left by exposing and
elucidating the Hogarth Press’s championing of working-class writing, Southworth’s paper
probes the publication decisions that the Press were making in the thirties with particular
emphasis upon working-class writing and gender, whilst Feigel argues that Hampson’s
use of the socialist technique of cinematic montage infl uenced Woolf’s own writing technique.
Ben Clarke demonstrates the nexus between class and gender in his analysis of
Woolf’s introduction to Life as We Have Known It, the collection of essays by members
of the Women’s Co-operative Guild published by the Hogarth Press in 1931. Examining
Woolf’s recollection of her discomfort when attending a congress of the Guild in June
1913, and her response to the material and political concerns of the participants as that
of “a benevolent spectator…irretrievably cut off from the actors,” Clarke argues that even
though class barriers would remain for Woolf ever-impassable, her very awareness of their
economic diff erential nevertheless enabled her to resist the tendency to universalise any
ideal of aesthetic or political sisterhood. Taken together these three papers destabilise the
division of working-class experiences in Britain’s industrial centres and Woolf’s position
within a putative Bloomsbury elite.
Th at the vigorously emerging fi eld of eco-criticism is making a signifi cant impact on
Woolf studies was attested to at the conference by two panels exploring the relationship
of Woolf’s writing and the natural boundaries where, as Bonnie Kime Scott notes, “the
cultivated garden meets the moors or the woods, or is invaded by wild ‘pests,’ where exotic
plants and animals import echoes of the Empire, where science divides the species.” Th e
papers collected here represent the diff ering critical perspectives informing this debate. In
Deborah Gerrard’s essay trees, petals, exfoliation, and chrysalises become the touchstones
of an exploration of Woolf’s writing in relation to the blossoming of her spiritual identity.
Gerrard unearths intriguing parallels between Edward Carpenter’s philosophical challeng-
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