Woolfian Boundaries - Clemson University

Pests And Pesticides
young Virginia Stephen was familiar with the sparrow problem is suggested by a diary entry
from 6 June 1897: “we planted seed in the back garden. Th is is to produce grass—but
whether the sparrows will have left any is a question. As soon as we had left the garden, the
horrid little creatures swooped down twittering & made off with the oats” (PA 96). Controversy
arose over the best method of addressing the proliferation of sparrows: sparrow
clubs dedicated themselves to the extermination of the birds, but the domestic associations
of the house sparrow in English culture and the biblical signifi cance of the sparrow
suggested in the promise, “one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father”
(Matt. 10.29), meant that the persecution of the sparrow was opposed with particular
vehemence by Victorian animal protectionists.
Woolf argues that the momentum of Ormerod’s scientifi c work compelled her, despite
her cultivated “disposition” towards tradition, to defy conventional sentiment and in
an act of “disloyal[ty] to much that she, and her fathers before her, held dear” set herself
against the sparrow, emblem of “the homely virtue of English domestic life” (E4 139). As
a scientist, Ormerod challenged conventions which as her father’s daughter she felt it her
duty to protect, for her science accepted nothing as sacred just as it accepted nothing as
profane. Th rough her campaign against the house sparrow, Woolf suggests, Ormerod set
herself in opposition to both the traditionally feminine domestic sphere and the paternalism
of Christian tradition and Victorian society more broadly.
In her account of the sparrow controversy, Woolf displays no sympathy for Ormerod’s
opponents, the animal protectionists. She mocks the moralising clergymen and sentimental
ladies of the Animals’ Friend and the Humanitarian League. Woolf was not opposed to
the cause of animal protection in principle. In an essay on the Plumage Bill she states that
as a child she took a vow never to wear the plumes of wild birds because of the cruelty
and destructiveness of the plumage trade (E3 241). Th e source of Woolf’s objections to
the protectionist movement lay in the religiosity and sentimentality of tone which often
characterised the movement’s rhetoric and the reinforcement of gender stereotypes which
occurred under its banner. Th e Reverend J. E. Walker’s response to Ormerod’s campaign
against the sparrow, printed in the Animals’ Friend under the title “God Save the Sparrow”
(to which Woolf alludes in her essay), exemplifi es the biases of protectionist rhetoric:
Madam,—It is with infi nite regret that I see a lady’s name quoted in the Daily
Chronicle as giving “the sentence of death” to the very bird of which the gentle
voice of the Son of God said…“one of them shall not fall on the ground without
your Father.” Surely as having the compassionate heart of woman, unsteeled (I
hope) by your scientifi c studies, you will feel a throb of agony whenever you hear
those all-sacred words, and know that your verdict has been taken as a wholesale
sentence of extermination…upon these birds, which “the Father” cares for. (241)
Woolf’s bias against the Victorian protectionist position may be further explained through
reference to the views of F. O. Morris, the clergyman-naturalist from whose works of piety-infused
taxonomic natural history Virginia and her siblings fi rst learned the art of entomological
collection and classifi cation. In Th e Sparrow Shooter, a pamphlet specifi cally
targeting Ormerod, Morris defends the sparrow on biblical grounds and on the grounds
of the bird’s good character: he opens his defence with the contention:
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