Woolfian Boundaries - Clemson University

es to late Victorian scientifi c materialism and Woolf’s ideas about modernism’s goal of
privileging the spiritual, arguing not only for Carpenter as an important infl uence on the
development of Woolf’s ideas, but that his evolutionary socialism and mysticism (as well
as the homosexuality that informed his thought) may have been a crucial factor in encouraging
and helping to foster Woolf’s development as a writer. Scott herself argues compellingly
for recognising Woolf as a proto-ecofeminist, frequently traversing the boundaries
of (wo)man and environment in both her fi ction and non-fi ctional writings. “When an
artist like Woolf traverses such barriers to think like a moth, take in the perceptions of
a snail, or the motion of a fl ock of birds,” Scott asserts, she counters the androcentric
power paradigm of man over nature in an articulation of “solidarity across distant species.”
Scott’s aligning of Woolf’s “sympathetic” nature writing with the critique of egocentrist
patriarchal binary values that she suggests is fundamental to a feminist and “Woolfi an”
epistemology and aesthetics, sits in constructive dialogue with Christina Alt’s analysis of
Woolf’s engagement with late nineteenth-century natural history as traced through her
1924 essay on the entomologist Eleanor Ormerod. Acknowledging that Ormerod publicly
denied feminist sympathies, and that her work has come under criticism from ecofeminism
for its promotion of the use of pesticides, Alt argues that what Woolf recognized
and championed in her essay was the revolutionary potential of Ormerod’s pioneering
emphasis on the empiricism of the new entomological science against the (patriarchal)
moral and religious paradigms of taxonomic natural history.
Richard Espley’s paper continues the developing debate over what Scott describes
as Woolf’s “artistic relations to ‘others’ of nature” in his examination of the “otherness”
of zoo animals, arguing that Woolf saw through metaphors of repression that rested
upon animality. Ian Blyth takes what might seem an inconspicuous presence in Woolf’s
work—the common native bird the rook—and shows just how pervasive this creature
is, appearing in practically every novel, as well as in Woolf’s other writings. Blyth argues
not only for Woolf’s extreme attentiveness to the natural environment, but suggests that
the rook functions “as a form of metonymy, a shorthand for rural England.” Similarly
concerned with the metaphoricity of animals in Woolf’s writings, Jane Goldman’s paper
focuses upon Woolf’s “signifying dog,” chasing the meaning of canine references through
her work in terms of discourses of repression based upon race, gender, and class.
Perhaps the most enduring of Woolf’s own imposition of boundaries in literary history
is her famous dating of December 1910 as the beginning of modern character and,
implicitly, the modern art of fi ction. Th aine Stearns’s essay confronts Woolf’s artistic politics
in defi ning her literary aesthetic in terms of an Impressionist and Post-Impressionist
modernism, tracing her elision of “the other modernist avant-garde” of Imagism and Vorticism
from her “manifesto” essays of the late 1910s and 1920s. Woolf’s exploration of the
verbal/visual boundaries of her literary aesthetic, and her allegiance to the ideas of Roger
Fry and the work of Vanessa Bell at the same time as she asserted the unique possibilities of
her own medium, is further pursued in Tara Surry’s essay on Woolf’s art criticism. Woolf
was always conscious of being an outsider in the matter of art, Surry notes, of standing
on the metaphoric threshold of the art gallery, “doubly excluded from the ‘silent kingdom
of paint’ as a woman and as a writer” and “trespassing” in her writing about art. It was
exactly this threshold position, she argues, and Woolf’s awareness of herself as spectator,
that produced the dialogic relationship between art object and viewer/reader that would
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