Woolfian Boundaries - Clemson University

110 WOOLFIAN BOUNDARIES
with a ‘completeness’ nowhere found in nature, the artist throws a bridge from nature’s
realm to the realm of freedom” (13). Th is stands closer to the male modernist mastery of
“make it new” than I can comfortably accept. Still, we might ask what sort of freedom
comes from various readings of Woolf, and what boundaries we may still wish to traverse
or impose on new readings, including ones enabled by an ecofeminist approach.
Th ough its exclusivity has now been successfully challenged, the modernism framed
by the “Men of 1914” had little room for expression of the emotions or respect for observed,
as opposed to “made,” nature. In his famous quarrel with Roger Fry over the Omega
Workshop, which extended into an attack on Woolf in Men Without Art, Wyndham
Lewis found Bloomsbury too close to nature. His short-lived but infl uential journal, Blast
(1914-15), relegated nature to an inferior, feminine position in the hierarchy of creativity
and control—a tradition reaching back to Aristotle. Lewis’s typical landscape of the period
was an urban, technologically-inspired grid-work (see Corbett 106).
I actually think there is a lot of room for a greening of modernism, in both male as
well as female writers of the period, and would place T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, H. D.,
and Katherine Mansfi eld high on the list of those susceptible to such rereading. Leonard
Woolf, interestingly, has his own place in this project. Of particular interest today is his
reaction to Lytton Strachey, who accused him of being sentimental in relation to animals:
“Th ere grows up between you aff ection of a purity and simplicity which seems to me
peculiarly satisfactory. Th ere is also a cosmic strangeness about animals which always fascinates
me and gives to my aff ection for them a mysterious depth or background” (100).
Th is attitude can be seen even in Leonard’s accounts of his responsibilities regarding wild
animals while he was stationed in Ceylon—an episode that must await a longer airing. Th e
challenge to the species barrier expressed in Leonard’s empathetic relation to animals is
akin to ecofeminist thinking. In his paper concerning the London Zoo at this conference
(published in this volume), Richard Espley noted that Leonard, like Leslie Stephen before
him, was a fellow of the Zoo. Th e zoo was a favorite destination for the Woolfs, both
during their courtship and after the marriage of the couple who addressed one another as
Mongoose and Mandrill. On another natural front, Leonard as a gardener is worthy of the
attention Elisa Sparks has given him. His highly quantitative approach, however, may not
immediately speak to ecofeminists. Virginia Woolf had the more holistic view of gardens,
as sites for conversation, and (starting in “Kew Gardens”) places where human and animal
activities, light and dark become blurred, erasing boundaries and hierarchies.
Given that segue, I’d like to move on now to a set of Woolf’s artistic relations to
“others” of nature, placing the emphasis on the boundaries she perceives and occasionally
crosses. I am drawing from various chapters of my book in progress, and widespread
Woolfi an texts—I hope without creating a dizzying eff ect. I promised in the abstract to
present moths, egrets, porpoises, pumpkins, red hot pokers, tulips, and orchids as central
characters—a list that now seems far too ambitious.
Woolf’s girlhood diaries give us a fi rst look at her shaping of contact with the “others”
of nature. She is assigned by her father and her doctor the task of constructing a back garden
at the family home at Hyde Park Gate, and manages to shift much of the labor to her
more willing gardener sister, Vanessa, who went on to create the memorable, mixed media
gardens of Charleston and to transport them into her paintings and illustrations. I say
mixed media because mosaics and pottery combined with a large array of fl owers, many of