Woolfian Boundaries - Clemson University

Woolf, Ecofeminism, and Breaking Boundaries
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Th ese aspiring entomologists manage to jar a huge, rare red underwing. Young Virginia
knows its name because it was her duty to look up such identities for her siblings. Woolf
adds an element of emotion to the outcome: “the whole procession felt some unprofessional
regret when, with a last gleam of scarlet eye & scarlet wing, the grand old moth
vanished” (145).
Th ere are numerous later critiques of hunting in Woolf. Among the most notable
is her indictment of the methods men used to garner egret plumes in her essay, “Th e
Plumage Bill,” where she also criticizes environmentalists who place blame on women for
demanding such accoutrements. Woolf satirizes England’s trophy hunters, as in this case
via a bored Lady Orlando:
Th e Archduke would bethink him how he had shot an elk in Sweden, and Orlando
would ask, was it a very big elk, and the Archduke would say that it was
not as big as the reindeer which he had shot in Norway; and Orlando would
ask, had he ever shot a tiger, and the Archduke would say he had shot an albatross,
and Orlando would say (half hiding her yawn) was an albatross as big as
an elephant, and the Archduke would say—something very sensible, no doubt,
but Orlando heard it not, for she was looking at her writing table, out of the
window, at the door. (O 181)
Woolf off ers more unusual qualms about fi shing. One occurrence comes in the “Plumage
Bill” essay, where she wonders why only the purchase of bird plumes by women shopping
on Oxford Street is subject to critical scrutiny by environmentalists. Aiming at the male
consumer, she muses, “Such an outburst about a fi shing-rod would be deemed sentimental
in the extreme. Yet I suppose that salmon have their feelings” (E3 243, emphasis added).
Grotesque fi shing practices are instanced in To the Lighthouse, as McAlister’s boy carves
bait from a live fi sh, and when a young Bart Oliver appalls his little sister with baiting
a hook. Several women, including Lady Bradshaw in Mrs. Dalloway and Isa Oliver in
Between the Acts once fi shed, until fi shlike they went under, or were tangled by their husbands’
lines. A mystical, irrational expression of connection to the world of sea creatures
may be apprehended in the sighting of the “fi n in the waste of waters” by Virginia Stephen
off Cornwall in 1905, an image she passes on to Bernard in Th e Waves (e.g., 189).
In her late essay, “Th e Death of the Moth,” Woolf takes up a typical position between
indoors and out, near a window. She is writing, but she is also attentive to a day-fl ying
moth, and she enters into its reality via hers. Th e initial signifi cance of this creature—a
humble, less beautiful form of moth than the class of night-fl yers—is that it shared “the
same energy which inspired the rooks, the ploughmen, the horses, and even, it seemed,
the lean bare-backed downs” on a mild mid-September morning (DM 4). Her construct
suggests the Gaia concept of the globe as a united, living thing. Th e essay grows somber
as Woolf pities the self-imposed limits of the moth, banging around on a single pane of
glass, when the wide expanse of the downs lies outside. Slowly she recognizes that this obscure
creature is struggling with death, and it wins her respect by righting itself, achieving
what Woolf constructs as a sense of composure. While nature’s force of death cannot be