Woolfian Boundaries - Clemson University

132 WOOLFIAN BOUNDARIES
of Harriet’s appearance. “Political” because Harriet and John were crucial fi gures in the
women’s suff rage movement: John through his activities as an MP and as the author of
Th e Subjection of Women (1869) and Harriet through her essay, “Th e Enfranchisement of
Women” (1851) and through her profound infl uence on John. So it is notable that in her
essay, which was published just a little over one year after women had for the fi rst time voted
in Britain, Woolf invokes Harriet as though she is noting a signifi cant lacuna, a gap in the way
the struggle for representation is being represented in this repository of national memory.
Ultimately, the political and aesthetic senses of representation become thoroughly intertwined
in the NPG.
Th e very London spaces Woolf traverses in “Pictures and Portraits” would have evoked
still-fresh memories of the struggle for the vote. Trafalgar Square had been an important
location for pro-suff rage speeches and parades, and in 1914 suff ragettes had entered the
NG to slash Velasquez’s Rokeby Venus and the NPG to desecrate Millais’s Portrait of Th omas
Carlyle. Notably, the choice of paintings in these acts focused attention to the distinctive
rationales underpinning each museum. To attack Venus was to attack beauty itself, while
an assault on Th omas Carlyle was also an assault on an early advocate and trustee of the
NPG. 7 Carlyle, moreover, had helped to strengthen the ideological grounds for the gallery
by stressing the “hero worship” of great men—a view Woolf references and undermines in
Jacob’s Room (1922)—as well as portraiture’s importance as a means through which these
men might be worshipped. Had Woolf cast her eyes upwards when she failed to enter the
NPG, she would have discerned that one of the portrait busts carved in stone above the
Figure 5
door belonged to Carlyle (see Figure 5).
Th e subject of the struggle for political representation returns us to Kapp’s Personalities.
In her essay, as she transitions away from the subject of the NPG to that of Kapp’s art, Woolf
casually (but surely very pointedly) notes the disparity between the number of women and
men included in the book, implying continuity between its biases and those of the gallery,