Woolfian Boundaries - Clemson University

Borderline Personalities: Woolf Reviews Kapp
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closely associated with the passing and implementation of the notorious Cat-and-Mouse
Act, which allowed for the release from prison and re-arrest of hunger-striking suff ragettes. 9
Margaret Gibbs, the suff ragette who, in 1914, had attacked the portrait of Th omas Carlyle
invoked McKenna’s name during her trial. “When she was found guilty,” the Times reported,
she “said she smashed the picture because of Mr. McKenna’s refusal to see a deputation”
(“Sentence”). An unlikely advocate for women’s rights, Mrs. Grundy’s presence in the Personalities
could nevertheless be taken as a sly allusion to this anti-suff ragist’s ultimate failure;
despite all his eff orts, she has crept in through the book’s back door.
Woolf neither mentions McKenna’s presence in Kapp’s book nor talks at any greater
length about Mrs. Grundy. But the suggestive placement of these two fi gures, together
with Mrs. Grundy’s connection to questions of selection and inclusion, may help to account
for the logic of her essay’s structure, for Woolf’s decision to describe herself meandering
through the spaces of Trafalgar Square and the NG in order to beat on the door of
the NPG in search of one of the founding fi gures of British feminism. Parts of Woolf’s description
of Harriet, or the lack of Harriet, might serve double-duty as a description of the
rather spectral, and insubstantial, Mrs. Grundy: “a mist, a wraith, a miasma of anonymous
merit.” “Th e face is the thing,” continues Woolf, alluding to Shakespeare’s Hamlet and to the
“mouse-trap” within that play. With all this ghostliness in the air this is entirely appropriate.
A portrait, like a play, might deploy mimesis to resurrect the dead, might add fl esh to a
specter, so that we can again (or for the fi rst time) hold the dead “in memory.” 10
Certain physical aspects of Kapp’s book might, I have been arguing, impact the way
we might read “Pictures and Portraits.” I want to end by suggesting that Woolf is also
using the essay to participate in the debate over the so-called “Usurpation of the Museums.”
Clive Bell, to return to his 1919 article, summarized two of the major arguments
in favor of expediting the return of these spaces to their pre-war uses. Th at they should
be reopened for the edifi cation of those American and colonial soldiers still stationed in
Britain; and that reopening them would demonstrate the strength of the government’s
commitment to “civilization.” “During the last fi ve years,” Bell points out, “the British
Government has left us in no doubt that, if it stands for anything, it stands for civilization”
(357). Suspicious of both arguments, Bell implies that they might still be usefully
deployed as part of a letter-writing campaign. “Above all,” he concludes:
you write to the papers and persuade your friends to write. If you know anyone
who can make use of some vaguely formidable signature such as “Fifty Years a
Trade Unionist,” so much the better: better still, something vaguely patriotic, as
“Demobbed” or “A Lad from Tasmania”.… “A Lover of Art” is not much to be
recommended. Th e great public does not love art. But it loves Government offi
cials even less, and therein lies our strength. (358)
In “Pictures and Portraits,” Woolf takes up Bell’s call for a letter writing campaign but pointedly
provides an alternative reason for why the closed museum spaces, or at least the NPG, should be
re-opened. She writes as a British woman who wants, in the language of A Room of One’s Own, to
continue the project of thinking back through her intellectual and artistic mothers.
In 1920, this might involve trying to make the historical roots of the suff rage movement
visible by retrieving images of its important fi gures, fi gures like Harriet Taylor Mill.