Woolfian Boundaries - Clemson University

PERFORMING THE SELF: WOOLF AS ACTRESS AND AUDIENCE
by Elizabeth Wright
That Woolf used her friends and acquaintances as templates for the characters in her
fi ction is no secret, but that this transformative process also translated into life is
perhaps more surprising. Out of the lives of her social circle, where Woolf’s imagination
met reality, dramatized life exploded. Clive Bell, amongst others, notes Woolf’s
ability to create life-dramas “in which any one of her friends might fi nd him or herself
cast, all unawares, for a part” (Noble 70). Th is assertion is borne out by the letters in
which she regularly portrays herself “play[ing] my game of making you up” (L2 177) or
of “invent[ing] you for myself” (L3 78, 204). In 1925 she assures Vita Sackville-West: “if
you’ll make me up, I’ll make you” (L3 214), while in 1930 she writes to Ethel Smyth: “I’m
building up one of the oddest, most air hung pageants of you and your life” (L4 214). Th e
characterisation of real people was often calculated. In a letter to her nephew Quentin Bell
she discusses his “new character:”
Please write again, and let us go at some length into the question of your new
character. Quentin was an adorable creature and I’m sorry he’s been sloughed
(sluff ed) like the gold and orange skin of the rare Mexican tsee-tsee snake. Why
not be him and Claudian on alternate days? Claudian is a secretive marble-faced
steady eyed deliberate villain. (L4 25)
Woolf did not exclude herself from this dramatic characterisation. In a letter dated 4
November 1923, she challenges Jacques Raverat to “write Virginia’s part, because she is
oddly enough, the last woman I have any idea of” (L3 78) and in her diary ponders “the
fi ctitious Virginia Woolf whom I carry like a mask about the world” (D5 307).
For Woolf, personality was made up of roles and the ability to play the part of another
was a positive, a means of delving into diff erent worlds. In her essay “Street Haunting”
(1927) the writer walks the London streets entering, momentarily, the lives of the people
she meets. Th e perambulation leads her to refl ect “Into each of these lives one could penetrate
a little way, far enough to give oneself the illusion that one is not tethered to a single
mind, but can put on briefl y for a few minutes the bodies and minds of others” (DM 35).
Th e ability to leave the “straight lines of personality” is a trait of the consummate actor.
In her essay “From the Scene of the Unconscious to the Scene of History,” Hélène Cixous
calls this ability démoïsation (cited in Cohen 13), Richard Schechner “transportation”
(191), meaning the process by which the actor becomes the role. To Cixous the successful
performer is “someone whose ego is reserved and humble enough for the other to be able
to invade and occupy him; he makes room for the other” (cited in Cohen 13). Th e actor
is the platform on which alternate identities are performed. Cixous cries in L’Incarnation:
“Let the Others in! I have the honour of being the stage of the other” (cited in Dobson
49), a sentiment which Woolf’s Orlando might easily express. 1
In the letters and papers for the Memoir Club Woolf’s role-playing evolved into a