Woolfian Boundaries - Clemson University

Performing the Self
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and for the world…experienc[ing] herself via the ‘audience’’s experience of her” (Wilshire
203). Clive Bell recalls this ability to amplify reality: “Such was the spell she threw, such
the cogency of her imagination, that many a time poor Lady X found herself, not only
playing up to the role assigned to her, but positively accepting Virginia in the role she had
allotted to herself” (Noble 70-71). Nevertheless, Woolf’s dramatisation of the self was
neither fake nor false, it was an element of her personality which served a practical function:
it allowed her to create a more vivid lived and written world.
Notes
1. In the fi nal chapter of Orlando the eponymous hero/ine calls out repeatedly for one of his/her alternative
selves:
Th en she called hesitatingly, as if the person she wanted might not be there, “Orlando?” For if there
are (at a venture) seventy-six diff erent times all ticking in the mind at once, how many diff erent
people are there not—Heaven help us—all having lodgment at one time or another in the human
spirit? Some say two thousand and fi fty-two. So that it is the most usual thing in the world for a
person to say, directly they are alone, Orlando? (if that is one’s name) meaning by that, Come, come!
I’m sick to death of this particular self. I want another. Hence, the astonishing changes we see in our
friends. (O 212)
2. Th ese panels are currently hanging in the Archive Room at King’s College, Cambridge.
3. Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, and Roger Fry, between them, painted scenery for Twelfth Night (1914),
Pelléas et Mélisande (1918), High Yellow (1932), Pomona (1933), Fête Galante (1934), Le Lac des Cygnes
(1932), and Th e Enchanted Grove (1932).
4. Th e Play Reading Society was formed in December 1907 by Clive Bell and originally consisted of Vanessa
Bell, Virginia Stephen, Adrian Stephen, Lytton Strachey, Saxon Sydney-Turner, and Clive Bell.
Works Cited
Cohen, Ralph, ed. Th e Future of Literary Th eory. London: Routledge, 1989.
Dobson, Julia. Hélène Cixous and the Th eatre: Th e Scene of Writing. Bern: P. Lang, 2002.
Heilbrun, Carolyn G. Reinventing Womanhood. London: Norton, 1993.
Noble, Joan Russell, ed. Recollections of Virginia Woolf. London: Peter Owen, 1972.
Reed, Christopher. Bloomsbury Rooms: Modernism, Subculture, and Domesticity. New York: Yale UP, 2004.
Schechner, Richard. Performance Th eory. London: Routledge, 2003.
Stape, J. H., ed. Virginia Woolf: Interviews and Recollections. London: Macmillan, 1995.
Wilshire, Bruce. Role Playing and Identity. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1982.
Woolf, Virginia. Th e Common Reader. Ed. Andrew McNeillie. Vols. 1 and 2. London: Vintage, 2003.
——. Th e Death of the Moth and Other Essays. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1970.
——. Th e Diary of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell with Andrew McNeillie. 5 vols. London: Hogarth,
1977-1984.
——. Th e Letters of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Nigel Nicholson and Joanne Trautmann. 6 vols. London: Hogarth,
1975-1980.
——. Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings. Ed. Jeanne Schulkind. London: Chatto and
Windus for Sussex UP, 1976.
——. Orlando: A Biography. London: Penguin, 1993.
——. A Passionate Apprentice: Th e Early Journals 1897-1909. Ed. Mitchell A. Leaska. London: Hogarth, 1990.