Woolfian Boundaries - Clemson University

Whose Face Was It?
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Woolf were embodied by the actor not only in gesture and expression but by dress, hair,
and, of course, that nose. Such signs, with their connotations of unsuccessful femininity
(or ugliness), served to highlight the performance of Kidman and stress the distance between
the character and the celebrity persona Kidman embodies off -screen. While media
reportage of Kidman’s performance often focused on the actress’s “bravery” in attempting
such an “unglamorous” role, however, Woolf was of course much-photographed and
frequently described as a beauty in her lifetime. Perhaps the most commonly reproduced
image of Woolf is the photograph taken when Virginia Stephen was 20 in 1902 which,
as Hermione Lee has noted, was a crucial image in the legend of Virginia, with her large
eyes, full lips and lacy dress (1996 246). Twenty years after this photograph, Woolf was included
in British Vogue’s 1924 “Hall of Fame” and in 1930, she featured in Cecil Beaton’s
Book of Beauty (Silver 91-93).
So how is it, we may ask, that when Virginia Woolf was brought to the screen in 2002
she was represented as dishevelled, peevish, and unfashionable? 1 Kidman’s distracted and
dowdy appearance, together with her aff ected chain-smoking, is meant to convey writer’s
block, the diffi culty of genius, and incipient mental illness. Th is image of Woolf as a composite
of clichés about women is of course both a historical simplifi cation and signifi cantly
diff erent from that off ered in Cunningham’s novel, and yet the overwhelming preoccupation
in critical discussion of the fi lm has been the physicality of Kidman-as-Woolf. While
critics were broadly divided between those who couldn’t see past the nose, as it were,
and those who praised Kidman’s total transformation into Woolf, the common currency
deployed by both groups of responses served to reiterate a perceived relation between embodiment
and an authentic femininity. Hiscock and Turan, for instance, concurred that
Kidman was unrecognisable thanks to the prosthetic nose, while Holden praised Kidman’s
“uncanny physical resemblance” to Woolf. Critics dismissive of Kidman’s performance, by
contrast, were not only scathing about the “putty” (Griffi n) nose but deplored Kidman’s
failure to embody Woolf: “She seems bloodless, a series of stiff poses in a fl icker book,”
wrote Sandhu, while Iannone described “a one-note, zombie-like” performance (51).
Both sides of the debate, then, privilege embodiment in the evaluation of performance,
diff ering only in their respective judgments of the actress’s achievements.
Th e favourable critical reception of Kidman-as-Woolf was also bolstered by interviews
with the fi lmmakers who praised Kidman’s embodied performance by recounting
production anecdotes to illustrate the way Kidman “fl eshed out” her characterization. For
example, Cunningham reported that Kidman turned down the use of a hand double for
the writing scenes, instead learning to reproduce Woolf’s handwriting (for the scene where
she writes the suicide note), which also required her to write with her right-hand when
Kidman is herself left-handed (“Kidman” 92). In an interview with Cunningham and
screenwriter David Hare, Kidman’s corporeal inhabitance of the role of Woolf is off ered as
proof of the authenticity of her performance—“Her whole body is acting” (Blackwelder).
Again referring to Kidman writing as Woolf, Hare sees this not only as evidence of Kidman’s
dedication but as establishing the accuracy of her embodied performance: “She had
a writing board, and she had a scratchy pen, and the physicalization of how Virginia Woolf
actually wrote is now totally authentic” (Blackwelder). Th e fi lmmakers, however, reserved
their highest praise for Kidman’s physicalization of Woolf during the suicide scene. No
body double was used here either, and Kidman waded into the river and stayed submerged