Woolfian Boundaries - Clemson University

2 WOOLFIAN BOUNDARIES
paper I will focus principally on some of Mass’s ideas about Woolf and the circumstances
of the writing of her thesis.
Already recognised as a brilliant young scholar, Mass was invited to take on a fulllength
study of Woolf for an MA by the Head of the English Department, Professor C.
J. Waldock. Her supervisor became R. G. Howarth, a native-born Australian academic,
with a BLetters from Oxford 1932, who returned to a lectureship at Sydney University
in 1933. He was a modernist champion and an admirer of Woolf’s writing. According to
Faculty of Arts Minutes, an MA thesis would normally be expected to be 20,000 words,
which Mass far exceeded by nature of the study she embarked upon with departmental
encouragement. (See Minutes Books, Southerly, Union Recorder).
Everything mattered as war came, lives were under threat, intellectual life had a real
edge, and student life was politically challenged by international and colonial confl icts. Mass
was not a typical student coming out of an orderly school life. She had lived away from
Australia in Argentina in early childhood, was home-schooled by her mother, refl ecting an
eccentric radical intellectual family base, youthful egotism, precocity, and passion for ideas.
In fact, her initial response to the idea of writing a thesis on Woolf was reluctance:
My fl imsy exposure to Virginia Woolf’s work previous to this had repelled and
even angered me. I had no time for the so-called private symbolism, a strong
feature among the moderns…. I saw Virginia Woolf as another literary egotist.
Th e University’s directive that I should do my Master thesis on her work fell upon
me like a sentence!!!…. I was alone with the books themselves. No guidelines, no
full scale critical analysis, only a scattering of book reviews. (Unpublished Autobiographical
Notes 98)
Mass struggled to get her research material together, all the novels including, miraculously,
Between the Acts which was hard to acquire, some short fi ction, some articles in magazines,
and Winifred Holtby’s 1932 study. No reliable biographical material existed, no stories of
Woolf’s peers and contemporaries, no diaries and letters, no holographs, no gossip, none
of the abundant nuancing material of the period since the 1970s. Th is was a moment in
time, with the full body of fi ction, and its ending point with the death just announced.
Mass really did not have anything but the texts and some essays in American magazines,
unlike scholars now who cannot ever go to that place of pure text again. Th is moment
gives her work now its great new potential as original insight, layering her research method
with the consequence of fugitive historical perception.
Mass was in the fi nal stages of writing as the news of Woolf’s disappearance on 28 March
and likely death by drowning was announced in the Sydney Morning Herald on 3 April1941.
She notes the death in her thesis Preface, as “a sudden and mysterious close” (Th esis 1), and
the shock of the death deeply aff ected her personally and her critique, especially of the later
fi ction. In her own words, written much later in the Unpublished Autobiographical Notes:
Subjecting Virginia Woolf’s philosophy and technique alike to microscopic scrutiny,
I was fi nding each to be an integral part of the other. Th ree main sections
emerged, precious weeks, one after the other, and in the midst of it all, Virginia
herself walking out into the sea and into eternity. A darkness falling upon my