Woolfian Boundaries - Clemson University

“OVER THE BOUNDARY”: VIRGINIA WOOLF AS COMMON SEER
by Tara Surry
Virginia Woolf’s writing on art explores the relationship between the verbal and visual
arts: there are strong parallels between Woolf and Vanessa Bell’s experiments
with new ways of looking and new forms of expression. Woolf engaged with
diff erent models as she looked at and wrote about art, entering into debate with, among
others, Vanessa Bell, Clive Bell, and Roger Fry. She argued with, built upon, and combined
diff erent elements, fusing together her surveying and questioning methodologies
and her fascination with “the astonishing loveliness of the visible world” (RF 45). Th e art
criticism sought a “language that wound itself into the heart of the sensation,” and both
celebrated and interrogated visual experience “in streets, in galleries and also in front of
the bookcase” (RF 106, 172). Woolf emphasizes the dialogue between painting and other
forms of art and the conversation between the work of art and the self, examining her own
spectatorship and exploring questions about ways of representing female experience. She
moves toward a new, more inclusive form of modernism: based on new understandings
of perception and cognition, responding to and articulated by the gallery, the street, and
domestic space, and depicting new forms of subjectivity.
Let us pause for a moment, however, to consider thresholds, spaces hovering between
the gallery and the street: “On fi rst entering a picture gallery;” “let us dally for a
little on the verge” (CE2 234, 241); “pausing upon the threshold,” “shillyshallying on the
threshold” (“Foreword” 97, 98); “on the paving stone at the doorway” (E3 163). Woolf’s
in-between positioning, which Jane Goldman calls her “doorstep model” (153), signifi es,
I suggest, at least three interconnected things. Firstly, a strategic drawing of attention to
a moment of hesitation, stemming in part from a desire to draw attention to a socially
produced sense of insecurity about a woman entering a “masculine” realm which positions
women as objects of the gaze rather than subjects. 1 Secondly, the threshold as a space of
liminality and marginality, and thus of abjection and haunting: “we are outsiders, condemned
for ever to haunt the borders and margins of this great art” (CE2 236). Woolf
presents herself as doubly excluded from the “silent kingdom of paint” as a woman and as
a writer (CE2 237), and furthermore one who is “trespassing” by writing about art (“Foreword”
99). Th irdly, however, the threshold is a transitional space. Like the repetition of
“But” as a rhetorical and spatial shift in A Room of One’s Own, it signals a conjunction or
hinge, of which the “doorway” is a literal manifestation. It marks a space of contemplation
and potential transformation, of contiguity and exchange: a “sunny margin where the arts
fl irt and joke” (CE2 234). It also, therefore, off ers the possibility of the emergence of new
forms.
Th e “pause for a moment on the threshold” which begins Roger Fry, for example (RF
11), is a strategic deployment of uncertainty as what de Certeau calls a tactic (37). Woolf
takes up an interstitial position: what Deleuze and Guattari describe as the “intermezzo”
(27), and Teresa de Lauretis the “space-off ” (25), from which to challenge the boundaries
themselves. Th ese in-between spaces off er a vantage point from which to look in multiple