Woolfian Boundaries - Clemson University

158 WOOLFIAN BOUNDARIES
directions, a temporary imagined space between hierarchized binary oppositions in which
to examine and critique the position of women as viewers and producers of art. Woolf
asserts the right to look and discuss, and challenges the convention of woman in relation
to the gallery space as either the, often nude, subject of the painting or, occasionally, a
“feminine,” inferior painter. Rather than the Victorian aunt painting “fl ower pieces,” who
is literally a skeleton in the closet (“Foreword” 97) or Lady Waterford with “her angel’s
wings, scandalously unfi nished” whilst she tries to “shore…up” “her father’s house” (E4
327), she substitutes the image of Vanessa Bell, who “looked upon nakedness with a brush
in her hand” (“Foreword” 98), taking up the masculine (and phallic) instrument as Woolf
took up a pen, and using it to disrupt and to re-represent.
Rooms, doors, and the movement through the spaces between them are signifi cant in
both sisters’ work: for example, Bell’s painting Th e Open Door. 2 Both also used mirrors to
present diff erent angles, perspectives, and refractions of the world around them. Compare
for example Woolf’s mirrors in “odd corners” in “Th e Art of Biography” and “On Not
Knowing Greek,” and on doors in “Th e Captain’s Death Bed” (CE4 226; CE1 7; CE1
173), to Bell’s use of mirrors in the drawing room she created at Penns in the Rocks (Reed
256). Both sisters could be seen as drawing on their mother’s suggestion of bringing a
looking-glass into the sick room and thus expanding the boundaries of the space (Stephen
231), and as using literal or metaphorical mirrors as a method of multiplying meanings
and refusing to impose an authoritative, unitary perspective. Woolf’s writing on art emphasizes
diversity and mutability and thus the fl uidity of identity.
Her approach is in part a challenge to Clive Bell’s doctrine of “signifi cant form,” in
which the work of art is detached, and seen from the point of view of a generalized viewer,
assumed to be male (Bell 8, 25): thus denying that the spectator brings specifi c, situated
experiences, and removing art from the world of human interactions. Woolf disputes the
possibility of a “complete theory of visual art,” held to be universally true (Bell v-vi). Her
attitude is closer to that of Fry, who although he also believed that “All art depends upon
cutting off the practical responses to sensations of ordinary life” (Vision 192), nonetheless
adopted a more speculative, heuristic approach which acknowledged its own provisionality.
Woolf stressed these qualities in her biography of Fry, which can be seen as a meditation
upon her own methodology: viewing as a circumambulatory “voyage of discovery,”
in which we “reach the particular picture laden with ideas gathered in other places” (RF
107), continually looking “from another angle” (“Foreword” 99), and engaging with art
as part of an active process of dialogue and inquiry.
Like Fry, who suggested that “in looking at a work of art, we are continually asking
why” (Last Lectures 29), Woolf extends her principle of interrogating public structures into
the art gallery, 3 and asks questions of works of art. By refusing to declare to have found
an all-encompassing “truth” about art and substituting an aesthetics of uncertainty, Woolf
opens up to argument what Griselda Pollock calls the patriarchal myths and “masculinist
discourse” of art (56, 11). Consider for example Clive Bell’s mountaineering metaphors,
in which the observer is a conqueror of “the superb peaks of aesthetic exaltation…the
cold, white peaks of art” (Art 32-33). 4 Woolf disputes this oracular and omniscient model
of the spectator. Th e “common seer” invoked in Roger Fry (105, 106, 227) off ers a diff erent,
more inclusive image. Rather than pictures as “treasure houses with locked doors in
front of which learned people…would lecture” (CE4 88), she argues for throwing open