Woolfian Boundaries - Clemson University

Virginia Woolf as Common Seer
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the doors and exposing to debate not only the pictures themselves but also the process of
viewing and the responses of the viewer.
Th e Fry that Woolf depicts is a construct, and not an ideal model: there is ambiguity,
for example, in the comment that under his tutelage “no one was allowed to remain an
outsider for long…. It was then not so easy to stand aside and laugh” (“Impressions” 11).
Woolf values her own “outsider,” dual perspective on art, but employs and expands upon
Fry as a fi gure for interrogation and debate. Her narrative strategies foreground exploration,
digression, and refusal of closure. “Walter Sickert,” for example, presents a meditation
on colour, perception, and the connections between writing and painting as a form
of life-writing, but in a way that stresses its own “mobility and idiosyncrasy” (CE2 240).
Paradoxically, it builds upon “the sound of the human voice” (240) by structuring the
essay as a symposium on the “silent” art. Th e essay (originally subtitled “A Conversation
about Art”) opens up a discussion of perception obliquely, by way of the new electric coloured
traffi c light system—itself a symbol of modernity. Th e interchanging voices move
rapidly to insects: portrayed as heterogeneous creatures existing solely in their response
to colour and changing with what they perceive. In “Pictures,” writers themselves are
depicted as “irresponsible dragonfl ies” fl itting from picture to picture and topic and to
topic (E4: 246). Insects’ multi-faceted eyes could be seen as tropes for Woolf’s essayistic
practice: from numerous perspectives they synthesize a point of view, which is, however,
continually in movement.
Similarly, Fry gazing at a picture is described as both a “snailhorn” and “a humming-bird
hawkmoth hanging over a fl ower, quivering yet still” (RF 121, 152). Woolf
uses tropes of combination that collide even with each other, presenting the arts fused
together synaesthetically: “Character is colour, and colour is china, and china is music”
(“Foreword” [1934]). Th e transmutation into insects is signifi cant in terms of hybridity
and the dissolution of boundaries: “the mixing and marrying of words,” as a painter mixes
paint, the conjugal union of disparate elements (CE2 241). Sickert is a hybrid of diff erent
nationalities, and even his name is unstable (CE2 244); women also occupy an interstitial
cultural space, as “queer, composite being[s]” (AROO 40). Woolf valorizes the collapse of
categories: “trespassing,” “pilferings” (“Foreword” 99; E4 246). She associates herself with
Sickert and Fry’s “raids across the boundaries” and “raids into the lands of others” (RF
239-40, CE2 243), as a metaphor for her own narrative manoeuvres and transgressing of
generic lines of demarcation.
In Woolf’s version of the gallery showing her sister’s work, “A meaning is given to
familiar things that makes them strange…. People’s minds have split out of their bodies
and become part of their surroundings.” Th rough moving “over the boundary,” disrupting
categories, and defamiliarizing familiar sites/sights (a technique the Russian formalists
called ostranenie), she suggests new ways of viewing them (“Foreword” [1934]). Th e “common
seer” is deliberately analogous to the “common reader.” In her writing on London,
the reader is told to look again at the city: similarly, she encourages new ways of looking
at pictures, of using our eyes not as passive “spheres of jelly” (“A Review” 382) but as an
active means of thinking and refl ecting on what we see, and thus perhaps of envisaging
alternative ways of seeing and acting.
Woolf’s writings on art are richly complex and ambiguous, exploiting the silence
of the topic: “words begin to raise their feeble limbs in the pale border land of no man’s