Woolfian Boundaries - Clemson University

Virginia Woolf as Common Seer
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and for the sisters, this was an ongoing and reciprocal theft (as Jane Dunn and Diane
Gillespie among others have discussed). Th ey sometimes collaborated directly, but their
letters also show both thinking through analogies between their work. 8 Metaphorical and
literal conversations intermesh and reverberate: for example Bell’s Th e Conversation, which
her sister wanted to experiment with writing “in prose” (L3 498). Woolf commented on
Fry’s ambition to publish a cheap, easily accessible broadsheet with art on one side of the
page and literature on the other (RF 172), and experimented with a book in which fact
and art appeared on facing pages: literally bringing the two into contact with each other. 9
Woolf and Bell also discussed a collaborative work to be called “Faces and Voices” (D5
57-58) which would have further embodied what Maggie Humm calls in the context
of Bell’s photographs “a diff erent picture of modernism…as a feminine, multi-generic
space” (290). Woolf is formulating a Post-Impressionist, feminist modernism, in part by
applying Post-Impressionist techniques to her writing: “Cézanne and Picasso had shown
the way; writers should fl ing representation to the winds and follow suit” (RF 172). In
her gallery, “Not a word sounds and yet the room is full of conversations” (“Foreword”
[1934]). Rather than the rarefi ed aesthetic realm of “signifi cant form,” the gallery space
is a “room full of intimate relationships” (“Foreword” [1934]); the focus is shifted from
the dominating male gaze to that of a network of relationships. A conversation continues
beyond the frame of the essay and beyond the canvas: “talk is a common habit” (CE2
233), and Woolf is staking a claim to the gallery as an expanded cultural space of polylogic
voices, a “common ground” (CE2 181).
Vanessa Bell’s “Lecture Given at Leighton Park School” also demonstrates these
shared concerns. Her approach is conversational, and pictures her audience speaking back;
it rejects “any show of authority,” and claims diff erent values (160, 149). She weaves “Mr
Bennett and Mrs Brown” into her speech but refuses to dictate its meaning to her listeners
(151-56), and her lecture moves through very Woolfi an metaphors, such as a “walk
through Reading some winter evening” (159) (Woolf of course often takes such a “walk
through reading” and through the city). Bell’s paintings move between interior and exterior
space, incorporate everyday life, and engage with female experience: “that women are
naked, and bring nakedness to birth” (“Foreword” 97).
Both Woolf and Bell are seeking connections, and are experimenting with diff erent
ways to represent quotidian experience and “the thing itself” (MOB 81) through their own
particular forms of Post-Impressionism. Christopher Reed has suggested that Bloomsbury’s
decorative art was a manifesto for a new, alternative form of living which valued a diff erent
kind of modernity and domesticity. It could be argued that even Clive Bell’s dogmatic assertions
about art allow a challenge to his assumptions. In “Art and War,” for example, he
contends that “the state of mind which art provokes…is one in which nationality has ceased
to exist” and “patriotism has become meaningless” (Potboilers 239, 240), thus leaving a potential
space for re-imagining boundaries as points of contiguity rather than as impermeable
divisions, and creating an area in which the artist and the viewer can engage in conversation.
Fry, meanwhile, actively invited debate, and thoroughly explored opposing arguments: it
was crucial to him to “have another pair of eyes to see with, another brain to argue with” (RF
121). For Woolf, viewing art, like reading, is a dialogic process. Th is process of exploration
and discovery, coupled with a willingness to be wrong and to start again, is an integral part
of Bloomsbury’s spirit of experimentation and reform, and its valuing of both the enduring