Woolfian Boundaries - Clemson University

162 WOOLFIAN BOUNDARIES
work of art and the “easily combustible” (TG 155).
In gazing at a picture, Woolf, as her sister recognized, was interested primarily not in
“the looks but only the impression the looks made upon you” (Selected Letters 87). She was
concerned with the viewer rather than, or as well as, the painting; and this places her in
an argument with “signifi cant form” as formulated by Clive Bell. 10 Woolf does not reject
signifi cant form, but rather than declaring that “Only one answer seems possible” (Art 8),
she emphasizes instead multiplicity and the process of observation and interrogation, the
importance of what Fry called “putting…many question marks into the text of our subject”
(Last Lectures 48). Typically, her essays deny closure, pivot and turn on themselves.
Th e 1930 introduction to her sister’s exhibition, for example, begins by voicing (and
parodying) moral concerns about women moving out of their roles as “mother, wife or
mistress” (97) by taking up painting in their own right, and ends by infi nitely deferring
any possibility of a conclusion: “Th at was the very question I was asking myself as I came
in” (“Foreword” 100).
Notes
1. Compare Lily Briscoe’s ambivalence as she begins to paint: “a curious physical sensation, as if she were
urged forward and at the same time must hold herself back”: To the Lighthouse (London: Penguin, 1964 ),
p. 179.
2. “Th e Open Door” was also a title Woolf considered for Th ree Guineas (D4 6n).
3. See for example Th ree Guineas, p. 187.
4. In contrast, in her own mountaineering metaphors in “Th e Value of Laughter,” rather than positioning
herself on the “heights” Woolf claims the “highways”: the space of everyday experience and of laughter,
which observes, mocks, and refashions the world around it—including Bell’s insistence on positioning
himself on the “pinnacle whence the whole of life can be viewed as in a panorama” (E1 59) rather than in
what Bell dismisses as “the snug foothills of warm humanity” (Art 32).
5. Spalding, Th e Bloomsbury Group (London: National Portrait Gallery, 2006), pp. 15-16; “Vanessa Bell’s
Portrait of Virginia Woolf at Smith College,” Woolf in the Real World: Selected Papers from the Th irteenth
Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf (Clemson: Clemson University Digital Press, 2005), pp. 130-31.
6. See Th e Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf, ed. Susan Dick (San Diego: Harvest-HBJ, 1989), p.
142; Th e Waves (London: Penguin, 1992), p.118.
7. As Woolf complains in a letter about Vanessa and Duncan Grant in the 1930s: “Th ere they sit looking at
pinks and yellows, and when Europe blazes all they do is screw up their eyes and complain of a temporary
glare in the foreground.” Modern Fiction Studies, 30, 2 (Summer 1984): 189-90, cited by Dunn, p. 151.
8. See for example Vanessa Bell, Selected Letters, 367-68.
9. As Andrew McNeillie has noted: Th e Common Reader: Second Series (San Diego, New York, London: Harvest-Harcourt
Brace, 1986), p. 4.
10. Vanessa Bell herself held fi rmly to signifi cant form, feeling that colour and relationships, rather than content,
were central to her work: see Selected Letters 133-34.
Works Cited
Bell, Clive. Art. 1914. London: Chatto and Windus, 1949.
——. Potboilers. London: Chatto and Windus, 1918.
Bell, Vanessa. “Lecture Given at Leighton Park School.”1925. Sketches in Pen and Ink. Ed. Lia Giachero. London:
Pimlico, 1998. 149-65.
——. Selected Letters. Ed. Regina Marler. London: Bloomsbury, 1994.
de Certeau, Michel. Th e Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.
de Lauretis, Teresa. Technologies of Gender: Essays on Th eory, Film and Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Th ousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. 1987. London: Con-