Woolfian Boundaries - Clemson University

166 WOOLFIAN BOUNDARIES
a model for Th e Hyde Park Gate News (xxi). 3 Humm’s Snapshots of Bloomsbury shows us that
the fi rst pages of Woolf’s own photo album displayed the traditional Victorian collection of
cartes-de-visite in a format Humm elsewhere describes as having an “almost childlike scrapbook
appearance” (Snapshots, pl. 1 and 2, pp. 40-41; Modernist Women 57). And through
Merry Pawlowski and Vara Neverow’s eminently useful website, we also have access to the
scrapbooks of newspaper clippings (both pictures and text) Woolf herself kept for the writing
of Th ree Guineas. Some of Woolf’s family members and friends also kept scrapbooks,
including her great aunt’s sister, Mia Cameron, and her sister’s longtime companion, Duncan
Grant. 4 As Susan Stanford Freedman documents in her book on H. D., other modernists
also adapted scrapbooking into collage as a means of visual expression (see collages and
notes, 430-31). It does not, therefore, seem a great leap to look at To the Lighthouse as one of
Woolf’s experiments in transforming visual methodologies to writing, another form of what
Humm calls the “technologies of memory” (Snapshots 11). As Allen and Hoverstadt note,
“early scrapbooks often seem an extension of the vogue for recording personal memories and
thoughts which was popular at the time. A great deal of personal writing was included” (16).
In this view, To the Lighthouse becomes a copious family album, fi lled with photographs, personal
writing, quotations from favorite poems, and bright colored scraps commemorating
famous people and events—all decorating the domestic life of a Victorian childhood. 5
Woolf’s attitude towards scraps and scrapbooks like her attitude towards photography
was ironic and ambivalent, veering between seeing them as over-literal and falsely
objective and using them subtly to evoke the unconscious shimmer of cathected memory.
Woolf was quite capable of using photographs literally and autobiographically. As Humm
points out, often “there are close parallels between details in the [family] photographs and
descriptive details in Woolf’s autobiographies” such that “Woolf seems to be describing
not an actual memory but…a photograph in front of her” (Snapshots ix). Th is literalness
is what Woolf refers to in the two occasions I have found so far where she mentions scrapbooks.
In note 29 to chapter 1 of Th ree Guineas, for instance, she quotes Dr. Alington,
former Head Master of Eton, when he refers to his own scrapbook as documenting a particular
sum of money given to support scholarships for boys (183); this refers to a scrapbook
simply as a collection of notes or facts. Her essay on “Miss Mitford,” published in
Th e Common Reader in 1925, demonstrates a more complicated view. Here she describes
“certain books which can be read without the mind and without the heart, but still with
considerable enjoyment” as “scrapbooks rather than biographies” (CR1 183). Interestingly,
the very limitations of such literal scrapbooks prove to be a paradoxical benefi t, for
as Woolf points out, such lack of synthesis and analysis “license[s] mendacity. One cannot
believe what Miss Hill [the author of the scrapbook biography] says about Miss Mitford,
and thus one is free to invent Miss Mitford for oneself” (CR1 183).
In To the Lighthouse, Woolf invents her own non-literal scrapbook, a collection of private
photographs and public illustrations, autobiographical musings, favorite bits of poetry,
comments on contemporary philosophical arguments and political events, to be read
with not only the heart and mind, but also the eyes. Th e most obvious series of private
photographs collaged into To the Lighthouse are, of course, the many pictures of Julia Stephen.
A central image of Section 1, “Th e Window”—the part of the novel I concentrate
on in this paper—is the triangular purple shadow Mrs. Ramsay casts while sitting on the
steps of the drawing room window at Talland House in St. Ives. Karen Kukil has identifi ed