Woolfian Boundaries - Clemson University

Inside and Outside the Covers
179
fl ow between inheritance and continuance, just as, in the larger context, the novel as a
whole identifi es its position as “between.”
But just as ethical writing, for Woolf, means positioning the text in the larger dialogic
conversation of community, so ethical reading means a two-way relationship with the
work of art. Woolf creates for her reader not an absolute freedom but a dialogic freedom,
in which the reader must, if reading ethically, respond to what the writer has shown. I don’t
mean just close textual reading in the way that I’ve been attempting here. I mean reading
in the way Woolf describes it in her essay “Notes on an Elizabethan Play”: [We must not
forget], she writes, “how great a power the body of a literature possesses to impose itself:
how it will not suff er itself to be read passively, but takes us and reads us…” (CR1 48;
emphasis added). Like La Trobe’s pageant, Woolf’s texts confront us with a mirror. 7 Th ese
unpleasant details we encounter in her fi ction: we focus on asking what they say about the
text, or about “Woolf.” But is the text not also asking what they say about us?
Th is reversing temporality—present interrogating past, and past interrogating future—might
also explain the recurring fi gures that make, perhaps not an ending, but
a point of arrest in many of Woolf’s longer works: a trope of reconciliation, détente, or
confrontation between the sexes. Perhaps I am not the only reader who has been puzzled
by such seeming conventionality in a writer who so opposed her culture’s gendered plots.
For Woolf, however, the polarization of entrenched gender identifi cations marked the site
of the most signifi cant confl icts of her generation (remembering all the contesting values
that Woolf understood those identifi cations to imply), so that her hoverings around the
traditional sexual plot suggest a constant return to the site where the rip of the cloth must
take place. Th us, echoing the end of A Room of One’s Own, Eleanor Pargiter looks out a
window to see an unknown man and woman in a taxi, although the couple in the later
work moves out of the taxi and into a house, not—as in the earlier instance—into the taxi
and down the street. In Between the Acts, Isa and Giles transform from audience members
to fi gures in a play, transforming in this way into emblematic fi gures, whose dramatic
roles remind us of Mrs. Swithin’s observation that the Chinese “put a dagger on the table
and that’s a battle” (142). 8 Functioning at a supra-character level, these fi gures expand the
narrative confl ict to the global stage—civilizations at war, humanity divided against itself.
Th e confl ict is inherited, and Woolf challenges us to know it, to see it, to face it as she has
shown it, even as our own voices are added to her own eff orts to transform it. Just as the
unknown couple at the end of Th e Years enters a house instead of freely driving off down
the street, and the curtain rises, in Between the Acts on a continuing performance, there
is a structure we must enter in order to play our dialogic role. Woolf avoids propaganda,
but she also defi nes for the future its ethical task, just as in Between the Acts, the grammar
of the ending moves from repetition through responsibility to possibility: “they must
fi ght,” “they would embrace,” “another life might be born” (219, emphasis added). Woolf’s
ragged endings do allow space for novelty to leak in, for thought that has never been
thought before. She leaves us free to defi ne a new future as much as we humanly can be
free. But she does not let us escape the human condition; she does let us escape her words.
Th e journey’s end—whether of Woolf’s text or of this conference—marks a site for new
beginnings, but in Woolf’s vision of human continuance, beginning is both a rupture and
part of the on-going fl ow. Full stop. Capital A and. Now. Question mark. Woolf’s legacy,
Woolf’s challenge, to us.