Woolfian Boundaries - Clemson University

Brown-ness, Trees, Rose Petals, and Chrysalises
Th e evidence for my argument is circumstantial. After reading from the brown book,
Sara attempts to enact philosophical idealism imaginatively by thinking herself into becoming
a tree. Again the choice of a tree immediately makes one think of Ronald Knox’s
well-known limerick about Berkeley and the tree in the quad (seen by God when no one
is there), but we can fi nd a closer analogue in Th e Art of Creation, where Carpenter uses
the tree to help the reader imagine how the universe is created by thought, arguing that “a
dominant Idea informs the life of the Tree; persisting it forms the tree” (29). In addition,
Berkeley—as it turns out—was not particularly interested in trees, whereas for Carpenter
in Th e Art of Creation the tree image becomes a unifying fi gure illustrating a message that
is predominantly evolutionary socialist as opposed to theological. Drawing on a range of
mystical infl uences, including Schopenhauer, Whitman, and Th eosophy, Carpenter uses
the tree as a fi gure for a world branching out from but ultimately rooted in a Universal
Will. A Carpenterian reading of Sara’s imaginary tree thus provides a mystical socialist
answer to Maggie’s related question: “Are we one, or are we separate?” (113). Carpenter’s
answer, namely that we are both, is echoed later in the novel in North’s image of the
bubble and the stream (329-30).
A recognition of Carpenter’s textual presence in the 1907 episode of Th e Years can
deepen our understanding of how that episode functions as the turning-point or hinge
of the novel, but fi rst more needs to be said about Carpenter’s mystical evolutionary socialism.
4 As a homosexual, a socialist, and a mystic, Carpenter’s interest in Berkeleyan
idealism was driven by his concern with personal and social growth. Th e notion that all
the individual elements of Creation emanate from a Universal Self provided him with a
philosophical argument in favour of breaking down a whole range of barriers—including
those of class and gender. In describing the inhibiting presence of such barriers within
late-Victorian society, Carpenter frequently used images of brick walls and being buried
alive. For example, in his epic poem Towards Democracy, he imagines the allegorical fi gure
of Democracy buried “deep underfoot”: “Th e clods press suff ocating closer and closer—
grit and fi lth accumulate in the eyes and mouth, I can neither see nor speak” (18). Th e use
of such imagery connects the brown book with Sara’s other reading matter in the 1907
episode, the Antigone. And it is here that the hinge of the novel is located. Stretched out
under the single white sheet of her bed, Sara imagines two stark alternatives not only for
herself but also for English society as a whole: being enclosed and suff ocated to death—
like Antigone—by the brick walls of a coercive materialist culture, or thinking and feeling
oneself—like Carpenter’s thought-tree—into new, organic forms of psychological and
social wholeness. It is the second of these spiritual choices that the Georgians—in Woolf’s
“novel of fact”—attempt , with agonizing slowness, to work towards (D4 129).
Carpenter’s mystical presence in Th e Years does not end there. It presides over the Georgian
struggle towards a more spiritually honest, organic society through the character of
Nicholas Pomjalovsky, otherwise known as Brown. Th e colour of the book Sara was reading—you
will recall—was brown, but Nicholas’s brown-ness also links him to Carpenter’s
Mrs. Brown in “Th e Science of the Future” as does Eleanor’s fi rst meeting with him, in which
he tells her that he and Renny have been “considering the psychology of great men…by the
light of modern science” (Civilisation 226, emphasis added). As Mrs. Brown’s male counterpart,
Brown is the pre-eminent advocate of the spiritual or psychological enquiry Carpenter
had called for in his essay. Like Carpenter, he is also homosexual.
17