Woolfian Boundaries - Clemson University

18 WOOLFIAN BOUNDARIES
In Woolf’s novel, Brown, like the historical Edward Carpenter, takes the role of a mystical
evolutionary socialist guide, although his theories are more tentative and inconclusive
than Carpenter’s, refl ecting Woolf’s own post-war pessimism. In Civilisation: Its Cause and
Cure, Carpenter had diagnosed and suggested a cure for the diseased state of late-Victorian
society; similarly, it is to the “medical” and “priestly” Brown that the victims of Victorianism
in Th e Years turn for help in curing their crippled lives (234). Brown’s diagnosis that contemporary
lives are “screwed up into one hard little, tight little—knot” echoes the second
stage of the three-stage evolutionary socialist scheme put forward by Carpenter (238). In
this second stage, modern Man abandons the communal harmony of primitive society for
the narrow egotism of competitive materialism and his life is described as “strangled tied
and bound” (sic) (Democracy 27). In addition, Brown’s prescription that “the soul…wishes
to expand…to form new combinations” (238) closely echoes Carpenter’s prediction that (in
the third evolutionary stage) the human soul will expand in ever-widening circles and the
creative mind “continually mak[e] new combinations” (Art 106).
Most signifi cantly, behind Brown’s anti-Fascism—and perhaps even behind Th ree
Guineas itself—can be discerned the anti-statist political philosophy that was Carpenter’s
response not to fascism but to Victorian homophobia. Brown’s question—“If we do
not know ourselves, how then can we make religions, laws that…‘fi t’?” (227)—implies
Antigone’s intuitive “unwritten” law, defi ned by Woolf in Th ree Guineas as “the private
laws that should regulate certain instincts, passions, mental and physical desires” (203),
but both are further linked to Carpenter’s goal of a non-governmental society in which
the heart’s internal authority takes precedence over external law. 5 In addition, Carpenter’s
prediction that Man will evolve beyond hero-worship—or the worship of “idols”—is refl
ected in Brown’s refusal to accept the role of Teacher or Master and in Rose’s confi rming
laughter, that seems to chime “no idols, no idols, no idols” (Art 152; TY 341).
Finally, Brown himself functions as an exemplar of Carpenter’s third and fi nal evolutionary
stage in which the soul expands to such a degree that it becomes one with the
Universal even while retaining its own individuality. Within this cosmic consciousness, Carpenter
argues, there is self-reliance but “no more self-consciousness” and in Woolf’s novel,
Brown’s complete lack of self-consciousness is repeatedly emphasized (Civilisation 70). A
capacity to see life from a cosmic perspective is also suggested by Brown’s otherwise rather
shockingly detached description of the air-raid in the 1917 episode as “only children letting
off fi reworks in the back garden” (236). Furthermore, the mysterious operation of Brown’s
“spontaneous subterranean benevolence” (337) on the other characters in the novel would
seem to illustrate the non-coercive, ripple-like process whereby, according to Carpenter,
“a new sentiment of life” “passes by some indirect infl uence from one to another” (Ideal 72,
emphasis added). Th us Eleanor’s contact with Brown “seemed to have released something in
her; she felt not only a new space of time, but new powers, something unknown within her,”
and under Brown’s presiding infl uence at the fi nal party scene, this “new sentiment of life”
spreads mystically to the younger generation of North and Peggy (239).
Two striking pieces of imagery from Th e Years—that of the fl owering bud and that
of the winged insect emerging from its chrysalis—confi rm the centrality of Carpenter’s
inter-textual presence within the novel, given his frequent use of very similar imagery to
illustrate his theory of psychological and social evolution or “exfoliation.” According to
this theory, both personal and social transformation are driven by internal desire; new