Woolfian Boundaries - Clemson University

Brown-ness, Trees, Rose Petals, and Chrysalises
growth comes from within. 6 Initially, inherited external forms such as laws and customs
serve to protect that new growth, but, in a radical move, Carpenter argues that such external
forms eventually become constricting and must be cast off or “exfoliated.” In the
terms of Carpenter’s fl oral metaphor: “Th e outermost petals…form a husk, which for a
time protects the young bud. But it also confi nes it. A struggle ensues, a strangulation, and
then the husk gives way.” Within Carpenter’s cosmic time-span, this process is seen as an
endless creative cycle: “And now the petals uncurl and free themselves like living things to
the light. But the process is not fi nished…. Th e fl ower, the petals, now drop off withered
and useless…. And the circle begins again”(Ideal 58-59).
As early as 1919, in “Reading”—an autobiographical essay that has obvious links
with Sara’s bed-time reading in Th e Years—Woolf too, had used the image of the blossoming
bud as a fi gure for psychological transformation, comparing her own experience of
psychological awakening as a young woman to that of “some bud [which] feels a sudden
release in the night and is found in the morning with all its petals shaken free” (E3 153).
At the end of Th e Years, as a new day dawns and the younger generation begins to imagine
the possibility of a world free from the constraints of Victorian materialism and hypocrisy,
the characters experience a communal moment of release, again pictured in similar
terms. Flowers and fl ower petals “fall and fall and over all”: someone showers Rose with
petals; Brown paddles his hands in fallen petals as he contemplates a toast to the spiritual
evolution of the human race; Maggie arranges petals in a bowl of water and tosses a fl ower
at Sara to wake her (341). Finally, Eleanor is presented with a “bunch of many coloured
fl owers,” as she watches a young man and a young woman emerging from a shared cab
(349). Coming at the end of a series of fl oral allusions to Carpenter’s theory of exfoliation,
this fi nal image of androgyny recalls one of Carpenter’s chief evolutionary goals, namely
the emergence of an intermediate sex combining male and female characteristics and possessing
exceptional powers of creativity. 7 As Sandra Gilbert has noted (217), Carpenter
had been an important source for A Room of One’s Own, Woolf’s earlier meditation on “the
art of creation” (AROO 99), in which the idea of imaginative androgyny is presented using
a very similar fi gure—a young man and a young woman getting into a taxi.
When Woolf draws on Carpenter’s second trope of exfoliation in the memorable image
of Sara curled up “like a chrysalis wrapped round in the sharp white folds of the sheet”
as she drifts off to sleep at the end of the 1907 episode, the image tells a more personal
story (117). For Carpenter himself, inside his concealing “Brown” book, has been written
into Sara Pargiter’s chrysalis stage—or rather that of the young Virginia Stephen—as the
catalyst that will enable her to transform herself into a butterfl y or some kind of winged
insect, dancing not her mother’s but her own dance. A key to Carpenter’s role in Woolf’s
psychological and creative development can be found in scattered allusions—throughout
Woolf’s writing and in particular in her bildungsroman, Th e Voyage Out, and the diaries
of the 1920s and early 30s—to a little known appendix on Th e Art of Creation, “Th e May-
Fly: A Study in Transformation.” Th e latter is a parable of human exfoliation in which
certain physical and mental illnesses in humans are equated with the pupal stage in the
life-cycle not only of the may-fl y but of other Woolfi an insects such as butterfl ies, bees,
gnats, dragon-fl ies, and the privet-hawk-moth. Just as, in may-fl ies and related species,
the “quiescent” chrysalis stage prepares for the emergence of “the perfect insect,” so, too,
in humans, Carpenter argues, “weeks and months of depression and lethargy…or even
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