Woolfian Boundaries - Clemson University

20 WOOLFIAN BOUNDARIES
of accompanying physical illness and incapacity” are often the prelude to an “outbreak
of fresh life,” involving a “veer[ing] round” of “the whole nature” and “a considerable
and rapid mental advance”: “discomfort and uneasiness,” enforced physical inaction, and
detachment from the outside world are the necessary accompaniments of worthwhile
transformation (Art 107, 248-52). Carpenter’s mystical evolutionism thus turns such illnesses
from “signals of failure” into “steps forward in the line of evolution,” celebrating the
fl uidity of the human mind (Art 251). It is not diffi cult to imagine the appeal of such a
conception to Woolf as a writer battling against mental and physical illness.
Turning to Woolf’s own writing, the fate of her semi-autobiographical heroine, Rachel
Vinrace, in her fi rst novel, Th e Voyage Out, may be read as a failed version of the
central miracle of “Th e May-Fly.” Just as Carpenter’s may-fl y begins life as “a brownish…creature”
(238), so the face of Woolf’s heroine at the opening of Th e Voyage Out
lacks “colour and defi nite outline” (13). However, though the may-fl y emerges from its
“lethargic subaqueous existence” as a chrysalis at the bottom of the stream to become “a
little fairy with four pearly lace-like wings” dancing in the sunshine (237-38), at this stage
in Woolf’s writing career Rachel cannot achieve the freedom of creative fl ight, remaining
“curled up at the bottom of the sea” unable to escape her illness (322). 8 In her diary, Woolf
similarly described her own “glooms” as “a plunge into deep waters” and referred to “that
odd amphibious life of headache” (D3 38, 112). Yet, as early as 1921, she began to see the
“feminine” mental and physical instability associated with her bouts of illness as a productive
form of fl uidity, “full of interest,” and preparatory to leaps forward in her creative life
(D3 112). 9 Signifi cantly, in a diary entry for 16 February 1930, she imagines this process
as a pupal stage: “It [my mind] refuses to go on registering impressions. It shuts itself up.
It becomes chrysalis. I lie quite torpid…. Th en suddenly something springs… & this is
I believe the moth shaking its wings in me” (D3 287). Alternatively, in “On Being Ill”
(1926), the deliverer of this creative lethargy—the “hero” Chloral—is itself pictured as an
ethereal insect “with the moth’s eyes and the feathered feet” (E4 319). Finally, and most revealingly,
the ultimate meaning of Carpenter’s “May-Fly” as a parable of immortality—of
the human spirit’s ability to “slip[] her [bodily] shroud”—contributed to the most mystical
of Woolf’s books, Th e Waves (1931), for which, of course, she had originally intended
the title Th e Moths (Art 254).
Notes
1. For a useful summary of Woolf’s acerbic comments on a variety of mystics see Kane (328-31).
2. See Gordon (82-83) and Lee (171).
3. Carpenter quotes from Berkeley’s Principles: “all the choir of heaven and furniture of the earth…have no
subsistence without mind” (Art 39n1; Berkeley 55).
4. See Woolf’s observation that the scene of “Elvira [Sara] in bed” is “the turn of the book” which “needs a
great shove to swing it round on its hinges” (D4: 149).
5. For Carpenter’s anti-statist views, see Cachin.
6. For an account of the infl uence of both Lamarck and Whitman on Carpenter’s theory of exfoliation, see
Gershenowitz.
7. See Carpenter’s Th e Intermediate Sex.
8. In Melymbrosia, Rachel expresses the view that “love and fl ying” are what matter in life (192). Rachel can
also be identifi ed with the moth trapped beneath the hotel sky-light in Th e Voyage Out (322).
9. See D2, 8 August 1921, 126; also D3, 28 September 1926, 112; D3, 16 September 1929, 254 and “On
Being Ill” (E4 317-29).