Woolfian Boundaries - Clemson University

WOOLF AND ANDREW MARVELL: THE GENDERING OF MODERNISM
by Jim Stewart
According to Alice Fox, Marvell’s lyrics were “a permanent part of [Virginia] Woolf’s
mind” (69); and he was, along with Herrick and Shakespeare, among “the poets
to whom she most frequently turned” (72). Th us, “Woolf always used Marvell in
a functional way” in her fi ction; and he was often “alluded to casually in [Woolf’s] diary
and letters” (73). To illustrate Woolf’s practice, Fox refers to the 1925 diary, to Orlando
(1928), to Th e Years (1937); and gives, in all, four paragraphs of her study to Marvell (73-
74). However, the space given him refl ects neither his importance to Woolf as a resource,
nor the uses she found for Marvell within the gender politics of modernism itself. Th is is
not a negative criticism: Fox’s exploration of Woolf’s responses to Renaissance literature is
more wide ranging than that kind of focus would have allowed.
While Juliet Dusinberre also discusses a range of Renaissance writers who mattered
to Woolf (such as Montaigne and Donne, or Pepys and Bunyan), she does not take up
Fox’s limited exploration of Woolf’s allusions to Marvell; and indeed, her book simply does
not refer to him. Sally Greene (despite that Marvellian surname) did not receive from the
various contributors to her edited collection of essays any discussions of Woolf’s relation to
Marvellian lyric. Her contributors treated such writers as Elizabeth I, Donne, and Milton,
and forms like the sonnet, but did not touch upon Marvell. Most recently, Jane de Gay has
chosen to pass Marvell by in her attempt to locate Woolf’s writing practices within what T.
S. Eliot famously called “tradition.” De Gay discusses Milton, Sir Th omas Browne (of whom
more later), and Shakespeare. But in the course of exploring what Th e Waves owes to Dante,
she has a moment of blindness. Quoting Jinny’s words, “Th e iron gates have rolled back.…
Time’s fangs have ceased their devouring” (TW 190), de Gay calls this “an allusion to the
gates of Dante’s Inferno” (177), as does Gillian Beer in her Oxford World’s Classics edition
(TW 257 n 190). Perhaps so. But surely Jinny, who is sexually active throughout Th e Waves,
also refers to Marvell’s “To his Coy Mistress,” with its equally keen, hortatory “Rather at
once our Time devour,” and its persona’s longing to “roll all our strength… / Th orough the
Iron gates of Life” (Marvell 27). Th ose “fangs” may also distantly echo the idea of Time’s
“slow-chapt pow’r” in that poem. Yet while the points of allusion to Marvell appear specifi c
and clustered, it seems he is not on de Gay’s mind, nor on Beer’s.
In Greene’s collection, however, David McWhirter’s essay “Woolf, Eliot, and the Elizabethans:
Th e Politics of Modernist Nostalgia,” does draw some useful contrasts between
Eliot’s and Woolf’s notions of the Renaissance literary past. McWhirter notes that Woolf’s
political agenda “diff ered substantially from Eliot’s conservative aims” (250). Whereas
Eliot aspired to an ideal, quasi-theocratic metanarrative, Woolf herself wanted “exuberant,
expansive, and unruly possibility, [and] a disorderly fecundity” (251); and this was to
comprise, in turn, “heterogeneity and generic instability” (260). One wonders, then, what
uses Woolf would fi nd for a male writer quite so guarded, lapidary, and secretive as Marvell;
and how such uses would further the distinctive aims which McWhirter identifi es.
At the end of March 1921, the City of Hull held a tercentenary celebration hon-