Woolfian Boundaries - Clemson University

Woolf and Andrew Marvell
(133-34); and so does the amputation done by a reaping machine in “Th e Window” (10).
For those motifs remember the group of erotic lyrics known as the “Mower” poems. “Th e
Mower against Gardens,” for instance, with its forced horticulture’s “Forbidden mixtures”
(Marvell 41), is clearly ironized in “Time Passes.” In “Damon the Mower,” the “whistling
Sythe” infl icts refl exive damage as “By his own Sythe, the Mower [is] mown” (44). Woolf
also seems to have had in mind the mowers who worked the meadows around Appleton
House. Th ere again, we meet those scythes, with their “Edge all bloody” from the death of
birds that had been nesting in the grass (71).
But maybe enough has been said to demonstrate that Woolf’s use of Marvell was far from
casual, or merely incidental. She had, on the contrary, a need to appropriate and rewrite him. Th is
was owing in part to the momentum towards canonisation that, as we saw earlier, had been under
way for some time, and behind which Eliot was throwing his signifi cant critical weight.
As I have suggested, Woolf’s uses of Marvellian lyric could be disruptive. McWhirter’s
description of her allusive praxis as often “unruly” or “disorderly,” and as the enactment of
fertile “instability,” seems justifi ed by what she did with Marvell (251, 260). For as we have
seen, she can lift images from widely diff erent poems and create new hybrids, so as to make
explicit the gendered assumptions of those verses. She is sceptical of the “tough reasonableness”
Eliot credits to Marvell, which was, as she saw it, sometimes bought at women’s
expense. His lyricism was easy to love, but perhaps it was too immediately attractive and
gratifying. Th ere could be generous experience of his poetic charm. But in Woolf’s case this
was not uncritical. It was accompanied by a strong sense of his imaginative limits, especially
in the stances his poetic voice assumed towards women. Her writing-large of those assumptions,
and her atomising and reassigning of his imagery, signal a deeper rebellion against
facile assimilation of Marvell into any ideal artistic order, Eliot’s included; and amounts to a
contesting, through fi gure, and by proxy, of Eliot’s critical authority.
Works cited
Bagguley, W. H., ed. Andrew Marvell 1621-1678: Tercentenary Tributes. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1922.
Birrell, Augustine. Andrew Marvell. London: Macmillan, 1905.
Browne, Sir Th omas. Th e Major Works. Ed. C. A. Patrides. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977.
——. Sir Th omas Browne’s Pseudodoxia Epidemica. Ed. Robin Robbins. Vol. 1. Oxford: Clarendon, 1981.
de Gay, Jane. Virginia Woolf’s Novels and the Literary Past. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2006.
Dusinberre, Juliet. Virginia Woolf’s Renaissance. London: Macmillan, 1997.
Eliot, T. S. Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot. Ed. Frank Kermode. London: Faber, 1975.
——. Th e Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound.
Ed. Valerie Eliot. London: Faber, 1971.
Fox, Alice. Virginia Woolf and the Literature of the English Renaissance. Oxford: Clarendon, 1990.
Greene, Sally. Virginia Woolf: Reading the Renaissance. Athens, OH: Ohio UP, 1999.
MacCarthy, Desmond. “Aff able Hawk”. New Statesman 2 April 1921: 757.
McWhirter, David. “Woolf, Eliot, and the Elizabethans: Th e Politics of Modernist Nostalgia.” Virginia Woolf:
Reading the Renaissance. Ed. Greene. 245-66.
Marvell, Andrew. Th e Poems & Letters of Andrew Marvell. In Two Volumes. Vol. 1. Ed. H. M. Margoliouth.
Oxford: Clarendon, 1927.
Sackville-West, Vita. Andrew Marvell. London: Faber, 1929.
Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. Introd. Elaine Showalter. London: Penguin, 1992.
——. Th e Diary of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell with Andrew McNeillie. Vols 1 and 2. Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1979, 1981.
——. To the Lighthouse. Ed. Susan Dick. Oxford: Shakespeare Head, 1992.
——. Th e Waves. Ed. Gillian Beer. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998.
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