Woolfian Boundaries - Clemson University

38 WOOLFIAN BOUNDARIES
ate and instructed might envy” (xxxix-xxxx). Nonetheless, the “pages are only fragments,”
containing traces of voices beginning to “emerge from silence into half articulate speech”
(xxxxi). Th e women are defi ned by their lack of sophistication, by their limitations, their
constraints. Th is determines even the valuable quality of their writing, which “judging
from a phrase caught here and there, from a laugh, or a gesture seen in passing, is precisely
the quality that Shakespeare would have enjoyed” had he wished to escape the “brilliant
salons of educated people” (xxix). Th ey are, in short, mechanicals, “half articulate” speakers
of prose, unable to produce poetry. Th e description of their writing matches that of
the women themselves. Th ey not only lack “variety and play of feature,” but are “indigenous
and rooted to one spot,” to the extent that their “very names were like the stones
of the fi elds—common, grey, worn, obscure, docked of all splendours of association and
romance” (xxiv). It is not explained why names such as “Mrs. Th omas, or Mrs Langrish,
or Miss Bolt of Hebden Bridge” (xxiii) are inherently more “common” or “grey” or less
romantic than, for example, Fry, Bell, Stephen or, for that matter, Woolf. Nonetheless, the
description defi nes these working-class authors in terms of their limitations, and in opposition
to “educated people” whose writing would be favoured by the “literary critic.”
In part these passages are simply the work of a professional author emphasising the
boundaries of her trade. In addition, however, they construct a materialist model of class
and writing. Woolf argues that she is divided, even in imagination, from the working-class
women who attended the Newcastle congress because “the imagination is largely the child
of the fl esh” and
one’s body had never stood at the wash-tub; one’s hands had never wrung and
scrubbed and chopped up whatever the meat may be that makes a miner’s supper….
One sat in an armchair or read a book. One saw landscapes and seascapes,
perhaps Greece or Italy, where Mrs. Giles or Mrs. Edwards must have seen slag
heaps and rows upon rows of slate-roofed houses. (xxiii)
Th e self-conscious vagueness about the meat itself emphasises the social division between
observer and observed. In contrast to an unnamed Lancashire Guildswoman and
Poor Law Guardian, who recorded that most “of my lectures and addresses have been
thought out when my hands have been busy in household duties—in the wash-tub, when
baking (and by the way I have never bought a week’s baking during my married life of
over twenty-one years), or doing out my rooms” (133-34), Woolf, as she herself acknowledged,
was removed from such domestic labour. Indeed, in “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown”
she traced the changes in “human character” in the early twentieth century through the
“homely illustration” of the “character of one’s cook” (70). Nonetheless, she was conscious
of the ways in which her domestic arrangements separated her from those who did not
have cooks, who balanced their writing with “household duties.” Moreover, as “writing is a
complex art, much infected by life” (xxix), her introductory letter traces the impact working-class
households had on the texts produced within them. Th e members of the Guild,
Woolf observed, had produced their essays “in kitchens, at odds and ends of leisure, in
the midst of distractions and obstacles” (xxxxi). Exhaustion caused by work, and a lack of
time, space, and privacy were obvious problems for working-class writers, male or female.
As Andy Croft argues, the demands of work in particular restricted working-class authors,