Woolfian Boundaries - Clemson University

56 WOOLFIAN BOUNDARIES
every side; turn them towards society, not private life; exhibit the eff ects of ceremonies”
(L6 116). It is interesting that Woolf is writing to Spender, who had admired the novel
and is part of a politically engaged younger generation. Woolf here takes on the mantle
of a thirties writer, motivated by much the same anger against society that she attributes
to her “Leaning Tower” writers. In this sense we can see the 1940 essay of that name as
describing not only the work of Auden and MacNeice and their comrades but of Woolf
herself. Th e writer who expresses hope in this essay “that the world after the war will be a
world without classes or towers” is direct in her liberalism and her acceptance of the hopes
and forms of modern society (175).
I would argue that as Woolf became more politically engaged, she sought more help
from the techniques of the screen to achieve her aim of picturing “society as a whole.” In
this she was infl uenced by the younger generation of writers I have discussed in this paper,
both working-class and upper-class. Th ere is no doubt that she had read Hampson’s novel,
despite her initially sceptical reaction to him. In 1924, Leonard Woolf had told William
Plomer that he could not decide whether to publish his book because Virginia had to read
it fi rst, and she was currently ill (Willis 129); similarly, describing his experience with the
Press in the 1930s, John Lehmann wrote that “Virginia read and gave her opinion on all
the literary manuscripts off ered to the Press” (17). It is clear from her “Leaning Tower”
essay that she had read work by Auden and MacNeice.
Woolf, then, was aware of thirties writers who used cinematic technique with a political
end, and she herself began to try out a specifi cally political kind of montage in
her Th ree Guineas notebooks, which she was compiling throughout the early 1930s. She
juxtaposes two articles from the Daily Herald on 1 August 1936, in the fi rst of which an
MP urges the public to “Stand up to Dictators” and in the second a woman complains
that her husband insists she “call him ‘Sir’” (volume 1: 31). Th rough contrasting the two,
Woolf implicitly asks how we can be expected to stand up to dictators if there are minidictators
ruling in homes throughout England. Later in the book, Hitler’s boast that “in
battle we have won the German Reich and in battle we shall maintain and guard it” is
followed by an article about animals who advertise their fi ghting qualities to women (2:
20-21). Th e fact that the animal article, which is placed after the Hitler article, was in fact
published two months earlier, indicates that Woolf’s montage process is conscious, and
that she assembled the articles and then chose the order for her volume, rather than just
adding them chronologically.
Th is conscious montage principle is also employed in the arrangement of quotations
in Th ree Guineas, where she often assembles selections of quotes, many of which come
from the notebooks. Th ree Guineas grew out of the factual essays planned to alternate
with the stories of the Pargiter family in the original novel-essay, Th e Pargiters. Once she
decided to abandon the novel-essay, she was able to include more direct quotes from the
sources she had assembled in the notebooks, and she employs them using conscious montage
and contrast. She juxtaposes Wilfred Owen’s desperate plea for pacifi sm: “Be bullied,
be outraged, be killed; but do not kill” with the Lord Chief Justice of England’s bellicose
“Th e home of Liberty is in England. And it is a castle indeed—a castle that will be defended
to the last” (TG 122-23). But it was her novel Th e Years, which grew out of the
novel side of Th e Pargiters, that would be the main receptacle for Woolf’s use of cinematic
technique in a politically charged frame.