Woolfian Boundaries - Clemson University

Reading the Woolf-Raverat Correspondence
indecent pain or “demonic” humanness is at once that which compels writing and makes
it terribly diffi cult, just as it compels love—in all its modulations, moodiness, strangeness.
Love befalls us and remains diffi cult to inhabit, to stay near.
Just how diffi cult it is to inhabit our loves is clear from a few letters exchanged between
Woolf and Gwen Raverat about three years after Jacques’s death. Th e diffi culty of
remaining open to the intensity of other people, particularly face to face, is suggested in
Woolf’s diary entries about visits with Gwen Raverat (184). Th e exposure to indecent pain
that shocks of love allow alters considerably in a letter from Gwen. She refers to having
been unable to read for two and a half years, a condition she calls “madness,” and continues
“What I really wanted to say (and the reason I didn’t write before is that its so diffi cult
to express)—is that being unhappy is to my mind both so boring and so disgusting, that I
feel I would like to apologize to the world for being so, or only it were not so ridiculous to
do it” (188, emphasis added). It becomes obvious near the end of the letter that the apology
is intended for Woolf, not the world at large: “it must have been rather horrid (and
dull) for you” (189). Gwen Raverat’s apology for her “boring” and “disgusting” depression
is the kind of “indecent” pain that required no apology in previous correspondence with
Woolf. In her response, Woolf mentions missing Gwen’s latest exhibition, and shifts from
a reference about the possibility of their meeting in the summer to this: “It is an almost
impossible achievement. Human beings are so terrifi ed of each other” (190).
Th e meeting of two people that Woolf considers an “almost impossible achievement” is
actualized as a possible impossibility in the frank, teasing, loving conversation of the Woolf
-Raverat correspondence. For Woolf, the satisfaction and terror of these encounters with
other human beings is a vital aspect of her attempts as a writer “to break every mould & fi nd
a fresh form of being, that is of expression, for everything I feel and think” (D4 233, emphasis
added). As she continues the diary entry, this work gives her a sense of being fully alive: “But
this needs constant eff ort, anxiety & risk” (D4 233). As I have argued, a religious sense of
subjectivity, without God or Gods, except as necessary fi ctions, allows Woolf to express her
sense of herself as a writer making precarious and necessary eff orts to love other humans.
As such, her writing, and here, the correspondence with the Raverats, gives the reader an
opening to a kind of engagement that moves beyond seeing others as “emanations from
ourselves” (L3 245) to the “constant eff ort, anxiety & risk” of ethical encounter with unloveabilty,
the demonic in other humans. 5 Th at is, a diffi cult responsiveness to the inchoate,
the unnameable, the unclassifi able in ourselves, other humans, and the world. For Woolf,
this kind of engagement is necessary for a writer, as it creates space for “a diff erent kind of
friendship.” For Rosenzweig, it is selfhood exposed to love for other humans: the central
task of religious life that disrupts static, clichéd religious formulations with keen, revelatory
“shock[s] of love.” Both draw us beyond the liberal ethos of the self as free chooser and its
reiterations of the happy endings of love. In so doing, Rosenzweig and Woolf take us into a
sharper kind of love that places us in the middle of life (and death).
Notes
1 Th e research for this essay was supported by the Lilly Th eological Research Grants Program. I am grateful
to Pat Saunders, Kathleen Skerrett, David Heckerl, and Diana Swanson for conversations that contributed
to this essay.
2 Some key works in this area include the following: Jane Marcus, “Th e Niece of a Nun: Virginia Woolf,
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