Woolfian Boundaries - Clemson University

66 WOOLFIAN BOUNDARIES
of “expert culture and specialized knowledge” and while her specifi c argument is beyond
the scope of this essay, it helpfully points up a tension between modernism’s complicity
with and opposition to the reorganization of these domains and the associated domains of
gender and sexuality (65).
While Woolf’s famous argument with the Angel in the House is set out in “Professions
for Women” (1931), the nature of Lawrence’s quarrel demands some further introduction.
Th e following quotation is from an unpublished fragment by Lawrence, assumed to have
been written shortly before his death in 1930, providing both a useful proximity to Woolf’s
essay and an interesting distance from Sons and Lovers (1913), which it seems to describe:
My mother’s generation was the fi rst generation of working-class mothers to become
really self-conscious…the woman freed herself at least mentally and spiritually
from the husband’s domination, and then she became that great institution,
that character-forming power, the mother of my generation. I am sure the
character of nine-tenths of the men of my generation was formed by the mother:
the character of the daughters too.
…Th e woman felt herself the higher moral being: and justly, as far as economic
reality goes. She therefore assumed the moral responsibility for the family, and
the husband let her. So she proceeded to mould a generation. (Phoenix 818)
Although Lawrence does not use the term Angel in the House, she is nevertheless
recognizable in the “character-forming institution” who “assumed the moral responsibility
for the family.” Lawrence’s version of the Angel in the House shares with Woolf’s renditions
the fundamental characteristics of self-consciousness, self-sacrifi ce, and charactermoulding,
characteristics which are unwittingly destructive of those around them, men
as well as women. In Sons and Lovers, Mrs. Morel’s drive to improve her family leaves her
husband an empty “husk” (62), her fi rst son William dead, and her youngest son, Paul,
struggling against a death-wish. In To the Lighthouse, although Mrs. Ramsay seems to be
dominated by her husband, she nonetheless infantilizes him, while her domesticating
drive results in a sham marriage for the Rayleys and a premature death in childbirth for
her daughter, Prue. And yet, while both novels kill their Angel/demon, neither fi nally
condemns the woman herself: what is actually contested is the institution of heterosexual
marriage and particularly the institution of motherhood. Lawrence’s repeated attacks on
the “magna mater” are usually interpreted as misogynistic, although they also bear some
resemblance to Luce Irigaray’s critique of the ideology of motherhood, whereby “‘Femininity’
fades away before maternity, is absorbed into maternity” and “the mother once
again…masks the woman” (Speculum 74,117).
In contrast to the outward self-denial of the mother fi gures in Sons and Lovers and
To the Lighthouse, both novels reveal an inner essence of being which could access a very
diff erent life than that of duty and social convention followed by Mrs. Morel and Mrs.
Ramsay: what Woolf describes as “a wedge-shaped core of darkness” which “could go anywhere,
for no one saw it” (TTL 69). And yet this potential transcendence of the physical
body is problematic for sex and gender identities, as a comparison of two passages from
the novels will illustrate. In the fi rst passage, from the opening chapter of Sons and Lovers,
a pregnant Mrs. Morel has been locked out of the house during a bitter argument with