Woolfian Boundaries - Clemson University

Real Bodies and the Psychology of Clothes
anxiety, dispelled only by the assurance of women’s penis envy and desire. Woolf’s tactic,
however, as Neverow shows, is to substitute mockery for desire and to emphatically refute
the Freudian theory of penis envy.
Th e source for Woolf’s ideas on what she terms “infantile fi xation” in Th ree Guineas
is identifi ed by Neverow as Freud, or rather as the Freudian theories circulating within
contemporary progressive culture. Whilst this is obviously true, a further likely infl uence
on Woolf’s understanding of the phallic value of clothing is the work of the psychologist
J. S. Flügel, who published his Psychology of Clothes with the Hogarth Press in 1930 and
Th e Psycho-Analytic Study of the Family in 1921. With Leonard Woolf (as well as Bertrand
Russell, H. G. Wells, and Rebecca West), he was one of twenty-two Vice-Presidents of the
Federation of Progressive Societies and Individuals (the FPSI), an umbrella organisation
for several groups with a shared commitment to social and economic reform. Flügel was a
co-author of the Federation’s 1934 Manifesto, contributing an essay entitled “A Psychology
for Progressives—How Can Th ey Become Eff ective?” Th roroughly steeped in Freudian
psychoanalytic theory Flügel’s work explores clothing in its full psychological range, from
the protective/maternal to the phallic/paternal, from sublimation of narcissism to cultural
discipline and constraint. Assuming a causal relationship between the corporeal discipline
eff ected by clothing and a conservative disposition, he proposes dress reform (as advocated
by the Men’s Dress Reform Party) and ultimately nudity (the ideal of the trans-European
nude culture movement) as eff ective progressive strategy.
Th e purpose of introducing Flügel into the argument of Th ree Guineas is not simply
to show how Woolf appropriates and revises Flügel’s thinking on sartorial psychology. It is
also, and more importantly, to throw light on Th ree Guineas as Woolf’s engagement with
contemporary progressive discourse and tactic as much as with British or Italian/German
fascism. Pawlowski’s collection of essays decisively makes clear the connection between
an obsessively phallocentric culture and phallologocentric language (the fascist poem and
the masculine metaphors defi ning modernist aesthetics), as well as between individual
bodies and the body politic (physically effi cient bodies functioning in the machinery and
spectacle of the organically unifi ed nation). It further demonstrates that the rhetoric of
organicism and “coordinated, cooperative and controlled” action also informed supposedly
progressive political thought, as evidenced in Labour Party and New Party writings of
the late 1920s and early 1930s (Berman 110). Jessica Berman’s reading of the New Party
journal Action, whose editor Harold Nicolson was one of Mosley’s strongest early supporters,
reveals its aim of “creating a modern State as organic as the human body…. A State in
which energy and effi ciency are always rewarded, and in which the bungler and the sluggard
must go to the wall” (Berman 120). As Berman points out, many early supporters
made a quick defection from the New Party, and, one would think, from its proto-fascist
tropology, when Mosley’s fascist aspirations became known. What is striking, however,
and what a focus on the sartorial as trope and theory brings clearly to light, is the extent to
which progressive discourse was constructed on, and continued to participate in, appropriations
of the body and, more to the point, a body-clothing dichotomy which validates
the body as positive term, as principle of modernity, transparency, and truth. Moreover,
foregrounding this dichotomy reveals the limits of the progressive analysis of the relation
between gendered bodies and socio-symbolic fabrics, and of the civilising and modernising
tactics which ensued from it. It also shows Woolf as an unusually sophisticated reader
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