Woolfian Boundaries - Clemson University

Real Bodies and the Psychology of Clothes
the patchwork of the serious and the trivial, the public and the private, past and present, fact
and fi ction, which uncovers and untangles threads. Further, it is suggested by the education
in signifi cation the essayist envisages for the poor college, where will be taught
the arts of human intercourse; the art of understanding other people’s lives and
minds, and the little arts of talk, of dress, of cookery, that are allied with them.
Th e aim of the new college, the cheap college, should be not to segregate and
specialize, but to combine. It should explore the ways in which mind and body
can be made to cooperate; discover what new combinations make good wholes
in human life. (TG 40)
What seems to be envisaged here is a redefi ned humanism and a signifying practice
based on combinations rather than boundaries, on human intercourse rather than the
dominance of the phallus, and, ultimately, on the ethics and aesthetics of the gift. Perhaps
we may imagine it in the fl ux and fl ow of Clarissa Dalloway’s mermaid dress, at once
transformative and unifying, or in the hat, the little work of art, made by the Italian milliner
and the victim of war, not to deck out the woman as a spectacle for consumption or
to advertise her value, but as a gift of beauty. Here, it seems, the sartorial has moved out of
the shadow of the phallus to take up its place at last as one of the “little arts.”
Works Cited
Berman, Jessica. “Of Oceans and Opposition: Th e Waves, Oswald Mosley, and the New Party.” Pawlowski 105-21.
Flügel, J. S. “A Psychology for Progressives: How Can Th ey Become Eff ective?” Joad et al. 292-313.
——. Th e Psychology of Clothes. Th e International Psycho-Analytical Library No. 18. London: Hogarth, 1930.
——. Th e Psycho-Analytic Study of the Family. Th e International Psycho-Analytical Library No. 3. London:
Hogarth, 1921.
Gymnos: Th e Offi cial Organ of the Gymnic Association of Great Britain. Vol. 1. No. 4. London: May 1933.
Joad, C.E.M. et al. Manifesto: Being the Book of the Federation of Progressive Societies and Individuals. London:
Allen and Unwin, 1933.
Neverow, Vara. “Freudian Seduction and the Fallacies of Dictatorship.” Pawlowski 56-72.
Pawlowski, Merry M., ed. Virginia Woolf and Fascism: Resisting the Dictator’s Seduction. London: Palgrave, 2001.
Rosenfeld, Natania. “Monstrous Conjugations: Images of Dictatorship in the Anti-Fascist Writings of Virginia
and Leonard Woolf.” Pawlowski 122-36.
Woolf, Leonard, ed. Th e Intelligent Man’s Way to Prevent War. London: Gollancz, 1933.
——. Quack, Quack! New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1935.
Woolf, Virginia. Th e Death of the Moth and Other Essays. London: Hogarth, 1942.
——. A Room of One’s Own. London: Granada, 1977.
——. Th ree Guineas. London: Hogarth, 1991.
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