Virginia Woolf (13 page)

As in a picture gallery, Virginia Woolf draws literary portraits of all the men whom she has studied. Imitating their styles in her key work “Orlando”, she describes their appearance from Elizabethan England to the present. Like Joyce’s “Ulysses”, she makes the prodigious attempt to trace the history of style in English literature. Yet though she owes much of her inspiration to Joyce, she cannot parody as he does. Her irony is not devastating enough; she is still too reverential to laugh at the figures she admires. Her vision is too brightly colored by her own personality; she cannot reproduce styles alien to hers, as Pope’s or Swift’s. At best, she recalls the Elizabethans, with whom modern English style, after Chaucer, begins. With brilliant insight, she satirizes their profusion of metaphors, their flair for allegory and their flowery “inspired” style, perceiving in them the traits in her own youthful writing. In discussing the danger of meditation, she gives vent to a torrent of bombastic associations which pale their minor Elizabethan models.

“It is these pauses (of reminiscences) that are our undoing. It is then that sedition enters the fortress and our troops rise in insurrection. Once before he had paused, and love with its horrid rout, its shawms, its cymbals, and its heads with gory locks torn from the shoulders had burst in. From love he had suffered the tortures of the damned. Now, again, he paused, and into the breach thus made, leapt Ambition, the harridan, and Poetry, the witch, and Desire of Fame, the strumpet; all joined hands and made of his heart their dancing ground.”
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Immature writers are largely attracted to warfare as a possibility for conceits. The noise and furious movement stimulate them as they stimulate a people not of necessity barbaric or childish, yet not highly intellectual. As imagery, these flourishes of war often become repellently inflated, recalling romantic associations fallen into sad repute. Such stale visions are amusing
in “Orlando”, being exaggerated for the sake of parody and humor; but that Virginia Woolf’s travesty of the Elizabethan conceits is founded upon her own style, is evidenced in similar passages in her more serious novels. “She was laughed at”, she writes in “To the Lighthouse”, “fire-encircled, and forced to vail her crest, dismount her batteries, and only retaliate by displaying the raillery and ridicule of the table”
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all because she had proposed cleaner dairies.

Lyly’s “Euphues and his England” is suggested in its artifice of balance of similar phrases and parallel construction. That she has studied him for a time at least is probable, though he, far more than the Elizabethans, is an influence which seems to have become subconscious.

“At length, however, there was no room in the galleries for another table; no room on the tables for another cabinet; no room in the cabinet for another rose-bowl; no room in the bowl for another handful of potpourri; there was no room for anything anywhere; in short the house was furnished.”
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The monotonous evenness of such euphuistic phrases with identical molds, whose rhythms are varied only by a new though slight thought, is even supplemented by the tripping tone implicit in Lyly. It is followed by a descriptive list whose length and discursive similarity seems to vie with Chaucer or the “Romaunt of the Rose”.

“In the garden snowdrops, crocuses, hyacinths, magnolias, roses, lilies, asters, the dahlia in all its varieties, pear trees and apple trees and cherry trees and mulberry trees, with an enormous quantity of rare and flowering shrubs, of trees evergreen and perennial, grew so thick on each other’s roots that there was no plot of earth without its bloom, and no stretch of sward without its shade.”
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Sir Thomas Browne’s style is suggested too, though with too much reverence to be called parody. She repeats his diction consciously and recalls his rhythm and philosophy of life:

“But of all that killing and campaigning, that drinking and love-making, that spending and hunting and riding and eating, what remained? A skull; a finger. Whereas, he said, turning to the page of Sir Thomas Browne, which lay open upon the table—and again he paused. Like an incantation rising from all parts of the room, from the night wind and the moonlight, rolled the divine melody of those words which, lest they should outstare this page, we will leave where they lie entombed, not dead, embalmed
rather, so fresh is their colour, so sound their breathing—and Orlando, comparing that achievement with those of his ancestors, cried out that they and their deeds were dust and ashes, but this man and his words were immortal.”
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The parallel with the “Hydriotaphia: Urn-Burial” is obvious not only in the language but in the concern with immortality. The passage recalls, with marked similarity, the famous sentences in the fifth chapter: “Had they made as good provision for their names as they have done for their relics, they had not so grossly erred in the art of perpetuation.”
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The seventeenth century philosopher’s flair for the word “diuturnity” recurs again, with unmistakeable influence, in “Orlando”. “Of the two forces which alternately, and what is more confusing still, at the same moment, dominate our unfortunate numbskulls— brevity and diuturnity—Orlando was sometimes under the influence of the elephant-footed deity, then of the gnat-winged fly.”
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The identical thought appears in Sir Thomas Browne, though his style here is more intellectual than is Virginia Woolf’s. “And therefore restless inquietude for the
diuturnity
of our memories unto present considerations, seems a vanity almost out of date, and superannuated piece of folly.”
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The transition in literary periods is made more obviously in “Orlando” than in “Ulysses”. Joyce changes from one completed style to another without explanation; the styles develop integrally. In “Orlando” literary time is always recited, Virginia Woolf being its discursive annotator. In a running commentary, she shows the change in writing:

“For it is for the historian of letters to remark that he (Orlando) had changed his style amazingly. His floridity was chastened; his abundance curbed; the age of prose was congealing those warm fountains. The very landscape outside was less stuck about with garlands and the briars themselves were less thorned and intricate.”
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The eighteenth century is heralded in; the style is discussed rather than parodied or, as with Sir Thomas Browne’s, reproduced often unconsciously. With feminine, romantic lawlessness, she tells what she, as an interpreter, thinks about the poets, what she feels about their styles and mannerisms. Pope’s style
is not suggested through clever imitation, but she analyzes it like a critical biographer herself, and as in her Gibbon quotation, cites him directly. It is a less sophisticated and less artistic method than Joyce’s, but it recalls significantly her own standards of creative criticism. With her ubiquitous complaint against the critics, she seeks comprehension for the poet himself. “In short, every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works, yet we require critics to explain the one and biographers to expound the other.”
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Here one of the direct intentions in “Orlando” becomes apparent; it appears as a satire of the contemporary biographical urge which she ridicules in the essay “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” as “those portentous and ridiculous biographies, that milk-and-watery-criticism.”
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Her consciousness of biographies is derived perhaps from her father, Leslie Stephen and from Lytton Strachey, a member of the “Bloomsbury group” to which she belongs, and which includes Clive Bell, E. M. Forster and Duncan Grant. Yet like the “Stürmer und Dränger” she seeks meaning only in the poet and not in his sterile commentators. His character, his mannerisms, his humor as well as his philosophy, she probes intuitively in his writing, and recreates the dead poet for herself. “The temptation”, she writes in “The Common Reader”, “to read Pope on Addison, Macaulay on Addison, Thackeray on Addison, Johnson on Addison rather than Addison himself is to be resisted.”
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Denouncing the critical commentators, Virginia Woolf assumes their role herself, seeking the deep “human interest” which characterizes Lytton Strachey’s biographies. Sensitive to aesthetic form she brings to the style of the poets, the same creative criticism she has used in analyzing their characters. Again in the manner of the historical biographer, she describes the change in the style of the eighteenth century. Orlando, now a woman, goes to school to Pope and Addison and Swift:

“They were very witty, too (but their wit is all in their books), and taught her the most important part of style, which is the natural run of the voice in speaking—a quality which none that has not heard it can imitate, not Greene even, with all his skill; for it is born of the air, and breaks like a wave on the furniture, and rolls and fades away, and is never to be recaptured, least of all by those who prick up their ears, half a century later, and try. They taught her this, merely by the cadence of their
voices in speech; so that her style changed somewhat, and she wrote some very pleasant, witty verses and characters in prose.”
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Her method of showing literary influences wavers between the Strachey method of commentation and Joyce’s method of imitation. The period of restrained Attic prose, she discusses; that of Asiatic purple prose, she imitates. Echoes of De Quincey are unmistakeable in Orlando’s conversion from man to woman, though in time, this being the dawn of the eighteenth century, the style is premature. But the Opium Eater is well chosen to depict the fantastic vision of a man changed physically into womanhood. De Quincey’s melodic rhythms are recalled, his allegory and symbolism are literally copied.

“The doors gently open, as if a breath of the gentlest and holiest zephyr had wafted them apart, and three figures enter. First, comes our Lady of Purity; whose brows are bound with fillets of the whitest lamb’s wool; whose hair is as an avalanche of the driven snow; and in whose hand reposes the white quill of a virgin goose. Following her, but with a statelier step, comes our Lady of Chastity; on whose brow is set like a turret of burning but unwasting fire a diadem of icicles; her eyes are pure stars, and her fingers, if they touch you, freeze you to the bone. Close behind her, sheltering indeed in the shadow of her more stately sisters, comes our Lady of Modesty, frailest and fairest of the three; whose face is only shown as the young moon shows when it is thin and sickle shaped and half hidden among clouds. Each advances towards the centre of the room where Orlando still lies sleeping; and with gestures at once appealing and commanding, ‘Our Lady of Purity’ speaks first … ”
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The three ladies are echoes of De Quincey’s vision in his “Dream-Fugue”, and such melancholy rhythms as “grief and lamentation” are taken directly from his style:

“The eldest of the three is named ‘Mater Lachrymarum’,—Our Lady of Tears. She it is that night and day raves and moans, calling for vanished faces. She stood in Rama, when a voice was heard of lamentation— …

“Her head, turreted (the very word repeated in Virginia Woolf’s parody) like that of Cybele, rises almost beyond the reach of sight … Madonna moves with uncertain steps; fast or slow, but still with tragic grace. Our Lady of Sighs creeps timidly and stealthily. But this youngest sister moves with incalculable motions, bounding and with a tiger’s leaps. She carries no key; for, though coming rarely among men, she storms all doors at which she is permitted to enter at all. And her name is ‘Mater Tenebrarum’—Our Lady of Darkness.”
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To trace the poet Orlando through the ages of literature required a degree of sexual flexibility; there were periods, the Elizabethan, for example, when women were only to be sung to; they themselves had no voices. In order for Orlando, living through the sixteenth century, the Restoration and the era of the Metaphysical poets, to be a typical poet, he was forced to be a man. But how account for his turning woman in the Age of Enlightenment, when poets were still virile? Virginia Woolf may have been thinking of Lady Winchilsea or even more of the Duchess of Newcastle, to whom Orlando bears conscious resemblance, in her flair for conceits, for allegory, and her speculations on the nature of integrity and womanhood. But the Duchess was a contemporary of Jeremy Taylor and Sir Thomas Browne, writing at a time when Orlando is still portrayed in his masculinity. It is curious that Virginia Woolf did not choose the nineteenth century for Orlando’s conversion, when Jane Austen and the Brontës were gaining quiet recognition, and Dorothy Wordsworth was helping her brother under no great obscurity. She may have been experimenting with history, speculating that “Elizabethan literature would have been very different from what it is if the woman’s movement had begun in the sixteenth century and not in the nineteenth.”
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In describing Orlando’s character as a woman, Virginia Woolf satirizes the contents of “Lady Chatterley’s Lover”. Lawrence’s belief that love is the prime motif in a woman’s life, and sex the most fitting subject for a novel, is burlesqued in a direct travesty of Lady Chatterley’s affair with her gamekeeper.

“And when we are writing the life of a woman, we may, it is agreed, waive our demand for action, and substitute love instead. Love, the poet has said, is woman’s whole existence … Surely, since she (Orlando) is a woman, and a beautiful woman, and a woman in the prime of life, she will soon give over this pretence of writing and thinking and begin at least to think of a
gamekeeper
(and as long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking). And then she will write him a little note (and as long as she writes little notes nobody objects to a woman writing either) and make an assignation for Sunday dusk and Sunday dusk will come; and the gamekeeper will whistle under the window—all of which is, of course, the very stuff of life and the only possible subject for fiction.”
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Creative imitation reaches its heights in the scene in which
Orlando is “safely delivered of a son”. De Quincey is once more recalled with Ruskin and the late Victorian poetic prose writers.