Woolf’s Ambiguities: Tonal Modernism, Narrative Strategy, Feminist Precursors

WOOLF’S AMBIGUITIES

TONAL MODERNISM, NARRATIVE STRATEGY, FEMINIST PRECURSORS

MOLLY HITE

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

Ithaca and London

For Mali and Lisa

CONTENTS

Preface

1. Woolf’s Tone: Listening to Mrs. Dalloway

2. Tone and Modernism: Jacob’s Room , To the Lighthouse , and The Waves

3. Not Thinking Back through Our Mothers: Elizabeth Robins and the Feminist Polemical Novel

4. Making Room for A Room of One’s Own

5. What Girls Should Know: The Voyage Out and My Little Sister

6. The Professional and the Poet: A Dark Lantern and Mrs. Dalloway

Epilogue: The Possibilities of The Pargiters

Notes

References

Index

PREFACE

I began this study from two observations about the fiction of Virginia Woolf, one having to do with narrative strategy, the other with tradition and influence.

My first observation was that the greatest innovation of Woolf’s major modernist fiction is its tonal ambiguity. I mean by this that readers of the novels often cannot be sure what attitude at a particular point is textually warranted—how they are supposed to feel about an assertion, event, or character—a situation that leads to multiple conflicting interpretations and, indeed, a number of conflicting Virginia Woolfs. There are relatively few clear tonal cues in much of her fiction—that is, indications of what attitude readers should take toward characters and events. Moreover, draft versions of the novels show a deliberate complicating, muting, or effacing of tonal cues as Woolf made the decisions that brought her works to final form. Some of her first feminist critics, in the 1970s and 80s, saw in these removals evidence of self-censorship, but the textual evidence should incline us to respect Woolf’s choices and see in the minimizing of tonal cues a deliberate strategy to blur or withhold grounds for authorially sanctioned opinions. I argue that Woolf’s distinctive experimental strategy lay in forcing on readers the difficult (and perhaps, in the most attentive readings, impossible) task of deciding how to take characters, events, passages of description and dialogue, or an independent third-person narrator’s commentary. This process of taking, often unconscious or automatic, is crucial for a reading because it is the basis for assigning values to incidents or characters.

My second observation was that, for all her famous sympathies with obscure or silenced women writers, Woolf as a critic was hard on women who actually succeeded in the literary marketplace and critical estimation. Except for Jane Austen, whom she treated as an exception operating within a limited aesthetic realm, Woolf regarded earlier female writers as flawed almost by definition, doomed not by gender stereotypes affecting ways their work is received but by a burning awareness of prejudice that actively damaged the quality of their writing. Woolf made clear in a number of her essays that this damage manifested itself in women’s fiction as polemical tendencies. The famous warning that she issued in A Room of One’s Own against hortatory elements within women’s poetry or fiction—It is fatal for a woman to lay the least stress on any grievance; to plead even with justice any cause; in any way to speak consciously as a woman (103)—is in some respects characteristic of a more general modernist aesthetic primarily interested in things in themselves; in character in itself; in the book in itself, as she put the matter in her modernist manifesto Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown (Captains 99). But the emphasis on the grievances and causes of women is peculiarly her own. One concern of this study is how her animus against authorial opinions expressed by characters or narrators in women’s fiction rules out of consideration the important novels about female genius or the progress of political movements for gender equality that were written by women in the generation immediately preceding her own. If such novels—by writers like Sarah Grand, Rhoda Broughton, George Egerton, Mona Caird, May Sinclair, and the precursor on whom I focus, Elizabeth Robins—are only now being rediscovered and read, part of the reason is Woolf’s own success in suppressing them in her role as a maker of the modernist literary canon.

In this book I explore the connections between a narrative technique of complicating, minimizing, or omitting tonal cues, and an aversion to women’s pleading a cause in fiction—connections of influence and reaction, aesthetic and ethical judgments, and suffrage-era and post-suffrage feminism.¹ Woolf’s Ambiguities is a formalist study in that it presents and develops the concept of narrative tone as a means to enrich and complicate our readings of Woolf’s modernist novels. It is also a historical study, however, because it grounds its investigation in comparisons with writing by Woolf’s immediate foremothers. In both general and particular ways, Woolf revised the approaches and methods of these feminist precursors. If this book encourages an interest in Elizabeth Robins and other female novelists of the late Victorian and Edwardian periods, it will join works by Ann Ardis, Elaine Showalter, Talia Schaffer, Rita Felski, Jane Marcus, Mary Jean Corbett, and Kathy Psomiades, among many others, which have helped bring back into literary history the often shocking modernity of British women’s writing around the fin de siècle.

I propose that in refusing to identify clear value positions for readers, Woolf defined her own modernist practice, and that her refusal must be seen in the context of a rather different account of origins than the one she herself offered or those that scholars of literary modernism find most familiar. This alternative account of Victorians, Edwardians, and early modernists takes seriously the female writers who figured prominently in the literary culture of the period when Woolf was growing up. Woolf’s Ambiguities thus reframes arguments in the context of current modernist scholarship: first, about Woolf’s modernist aesthetic and techniques, and second, about frequently overlooked elements of her literary tradition.

The claim that Virginia Woolf was an experimental novelist would probably strike most of us as a truism, merely reiterating that she was part of the great movement of modernist innovation. Many of her methods have been assimilated to the point where they seem to amount to eternal maxims of good writing—the dictate that a writer should show rather than tell, for instance, which is still a core precept in many creative writing courses.² In line with this mandate to show, we honor her as one of the pioneers of free indirect discourse and a migrating point of view within a third-person narrative voice, a strategy she did not originate but did bring to a very high degree of development. In fact, she was so influential in her use of shifting, mutating perspectives, often flavored with a character’s distinctive habits of speech or thought, that the technique has become common in literary fiction and can currently be found in novels and short stories by writers from Toni Morrison to Don DeLillo to Mary Gordon to Michael Cunningham to Jennifer Egan.³ The migrating point of view is an innovation that took. To experienced readers, it no longer feels like an innovation.

My main formal concern in this study is with tone as a further dimension of Virginia Woolf’s literary strategy that has attracted only passing attention.⁴ In Woolf’s Ambiguities, I argue that the novels are tonally experimental, so thoroughly experimental that attention to how tone is signaled (or not signaled) discloses a fundamentally different approach from what most readers still expect of the literary construction of feeling and value.

In Woolf’s fiction, attitudes that appear to have the author’s sanction and that counsel us to think and act in particular ways arise only to be undercut, within prose that scrupulously refrains from endorsing a single position as the one that Woolf wants us to see or means or is showing us (or assumes or cannot see beyond) or other such critical locutions. The writing is radically experimental in ways that other modernist fiction writers did not attempt and stands in explicit contrast to a tradition of feminist polemical fiction that critics are only beginning to bring into dialogue with Woolf’s work. When we pay attention to their tonal complexity, her novels emerge as disorienting and difficult in original and positive ways: full of unfamiliar and disconcerting effects, resisting translation into other idioms, embodying a newness that remains strange despite long acquaintance, and raising the possibility of further revelations the more profound because unanticipated—revelations of precisely what readers have not always thought and felt.

This book’s first two chapters set out the questions arising from Woolf’s use of tone and show ways in which tonal ambiguity arises in several of her most famous novels. Chapter 1, "Woolf’s Tone: Listening to Mrs. Dalloway, introduces tonal cues and how they work, using passages from canonical modernist writing and from the fiction of Elizabeth Robins, the feminist precursor on whom this study focuses. The ensuing discussion emphasizes how tonal ambiguity complicates our understanding of characters and even of the famous climax of this novel. Chapter 2, Tone and Modernism: Jacob’s Room, To the Lighthouse, and The Waves," looks at tone and point of view in three very different modernist experiments and suggests how they both enable and destabilize certain ethical stances. The chapter closes with a section on what might be good about the ethical uncertainty that Woolf’s writing can prompt.

The third and fourth chapters bring in some of the most important of Woolf’s feminist precursors, whose writings Woolf not only criticized or rejected but also (and less obviously) adapted and revised. Chapter 3, Not Thinking Back through Our Mothers: Elizabeth Robins and the Feminist Polemical Novel, deals with the long association of this novelist, actor-manager, and suffrage activist with the Stephen family while Virginia was growing up and then with Virginia and Leonard throughout Virginia’s career. Despite Woolf’s famous claim that the key Edwardian writers were Arnold Bennett, H. G. Wells, and John Galsworthy, Robins and other feminist fiction writers often grouped under the New Woman rubric were well-known and critically esteemed, along with being formidable models of the public woman, engaged in both the aesthetic and the political movements of the turn of the century. Woolf notoriously rejected their precedent both as writers and as public figures, but many of her interactions with Robins, especially the revisions that she did of themes in Robins’s own work, testify that her personal as well as professional competition with her foremother was intellectually stimulating and productive. Chapter 4, "Making Room for A Room of One’s Own," is my first sustained comparison showing how an earlier work influenced and interacted with one of Woolf’s important writings. I show that A Room of One’s Own, widely regarded as the foundational feminist document in English about women and writing, is in fact one of several works from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries making arguments for the value and tradition of literature by women. In particular, Elizabeth Robins’s 1924 Ancilla’s Share: An Indictment of Sex Antagonism shares not only arguments but also images, metaphors, allusions, and quotations with Woolf’s 1929 long essay.⁵ The differences between these two major discussions may finally be more interesting than their similarities, however. The last section of this chapter considers Robins’s emphasis on middle-class and working-class women in contrast with the emphasis by Woolf and two of her feminist fore-mothers on the woman of genius.

The next two chapters offer comparisons of novels by Robins and Woolf dealing with similar themes. Chapter 5, "What Girls Should Know: The Voyage Out and My Little Sister, considers two novels published two years apart, on the subject of a Victorian girl’s upbringing. Both concentrate on the demand for purity, which in practice means extreme ignorance or at least naïvete about the conditions of social life, and both climax with the death of a young woman. But they emphasize very different kinds of knowledge, and these emphases make them very different novels. Robins’s is the sort of story that Woolf ridiculed in Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown as leaving the reader with such a sense of incompleteness and dissatisfaction that it seems necessary to do something—to join a society, or, more desperately, to write a cheque" (Captain’s 99). Woolf’s Künstlerroman is pessimistic about the possibility of women as artists in a society that cannot perceive any female talent but the domestic. Despite the familiar criticism of Robins’s polemical and didactic aims, I suggest that My Little Sister is a superb horror story aiming to persuade readers precisely to join that society, write that cheque, or otherwise take action against sexual slavery.

Chapter 6, "The Professional and the Poet: A Dark Lantern and Mrs. Dalloway," returns to Mrs. Dalloway, this time not to explore its tonal uncertainty but to begin from the unusual passage that leaves readers with no doubt about how they should feel about Dr. Bradshaw and his twin goddesses, Proportion and Conversion. Woolf’s representation of this oppressive nerve doctor and his notorious treatment, the rest cure, reverses the values in Robins’s controversial 1905 novel A Dark Lantern, which Woolf reviewed when recovering from a suicide attempt and her own first experience with the rest cure. In contrast with the presentation of Dr. Bradshaw and his profession in Mrs. Dalloway, Robins’s rest cure novel is a steamy post-traumatic romance in which a young woman who is psychically broken by an attempted rape is restored to agency and sexual health by her overbearing doctor and goes on to initiate a passionate affair with him. The two novels give disparate values to the rising professional class (as opposed to the upper classes) and provide very different pictures of the relation between art and mental health.

Woolf’s experiments with tonal instability were essential to her most famous and critically acclaimed long works, those she categorized as novels of vision. But she was also interested in novels of fact, and after the publication of The Waves in 1931 turned her attention to a different kind of fictional work based on historical research and centered on social life and its norms and secrets.⁶ This novel of fact would use the voice and many of the strategies she had developed in her previous polemical essays, not only the feminist A Room of One’s Own, Women in Fiction, and Professions for Women, but also modernist manifestoes like Modern Fiction, Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown, Poetry, Fiction, and the Future, and Letter to a Young Poet. The epilogue to Woolf’s Ambiguities, "The Possibilities of The Pargiters," deals with a draft of such a novel of fact, a different kind of radical experiment with both structure and style involving clear tonal cues. Woolf began writing The Pargiters in 1932, but after a period of unusually fluent and pleasurable composition she essentially abandoned the project, changing its form by omitting the interspersed sections in which a fictional author-narrator introduces and comments on chapters of a novel in progress. Against the critical consensus that The Pargiters in its original form was a failure, I argue that the six essays and five chapters we have constitute a brilliant beginning to a strikingly original literary work. Recent critical studies that have shed light on why Woolf turned away from The Pargiters suggest convincingly that she found herself confronting traumatic personal revelations in the process of trying to write a book that told the truth, especially about women’s bodies. I note that this explanation has no bearing on whether the Pargiters project is aesthetically a success or failure and, like Woolf herself, call for new generations of writers to take on the truth-telling mission and perhaps also the frame and embedded story structure of this novel.

I could not have written Woolf’s Ambiguities without the support of colleagues in Woolf studies, modernist studies, Victorian studies, and narrative studies. I introduced versions of the major arguments in this book at the annual conferences of the International Virginia Woolf Society, the Modern Language Association, the Modernist Studies Association, and the International Society for the Study of Narrative, as well as at invited lectures at Miami University of Ohio, Washington University, Rutgers University, the University of Washington, Fredonia College, the University of Montana, Oxford University, the University of East Anglia, the University of Lund, and Vassar College. The colleagues whose questions and comments most helped me revise or refine my approach include Bonnie Kime Scott, Christine Froula, Melba Cuddy-Keane, Rita Felski, Marysa Demoor, Susan Lanser, Anna Snaith, Jeanette McVicker, Marianne DeKoven, Lyndsey Stonebridge, Mark Hussey, David Bradshaw, and Susan Stanford Friedman. As my notes and bibliography attest, I also learned a great deal from the published writings of these critics.

James Phelan, James Eli Adams, Debra Fried, and Harry Shaw read versions of one or more chapters of this study and offered commentary that made me back up and look hard at my presuppositions. Mark Hussey gave me the opportunity to introduce and write notes for the new Harcourt volume of The Waves. His feedback encouraged me to dig deeper into the sources for this amazing playpoem and to be clear about my reasons for valuing this most difficult of Woolf’s works. Sandra Siegel encouraged me to pay attention to several of Woolf’s essays that have received less critical attention.

I have been extremely fortunate in being able to work with superb graduate students, many of whom have become valued colleagues. Talia Shaffer introduced me to Elizabeth Robins and the other late Victorian female novelists I consider in this study. She was also the first person I knew who shared my sense that Woolf was not particularly generous in her evaluation of her female precursors. Gabrielle McIntire and Tamar Katz offered their own very different reading strategies, which enlarged the scope of my own approaches. Other PhD students who showed me new aspects of texts by Woolf and other modernist and late Victorian writers include Nadine Attewell, Wyatt Bonikowski, Rebecca Colesworthy, Bill Van Esveld, Megan Graham, Marlon Kuzmick, Kevin Lamb, Jodie Medd, Dorian Stuber, and Sara Wasson. I also learned much from my senior Honors students, especially Adrienne St. Aubin and Alexander Rosenberg.

The International Virginia Woolf Society runs an e-mail discussion forum that over the years has aired questions and comments from a wide variety of Woolf aficionados, from academics and students to the audience that Woolf, with love and respect, termed common readers. I have found a great deal that was enlightening as well as entertaining in these discussions. I encourage anyone interested in Woolf studies or just news and speculation about Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group to join at VWOOLF@lists.acs.ohio-state.edu. There is at this time no similar organization for Elizabeth Robins studies, but my students and I have benefited enormously from the materials, including complete texts of her major novels and memoirs, on Joanne Gates’s excellent Elizabeth Robins Web at www.jsu.edu/depart/english/robins/.

A National Endowment for the Humanities grant in 2003, a fellowship at the Institute for Women’s Studies at Oslo University, and study leaves and sabbaticals from Cornell sustained my work on this project. I am especially grateful for the recommendations and other support that I received from Sandra Gilbert, Susan Gubar, and the late Jane Marcus.

Finally, I owe a great deal to Mary Jean Corbett, who wrote a thorough, detailed, and unfailingly intelligent report on a late manuscript of Woolf’s Ambiguities. Her knowledge and attentiveness inspired me to undertake a major revision of several parts of this study. Her suggestions ultimately made this a much better book.

Parts of chapter 1 of this study appeared in Narrative, vol. 18, no. 3, 2010. An earlier version of chapter 4 was published in Marketing the Author: Authorial Personae, Narrative Selves and Self-Fashioning, 1880–1930, edited by Marysa Demoor, Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. A version of chapter 5 appeared in Modernism/Modernity, vol. 17, no. 3, 2010.

CHAPTER 1

Woolf’s Tone

Listening to Mrs. Dalloway

James Phelan describes tone, in the sense that I use the word, as a quality of narrative voice indicating the attitude the narrator has toward his or her subject (Rhetoric 45). As we shall see, this attitude can fluctuate—in Woolf’s work, often within a single sentence. I am not invoking the older, limited sense of the word tone to indicate qualities, usually having to do with genre as well as style, distinguishing a work as a whole, as in "The Waves has an elegiac tone or Orlando is satirical in tone. Nor am I concerned with the kind of shifting tone found in first-person narration, which is usually read as ignorance, evasion, self-delusion, or calculated misinformation by the narrating character—the situation of the unreliable narrator." In this book I am concerned mostly with tone in third-person narration. The third-person narrator is the dominant voice in all Elizabeth Robins’s novels but My Little Sister and all Virginia Woolf’s novels except The Waves. As I will suggest, even The Waves retains some of the tonal effects of the third-person narrator—and much of the tonal uncertainty.¹

Tone in this sense elicits particular feelings and then may go on to complicate or undermine these feelings. The narrator’s observations may seem designed to evoke sympathy, irritation, pathos, assent, rejection, contemplation, or some humorous or angry or approving combination of these or other responses.² My main formal claim in this book is that Virginia Woolf designed her experiments with tonal indeterminacy to leave readers unclear how to feel about—or take—many descriptions and utterances and, ultimately, events and characters. My use of take here invokes the colloquial American sense of having an attitude or general feeling about, as in I don’t know how to take his jokes. In this instance of taking someone’s jokes, the speaker expresses affective confusion, laying out an array of possible emotional responses to the joke-teller without clearly favoring any one of them. The possible responses include (but are not limited to) gratification at being in the group presumed to understand the joke, humiliation at feeling oneself the butt of the humor or an outsider to the joke’s references, offense at the rejection of a value that the listener had assumed was shared with the joker, or contempt for the general inadequacy of the joke or its telling.

In literature, tonal responses present a problem when narrative authority is difficult to gauge. This sort of situation often involves point-of-view narration, especially when point-of-view passages use free indirect discourse or—common in Woolf’s practice—slide back and forth between indirect discourse (what Dorrit Cohn terms psycho-narration) and free indirect discourse. Indirect discourse presents passages in which the narrator reports directly on a character’s psychic states. In Woolf’s writing, however, these reports frequently modulate almost imperceptibly into passages in which the language acquires an inflection of the character’s habits of speech and mental processes—for example, picking up some of his or her distinctive vocabulary or syntactically representing erratic mental jumps from subject to subject.³ Because the most characteristic and striking elements of Woolf’s mixing of the two techniques come from the elements of free indirect discourse, I follow the precedent of critics like Anna Snaith in focusing on free indirect discourse as the dominant mode.

With some important exceptions, Woolf does not offer direct authorial sanction for the various pronouncements in the fiction that I discuss in this study. As my statements above suggest, the concept of authority, and thus authorial sanction, invokes that vexed figure for criticism the author, a historical and biographical reality if not a readily discernible presence in a fictional work. The kind of case I am making does not really benefit from such narratological concepts as the implied author, since I will be claiming that it is difficult to discern even the narrator’s opinions in many of the novels, present though this narrator is in the play of voices, modes, and values. Further, critical practice attests to a widespread assumption that a third-person knowledgeable narrator who is not engaged in point-of-view narration generally speaks for the author unless there is strong evidence to the contrary. In criticism of Virginia Woolf’s fiction alone, few studies can do without phrases suggesting her intentions. For instance, Rebecca Walkowitz in Cosmopolitan Modernism gives a fine-grained, insightful account of evaluative evasiveness in Woolf’s novels in which she attributes a lack of clear value statements in the narrative voice to conscious strategies by the author (81–83). But Walkowitz’s argument also depends on the premise that the author does make value commitments in her fiction, especially through narrative strategies. She claims, for instance, that Woolf asks readers to see that interpretive judgments operate historically: that they help to shape the boundaries and meanings of British society and that they are, in turn, shaped by social contestations, and that Woolf tries to resist the hierarchy of objects she associates with patriotic thought (83, 101).

In Fictions of Authority, the eminent narratologist Susan Lanser investigates how female realist authors became public intellectuals in the nineteenth century, read and consulted as experts in the most important decisions of human life. She finds the most compelling examples of authoritative female writing in George Eliot’s maxims, didactic and polemical observations figuring as headnotes and within the body of Middlemarch. Although technically the maxims come from third-person knowledgeable narrators, who often address readers directly rather than using dialogue or point-of-view narration to voice a character’s necessarily limited insights, readers do not hesitate to understand them as Eliot’s own opinions, offered as the wisdom of an established authority. The maxims concern individuals within the story but have reverberations extending to society as a whole. Given Eliot’s magisterial example of female authorship and authority, Lanser’s turn to Woolf’s novels manifests a certain caution. As she observes, developments in the culture of modernity drastically reduced the ability of fiction writers to claim the kind of knowledgeability and moral authority that Eliot had claimed. Narrators could no longer pretend to be infallible. The novel no longer required or desired an overtly authorial narrator. The new indirect and oblique method modeled by Flaubert and James and championed by Percy Lubbock submerged the entire question of narrative voice beneath point of view—what Gerard Genette calls focalization—just as the new practice claimed to submerge the voice of the author beneath the perceptions of characters (Lanser 103–4).

While Lanser finally does claim a diffused but potent authority for Woolf in The Waves, her insight about the difficulty of locating an authorial point of view in indirect and oblique writing sets up exactly the indeterminacy that Anna Snaith claims as a major source of strength for many of Woolf’s novels. Snaith’s Virginia Woolf: Public and Private Negotiations (2000) emphasizes how Woolf developed the voice of her third-person narrator through writing reviews for general-audience publications, at least initially without her name attached (63, 69). Snaith argues that in this way Woolf created a public voice aimed at persuading readers. In her fiction, Woolf weaves strands of point-of-view observation into this more public, authoritative kind of writing, often signaling through the idiosyncrasies of free indirect discourse that a character is the source of a particular sentiment, although which character and where, exactly, the point-of-view narration begins and ends are often unanswerable questions. As Snaith notes, such techniques can produce cognitively insoluble readings, in which readers cannot separate the authorial narrator’s attitudes and conclusions from those of various characters (90). In this book I take her analysis further, into the field of values, arguing that questions of where passages in the narrative voice originate come up largely because these readings are also tonally unresolvable. I agree with Snaith’s conclusion to her treatment of narrative control and domination that unresolvability can be a productive quality.

Both Snaith and Lanser focus on how Woolf’s writing techniques blur certain distinctions: between public and private, outer and inner, authorial and character-initiated, authoritative and dubitable. Snaith’s focus is mostly epistemological. She concentrates on how readers know (or cannot be sure of) the source of various threads of discourse within a scene, paragraph, or single sentence. Such knowledge, which may well be unattainable in certain parts of the book, could establish that a particular attitude or opinion belongs to the freestanding third-person, knowledgeable voice that we might conclude had authorial sanction. Lanser, too, is concerned with questions of knowing, but she also emphasizes judging, a second cognitive function that establishes value—in this case, especially ethical value. The concern with value is central to my argument about tone.

The modes of narration on which both critics focus elicit emotional responses. At different moments, sometimes within a single sentence, a literary text can engage sympathies, spur revulsion, raise suspicions, produce astonishment, arouse anxiety, provoke hostility, and prompt guffaws. Narrative effects are not simply cognitive. They have a major somatic component that engenders feelings at the same time as it engenders cognitive effects. Such feelings are wound up with questions of narrative authority and point-of-view narration. For instance, does the authorial narrator produce these effects, perhaps unknown to or at the expense of the characters? Or, on the contrary, should we attribute the passage to the attitude of a character who offers an opinion or observation? Aspects of language producing emotional experiences are not the same as either authority or free indirect discourse. The quality of writing that produces affective as well as intellectual responses is tone.

Virginia Woolf is remarkable for the unstable tonal cues in her fiction. By tonal cues I mean markers within the third-person knowledgeable narrator’s voice signaling how to react to a character, situation, or scene. In her writing these tonal cues may be in conflict, prompting readers to balance one kind of feeling and evaluation with another that is quite different. Or the tonal cues may be muted, suggesting that readers should respond in a certain way, but tentatively or ironically. Or the tonal cues may simply be absent, as is the case in the dialogue portion of The Waves, where the narrator’s role is so curtailed that the only indications of how we are supposed to take a limited, biased character’s pronouncement come from the speech of other characters who are equally limited, equally biased.

How Tonal Cues Work

We cannot understand what conflicting or unclear or absent tonal cues might do, or even look like, until we recognize the work done by explicit and direct tonal cues. An observation by Wayne Booth in The Rhetoric of Irony suggests how a literary work makes amiable communities out of its readers, inviting their assent to calls for sympathy or revulsion, identification or ironic distance: All readers are invited to agree with whatever message they have discerned. Even the least didactic authors, . . . even the purest poets, ask us to join them in whatever opinions, views, attitudes, or emotions they present or imply, and we have difficulty resisting a decision for or against them (41). Such reader responses are at least in part ethical, although they rarely take explicit ethical form, as in the statements Stephen Dedalus is an admirable young man or Charlotte Lucas’s decision to marry Mr. Collins for security is morally debased. Usually a character or action represented in a literary text (like people and actions in everyday life) prompts a feeling—liking, suspicion, pity—entailing a judgment that may or may not ever rise to consciousness: He’s a great guy, or I don’t trust him because he doesn’t say what he means, or She shouldn’t have to suffer. Peter Rabinowitz writes about snap moral judgments that a reader makes in the course of navigating a narrative (84–93). The phrase may grate—in present-day society it sometimes passes as a truism that one should not make either snap judgments or moral judgments. (Both truisms are, of course, moral judgments, too often made reflexively.) But Rabinowitz is right that snap moral judgments are as much the stuff of literary response as are pleasure and suspense. Consider this passage from the unusual part of Mrs.