The Scholastic Influence on Virginia Woolf

In the excerpt that I have selected from within Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf uses
several different narration techniques to express a Scholastic understanding of the soul. Nowhere
is this more apparent than in her exposition on death, where she hints at the possibility of an
afterlife so that readers are left to contemplate the nature of the soul and its relation to the body.
When reasoning that death itself is an unfortunate tragedy because “closeness drew apart” (184),
Woolf undermines the Cartesian notion of a total distinction between the soul and body. Rather,
in accordance with the hylomorphism of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, she asserts a Scholastic
conception of the soul and body as two parts to a whole that together comprise the human person
that, she concludes, “must inevitably cease [to live] completely” (9). That is to say, because there
is an intrinsic relation between the human soul and body, death inevitably entails a dissolution of
the individual person rather than a mere disembodiment or loss of corporeality. Indeed, just as
Scholasticism teaches the immortality of the soul but dissolution of the person as a whole, Woolf
also affirms through the voice of the narrator the existence of an afterlife but in an inferior state.
When stating that “rapture faded, one was alone” (184), Woolf presupposes a Scholastic
position known as hylomorphism: the notion that all things are composed of matter and form. In
Real Essentialism, Dr. David Oderberg, professor of philosophy at University of Reading, writes
“every finite material body has a twofold composition [of] act and potency” (62). In other words,
the soul can be described as the form or structure of a being that combined with the prime matter
of the body constitutes the person as a whole. That Virginia Woolf conceives of death as a lonely
experience characterized by the loss of rapture logically entails the existence of an afterlife but in
a reduced or inferior state, along with her statement that the sky contains “something of her own
in it [but] turning away its cheek in beauty” (185-6). The metaphor implies that although the soul
may persist after death, it will not be in the same capacity as when the individual was alive, since
the soul itself does not constitute the person as a whole unless it is united with their body. Hence
Oderberg continues to explain that part of the reason why bodily resurrection is traditionally such
an important dogma in most Christian confessions is because that “the relation between form and
matter is one of union [not] containment” (82). Consequently, eternal life would necessitate that
God restores the soul to its body, since from a hylomorphic perspective that is the only way that
a person can be brought back as a whole, though Woolf does not take her hylomorphism that far.
That Virginia Woolf assumes a hylomorphic understanding of the soul and its relation to
the body as opposed to a Cartesian one is also evidenced by her use of indirect and free-indirect
discourse in such close proximity to each other. In one paragraph she writes, “What business had
the Bradshaws to talk of death at her party?” and “he had killed himself – but how?” (184). This
is an example of free-indirect discourse because the reader cannot determine if these thoughts are
coming from the narrator or from Mrs. Dalloway. On the next page she continues to write, “Then
(she had felt it only this morning)” and “No pleasure could equal, she thought” (185). This is an
example of indirect discourse because the narrator is reporting the thoughts and feelings of Mrs.
Dalloway but without quotation marks. The use of these two narration techniques in such rapid
succession gives the impression of an intrinsic connection between the soul and body, whereas
the use of direct discourse and reported speech would imply total distinction. In Neo-Scholastic
Essays, Dr. Edward Feser, professor of philosophy at Pasadena City College, declares that Rene
Descartes “and other early modern thinkers [embraced] dualism in one form or another” (259). I
find it interesting that by undermining this dualism through hylomorphism, Woolf presupposes a
Scholastic understanding of the soul and its relation to the body as opposed to a Cartesian one.
 Works Cited

Feser, Edward. PhD. Neo-Scholastic Essays. IN. St. Augustine’s Press. 2015. Print.

Oderberg, David. PhD. Real Essentialism. NY. Routledge. 2007. Print.

Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. NY. Harcourt, Inc. 1981. Print

James Richards

Professor Loretta Stec

English 580 (01)

16 October 2019

“Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to

communicate; people feeling the impossibility of
reaching the center which, mystically, evaded them;
closeness drew apart; rapture faded, one was alone.
There was an embrace in death” (Woolf 184).