Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf
The Patterns of Ordinary Experience
Lorraine Sim
Virginia Woolf
For my parents
Virginia Woolf
Lorraine Sim
University of Ballarat, Australia
First published 2010 by Ashgate Publishing
Published 2016 by Routledge
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Sim, Lorraine.
Virginia Woolf : the patterns of ordinary experience. 1. Woolf, Virginia, 1882–1941—
Criticism and interpretation. 2. Experience in literature. 3. Manners and customs in
literature. 4. Popular culture in literature.
I. Title
828.9’1209–dc22
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Sim, Lorraine.
Virginia Woolf : the patterns of ordinary experience / Lorraine Sim.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-7546-6657-8 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Woolf, Virginia, 1882–1941—
Criticism and interpretation. 2. Woolf, Virginia, 1882–1941—Philosophy. 3. Experience
in literature. I. Title.
PR6045.O72Z87643 2010
823’.912—dc22
2009026055
ISBN 978-0-754-66657-8 (hbk)

ISBN 978-1-315-54809-8 (ebk)
Contents
Acknowledgements vii
List of Abbreviations ix
Introduction – Virginia Woolf: The Patterns of Ordinary Experience 1
Part 1 Quotidian Things
1 Factualism and the Search for Ordinary Things 29

2 Blue and Green: Sensations of Colour 59
Part 2 Rethinking Ordinary Experience
3 Pain, Common Illness and Ordinary Life 81

4 Motoring from Beauty to the Sublime 107
5 Moments of Being: Little Daily Miracles 137
Part 3 The Ordinary, Being, Ethics
6 Tracing Patterns 163

7 Woolf and the Ethics of the Ordinary 175
Bibliography 201
Index 215
This page has been left blank intentionally
Acknowledgements
Many people and several institutions have been instrumental to the writing of this
book. I am indebted to my friends and colleagues in the Discipline of English
and Cultural Studies at The University of Western Australia, where this project
had its beginnings. I am extremely grateful to Daniel Brown, Judith Johnston and
Gail Jones for all they have taught me about scholarship, intellectual exploration
and finding your own voice. Thanks to Tama Leaver for his friendship during that
journey and to Pearl Rasmussen for so many precious exchanges on the topic of
the everyday. I am grateful to my thesis examiners – Kate Flint, Jane Goldman and
Mark Hussey – for their astute and thoughtful feedback, which contributed to the
writing of this book.
I would like to thank my colleagues at the University of Ballarat who have
been very welcoming and have offered me much support and encouragement in
the development and publication of this book. Special thanks to Jane Mummery
for her valuable input and advice. My sincere thanks to Ann Donahue, my
Commissioning Editor at Ashgate, for supporting this project and for making
the publication process such a pleasant one. I am very grateful to the anonymous
reader for Ashgate whose detailed feedback and insightful comments were not
only instrumental in reshaping parts of this book, but gave me renewed confidence
in, and enthusiasm for, the project. Many thanks to Kate Machin for her wonderful
editorial work on the typescript, which demonstrated a dazzling and thoughtful
attention to detail. The international community of Woolf scholars is a vibrant and
enriching one, from which this project has benefited greatly: the Woolf conference
at Smith College in 2003 and the Woolf Listserv have been particularly enabling
in making this Antipodean Woolf scholar feel connected to the broader sphere of
Woolf Studies.
An earlier version of part of Chapter 3 appeared as ‘Ailing Dualisms: Woolf’s
Revolt against Rationalism in the “Real World” of Influenza’ in Woolf in the Real
World: Selected Papers from the Thirteenth International Conference on Virginia
Woolf (ed. Karen V. Kukil, Clemson University Digital Press, 2005). An earlier
version of Chapter 6 was published as ‘Virginia Woolf Tracing Patterns Through
Plato’s Forms’ in the Journal of Modern Literature, volume 28, number 2 (Indiana
University Press, 2005). I thank both publishers for allowing me to reprint the
material here.
I thank The Society of Authors as the Literary Representative of the Estate
of Virginia Woolf for permitting me to quote from The Voyage Out and To the
Lighthouse, and for permission to reproduce in full the sketch ‘Blue & Green’ from
Monday or Tuesday (Hogarth, 1921). Excerpts from Moments of Being by Virginia
Woolf, copyright © 1976 by Quentin Bell and Angelica Garnett, are reprinted
viii Virginia Woolf
by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. My grateful

thanks to Henrietta Garnett as Representative of the Estate of Vanessa Bell for her
permission to reproduce the woodcut by Vanessa Bell from Monday or Tuesday on
the front cover of this book. This image is still in copyright. I am grateful to Karen
Kukil, Barbara Blumenthal and the Mortimer Rare Book Room, Smith College,
for providing me with reproductions of this woodcut by Vanessa Bell and Virginia
Woolf’s ‘Blue & Green’ from Monday or Tuesday (Hogarth, 1921).
I am grateful to those friends who have shown an interest in, or at least tolerated,
my endless ruminations on the everyday in recent years, or who, through their love
and support, have been in other ways instrumental to this project: Pat Browne-
Cooper, Ewan Jansen, Bronwen Fraser, Lisa Majteles, Rafal Stepien and Nicola
Hart. Thanks to Steve for his love, good humour and faith in me; for cooking
wonderful dinners when my work on the everyday made me incapable of partaking
in all of its forms properly. Finally, my profound thanks to my family, both here
and abroad, but particularly my parents – whose love, support and unwavering
encouragement have made this and many other things in my life possible.
List of Abbreviations
Throughout this book I am quoting from the Hogarth edition of Virginia Woolf’s
novels.
AROO A Room of One’s Own

BA Between the Acts
CE1–4 Collected Essays. 4 volumes
CSF The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf
D1–5 The Diary of Virginia Woolf. 5 volumes
E1–4 The Essays of Virginia Woolf. 4 volumes
JR Jacob’s Room
L1–6 The Letters of Virginia Woolf. 6 volumes
MB Moments of Being: A Collection of Autobiographical Writing
MD Mrs. Dalloway
MT Monday or Tuesday
ND Night and Day
O Orlando
RF Roger Fry: A Biography
TL To the Lighthouse
VO The Voyage Out
W The Waves
Y The Years
Introduction
Virginia Woolf:
The familiar is not necessarily the known. (G.W.F. Hegel)
Indeed most of life escapes, now I come to think of it: the texture of the ordinary day.
(Virginia Woolf, D2, 298)
The ordinary and everyday, as theoretical concepts and subjects of analysis, have
received an increasing amount of attention since the 1960s, following the rise of
cultural studies. In Critiques of Everyday Life, Michael E. Gardiner comments
that despite the burgeoning interest in the sphere of everyday life in social science
literature, feminism, cultural studies and postmodernism, ‘there have been few
concerted attempts to survey, in a systematic and synoptical fashion, the theories
that have underpinned such developments’. Furthermore, Laurie Langbauer
argues that, while of central import to the field of cultural studies, the category
of the ‘everyday’ remains vague and ill-defined. In recent years several studies
of everyday life have sought to provide a clearer sense of this category and the
‘theories that have underpinned’ contemporary interest in the field, beyond the
writings of the two key figures that have, to date, dominated it: Henri Lefebvre
and Michel de Certeau. Gardiner’s Critiques of Everyday Life considers concepts
of the everyday in the work of a number of twentieth-century artists, social critics
and philosophers including the Surrealists, Mikhail Bakhtin, Henri Lefebvre,
the Situationist International and Agnes Heller. In his 2002 study Everyday Life
and Cultural Theory, Ben Highmore traces a range of theories of everyday life
that respond to the changing conditions and experiences of late nineteenth- and
twentieth-century modernity. He finds the everyday to be an important subject
of cultural, social and philosophical analysis in the writings of Georg Simmel,
the Surrealists, Walter Benjamin and Mass-Observation, as well as Lefebvre and
de Certeau. More recently, Michael Sheringham has developed these histories

G.W.F. Hegel, quoted in Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, vol. 1, trans.
John Moore (London: Verso, 1991), 132.

Michael E. Gardiner, Critiques of Everyday Life (London: Routledge, 2000), 2–3.

Laurie Langbauer, ‘Review: cultural studies and the politics of the everyday’,
Diacritics 22, no. 1 (1992): 47–65.

Ben Highmore, Everyday Life and Cultural Theory: An Introduction (London: Routledge,
2002). See also Ben Highmore (ed.), The Everyday Life Reader (London: Routledge, 2002).
Virginia Woolf
of the everyday by considering the work of continental philosophers and writers

including Maurice Blanchot, Martin Heidegger and Georges Perec, as well as
the cultural criticism of Roland Barthes, in addition to the other individuals and
movements discussed previously by Gardiner and Highmore.
While the above studies are immensely valuable in extending our understanding
of conceptions of the everyday beyond contemporary cultural contexts, two issues
become apparent. Firstly, with the exception of Surrealism, recent histories of
everyday life have predominantly focused upon significant cultural and social critics
and philosophers; literature and art more broadly remain largely untapped areas in
contemporary explorations of the everyday. Secondly, as Langbauer has argued,
it is a history from which the experiences and voices of women are conspicuously
absent. This study provides an addition to such histories in that it explores ideas
and representations of the ordinary in the work of one of the most important women
writers of the twentieth century: Virginia Woolf. Woolf was influential not only as a
novelist, but as a perceptive literary, social and cultural critic, philosophical thinker
and political essayist. An analysis of the ordinary and everyday forms of experience
in Woolf’s writings provides insight not only into a key thematic concern of her
fiction, but to her broader philosophy and historical milieu. This study proposes that
the ordinary is a very important concept in Woolf’s fiction and non-fiction, and has
developed out of my sense of the need for a detailed analysis of her sophisticated
views on the nature of ordinary experience. Examining our engagement with
ordinary things and environments, and tracing the shifting patterns of everyday life
and experience in early twentieth-century Britain, are themes that recur throughout
much of Woolf’s fiction and non-fiction. Lefebvre’s passing comment in the Critique
of Everyday Life that Woolf ‘uses an acute sensitivity to show the subtle richness of
the everyday’ is an idea I believe is worthy of detailed analysis.
While the ‘everyday’ is the term most commonly employed in cultural studies
and cultural theory at the present time, Woolf uses the word ‘ordinary’ with much
more frequency, and this is the term I favour throughout this study. Furthermore,
while the everyday in cultural studies tends to centre upon the sphere of human
activities – particularly patterns of work, leisure and consumption – Woolf’s
preoccupation with the ordinary signals her keen interest in things (material objects
both natural and human-made), in addition to daily experiences and behaviours.
Also, the everyday implies a degree of repetition and, potentially, monotony which
is not an implicit aspect of the ordinary. Something can be ordinary without being
everyday. For example, illness, celebrations and falling in love are a part of ordinary
experience and life but are not typically a part of everybody’s everyday life. Such

Michael Sheringham, Everyday Life: Theories and Practices from Surrealism to the
Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).

The notable exception to this is Laurie Langbauer’s Novels of Everyday Life: The
Series in English Fiction, 1850–1930 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999).

Langbauer, ‘Review’.

Lefebvre, Critique, 28.
Introduction
subtle differences between the terms ‘everyday’ and ‘ordinary’ are important ones,
and because of this the two are not viewed as synonymous, although they do, of
course, overlap in many ways.
Before outlining Woolf’s ideas about ordinary experience, it is important to
consider why modernism has been, to date, largely overlooked in contemporary
discussions of the everyday in cultural theory, and why it might be a particularly
fruitful cultural period for investigating this very subject.
Modernism, Modernity and Everyday Life
The ordinary and everyday in modernism remain relatively unexplored topics.

In his discussion of modern art and literature in the first volume of the Critique
of Everyday Life, Lefebvre finds much of it, including Surrealism, devalues
the everyday through attempts to transcend or transform it through the strange,
marvellous and weird. In the past few years a number of articles on modernism
and the everyday have been published, several of which focus on the idea of ‘habit’,
which constitutes one of the many suggestive ways in which the ordinary and
everyday might be approached in modernism.10 In her doctoral thesis Modernism
and the Ordinary, which focuses on the work of Woolf, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein
and Wallace Stevens, Liesl M. Olson explores what she argues to be these authors’
shared preoccupation with ‘the habitual, unselfconscious actions of everyday life’.
Rather than taking the ordinary and making it strange, as Lefebvre contends of the
Surrealists, or transforming it through symbolic, ‘spiritual, psychological or ethical
signification’, Olson argues that literary modernism finds the ‘non-transformative
power’ of the ordinary to be its most compelling aspect.11 While Olson’s thesis
constitutes a very important contribution to the fields of modernist studies and
studies in the everyday, her definition of the ordinary as habit is one I find limited
in relation to an author such as Woolf, for reasons I will explain in the course of
this introduction.

Lefebvre, Critique, see ch. 1, ‘Brief Notes on some Well-Trodden Ground’.
10
Liesl M. Olson, ‘Virginia Woolf’s “cotton wool of daily life”’, Journal of Modern
Literature 26, no. 2 (Winter 2002–2003): 42–65; Ella Ophir, ‘Modernist fiction and “the
accumulation of unrecorded life”’, Modernist Cultures 2, no. 1 (Summer 2006): 6–20
(this is a special issue on modernism and the everyday edited by Scott McCracken);
Lisi Schoenbach, ‘“Peaceful and exciting”: habit, shock, and Gertrude Stein’s pragmatic
modernism’, Modernism/modernity 11, no. 2 (2002): 239–59; Evan Horowitz, ‘Ulysses:
mired in the universal’, Modernism/modernity 13, no. 1 (2006): 869–87; Harold Schweizer,
‘With sabbath eyes: the particular and the claims of history in Elizabeth Bishop’s “Poem”’,
Journal of Modern Literature 28, no. 2 (Winter, 2005): 49–60.
11
Liesl M. Olson, ‘Abstract’, in ‘Modernism and the Ordinary: Joyce, Woolf, Stein,
Stevens’ (PhD thesis, Columbia University, 2004). Olson’s study is also available as a book:
Modernism and the Ordinary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
Virginia Woolf
While the ‘precise description and evocation of the daily, the diurnal, the
stubbornly ordinary’ has recently been noted to be as central to modernism as
‘exalted … moments of artistic transcendence’, such evocations have been under-
explored.12 The historical tendency to overlook the everyday and ordinary as
subjects for modernism may be due, as Olson argues, to the fact that modernism,
particularly so-called ‘high modernism’, was traditionally viewed as an elitist
movement that celebrated interiority and formal experimentation at the expense
of the external and the realm of ordinary social and cultural life.13 For example, in
Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Fredric Jameson claims
that modernists thought ‘compulsively about the New’, and sought to escape the
real, material world in favour of new Utopian ones.14 In his well-known essay
‘The Ideology of Modernism’, Georg Lukács criticized what he viewed as an
‘attenuation of actuality’ in modernist literature, arguing that material and social
reality were obscured by an obsessive subjectivism.15 A concern with subjective
experience and the cult of the new are seen by these critics to be antithetical to
the realm of ordinary, material life. This is a view that I will be challenging in
the course of my analysis of Woolf’s account of ordinary experience. It is surely
inevitable that every cultural period will reflect its particular engagement with,
and understanding of, the everyday and a great deal of modernist literature and
art reveals a fascination with that very sphere of experience. This, it would seem,
is in part due to the fact that the ‘everyday’ and ‘ordinary life’ were undergoing
dramatic transformation during the period of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-
century modernity.
In his influential study of modernity, All that is Solid Melts into Air, Marshall
Berman describes the primary condition in the experience of modernity to be that
12
This point is made by Kevin J.H. Dettmar in his introduction to A Companion to
Modernist Literature and Culture, eds David Bradshaw and Kevin J.H. Dettmar (Malden,
MA: Blackwell, 2006), 3.
13
See Olson, ‘Modernism and the Ordinary’, ch 1. Since the 1980s, there have been
many revisionist formulations of modernism that have challenged earlier critical accounts
of ‘high modernism’ and expanded the parameters of the movement considerably. Feminist
and postcolonial critics, such as Susan Stanford Friedman, Rachel Bowlby, Gillian Beer and
Laura Marcus, have demonstrated that modernism was far from apolitical but intimately
engaged with a range of social, cultural and political issues and contexts. Contemporary
cultural and historical surveys of modernism such as Bradshaw and Dettmar’s, A Companion
to Modernist Literature and Culture and Tim Armstrong’s Modernism: A Cultural History
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005) reflect the broad, interdisciplinary scope of the new
modernist studies.
14
Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
(London: Verso, 1991), ix.
15
Georg Lukács, ‘The ideology of modernism’, (1957) in 20th Century Literary
Criticism, ed. David Lodge (London: Longman, 1972), 474–88; 480.
Introduction
of constant change.16 Berman argues that this condition has united humankind
during the twentieth century because of modernity’s global reach, but also that
this unity is a ‘paradoxical’ one: ‘[I]t pours us all into a maelstrom of perpetual
disintegration and renewal, of struggle and contradiction, of ambiguity and
anguish.’17 It is in the words of Karl Marx that he finds this experience of constant
change to be most succinctly expressed:
All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices
and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before
they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and men
at last are forced to face … the real conditions of their lives and their relations
with their fellow men.18
While, as Berman notes, modernity began in the sixteenth century, individuals are
inclined to feel that they are ‘the first ones’.19 Indeed, Woolf’s famous dictum in
her 1924 paper ‘Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown’, ‘that in or about December, 1910,
human character changed’, thereby marking the emergence of a new era, reflects
such a feeling (CE1, 320). The change that she observes presented itself as a shift
in ‘[a]ll human relations’, the first signs of which she locates in the latter stages of
the nineteenth century. When relations between people change – be they between
‘masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children’ – there is, she
writes, an attendant change in all spheres of life: ‘religion, conduct, politics, and
literature’ (CE1, 321). Woolf’s claim that the apparent shift in all human relations
occurred around 1910, however, echoes Marx who viewed such ‘fixed, fast-frozen
relations’ to have started melting a good deal earlier.20
Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century modernity changed the patterns
and nature of daily life in much of Europe and America and these transformations
are reflected in the art and literature of the period.21 Malcolm Bradbury and James
McFarlane view the radical artistic innovations so integral to modernism to be a
product of these significant social and cultural upheavals, which they deemed to be
16
Change has continued to be the defining feature in contemporary discussions of
the experience of modernity. See, for example, Zygmunt Bauman: ‘Modernity may be best
described as the age marked by constant change’, ‘Modernity (1993)’, in The Bauman
Reader, ed. Peter Beilharz (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001), 164.
17
Marshall Berman, All that is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity
(London: Verso, 1983), 15.
18
Karl Marx, quoted in Berman, All that is Solid, 21.
19
Berman, All that is Solid, 15.
20
Woolf does comment in her essay on the disputability of this date and its degree
of arbitrariness, but it has nevertheless been very influential in various critical attempts to
clarify the dates of modernism as an artistic and cultural movement (CE1, 320).
21
Western modernity of course impacted on colonized nations in equally profound,
if different, ways.
Virginia Woolf
of a ‘cataclysmic order’.22 A brief overview will serve to indicate at least some of

the major areas of change, several of which I will return to in more detail at later
stages of this study.
The urban mass and the city, distinguishing features of modern life and the
modern condition, strongly influenced the work of nineteenth-century writers
such as Charles Baudelaire and Edgar Allan Poe, and continued to be a source
of great interest for social theorists, writers and artists into the early twentieth
century. London, which was Woolf’s home for most of her life and a continual
source of fascination to her as a writer, was the world’s biggest city in the early
decades of the twentieth century.23 London was therefore the quintessential space
of modernity, making it an exciting place to be, not only for British artists but
the many American and other expatriates who moved there.24 Class relations, as
Woolf observes in ‘Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown’, continued to be redefined, as
did gender roles and relations, particularly during the First and Second World
Wars. Industry continued to develop and expand and new technologies became
more numerous in form and more ubiquitous in nature; automobiles, the radio
and the cinema were a particular source of interest to modernists due to their
impact on everyday culture and sensory experience. More efficient modes of mass
production, advertising and spectacle contributed to ever-expanding commodity
cultures which affected people’s relationship to objects, as well as notions of art
and artistic production, as Walter Benjamin’s essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age
of Mechanical Reproduction’ famously argued.25 Challenges to traditional ideas
about the world and human beings, which were initiated by radical thinkers such
as Charles Darwin and Marx in the nineteenth century continued into the twentieth
century, particularly through the influence of Sigmund Freud.
Perhaps most crucially, however, it was the First World War that rendered daily
life for the early twentieth-century individual more fragile and volatile than ever
before. Through the implementation of new technologies such as the machine gun
and tank, the First World War caused a level of destruction and carnage previously
unknown in Western history. As Walter Benjamin describes in ‘The Storyteller’,
‘[a] generation that had gone to school on a horse-drawn streetcar now stood
under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but
the clouds, and beneath these clouds, in a field of force of destructive torrents
22
Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, ‘The name and nature of modernism’,
in Modernism 1890–1930, eds Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1976), 20.
23
On this topic see Jean Moorcroft Wilson, Virginia Woolf’s London: A Guide to
Bloomsbury and Beyond (London: Tauris Parke Paperbacks, 2000).
24
Malcolm Bradbury, ‘London 1890–1920’, in Modernism 1890–1930, eds Bradbury
and McFarlane, 179.
25
Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York:
Schocken Books, 1969), 217–52.
Introduction
and explosion, was the tiny, fragile human body’.26 Arguably, the fragile status of
the everyday became more acute still during, and in the aftermath of, the Second
World War. Hence, given the radical changes that impacted upon all areas of life
during the first decades of the twentieth century, it seems almost inevitable that the
very notions of ‘everyday life’ and the ‘ordinary’ would be ones of great interest
and also anxiety for modernists. Indeed, as I will show, the very conception
of ‘ordinary experience’ is one Woolf wanted to open up for debate given her
historical climate of ‘adventure’, ‘disintegration and renewal’, and ‘struggle and
contradiction’.27
A glance at representative authors of the period indicates the rich field that
modernism presents for new historical perspectives on the everyday and ordinary.
A detailed engagement with the quotidian and everyday material world forms the
basis of James Joyce’s epic tale of ordinariness, Ulysses (1922). It was, however,
an account of the ordinary that Woolf found to be somewhat confronting and base
with its focus on bodily processes and often macabre, abject or erotic themes
(E4, 161–2). Dorothy Richardson’s multi-volume Pilgrimage (1915–1967) and
Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927) carefully
present the complexity of ordinary experience in the present moment. Much of
Gertrude Stein’s prose and poetry, from Tender Buttons (1914) to Wars I Have Seen
(1945), centres quite obsessively upon the domestic everyday, carefully tracing
its objects, people, rhythms and speech. Vignettes of seemingly unexceptional
moments form the basis for short stories by Katherine Mansfield, Woolf and Jean
Rhys. In terms of modern poetry, Imagism reflects a preoccupation with the daily
in its aspiration towards an objective presentation of the concrete and particular
thing through plain language. Likewise, the subject matter of much of T.S. Eliot’s
poetry expresses a persistent, if somewhat vexed, relationship to the sphere of
everyday, urban modernity. For example, in ‘Preludes’ he describes the coming to
a consciousness:
Of faint stale smells of beer

From the sawdust-trampled street
With all its muddy feet that press
To early coffee-stands.28
Like many of her contemporaries, Woolf’s writing reflects a fascination with the
ordinary and everyday. However, the ordinary not only comprises the subject of
much of her fiction and non-fiction; it also informs her implicit philosophy and
broader social and political views.
26
Benjamin, Illuminations, 84.
27
28
T.S. Eliot, ‘Preludes’, II, in T.S. Eliot: Collected Poems 1909–1962 (London: Faber
and Faber, 1974), 23.
Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf and Ordinary Life
Woolf’s preoccupation with the ordinary can be found in one of her most well-
known essays, ‘Modern Fiction’ (1925), a revised version of the 1919 essay
‘Modern Novels’. In ‘Modern Fiction’ she appeals to the reader to ‘[e]xamine for
a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day’ and to reflect upon ‘life’ (E4, 160).
Through this act of reflection, Woolf hopes to alert her reader to the possibility
that the conventional requirements of the novel in the past, such as ‘plot’, a ‘love
interest’, ‘comedy’ or ‘tragedy’ are, in their present style, ‘ill-fitting vestments’
within which to capture ‘life’ (E4, 160). Her critique in ‘Modern Fiction’ is
specifically aimed at the Edwardian novelists Arnold Bennett, John Galsworthy
and H.G. Wells, whom she collectively refers to as ‘materialists’. They are
‘materialists’ in the sense that they focus their attention upon ‘unimportant things’
– the enumeration of irrelevant facts – which do not illuminate a character’s
experience: ‘[Mr Bennett’s] characters live abundantly, even unexpectedly, but it
remains to ask how do they live, and what do they live for?’ (E4, 159). In this and
other essays composed during the 1920s, Woolf argues that these novelists fail to
capture ‘life’ because they ‘spend immense skill and immense industry making the
trivial and the transitory appear the true and the enduring’ (E4, 159).29 The word
‘trivial’ refers to that which ‘may be met with anywhere; common, commonplace,
ordinary, everyday, familiar, trite’. It denotes something ‘of small account, little
esteemed, paltry’, ‘inconsiderable, unimportant, slight’.30 But given her interest
in recording the patterns of ‘an ordinary mind on an ordinary day’, one that is
evident in her novels Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927), as
well as throughout her many volumes of diaries, Woolf cannot be calling for a
repudiation of the commonplace or ‘small’ in literature; indeed, she states later in
‘Modern Fiction’ that we cannot ‘take it for granted that life exists more fully in
what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small’, citing
Joyce’s prose as a case in point (E4, 161). There is a sense that what she finds
problematic in the novels of Bennett and Galsworthy is their superficial account of
human experience. She also draws to our attention the words ‘ordinary’, ‘trivial’
and ‘small’ in relation to notions of truth, fiction and endurance in her essay so that
we might reconsider their meanings and relations.
‘Modern Fiction’ not only reveals Woolf’s opinions about the aims and scope
of the modern novel and how she thinks it will differ from novels in the past,
but also asks the reader to reflect upon the very idea of ‘ordinary’ experience.
The word ‘ordinary’ is derived from the Latin ordinarius, which means ‘regular,
orderly, customary, usual’.31 To talk, as Woolf does in her essay, about ordinary
minds and ordinary experience suggests ideas of familiarity, routine, custom
and habit. In his essay ‘The myth of everyday life: Toward a heterology of the
29
See also ‘Life and the novelist’, CE2, 131–6.
30
‘Trivial’, Oxford English Dictionary, http://dictionary.oed.com.
31
‘Ordinary’, etymology, Oxford English Dictionary, http://dictionary.oed.com.
Introduction
ordinary’, Barry Sandywell notes the close historical association between ideas of
the ordinary and the everyday.32 Ordinary life is often associated with mundane,
daily activities such as eating, bathing and travelling to work – the ‘Monday
or Tuesday’ of ordinary life to which Woolf alludes in ‘Modern Fiction’ (E4,
160). Sandywell is critical of approaches to everyday life that have suppressed
the materiality, contingency and historicity of human experience and he explores
how the ordinary has been ‘systematically denigrated’ in the very act of being
theorized as everyday life.33 Similarly, Woolf encourages us to reconsider and
re-examine ordinary life afresh so as to recover it from the misrepresentation
she argues it has received by certain Edwardian novelists. Indeed, recovering
ordinary life is not contingent upon the extolling of custom but a release from it:
‘But sometimes, more and more often as time goes by, we suspect a momentary
doubt, a spasm of rebellion, as the pages fill themselves in the customary way. Is
life like this? Must novels be like this?’ (E4, 160).
In Doing Time: Feminist Theory and Postmodern Culture, Rita Felski
discusses how the everyday, like the ordinary, is an idea that is both ‘self-evident’
yet ‘puzzling’.34 While observing that everyday life is generally equated with the
‘essential, taken-for-granted continuum of mundane activities’, she observes that
it is also ‘strangely elusive’ and ‘resists our understanding’ when it is ‘subject
to critical scrutiny’.35 The elusiveness of the everyday – its ‘veiled’ character
and resistance to both our understanding and representation – is one of the
problems Lefebvre seeks to address in his multi-volume critique of everyday
life. ‘Where’, he asks, ‘is [the everyday] to be found’ and how are we to ‘reveal’
it to itself and ourselves, without transforming it in the process of that analysis
and representation?36 In his Marxist assessment of the status of everyday life in
modern Western society, Lefebvre sees the cover that obscures the everyday to be
that of ‘modernity’, which he argues has transformed the nature of everyday life
and our relationship to it. Alienated from the cyclical rhythms, diverse objects and
styles that defined the pre-modern everyday, in the twentieth century the everyday
exists merely as repetition, rationalized uniformity and monotony.37 For Lefebvre,
32
Barry Sandywell, ‘The myth of everyday life: Toward a heterology of the ordinary’,
Cultural Studies 18, no. 2–3 (March/May 2004): 160–80; 162. Volume 18, no. 2–3 of
Cultural Studies is a special issue called ‘Rethinking Everyday Life: And Then Nothing
Turns Itself Inside Out’.
33
Sandywell, ‘Myth’, 160.
34
Rita Felski, Doing Time: Feminist Theory and Postmodern Culture (New York:
New York University Press, 2000), 77.
35
Felski, Doing Time, 77–8.
36
Lefebvre, Critique, 31. See also ‘The Everyday and Everydayness’, Yale French
Studies 73 (1987): 7–11.
37
Lefebvre, ‘The Everyday and Everydayness’, 10. These issues are discussed at
length in his ‘Foreword’ to the second edition of volume 1 of the Critique, but permeate
every volume of the Critique.
10 Virginia Woolf
there is a sense in which everyday life is ‘residual’, comprised of that which is ‘left
over’ from ‘all distinct, superior, specialized, structured activities’. However, he
also argues that the everyday must be conceived of as a totality and is ‘profoundly
related to all activities’, being their ‘meeting place’ and ‘common ground’.38
Feminist critics working in the field of cultural studies have been quick to
challenge negative attitudes towards the everyday that define it as residual or
monotonous.39 Similarly, in ‘Modern Fiction’, Woolf makes it clear that her
conception of the contents of an ordinary mind and the trajectory of an ordinary
day are not in the least dull or self-evident, but complex and far more exciting than
conventional attitudes to the daily suggest. She argues that a new literary form is
required to represent an ordinary day at the present time:
Look within and life, it seems, is very far from being ‘like this’. Examine for
a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad
impressions – trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of
steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and
as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the
accent falls differently from of old; the moment of importance came not here but
there; so that, if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what
he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work upon his own feeling and
not upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love
interest or catastrophe in the accepted style … Life is not a series of gig-lamps
symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope
surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not the
task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed
spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display, with as little mixture of
the alien and external as possible? We are not pleading merely for courage and
sincerity; we are suggesting that the proper stuff of fiction is a little other than
custom would have us believe it. (E4, 160–161)
Traditionally this passage has been viewed as an expression of Woolf’s disavowal

of material reality and her privileging of states of aesthetic reverie over more
mundane states of consciousness. John Fletcher and Malcolm Bradbury, for
example, understand this passage from ‘Modern Fiction’ to reveal Woolf’s view of
consciousness as an ‘unconditioned state of high reverie and awareness analogous
to the condition of the artist’. They go on to argue that, for Woolf, the modern
novel ‘desubstantiates the material world and puts it in its just place; it transcends
the vulgar limitations and simplicities of realism, so as to serve a higher realism’.40
Rather than promoting an aestheticist withdrawal from ordinary life, as Fletcher
38
Lefebvre, Critique, 97.
39
Felski, Doing Time, 80.
40
John Fletcher and Malcolm Bradbury, ‘The introverted novel’, in Modernism
1890–1930, eds Bradbury and McFarlane, 408.
Introduction 11
and Bradbury suggest, we might also interpret this passage to offer a reassessment
of our conception of it.
For Woolf, ordinary life is not a given, ‘like this’, or explained by our customary
attitudes. As for Sandywell, Woolf finds that the ‘shape’ and prominent features
of the ordinary day change over time and are historically contingent: ‘the accent
falls differently from of old.’ Rather than it being a commonplace and uncontested
phenomenon, Woolf argues that the pattern of everyday life is mysterious and, at
the present time, ‘uncircumscribed’, yet to be ‘conveyed’ by the novelist. When
she looks ‘within’ at the life of the mind on an ‘ordinary day’, she observes that it
is not only scored by ‘trivial’ impressions but ‘fantastic’, ‘evanescent’ and striking
ones. Rather than privileging heightened states of consciousness at the expense
of more commonplace impressions, as Fletcher and Bradbury argue, Woolf is
fundamentally concerned with their interconnection and coexistence in everyday
experience. As Michael Gardiner argues:
Although everyday life can display routinized, static and unreflexive

characteristics, it is also capable of a surprising dynamism and moments of
penetrating insight and boundless creativity. The everyday is, as Maffesoli puts
it, ‘polydimensional’: fluid, ambivalent and labile.41
Similarly, through her fiction, Woolf attempts to convey the ‘polydimensional’

nature of ordinary experience. She realizes that when the author attempts to ‘trace
the pattern’ of the mind by recording the ‘atoms’ which fall upon it, those myriad
impressions may at first appear ‘disconnected and incoherent’. However, the
novelist’s task, in her view, is to uncover a pattern to those various impressions.
The novelist must not oversimplify ordinary experience but give form to its
complex nature. While acknowledging the heterogeneity of everyday experience,
Woolf recognizes the importance of finding order or ‘pattern’; the meaning central
to the etymology of ‘ordinary’ (E4, 161).
Echoing Lefebvre, Felski argues that while much modern literature reflects
a fascination with the ordinary and a desire to ‘redeem the everyday by rescuing
it from its opacity’ (an idea suggested in ‘Modern Fiction’ through Woolf’s
metaphor of modern life as akin to a ‘luminous halo’), such a detailed attention
to the ordinary ultimately transcends and transforms the very dailiness it seeks to
recuperate.42 But does attending to the details of an ordinary object, experience
or activity necessarily undermine its everydayness? Is ‘everyday’ consciousness
grounded upon a ‘casual inattentiveness’ to one’s environment and experience?43
Is there a universal everyday, and a common consciousness of it? In his assessment
of the nineteenth-century sociologist Georg Simmel’s ‘sociological microscopy’,
Ben Highmore argues that aesthetic approaches to the everyday that render it as
41
Gardiner, Critiques of Everyday Life, 6.
42
43
12 Virginia Woolf
‘vivid’ do not necessarily undermine its everydayness in the process.44 Likewise, in

drawing attention to the ordinary, Woolf seeks to alert her readers to its overlooked
potential, not to make it strange or to transcend it. As ‘Modern Fiction’ makes
clear, she challenges the assumption that ordinary life is restricted to the habitual
and unreflective aspects of experience, the ‘casual inattentiveness’ that, for Felski,
‘defines the everyday experience of everyday life’.45 On the contrary, ordinary
experience during Woolf’s lifetime was often marked by a keen awareness and
a sense of ‘adventure’, not the condition of alienation and apathy described by
Lefebvre and reflected in other areas of modernism, such as T.S. Eliot’s poetry.46
Clarissa Dalloway’s ‘lark’ and ‘plunge’ into the streets of London to buy flowers
one June morning in 1923 is one example of Woolf’s sense of the vividness and
excitement that can attend the ordinary (MD, 1). The responsiveness to ordinary
things and environments described in ‘Modern Fiction’, and made evident in
Woolf’s diaries and fiction, was a product of the dynamic and changing nature of
daily life during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A more extreme account of
the modern subject’s hypersensitivity can be found in Georg Simmel’s psychology
of the metropolitan individual, which he argued was ‘neurasthenic’ and indifferent
by turns. Such sensitivity is akin to the condition of sensory ‘shock’ that Walter
Benjamin viewed to be integral to the experience of modernity.47
Woolf sees the challenge that confronts the novelist and the modern subject to
be the way in which they negotiate the various sorts of impressions and experiences
that comprise an ordinary day and the view of the world that they entail. In To
the Lighthouse, the artist Lily Briscoe expresses her desire to be able to maintain
a dual and paradoxical perception of ordinary things that sees them as at once
familiar and known, yet miraculous:
One wanted, she thought, dipping her brush deliberately, to be on a level with
ordinary experience, to feel simply that’s a chair, that’s a table, and yet at the
same time, It’s a miracle, it’s an ecstasy. The problem might be solved after all.
(TL, 272)
As Mark Hussey observes, Lily ‘reveals the ecstasy of the ordinary’ and To the
Lighthouse expresses what he describes as the ‘excessive richness of ordinary
44
Highmore, Everyday Life and Cultural Theory, 39.
45
46
47
Benjamin’s idea of ‘shock’ is discussed in his essay ‘On some motifs in Baudelaire’
in Illuminations. I will return to this topic in Chapter 4. Georg Simmel viewed the constantly
changing internal and external stimuli experienced in the urban environment to lead to either
a condition of hypersensitivity (which Simmel sometimes diagnoses as ‘neurasthenic’)
or indifference. For a discussion of Simmel’s theory of the everyday and modernity see
Highmore, Everyday Life and Cultural Theory, ch. 3.
Introduction 13
experience’.48 Lily’s desire for a dual mode of apprehending the world, as familiar
and ordinary, yet also extraordinary and ecstatic, informs much of Woolf’s thought
and writing. While these two ways of experiencing ordinary life can come into
conflict with one another, I will examine how Woolf tries to place them in a
positive, dialectical relationship. Woolf’s sense that the ordinary is a site that can
be not only mundane and familiar but also extraordinary marks a departure from
traditional conceptions of the everyday in the social sciences, and coincides with
the tradition of everyday life theory that Michael Gardiner traces in Critiques of
Everyday Life:
Whereas for mainstream interpretive approaches the everyday is the realm of the
ordinary, the alternative pursued here is to treat it as a domain that is potentially
extraordinary. The ordinary can become extraordinary not by eclipsing the
everyday … but by fully appropriating and activating the possibilities that lie
hidden, and typically repressed, within it.49
It is this process of returning to the ordinary, and moving beyond customary

perceptions and formulations of it in order to realize its richness and, in the
twentieth century, constant evolution, that I will trace in Woolf’s writing. Through
examining her representations of a subject’s engagement with ordinary objects
(such as a table or a flower), common experiences (such as illness) and new cultural
experiences (such as travelling in a motor car), I propose that Woolf challenges a
view of everyday life as simply the habitual and mundane. Rather than restricting
my analysis of Woolf’s treatment of the ordinary and everyday to contemporary
theoretical frameworks, I will focus upon how her account of ordinary experience
responds to, and is informed by, the philosophy she read, as well as the cultural and
social contexts of her time. In doing so, I will locate her exploration of these issues
in relation to alternative histories of the everyday to those that have dominated
recent books on the subject. By interrogating the positivist and common-sense
epistemologies that dominated much eighteenth-, nineteenth- and early twentieth-
century British philosophy, Woolf, I will argue, promotes an engagement with
the everyday that apprehends it as at once familiar and unknown, mundane yet
potentially extraordinary, an approach that is in the tradition of Romantics such as
William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. I will explore how this dual
nature of the ordinary enables it to provide continuity and form to experience in a
practical sense, but also allows it to be the source of personal value and meaning.
In addition to being a site of personal meaning, the ordinary, I argue, informs
Woolf’s broader political and ethical views.
48
Mark Hussey, ‘“For nothing is simply one thing”: knowing the world in To the
Lighthouse’, in Approaches to Teaching Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, eds Beth Rigel Daugherty
and Mary Beth Pringle (New York: Modern Language Association, 2001), 41–6; 46; 44.
49
Gardiner, Critiques of Everyday Life, 6.
14 Virginia Woolf
Other Woolf scholars have recently drawn attention to Woolf’s commitment to,
and engagement with, everyday life and ordinary things in her fiction. For example,
Gillian Beer argues that Woolf valued the ordinary and refused to ‘set thinking
apart from ordinary experience’. She observes how Woolf situated contemporary
intellectual debates in relation to ordinary experience and presented them in
such a way as to make them accessible to the ‘common reader’.50 In ‘Virginia
Woolf’s “cotton wool of daily life”’, Olson discusses the importance of habit
and unselfconscious moments and activities to Woolf’s modernism, particularly
the role that trivial gestures and habitual behaviours assume in Woolf’s concept
of character and inter-personal relations in such novels as Mrs. Dalloway.51 In
exploring the role of the everyday in her view of history, Melba Cuddy-Keane
discusses Woolf’s rejection of dominant historical paradigms that view history
as linear, political and monumental, and her preference for microhistory and the
history of the everyday.52 The diverse ways these critics approach the ordinary
in Woolf’s writing points to both its subtle treatment by her and its complex and
variable status as a concept at the present time.
Thus far I have argued that while advocating a return to small things and daily
experience, Woolf’s modernism reveals that the ordinary cannot be adequately
captured through such notions as habit, custom and common sense. Other states
of being constitute a part of the ordinary whilst simultaneously challenging its
basic assumptions and routines. In her unfinished memoir, ‘A Sketch of the Past’,
which she began writing in April 1939, Woolf outlines two phases that she believes
are integral to daily life: ‘being’ and ‘non-being’. These two phases of daily life
involve contrasting attitudes to the world that are central to her view of ordinary
experience and important to the conceptual framework of this study.
Woolf uses the phrase ‘non-being’ to refer to those parts of the day that are
‘not lived consciously’ – the things we do, say and see habitually: ‘A great part
of every day is not lived consciously. One walks, eats, sees things, deals with
what has to be done; the broken vacuum cleaner; ordering dinner … cooking
dinner; bookbinding.’ ‘Every day’, Woolf suggests, ‘includes much more non-
being than being’ and for her ‘non-being’ is not altogether desirable: ‘When it is
a bad day the proportion of non-being is much larger’ (MB, 70). She likens it to a
‘nondescript cotton wool’ that surrounds much of daily life, an image that suggests
comfort and safety but also homogeneity and formlessness. It is the ‘cotton wool’
of habit and routine that Olson argues is central to Woolf’s modernism, and it
clearly recalls those definitions in cultural studies that equate the everyday with
the undifferentiated and unnoticed parts of experience. ‘Non-being’ therefore
Gillian Beer, Virginia Woolf: The Common Ground (Ann Arbor: University of
50
Michigan Press, 1996), 2–4.

51
Olson, ‘Virginia Woolf’s “cotton wool of daily life”’.
52
Melba Cuddy-Keane, ‘Virginia Woolf and the varieties of historicist experience’,
Virginia Woolf and the Essay, eds Beth Carole Rosenberg and Jeanne Dubino (New York:
St Martin’s Press, 1997), 59–77; 65.
Introduction 15
refers to a form of perception and a mode of being; the phases of life that are lived
automatically and inattentively. Such a state of being renders one blind to the
particular and the commonplace, as the world is experienced as an undistinguished
mass of stuff, like cotton wool.
Woolf’s ‘cotton wool of daily life’ (MB, 72) anticipates Jean-Paul Sartre’s
notion of the ‘viscous’, when unconscious physical reality loses its particularity
and existential meaning, a condition the protagonist of his novel La Nausée
(Nausea, 1938) finds disturbing and alienating.53 The world experienced as ‘cotton
wool’ can provoke feelings of boredom and complacency as well as comfort, but
can also threaten an existential condition of alienation and absurdity, one that is
felt by Rhoda in The Waves:
All palpable forms of life have failed me. Unless I can stretch and touch
something hard, I shall be blown down the eternal corridors for ever. What, then,
can I touch? What brick, what stone? and so draw myself across the enormous
gulf into my body safely? (W, 120)
While routine in the form of habitual gestures and actions determines much of
who we are and the lives that we lead, and forms a very important aspect of
Woolf’s modernism, Woolf herself believes that to live life inattentively in an
attitude directed by habit is not desirable. Although she values form and pattern
to life, which are sometimes presented as the products of customary and habitual
behaviour, she does not condone living life habitually, in the sense of being
inattentive or uncritical.
In contrast to non-being, Woolf also refers in ‘A Sketch of the Past’ to the
various moments of ‘being’ that punctuate the cotton wool of daily life. In the
critical literature, ‘moments of being’ are generally treated as one kind of
experience. They have been described as ‘heightened’ experiences and compared
to the epiphany and various kinds of mystical experience.54 I will discuss the more
53
In Being and Nothingness, Sartre distinguishes between the in-itself, meaning
consciousness, and the for-itself, which refers to unconscious physical reality. When the
for-itself loses its existential solidity and meaning Sartre calls it ‘viscous’, the world seen
as a mass of indistinguishable matter. Sartre’s antihero in Nausea, Roquentin, is repeatedly
faced with this experience of the viscous. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans.
Hazel Barnes (London: Routledge, 1996), 73–9; Nausea, trans. Robert Baldick (London:
Penguin, 1965), 182–92.
54
Olson describes moments of being as ‘heightened’ experiences and views them to
involve a devaluation of ordinary life, ‘Virginia Woolf’s “cotton wool of daily life”’, 42–3.
Morris Beja discusses Woolf’s moments of being as a version of the epiphany, Epiphany
in the Modern Novel (London: Peter Owen, 1971), ch. 4. For a discussion of the Woolfian
moment as a form of mystical experience see Stephanie Paulsell, ‘Writing and mystical
experience in Marguerite d’Oingt and Virginia Woolf’, Comparative Literature 44, no. 3
(1992): 249–67; Julie Kane, ‘Varieties of mystical experience in the writings of Virginia
Woolf’, Twentieth Century Literature 41, no. 4 (1995): 328–49; Val Gough, ‘“That razor
16 Virginia Woolf
dramatic and heightened moments of being in this memoir and their relationship
to the ordinary world in Chapter 5. It is important to stress here that in ‘A Sketch
of the Past’ moments of being are not all dramatic or mystical experiences. After
defining non-being, Woolf goes on to describe the moments of ‘being’ in the
previous day in April 1939:
Yesterday for example, Tuesday the 18th of April, was [as] it happened a good
day; above average in ‘being’. It was fine; I enjoyed writing these first pages .…
I walked over Mount Misery and along the river; and save that the tide was out,
the country, which I notice very closely always, was coloured and shaded as I
like … I also read Chaucer with pleasure. (MB, 70)
‘Being’ refers here to the moments in our daily lives that are lived attentively, and
this state of perception accentuates Woolf’s pleasure in everyday activities like
walking in the country and reading a book. Thus, being and non-being refer to two
daily but contrasting ways of perceiving and experiencing the world.
In addition to being and non-being, a variety of attitudes and relationships
to the ordinary recur in Woolf’s writing and are examined in the chapters that
follow, including common sense, factualism, utility, rationalism, curiosity, wonder
and imagination. These discussions are situated in relation to the philosophical
and intellectual contexts that informed her writing, such as British empiricism,
Romanticism and Platonism, as well as the social and cultural contexts of her time.
Not only will the nature of these different attitudes to the everyday be considered in
detail, but also what Woolf presents as their social effects and ethical consequences
– effects that are often revealed through her spatial poetics.
Common Experience
An account of the everyday and ordinary experience relies on certain assumptions

as to what is normal and common to experience. Observing that the everyday is
homogenized in some contemporary theoretical formulations, Langbauer argues
that enforcing ‘one particular definition of the everyday on everyone’ is a strategy
of dominance.55 Technologies of power and hegemony present themselves as
important issues in Woolf’s exploration of ordinary experience. In A Room of
One’s Own (1929), she discusses women’s historical position as social and cultural
outsiders from dominant institutions and cultural formations in patriarchal society.
Reflecting upon her anger at being barred from entering an Oxbridge library,
edge of balance”: Virginia Woolf and mysticism’, Woolf Studies Annual 5 (1999): 57–77;
Val Gough, ‘With some irony in her interrogation: Woolf’s ironic mysticism’, Virginia Woolf
and the Arts: Selected Papers from the Sixth Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf, eds
Diane F. Gillespie and Leslie K. Hankins (New York: Pace University Press, 1997), 85–90.
55
Langbauer, Novels of Everyday Life, 4.
Introduction 17
this literal presentation of denied access is made representative in the essay of

women’s historical exclusion from a range of public domains, from publishing
to university and politics, and their lack of legal identity or equal rights until the
twentieth century. Woolf emphasizes the significant material effects of social and
cultural marginality; in this instance, how women’s poverty and lack of financial
independence impacted upon their capacity to write. Woolf’s self-proclaimed
status as outsider made her sensitive to other forms of social or cultural difference
and marginality, but she also tried to perceive the positive potential integral to
being an outsider: ‘I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought
how it is worse perhaps to be locked in’ (AROO, 21).
Several characters in Woolf’s fiction are outsiders and unable to accept, or
be accepted within, hegemonic forms of the ordinary. Louis in The Waves feels
himself to be an outsider because of his Australian origins. This places him in
an ambivalent relation to ordinary life in London, a situation that recalls the
representations of the ordinary in the work of the American poet on whom his
character was based – T.S. Eliot:
Here is the central rhythm; here the common mainspring. I watch it expand,
contract; and then expand again. Yet I am not included … I, who desire above all
things to be taken to the arms with love, am alien, external. I, who would wish
to feel close over me the protective waves of the ordinary, catch with the tail of
my eye some far horizon; am aware of hats bobbing up and down in perpetual
disorder. (W, 70)
As with contemporary theories of the everyday, assumptions about ordinary

experience often privilege some modes of experience as more ‘normal’ than others.
As critics have observed, usually with reference to the presentation of multiple
perspectives in her fiction, Woolf resists the view that ordinary experience is
an uncontested site and forces her readers to question their assumptions about
experiential normality.56 In Chapter 3, I will discuss common illness as a case in
point, as an experience which is integral to ordinary life but one which is often
presented as an aberrant deviation from the normal sphere of health. Woolf often
links normative models of experience to discourses and systems of power, such
as the rhetoric of ‘proportion’ espoused by the rationalist physician Sir William
Bradshaw to the shell-shocked soldier Septimus Warren Smith in Mrs. Dalloway.
Septimus’ condition, despite its commonness in Europe following the First World
War, is dismissed by doctors as either fantasy – as in the case of Dr Holmes ,who
tells him ‘There was nothing whatever the matter’ (MD, 79) – or self-indulgence,
as by Sir William Bradshaw: ‘“We all have our moments of depression,” said Sir
56
One of the first critics to discuss Woolf’s perspectivism from a philosophical
perspective was Avrom Fleishman. He considers this issue in relation to the epistemology
of the British Idealist, J.E. McTaggart: ‘Woolf and McTaggart’, ELH 36 (1969): 719–38.
18 Virginia Woolf
William’ (MD, 86). In Chapters 1 to 3, I examine Woolf’s treatment of cultural

assumptions about normal experience, and their social and ethical implications.
Another important way in which Woolf’s approach to ordinary experience is
suggestive, which I will examine in Chapters 1 and 2, is her treatment of common
sense – what might also be termed the ‘natural attitude’. Throughout the history
of philosophy there has always been an assumed connection between common
sense and ordinary life. Common sense traditionally includes our unreflective
assumptions about the world: for example, the belief that there is a world of solid
objects that continue to exist even when one is not looking at them. It is such
a common-sense belief that the philosopher Mr Ramsay investigates in To the
Lighthouse. His son, Andrew, views his father’s philosophy to centre upon these
kinds of epistemological questions: ‘Think of a kitchen table … when you’re not
there’ (TL, 33). While common sense has a close relationship to ordinary life,
esoteric thought and metaphysical speculation have historically been viewed
as departures from ordinary life and violations to it. In introducing the theme
of common sense as it relates to Woolf’s conception of ordinary experience, I
will draw upon two examples that will elucidate how her view of common sense
and the natural attitude differ from the philosophers she read who expressed a
commitment to the philosophical value of common sense; the eighteenth-century
Scottish empiricist David Hume and the twentieth-century Cambridge philosopher
G.E. Moore. In Chapters 1 and 2, I will return to these thinkers in my analysis of
Woolf’s representations of a character’s perception of everyday objects and the
epistemological status of common-sense facts.
Hume’s Philosophy of Common Life
Hume is an important figure in Woolf’s thought and fiction. This influence came
to her through her father, Leslie Stephen, who was a keen supporter of the Scottish
Enlightenment, particularly Hume’s philosophy, which he discusses at length in
his History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century (1876).57 Woolf seems to
Beer, Virginia Woolf: The Common Ground, ch. 2; Leslie Stephen, History of
57
English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, 3rd edn, 2 vols (London: John Murray, 1927),
vol. 1. Volume one contains his assessment of Hume’s philosophy. As is now established
knowledge in Woolf scholarship, she was familiar with eighteenth- to twentieth-century
British philosophy through her father, who wrote books on the history of British philosophy,
and her Bloomsbury friends, many of whom studied philosophy at Cambridge. For a
discussion of this background see Ann Banfield, The Phantom Table: Woolf, Fry, Russell
and the Epistemology of Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); J.K.
Johnstone, The Bloomsbury Group. A Study of E.M. Forster, Lytton Strachey, Virginia Woolf,
and their Circle (London: Secker and Warburg, 1954); Andrew McNeillie, ‘Bloomsbury’, in
The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf, eds Sue Roe and Susan Sellers (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000), 1–27; S.P. Rosenbaum, Victorian Bloomsbury. The
Early Literary History of the Bloomsbury Group (London: Macmillan, 1987), vol. 1.
Introduction 19
have been interested in her father’s philosophical preoccupations, as she read the
works of some of the people he discusses in his History, such as Hume and George
Berkeley.58 She often consulted her father’s philosophical studies and literary
criticism in order to develop her own ideas. For example, in ‘A Sketch of the Past’
she explains how she read her father’s books to get ‘a critical grasp on him’: ‘I
always read Hours in a Library by way of filling out my ideas, say of Coleridge, if
I’m reading Coleridge; and always find something to fill out; to correct; to stiffen
my fluid vision’ (MB, 115).59 Woolf refers to ‘Hume’s Essays’ in her 1920 diary in
the hope that reading Hume may ‘purge’ her of the propensity to write in images
(D2, 56). ‘Hume’s essays’ most likely refers to his Essays and Treatises on Several
Subjects, an 1809 edition of which was in the Woolfs’ library.60
Hume’s valuing of common sense and ‘common life’ is linked to his rejection
of metaphysics. In his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), he
discusses what he believes should be the proper limits of philosophical enquiry.
Critical of speculative or ‘abstruse’ philosophy, due to its lack of application in
everyday ‘business and action’, he maintains that philosophy should limit itself
to an analysis of experience, ‘the operations of the mind’.61 Tracing our ‘mental
geography’ and assessing the ‘common sense of mankind’ keeps the philosopher
within the domain of what is immediately accessible to him, and safely distant
from the pitfalls of speculative enquiry.62 Rather than rejecting the popular or lay
view of the world as a barrier to understanding or as an illusion, as would the
58
She refers to Berkeley in several entries dating from April and May of her 1920
diary; D2, 24 April 1920, 33; 11 May 1920, 36. The particular text is not mentioned but it
is most likely A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge. A 1734 reprint
of the 1713 edition was in the Woolfs’ library. My references to the contents of the Woolfs’
library come from ‘The library of Leonard and Virginia Woolf: a short title catalogue’,
compiled and edited by Julie King and Laila Miletic-Vejzovic, intro. Diane F. Gillespie
(Pullman, WA: WSU Press, 2003). Available at: www.wsulibs.wsu.edu/holland/masc/
OnlineBooks/Woolflibraryonline.htm.
59
On the intellectual relationship between Woolf and her father see Banfield,
‘Introduction’, in The Phantom Table; Beth Rigel Daugherty, ‘Learning Virginia Woolf:
of Leslie, libraries, and letters’, Virginia Woolf and Communities. Selected Papers from the
Eighth Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf, eds Laura Davis and Jeanette McVicker (New
York: Pace University Press, 1999), 10–17.
60
This two-volume edition includes his Essays Moral, Political and Literary, An
Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of
Morals, A Dissertation on the Passions and The Natural History of Religion. David Hume,
Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects, 2 vols (Edinburgh: James Clarke, 1809).
61
David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, in The Philosophical
Works, vol. 4, Essays Moral, Political and Literary 2, eds Thomas Hill Green and Thomas
Hodge Grose (Aalen: Scientia Verlag, 1964), sec. 1, p. 4; p. 10.
62
Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, in The Philosophical
Works, sec. 1, p. 10; p. 5. For his most sustained critique of metaphysics in the Enquiry see
part 12, ‘Of the academical or sceptical philosophy’.
20 Virginia Woolf
philosophical sceptic, Hume views our common-sense beliefs about the world as a
necessary constituent of our thinking about experience. Hence, habit and custom,
principles that provide form and stability to everyday experience, are crucial
concepts in Hume’s account of human understanding in his A Treatise of Human
Nature and the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding: ‘Custom, then, is the
great guide of human life. It is that principle alone, which renders our experience
useful to us, and makes us expect, for the future, a similar train of events with
those which have appeared in the past.’63
According to Donald W. Livingston in his book Hume’s Philosophy of Common
Life, the popular thesis about the world is not subject to ‘empirical test’ but is,
for Hume, an ‘a priori framework for interpreting experience’, much in the same
way that the categories of space and time are for Kant in The Critique of Pure
Reason: ‘[P]hilosophy may form abstract principles and ideals to criticize any
judgment in common life; what it cannot do, on pain of total skepticism [sic],
is throw into question the whole order.’64 Denying the existence of a private and
public world for the benefits of philosophical theory is pointless if the philosopher
must continue to operate in the world on a day-to-day basis in accordance with
the common-sense view. ‘[F]alse philosophy’, which seeks to be autonomous
from the ‘received beliefs, customs, and prejudices of common life’ ultimately
‘alienates the philosopher from the world of common life in which he must
live and move and have his being and through which he must think about the
real’.65 Like Hume, Woolf believes that philosophy must embrace ordinary life,
and Chapter 1 will examine this process of alienation as it is experienced by Mr
Ramsay in To the Lighthouse. Whereas ‘false philosophy’ seeks to be autonomous
from the unreflective assumptions of common life, ‘true philosophy’, Hume states
in A Treatise of Human Nature, ‘approaches nearer to the sentiments of the vulgar’
(i.e. popular or lay).66
Common life for Hume does not only refer to a positivist realm of common-
sense fact, but is also a space of passion, prejudice and tradition.67 However, in his
Enquiry, certain states are deemed more instructive to an account of common life
than others, and it is in this respect that Hume’s analysis of common experience
differs from that of Woolf. While Hume promotes an academic philosophy that
is durable and useful, and proffers ideas that were very radical and original, his
conception of what he refers to as ‘common life’ privileges the customary and
familiar:
Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, in The Philosophical

63
Works, sec. 5, p. 39.

64
Donald W. Livingston, Hume’s Philosophy of Common Life (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1984), 22; 3.
65
Livingston, Hume’s Philosophy of Common Life, 3; 32.
66
Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, quoted in Livingston, Hume’s Philosophy of
Common Life, 22.
67
Livingston, Hume’s Philosophy of Common Life, 31.
Introduction 21
The imagination of man is naturally sublime, delighted with whatever is remote

and extraordinary, and running, without controul [sic] into the most distant parts
of space and time in order to avoid the objects, which custom has rendered too
familiar to it. A correct Judgment observes a contrary method, and avoiding all
distant and high enquiries, confines itself to common life, and to such subjects as
fall under daily practice and experience; leaving the more sublime topics to the
embellishment of poets and orators, or to the arts of priests and politicians.68
Hume wants to keep ‘sublime topics’ and the operations of a vivid ‘imagination’
separate from ‘common life’, and sees them to fall outside the realm of ‘daily
practice and experience’. As Woolf’s concept of non-being suggests, mental habit
and custom impose certain limits upon experience and account for only a portion
of everyday life. There are also innumerable ‘moments of being’ which punctuate
the ‘cotton wool of daily life’ (MB, 72). Imaginative and creative engagements
with the world are integral to a broader understanding of it and a means to reflect
critically upon our habitual attitudes. ‘[S]ublime topics’ and ‘extraordinary’
experiences are not, in Woolf’s view, ‘distant’ or ‘remote’ from everyday life but
integral to it. Chapter 4 demonstrates how motoring through the countryside, an
increasingly common recreational pursuit for the British middle classes from the
1920s, becomes the source for just such an extraordinary encounter with nature’s
beauty in one Woolf essay. In contrast to Hume then, for Woolf the experiential
realms of the extraordinary and ordinary are both a part of common life and are
intimately related in a number of complex ways. As she comments in ‘Phases
of Fiction’, the material world comes to the fore when our habitual attitude is
suspended:
By cutting off the responses which are called out in the actual life, the novelist
frees us to take delight, as we do when ill or travelling, in things in themselves.
We can see the strangeness of them only when habit has ceased to immerse us
in them, and we stand outside watching what has no power over us one way or
the other. Then we see the mind at work; we are amused by its power to make
patterns; by its power to bring out relations in things and disparities which are
covered over when we are acting by habit or driven on by the ordinary impulses.
(CE2, 82)
Two other significant differences between Hume’s account of common life and
Woolf’s presentation of ordinary experience can be observed. Firstly, Hume
views ‘common life’, the experiential space of ordinary people, as a largely
unreflective and thereby epistemologically unproblematic space. The layperson is
not preoccupied with the traumas of the sceptical metaphysician who finds himself
68
Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Philosophical Works, sec.
12, pt. 3, p. 133.
22 Virginia Woolf
alienated from the ordinary world by doubting its objective reality.69 Woolf does
not see ordinary life or the everyday as unreflective realms of experience in the
way that Hume and some other theorists of the everyday do. While Hume wants
to develop a philosophy that supports the epistemological value of our ordinary
beliefs, he does not view the ‘vulgar’, the masses, as inclined to engage in reflective
thought of a philosophical kind in everyday life. Although this attitude may well
be a consequence of Hume’s historical context, rather than intellectual prejudice,
for Woolf the lives of ordinary people in the early twentieth century are marked
by experiential complexity. She does not, as Gillian Beer states, ‘set thinking apart
from ordinary experience’.70 Secondly, for Woolf, the natural or common-sense
attitude is not always reflective of the values and attitudes of ordinary people in
the way it is traditionally assumed to be in philosophy. As my discussion in the
following chapter of her early shorter fiction will show, Woolf associates common
sense and normative ideas about the world with patriarchy and political propaganda,
and interrogates the origins of our so-called common sense, customary or natural
attitudes. While I have noted here some differences between Woolf’s and Hume’s
views of common life and its philosophical investigation, suggestive consonances
appear elsewhere, such as their respective accounts of the mind-body relation, and
also ethics, the latter of which I discuss in Chapter 7.
G.E. Moore’s Defence of Common Sense
While some scholars, such as S.P. Rosenbaum, have argued for the influence of
G.E. Moore’s realism on Woolf’s thought, other critics, such as Mark Hussey, find
little correspondence between their respective ideas about reality: ‘The Moorean
universe, endorsed by such as [Bertrand] Russell and [John Maynard] Keynes, is
continually questioned by the novels.’71 While I think that Woolf was interested in
and engaged with Moore’s ideas, evidenced by the fact that she read his Principia
Ethica (1903), there is little in common between his explicit and her implicit
philosophy. Moore’s essay ‘A Defence of Common Sense’ (1925) highlights the
differences between their respective attitudes to ordinary experience.72
69
Livingston, Hume’s Philosophy of Common Life, ch. 1.
70
Beer, Virginia Woolf: The Common Ground, 2–4.
71
Mark Hussey, The Singing of the Real World: The Philosophy of Virginia Woolf’s
Fiction (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1986), 99; S.P. Rosenbaum, ‘The
philosophical realism of Virginia Woolf’, in English Literature and British Philosophy
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971).
72
Woolf first read Moore’s ethical treatise Principia Ethica in 1908 and I will return
to his account of colour perception in relation to Woolf’s sketch ‘Blue & Green’ in Chapter
2; for Woolf’s comments on Moore’s Principia Ethica see Woolf’s Letters, vol. 1, letters
435, 438, 444; pp. 352–3; 357; 364. In these letters she expresses some difficulty with his
ideas and his abstruse style.
Introduction 23
G.E. Moore, whose intellectual dialogues with Woolf will be the topic of
Chapter 2, was a Cambridge philosopher who developed close intellectual and
personal ties with the Bloomsbury Group, many male members of which studied
philosophy at Cambridge, such as Desmond MacCarthy, Leonard Woolf and
Lytton Strachey.73 At the turn of the twentieth century, Moore’s common-sense
realism effectively overturned the Hegelian idealism currently in vogue under
the influence of J.E. McTaggart, and Moore and Bertrand Russell became very
influential figures in British epistemology, logic and ethics.74 Moore’s ‘A Defence
of Common Sense’ sets out a number of propositions about himself and other
human beings that he argues are ‘truisms’ which he knows to be true of himself
and most other people. The sorts of ‘truisms’ he argues for are very basic, such
as the objective existence of his mind, his body, other bodies and the world. For
example, he ‘knows’ that since his body was born it has been ‘either in contact
with or not far from the surface of the earth’ and that in addition to his body, there
have been ‘large numbers of other living human bodies’ of a similar kind. He
knows that he has ‘thought of imaginary things … had dreams … [and] feelings
of many different kinds’.75 He then goes on to show, much as Hume did before
him, the difficulty that any sceptic will face when they try to refute such kinds of
common-sense knowledge.
Like Hume, who viewed scepticism to be philosophically and morally
dangerous, Moore’s philosophy seeks to valorize our common-sense beliefs about
the world, and argues from the natural attitude. He views idealism to be, like
Hume’s ‘false philosophy’, non-intuitive and violent upon our everyday beliefs.
While the problem of scepticism is central to the philosophical projects of Hume
and Moore, I do not think it is an issue that Woolf takes quite so seriously. The
presence, the vivid reality of the external world, explodes with great force and
energy throughout her writing and was a constant influence upon her, as she
comments in her diary in 1928: ‘The look of things has a great power over me.
Even now, I have to watch the rooks beating up against the wind, which is high’
(D3, 191).
73
For a discussion of Moore’s influence on Bloomsbury philosophy see Johnstone,
The Bloomsbury Group and McNeillie, ‘Bloomsbury’, in The Cambridge Companion to
Virginia Woolf, eds Roe and Sellers, 1–27.
74
In a letter to Ethyl Smyth in 1936, Woolf expressed her interest in what she
described as McTaggart’s ‘mystic Hegelianism’; see Woolf’s Letters, vol. 6, letter 3098
to Ethyl Smyth, 16 January 1936, 5–6. She is likely referring to his Philosophical Studies,
which was published in 1934. Woolf tended to be drawn to the more idealist and literary
philosophers she read, such as Plato, Walter Pater, Coleridge, Wordsworth and McTaggart,
as opposed to the rational-empiricist and analytic style of philosophy espoused by her father
and contemporaries such as Moore and Russell (see note 72 on her response to reading
Moore above).
75
G.E. Moore, ‘A defence of common sense’, in Philosophical Papers (London:
George Allen and Unwin, 1959), 32–59; 33–4.
24 Virginia Woolf
While in her fiction, Woolf interrogates the nature of reality and presents it as
something complex and by no means entirely accessible to human understanding,
I do not believe that she doubted the independent existence of the external world
or our capacity to know it in some manner through sense perception. By contrast,
the sorts of truisms that Moore is seeking to establish are ones that respond to
the problem of scepticism. Woolf’s analysis of ordinary experience and common-
sense belief is based upon a different set of questions and problems. Rather than
attempting to show that other bodies exist, as Moore does in his essay, she asks
whether we can truly talk about common experiences of the body if there is not
even an adequate language for pain. This question is pursued in Chapter 3. When
we talk about seeing a patch of ‘blue’ or ‘green’, she asks if we can assume that
these words represent the same experience for everyone, and whether single words
like ‘blue’ and ‘red’ can capture the complex cluster of experiences to which
they refer. These issues are explored in Chapter 2. To what extent did the new
forms of technology that were progressively becoming an integral part of Western
modernity’s everyday life during Woolf’s lifetime alter perception, understanding
and human relationships? For Woolf, an account of common experience has to
be more sophisticated than Moore’s, as we daily assume and rely upon a body of
shared knowledge and experience far broader than the simple examples for which
he argues in his ‘A Defence of Common Sense’.
One further issue relating to ideas about the ordinary and common that needs to
be addressed in this introduction is class. The word ‘common’ clearly entails class
connotations. While the term refers to that which is shared and public, it also refers
to people who are not distinguished by ‘rank or dignity’.76 As Michael Whitworth
observes in his discussion of lower social groups in Britain in the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, class is not as much of a focal issue in Woolf’s writing
as it is for some of her contemporaries, such as E.M. Forster and James Joyce. This
is perhaps due to the fact that Woolf seemed reluctant to speak on behalf of those
whose lives she had little direct experience or first-hand knowledge of (such as the
lower classes or people of other races or ethnicities). However, Whitworth, as do I,
sees her interest in ‘eccentrics and outsiders’ to reflect her concern for people who
are marginalized for various reasons, or who defy easy social categorization.77
Thus, while class is not a primary focus of this study, various issues relating to
ideas of difference and social power are addressed throughout. Furthermore, in
discussing Woolf’s exploration of the ordinary and recognizing it as a central
concern in her writing, and by analysing the literary strategies by which she
relocates the debates of philosophers in the context of everyday life in a form
that is accessible to the common reader, this study develops upon claims by other
Woolf critics, including Melba Cuddy-Keane, Gillian Beer and Kate Flint, that
76
‘Common’, The Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon, 1961), 12 vols,
vol. 2, 690.
77
Michael Whitworth, Virginia Woolf: Authors in Context (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2005), 56.
Introduction 25
Woolf’s writing is not alienating or elitist or restricted to the realm of the internal
and private.78 Instead, she presents to the reader her sense of ‘an ordinary mind on
an ordinary day’ in the hope that as a community of readers we might establish a
clearer understanding of that complex topography of experience that she calls in
‘The Leaning Tower’ the ‘common ground’ (CE2, 180–81).
Approaching Ordinary Experience
Through examining texts from her early shorter fiction, essays, autobiographical
writings and novels, with a focus on a number of shorter and less-discussed works,
this study approaches questions about the ordinary in Woolf’s oeuvre in three ways.
Part 1, ‘Quotidian Things’, examines Woolf’s representations in her early shorter
fiction and To the Lighthouse of a subject’s perception of everyday objects; both
material things, like a table or flower, and properties of objects, such as colour. I
consider her interrogation in these texts of common sense, positivist, instrumental
and habitual approaches to the everyday, in the context of her reading of British
empiricists such as Hume and Stephen, Victorian positivism, and the common-
sense philosophy of G.E. Moore. Part 2, ‘Rethinking Ordinary Experience’, turns
to modes of experience that Woolf argues are common but that have the potential
to challenge normative understandings of ourselves and the world, such as physical
pain and illness, the impact of technology on everyday life and experience, and
the presence of moments of being in daily life. This section of the study focuses
upon daily or common experiences that challenge or disrupt the cotton wool of
non-being, and how the subject negotiates these moments of experiential conflict
or paradox in relation to existing patterns of everyday life and thought. Part 3,
‘The Ordinary, Being, Ethics’, turns to the recurring motif of a numinous ‘pattern’
in Woolf’s writing and its relationship to the everyday, material and social world.
Developing upon ideas of community integral to Woolf’s philosophy of a pattern,
the final chapter demonstrates how the ordinary takes on ethical significance in
Woolf’s oeuvre, particularly in terms of her account of our relationship to, and
sense of responsibility for, the other.
Although Woolf views philosophy to be an essential part of much literature,
she criticises art that is a vehicle for philosophical dogmatism (CE1, 230). She
states this belief in her diary in October 1932 whilst reflecting on the ‘system’ that
she believed is expressed throughout D.H. Lawrence’s letters:
I dont [sic] want ‘a philosophy’ in the least; I dont [sic] believe in other people’s
reading of riddles … I mean its [sic] so barren; so easy; giving advice on a
system. The moral is, if you want to help, never systematise – not till you’re 70:
78
Melba Cuddy-Keane, Virginia Woolf, the Intellectual, and the Public Sphere
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Kate Flint, ‘Reading uncommonly: Virginia
Woolf and the practice of reading’, The Yearbook of English Studies 26 (1996): 187–98.
26 Virginia Woolf
& have been supple & sympathetic & creative and & tried out all your nerves and
scopes … Art is being rid of all preaching: things in themselves: the sentence in
itself beautiful … L[awrence]. would only say what proved something … Hence
his attraction for those who want to be fitted; which I dont [sic] (D4, 126)
While resisting theories and systematic philosophies, Woolf’s writing self-

consciously engages with many philosophical issues and questions. As Gillian
Beer observes: ‘She picked up lightly the thoroughgoing arguments of historians,
physicists, astronomers, philosophers, politicians, and the stray talk of passers-by.
That lightness is not superficial. Rather, it “lets the light through”. Her glance has
a wide arc.’79 While I consider Woolf’s treatment of several philosophical and
theoretical questions as they inform her account of ordinary experience, I do not
propose that she sets forth a systematic philosophy as such. However, her refusal
of system does not come at the expense of the depth, subtlety or suggestiveness of
her ideas, nor are those ideas haphazardly examined. If Woolf rejects philosophical
‘system’ building in literature, ‘pattern-making’ may be a more apt phrase to
describe the philosophical work that infuses so much of her writing.
Woolf’s love of intellectual enquiry in part accounts for her life-long interest in
Greek philosophy, which valued the process of pursuing knowledge as much as the
truths obtained. Beginning her studies in Greek and Latin at the age of 15, Woolf
later became an admirer of Plato’s dialogues and she returned to Greek literature
and philosophy throughout her life.80 As she states in her essay ‘On Not Knowing
Greek’, concurring with the Socratic method in Plato’s dialogues: ‘[W]hat matters
is not so much the end we reach as our manner of reaching it’ (E4, 46). As such,
dialectical enquiry and flexible, supple forms of thought that engage and involve
the reader are, as Melba Cuddy-Keane has argued, key features of Woolf’s
philosophical method.81 Such dialectical forms are employed in her examination
of everyday objects in the short stories ‘The Mark on the Wall’, ‘Solid Objects’
and ‘Kew Gardens’, the texts where this enquiry now turns.
Beer, Virginia Woolf: The Common Ground, 4.

79
In 1897, at 15 years of age, she began attending classes on Greek at King’s College
80
under the tutorage of Dr Warr, and later, Latin and Greek under the tutorage of Clara Pater,
Walter Pater’s sister. In 1902, she started private lessons in Greek with Janet Case, from
which time she started to read some of Plato’s dialogues, such as the Symposium, more
systematically. Her notes on the Phaedrus, Protagoras, Euthyphro and Symposium are
preserved, and Emily Dalgarno argues that there are strong indications that Woolf also read
the Republic; see Dalgarno, Virginia Woolf and the Visible World (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2001), 41–3.
81
For example, Melba Cuddy-Keane discusses Woolf’s resistance to dogmatic
‘pugnacious’ prose in Woolf’s essay ‘Middlebrow’ and her preference for ‘elastic, pluralistic
prose that challenges the reader to think’; Melba Cuddy-Keane, ‘Brow-beating, wool-
gathering, and the brain of the common reader’, Virginia Woolf Out of Bounds: Selected
Papers from the Tenth Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf, eds Jessica Berman and Jane
Goldman (New York: Pace University Press, 2001), 58–66; 62.
Part 1
Quotidian Things
1
Factualism and the Search for
Ordinary Things
Who knows? Who has ever seen this before?

(Virginia Woolf, ‘Kew Gardens’, CSF, 88)
This is one of the questions posed by a young woman, Trissie, in Woolf’s 1919
story ‘Kew Gardens’, as she strolls around the gardens with her suitor. ‘[V]ery
common objects’ appear unfamiliar and exciting to Trissie and her companion
due to the effects of romance and desire. ‘Kew Gardens’ is one example of
modernism’s fascination with objects; what Douglas Mao calls ‘brute matter’,
the ‘physical object as object’. Along with Woolf’s engagement with the object
world, Mao cites Joyce’s catalogues of ‘urban detritus’ and ‘household debris’
and Wallace Steven’s intimate portraits of the mind’s confrontation with things
in his poetry, as further examples of brute matter. In addition to Trissie’s awe in
‘Kew Gardens’ at tables, other people and the prospect of ‘tea’, Rhoda’s terror of
the physical world in The Waves and Rachel Vinrace’s curiosity about everyday
objects in The Voyage Out constitute other responses to the otherness of material
things in Woolf’s fiction. This chapter examines characters’ engagement with,
and knowledge claims about, the everyday object world in a selection of Woolf’s
early short stories. How we see, value and think we might come to know common
objects are recurring themes in Woolf’s exploration of the ordinary.
As well as the object qua object and its representation, modernists were also
interested in the complex interplays between the perceiving subject and the
object world; the way minds constitute things and things in turn constitute minds.
‘Kew Gardens’ is an example of this as it explores, through a range of different
characters, the various internal states and external factors that can influence the
way we experience common objects like flowers and trees, thereby interrogating
their ordinariness. As Randall Stevenson observes, early modernists such as Joseph
Conrad, D.H. Lawrence and Dorothy Richardson were concerned with the way

Douglas Mao, Solid Objects: Modernism and the Test of Production (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1998), 4.

Mao, Solid Objects, 13.

Rachel Vinrace is frequently struck by the otherness of material things: ‘She was
next overcome by the unspeakable queerness of the fact that she should be sitting in an arm-
chair, in the morning, in the middle of the world … She was overcome with awe that things
should exist at all’ (VO, 127).
30 Virginia Woolf
in which the ‘perceptual apparatus of the individual perceiver’ influenced their

perception of the external world, and questioned the possibility of apprehending
things as they are in themselves, apart from all perceptions. The truth status of
our sense perceptions has remained one of the perennial questions of philosophy,
with scepticism finding expression in many forms of philosophy from Greeks such
as Parmenides and Plato to modern physics. The eighteenth-century idealist and
sceptic George ‘Bishop’ Berkeley viewed the subjectivity of sense perception, and
its dependence upon the organization and point of view of the individual, as strong
grounds for questioning the world of sense.
Such epistemological questions were central to many of the philosophical
debates circulating in Britain and elsewhere in Europe during the early twentieth
century. For example, Bertrand Russell explores the problem of scepticism and
the subjectivity of perspective in relation to our apprehension of objects in his
essay ‘On Our Knowledge of the External World’. Considering several versions
of scepticism, including Berkeley’s idealism, Russell’s essay seeks to redeem both
common sense and the world of sense – an aim shared by his contemporary and
friend G.E. Moore. Russell maintains that ‘common knowledge’, which includes
the particular objects of daily life we know via the facts of sense, is the best kind
of knowledge we have and deems universal scepticism to be ‘barren’: ‘[I]t is not
that common knowledge must be true, but that we possess no radically different
kind of knowledge derived from some other source.’ In evaluating the reliability
of our common-sense assumptions about things in the external world, he suggests
that while each person can claim only a specific and limited point of view on
the world that is ‘peculiar’ to themselves, if we take together all the perceived
and unperceived perspectives that make up a synoptic picture of the momentary
common-sense thing, we have a hypothesis of that thing that fits with both the
facts and our intuitions.
Randall Stevenson, Modernist Fiction: An Introduction (Lexington: University

Press of Kentucky, 1992), 36.

Bertrand Russell, ‘On Our Knowledge of the External World’, in Our Knowledge
of the External World as a Field for Scientific Method in Philosophy (London: George
Allen and Unwin, 1926), 70. This essay was originally delivered as part of Russell’s Lowell
lecture series in Boston in 1914.

Russell, ‘On Our Knowledge of the External World’, Our Knowledge of the External
World, 74.

Russell, ‘On Our Knowledge of the External World’, Our Knowledge of the
External World, 94–7. Jaakko Hintikka discusses similarities between Russell’s and Woolf’s
epistemological perspectivism, ‘Virginia Woolf and our Knowledge of the External World’,
Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 38, no. 1 (1979): 5–14. Of course, the notion of
perspectivism had been circulating for some time. The idea is present in Thomas Carlyle’s
essays and is central to Friedrich Nietzsche’s epistemology; see Maudemarie Clark, Nietzsche
on Truth and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), ch. 5.
Factualism and the Search for Ordinary Things 31
While Russell saw the collating of discrete perspectives into a synoptic unity
to lend support to our common-sense view of everyday objects like a coin or table,
modernist art and literature treated the idea of perspective somewhat differently
and in terms of fragmentation, not coherent, synoptic unities. For example, the use
of visual fragmentation and collated perspectives in art movements such as Cubism
and Futurism challenged rather than supported the assumptions and perspectives
of common-sense realism. Picasso’s portraits such as Les Demoiselles d’Avignon
(1907) and the Weeping Woman (1937), and Braque’s still-life paintings of everyday
objects simultaneously offer multiple perspectives on a subject/object. However,
in doing so, they challenge ordinary structures of perception and interrogate
the nature of objects, subjects and their knowability. As Roger Fry observed in
1919, the Cubists introduced a ‘complete break of connection between ordinary
vision and the constructed pictoral vision’. A crisis of common perspective and
the absence of a common language through which to communicate are conveyed
through the fragmented voices and visions of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922):
I sat upon the shore

Fishing, with the arid plain behind me
Shall I at least set my lands in order?
London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down
Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina
Quando fiam uti chelidon – O swallow swallow
The commensurability of separate, private worlds and perspectives is a recurring

concern throughout Woolf’s oeuvre, but particularly in The Waves. In that novel, it
is only in rare moments that the separate characters or points of view represented
by Susan, Jinny, Rhoda, Bernard, Louis, Neville and Percival share a common
experience or understanding of the world. While these moments present the kind
of synoptic unity of vision described by Russell, such ‘moments of vision’ are
mystical in quality, rather than confirming the beliefs of common-sense fact.
The collation of multiple perspectives in Woolf’s work tends to operate in the
service of aesthetic unities, as at the end of ‘Kew Gardens’, or experiences of
emotional connection, as in The Waves, rather than in support of common-sense
facts. Furthermore, even if our perceptions of daily objects are homogenous – an
assumption this chapter argues Woolf questions – what concerns her is not the
objective truth of our sense perceptions but the attitudes we assume and values
we attach to the particular objects of daily life. Thus, in contrast to the philosophy
of Moore and Russell, which sought to defend the beliefs of common sense,
modernism’s varied explorations into objects, their apprehension and representation

Roger Fry, ‘Modern French Art at the Mansard Gallery’, in A Roger Fry Reader, ed.
Christopher Reed (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 341.

T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land, pt V, lines 423–8, in The Collected Poems 1909–1962
(London: Faber and Faber, 1974), 79.
32 Virginia Woolf
pointed to a cultural anxiety in early twentieth-century Europe about facts and

common sense, the epistemology that had been dominant in Britain and elsewhere
in Western Europe throughout the nineteenth century. The ‘solidity’ that Marx
associated with early nineteenth-century modernity was not so much melting as
fragmenting.
Woolf often expresses ambivalence about the value and effect of ‘normal’
perceptual attitudes – like common sense, utility and custom – on our perception
of things. These are forms of perception that she sometimes associates with the
‘ordinary’ English point of view: ‘For the ordinary eye, the English unaesthetic
eye, is a simple mechanism, which takes care that the body does not fall down
coal-holes … and can be trusted to go on behaving like a competent nursemaid
until the brain comes to the conclusion that it is time to wake up’ (E4, 592). In his
essay ‘The Artist’s Vision’, which was published in the Athenaeum in 1919, Roger
Fry refers to this instinctive form of perception as the ‘practical vision’. Fry, like
Woolf, understands that much of the time we maintain a degree of ‘ignorance’ to
visual appearances, only noticing that which is relevant to us for practical purposes.
‘We were’, he writes, ‘given our eyes to see things, not to look at them’ and he
suggests that this process starts from a very early age. However, such a ‘practical
vision’ limits our apprehension of the things around us, restricting our attention
to the ‘label on the object’; we do not see things beyond their surface, ‘utility
value’.10 Fry’s essay goes on to describe three other forms of vision that depart
in varying degrees from the practical one to which I will return later. In the three
early short stories that form the focus of this chapter – ‘The Mark on the Wall’,
‘Solid Objects’ and ‘Kew Gardens’ – Woolf challenges the view that everyday
things are equivalent to their customary meanings, labels or practical functions.
Like Gertrude Stein’s experimental sketches of common objects, their names and
everyday uses in Tender Buttons (1914), Woolf’s early shorter fiction suggests
that factual statements do not necessarily convey the truth about everyday things;
things that are – for modernists such as Stein, Fry and Woolf, and characters such
as Trissie – spaces of creative and imaginative possibility.11
In his preface to the Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty offers a
definition of the nature and function of philosophy that is instructive for reading
Woolf’s early shorter fiction and understanding its philosophical concerns. ‘True
philosophy’, he states, ‘consists in relearning to look at the world, and in this
sense a historical account can give meaning to the world quite as “deeply” as
a philosophical treatise’.12 For Merleau-Ponty ‘re-learning to look at the world’
10
Roger Fry, ‘The Artist’s Vision’, in Vision and Design (London: Chatto and Windus,
1920), 47–8.
11
Gertrude Stein, ‘Tender Buttons’, Gertrude Stein. Writings 1903–1932, eds
Catharine R. Stimpson and Harriet Chessman (New York: Library of America, 1998), 313–
55. ‘Tender Buttons’ was written in 1912 and first published in 1914.
12
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London:
Routledge, 1962), xx. Mary Rose Barral translates this passage as: ‘[A] story told can be as
involves a process of phenomenological reflection, and a suspension of our

common-sense view and the natural attitude: ‘[Phenomenology] places in
abeyance the assertions arising out of the natural attitude, the better to understand
them … all its efforts are concentrated upon re-achieving a direct and primitive
contact with the world, and endowing that contact with a philosophical status.’13
‘[I]n order to see the world and grasp it as paradoxical’, he writes, ‘we must break
with our familiar acceptance of it’.14 The ‘phenomenological reduction’ invokes a
‘return to things themselves’, which is not ‘the idealist return to consciousness’ but
a return to ‘that world which precedes knowledge’.15
Several of Woolf’s early short stories present characters who are ‘re-learning
to look at the world’ and experiencing a more direct engagement with everyday
objects by suspending their common-sense, practical or, as Merleau-Ponty terms
it, ‘natural’ attitude towards them. In the phenomenological tradition, these stories
are not concerned with a pure description of the object alone or an idealist return to
the subject alone, but rather ‘the point of contact at which subject and object meet in
the intentionality of consciousness’.16 These stories also illustrate Merleau-Ponty’s
sense of the importance of narrative to philosophy – particularly the manner in
which stories can present alternative viewpoints that, by engaging the reader’s
imagination, actively involve them in narratives of ‘re-learning’. The following
discussion considers the narrative techniques that Woolf uses to implicate the
reader in these stories of discovery and re-learning. Resisting forms of perception
that are dominated by custom and common sense, these texts penetrate beyond the
familiar veil, or ‘cotton wool’, of everyday facts and habituated perception. In The
Waves, Rhoda searches beyond simile, ‘“Like” and “like” and “like”’, seeking to
uncover the ‘thing that lies beneath the semblance of the thing’ (W, 123). In her
early shorter fiction, Woolf represents factual, common-sense interpretations of
the world in a similar manner, as a surface or ‘semblance’ of things.
Victorianism, Facts and To the Lighthouse
As Ann Banfield notes in The Phantom Table, ‘fact’ is an important term in

Woolf’s writing.17 Before turning to Woolf’s treatment of fact and the object world
in her early shorter fiction, I will start with a discussion of the importance of
profoundly significant of the world as a philosophical treatise’, which is still more suggestive
for my present discussion of Woolf’s short stories, Merleau-Ponty: The Role of the Body–
Subject in Interpersonal Relations (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1965), 59.
13
Merleau-Ponty, ‘Preface’, Phenomenology of Perception, vii.
14
Merleau-Ponty, ‘Preface’, Phenomenology of Perception, xiv.
15
Merleau-Ponty, ‘Preface’, Phenomenology of Perception, ix.
16
Barral, Merleau-Ponty, 3.
17
Ann Banfield, The Phantom Table: Woolf, Fry, Russell and the Epistemology of
Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 89.
34 Virginia Woolf
facts in Victorian culture and in Leslie Stephen’s philosophy in particular, as these

are important contexts for understanding Woolf’s treatment of fact in her prose.
The relationship between factualism and the ordinary world in To the Lighthouse
will then be explored in relation to the character of Mr Ramsay, who was partly
modelled on Leslie Stephen.
Banfield has argued for the similarities between Woolf’s treatment of fact and
the theories of fact described by Russell, Moore and Ludwig Wittgenstein. These
three philosophers support a correspondence theory of truth, whereby truth rests on
a correspondence between a proposition and a state of affairs in the external world.
‘The fact’s role’, writes Banfield, ‘is to preserve the realism of logic. It is the unit
of reality to which a logical complex, the proposition (or belief or judgement),
now “corresponds”’.18 A correspondence theory of truth was supported by Moore
in his 1910 lectures.19 However, it is the correspondence theory of truth that I argue
Woolf explicitly interrogates in ‘The Mark on the Wall’ and implicitly undermines
in ‘Solid Objects’ and ‘Kew Gardens’.
While Banfield locates Woolf’s treatment of facts in the context of the
British empirical–analytic tradition, I, along with Janis Paul, understand Woolf’s
engagement with facts to be just as likely a product of her Victorian heritage,
particularly her father’s philosophy. Paul observes that Woolf grew up in a
Victorian ‘atmosphere that celebrated externality and factuality’ and argues that
her writing celebrates materiality, not just the interior realms of consciousness.20 In
The Victorian Temper, Jerome H. Buckley notes that the plethora of early twentieth-
century conceptions of the terms ‘Victorianism’ and ‘Victorian culture’ point to
their vagueness and the complexity of the period. However, he finds that one of the
features most commonly associated with the Victorian temper was its materialism
and commitment to the epistemological value of empirical fact.21 The Victorian
preoccupation with factualism is evident in the literature of the period, but it was
also treated satirically by a number of authors. In Hard Times (1854), Charles
Dickens is highly critical of, and satirical about, empiricism and instrumental
ideas about education and society. Similarly, and despite her engagement with the
English Positivist movement, George Eliot treats the factualism and dry erudition
of Mr Casaubon somewhat ambivalently in Middlemarch (1871–72).
Leslie Stephen was an influential figure in Victorian intellectual life and culture.
In his History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, Stephen argues for the
philosophical and utilitarian importance of fact, and Gillian Beer has previously
18
Banfield, The Phantom Table, 89.
19
Banfield, The Phantom Table, 89.
20
Janis M. Paul, The Victorian Heritage of Virginia Woolf: The External World in her
Novels (Normal, OK: Pilgrim Books, 1987), 9; 3. While I agree with Paul on this point, I do
not think that Woolf’s valuing of externality commits her to a Victorian reverence for fact
and a preference for fact over imaginative vision, as Paul suggests; 37.
21
Jerome Hamilton Buckley, The Victorian Temper: A Study in Literary Culture
(London: George Allen and Unwin, 1952), 2.
discussed the shared philosophical preoccupations of that text and Woolf’s To the
Lighthouse.22 Paul suggests that ‘Sir Leslie Stephen’s eminence in his own time
derived in great part from his association with fact: most of his work was editorial,
philosophical, critical, and biographical’.23 While the form of Stephen’s writing
reflects his reverence for fact, his philosophy articulates it. In the introduction to
his History, Stephen suggests, in the positivist spirit of the period, that the progress
of human knowledge and society is contingent upon a rejection of superstition and
metaphysical speculation, and a turning towards material facts and the utilitarian
benefits that only a scientific knowledge of them can secure:
The history of thought is in great part a history of the gradual emancipation of

the mind from the errors spontaneously generated by its first childlike attempts
at speculation.
From the purely utilitarian point of view, we are better off the closer the
correspondence between our beliefs and the external realities.24
While the Romantics understood childhood as a period in which special kinds of

knowledge are made accessible through the child’s sense of wonder and novelty,
in the tradition of Enlightenment thinkers such as Kant, Stephen equates ignorance
with childhood. It is for him the period in which superstition and imagination run
riot prior to the disciplining forces of a mature reason.25 Reason and fact are the
epistemological tools of influential men: ‘Men become leaders of thought in virtue
of the fact that their opinions are in some degree influenced by reason.’26 For a
philosophy to endure it must reflect ‘conformity between the world of thought
and the world of facts’.27 Like the empirical–analytic philosophy of Moore and
Russell that followed his own version of rational empiricism, Stephen advocates
a view of knowledge as a correspondence between fact and thought: ‘The closer
22
In Chapter 2 of her book Virginia Woolf: The Common Ground, Gillian Beer
observes that anxieties about reputation and survival are themes common to Stephen’s
History and Woolf’s novel, and she shows how the novel’s epistemological concerns engage
closely with her father’s treatment of Hume in his History. Gillian Beer, Virginia Woolf:
The Common Ground (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996); Leslie Stephen,
History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, 3rd edn, (London: John Murray,
1927), vol. 1.
23
Paul, The Victorian Heritage of Virginia Woolf, 17.
24
Stephen, History, §5, p. 6; §15, p. 14.
25
See Kant’s ‘An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?’ (1784), in
Practical Philosophy, trans. and ed. Mary J. Gregor, The Cambridge Edited Works of
Immanuel Kant, general editors Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge
26
Stephen, History, §3, p. 3.
27
36 Virginia Woolf
the correspondence between facts and our mental representation of facts, the more
vigorous and permanent should be the creed which emerges.’28
While Stephen advocates an empirical and scientific philosophy that limits
itself to material facts, Woolf often presents facts as an obstacle to the subject’s
awareness and knowledge of things. In To the Lighthouse, the philosopher Mr
Ramsay’s factualism paradoxically estranges him from the ordinary, material
world and its apprehension. Mr Ramsay’s status as a contemporary philosopher of
good reputation places him apart from ordinary people, a description reminiscent
of Woolf’s presentation of the Victorian male genius in ‘A Sketch of the Past’.29
Mr Ramsay’s intellect positions him above ordinary minds and moral standards.
Mrs Ramsay believes that his ‘great mind … must be different in every way from
ours’, while Lily Briscoe speculates that such people in possession of the ‘finest
minds’ ‘could not be judged like an ordinary person’ (TL, 96; 34). Like Stephen, Mr
Ramsay inclines to the view that the ‘progress of civilization depend[s] upon great
men’, although much of the novel centres on his anxieties about the endurance of
his reputation (TL, 59).
In contrast to the Victorian model of genius exemplified in the character of Mr
Ramsay, the Romantic poet and philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge maintained
that genius has its ground in childhood:
To carry on the feelings of childhood into the powers of manhood; to combine

the child’s sense of wonder and novelty with the appearances which every day
for perhaps forty years had rendered familiar … this is the character and privilege
of genius, and one of the marks which distinguish genius from talent.30
By contrast, both Mr Ramsay and Stephen harbour a less democratic view of the
intellectual capabilities of ordinary people and devalue the child’s point of view:
‘[T]he mass of mankind still preserves its childish imaginations’; ‘The love of
abstract truth, the love of consistency, and even the intellectual curiosity which
seeks to extend the boundaries of knowledge, are motives which can only be
operative in the minds of exceptional activity.’31 Mr Ramsay is critical of what he
views to be the intellectual shortcomings of his family, particularly women. Such

28
‘But it was also, I guess, the convention, supported by the great men of the time,
29
Carlyle, Tennyson, that men of genius were naturally uncontrolled. And genius when my
father was a young man was in full flower. A man of genius meant a man who had fits of
positive inspiration … Those who had genius in the Victorian sense were like the prophets;
different, another breed. They dressed differently; wore long hair, great black hats, capes
and cloaks. They were invariably “ill to live with”. But it never struck my father, I believe,
that there was any harm in being ill to live with’ (MB, 109).
30
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, quoted in Takei da Silva,
Modernism and Virginia Woolf (Windsor: Windsor Publications, 1990), 102.
31
Stephen, History, §6, p. 5; §12, p. 10.
intellectual weakness for him takes the form of his wife’s tendency to exaggerate
and refuse the facts, and his daughter Cam’s lack of accuracy in thought and
inability to read the points of a compass (TL, 226).
Mr Ramsay and Stephen view truth as constituted by a series of fixed,
irrefutable axioms, and thought to proceed in a linear fashion. As Stephen writes
in his History: ‘Thought moves in a spiral curve, if not in a straight line … Our
knowledge has, in some departments, passed into the scientific stage. It can be
stated as a systematic body of established truths. It is consistent and certain. The
primary axioms are fixed beyond the reach of scepticism.’32 In To the Lighthouse,
the alphabet and keys of a piano are the metaphors Woolf adopts to represent the
linear and inflexible nature of Mr Ramsay’s thought: ‘It was a splendid mind. For
if thought is like the keyboard of a piano, divided into so many notes, or like the
alphabet is ranged in twenty-six letters all in order, then his splendid mind had no
sort of difficulty in running over those letters one by one, firmly and accurately,
until it reached, say, the letter Q’ (TL, 47).33 Mr Ramsay, like Stephen, views
human knowledge as akin to a linear progression, and truth as something fixed,
ahead of him, symbolized in the letter ‘Z’ towards which he strives despite the
fact that he is stuck at ‘Q’ (TL, 47). In Jacob’s Room, the narrator sarcastically
suggests that the mind of Old Professor Huxtable is worth the heads of ‘a whole
seat of an underground railway carriage’ – a mind that is logical in function, linear
in process and, like Mr Ramsay’s, military in its efficiency: ‘[W]hat a procession
tramps through the corridors of his brain, orderly, quick-stepping’ (JR, 32). Later
in that novel, the British Museum is likened to a ‘vast mind’, compartmentalized
and ‘dry’, and the texts of the male geniuses that fill its chambers protected from
rain, vermin and burglars by humble nightwatchmen, ‘poor, highly respectable
men’ from ‘Kentish Town’ (JR, 94). The systematic, regimental and encyclopaedic
approaches to knowledge that Woolf associates with patriarchal culture recall
Casaubon’s ‘key to all mythologies’ in Middlemarch; Casaubon being a Victorian
genius who harbours anxieties of completion, influence and reputation similar
to those experienced by Mr Ramsay.34 In To the Lighthouse, Woolf contrasts Mr
Ramsay’s linear thought patterns, inflexible concept of truth and dogmatism with
the dynamic, plural and dialectical spatial models of thought and perspective
associated with Mrs Ramsay and Lily Briscoe.35
32
33
Rachel Bowlby discusses these metaphors in detail in Virginia Woolf: Feminist
Destinations (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 63–5.
34
George Eliot, Middlemarch, eds Margaret Harris and Judith Johnston (London:
Everyman, 1997), book V, ch. 48.
35
Mobility is an important trope in Woolf’s representations of consciousness and
knowledge and suggests the ability to think dialectically and from multiple points of view.
For spatial descriptions of Lily’s and Mrs Ramsay’s thought see To the Lighthouse, 41; 68,
266. Similar contrasts occur in Woolf’s other novels; for example, Mrs Durrant’s mind is
also described as dialectical and expansive, ‘skimming leagues’ and moving back and forth
38 Virginia Woolf
Mr Ramsay is affiliated in the novel with British Empiricism, particularly

the philosophy of Locke, Berkeley and Hume. In accordance with the empirical
tradition, Mr Ramsay believes that ‘facts [are] uncompromising’ and harbours a
‘secret conceit in his own accuracy of judgement’. According to Mrs Ramsay, he is
‘incapable of untruth’ and has ‘never tampered with a fact’ (TL, 8). But rather than
representing an ideal of intellectual emancipation from superstition, as Stephen
suggests in his History, in Woolf’s novel facts are frequently shown to be a source
of violence and oppression, particularly against women and children. Mr Ramsay
refuses to entertain an illusion to ‘suit the pleasure or convenience of any mortal
being, least of all his own children’ and facts, about the weather for example, are
employed by him and the mathematician Charles Tansley as weapons to ‘sm[i]te’
others (TL, 8; 53). In the opening scene of the novel, in which the youngest son,
James, asks his parents if they might be able to travel to the lighthouse the following
day, Mr Ramsay refutes his wife’s optimistic response and instead aggressively
asserts his belief that the weather will not be fine as objective fact. Through her
spatial poetics, Woolf images this act of truth-telling as tantamount to a form of
domestic violence:
To pursue truth with such astonishing lack of consideration for other people’s
feelings, to rend the thin veils of civilisation so wantonly, so brutally, was to
[Mrs Ramsay] so horrible an outrage of human decency that, without replying,
dazed and blinded, she bent her head as if to let the pelt of jagged hail, the drench
of dirty water, bespatter her unrebuked. (TL, 45)
Mr Ramsay’s commitment to facts is not presented in the novel as an innocuous

one without social and ethical implications. Woolf presents his factual version of
the truth as a potential source of violence upon others.
Woolf’s critique is not limited to an obsessive factualism but extends to several
distinct philosophical traditions. Mr Ramsay is affiliated with incompatible
traditions; for example, the empiricism of Hume, but also metaphysics which was
a branch of philosophy that Hume and Stephen rejected as an obstacle to human
progress.36 Charles Tansley believes that Mr Ramsay is the ‘greatest metaphysician
of the time’, and his meditations about, for instance, the ontological status of a
kitchen table inhibit his engagement with such particular things (TL, 52). Lily
speculates that it is Mr Ramsay’s obsession with ‘angular essences’ that accounts
for his inability to apprehend or enjoy beauty; what she refers to as his tendency to
(JR, 46), as contrasted to her son, Timmy, who is rational, methodical and scientific (JR,
40). This distinction is not always a gendered one. Jacob is a Romantic figure, his mind
reflective and poetic, and he is reluctant to follow the steps of Timmy’s argument (JR,
40–41).
36
In his An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Hume likens metaphysics to
a dangerous and ultimately impenetrable landscape, a ‘forest’ of ‘brambles’ and ‘robbers’,
in The Philosophical Works, sec. 1, p. 8.
reduce ‘lovely evenings, with all their flamingo clouds and blue and silver to a white
deal four-legged table’ (TL, 34). ‘Angular essences’ suggest an interest in abstract
entities and speculative thought and, despite his positivist conviction in fact, Mr
Ramsay has a tendency to ignore his material surroundings and to resent domestic
activities that might distract him from his meditations. What Lily describes as
Mr Ramsay’s ‘narrowness, his blindness’ suggests that his intellectual conceit
and dogmatism precipitates a narrow, limited vision that makes him insensitive
to others and unaware of his immediate environment (TL, 64). When observing
everyday objects or people, his eyes often tremble on ‘the verge of recognition’
but he wants to ‘brush off’ the ‘normal gaze’ of others, as any engagement with the
mundane will potentially interrupt his meditations and impede upon his ‘moment
of discovery’ (TL, 36). Mrs Ramsay likewise feels frustrated at the manner in
which her husband fails to see ordinary things:
Was it not odd, she reflected? Indeed he seemed to her sometimes made
differently from other people, born blind, deaf, and dumb, to the ordinary things,
but to the extraordinary things, with an eye like an eagle’s. His understanding
often astonished her. But did he notice the flowers? No. Did he notice the view?
No. Did he even notice his own daughter’s beauty, or whether there was pudding
on his plate or roast beef? He would sit at table with them like a person in a
dream. (TL, 96)
Thus, in To the Lighthouse, Woolf frequently positions the rational empiricism

of Mr Ramsay as opposed to ordinary life. In the novel, an obsessive commitment
to the facts is not equivalent to knowledge or a proper awareness of one’s lived
environment. While his meditations centre upon ordinary objects, like a kitchen
table, or quotidian states in the world, like the weather, those things become mere
abstractions that are drained of life and particularity. Although his ‘kitchen table
was something visionary, austere’, it is imagined by Lily Briscoe to be ‘bare,
hard, not ornamental. There was no colour in it; it was all edges and angles; it
was uncompromisingly plain’. Although ‘Mr Ramsay kept always his eyes fixed
upon it, never allowed himself to be distracted or deluded’, Lily thinks that he
‘must have had his doubts about that table … whether the table was a real table;
whether it was worth the time he gave to it; whether he was able after all to find
it’ (TL, 210–11). Not only does Mr Ramsay drain external particulars of their
life, he publicly deprecates their very ordinariness. William Bankes muses that
the ‘fluttering wings and clucking domesticities’ of daily life were often at odds
with Mr Ramsay’s intellectual pursuits and ‘destroyed’ their potential (TL, 32–3).
Sadly, his abstract philosophizing estranges him from the realm of common life
that his avowed mentor, Hume, argues to be the philosopher’s proper domain.
Mr Ramsay is alienated from the ‘circle’ of ordinary life, and lives out the harsh
reality of his idealized heroic fantasies: ‘It was his fate, his peculiarity, whether
he wished it or not, to come out thus on a spit of land … and there to stand, like a
40 Virginia Woolf
desolate seabird, alone’ (TL, 61).37 His ‘bare, hard’ world of facts must therefore be
supplemented by the energies, emotion and colour of those around him:
He was a failure, he said … It was sympathy he wanted, to be assured of his

genius, first of all, and then to be taken within the circle of life, warmed and
soothed, to have his senses restored to him, his barrenness made fertile, and all
the rooms of the house made full of life. (TL, 52)
‘The Mark on the Wall’ and ‘the Standard Thing’
In ‘A Positivist’, her 1919 review of Frederic Harrison’s Obiter Scripta (1918),

Woolf describes Harrison, a leading figure in the English positivist movement, as
intellectually arrogant and out of touch with contemporary society: ‘[A]lthough he
says much that is sound … he seems to be talking to someone in the next room,
or, more mysteriously, addressing a world that has ceased to exist.’ She finds his
work to reflect the intellectual arrogance that she associates with the Victorian
period, as examined above through the figure of Mr Ramsay: ‘The belief that there
is one mind … which is the right one is the mark of Mr Harrison’s generation,
but no longer of ours’ (E3, 65; 66).38 By contrast, Woolf favours a perspectival
view of truth – as opposed to the dogma of one mind – and describes reality as
‘many-sided’ in her essay ‘Craftsmanship’ (CE2, 251). ‘The Mark on the Wall’,
which was first published in 1917 in Two Stories, critiques positivist and common-
sense epistemologies that are associated in the story with Victorian society and
culture. The narrator invites the reader to reflect upon and evaluate the attitudes to
knowledge that often unconsciously inform and shape our everyday lives.
The narrator’s philosophical reverie in ‘The Mark on the Wall’ is initiated by the
most trivial of phenomena – a ‘small round mark, black upon the white wall, about
six or seven inches above the mantelpiece’ – which she observes from her armchair
(CSF, 77).39 The story explores the patterns of thought that the mark elicits when the
37
Deborah Esch interprets Mr Ramsay’s condition of physical estrangement to
literalize Hume’s vision at the end of the Treatise of the philosopher as a doomed explorer
who ‘having struck on many shoals’ resolves to ‘perish on the barren rock’; quoting Hume
from Deborah Esch, ‘Think of a kitchen table’: Hume, Virginia Woolf and the Translation of
Example’, Perspectives on Perception: Philosophy, Art, and Literature, ed. Mary Ann Caws
(New York: Peter Lang, 1989), 91. I think Mr Ramsay also represents Hume’s warning that
false (speculative) philosophy ultimately estranges the individual from ordinary life and
can result in social alienation.
38
For a discussion of the relationship between modernism and positivism see Stuart
Hughes, Consciousness and Society: The Reorientation of European Social Thought 1890–
1930 (London: MacGibbon, 1959), ch. 2.
39
I am quoting from the 1921 edition of the story which was published in Monday
or Tuesday.
narrator’s mind is free to ‘slip easily from one thing to another’, never settling on
a particular conclusion about its identity (CSF, 79). Moving ‘dialectically through
a series of different perceptual alternatives’ about the mark and offering counter-
arguments to each common-sense hypothesis about it, the narrator satisfies a desire
to perpetuate thought rather than inspect the mark at closer range and thereby arrive
at a factual conclusion.40 The narrator initially proposes that the mark is a hole caused
by a nail, a thought that prompts a series of speculations about the picture that
might have hung there, and its owners. This hypothesis is rejected and the narrator
expresses doubts about the epistemological reliability of sense perception:
But as for that mark, I’m not sure about it; I don’t believe it was made by a nail
after all; it’s too big, too round, for that. I might get up, but if I got up and looked
at it, ten to one I shouldn’t be able to say for certain; because once a thing’s
done, no one ever knows how it happened. Oh! dear me, the mystery of life! The
inaccuracy of thought! The ignorance of humanity! (CSF, 77–8)
Two other factual hypotheses are offered: first, that the mark has been caused by
‘some round black substance’ and finally, that the mark is a physical projection
from the wall, ‘a small tumulus’ (CSF, 78; 80). These speculations initiate further
associational streams of thought which do not tell us anything about the mark itself,
but instead show how curiosity, biases and beliefs direct and determine thought:
In certain lights that mark on the wall seems actually to project from the wall
[ … ] suggesting that if I ran my finger down that strip of the wall it would, at a
certain point, mount and descend a small tumulus, a smooth tumulus like those
barrows on the South Downs which are, they say either tombs or camps. Of the
two I should prefer them to be tombs, desiring melancholy like most English
people [ … ] There must be some book about it. Some antiquary must have dug
up those bones and given them a name … What sort of a man is an antiquary, I
wonder? (CSF, 80–81)41
The manipulation of narrative rhythm in this passage through forms of punctuation

mimics the succession of mental acts occurring in the narrator’s mind. Numerous
ellipses, hyphens and semi-colons are used throughout the story to simulate,
respectively, shifts and pauses in the narrator’s thought. Consciousness is not
presented as a Bergsonian, uninterrupted flow, but, as Jane Goldman has argued,
as something subject to interruptions, starts and stops.42 Thought is depicted here
40
Jesse Matz, Literary Impressionism and Modernist Aesthetics (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001), 182.
41
Brackets indicate my ellipses.
42
Jane Goldman, The Feminist Aesthetics of Virginia Woolf: Modernism, Post-
Impressionism and the Politics of the Visual (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1998), 4–6.
42 Virginia Woolf
as dynamic and reflexive and, following the story’s punctuation, the reader’s mind
mimics the mental rhythms and patterns occurring in the narrator’s mind.
Woolf employs a variety of narrative techniques in this story that engage the
reader in the narrator’s reverie through the act of reading. This process of being
drawn into the text’s logic through its narrative form effectively mobilizes the
story’s epistemological concerns and implicates the reader within them. The
text’s dialectical form is crucial to this process. Plato’s name for the philosophical
method, ‘dialectic’, originally meant ‘conversation’ in Greek, and the word
implies that philosophical enquiry proceeds by a reciprocal exchange of questions
and answers between people. According to David Halperin, the Platonic dialogue
aspires to engage the reader ‘by inviting a sympathetic identification with the
characters and his intellectual participation in their discourse – in a give and
take, a mutual exchange of ideas, an open-ended discussion’.43 In ‘The Mark
on the Wall’, Woolf approaches questions about knowledge through a simulated
conversation or dialogue. In contrast to the dogmatic approach of Mr Ramsay,
whose assertions about the facts seek to close dialogues that he deems are
irrational and untrue, Woolf’s story creates a space for the reader to think about,
and respond to, the questions that the text poses (TL, 44–5). Through techniques
of interrogation and persuasion, and the use of the universal person pronouns
‘one’ and ‘we’, the narrator of ‘The Mark on the Wall’ seeks to establish our
agreement on a number of commonly held views on the nature of knowledge,
experience and what is real, only to expose their fallacious and fictitious nature
(CSF, 82). This agenda is in part obscured by the narrator’s chatty and, at times,
playful tone (CSF, 79).
Over twenty questions are posed in the story, many of which are addressed
to the reader. The only closed questions are indirect and constitute the narrator’s
three factual hypotheses about the mark; that it is a hole, a mark or a projection.
Thus, the narrative associates factual points of view with a tendency to terminate
thought and put an end to discussion. These three factual hypotheses are, however,
rejected and give rise to a plethora of open questions: ‘And what is knowledge?’,
‘What sort of a man is an antiquary, I wonder?’ (CSF, 80–81). These questions are
directed to the reader, drawing them into a simulated conversation. Conditional
and tentative terms and phrases, such as ‘perhaps’, ‘if’, ‘I wonder’, ‘I suppose’,
‘I cannot be sure’, ‘suggesting’ and ‘seems’, are also interspersed throughout the
narrative and create a tone of uncertainty and openness. ‘The Mark on the Wall’
therefore engages the reader in the kind of critical thought that the story promotes
and prompts them to consider the epistemological problems and questions that the
text explores. Having established the reader’s active engagement in the story’s
various enquiries, Woolf turns our attention to broader epistemological questions
about the relationship between facts and knowledge.
43
David M. Halperin, ‘Plato and Erotic Reciprocity’, Classical Antiquity 5, no. 1
(1986): 60–80; 78.
Towards the final stages of the story, the narrator proclaims that there is no
such thing as knowledge and discredits the idea that knowledge is of empirical
facts:
No, no, nothing is proved, nothing is known. And if I were to get up at this very
moment and ascertain that the mark on the wall is really – what shall I say?
– the head of a gigantic old nail, driven in two hundred years ago, which has
now, owing to the patient attrition of many generations of housemaids, revealed
its head above the coat of paint, and is taking its first view of modern life in the
sight of a white-walled fire-lit room, what should I gain? Knowledge? Matter
for further speculation? I can think sitting still as well as standing up. And
what is knowledge? What are our learned men save the descendants of witches
and hermits who crouched in caves and in woods brewing herbs, interrogating
shrew-mice and writing down the language of the stars? And the less we honour
them as our superstitions dwindle and our respect for beauty and health of mind
increases … Yes, one could imagine a very pleasant world. (CSF, 81)
Rejecting the view that empirical facts constitute knowledge, the narrator claims
that ‘learned men’ have no privileged access to knowledge that makes their truth
superior to the heretical traditions modern science deems mere superstition and
nonsense. Such opinions do not need to be honoured, as all perspectives, whether
that of the university professor or the ‘hermit’, entail their own superstitions and
prejudices. The narrator asks us to question the intellectual authority of ‘learned
men’. Ordinary women, ‘housemaids’, are attributed with a role equal to that of
the professor or specialist in uncovering truth. It is through their ‘patient attrition’
that the ‘old nail, driven in two hundred years ago’ is made visible and open to
scrutiny. That object of scrutiny is not just the nail but also the epistemological
traditions that modernism inherited from the past and that Woolf wants to consider
afresh. Inherited intellectual traditions are, like the mark on the wall, open to
investigation, analysis and critique.
The story’s critique of ‘our learned men’ is associated with a rejection of
what the narrator calls a ‘standard’ conception of ‘the thing’ and a view of reality
that is comprised of ‘generalisations’. Rather than referring to general ideas
or essences, ‘generalisations’ are equated in the story with social customs and
accepted viewpoints that are, according to the narrator, ‘very worthless’. The word
possesses a ‘military sound’ and ‘recalls leading articles, cabinet ministers’ and
a ‘whole class of things’ that are ‘standard’ and therefore deemed ‘real’ (CSF,
80). ‘Standard’ things are determined by patriarchal and class conventions, which
create for the nineteenth-century child and woman a world full of ‘half phantoms’.
That ‘class of things’ which the child thought to be ‘the thing itself, the standard
thing, the real thing, from which one could not depart save at the risk of nameless
damnation’ is first constructed in accordance with parental rules: ‘There was a
rule for everything … How shocking, and yet how wonderful it was to discover
that these real things, Sunday luncheons, Sunday walks, country houses, and
44 Virginia Woolf
tablecloths were not entirely real, were indeed half phantoms.’ To later realize that
these cultural artefacts and social rituals are not ‘entirely real’, but fabrications and
constructions, is a ‘shocking’ and ‘wonderful’ discovery (CSF, 80).
Similarly, in Woolf’s first novel, The Voyage Out (1915), Rachel Vinrace
expresses contempt for her upper-middle-class Victorian lifestyle in London,
which entails an endless repetition of social obligations and customs. This world,
‘very real’ before the voyage out to South America, is something she now wishes
to ‘smash to atoms’ (VO, 227). When asked by her future fiancé, Terence Hewet, to
describe one day in her life, Rachel does so as if her days are physical objects cut
into pieces by the rule of meal times: ‘When she thought of their day it seemed to
her that it was cut into four pieces by their meals. These divisions were absolutely
rigid, the contents of the day having to accommodate themselves within the four
rigid bars’ (VO, 222). As with the regimental and knife-like Mr Ramsay, whose
mind and actions divide the world into discrete factual or logical units, Victorian
social customs and conventions enforce rigid and unwelcome divisions upon
Rachel’s daily life.44
The ‘standard’ reality imposed upon the child by Victorian society and culture
is replaced for the adult woman by ‘the masculine point of view’, which ‘governs
our lives [ … ] sets the standard [ … ] establishes Whitaker’s Table of Precedency’
(CSF, 80). The masculine point of view is linked to social and political hierarchies
of power, symbolized by the ‘philosophy of Whitaker’ which informs us ‘who
follows whom’ in that hierarchy of power: ‘The Archbishop of Canterbury is
followed by the Lord High Chancellor; the Lord High Chancellor is followed by
the Archbishop of York’ (CSF, 82). This encyclopaedic and linear view of society
recalls the form of Mr Ramsay’s mind and Leslie Stephen’s Dictionary of National
Biography. Such regimented, organizational systems are a palliative and ‘comfort’
for the fact of our ignorance and prevent any ‘collision with reality’ (CSF, 82).
Just as the ‘practical vision’ directs our daily, instinctive life, ensuring that we do
not fall down ‘coal-holes’ or notice anything beyond the surface label of things,
social and political hierarchies and normative cultural practices serve to maintain
the status quo and separate (or protect) the individual from ‘reality’.
The ‘standard’ reality of social, legal and political facts is referred to by Terence
in The Voyage Out as ‘an amazing concoction’ and a miraculous conception that
recalls Mrs Ramsay’s view of the masculine intelligence as a carefully woven
‘fabric’ (TL, 143): ‘What a miracle the masculine conception of life is – judges,
civil servants, army, navy, Houses of Parliament, lord mayors – what a world
we’ve made of it!’ (VO, 221). For the narrator of ‘The Mark on the Wall’, these
conceptions and their attendant social and political structures are not miracles but
Mr Ramsay is described as being as ‘lean as a knife, narrow as a blade of one’.

44
While he intellectually divides the world into ordered logical axioms, his point of view is
metaphorically represented as rending, rupturing and piercing ‘the thin veils of civilization’
rather than structuring it (TL, 8; 45). It is Mrs Ramsay who ministers over the social
structures and conventions of upper-middle-class Victorian culture.
out-dated fictions which must be ‘laughed into the dustbin where the phantoms go,
the mahogany sideboards [ … ] Gods and Devils, Hell and so forth’. Once these
facts are viewed as collective fictions, the individual experiences ‘an intoxicating
sense of illegitimate freedom’; the freedom to apprehend and engage with the
world in alternative ways that are not determined by conventional authority or
custom (CSF, 80). We are afforded a clear mental space to ‘re-learn’ the world.
‘The Mark on the Wall’ imagines a space of reflection termed ‘after-life’, which
is juxtaposed with a picture of modern ‘life’ as one of disorientating flux: ‘Why, if
one wants to compare life to anything, one must liken it to being blown through the
Tube at fifty miles an hour’ (CSF, 78). Wanting to ‘sink deeper and deeper, away
from the surface, with its hard separate facts’ (CSF, 79), the narrator describes an
aqueous space of ‘after-life’ which enables, in the phenomenological tradition,
a pre-objective encounter with the material world. All habitual judgements are
here suspended: ‘The slow pulling down of thick green stalks so that the cup of
the flower [ … ] deluges one with purple and red light [ … ] As for saying which
are trees, and which are men and women, or whether there are such things, that
one won’t be in a condition to do for fifty years or so’ (CSF, 78). ‘After-life’ is
a peaceful place to which one feels ‘rooted’, as if at the ‘centre of the world’. It
is without ‘professors or specialists or house-keepers’ and permits a freedom to
observe and reflect without external impositions or conventions like ‘Whitaker’s
Almanack’ or ‘The Table of Precedency’ (CSF, 81–2). ‘The Mark on the Wall’
therefore encourages a mental movement away from a world of common-sense
‘surface’ facts and the natural attitude, which are associated with male intellectual
authority and social convention, to new spaces of reflective consciousness. The
space of ‘after-life’ disrupts our taken-for-granted relations and attitudes and
provides an opportunity for a renewed contact with things.
While the story celebrates reflection and a momentary disengagement from life
that enables one to acquire a critical perspective on it, the narrative does not reject
the external world in favour of the internal:
Indeed, now that I have fixed my eyes upon it [the mark], I feel that I have
grasped a plank in the sea; I feel a satisfying sense of reality which at once turns
the two Archbishops and the Lord High Chancellor to the shadows of shades.
Here is something definite, something real. Thus, waking from a midnight
dream of horror, one hastily turns on the light and lies quiescent, worshipping
the chest of drawers, worshipping solidity, worshipping reality, worshipping the
impersonal world which is proof of some existence other than ours. That is what
one wants to be sure of … (CSF, 82)
However, the narrator finds that upon her return from ‘after-life’ to the ‘impersonal’,
material world, she is again confronted with the ‘standard’ point of view, with
her (male) companion declaring the mark to be a ‘snail’, thereby putting an end
to her ruminations and closing off the possibility of dialogue with a somewhat
surprising statement of fact. Significantly, the story ends with her companion
46 Virginia Woolf
complaining that buying newspapers is futile in a world in which ‘[n]othing ever

happens’. Written in 1917, Woolf’s short story reminds the reader that facts are
not neutral, but frequently the agents of propaganda and deception for those in
positions of political power. Woolf here alludes to the continued suppression of
accurate information in the British popular press about the progress of the war on
the Continent. Based on his experience in the French trenches, Marc Bloch recalls
how ‘[t]he prevailing opinion in the trenches was that anything might be true,
except what was printed’.45 This feeling is expressed in a number of First World
War novels and memoirs, such as Richard Aldington’s Death of a Hero (1929)
and Erich Maria Remarque’s ironically titled All Quiet on the Western Front
(1929).46 Woolf’s story therefore highlights the danger of a social apathy towards
the ‘standard’ point of view and situates her philosophical reverie in relation to the
horrifying, physical realities of daily life for soldiers at the front in 1917.
Thus, while staging an experience of reverie about a mark on the wall that may
appear solipsistic and apolitical, Woolf’s exploration of knowledge in this story
has a political message. What she calls ‘standard’ viewpoints about the everyday
world, viewpoints associated with an epistemology of fact and custom, are shown
not to be neutral or objective or even reflective of the perspectives of ordinary
people. Rather they are presented as being the product of a complex system of
intellectual, social and political power structures comprised of ‘learned men’,
‘leading articles and cabinet ministers’ who decree what is real and true (CSF, 81;
80). Woolf encourages her readers to actively interrogate normative perspectives
by looking at the world again, and she suggests that such investigations can begin
within the space of the domestic everyday.
Contrary to the criticism of male contemporaries such as Wyndham Lewis –
who disparaged the work of women writers of the period, including that of Woolf,
for being introverted and trivial – ‘The Mark on the Wall’ and To the Lighthouse
exemplify the way Woolf’s modernism contested and reconfigured the assumed
separation between the private and public spheres.47 Mrs Ramsay’s musings on
religion and the self while sewing a stocking (TL, 85–7), Lily’s scepticism about
the value of academic philosophy while painting or engaging in polite conversation
with male companions, and one narrator’s critical reflections on the nature of
knowledge and prevailing social and political hierarchies in Britain in 1917 while
staring at a mark on the wall, are a few of the many instances in which Woolf’s
45
Quoted in Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1975), 115.
46
Richard Aldington, Death of a Hero (London: Sphere Books, 1965), see part three
in particular; Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, trans. A.W. Wheen
(Frogmore, St Albans: Mayflower, 1973).
47
Geneviève Sanchis Morgan, ‘The Hostess and the Seamstress: Virginia Woolf’s
Creation of a Domestic Modernism’, in Unmanning Modernism: Gendered Re-readings,
eds Elizabeth Jane Harrison and Shirley Peterson (Knoxville: University of Tennessee
Press, 1997), 90–104; 93.
writing actively speaks to the realm of the public from the sphere of the private and
personal. The apparently trivial and ordinary assume an important position in the
development and articulation of Woolf’s broader political and philosophical views.
Indeed, these narratives show how she adopts the spaces traditionally reserved
for middle-class women of her era (the sitting-room, the garden – the domestic
everyday) as the unexpected and subversive locations for these articulations.
‘Solid Objects’
Like ‘The Mark on the Wall’, ‘Solid Objects’ presents a dichotomy between a
surface world of facts and a submerged world of alternative forms and values, and
critiques a ‘standard’ conception of reality that is also associated with a common-
sense, practical worldview. The story describes a character, John, ‘re-learning
to look at the world’ through a perspective of child-like wonder and curiosity, a
transformation that is effected by his encounter with a solid object that he finds
on the beach. Whereas the narrator in ‘The Mark on the Wall’ actively let her
thoughts ‘swarm’ upon a sensory stimulus, exploring the mark in relation to her
mental whims, John’s consciousness assumes a more passive relationship to this
solid object which comes to permeate his thought and take on, as Bill Brown has
suggested, a secret life of its own (CSF, 77).48
In a bid to engage the reader in active thought, the third-person narrator of
‘Solid Objects’ assumes a conversational tone and adopts techniques of persuasion
and questioning similar to those used in ‘The Mark on the Wall’: ‘You know how
the body seems to shake itself free from an argument, and to apologise for a mood
of exaltation; flinging itself down and expressing in the looseness of its attitude a
readiness to take up with something new…’ (CSF, 96). In the opening paragraph,
the narrator expresses a sense of curiosity about the scene before him, something
that is common to several of Woolf’s early short stories and Jacob’s Room. Of
the 11 short stories Woolf wrote between 1917 and 1921, six employ techniques
of enticement or curiosity, including ‘The Evening Party’, ‘An Unwritten Novel’
and ‘Kew Gardens’. These early experiments in narrative form and point of view
reflect Woolf’s interest in challenging practical and habitual attitudes in her readers,
and assumptions about knowledge. In ‘Solid Objects’, expressions of uncertainty
do not generate anxiety about the truth status of our empirical observations but
excitement at the mystery and strangeness of the world, an attitude reflected in the
story’s protagonist, John. The opening scene is viewed from an aerial perspective
that looks down upon a ‘vast semicircle of beach’ containing ‘one small black
spot’ (CSF, 96). As in ‘The Mark on the Wall’, a small, insignificant mark is the
point of departure for reflection and analysis. The narrative perspective zooms
in upon the spot, recognizing it to be two men walking on a beach towards a
48
Bill Brown, ‘The Secret Life of Things (Virginia Woolf and the Matter of
Modernism)’, Modernism/modernity 6, no. 2 (1999): 1–28.
48 Virginia Woolf
stranded pilchard boat: ‘[N]othing was so solid, so living, so hard, red, hirsute and
virile as these two bodies for miles and miles of sea and sandhill’ (CSF, 96). This
description later becomes ironic when John loses his public political identity due
to his search for solid objects.
Throughout Woolf’s fiction, physical movement and spatial practices are often
expressive of a character’s attitude to the everyday. In ‘Solid Objects’, Charles
the politician is a character of action whose physical movement mirrors his
instrumentalism and functions to consolidate his political viewpoint: ‘“You mean
to tell me … You actually believe …” thus the walking-stick on the right-hand
side next the waves seemed to be asserting as it cut long straight stripes on the
sand’ (CSF, 96). Charles’ assertive actions are directed against physical surfaces
which he frequently marks in a bid to aggressively assert his opinion and have its
correctness acknowledged by others. Wielding a stick in his hand, he walks along
‘slashing the beach for half a mile or so’ (CSF, 96). He finds flat stones suitable for
skimming across the water and dismisses John’s solid object when he realizes that
it is ‘not flat’ and therefore useless to him (CSF, 97). Charles therefore embodies
Fry’s ‘practical vision’, which only registers the surface of the object, assessing its
‘utility value’.49 Political dogmatism, aggression and utilitarianism (in the sense of
instrumental utility) are qualities and attitudes Woolf also aligns with the character
of Charles.
Charles is associated with terrestrial spaces, surfaces and divisive actions that
dominate and appropriate his surrounding environment. He occupies a surface
world of facts. Similarly, Mr Ramsay identifies himself with the barren, isolated
strip of land upon which the lighthouse stands, as compared to Mrs Ramsay, who
is drawn to the ocean that surrounds and is slowly eroding it (TL, 61).50 Actions of
slicing, stabbing and skimming enacted by Charles in ‘Solid Objects’ anticipate
the knife-like Mr Ramsay, whose behaviour is at times socially divisive. While
preoccupied with facts, Charles, like Mr Ramsay, is oblivious to things within
his immediate environment: ‘He did not see, or if he had seen would hardly have
noticed, that John after looking at the lump for a moment, as if in hesitation,
slipped it inside his pocket’ (CSF, 97). He not only represents an attitude of non-
being towards the everyday but an antipathy to it.
In ‘The Artist’s Vision’ which, as I stated earlier, was first published in 1919,
Fry catalogues four forms of ‘vision’ that find striking parallel in Woolf’s story.
These parallels are unlikely to be mere coincidence. Woolf began working on ‘Solid
Objects’ on 26 November 1918 and the story was published in The Athenaeum on
22 October 1920.51 Fry wrote various essays on aesthetics during this period, some
of which were collectively published in his book Vision and Design in 1920. In a
letter to Fry written on 17 August 1919, Woolf expresses her pleasure at finding
Fry, ‘The Artist’s Vision’, Vision and Design, 47–8.

49
The association of masculine reason with terrestrial spaces and feminine imagination
50
and affect with aqueous spaces occurs throughout Woolf’s writing.

51
See Dick’s ‘Notes’ on this story in The Complete Shorter Fiction.
her ‘name in [his recent] article’, ‘Modern French Art at the Mansard Gallery’,
which was published on 8 August in The Athenaeum, and goes on to say how
much she enjoys reading his articles and enquires after his book (L2, 385).52 By
21 December 1920, Woolf had received a copy of the book and writes that she
was ‘fascinated’ (L2, 450). During this period then, Fry and Woolf expressed keen
admiration for, and interest in, each others’ work and there was a regular flow and
exchange of ideas and perspectives.
The four forms of vision that Fry discusses in ‘The Artist’s Vision’ are the
practical vision, curiosity vision, artistic vision and creative vision. Fry’s essay
considers how these different kinds of vision affect the way we see or, conversely,
look at, everyday objects. His essay also discusses the relationship between the
artistic vision and collecting, which is another important theme in ‘Solid Objects’.
Fry believes that, despite the early ‘lesson’ of instinct that drives the practical
vision, we retain some of the curiosity and passion that distinguishes the child’s
from the adult’s perspective. This, he suggests, is evident in the capacity adults
retain to look attentively at flowers and with pleasure, as well as the adult’s penchant
for collecting objects that possess some ‘marked peculiarity of appearance that
catches [the] eye’. Such objects, he continues, can be natural – stones, fossils – or
human-made, but they all exhibit ‘peculiarities of colour or shape, and these are
called ornaments’.53 Both the artist’s vision and the creative vision mark a further
departure still from the practical vision. To varying degrees, both the artistic and
creative vision involve the apprehension of the relation between forms and colours
as they are present in the object, and this apprehension necessitates the detachment
of the object from its surrounding reality – of space and time – and any other
meanings or implications of the object’s practical appearance. This detachment
from reality, or ‘disinterestedness’, is central to Fry’s and also Clive Bell’s theory
of the aesthetic emotion, which is discussed in Chapter 2.54
In ‘Solid Objects’, Charles reflects the practical vision. By contrast, John is
a contemplative figure whose perception suggests qualities of both the child and
the artist. Sitting on the beach, ignoring his companion’s political exhortations,
he burrows his hand and arm into the sand, much like the child Jacob who, in the
opening pages of Jacob’s Room, plays on a beach ‘plung[ing]’ his hand in the
sand in pursuit of a large crab (JR, 5). John’s action of immersing his body into
the world prefigures the manner in which his mind will become mixed with, and
inseparable from, the solid object he is about to discover. The action of burying
initiates memories from John’s childhood and the practical vision is replaced by
one of child-like wonder and rapture:
As his hand went further and further beyond the wrist, so that he had to hitch
his sleeve a little higher, his eyes lost their intensity, or rather the background of
52
Fry, A Roger Fry Reader, 339–42.
53
54
50 Virginia Woolf
thought and experience which gives an inscrutable depth to the eyes of grown
people disappeared, leaving only the clear transparent surface, expressing
nothing but wonder, which the eyes of young children display. No doubt the act
of burrowing in the sand had something to do with it. (CSF, 96–7)
The ‘background’ of ‘thought and experience’ creates an inscrutable quality in

the adult’s perspective that obscures a clear awareness of things. By contrast,
and in the tradition of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological reduction, John’s
perception reflects a simple, ‘transparent’ awareness of things that is unhindered
by preconceptions. When John’s fingers curl around ‘something hard’ in the sand,
he discovers a ‘large irregular lump’ of green glass, the function of which he
cannot determine:
When the sand coating was wiped off, a green tint appeared. It was a lump of
glass, so thick as to be almost opaque; the smoothing of the sea had completely
worn off any edge or shape, so that it was impossible to say whether it had
been a bottle, tumbler or window-pane; it was nothing but glass; it was almost a
precious stone. (CSF, 97)
In his analysis of ‘Solid Objects’, Bill Brown suggests that what I have termed
the process of ‘re-learning’ to see the world might begin with the ‘vertiginous
banality of things’, a regained ‘sense of the curious thingness of those objects we
incessantly if unconsciously touch, the objects we see without ever looking’.55 For
Brown, apprehending the thingness of things depends upon ‘dislocating material’
objects from ‘an instrumentalist teleology’ and relocating them into ‘an aesthetic
scene’.56 While the fragments that John discovers are not everyday objects like a
chair or tree, as most are fragments of objects which lack their original use value,
his relationship with them is not instrumentalist but aesthetic and affective. The
fragment of green glass cannot be ascribed a definite function and while John upholds
an initial pretence to use this and the other objects he collects as paperweights, he
has fewer and fewer papers to order as he loses interest in his political career. He
values his new solid object not for its utility value but its ‘marked peculiarity of
appearance that catches his eye’ and ignites his curiosity vision.57
John’s relationship with his new-found object reveals the manner in which
our impressions of things ‘commonly thought small’ and trivial can influence
the pattern of the mind when they are attended to, as Woolf suggests in ‘Modern
Fiction’ (E4, 161). The ‘lump of glass’ affects John’s perception of the world and
his attitude to life. Initially, it alters his visual perspective as he places it up to his
eye and looks at the world through it: ‘[H]e held it so that its irregular mass blotted
out the body and extended right arm of his friend’ (CSF, 97). The object obscures
55
Brown, ‘The Secret Life of Things’, 2.
56
Brown, ‘The Secret Life of Things’, 3.
57
Fry, ‘The Artist’s Vision’, Vision and Design, 48.
his perception of Charles, as it will soon obliterate his significance in John’s

professional and personal life. The colouring of John’s visual field anticipates how
his mind will become altered by his new-found fragment: ‘Looked at again and
again half consciously by a mind thinking of something else, any object mixes
itself so profoundly with the stuff of thought that it loses its actual form and
recomposes itself a little differently in an ideal shape which haunts the brain when
we least expect it’ (CSF, 98). John becomes fixated upon such an ideal, seeking
out a new object that will surpass the uniqueness and expressive potential of the
other objects he has collected.
Fry suggests that artists initiate a renewed interest in ‘forgotten’ and ‘despised
styles’ and, in doing so, ‘anticipate both the archaeologist and collector’.58
Furthermore, under the influence of the artistic and creative vision, the actual matter
of the object is irrelevant, as all matter assumes the potential to present inspiring
combinations of colour and form: ‘[T]he greatest object of art becomes of no more
significance than any casual piece of matter; a man’s head is no more and no less
important than a pumpkin.’59 Hence, the artist will find their materials in unlikely
places: ‘[O]bjects saturated for the ordinary man with the most vulgar and repulsive
associations, may be grist to his mill.’60 In a manner reminiscent of Walter Benjamin’s
ragpicker, one example of the modern collector, John searches for his objects in
spaces and places that house the discarded materials of capitalist modernization.
While occupying very different positions in modernity’s socio-economic hierarchy
– John rejecting its terms and conditions, the ragpicker suffering under them – both
find value in the ‘detritus of [everyday] modernity’.61 Valuable things – whether
that value is construed in material, aesthetic or historical terms – are to be found
everywhere, a ‘slum in Soho’ as much as under the dome of ‘St Paul’s’:62
So John found himself attracted to the windows of curiosity shops … He took, also,
to keeping his eyes upon the ground, especially in the neighbourhood of waste
land where the household refuse is thrown away. Such objects often occurred there
– thrown away, of no use to anybody, shapeless, discarded. (CSF, 98)
Anything will do ‘so long as it [is] an object of some kind’ – glass, rock, amber,
china or metal, natural or human-made (CSF, 98).
Voyaging around the streets of London in pursuit of more unusual objects,
John abandons his political career, and instead embarks on an exploration of the
city’s discarded materials, reflecting upon their history and expressive capacities.
No longer directed by the practical vision, he becomes increasingly conscious of
58
59
60
61
Ben Highmore, Everyday Life and Cultural Theory: An Introduction (London:
Routledge, 2002), 63.
62
52 Virginia Woolf
the everyday material world and its overlooked value: ‘[H]e was often astonished,
as he came to go into the question more deeply, by the immense variety of shapes
to be found in London alone, and there was still more cause for wonder and
speculation in the differences of qualities and designs’ (CSF, 99). While through
his new perspective of ‘illegitimate freedom’ John rediscovers the world’s material
diversity, curiosity and beauty, his passion for obscure things becomes an obsession
which causes him ‘innumerable’ disappointments as he continues to adopt higher
standards and cultivate a ‘taste more severe’ (CSF, 100).
The final exchange between John and Charles at the end of the story marks a
breakdown in their ability to communicate as a result of their different perspectives
and values. Charles visits his friend to console him on not being elected to
parliament but finds John unmoved, recently having discovered an unusual piece
of iron on the Barnes Common. John observes Charles looking at his collection of
objects on the mantelpiece and, as occurred earlier on the beach, notes his failure to
notice their existence. Instead Charles wields them in a functional and aggressive
manner, putting each solid object ‘down emphatically to mark what he was saying
about the conduct of the Government’ (CSF, 100). Disinterested in Charles and
his prior associates, John does not speak to them about his ‘serious ambitions’, as
‘their lack of understanding was apparent in their behaviour’ (CSF, 100). Their
final dialogue centres upon confusion as to what it is that John has ‘given up’ and
Charles’ desire to reach the truth about the situation:
‘What was the truth of it, John?’ asked Charles suddenly, turning and facing him.
‘What made you give it up like that all in a second?’
‘I’ve not given it up,’ John replied.
‘But you’ve not a ghost of a chance now,’ said Charles roughly.
‘I don’t agree with you there,’ said John with conviction. Charles looked at him
and was profoundly uneasy; the most extraordinary doubts possessed him; he
had a queer sense that they were talking about different things. (CSF, 100–101)
Despite an expressed desire to understand his friend’s changed behaviour and

attitudes, Charles cannot accept them. John’s sense of conviction fills him with
‘extraordinary doubts’ and profound anxieties, rendering his world of solid facts
unstable and their value ambiguous.
Panthea Reid Broughton argues that ‘Solid Objects’ reflects Woolf’s
distancing from formalism and critiques the aesthetic principle of ‘disinterested
contemplation’, which maintains that art should be detached from political or
ideological concerns. She argues that, through the character of John, Woolf suggests
that the ‘disinterested contemplation of aesthetic objects in not an effective or
meaningful way to live in this world’.63 Broughton does not elaborate on what
63
Panthea Reid Broughton, ‘The Blasphemy of Art: Fry’s Aesthetics and Woolf’s
Non-“Literary” Stories’, in The Multiple Muses of Virginia Woolf, ed. Diane F. Gillespie
(Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1993), 56.
she means by living effectively or meaningfully, but appears to refer to John’s

withdrawal from public life and his renunciation of his political career. Although I
agree with Broughton that ‘Solid Objects’ critiques, or at least treats humorously,
aspects of formalist theory, neither John nor the story present an aestheticist
escape from politics. Bill Brown argues that what this story ‘nowhere imagines
but everywhere intimates is the violence of war’ and suggests that Woolf’s story
offers an account of the ‘relation between aesthetics and politics’, particularly
the way sensory experience was ‘fundamentally altered by the facts of wartime
scarcity and postwar depression’.64 I have suggested that the violence in this story
is associated with the character of Charles in relation to his dogmatism, factualism
and instrumentalism – attitudes and behaviours that Woolf frequently associates
with patriarchal culture and sometimes links to war, as she does in Three Guineas
(1938). As in To the Lighthouse, the disavowal of one’s daily material surroundings
because of their apparent triviality is critiqued in ‘Solid Objects’. Like Benjamin’s
ragpicker, John finds value in the overlooked and discarded fragments of everyday
modernity, and it is through those fragments that he acquires a new understanding
of his own attitude to the political structures and ideologies that drive it.
‘Kew Gardens’ and Common Experience
‘Kew Gardens’ is concerned with paying homage to the small, overlooked things
in our daily environment. It also investigates the diverse ways that people engage
with commonplace scenes, rendering their status as familiar and shared somewhat
complex. Playful in its treatment of fact, the story explores some of the other
common, but less considered, states of body and mind that might comprise a part
of our daily experience. It adopts as its subject matter an activity that Woolf viewed
as synonymous with middle-class Victorian culture – walking around the public
gardens in London. However, as I will discuss, the characters in the story in fact
occupy a range of different social backgrounds. In ‘A Sketch of the Past’, Woolf
describes how she and her sister, Vanessa, would make ‘up stories, long long,
stories’ to ‘beguile the dullness [of] innumerable winter walks’.65 ‘Kew Gardens’
is one such imaginative reconstruction that examines the profound otherness that
the ordinary can take on when it is looked at rather than merely seen.
Woolf presents the gardens as unprecedented, mysterious and not reducible to
one common interpretation or experience. The description of a garden-bed in the
64
Brown, ‘The Secret Life of Things’, 15; 5. The ‘violent argument’ between John
and Charles, the latter’s ‘repeated lunging’, their ‘rough boots’ and ‘shooting coats’, the
mood of intense political debate and conflict with which the story engages, and the London
landscape of broken objects, waste lands and demolished buildings within which the story
is set, all implicitly allude to the violence and destruction of war (CSF, 96–9).
65
She describes daily walks around Kensington Gardens during her youth in ‘A
Sketch of the Past’ (MB, 76).
54 Virginia Woolf
opening paragraph alerts our attention to the small details to which we are often
blind. This opening description is significant as the gardens are the very thing
many of the walkers fail to see because they are mentally preoccupied with other
matters. Each empirical fact is described in minute positivist detail with the rigour
and exactitude of a botanist. However, the narrative subsequently renders the
accuracy of these observations suspect as expressions of uncertainty slip into the
catalogue of facts. The opening paragraph describes each physical phenomenon,
including flowers, petals, pebbles, earth and a snail, in terms of its colour, form,
mass, space, texture, light and movement:
From the oval-shaped flower-bed there rose perhaps a hundred stalks spreading
into heart-shaped or tongue-shaped leaves half way up and unfurling at the tip
red or blue or yellow petals marked with spots of colour raised upon the surface;
and from the red, blue or yellow gloom of the throat emerged a straight bar,
rough with gold dust and slightly clubbed at the end. (CSF, 84)
Although the narrative style echoes that of the botanist, the descriptions do not
centre on accurate factual details but approximations, particularly numerical
approximations: ‘[T]here rose perhaps a hundred stalks spreading into heart-
shaped or tongue-shaped leaves’ (CSF, 84). Qualitative expressions multiply as
the narrative progresses and the narrator’s sense of curiosity escalates as he turns
his attention to the people and creatures moving around the gardens. A sense of
curiosity is conveyed through references to the inhabitants of the garden, all of
whom act in ways that are inexplicable and strange to the narrator: ‘The figures
of these men and women straggled past the flower-bed with a curiously irregular
movement’; ‘[the green insect] stepped off as rapidly and strangely in the opposite
direction’ (CSF, 84; 85). Although the narrator sees the garden in minute detail,
expressions of uncertainty such as ‘perhaps’, ‘now appeared’ and ‘seemed’
prefix the majority of statements describing empirical facts; ‘perhaps a hundred’;
‘rather more briskly’; ‘The man was about six inches in front’; ‘now appeared
to be moving’; ‘an expression of perhaps unnatural calm’; ‘He talked almost
incessantly’; ‘he seemed to have caught sight of’ (CSF, 84–6). This discourse of
uncertainty and speculation undermines the reliability of the narrator’s empirical
observations, while the entire positivist tendency to discuss human behaviour in
terms of analogies drawn from the natural sciences is questioned. ‘Kew Gardens’,
like the other early short stories discussed here, undermines positivist discourses
and methodologies and seeks to progress beyond common-sense facts. As in ‘The
Mark on the Wall’ and ‘Solid Objects’, an imaginative and dialectical approach to
ordinary scenes replaces dogmatic, factual ones.
The narrative mode of ‘Kew Gardens’ shifts from a positivist account of
observable phenomena to a series of speculations about the states of consciousness
and feeling experienced by the sentient creatures and people moving around Kew
Gardens. While the text suggests a crisis of narrative authority, the narrator’s
speculations are expressed with greater confidence than his empirical observations.
An initially positivist account of Kew Gardens transforms into one that is filled with
speculations, which are paradoxically presented as facts. For example, the narrator
speculates about a mollusc’s state of consciousness and feeling, as fact: ‘Before he
[the snail] had decided whether to circumvent the arched tent of a dead leaf or to
breast it there came past the bed the feet of other human beings’ (CSF, 86).
The story also presents various attitudes apart from common sense or the
practical vision that can dominate consciousness during commonplace experiences
like walking around a public garden. For example, the first couple introduced in
the story do not experience the things around them in the present moment but in
relation to the past. The present is backed by the past, making it something more
than its surface appearance – an idea discussed in ‘A Sketch of the Past’: ‘For the
present when backed by the past is a thousand times deeper than the present when
it presses so close that you can feel nothing else, when the film on the camera
reaches only the eye’ (MB, 98). Woolf’s sense of the presentness of the past is one
that resonates through much modernist literature. ‘The actuality of the present, its
bearing on the past, their bearing on the future. Past, present, future, these three’,
as H.D. states in Writing on the Wall (1944), are preoccupations both for her and
modernism generally.66 Proust’s extended exploration in À la recherche du temps
perdu (Remembrance of Things Past; 1913–27) of the persistence of past moments
into the present is a further and well-known instance of modernism’s interest in the
relationship between past experience and the present moment. In ‘Kew Gardens’
both husband and wife are drawn back to previous experiences in Kew Gardens
that affect their apprehension of the scene before them. The man recalls proposing
to another woman 15 years previously at a certain spot in the garden and that past
memory is more visible than the present garden: ‘[H]ow clearly I see the dragon-
fly and her shoe with the square silver buckle at the toe’ (CSF, 84). When he asks
his wife if she minds his reminiscing, she suggests it is common to think of one’s
past when walking around a park: ‘Doesn’t one always think of the past, in a
garden with men and women lying under the trees?’ For his wife, the past is ‘one’s
happiness, one’s reality’ (CSF, 85). That the past is an integral influence on present
consciousness is an idea subsequently challenged when we become privy to the
ways in which other walkers experience Kew Gardens.
The second couple, two men, also experience the garden mediately, through
the effects of shell-shock, a condition that was very common but extremely
marginalized in Britain following the First World War. Society’s embarrassment
about and mistreatment of the victims of shell-shock were issues that Woolf
explored through the character of Septimus Warren Smith in Mrs. Dalloway. Like
Septimus, the man suffering from shell-shock in ‘Kew Gardens’ is obsessed with
death and the spirits of men who have died at war, and his companion, William,
expresses embarrassment at his condition. William walks around the garden in
silence, while his companion talks ‘almost incessantly’ about ‘the spirits of the
66
H.D., Tribute to Freud. Writing on the Wall. Advent (New York: New Directions,
1974), 23.
56 Virginia Woolf
dead, who, according to him, were even now telling him all sorts of odd things
about their experiences in Heaven’ (CSF, 86). For the victim of shell-shock, as for
every soldier engaged in battle, the everyday is infused with the fact of death. The
man, whose namelessness in the story suggests not only his symbolic status but
the manner in which war destroys identity, notices a woman in the distance merely
because her dress appears in the shade to be a purple black and so suggests a widow
in mourning. When William tries to prevent his companion from approaching her,
instead diverting his attention to a flower, his efforts are again thwarted. Having
stared at the flower in some confusion, the man bends down and seems to ‘answer
a voice speaking from it’ before embarking upon talk of the forests of Uruguay
(CSF, 86). No commonality of experience exists between these two men, much less
between these two men and the previous couple who were preoccupied with their
memories. In each case, a character’s perception of their surrounding environment
in the present moment is influenced by a different cross-section of associations,
experiences and memories. Mrs. Dalloway presented a strong case for approaching
shell-shock – which was a topical and important issue when the novel was published
in 1925 – as common experience. While not mourned by Clarissa, the suicide of
Septimus Warren Smith at the end of the novel highlighted the terrible implications
of society’s denial of shell-shock in post-war Britain. That shell-shock is one of the
modes of common experience explored in ‘Kew Gardens’, along with such states
as memory, gossip and desire, suggests that Woolf was approaching ‘male hysteria’
as a form of ordinary experience as early as 1920.67 This was possibly a sympathy
borne of her own experiences of mental and physical illness.
That the man’s condition in ‘Kew Gardens’ is a misunderstood one is made
explicit by the third couple – ‘two elderly women of the lower middle class’ – who
surmise from a distance that his behaviour is a product of ‘eccentricity’ or possibly
madness, but not trauma. For these women, the gardens are perceived through
their ‘pattern’ of gossip. Domestic responsibilities and concerns influence their
experience of Kew Gardens. Like the man’s ramblings, their dialogue is a form
of private language, consisting of repeated names and commodities arranged in
verbal patterns and rhythms:
‘Nell, Bert, Lot, Cess, Phil, Pa, he says, I says, she says, I says, I says, I says’
‘My Bert, Sis, Bill, Grandad, the old man, sugar
Sugar, flour, kipper, greens
Sugar, sugar, sugar.’ (CSF, 87)
67
In The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture 1830–1980 (New
York: Pantheon Books, 1985), Elaine Showalter discusses how shell-shock was a condition
that reached near epidemic proportions following the First World War and how men suffering
from the condition were treated as cowards. See also Mark Hussey, ‘Introduction’, in
Virginia Woolf and War: Fiction, Reality, and Myth, ed. Mark Hussey (New York: Syracuse
The dialogue consists of names and domestic commodities, while the rhythmic
and repetitive qualities recall a domestic ditty, chant or song. In the typescript
version the words become visible forms that the women attempt to make into a
pattern:
They made a mosaic round them in the hot still air of these people and these
commodities each woman firmly pressing her own contribution into the pattern,
never taking her eyes off it, never glancing at the differently coloured fragments
so urgently wedged into its place by her friend.68
As their dialogue dominates perception for a time, the ‘ponderous woman’ ceases
to listen to her companion’s words and comes again to a consciousness of the
things before her like a ‘sleeper waking from a heavy sleep’ who finds ordinary
things ‘unfamiliar’ and striking (CSF, 87).
The final couple perceive Kew Gardens through feelings of love and, as the
youngest couple discussed in the story, they also represent a perspective closest to
that of a child-like awe and novelty. Their journey around the gardens is an ecstatic
adventure, a metaphor for their entry into the unfamiliar territory of first love:
[W]ords … alighting awkwardly upon the very common objects that surrounded
them and were to their inexperienced touch so massive: but who knows (so
they thought as they pressed the parasol into the earth) what precipices aren’t
concealed in them, or what slopes of ice don’t shine in the sun on the other side?
Who knows? Who has ever seen this before? Even when she wondered what sort
of tea they gave you at Kew, he felt that something loomed up behind her words,
and stood vast and solid behind them … (CSF, 88)
Love and desire make the familiar world of objects strange and exciting, an
experience shared by Terence Hewet and Rachel Vinrace in The Voyage Out (VO,
ch. 21). Emotions of love create a sense of sinking away from the ordinary world
which the young man in ‘Kew Gardens’ controls through action, bringing himself
back to ‘reality’ through the ceremony of having tea: ‘[T]here was a bill that he
would pay with a real two shilling piece, and it was real, all real, he assured himself
… real to everyone except to him and to her; even to him it began to seem real; and
then – but it was too exciting to stand and think any longer’ (CSF, 88).
One of Woolf’s earliest explorations in epistemological perspectivism,
‘Kew Gardens’ illustrates the many ways in which an ordinary activity can be
experienced and familiar objects seen, thereby questioning their status as ordinary
and known. Through dialectical narrative forms and techniques of enticement
and persuasion, Woolf’s early shorter fiction invites the reader to reconsider their
engagement with the object world and the nature of ordinary things. As in her
later fiction, these texts challenge the reader to suspend their natural attitude and
68
Woolf, CSF, see Dick’s notes, 291.
58 Virginia Woolf
regain, in the Romantic tradition, a renewed sense of curiosity and wonder at the
world. Normative approaches to the ordinary are associated in these stories with
custom, factualism and instrumentalism, attitudes that Woolf suggests devalue the
ordinary and commonplace despite their emphasis upon it from an epistemological
and practical standpoint. Rather than politically neutral or, indeed, ordinary, the
‘standard’ point of view is presented in these stories as the product of dominant
social hierarchies and political power structures. Such ‘standard’ viewpoints are
sometimes linked to dogmatism and acts of violence and oppression, as with Mr
Ramsay and Charles Tansley in To the Lighthouse, Charles in ‘Solid Objects’ and
the suicide of Septimus Warren Smith in Mrs. Dalloway, which is a consequence
of his oppression under various normative social and medical attitudes. Woolf
encourages her readers to engage critically with such points of view, and to reflect
upon their personal and social effects. In opposition to a ‘standard’ point of view
that effaces ordinary things and limits or dictates the scope of everyday experience,
Woolf’s early shorter fiction examines the diversity and richness of the quotidian
and presents ordinary things as the overlooked sites of intellectual, personal and
emotional significance.
2
Blue and Green: Sensations of Colour
A jar was so green that the eye seemed sucked up through a funnel by its intensity
and stuck to it like a limpet. (Virginia Woolf, W, 82)
One of the consequences of the close scrutiny of things in much of Woolf’s writing
is a careful attention to colour. Colour can take on a very powerful aspect and
assume narrative significance in her fiction, as in the interludes of The Waves
from which the above epigraph is taken. Although colour is an integral part of
ordinary experience, Woolf’s fiction often demands that her readers attend to
her presentations of it with a consideration comparable to that with which they
would contemplate the canvases of a Fauvist painter. The close dialogues between
many visual artists and writers during the modernist period gave rise to a range
of innovative, almost multidisciplinary, explorations into the literary and plastic
arts and their respective modes of representing the world. Gertrude Stein’s verbal
portraits of people and domestic objects occurred in dialogue with her friend
Picasso’s Cubism. Early reviews of Stein’s work described her writing as a form
of literary Cubism (and sometimes Futurism), her radical disruptions to syntax
and grammar creating a literary analogue to Picasso’s refiguring of space and
perspective in his paintings. Similarly, Woolf’s emerging literary style in the
late 1910s and early 1920s was influenced by, and in turn influenced, a number
of Post-Impressionist artists and critics, particularly Roger Fry, who was at the
centre of the movement in England, and her sister, the painter Vanessa Bell. Woolf
debates in her essays and novels the adequacy of everyday speech to represent
sensations of colour, and the literary evocation of the visual was a topic discussed
on several occasions by Woolf and also Fry. Post-Impressionism is therefore one
of the contexts through which Woolf’s approach to colour will be considered in
this chapter. The other aim of this chapter is to evaluate Woolf’s ideas on the
nature of colour sensation from a philosophical perspective in relation to ideas of
ordinary and common experience.

Stein’s writing is compared to Cubism, Vorticism and Futurism in several
contemporary reviews, many of which were highly critical and dismissive of her experimental
prose style. See the ‘Contemporary Reviews: The Making of a Reputation’ section in Kirk
Curnutt, ed., The Critical Response to Gertrude Stein (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press,
2000). For example: Richard Burton, ‘Posing’ (1914), 163–5; H.L. Mencken, ‘A Cubist
Treatise’ (1914), 14–15; G.E.K., ‘Miss Stein Applies Cubism to Defenceless Prose’ (1923),
27–8; Robert Emons Rogers, ‘New Outbreaks of Futurism’ (1914), 18–21.
60 Virginia Woolf
The three stories examined in the previous chapter focus upon the perception
of what the seventeenth-century empiricist John Locke calls ‘primary qualities’,
which include solidity, extension, motion and number. Colour is a ‘secondary
quality’. Secondary qualities are, in Locke’s view, not a part of an object as such
but rather powers inherent within an object to produce certain sensations in us by
their primary qualities. Secondary qualities include colours, tastes and sounds,
and sensations such as pain. This chapter draws on a range of Woolf’s comments
about colour in her essays and letters, but focuses in particular on the infrequently
discussed sketch ‘Blue & Green’ which was first published in 1921 in Monday or
Tuesday (D2, 106). Susan Dick, the editor of Woolf’s shorter fiction, places ‘Blue
& Green’ with other stories and sketches composed in 1920. My analysis of colour
in this sketch is developed in relation to the philosophy Woolf was reading and
discussing that year. In particular, her sketch bears some very suggestive parallels
to G.E. Moore’s famous essay ‘The Refutation of Idealism’ (1903).
Woolf challenges assumptions that there is a universal way of perceiving
quotidian objects, like a flower, and that our common-sense understanding of
objects is equivalent to knowing them. She is also interested in the nature of
colour and how different people experience colour. As a part of everyday life,
colour can assume practical, aesthetic and emotional significance for us; its uses
and functions are complex. Philosophers have understood the epistemological
and ontological status of colour in several ways. The natural or naive view of
colour assumes that colours are properties that really are a part of the object;
that they exist independently of our consciousness of them. It is such a natural
or common-sense view that Moore attempts to provide logical grounds for in his
‘Refutation of Idealism’. He claims that colours are as much objects independent
of consciousness as material objects, like a table. The sophisticated view of colour,
which Barry Maund refers to as the Descartes–Locke tradition, maintains that
colour has a power or disposition to induce the appropriate sensations; an idea that
Bertrand Russell finds probable. In this view, colours do not exist objectively in
John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, in Great Books of

the Western World, editor in chief Robert Maynard Hutchins, vol. 35 (Chicago: William
Benton, 1952), book 2, ch. 8.

Although an exact composition date for ‘Blue & Green’ is uncertain, Susan Dick
places it alongside other stories written in 1920. Monday or Tuesday contains eight short
stories, all but two of which were written during 1920; see CSF, ‘Notes’, 290–94.

Barry Maund, Colours: Their Nature and Representation (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1995), 86; Bertrand Russell, Our Knowledge of the External World as a
Field for Scientific Method in Philosophy (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1926), 71; ‘I
think it must be admitted as probable that the immediate objects of sense depend for their
existence upon physiological conditions in ourselves … for example, the coloured surfaces
which we see cease to exist when we shut our eyes. But it would be a mistake to infer that
they are dependent upon mind, not real while we see them.’ Here Russell is arguing for a
provisional realism for perceptions of colour.
Blue and Green: Sensations of Colour 61
the way we experience them – rather, they are ideal. Maund proposes that colours
are ‘virtual’ properties in that, while they are located in space on the surfaces of
objects, they are virtual in the sense that the objects do not have the colours we
perceive them as having.
While Woolf does not explicitly pose questions about the real or ideal status of
colour, her writing is sensitive to its complex epistemological status and the ways
in which, for instance, age, vocation and birthplace might influence how a person
perceives colour. In the essay ‘Walter Sickert’, it is suggested that for a motorist
‘red is not a colour but simply a danger signal’, and that an artist’s place of birth
‘whether in the blue South or the grey North’ influences their colour perception.
Colour ‘blazes’ in the eyes of children ‘unrelated to any object’, yet politicians
and businessmen may be ‘blind, days spent in an office leading to atrophy of
the eye’ (CE2, 233–4). ‘Walter Sickert’ questions the assumption implicit to
many philosophical discussions about colour that terms like ‘blue’ and ‘green’
express a universal idea or that a sensation of blue refers to a universal experience.
This assumption is implicit in Moore’s ‘Refutation of Idealism’, which adopts
contrasting sensations of colour as its main example.
Woolf also considers how cultural and aesthetic transformations might alter
a society’s experience of colour. Modern art is one of the changes that Orlando
– the heroine in Woolf’s biographical fantasy of the same name – comments upon
following her sudden birth from the nineteenth into the twentieth century. The
walls, she notes, are no longer hidden beneath ‘[c]urtains and covers’ but display
‘brilliantly coloured pictures of real things like streets, umbrellas, apples’ which
were ‘hung in frames’ or painted on wood. She delights in this new-found focus
on real, material things through colour and describes the modern age as one in
which light and colour ‘poured in’ (O, 206). As Orlando drives off in her motor
through London, her observations are all marked in particular by the colours of
the city, such as the ‘[v]ast blue blocks of building’, the ‘white-faced drivers’
of omnibuses and ‘boxes of green American cloth’ and the many other bright
commodities displayed in shop-windows (O, 206–207). Woolf’s ideas about, and
literary approach to, colour were informed by what Jane Goldman describes as
the ‘riotous and shocking explosion of colour’ first witnessed at the initial Post-
Impressionist exhibition, which was held at the Grafton Galleries in 1910. In her

Maund, Colours, 4.

Jane Goldman, The Feminist Aesthetics: Modernism, Post-Impressionism and the
Politics of the Visual (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 116. Several critics
have discussed the influence of Post-Impressionism on Woolf’s aesthetics. Christopher
Reed takes a historical approach to this relationship and explores the different phases in
Woolf’s engagement with Bloomsbury aesthetics, particularly through the influence of
Roger Fry. Reed argues that Woolf’s early critique of formalism in the 1910s changed during
the 1920s when she began to see new potentials for modern literature through its closer
dialogue with painting, ‘Through Formalism: Feminism and Virginia Woolf’s Relation to
Bloomsbury Aesthetics’, in The Multiple Muses of Virginia Woolf, ed. Diane F. Gillespie
62 Virginia Woolf
chapter on ‘The Post-Impressionists’ in her biography of Roger Fry (1940), Woolf

describes the public’s dramatic emotional response to the paintings shown at that
exhibition, which included works by Cézanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Picasso, Paul
Signac, Matisse, Derain and Othon Friesz (RF, 122). The exhibition generated a
‘mine of emotion in that very phlegmatic body’ of the British public. The response
was overwhelmingly negative, as the public’s conventional ideas about painting
were challenged. These paintings were deemed ‘childish’, ‘anarchistic’ and
‘outrageous’; their aesthetic primitive and regressive (RF, 123). The colours were
unrealistic, ‘bold, bright, impudent almost’ to the eye of the unprepared observer,
shocking in their hues and intensity (RF, 121). Only a few of the younger English
artists perceived this new painting as a ‘revelation’ (RF, 127). In her biography
of Fry, Woolf therefore recalls the Post-Impressionist exhibition as challenging
ordinary perception as well as conventional ideas about art.
The Post-Impressionists used colour in innovative ways. It became an expressive
medium in and of itself, not simply a means to portray things in nature. In her essay
on Fauvism, an avant-garde movement in painting that included Matisse, Derain
and Vlaminck, Sarah Whitfield explains that the ‘freedom of expression’ that the
Fauves sought was to be achieved by the ‘use of pure colours’, as well as through
experimentations in space and perspective. Fauvist painters therefore used colour
in non-natural ways, and the brightness and expressiveness of their paintings were
a source of shock and sometimes consternation to the viewing public. According
to the artist Derain, ‘[c]olours became charges of dynamite. They were supposed
to discharge light. It was a fine idea in its freshness, that everything could be raised
above the real’. In their reaction against rationalism, the Surrealists sought to
uncover the marvellous within the everyday through foregrounding the impact of
the unconscious on thought and perception. Their approach to the everyday was
often provocative and emphasized its transformation through techniques such as
contrived or found juxtaposition. By contrast, the Post-Impressionists wanted to
re-present common objects and everyday scenes in new ways through innovative
approaches to form and colour. Rather than transforming the everyday as such,
they wanted to change its manner of presentation in painting and to reinvigorate
(Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1993), 11–35. For other discussions
of this relationship see Allen McLaurin, Virginia Woolf: The Echoes Enslaved (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1973), ch. 7; Diane F. Gillespie, The Sisters’ Arts: The Writing
and Painting of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press,
1988); Mark Hussey, The Singing of the Real World: The Philosophy of Virginia Woolf’s
Fiction (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1986), ch. 4; Ann Banfield, The Phantom
Table: Woolf, Fry, Russell and the Epistemology of Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge

Pure colours are colours unmixed and used directly from the tubes. Sarah Whitfield,
‘Fauvism’, in Concepts of Modern Art, ed. Nikos Stangos, 3rd edn (London: Thames and
Hudson, 1994), 11.

Quoted in Whitfield, ‘Fauvism’, Concepts of Modern Art, 26–7.
our relationship to our everyday, lived environment through art. This is evidenced
in Fry’s Omega Workshops and the Post-Impressionists’ enthusiasm for decorative
forms of art, such as murals, painted furniture and crafts, which thereby made colour
and a distinctive personal style a part of the Post-Impressionists’ lived space.
Destabilizing the practical, functional mode of vision and approach to objects,
as described by Fry in Vision and Design, was one of the movement’s central
aims. The Post-Impressionists’ approach to representation was motivated by a
desire to foreground an object’s expressive potential; something they believed
was suppressed in contemporary society due to modernity’s instrumentalism
and emphasis on utility. In his introduction to the 1910 exhibition catalogue,
Desmond MacCarthy writes that, due to an emphasis on the exact rendering of a
sense impression in a given moment, the Impressionists adopted a passive attitude
towards the appearance of things that ‘often hindered them from rendering their
real significance’. The ‘“treeness” of the tree’, he suggests, ‘was not rendered
at all; all the emotion and associations such as trees may be made to convey in
poetry were omitted’. According to MacCarthy, colour was a crucial vehicle for
the Post-Impressionists as it enabled them to ‘express emotions which the objects
themselves evoked’.
Jane Goldman argues that colour assumes an important place in Woolf’s
writing not only aesthetically, but politically. She has demonstrated how the use
of light, dark and colour in Woolf’s fiction and non-fiction informs and expresses
her feminist politics, particularly through her engagement with suffrage art and
Vanessa Bell’s paintings.10 In Roger Fry, Woolf describes what she understood
to be the egalitarian aspects of the Post-Impressionist movement, particularly its
non-elitist attitude and democratic basis and appeal. She claims that Fry drew
on many different opinions and sources in his discussions and explorations into
aesthetics. Everybody’s sensations, opinions and perspective, she writes, mattered
to him: ‘Under his influence, his pressure, his excitement, picture, hats, cotton
goods, all were connected. Everyone argued. Anyone’s sensation – his cook’s, his
housemaid’s – was worth having. Learning did not matter; it was the reality that
was all-important’ (RF, 122).
Goldman argues that the political impetus and concerns of the Post-Impressionist
movement changed over time. While colour was of primary importance during
the time of the first Post-Impressionist exhibition, the second exhibition of 1912
marked a shift away from its radical and reactionary exploration of colour and
form to a depoliticized emphasis on Post-Impressionism as a spiritual, apolitical
movement which centred on the idea of ‘significant form’.11 ‘Significant form’, a

Desmond MacCarthy, ‘The Post-Impressionists’, in Modernism: An Anthology
of Sources and Documents, eds Vassiliki Kolocotroni, Jane Goldman and Olga Taxidou
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998), 174–8; 175.
10
Goldman, The Feminist Aesthetics, 10.
11
Goldman, The Feminist Aesthetics, ch. 10. The paintings in the second exhibition
included works by Cézanne, Vlaminck, Derain, Braque, Matisse, Picasso and English
64 Virginia Woolf
phrase coined by Clive Bell in his book Art (1914), sought to define the ‘common
quality’ in objects capable of eliciting aesthetic emotions: ‘In each, lines and
colours combined in a particular way, certain forms and relations of forms, stir
our aesthetic emotions … these aesthetically moving forms, I call “Significant
Form”; and “Significant Form” is the one quality common to all works of
visual art.’12 While the doctrine of significant form has what Goldman terms a
‘democratic appeal’ through its claim that sensitivity to colour and form is all
that is required to appreciate art, she argues that the movement developed more
elitist tendencies, particularly through Bell’s increasing emphasis on the spiritual,
as opposed to the material, aspects of painting.13 Fry and Bell, Goldman suggests,
increasingly understood art in relation to the classical notion of disinterestedness,
thereby detaching the movement from its earlier Romantic emphasis on subjective
feeling, association and expression. By 1912, Bell and Fry wanted to present Post-
Impressionism as a movement interested in ‘pure emotion’ and free of literary,
social, political and historical associations. As my discussion of Fry’s essay ‘The
Artist’s Vision’ in the previous chapter showed, he still thought about forms
of vision in relation to emotion; but as Goldman argues, the ‘artistic vision’ is
described in that essay in relation to the ideal of disinterestedness whereby the
art object is considered separate from its historical and social contexts. In what
may have been a self-conscious opposition to this aesthetic ideal, the character
of John in ‘Solid Objects’ maintains a demeanour of curiosity and childlike
wonder throughout (forms of vision between the practical and artistic), and never
replicates the artistic vision as described by Fry. Contrary to Fry and Bell’s ideal of
disinterestedness, John meditates on the histories of his found objects and the story
brings into sharp relief material and political contexts, such as the city’s vacant
lots and demolished landscapes, and the political tensions and debates in relation
to which John’s decisions and actions are situated.
Despite Fry and Clive Bell’s ‘quasi-religious dogma of significant form’,
Goldman argues that Woolf’s writing remained politically conscious and engaged,
and she traces this engagement through Vanessa Bell’s ‘prismatics’ and Woolf’s
use of colour in her writing.14 I find that Woolf’s approach to colour is also
political from a philosophical point of view, as she challenges assumptions about
a universal experience of colour as well as philosophical assumptions as to what
a common-sense view of colour might be. While G.E. Moore’s account of colour
perception in ‘The Refutation of Idealism’ sets out with the very honourable aim
of defending the common-sense view that colour is real and not ideal, he implicitly
assumes that ‘the sensation of blue’ and ‘the sensation of green’ refer to universal
experiences and oversimplifies these complex and diverse sensations.
painters including Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell and Wyndham Lewis. See Diane Kelder,
The Great Book of Post-Impressionism (New York: Abbeville Press, 1986).
12
Clive Bell, Art (London: Chatto and Windus, 1931), 7; 8.
13
Goldman, The Feminist Aesthetics, 132–7.
14
Goldman, The Feminist Aesthetics, 136; ch. 11.
G.E. Moore and ‘The Refutation of Idealism’
[P]hilosophers … have not been able to hold [consciousness] and blue before
their minds and to compare them, in the same way in which they can compare
blue and green.15
Woolf’s 1920 sketch ‘Blue & Green’, like other stories published in Monday or
Tuesday, engages with questions about our knowledge of the external world and
the status of our sense perceptions that are central to the writings of eighteenth-
century philosophers such as Hume and Berkeley, as well as twentieth-century
common-sense realists such as Moore. These three philosophers are referred to
in Woolf’s 1920 diary, which indicates the close relationship between the issues
she was exploring in her reading and writing that year. In August, she expresses a
need to read Hume in order to purge her mind of too many images, while several
entries written during April and May refer to her reading Berkeley – most likely
A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge – whose ideas she
discussed with Moore in June of that year.16
George Berkeley’s idealist philosophy was in part a reaction against Locke.
In response to developments in science during the seventeenth century, Locke
advocated a mechanistic view of the universe. Like early Greek and Roman
atomists, he maintained that the universe is comprised of material atoms that
act upon the brain, causing ideas to arise in the mind. Locke argued that all our
knowledge about the world is obtained mediately through ideas. For Berkeley,
Locke’s philosophy conflicted with common sense, which suggests that we know
the external world directly, not merely through our ideas. Locke’s scientism,
Berkeley believed, led to materialism and raised problems regarding theological
proofs for the existence of God and the soul’s immortality. Berkeley’s rather radical
solution to the problem was to suggest that if all we can ever know are our ideas,
then we can deny the material world altogether and do away with the problem of
scepticism. Berkeley, like Descartes, nominated God as the cause of all our ideas
and the guarantor of their truth.17
Woolf alludes to the idealist philosophy of Berkeley in The Years (1937).
In the 1907 section of the novel, Sara Pargiter is reading a ‘faded brown book’
one evening, the author of which proposes the view that ‘the world is nothing
15
‘The Refutation of Idealism’, in G.E. Moore, Philosophical Studies (London:
Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1922), 25. Original italics.
16
Woolf, 5 August 1920 (D2, 56); 24 April 1920 (D2, 33); 11 May 1920 (D2, 36). A
1734 reprint of the 1713 edition of Berkeley’s Treatise was in the Woolfs’ library, see ‘The
Library of Leonard and Virginia Woolf: A Short Title Catalogue’, compiled and edited by
Julie King and Laila Miletic-Vejzovic, intro. Diane F. Gillespie (Pullman: WSU Press, 2003).
Available at www.wsulibs.wsu.edu/holland/masc/OnlineBooks/Woolflibraryonline.htm.
17
Geoffrey Warnock, ‘Berkeley, George’, in The Oxford Companion to Philosophy,
ed. Ted Honderich (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 89–92.
66 Virginia Woolf
but … thought’. She decides to explore this idea by letting herself ‘be thought’,
and eliminating all sense of the external world. She lies in her bed, giving her
body up to thought: ‘[T]he whole of her must be laid out passively to take part
in this universal process of thinking which the man said was the world living.’
She wonders where ‘thought begins’ and comically begins with her feet, thereby
exploring the thesis from the equivalent of a corporeal antithesis. She finds herself
coming up against solid sensations both from within herself and from the outside
world: ‘It was impossible to act thought. She became something; a root; lying sunk
in the earth … the branches had leaves’ (Y, 108). It is this idea which draws her
attention to the trees as they sway and rustle outside her bedroom window. Sara
has difficulty blocking out the material world and her sensations. When she is
discussing the idea with her sister Maggie later that night, Maggie enquires if this
implies that there might not be ‘trees if we didn’t see them’ (Y, 114), a question
which recalls Andrew Ramsay’s challenge to Lily Briscoe in To the Lighthouse to
‘Think of a kitchen table … when you’re not there’ (TL, 33).
Woolf discussed Berkeley’s philosophy with Moore when he visited her and
Leonard at Sussex in June 1920, but she writes that she was ‘too muddled … to
follow his explanation’ due to a lack of sleep the previous night (D2, 49). Following
Moore’s visit, she reflects upon his prior influence upon her Bloomsbury friends,
particularly those who were, like Moore, Cambridge Apostles.18 As mentioned
in my introduction, Moore and Russell rejected and overturned the prevailing
school of idealist philosophy led by John McTaggart that dominated Cambridge
in the 1890s in favour of a more pragmatic analytic realism. In her reflections on
Moore’s influence in her 1920 diary, Woolf does not ‘see altogether why he was
the dominator & dictator of youth’, speculating that perhaps ‘Cambridge is too
much of a cave’, but noting his ‘entire innocency & shrewdness’: ‘not the vestige
of falsehood obscuring him anywhere’ (D2, 49).
Moore’s ‘Refutation of Idealism’, first published in 1903, is an attack on
modern idealism and earlier idealist philosophies, such as that of Berkeley. The
central idealist proposition that Moore’s essay sets out to refute – that to be is to
be perceived, or experienced – originates from Berkeley. Given Woolf’s interest
in Berkeley’s philosophy in 1920, it is quite possible that Moore referred to his
earlier essay in their conversation, or that she consulted it later. The recurring
example in his essay compares sensations of blue and green. ‘Blue & Green’
attempts Moore’s appeal in his essay to try to observe, through acts of reflection,
the difference between the sensation of blue, the sensation of green, and their
18
The Cambridge Apostles was a secret society begun in 1820 and enlisted the most
talented Trinity College undergraduates. E.M. Forster, Lytton Strachey, Saxon Sydney-Turner,
Leonard Woolf and Maynard Keynes were all elected Apostles between the years 1901 and 1903.
Desmond MacCarthy was elected during the previous decade in 1896, and was a contemporary
of Apostles Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore, elected in 1892 and 1894 respectively. Paul
Levy, Moore: G.E. Moore and the Cambridge Apostles (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson,
1979); see the ‘Appendix: The Apostles’ Elections up to the First World War’, 310–11.
common aspect, consciousness. ‘The Refutation of Idealism’ is considered by C.J.

Ducasse to be ‘one of the most famous articles written in philosophy since the
turn of the century’.19 Given Bloomsbury’s engagement with Moore’s philosophy,
particularly around the early 1900s, Woolf would likely have encountered its
arguments and concerns before 1920.
Moore begins his essay by stating that the fundamental claim of modern idealism
is that the universe is conscious, intelligent and purposive, not merely mechanical.
This, he claims, is contrary to how the universe ‘seems’, and attributes it properties
that it does not seem to possess. It is, he claims, contrary to our ‘ordinary view
of the world’.20 Moore does not attempt to refute the view that reality is spiritual
or intelligent, but instead refutes an idealist argument he claims to be ‘necessary’
to that conclusion. This argument, which originates from Berkeley, is the ‘trivial
proposition’, esse is percipi, or whatever exists is perceived. Moore describes the
truth of the idealist view as contingent upon a series of conditional arguments of
the form ‘Since A is B, and B is C, and C is D, it follows that A is D’, a form of
logical argument that recalls the description of Mr Ramsay’s mind as akin to an
alphabet in To the Lighthouse (47). If Moore can prove the falseness of the first
conditional, A is B, then the conclusion (A is D) is, he argues, merely a ‘pleasant
and plausible supposition’, not a proven conclusion.21 Berkeley’s proposition
constitutes for Moore the A is B of this series.
Moore defines esse is percipi as equivalent to saying that whatever is is
experienced, and that this again is equivalent to saying that whatever is, is a part
of someone’s mental experience. This leads Moore to the first of two questions,
which preoccupies the first two-thirds of the paper; namely, ‘Is esse percipi?’22
He provides a detailed discussion as to what he means by the terms ‘percipi’,
‘esse’ and the copula ‘is’. Percipi includes all mental facts that comprise part of
consciousness or experience, such as our sensations and thoughts. Moore qualifies
percipi to refer more specifically to what is common to sensation and thought; that
is, consciousness. He makes this qualification because much of his later discussion
depends upon establishing a distinction between consciousness and mental facts,
the latter of which he calls ‘objects’ of consciousness. This is because he seeks to
show that ‘what makes a thing real cannot possibly be its presence as an inseparable
aspect of a sentient experience’.23 By attempting to clarify the distinction between
consciousness and its various objects, Moore seeks to disprove the idealist’s
equivocation between the two.
Many versions of idealism, according to Moore, assert a necessary relation
between a sensation or an idea (percipi) and its object (esse). For the idealist, he
19
C.J. Ducasse, ‘Moore’s “The Refutation of Idealism”’, in The Philosophy of G.E.
Moore, ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp (Evanston: Northwestern University, 1942), 225–51; 225.
20
Moore, Philosophical Studies, 1–2.
21
22
Moore, Philosophical Studies, 7.
23
68 Virginia Woolf
suggests, green is inconceivable apart from the sensation of green. When Andrew
challenges Lily to think of a table when she is not there, he is asking her to try to
conceive of a table apart from her perception of it. Instead she imagines a fictive
table lodged in the pear tree before her, rendering both the tree and the exercise
comical and absurd (TL, 33). Moore attributes the idealist equivocation between
an object and its idea or sensation to Hegel, and deems it a ‘fallacy’ to which many
contemporary philosophers, such as F.H. Bradley and McTaggart, have become
‘addicted’.24 By contrast, Moore wants to establish the existential independence of
mental objects such as ‘green’, ‘sweet’ and ‘heat’. In so doing, he believes he can
establish logical grounds for what he considers to be our common-sense view of the
world, which holds that, for example, green and blue have a reality apart from our
sensations of them, and that they exist even when no one is experiencing them.
Several appeals are made during the course of Moore’s essay to the reader’s
imagination, and he employs many visual metaphors:
I have asserted that anybody who saw that ‘esse and percipi’ were as distinct as
‘green’ and ‘sweet’ would be no more ready to believe that whatever is is also
experienced, than to believe that whatever is green is also sweet. I have asserted
that no one would believe that ‘esse is percipi’ if they saw how different esse is
from percipi: but this I shall not try to prove.25
Moore’s discourse changes from logical arguments and an explication of terms, to

an appeal to the reader’s imagination; that is, an appeal that the reader try to ‘see’
a difference he states he believes to be true but will not try to prove. This method
becomes important as the second part of his argument again calls on the reader
to reflect on consciousness and, through attempting to distinguish ‘blue’ from
consciousness, to ‘see’ that the two are existentially independent and different.
The examples of sensations in Moore’s essay are all secondary qualities, and
mostly of colour. He writes, ‘We all know that the sensation of blue differs from
that of green’, but he wants to establish what these ‘objects’ of our sensations are.26
In so doing, he argues for the independent reality of things that earlier empiricists
such as Locke and Hume viewed as ideal. He insists throughout the essay in calling
‘green’ and ‘blue’ ‘objects’ rather than contents of consciousness or qualities of
sensations. However, he does not really discuss his use of the word ‘object’ in
sufficient detail and it is unclear if he is proposing that ‘blue’ is an object in the
same sense that spatially extended things, like a table, are objects.27 What is clear
in his argument is that, in his view, we know them in exactly the same way.
24
25
26
27
Moore’s failure to properly discuss the different uses of the word ‘object’ in his
essay, and the kind of existential independence he is arguing for such objects, has constituted
a major objection to his argument. See Ducasse, ‘Moore’s “The Refutation of Idealism”’,
Moore’s second question in ‘The Refutation of Idealism’ is ‘What is a sensation

or idea?’ A sensation, he claims, comprises two parts; consciousness and its object.
He proceeds with a lengthy discussion as to why the existence of blue must be
something different and distinct from the existence of the sensation. To equate ‘blue’
with the ‘sensation of blue’ would be, he argues, self-contradictory: ‘We can and must
conceive that blue might exist and yet the sensation of blue not exist.’28 The difficulty
we face when trying to distinguish between the sensation of blue and that of green is
their common part – consciousness – which is ‘extremely difficult to fix’:
[T]hat which makes the sensation of blue a mental fact seems to escape us: it
seems, if I may use a metaphor, to be transparent – we look through it and see
nothing but the blue; we may be convinced that there is something but what it is
no philosopher, I think, has yet clearly recognised.29
Consciousness is, he writes, ‘diaphanous’: ‘[T]he moment we try to fix our attention
upon consciousness and try to see what, distinctly, it is, it seems to vanish: it seems
as if we had before us a mere emptiness.’30 Thus the idealist conflation between esse
and percipi is deemed to be a result of our failure to know what to look for in our
moments of reflection. Despite his metaphorical description of consciousness earlier
in his essay, as a transparency through which we perceive things, Moore’s repeated
appeal to the reader to look and see consciousness is a rhetorical trick that seeks to
naturalize the idea that consciousness is, like matter, an object of some kind:
When we try to introspect the sensation of blue, all we can see is the blue: the
other element is as if it were diaphanous. Yet it can be distinguished if we look
attentively enough, and if we know that there is something to look for. My main
object in this paragraph has been to try to make the reader see it; but I fear I shall
have succeeded very ill.31
Thus, Moore launches repeated attempts to make the reader visualize consciousness.
His essay concludes with the ‘true analysis of a sensation or idea’, which hinges
on his account of awareness. Consciousness, he claims, really is consciousness
of something: ‘A sensation is, in reality, a case of “knowing” or “being aware
of” or “experiencing” something.’32 Moore maintains that when we know that the
sensation of blue exists, the fact we know is that there exists an awareness of blue.
sec. 10–11; 237–40. The adequacy of Moore’s argument is not my concern here. I want to
map out the progress of his discussion, his rhetorical devices and the examples he uses and
to suggest their consonance with Woolf’s sketch.
28
Moore, Philosophical Studies, 17; 19.
29
30
31
32
70 Virginia Woolf
The awareness of blue we have comprises a distinct relation to blue, ‘a relation

which is not that of thing or substance to content, nor one of part of content to
another part of content. This relation is just that which we mean in every case by
“knowing”’.33 A sensation, whether of blue, a table, or other minds, he argues,
points to the independent existence of something beyond consciousness:
To be aware of the sensation of blue is not to be aware of a mental image – of a

‘thing,’ of which ‘blue’ and some other element are constituent parts in the same
sense in which blue and glass are constituents of a blue bead. It is to be aware of
an awareness of blue; awareness being used, in both cases, in exactly the same
sense … The awareness which I have maintained to be included in sensation is
the very same unique fact which constitutes every kind of knowledge: ‘blue’ is as
much an object, and as little a mere content, of my experience, when I experience
it, as the most exalted and independent real thing of which I am ever aware.34
Moore’s conclusion in ‘The Refutation of Idealism’ is that all mental facts are
objects of which we are aware in the same way. The relation between consciousness
and its objects is of the same kind for both primary and secondary qualities. Each
sensation or idea places the subject outside the ‘circle’ of consciousness and points
to the existence of things apart from their perception of them.35 If Moore sought to
unravel the idealists’ claim that reality is mental by contesting the first syllogism
in their series (that a thing must be perceived in order to exist), Woolf’s sketch
similarly unravels a key assumption of Moore’s argument; that the words ‘blue’
and ‘green’ refer to a universal thing at all (whether that thing be an independent
object or a universal idea).
‘Blue & Green’ and the Language of Colour
So then he tried saying the grass is green and the sky is blue and so to propitiate the
austere spirit of poetry … ‘The sky is blue,’ he said, ‘the grass is green.’ Looking
up, he saw that, on the contrary, the sky is like the veils which a thousand Madonnas
have let fall from their hair; and the grass fleets and darkens like a flight of girls
fleeing the embraces of hairy satyrs from enchanted woods. ‘Upon my word,’ he said
… ‘I don’t see that one’s more true than another. Both are utterly false.’ (O, 70)
McLaurin argues that this passage from Orlando is an example of Woolf’s view
that the ‘colours of nature’ can be repetitive and boring if they are not put into what
he calls a ‘meaningful relation’.36 This passage also alludes to Orlando’s anxieties
33
34
35
36
McLaurin, Virginia Woolf: The Echoes Enslaved, 72.
about the adequacy of common names to represent colour perception. His efforts to
represent sensations of colour through factual and lyrical descriptions are deemed
‘utterly false’ and he experiences frustration regarding what he perceives to be
the inability of language to express the reality or ‘truth’ about colour. The effort
to ‘say what one means and leave it’ results in a ‘deep dejection’ and uncertainty
about what ‘poetry is and what truth is’ (O, 70). Like Moore, Orlando realizes the
important role that language plays in our claims as to what exists.
In her reflections on colour, Woolf expresses an interest in the ways in which
we represent our experiences of colour in language and what it might be that the
proper name of a colour actually refers to. This is connected to her interest in the
relationship between writing and painting. In ‘Walter Sickert’, a group of diners
discuss the narrative qualities of Sickert’s portraits, their personal responses to his
use of colour, and his representation of character. One diner finds him to be a ‘great
biographer … when he paints a portrait I read a life’, and the essay considers how a
painting can be discursive and present a narrative (CE2, 235). These are questions
with which Woolf was preoccupied in the 1920s; for example, in her review of
Edmond X. Kapp’s Personalities. Twenty-four drawings (1919), published in
January 1920. In this review entitled ‘Pictures and Portraits’, she considers how a
literary artist might come to terms with pictures through transforming perceptions
of colour into words. Walking around the National Gallery and the National
Portrait Gallery, she describes her attempt to negotiate the ‘silent art’ of painting
by transforming her sensations of colour into words:
The silence is hollow and vast as that of a cathedral dome. After the first shock
and chill those used to deal in words seek out the pictures with the least of
language about them – canvases taciturn and congealed like emerald or
aquamarine – landscapes hollowed from transparent stone, green hillsides, skies
in which the clouds are eternally at rest. Let us wash the roofs of our eyes in
colour; let us dive till the deep seas close above our heads. That these sensations
are not aesthetic becomes evident soon enough, for, after a prolonged dumb
gaze, the very paint on the canvas begins to distil itself into words – sluggish,
slow-dropping words that would, if they could, stain the page with colour; not
writers’ words. But it is not here our business to define what sort of words they
are; we are only concerned to prove our unfitness to review the caricatures of
Mr Kapp. (E3, 164)
To render colour in words is a puzzling prospect here. How, she writes, might the
author transform these ‘taciturn’ spaces of ‘emerald’ and ‘aquamarine’ from visual
landscapes to discursive ones? It would involve, she suggests, immersing oneself
completely in the sensation of colour so that the visual experience will ‘distil itself
into words’.
Fry expresses a similar interest in the interrelations between writing and painting
in his essay ‘Modern French Art at the Mansard Gallery’, which was published in
The Athenaeum in August 1919. In this essay, which is a review of an exhibition
72 Virginia Woolf
of works at the Mansard Gallery in London, Fry discusses the development of a

style of ‘literary painting’, the early instances of which he finds in some Cubist
and Futurist paintings.37 By ‘literary painting’ he means a process whereby ideas,
symbolized by forms, are juxtaposed, contrasted and compared in a manner similar
to that of words in prose. To test his theory, Fry attempts to ‘translate’ one of the
paintings at the Mansard Gallery by a contemporary French painter, Survage, whose
paintings he finds to be a current example of such a literary style. Fry’s translation, a
paragraph of descriptive prose much like experimental Woolf sketches such as ‘Blue
& Green’ and ‘Monday or Tuesday’, is distinctly Woolfian in style and length, and
Fry comments that the task he has attempted to undertake is one for ‘Mrs Virginia
Woolf’, whose prose style he compares to the painting style of Survage. Fry’s word-
painting entitled ‘The Town’ is poetic, highly descriptive and emotionally evocative,
using rhythmic, flowing prose, the pace of which is carefully measured by many
semi-colons and commas, much like Woolf’s experimental sketches:
[H]ard green leaves, delicate green leaves, veined all over with black lines,
touched with rust between the veins, always more and more minutely articulated
… Between houses and leaves there move the shapes of men … their shadows
stain the walls for a moment; they do not even rustle the leaves.38
The slightly sombre tone of Fry’s descriptive sketch is also similar to that of ‘Blue
& Green’.
Woolf’s essay ‘Pictures and Portraits’ anticipates ‘Blue & Green’ in which the
narrator immerses herself visually, then imaginatively, into a ‘pool of green’ and then
a pool of blue, the latter of which ‘closes over’ her consciousness (CSF, 136). Woolf
attempts in this sketch to challenge the reader to reflect upon the relationship between
a sensation of colour and its signification in language. As McLaurin observes, ‘the
way in which we see things, our “reality”, is bound up with our conventions …
colour-words depend upon the kind of language game we happen to be engaged in’.39
Woolf’s sketch is an attempt to render colour in language, but the common names
for colour, such as ‘blue’ and ‘green’, are deemed inadequate. This is suggested by
the titles of each sketch, ‘BLUE.’ and ‘GREEN.’, which are followed by full stops,
indicating the limited expressive capacity of these names. Woolf juxtaposes these
names with detailed descriptive paragraphs that represent colour perception in an
alternative form. ‘Blue & Green’ offers associative portraits of sensations of colour.
In the original Hogarth edition of Monday or Tuesday, the two sketches have the
appearance of paintings, as the paragraphs are almost square and are positioned in the
centre of two pages opposite one another. Thus, both in terms of their spatialization
and content, they resemble paintings hanging in a gallery (see Figure 1).
37
Roger Fry, ‘Modern French Art at the Mansard Gallery’, A Roger Fry Reader, ed.
Christopher Reed (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 339–42; 341.
38
Fry, ‘Modern French Art at the Mansard Gallery’, A Roger Fry Reader, 341–2.
39
McLaurin, Virginia Woolf: The Echoes Enslaved, 71.
Figure 1 ‘Blue & Green’, from Monday or Tuesday (London: Hogarth, 1921) © The Society of Authors. Reproduction provided
by the Mortimer Rare Book Room, Smith College.
74 Virginia Woolf
S.P. Rosenbaum has argued for the primary influence of Moore’s philosophy on
Woolf, and he suggests that her analysis of consciousness in ‘Blue & Green’ reflects
Moore’s view of consciousness as ‘diaphanous’.40 The examples of contrasting
colour sensations that Moore adopts in ‘The Refutation of Idealism’ find striking
parallel in ‘Blue & Green’. However this sketch is a playful response to Moore’s
appeal to reflect on the sensation of colours, and shifts the nature of the problem
from what we mean by terms like ‘esse’ or the copula ‘is’ to the inadequacy of
the terms ‘blue’ and ‘green’. Moore’s philosophy is centrally concerned with the
accuracy of language and, like much analytic philosophy, his essays painstakingly
clarify what he means by key words and statements, as my discussion of ‘The
Refutation of Idealism’ shows. But Moore and Woolf have different ideas about
words and their relationship to truth. Simple statements like ‘the sky is blue’ and
‘the grass is green’ are sometimes ‘utterly false’, according to Woolf. Sometimes
simple statements and common words, like ‘blue’ for instance, do not capture a
subject’s experience truthfully because they suggest something that is too simple,
general and vague. McLaurin aptly recruits ‘Blue & Green’ as Woolf’s example
of the many ‘shades’ of things that can fall under such universal headings as blue
and green.41 What I want to consider is how this sketch can be read as a response
to Moore’s ‘Refutation of Idealism’ and as an attempt, like Post-Impressionist
painting in its early stages, to create affect in the reader through the creative and
imaginative rendering of colour in language.
‘Blue & Green’ incorporates different philosophical approaches to the nature
of colour – as an independent object, as a property of objects, and as a power
inherent within objects due to the effect of light on their surfaces. The first picture
‘GREEN.’, describes green as an object, a ‘pool of green’, which is caused by the
refraction of light by glass: ‘The pointed fingers of glass hang downwards. The
light slides down the glass, and drops a pool of green. All day long the ten fingers
of the lustre drop green upon the marble.’ Initially it is presented as a power, the
effect of light on glass, then as an independent object, ‘a pool of green’. Below
is the first picture in full (see Figure 1 for the text’s presentation in the original
Hogarth edition):
GREEN.
The pointed fingers of glass hang downwards.
The light slides down the glass, and drops a pool
of green. All day long the ten fingers of the
40
S.P. Rosenbaum, English Literature and British Philosophy (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1971), ch. 15; 320–25.
41
McLaurin, Virginia Woolf: The Echoes Enslaved, 74. In his chapter entitled
‘Colour’, McLaurin goes on to offer a reading of Woolf’s use of colour in The Waves as
an attempt to create psychological volume, a reading situated in relation to the theories of
colour developed by Roger Fry and Charles Mauron. For an alternative, feminist reading of
Woolf’s use of colour in The Waves, see Goldman, The Feminist Aesthetics, ch. 14.
lustre drop green upon the marble. The feathers

of parakeets – their harsh cries – sharp blades of
palm trees – green too; green needles glittering
in the sun. But the hard glass drips on to the
marble; the pools hover above the desert sand;
the camels lurch through them; the pools settle
on the marble; rushes edge them; weeds clog them;
here and there a white blossom; the frog flops
over; at night the stars are set there unbroken.
Evening comes, and the shadow sweeps the green
over the mantelpiece; the ruffled surface of ocean.
No ships come; the aimless waves sway beneath
the empty sky. It’s night; the needles drip blots
of blue. The green’s out. (MT, 66)
At the beginning of the sketch, consciousness is presented passively, as it becomes

infused by the green like a dye running through water. This equivocation between
consciousness and its objects is of the kind that Moore argues we need to resist
through reflecting upon consciousness as something distinct from its objects.
Following Hume, the sketch then assumes an active, associative theory of mind,
as the perception of a ‘pool’ of ‘green’ provokes thoughts of green objects. Rather
than being one impression or idea, as Moore’s essay implicitly assumes, green is
presented as a volatile, multifaceted space: ‘The feathers of parakeets – their harsh
cries – sharp blades of palm trees – green, too; green needles glittering in the sun.’
The sensation is not stable or simple but transforms under the associative activity
of the mind. From these objects, the narrator imagines an exotic landscape which
carries particular emotional resonances. The desert scene is slightly threatening and
inhospitable: birds cry harshly, leaves have the appearance of needles and blades,
weeds ‘clog’ the ‘pools’, and there is no sign of human civilization in the picture.
The expression of an object’s ‘emotional and associative evocation in the subject’,
which the Post-Impressionists viewed as the proper task of art, accurately describes
what Woolf attempts in this sketch.42 Like John’s piece of green glass in ‘Solid
Objects’, the object ‘green’ becomes inextricably mixed with consciousness. In
Woolf’s sketch, to reflect upon green and the sensation of green, as Moore suggests,
does not reveal consciousness apart from its object, but rather their dynamic
interrelations. Woolf encourages the reader, contra Moore, to experience colour not
habitually, ‘like this’ (E4, 160), but imaginatively, associatively and emotionally.
The narrator’s impulse to convert something abstract and non-representational,
like a patch of green, into a representational and discursive landscape might refer
to Woolf’s difficulty in coming to terms with the abstraction integral to much
Post-Impressionist painting, an ambivalence she expressed in a letter to Violet
Dickinson following the second Post-Impressionist exhibition at the Grafton
42
Goldman, The Feminist Aesthetics, 125.
76 Virginia Woolf
Galleries in 1912: ‘The Grafton, thank God, is over; artists are an abominable race.
The furious excitement of these people all the winter over their pieces of canvas
coloured green and blue, is odious’ (L2, 15). However, by 1916, Woolf was coming
to terms with the process of observing patches of colours and reflecting upon their
expressive and discursive potential. In a letter to Duncan Grant in December 1916,
she expresses her changing engagement with colour in painting:
I began a letter to you, in my head at least, some days ago, after seeing your
pictures at the Omega. I liked the one over the fireplace immensely: the green and
blue one, I mean; which seemed to me divinely romantic and imaginative. Lord!
How tired I got of those sturdy pots and pans, with red billiard balls attached to
them … I was taken round by Roger … he showed me minute patches of black,
and scrapings of a sort of graining upon which the whole composition depended.
And I believe it did too. Certainly, it is a most remarkable art. (L2, 130)
While ‘GREEN.’ begins with observations during the daytime, it ends with the
onset of darkness. As such, the second sketch ‘BLUE.’ suggests a perception of
blue that is purely imaginative, as it occurs at night-time when colour is no longer
visible. Given this emphasis on imagination as opposed to empirical perception,
the sketch describing ‘BLUE.’ is surreal and fantastic:
BLUE.
The snub-nosed monster rises to the surface
and spouts through his blunt nostrils two columns
of water, which, fiery-white in the centre, spray
off into a fringe of blue beads. Strokes of blue
line the black tarpaulin of his hide. Slushing the
water through mouth and nostrils he sinks, heavy
with water, and the blue closes over him dowsing
the polished pebbles of his eyes. Thrown upon
the beach he lies, blunt, obtuse, shedding dry blue
scales. Their metallic blue stains the rusty iron
on the beach. Blue are the ribs of the wrecked
rowing boat. A wave rolls beneath the blue bells.
But the cathedral’s different, cold, incense laden,
faint blue with the veils of madonnas. (MT, 67)
The snub-nosed monster submerged in a sea of blue functions as an apt metaphor

for the narrator’s psychological absorption in the sensation of blue. Woolf paints
a picture of extinction, not by water, but by colour. Blue is linked to ideas of
death, decay and transcendence. The ‘snub-nosed’ monster ‘[t]hrown upon the
beach’ and ‘shedding’ his ‘scales’ appears vulnerable, drowned and washed up on
the beach like the ‘wrecked rowing boat’ with its exposed ‘ribs’. Death leads to
thoughts of the divine: the bells of a perhaps partly submerged ocean temple, and a
cathedral filled with wreaths of incense and the ‘faint blue … veils of madonnas’.
The narrator does not present the perception of green or blue as a simple act of
reflection, as Moore suggests, nor does she find blue or green to be one, universal
thing. Rather, they are complex phenomena that are apprehended imaginatively
and associatively. In his comments about knowledge as an awareness of the objects
in consciousness, Moore argues that:
To be aware of the sensation of blue is not to be aware of a mental image – of

a ‘thing’, of which ‘blue’ and some other element are constituent parts in the
same sense in which blue and glass are constituents of a blue bead. It is to be
aware of an awareness of blue; awareness being used, in both cases, in exactly
the same sense.43
Woolf’s sketch does not undermine the independent reality of colour but seeks,
through a new language game, to find alternative ways of representing colour
that, like the paintings of her contemporaries, create affect in the reader/viewer.44
One of the dinner guests in ‘Walter Sickert’ laments the failure of contemporary
society to experience colour in itself, rather than as a signal suggesting action.
It is, he claims, one of the ‘worst’ consequences of ‘living in a highly organised
community’ (CE2, 233). Through its experimental form, ‘Blue & Green’ disrupts
practical and habituated responses to colour and challenges the reader to stop and
reflect creatively upon its associative nature and emotional effects.
Moore’s philosophy constitutes a defence of our common-sense beliefs. While
expressing a desire to confirm the beliefs of ordinary people, he makes reductive
and universal assumptions as to what ‘ordinary’ people think, perceive and feel.
In contrast, Woolf considers not only the subjective nature of colour perception
– how age, occupation and personal history can influence the way a person
experiences colour – but also the changes that colour was undergoing as a material
phenomenon in the art of her time. Moore goes to great lengths in ‘The Refutation
of Idealism’ to define what he means by esse, percipi and the copula ‘is’, but he
approaches the terms ‘blue’ and ‘green’ as if they are simple, unproblematic things.
To ‘introspect the sensation of blue’ or green, as Moore demands, begins with the
false assumption that these words express a universal idea and that there is one,
universal ‘sensation of blue’.45 As Woolf’s essay ‘Walter Sickert’ makes explicit,
‘different people see colours differently’, and common-sense statements such as
‘The grass is green’ or ‘The sky is blue’ may not have captured what it was to talk
about colour in Britain in the 1920s (CE2, 234; O, 70). ‘Blue & Green’ illustrates
43
44
I am indebted to Kate Flint for the suggestion that Woolf’s emphasis in this
sketch comes to focus upon creating affect in the reader, not just representing states of
consciousness in the perceiver.
45
78 Virginia Woolf
the limitations of representations of colour perception in everyday speech, and

offers an alternative language of colour that emphasizes its associative nature and
emotional power. I turn now to another secondary quality and mode of experience
that is common but for which there are insufficient words – physical pain – and its
relationship to the realm of ordinary life.
Part 2
Rethinking Ordinary Experience
3
Pain, Common Illness and Ordinary Life
In casting accounts, never forget to begin with the state of the body.
(Virginia Woolf, D2, 228)
Pain, in one form or another, is an inseparable part of everyday life.

(Cecil G. Helman)
As readers of Woolf’s diaries know, physical illness and regimes of preventative

health care and health management were integral aspects of her daily life. She
periodically suffered from a range of recurring ailments including headaches,
loss of appetite, an elevated pulse, sleeplessness, fatigue and other symptoms
which were commonly diagnosed by her physicians and referred to by Woolf
herself as a form of ‘influenza’. These symptoms intersected in complex ways
with her periods of nervous exhaustion and mental illness. During her times of
illness, doctors and family members determined the amount of time Woolf could
spend writing each day and limited her social activities, while Leonard oversaw
various preventative health-care practices pertaining to diet and exercise when
Virginia was in good health. Her experience of periodic physical illness made
Woolf well aware of the primary, indeed often formative, role of the body in daily
experience, a view expressed in the first epigraph to this chapter. Despite the
recurring presence of physical illness in her life, there are only a few occasions
in her fiction and essays in which she explores physical illness in detail. This is
possibly a reflection of her own feeling as expressed in the essay ‘Professions for
Women’ that as an author she had not resolved the problem of how to tell ‘the truth
about [her] own experiences as a body’ in her fiction (CE2, 288). Nevertheless,
the central importance of the body and its material needs to all other facets of
human experience and life is a theme that recurs in Woolf’s writing – for example,
in A Room of One’s Own, which argues that the lack of women writers in English
literary history is a product of their lack of material resources, from good food, to
private rooms: ‘One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined
well. The lamp in the spine does not light on beef and prunes’ (AROO, 16). All
aspects of human life and activity, she reminds us, even the seemingly rarefied
activities of the poet or playwright, are the product of ‘suffering’ bodies that rely

Cecil G. Helman, Culture, Health and Illness. An Introduction for Health
Professionals, 2nd edn (Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann, 1990), 158.

For a detailed discussion of Woolf’s illnesses during her life see Hermione Lee’s
biography, Virginia Woolf (New York: Vintage, 1999), ch. 10 and Woolf’s diaries.
82 Virginia Woolf
upon ‘grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in’
(AROO, 38). One of Woolf’s contributions to narratives of and about the body is
the 1926 essay ‘On Being Ill’. This is a short but extremely suggestive exploration
into the experience of pain associated with quite common illnesses and ailments,
and the changes illness effects upon our relationship to language, literature, other
people, nature and the sphere of work. While the essay is playful and humorous
– rambling over a whole range of topics so as to mimic the kind of plotless and
rash narrative Woolf sees as fitting to the experience of sickness (E4, 317; 320) – it
contains more serious undertones, particularly on the topic of why illness remains
an ignored and often marginalized part of ordinary experience.
In order to establish a historical context for my analysis of ordinary life
and common illness in this chapter, I will begin by discussing developments
in technologies of health care in Britain in the early twentieth century and the
discourses surrounding common illnesses, such as influenza and the cold,
which were circulating around the time Woolf wrote ‘On Being Ill’. The second
section of the chapter discusses the various themes of Woolf’s essay: pain and
its representation, literature and illness, her critique of the Platonic conception
of the mind–body relation and her account of the role of the sick body in the
acquisition of knowledge more generally. ‘On Being Ill’ is also concerned with
the social marginalization of the sick and their relationship to the healthy masses.
In the essay, Woolf figures the relationship between illness and health through
geographical and military metaphors, which I consider in the third section of
this chapter. While these metaphors have recurred in representations of health
and disease throughout Western history, I argue that in ‘On Being Ill’ they take
on new meanings and must be understood in relation to attitudes to illness and
public health in Britain at the time, as well as other social and political discourses
relating to health that were circulating in Europe during the inter-war period.
Woolf politicizes the experience of illness in her essay and, contrary to dominant
medical and lay perspectives which tend to view illness in only negative ways,
her essay argues that periods of common illness can offer enabling insights into
what might be termed the various ‘ideologies of the healthy’ (being the powerful
majority and therefore the producers of ideology in Louis Althusser’s sense of the
term) and the relationship between the individual and the community. To this end,
‘On Being Ill’ seeks to validate the perspective of the invalid, and while illness and
pain are not enjoyable or desirable states Woolf suggests that, as integral aspects
of ordinary life, they require much more attention and narrative representation so
that as experiences they might be better understood and appreciated. The final part
of the chapter offers a close reading of Rachel Vinrace’s fever in The Voyage Out.
While Rachel’s fever offers a slightly different version of illness in that it proves
fatal, Woolf’s detailed account of her experience further illustrates how illness
can radically disrupt our sense of the ordinary world and conventional values and,
like ‘On Being Ill’, demonstrates the importance of understanding and accepting
illness as a part of the ordinary rather than simply a threat to it.
Pain, Common Illness and Ordinary Life 83
Technologies of Health in Early Twentieth-century Britain
Michael Whitworth observes that the health of the nation became a key concern
of the British government and general public in the early twentieth century. He
relates this to a shift from the nineteenth-century cult of individual liberty to an
increasing emphasis on national efficiency. Importantly, a focus on national health
was intimately related to concerns about national defence. The rejection of many
working-class men from enlisting in the army between 1897 and 1902 increased
political and social awareness of the importance of health to the nation’s future.
A new emphasis on national health was coupled with changes in medical practice
and attitudes to health management.
In Political Anatomy of the Body. Medical Knowledge in Britain in the
Twentieth Century, David Armstrong argues that a change occurred in the ‘diagram
of power’ inscribed by modern medicine from the beginning of the century. The
medical gaze, he suggests, shifted from an analysis of the ‘microscopic detail of the
individual body’ to the ‘undifferentiated spaces’ that lay between bodies, thereby
forging a new political anatomy. An extended medical gaze became directed upon
the relations between the sick and the healthy in society, and that gaze ‘began to
focus with greater intensity on the potentially ill: the healthy and the normal’.
This change in the medical gaze was partly a consequence of the new science of
bacteriology, which arose following the discovery of bacterial causes of disease
in 1877. This discovery revolutionized medical and practical views on illness,
and the focus of disease management was no longer centred on the environment
but infection. According to Armstrong, the new dispensaries instituted throughout
Britain in the twentieth century reflected this changing attitude to the management
of infection. While still serving as out-patient hospitals as they had done in the
past, they also involved new programmes whereby nurses would move out into the
community, visiting patients and screening and observing friends and relatives who
might be at risk due to their proximity to the sick. This practice was particularly
applied to tubercular patients and their families and friends. Other interventionist
and surveillance processes were introduced into the British public health system
during the early twentieth century, such as the compulsory notification of certain
communicable disease cases (such as tuberculosis from 1913) and weekly notices
of infectious disease cases in England and Wales in medical journals such as

Michael Whitworth, Virginia Woolf: Authors in Context (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2005), 33.

David Armstrong, Political Anatomy of the Body. Medical Knowledge in Britain in
the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 6.

Armstrong, Political Anatomy of the Body, 8–9.

Sir George Newman, ‘Progress in Public Health’, from his presidential address to
the Sanitary Science Section of the Congress of the Royal Sanitary Institute at Edinburgh
in July 1925, published in The Lancet, 25 July 1925; The Lancet, 1925, vol. II (London:
Hazell, Watson and Viney), 165–8.
84 Virginia Woolf
The Lancet; compulsory vaccinations; increasingly interventionist maternal care

practices (particularly for the lower classes); and the use of survey techniques to
acquire a more detailed knowledge of patterns of health and illness in different
parts of the country. Armstrong’s Foucauldian analysis of British medicine in the
twentieth century argues that such disciplinary regimes facilitated the surveillance
of not only the ‘abnormal’ – the sick and ‘deviant’ – but also the normal. As my
analysis of ‘On Being Ill’ in the following sections will show, this increasing focus
at the time upon the health of the citizen and the relationship between the invalid
and the social body finds expression in Woolf’s essay.
Following the new science of bacteriology in Britain from the 1880s, and a
concomitant focus upon preventative health care, came an emphasis on individual
and social hygiene in the early decades of the twentieth century. As the agent of
illness was now seen to be the individual rather than the environment, health was
now also viewed as the responsibility of the individual and a social objective.
George Newman, Chief Medical Officer to the Ministry of Health from 1919 and
expert in bacteriology and infectious disease, writes in the British Medical Journal
in 1920 that the new hygiene depends upon educated people being ‘willing and
able to practise the way of health’. In 1925, he again stresses the importance of
public education in hygiene as the key factor in health reform and presents public
health as not only a personal, but a national and Imperial responsibility: ‘[W]e
must learn to think of public health, not only in terms of the individual, the home
or the parish, but nationally, Imperially, and even internationally.’
The issues of The Lancet from 1925 and 1926 clearly indicate these new
trends in, and attitudes to, medicine and public health. Several items address the
‘new hygiene’ and consider the transmission of disease in a variety of everyday
contexts. In ‘The Trend of Modern Hygiene’, published on 9 May 1925, Andrew
Balfour writes that the new hygiene is the most significant and far-reaching
change to have occurred in modern medicine in recent times and stresses
the importance of educating the ‘lay public’ about health. A new emphasis on
hygiene obviously assisted in minimizing the spread of communicable diseases,
but items in The Lancet also suggest a developing paranoia in the middle classes
about the transmission and social risk of common and minor illnesses, like the
common cold and influenza – the latter of which Woolf mentions in ‘On Being
Ill’. A commentary titled ‘Germ Dissemination’, published in The Lancet in April
1925, criticizes the ‘recklessness’ of those members of the public who display a
disregard for ‘the possible spread of infections from … coughing, sneezing, and
nose-blowing performances’ in public and urges the use of ‘paper handkerchiefs’
and ‘watchfulness’ to minimize the spread of infection. The item is accompanied
by an illustration, commonly displayed on trains, trams, buses and in theatres at

Armstrong devotes separate chapters to these different systems of health and
infection management.

Quoted in Armstrong, Political Anatomy of the Body, 10–11.

Newman, ‘Progress in Public Health’, The Lancet, 1925, vol II, 168.
the time, showing a man on a train sneezing directly into the face of a child sitting
in the seat in front of him, with the following caption beneath:
This is the man with the cold,

He shares his germs with neighbours and friends,
And he keeps the children from growing old.10
The author goes on to suggest that such behaviour is particular to the ‘lowest
classes’ and not evident in ‘well-educated citizens’ – a class-based attitude to
illness and infection that is expressed in a number of letters and commentaries
published in the 1925 and 1926 volumes of The Lancet.
A similar letter was published in October 1925 bewailing those citizens who, it
maintained, spread their germs by continuing their normal activities in the public
sphere when sick, and urging the introduction of separate train carriages for the
infected:
If everyday life must throughout the winter be cursed with such members of
society (who are sick but continue as normal) let them at least be segregated.
Let them travel only in railway carriages intended for the purpose and clearly
labelled ‘colds’, and there let them close the windows and there let them create
an emulsion of pride and micrococci to their heart’s content.11
In addition to letters such as these are a number of articles in the 1925 volumes of
The Lancet about the nature, spread and prevention of the common cold and its
relationship to influenza, which seem to be in response to a high incidence of the
common cold that winter. One letter to the editor in September suggests reports of
an ‘epidemic’ of the common cold that year.12
As I will show, Woolf’s essay ‘On Being Ill’ implicitly comments on these
current trends in social hygiene, the increasing social paranoia13 about infection
10
n.a., ‘Germ Dissemination’, The Lancet, 1925, vol. I, 904.
11
A letter signed F.R.C.S., 10 October 1925, The Lancet, 1925, vol. II, 781–2.
12
John Alexander, 19 September 1925, The Lancet, vol. II, 626. See also the essay
‘Colds’ (1 August 1925), The Lancet, 1925, vol. II, 236, which mentions a number of books
published that year that deal with the nature, treatment, and particularly the prevention, of
the common cold. In ‘An Address on the Prophylaxis of the Common Cold and Febrile
Catarrhs’ (21 November 1925) originally delivered as a lecture to the Medical Officers of
the Schools Association, A.I. Simey discusses the issue of colds in schools; The Lancet,
1925, vol. II, 1051–4. ‘Deaths from Influenza’ (21 March 1925) responds to a request by
Sir Alfred Butt to the Minister of Health for the removal from factories, workshops and
offices of people in the early and infectious stages of influenza, with the equivalent of sick
pay assured to employees; The Lancet, 1925, vol. I, 635.
13
One example of this is an article titled ‘Infection by Books’ by J.E. McCartney
(25 July 1925), which discusses public library books and letters as potential sources of
86 Virginia Woolf
and illness, and demands from certain sectors of the public that the sick be
segregated, controlled and effectively marginalized by laws and other state-
directed measures. The sense one receives from looking at journals such as The
Lancet in 1925 and 1926 is that illness, even common illness, is viewed by both
professionals and the middle-class public as a problem to be managed and avoided,
and that the sick are to be kept away from the healthy as much as possible. In
contrast to the perspectives of the healthy on sickness which dominate the pages
of medical journals and medical histories, Woolf as a convalescent reflects upon
the implications of these attitudes and regimes of power from the perspective of
the invalid and their suffering body.
The Daily Drama of the Body14
Woolf wrote ‘On Being Ill’ in October 1925. She had been unwell throughout
September and October and remained unwell for much of November, suffering
from intermittent headaches (her ‘odd amphibious life of headache’ as she calls it
on 5 September; D3, 38), tiredness and general nervous exhaustion, referring on
several occasions to a perceived instability in the nerves in her neck and spine (D3,
40; 43). As a result of this prolonged period of ill health, her writing output was
limited to that essay and a few reviews, and her social activities were also much
reduced (D3, 46). ‘On Being Ill’ was published in January 1926 in T.S. Eliot’s
New Criterion, and while Eliot was unenthusiastic about the essay both Virginia
and Leonard considered it one of her best (D3, 49 and note 2). The essay discusses
the effect that the pain and social isolation that attends common ailments, such as
influenza and a headache, has upon the perspectives and values Woolf attributes
to everyday, healthy consciousness, which is represented in the essay by the
‘army of the upright’ (E4, 322). This metaphor evokes ideas of militancy, the state
and progress. The ‘army’ of the healthy is linked in the essay to capitalism and
imperialism. I interpret this metaphor and its sometimes negative associations to
refer to the state or nation as a bureaucracy, rather than the ‘masses’ or individuals
who compose it. As Woolf reflects in her discussion of patriarchal society in A
Room of One’s Own, it is ‘absurd to blame any class or any sex, as a whole [for
the effects of patriarchy]. Great bodies of people are never responsible for what
they do. They are driven by instincts [and imperatives] which are not within their
control’ (AROO, 34). The idea of the healthy as an ‘army’ will also be considered
in relation to other social and cultural discourses of the period that were concerned
with illness and the invalid’s relationship to the wider community or nation.
infection. The author discusses various forms of communicable disease, concluding that
books and letters do not pose a significant threat of disease transmission with the exception
of smallpox; The Lancet, 1925, vol. II, 212. Such articles reveal that concerns about germ
and disease transmission were reaching fairly extreme levels at this time.
14
Woolf, ‘On Being Ill’, E4, 318.
At the start of the essay Woolf asserts that illness, while ‘common’ to everyone,
is an experience that remains ignored by literature which, she claims, is concerned
only with the ‘doings of the mind’ (E4, 317; 318). Ailments such as a headache,
toothache and fever are indeed common experiences. However, as Woolf observes,
a complexity arises regarding the shared or private nature of common illness, due to
the inexpressibility of physical pain. In The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry discusses
the political and social consequences of pain’s inexpressibility. Pain is rendered
unsharable not only through its ‘resistance to language’ but its capacity to actively
destroy language, ‘deconstructing it into the pre-language of cries and groans’.15
In her introduction, Scarry refers to ‘On Being Ill’ in which Woolf laments the
‘poverty of … language’ to express physical pain, how language ‘runs dry’ when
a sufferer tries to ‘describe a pain in his head to a doctor’ (E4, 318).16 Ludwig
Wittgenstein, a contemporary of Woolf’s, discusses the relationship between
our private sensations and names in his Philosophical Investigations (1953).
He considers how words refer to sensations and how a person comes to learn to
associate a certain word with an inner sensation:
How do words refer to sensations? – There doesn’t seem to be any problem here;
don’t we talk about sensations every day, and give them names? But how is the
connexion between the name and the thing set up? This question is the same as:
how does a human being learn the meaning of the names of sensations? – of the
word ‘pain’ for example.17
While Wittgenstein here reflects upon how the connection between a subjective
sensation and its name is established, Woolf’s concern is that language in
its current form is not capable of representing the diverse forms that pain can
assume, or bodily sensations more generally. Although pain is, as the second
epigraph to this chapter states, a part of everyday life, it assumes many forms and
its experience is influenced by social and cultural factors.18 Woolf suggests that
the physical experiences of the invalid are both culturally under-represented and
lack an adequate language. Observing this theme in The Waves, Kate Flint finds
that the novel suggests language requires ‘“cracks [and] fissures” to convey that
which disrupts material existence’.19 If the experience of illness and pain is under-
represented in literature, this is also true of medical literature which provides
information about technologies of public health – theories of disease, illness and
their management – but little in terms of the actual experience of illness itself from
15
Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain. The Making and Unmaking of the World (London:
Oxford University Press, 1985), 4; 172.
16
Scarry, The Body in Pain, 3–6.
17
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958), book 1, sec. 244, 89e.
18
Helman, Culture, Health and Illness, 160.
19
Kate Flint, ed., ‘Introduction’, The Waves (London: Penguin, 1992), xxxii.
88 Virginia Woolf
the sufferer’s point of view. Pain, Woolf argues in ‘On Being Ill’, is too general a
word for a sensation that can assume so many different forms; the sufferer must
take their ‘pain in one hand’ and ‘a lump of pure sound in the other’ and ‘crush
them together’ until a ‘brand new word … drops out’ (E4, 319). We need a ‘new
language’ for pain, she suggests, one that is ‘primitive, subtle, sensual, obscene’
(E4, 319). However, before we create a new language we need a new ‘hierarchy
of the passions’, a revaluation of values, in which love is relegated in favour of
temperature, and jealousy ‘give[s] place to the pangs of sciatica’ (E4, 319). If
language ‘has no words for the shiver and the headache’ (E4, 318) as sensations,
the effects of pain or a ‘little rise of temperature’ on perception and thought can be
communicated (E4, 317). Thus, while ‘On Being Ill’ does not represent physical
pain through a new language of cries and groans, it does describe how the whims
of the sick body alter our conventional or ordinary ideas about self and the world.
The essay achieves this by presenting the perspective of the patient, one validated
by the fact that Woolf was actually in a state of convalescence whilst writing the
essay.
Woolf criticizes what she claims is literature’s failure to account for the ‘daily
drama of the body’ (E4, 318): ‘Novels, one would have thought, would have
been devoted to influenza; epic poems to typhoid; odes to pneumonia; lyrics to
toothache’ (E4, 317). There are she claims but a few exceptions in the writings of
De Quincey and Proust. Instead of narrating the experiences of the body, literature
has privileged those of the mind:
People write always about the doings of the mind; the thoughts that come into it;
its noble plans; how it has civilised the universe. They show it ignoring the body
in the philosopher’s turret; or kicking the body, like an old leather football, across
leagues of snow and desert in the pursuit of conquest or discovery. (E4, 318)
However, contrary to Woolf’s claim, much Romantic and Victorian literature

does deal with illness. In Illness as Metaphor, Susan Sontag explores literary
representations of tuberculosis in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature,
and cancer and mental illness in twentieth-century literature.20 In Somatic
Fictions: Imagining Illness in Victorian Culture, Athena Vrettos suggests ‘[i]t is
difficult to find many Victorian novels that do not participate in a general dialogue
about sickness and health’.21 Vrettos’ study draws upon the writings of George
Eliot, the Brontës, Elizabeth Gaskell, Henry James and George Meredith, authors
Woolf had read. However, representations of illness in Romantic and Victorian
literature tend to focus upon terminal physical illnesses and mental illness. More
minor ailments such as headache, toothache, colds and influenza are ignored in
Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978).
20
Athena Vrettos, Somatic Fictions. Imagining Illness in Victorian Culture (Stanford,

21
CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 1.

favour of the greater dramas of melancholy, consumption and hysteria.22 With

the notable exception of Thomas Mann’s detailed exploration of physical illness
and the sanatorium in Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain), shell-shock and
other forms of ‘madness’ broadly conceived dominate representations of illness
in modernism.23 Mental illness (such as schizophrenia, depression, paranoia
and anxiety) also tends to be privileged over representations of physical illness
in postmodern literature and film (possibly with the exception of AIDS), and
illnesses such as schizophrenia have been utilized as metaphors for postmodern
subjectivity by theorists such as Fredric Jameson, Felix Guattari and Gilles
Deleuze.24 Woolf’s argument then that literature ignores common and more
mundane forms of illness seems justified. This situation also appears to be true of
medical literature. In an article in The Lancet titled ‘Colds’, the author observes
that ‘[s]cientific interest in a disease is apt to vary directly with its rarity, so that
minor maladies … do not receive that attention in text-books of medicine which
their prevalence would appear to warrant’.25
The theory of the body and its relation to mind that ‘On Being Ill’ critiques is
derived less from literature than the ‘philosopher’s turret’ (E4, 318). It refers to what
Elizabeth Spelman calls the tradition of ‘somatophobia’, or fear of the body, which
has dominated notions of subjectivity in Western philosophy since pre-Socratic
times.26 Feminist critics have explored how such negative views of the body find
22
I am aware that ‘common’ illnesses change over time and that it is difficult to
always draw simple distinctions between minor and potentially life-threatening forms of
illness. For example, tuberculosis was very common in the nineteenth century (and was
still prevalent in the early twentieth century); influenza, while common in Woolf’s time,
was a potentially very dangerous form of illness as evidenced by the devastating influenza
pandemic of 1918–19. What I think Woolf argued, and what I am arguing, is that historically
literature, and culture more broadly, tends to focus on the dramas of terminal illness and
mental illness, affording less attention to mundane or non-life-threatening illness.
23
Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, trans. H.T. Lowe-Porter (London: Penguin,
1960). This was first published in Germany in 1924; the first English translation was not
available until 1927. For a discussion of forms of madness and modernism see Kylie Valentine,
Psychoanalysis, Psychiatry and Modernist Literature (Hampshire: Palgrave, 2003).
24
On schizophrenia and postmodernism see Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or,
the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991) and Gilles Deleuze and Felix
Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). A preoccupation with mental illness
is evident in the work of postmodern authors such as Don DeLillo (e.g. White Noise,
1985) and Jeanette Winterson (e.g. The Passion, 1987) and films such as Memento (dir.
Christopher Nolan, 2000), Donnie Darko (dir. Richard Kelly, 2001) and The Machinist (dir.
Brad Anderson, 2004).
25
The author cites the common cold as a rare exception in that year to this trend; n.a.
The Lancet, 1925, vol. II, 236.
26
Elizabeth Spelman discusses the idea of ‘somatophobia’ in her essay on
representations of the body in Plato in ‘Woman as Body: Ancient and Contemporary
90 Virginia Woolf
expression in Plato’s philosophy, and the Manichaean model of soul–body relations

that ‘On Being Ill’ critiques is most likely derived from Woolf’s reading of Plato.27
Emily Dalgarno argues that Woolf ‘wrote of Plato primarily as a poet and image-
maker’, and several of the images and metaphors used to describe the soul–body
relation in ‘On Being Ill’ are based on those in Plato’s dialogues.28 Woolf had
translated two dialogues that discuss the mind–body relation, the Phaedrus and
the Symposium, by the time she wrote ‘On Being Ill’ and had previously explored
this relation in the context of the Phaedrus in Jacob’s Room.29
Plato’s dualist philosophy distinguishes between the realm of matter
apprehended through the senses and the realm of Forms known rationally by the
intellect. As eternal and unchanging, Forms constitute real and perfect knowledge
while the material realm is ever-changing and therefore unreliable, and is
comprised of secondary copies of the Forms. In the dialogues, the body, as a part
of the changing realm of matter, is presented as a deceptive and morally corrupting
creature that must be disciplined by the rational soul if the subject is to attain
real knowledge. In Book Three of the Republic, Socrates describes the body as a
hindrance to the soul and an obstacle to virtue, while in Book Four he claims that
Views’, Feminist Studies 8, no. 1 (1982): 109–131; see also Genevieve Lloyd, The Man of
Reason: ‘Male’ and ‘Female’ in Western Philosophy (London: Methuen, 1984). In Orphic
mythology the body is viewed as a nuisance, an evil and a hindrance to the soul’s grasp of
truth. This association of the body with evil and spiritual defilement reappears in Socratic
accounts of the body (for example, Phaedo) and later in St Paul’s distinction between body
(soma) and flesh (sarx), the latter of which cannot enter the kingdom of God and is the
domain of sin. See Paul S. MacDonald, History of the Concept of Mind: Speculations about
Soul, Mind and Spirit from Homer to Hume (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 37–54; 89–107.
27
Some Platonists have argued that the Manichaeanism present in Plato’s dialogues is
attributable to Socrates, not Plato. For example, in Plato and Platonism, Walter Pater argues
that Plato was not convinced by Socrates’ Manichaeanism, claiming that Plato contributed
to the ‘redemption of matter’, ‘the world of sense’ and a ‘vindication of the dignity of the
body’; Walter Pater, Plato and Platonism (London: Macmillan, 1909), 146. Whether or not
Socrates’ view of the mind–body relation is also attributable to Plato does not concern me
here; it is a model of self that Woolf would have encountered through reading Plato.
28
Emily Dalgarno, Virginia Woolf and the Visible World (Cambridge: Cambridge
29
In Jacob’s Room, Jacob fails to have satisfying relations with women whom he
physically desires but intellectually disrespects: ‘The problem is insoluble. The body is
harnessed to a brain. Beauty goes hand and hand with stupidity’ (JR, 69). In her notes to
the novel, Sue Roe suggests that this quote may be based on Lucretius, De Rerum Natura,
III: ‘The intellect cannot spring up / Alone outside of the body, or live far from blood and
sinews’ (JR, 171, note 18). Earlier, Jacob reads Plato’s Phaedrus, which describes the myth
of the charioteer who seeks to control the virtuous and vicious parts of a divided, immortal
soul. Erotic love is designated here as one of the four types of divine madness. The narrator
of Jacob’s Room states the dialogue is ‘very difficult’, as it contradicts Jacob’s own views,
and is further contradicted by the conspicuous absence of Jacob, both body and soul, at the
end of the novel after he dies in the war (JR, 95).
the appetitive part of the soul can be infected by the pleasures of the body and
must be guarded and ruled over by the rational part of the soul.30 In the Phaedrus,
in which Socrates describes the nature of the human being through the myth of the
chariot and charioteer, the pleasures of the body are deemed to be ‘slavish’, while
in the Phaedo the soul is described as being ‘imprisoned’ in the body.31 ‘On Being
Ill’ parodies this Platonic, and later Christian, concept of the body as a tomb or
prison, and transfers animal and primitive status from body to soul:
The creature within can only gaze through the pane – smudged or rosy; it cannot
separate off from the body like the sheath of a knife or the pod of a pea for a
single instant; it must go through the whole unending procession of changes
… until there comes the inevitable catastrophe; the body smashes itself to
smithereens, and the soul (it is said) escapes. (E4, 318)
The body is figured in this passage as a powerful agent, not a passive object or ‘old
leather football’. Its death is also troubling, described by Woolf as a ‘catastrophe’,
thereby challenging the Manichaean view that the body’s death liberates the soul.
Plato’s association of the rational soul with truth and the good, and the body
with deception, defilement and corruption, is reflected in classical and mediaeval
attitudes to health and illness. In the ancient world, health and cleanliness were
championed as the means to avoid spiritual defilement, and throughout the
mediaeval period many forms of disease including leprosy, syphilis and plague
were viewed as the physical manifestations of moral or spiritual corruption. In
contemporary times, diseases such as AIDS have been understood by some sectors
of the community through similarly moralistic frameworks. The suggestion
in Plato’s dialogues that the rational soul must discipline the unwieldy body is
also echoed in modern discourses of health management. In The Imperative of
Health: Public Health and the Regulated Body, Deborah Lupton argues that
rational mastery of the body continues to be viewed as a prerequisite for health:
‘The response to illness or its threat is to champion greater rationality and bodily
control, pushing the materiality of mortal bodies away in a vain attempt to defy
corporeal disorder and death.’32 The new public health regimes in Britain designed
to aid in the fight against germs, bacteria and ill-health generally exemplify such
an effort to use rationality (in the form of public education, preventative health-
care practices and medical institutions) and bodily control (both by the individual
and within the community) to defy illness and death.
30
Plato, Republic, trans. Paul Shorey, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato including
the Letters, Bollingen Series, LXXI, eds Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (New York:
Pantheon, 1961), 407b–c, pp. 651–2; 441–2, pp. 683–5.
31
Plato, Phaedrus, trans. R. Hackforth, in Collected Dialogues, 258e, p. 504; 250c, p.
497; Phaedo, trans. Hugh Tredennick, in Collected Dialogues, 81, pp. 64–5.
32
Deborah Lupton, The Imperative of Health: Public Heath and the Regulated Body
(London: Sage, 1995), 9.
92 Virginia Woolf
In ‘On Being Ill’, the Platonic view of the body as an ethically corrupt creature
that must be ruled over by sovereign mind is reversed. Woolf rejects the suggestion
that the body’s significance is limited to a few corrupt or distracting passions ‘such
as desire and greed’, beyond which it is ‘null, and negligible, and non-existent’
(E4, 317–18). ‘On the contrary’, she claims, ‘the very opposite is true’. ‘All day,
all night’ the body perpetually ‘intervenes’ upon the soul; ‘it cannot separate off
from the body’, but is itself a ‘slave to it’, particularly during the ‘great wars’ of
illness (E4, 318). Here, Woolf inverts the Socratic image of the body as a slave
to be mastered by the mind, and is perhaps echoing Hume’s notorious claim in
A Treatise of Human Nature that ‘[r]eason is, and ought only to be the slave of
the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey
them’.33 In the Phaedo, Socrates claims that sickness, as a time of intensified
bodily sensation, hampers the pursuit of ‘reality’ to an even greater extent, and
that the body is, more generally, a hindrance to thought:
[T]he body provides us with innumerable distractions in the pursuit of our

necessary sustenance, and any diseases which attack us hinder our quest for
reality. Besides, the body fills us with loves and desires and fears and all sorts of
fancies and a great deal of nonsense, with the result that we literally never get an
opportunity to think at all about anything.34
By contrast, in her essay Woolf explores how the sick body functions as a catalyst
for thought and procures a critical perspective on the attitudes and values that
dominate the world of good health. Illness uproots several ‘ancient and obdurate
oaks’ within us, and in the essay these take the form of various rationalist ideologies
and romantic ideals and sentiments (E4, 317).
‘On Being Ill’ argues that during illness some of the fundamental beliefs and
values of normal, healthy consciousness are challenged. Woolf presents healthy
consciousness as dominated by reason, utility and the values of economic and
social progress which motivate the ‘army of the upright’ as they march ‘to battle’
with the ‘heroism of the ant or the bee’ (E4, 322). ‘[I]f the cities of the Middle West
are to blaze with electric light’, she suggests, ‘Mr Insull [the American financier
and business magnate] “must keep twenty or thirty engagements every day of his
working months”’ (E4, 320, n 5). ‘Mrs Jones’ must catch her train, ‘Mr Smith’
must mend his motor, the cows must be milked, engines must turn and factories
produce (E4, 322). In short, modern life allows no time for illness or idleness. By
contrast, when we are ill the experience of intensified physical sensation dominates
David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, eds David Fate Norton and Mary J.
33
Norton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), sec. 2.3.3, p. 266. For a discussion of the
relationship between reason and the passions in Hume’s Treatise see David Fate Norton,
‘Hume, human nature, and the foundations of morality’, in The Cambridge Companion to
Hume, ed. David Fate Norton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 148–81.
34
Plato, Phaedo, in The Collected Dialogues, 66b–c, p. 49.
consciousness and determines thought and action, but this is not a negative event
for Woolf as it is for Socrates in the Phaedo. Social ‘responsibility [is] shelved’ and
‘reason’ put ‘in abeyance’ and this ‘shelving’ of responsibility and the suspension
of reason enables the ‘invalid’ to perceive self and world in new ways and reflect
sceptically upon the limits of normal, healthy understanding (E4, 324). Thus, in
contrast to Socrates in Plato’s dialogues, Woolf views the daily experiences of
the body, including the sick body, as opportunities for new understandings and
knowledge, not obstacles to knowledge.
Geographies of Health and Illness
Illness is represented in ‘On Being Ill’ through a range of geographical metaphors

which are common to historical presentations of illness and its management.
Spatial metaphors feature prominently in Woolf’s diary during times of illness.
For example, in March 1918 when in bed for a week with influenza, she laments
being ‘divorced’ from her pen, a ‘whole current of life cut off’ (D1, 119). In
January 1919, after having a tooth extracted, she refers to her convalescence
as a time of ‘captivity’ (D1, 234). Deborah Lupton argues that isolation or the
separation of unhealthy and infectious from healthy bodies has been the basic
measure of public health formations since mediaeval times.35 In a different
conceptualization of spatial metaphors in relation to illness, David Armstrong
explains that the practice of modern medicine from the nineteenth century involved
the anatomical mapping of the human body and its ailments, thereby making the
body transparent and legible to the observing eye – a kind of ‘anatomical atlas’.36
However, if by the 1920s the sick body had become increasingly transparent to
the medical gaze, Woolf argues that the experiences of the sick person remained
unrepresented and misunderstood, rendering the medical gaze and the atlas it
envisioned somewhat lacking in important ways. While Woolf’s essay does
consider the geography of health and illness in terms of spatial divisions between
the invalid and the healthy, she examines these metaphors in other ways as well,
and from the perspective of the sick.
35
Lupton, The Imperative of Health, 18–19; Dorothy Porter, Health, Civilization and
the State: A History of Public Health from Ancient to Modern Times (London: Routledge,
1999), 27–30. In mediaeval times the separation of the sick from the healthy was not only
due to the fear of contagion. For example, the segregation of lepers was a result of the social
meanings attached to the disease, leprosy being viewed as punishment for lechery or other
sins; Porter, Health, Civilization and the State, 27. By the early modern period concerns
about contagion gained currency, although an understanding of the spread of disease was
still limited. It was in 1518 that the first measures of a public health policy were introduced
in Britain with the compulsory segregation and house-arrest of plague victims and their
families for six weeks; Porter, Health, Civilization and the State, 41–2.
36
Armstrong, Political Anatomy of the Body, 1.
94 Virginia Woolf
‘On Being Ill’ figures illness as a process of physical estrangement from

ordinary life, an idea I will return to in detail in my discussion of Rachel’s fever
in The Voyage Out. As sickness alters the subject’s perceptions, the pattern of life
also changes: ‘[T]he world has changed its shape; the tools of business grown
remote … the whole landscape of life lies remote and fair, like the shore seen from
a ship far out at sea’ (E4, 319). Illness also alters our relations with others due
to the physical isolation integral to convalescence and the social ostracism that
often attends communicable or more serious forms of illness. Society’s lack of
willingness to bestow sympathy on the sick is interpreted by Woolf as a result of
the negative impact such a ‘burden’ would have on social and economic progress.
Indeed, from the State perspective, illness has historically been viewed as a threat
to the wider community and civilization, as well as their progress; hence the
various disciplinary regimes implemented to contain and control illness. If the
healthy were to sympathize with the pains of another, Woolf continues, civilization
would run to rack and ruin: ‘[B]uildings would cease to rise; roads would peter out
into grassy tracks; there would be an end of music and painting.’ Thus, the healthy
will always find ‘some little distraction’ to avoid the burden of ‘sympathy’ (E4,
319). Woolf sarcastically observes that sympathy in modern times is a folly that
is ‘dispensed chiefly by the laggards and failures, women for the most part’ who
have ‘dropped out of the race’ to spend time on such ‘unprofitable’ activities (E4,
320). Both illness and sympathy are at odds with profit and progress.
The idea of a common humanity, or even a unified community, and the
possibility of shared experience are therefore challenged during times of illness.
The Romantic view of nature and humanity as a harmonious organic unity, a
‘world so shaped that it echoes every groan’, and ‘human beings’ ‘tied together
by common needs and fears’ are deemed ‘illusion[s]’ (E4, 320). This situation
is exemplified by the shell-shocked Septimus Warren Smith in Mrs. Dalloway,
who states that when ‘you stumble’ or show weakness ‘human nature is on you.
[Dr] Holmes is on you’ (MD, 81). Questions regarding our knowledge of others
are displaced during times of illness by a scepticism regarding the limits of self-
knowledge: ‘We do not know our own souls, let alone the souls of others. Human
beings do not go hand in hand the whole stretch of the way’ (E4, 320). The limits
to shared experience are represented in the essay through images of disrupted
physical connection, isolation and estrangement: ‘They march to battle. We float
with the sticks on the stream; helter-skelter with the dead leaves on the lawn,
irresponsible and disinterested’ (E4, 321). Woolf’s imaging of the sick person as
mere flotsam or fallen leaves presents them, like the dead on the battlefield, as
debris that is left behind. The essay also associates the invalid with practically
purposeless activities like sky-gazing which, as Woolf satirically notes, would both
impede and disconcert other pedestrians. The ‘endless’ yet unutilized ‘activity’ of
the sky is itself a source of concern to any healthy pedestrian who should happen
to stop and notice it: ‘Some one should write to The Times about it. Use should be
made of it’ (E4, 321).
While the invalid may be ostracized and left behind by the army of the healthy,
she also willingly distances herself from certain social ideologies and national or
state-driven imperatives. All the ‘genial pretence[s]’, Woolf writes, that motivate
the ‘army of the upright’ – ‘to communicate, to civilize, to share, to cultivate the
desert, educate the native, to work by day together and by night to sport’ – are no
longer perceived as ‘genial’ but the ruses of capitalism and imperialism (E4, 321).
Woolf’s association among militancy, civilization and cultivation in the context of
illness reminds the reader of the devastating impact of European colonization on
the health of indigenous populations. Imperialism and colonialism brought with
them not only pretences of civilizing indigenous populations but disease epidemics.
For example, pre-Columbian Americans were decimated (in some places by up to
90 per cent) by diseases such as small pox, measles, chicken pox and scarlet fever
transmitted by European colonists and African slaves.37 Woolf’s image of the army
of the healthy and their genial pretences is rendered more ironic in the context of
histories of illness. Nevertheless, imperialist and colonial campaigns to ‘educate
the native’ about health were still circulating in the 1920s; for example, in relation
to the new hygiene: ‘The trend is towards creating native hygienists who will be
able to aid in the sanitary salvation of the Dark Continent.’38 Studies on disease
and public health since the 1980s have demonstrated how disease influenced
not only class relations but the processes of imperialism and colonization, with
biopolitics playing a determining role in forms of economic, military and political
oppression.39 Furthermore, while it is imaged as an ‘army’ engaged in such civic
processes as ‘sharing’, working together and furthering the modern ideal of
progress, the tone of Woolf’s essay clearly implies that that particular version of
social unity is a fabricated and bureaucratic one, shot through with division.
Illness challenges several forms of ‘make-believe’ about the community, its
values and agendas. The sick ‘deserter’, Woolf writes, who is no longer a soldier in
the ‘army of the upright’, becomes estranged from healthy others, their objectives
and values, and therefore becomes a social and economic liability:
Directly the bed is called for, or, sunk deep among pillows in one chair, we raise
our feet even an inch above the ground on another, we cease to be soldiers in
the army of the upright; we become deserters … We float with the sticks on the
stream … irresponsible and disinterested … (E4, 321)
This disengagement from state-determined imperatives may appear in the essay a

somewhat playful and rebellious escape from responsibility, but Woolf’s figuring
of the invalid as a ‘deserter’ and a social and economic liability who threatens
the progress of civilisation can be understood to have more serious undertones in
Porter, Health, Civilization and the State, 47.

37
Balfour, ‘The Trend of Modern Hygiene’, The Lancet, 1925, vol. I, 1010. Here,
38
Balfour is talking about the British colonies, particularly Africa and India.
39
96 Virginia Woolf
the context of the inter-war period in which it was written. The consequences for
the deserter during the First World War were, of course, well known to Woolf’s
readers. Furthermore, during the inter-war period, sickness or perceived ‘weakness’
of various kinds was a source of national anxiety and formed the focus of several
more extreme social movements and political agendas.
‘Demographic change and declining birth rates were an international concern
by the inter-war years.’40 Due to the decimation of a generation of young men
during the First World War and decreasing birth rates in the middle classes in the
early decades of the twentieth century, the British government emphasized the
importance of population growth to the nation’s future, and the need for a national
stock that would be strong and robust, thereby ensuring the future of the Empire.41
This sentiment is echoed in George Newman’s previously cited statement that
public health must be thought of in terms of not only the individual but the
Empire.42 From the late nineteenth century, Darwinian evolutionary theory and
concerns about demography and degeneration initiated an interest in heredity. For
the burgeoning eugenicist movement, the careful control of human reproduction
was the means to prevent potential evolutionary degeneration and secure the future
of the British race. As discussed at the start of this chapter, new regimes of social
hygiene developed in response to the new science of bacteriology, in conjunction
with new kinds of dispensaries, facilitated the surveillance and increased control of
illness within the community. The eugenicist movement aspired to more extreme
levels of intervention, not only managing but actively eliminating certain kinds of
illness and difference which it perceived as weaknesses or deficiencies.
An ideology that crossed national boundaries, eugenics highlighted the
significance of demographic change in modern societies and created a new
discourse on the relationship between quantity and quality.43 Eugenicists in Britain
encouraged the sequestration of the mentally ill, alcoholics, and women who had
more than one illegitimate pregnancy. Eugenicist attitudes are clearly attributed to
the doctor Sir William Bradshaw in Mrs. Dalloway, who sees the marginalization
of all who deviate from his idea of normality and proportion as necessary to
England’s progress and prosperity: ‘Worshipping proportion, Sir William not
only prospered himself but made England prosper, secluded her lunatics, forbade
childbirth, penalised despair, made it impossible for the unfit to propagate their
views until they, too, shared his sense of proportion’ (MD, 87). Woolf undermines
any benevolent pretence to such practices or ideologies and makes their personal
interest, as financial ‘profit’ for the likes of Bradshaw, explicit. In Germany,
40
41
42
Newman, ‘Progress in Public Health’, The Lancet, 1925, vol II.
43
Eugenics was politically influential in various European countries, including
Germany, Britain and Switzerland, and America in the early twentieth century. It influenced
various policy areas relating to marriage regulations, forced sterilization and, in America,
immigration restrictions. See Porter, Health, Civilization and the State, 168–73.
still more radical attitudes prevailed, targeting the physically weak and ill. Late
nineteenth-century racial hygienists such as the German physician Alfred Ploetz
maintained that medical care for the weak should be discouraged so they did not
survive to reproduce, and similar debates about eugenic intervention to ‘annihilate
and prevent “lives not worth living”’ were prominently debated in Germany from
1920.44 Eugenics later came to accommodate the set of political goals that informed
Nazism and formed the basis for the horrific ‘science’ of the ‘Final Solution’
implemented under the Third Reich. Eugenicist and Fascist ideas and debates were
prominent during the inter-war years and were an influence on modernism. While
Woolf critiqued such views in her fiction, other modernists supported them. W.B.
Yeats was a supporter of eugenics in the inter-war period and attracted to aspects
of Fascism, while Ezra Pound’s Fascist attitudes have been well documented.45
Woolf’s exploration of common illness, healthy armies and the social ostracism
of the invalid in ‘On Being Ill’, combined with the invalid’s status as deserter and
national/civic liability, cannot be separated from these broader social attitudes and
political currents in Britain and Continental Europe during the inter-war period.
Escalating nationalism, which brought with it a greater emphasis on reproduction,
national health and their management, contributed to the increasingly precarious
position of the physically and mentally ill and weak in modern culture and an
escalating fear, and state control of, difference of various kinds. Woolf addresses
these issues in her essay by sympathizing with the invalid and giving expression
to their experience, while placing in a critical perspective the various ideologies
that, if sometimes unconsciously, inform the healthy majority whose attitudes and
interests she aligns with those of the State.
In conjunction with a pragmatic scepticism about the illusions she attributes to
the healthy majority and the often questionable desires that motivate that ‘army’,
Woolf views illness as a mode of experience that can facilitate self-knowledge.
While the essay critiques Romantic attitudes to nature (E4, 321–2), it echoes
Romantics such as De Quincey and Coleridge for whom sickness can initiate an
inward, spiritual journey. On several occasions in her diaries Woolf associates her
periods of more prolonged physical illness, fatigue and depression with ‘mystical’
experiences or feelings, and describes the illnesses themselves as ‘partly mystical’
(D3, 287). In her diary on 16 February 1930 this withdrawal into herself and her
sensations is described as a mental response to physical pain: ‘It [her mind] refuses
to go on registering impressions. It shuts itself up … I lie quite torpid, often with
acute physical pain … Then suddenly something springs’ (D3, 287).
‘On Being Ill’ retains the Platonic, and later Christian, dichotomy of the soul and
body but Woolf does not present them as always in conflict, nor does she present
the body as a hindrance to spiritual knowledge. Rather, as the quotation from
her diary above shows, she associates pain with different kinds of psychological
44
45
Pericles Lewis, ‘Religion’, in A Companion to Modernist Literature and Culture,
eds David Bradshaw and Kevin J.H. Dettmar (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006), 26.
98 Virginia Woolf
states and forms of knowledge. Thus, while Socrates maintained that the body
deceives and hinders the soul’s desire for knowledge, in ‘On Being Ill’ and her
diaries Woolf suggests that the sick body facilitates new knowledge about the soul
itself: ‘[H]ow astonishing … the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed,
what wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to light’
(E4, 317).46 As will be shown below, The Voyage Out also presents illness as a
solitary journey into the ‘snow field’ of the soul, a place ‘where even the print
of birds’ feet is unknown’ (E4, 320). Thus, in contrast to the claims of rationalist
philosophy, Woolf finds physical pain and illness to be at times a vehicle for self-
knowledge and she disrupts the Manichaean dichotomy between matter and spirit
by materializing the soul and linking it with the sphere of nature and matter.
In Illness as Metaphor, Susan Sontag critiques traditional metaphors such as
‘war’ and ‘spiritual journey’, which are often used to describe illness, because
she claims that they distract from the physicality of illness and romanticize the
condition of the sick person. Judith Shulevitz, in her review of the 2002 Paris Press
edition of ‘On Being Ill’, refers to Sontag’s essay and claims that ‘being ill, in “On
Being Ill”, looks a lot like a Romantic’s idea of being interesting’.47 However,
Woolf reappropriates tropes of discovery and travel in this essay to suggest that not
only is illness an opportunity for self-discovery, but it provides sceptical insights
into the point of view of health, represented by the ‘army of the upright’. Tropes of
travel do not, as Woolf warns in the essay, result in a metaphysical flight into ‘the
raptures of transcendentalism’ (E4, 318). Illness affords insights into the ordinary
world of health; for example, the rationalist agendas that motivate the ‘army of the
upright’ and the State, their self-interestedness and the limits to society’s sympathy,
tolerance and compassion. While the sick body is shown in the essay to reveal new
parts of the self or ‘soul’, metaphors of space and travel represent, not a flight from
the real, but the critical distance from which the invalid can assess the values and
beliefs of healthy consciousness (E4, 320). Similarly, metaphors of war and conflict
in ‘On Being Ill’ do not focus, in the Manichaean tradition, on the relationship
between the body and invading illness but on the conflicts of understanding and
interest between the invalid – the social ‘deserter’ – and the healthy majority – the
‘army’ – which ostracizes or forgets them. In Chapter 25 of The Voyage Out, which
was published a decade before ‘On Being Ill’, Woolf examines how illness affects
the wider community when they are willing to engage in the acts of sympathy that
the ‘army of the upright’ avoid due to a fear of compromising the nation’s social
and economic progress and power.
As Hermione Lee notes in her introduction to the Paris Press edition of the essay,
46
the ‘undiscovered countries’ is a reference to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, III, i, in The Complete

Works, vol. 3 (England: Heron, 1976), 522; Hermione Lee, ‘Introduction’, On Being Ill
(Ashfield: Paris Press, 2002), xxx.
47
Judith Shulevitz, ‘The Poetry of Illness’, New York Times, 29 December 2002.
A Voyage through Pain
The Voyage Out charts Rachel Vinrace’s intellectual, sexual and emotional
growth during her voyage from England to South America. Chapter 25 records
the final stage of her journey through a fever – contracted during an expedition
into the jungle – into death. Rachel’s fever slowly dismantles ordinary life as
she had previously known it: everyday speech, perceptions of space and time,
daily routines and systems of value are disrupted not only for her, but also for her
companions and carers.
As suggested in ‘On Being Ill’, Rachel’s fever creates a rupture in language.
The first effect of her headache, which marks the onset of her fever, is an inability
to communicate with others and the holograph and typescript drafts refer to her
state as one of ‘delirium’.48 Heat is a central theme of the chapter. The afternoon,
which is very hot, renders the guests too ‘hot to talk’ and ‘it was not easy to find
any book that would withstand the power of the sun. Many books had been tried
and then let fall’ (VO, 347). Terence is reading from Milton’s Comus and the lines
he recites to Rachel describe the goddess Sabrina who is later implored to help the
imprisoned Lady. These lines anticipate Rachel’s subsequent entrapment within
her sick body, and her desire to imaginatively grasp the ‘cool, translucent wave’
beneath which Sabrina sits (VO, 351).49 To Rachel, the words Terence utters are
heavy with meaning, ‘painful to listen to’ and sound strange, meaning ‘different
things from what they usually meant’. The pain in her head distracts her attention
away from his words and her declaration of pain abruptly destroys them: ‘“My
head aches so that I shall go indoors.” He was half-way through the next verse, but
he dropped the book instantly’ (VO, 348).
Woolf’s sonorous repetition of the word ‘ache’ in this passage – ‘her head
ached’, ‘her head ached; it ached’, ‘My head aches’, ‘Your head aches?’ – mimics
the relentless ‘pulse’ ‘beat’ and ‘thump’ that seems to ‘tread upon a nerve’ in her
head. Rachel’s declaration of pain interrupts language. Following her complaint
to Terence, they ‘sat … in silence’ for ‘two minutes’. He confronts a sense of
‘dismay’ and ‘catastrophe’ which ‘were almost physically painful’ (VO, 348–9).50
News of Rachel’s illness subsequently disrupts others’ dialogue:
48
Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out holograph and typescript drafts (Henry W. and
Albert A. Berg Collection, New York Public Library), microfilm, reel 8, M32, M34.
Accessed at the Scholars’ Centre, Reid Library, The University of Western Australia.
49
For a discussion of Woolf’s allusions to Milton’s Comus in the novel see Lisa Low,
‘“Listen and Save”: Woolf’s Allusion to Comus in Her Revolutionary First Novel’, Virginia
Woolf: Reading the Renaissance, ed. Sally Greene (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1999),
117–35.
50
In an earlier typescript, Terence’s pain is localized, first in his ‘heart’ and later in
his ‘side’, The Voyage Out holograph and typescript drafts, M34 (typescript unsigned and
undated). This description of physical suffering is reminiscent of Christ’s crucifixion.
100 Virginia Woolf
When Helen came in an hour or two later, suddenly stopped her cheerful words,
looked startled for a second and then unnaturally calm, the fact that she was ill
was put beyond a doubt. It was confirmed when the whole household knew of
it, when the song that some one was singing in the garden stopped suddenly, and
when Maria [a servant], as she brought water, slipped past the bed with averted
eyes. (VO, 350)51
Rachel’s pain exiles her from the sphere of language and her pain in turn stops the
dialogue and song of the other guests.
In The Voyage Out, Terence is presented as partaking in Rachel’s pain.
Pain disrupts his capacity for rational judgement thereby anticipating Woolf’s
opposition between reason and pain in ‘On Being Ill’. Initially he is ‘unreasonably
reassured by [Helen Ambrose’s] words, as he had been unreasonably depressed
the moment before’ (VO, 349). By contrast Helen, who nurses Rachel throughout
her fever, is described as a figure of ‘good sense’ (VO, 349). In contrast to Terence,
she is sceptical of the capacity for language to properly represent Rachel’s
illness and becomes frustrated with the local doctor Rodriguez who consistently
underestimates its seriousness (VO, 355). Unlike Terence, who talks incessantly
about illness, Helen is always ‘too hurried and preoccupied to talk’ at length about
Rachel’s condition (VO, 356).
Believing that illness, the ‘force outside of them which was separating them’,
can be bridged by language, Terence makes several failed attempts to understand
and control Rachel’s illness by rendering it in words, and talking functions as a
remedy for his pain. During his visits to her, he endeavours to bridge this gap and
‘bring her back’ to ‘their old relationship’ through normal dialogue. When ‘this
failed he was in despair’ (VO, 353–4). Despite Rachel’s efforts ‘to remember certain
facts from the world that was so many millions of miles away’, their conversations
reflect the increasing gap between their respective worlds of health and illness:
“We’ve just had luncheon,” he continued, “and the mail has come in. There’s a
bundle of letters for you – letters from England.”
Instead of saying, as he meant her to say, that she wished to see them, she said
nothing for some time.
“You see, there they go, rolling off the edge of the hill,” she said suddenly.
“Rolling, Rachel? What do you see rolling? There’s nothing rolling.”
“The old woman with the knife,” she replied, not speaking to Terence in
particular, and looking past him …
He became so profoundly wretched that he could not endure to sit with her ….
(VO, 354)
In the holograph version (dated 29 March 1912) the song occurs in the ‘kitchen’ not
51
the garden, suggesting that the fact of Rachel’s pain impacts not only on the conversation
of the guests, but also that of local staff, The Voyage Out holograph and typescript drafts,
M32, vol. 1.
Terence’s inability to regain Rachel through language leads him to try to gain
control over the illness itself through language, by diagnosing and explaining it.
This effort assumes the form of a series of conversations with St John Hirst, the two
doctors – Rodriguez and Dr Lesage – and Nurse McInnis: ‘The least intolerable
occupation was to talk to St John about Rachel’s illness, and to discuss every
symptom and its meaning, and, when this subject was exhausted, to discuss illness
of all kinds, and what caused them, and what cured them’ (VO, 353). However,
Terence’s attempts to represent a condition which Rachel herself cannot express
fails completely, and a series of miscommunications and misrepresentations of her
condition by her initial doctor, Rodriguez, tragically contribute to her death.
Rodriguez attempts to placate Terence’s concern with false assurances and
shifts from one arbitrary definition of Rachel’s condition to another. The novel’s
negative representation of doctors is similar to that of Mrs. Dalloway and reflects
Woolf’s personal mistrust of doctors, their diagnoses and regimes of treatment.52
Interviews with Rodriguez, which are ‘conducted laboriously in French’, create
confusion as to what he ‘was understood to say’ and ‘appeared to think’, and
after a week Helen declares that Rachel’s condition is deteriorating and they need
another doctor (VO, 355). Thus, attempts to diagnose and communicate clearly
about Rachel’s condition fail and her illness again resists language. Woolf’s claim
in ‘On Being Ill’ that language cannot adequately represent the experiences of the
sick body is shown to have serious consequences in her first novel, and this lack
affects how illness is interpreted, understood and managed (or mismanaged), an
experience Woolf herself confronted throughout her life.
Rachel’s illness also disrupts communication between others, and the guests
make conscious attempts to uphold their everyday routines of inter-personal
communication. At mealtimes, ‘St John generally made it his business to start
the talk and to keep it from dying out’ but his efforts end in failure, as ‘a long
silence’ descends in the dining-room (VO, 357). Other forms of communication,
such as touch and physical gesture, come to dominate inter-personal relations:
‘[Helen] stopped at the door and came back and kissed [Terence] without saying
anything’ (VO, 368). The hotel guests begin to fear solitude and silence and seek
out others in a bid to allay their boredom and uneasiness: ‘Unable to stay in the
empty drawing-room, [Terence] wandered out and sat on the stairs half-way up
to Rachel’s room. He longed for someone to talk to’ (VO, 365); ‘[Mrs Flushing]
wandered from room to room looking for some one to talk to, but all the rooms
were empty’ (VO, 362).
52
Leonard and Virginia consulted numerous specialists about her physical and
psychological ailments and a great deal of disagreement existed regarding the nature of her
illness and the best ways in which to manage her symptoms. The diaries frequently express
mistrust in doctors and frustration at their proposed regimes of convalescence and care (see,
for example, 6 and 12 March 1922 and 17 July 1922, D2). These issues are discussed by
Lee, Virginia Woolf, ch. 10.
102 Virginia Woolf
Rachel’s perceptions of her surrounding environment are radically altered by

pain and she becomes increasingly estranged from the ordinary world of health.
There are numerous references in the chapter to things appearing ‘strange’ and
people looking ‘unnatural’. Initially, she makes ‘an effort to cross over into the
ordinary world, but she found that her heat and discomfort had put a gulf between
her world and the ordinary world which she could not bridge’. By the second day,
her bed ‘had become very important’ and the outside world ‘appeared distinctly
further off’. On the third day, ‘all landmarks were obliterated, and the outer world
was so far away’ that to recall it requires ‘a great effort of memory’. Rachel’s focus
turns inward: ‘every object in the room, and the bed itself and her own body with
its various limbs and their different sensations were more and more important each
day’. She is left ‘cut off’ and ‘isolated’ in her sick body, unable to ‘communicate
with the rest of the world’ (VO, 350–51).
Pain also distorts her perception of others and she is haunted by what De
Quincey describes in his Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821) as the
‘tyranny of the human face’.53 During his opium-induced dreams, De Quincey
experienced radical changes to perceptions of space, time and other people and
his influence on representations of illness in Woolf’s novel is evident in both the
published version and earlier drafts. Rachel loses all sense of identification with
others and Nurse McInnis, Rodriguez and Helen appear as gothic figures, each
implicated in a conspiracy against her. She has a recurring nightmare in which
Nurse McInnis appears ‘inexplicably sinister’ when Rachel visualizes her in a
dark tunnel playing cards by a light, a vision that recalls the nightmare Rachel
has in Chapter 1 after being kissed by Richard Dalloway (VO, 352). The doctor,
Rodriguez, a ‘little dark man’ with ‘very hairy hands’, furtive in glance and shifty
in demeanour, is reminiscent of a Dickensian character and also recalls the ‘Malay’,
the ‘fearful enemy’, in De Quincey’s opium dreams (VO, 350).54 The strangeness
and sometimes hostility between the sick and healthy is a theme common to
Woolf’s presentation of illness in this novel, ‘On Being Ill’ and her diaries.
The terror that Rachel endures during her illness, which is lived in a dark,
curtained room, is compounded by the way her fevered state prolongs time so
that nights can go on into ‘double figures … the thirties, and then the forties …
there is nothing to prevent nights from doing this if they choose’ (VO, 351–2).
Similarly, De Quincey refers to the ‘vast expansion of time’ during his opium
reveries and dreams: ‘I sometimes seemed to have lived for 70 or 100 years in one
night; nay, sometimes had feelings representative of a millennium passed in that
time, or, however, of a duration far beyond the limits of any human experience.’55
Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium Eater, in The Norton

53
Anthology of English Literature. The Romantic Period, eds M.H. Abrams and Jack
Stillinger (New York: Norton, 2000), 539. In her essay ‘Impassioned Prose’ Woolf refers to
the Confessions as De Quincey’s ‘masterpiece’ (E4, 365).
54
De Quincey, Confessions, in Norton Anthology, eds Abrams and Stillinger, 539.
55
De Quincey, Confessions, in Norton Anthology, eds Abrams and Stillinger, 536.
Pain therefore completely disturbs Rachel’s sense of the ordinary world as it alters
her sense of time, transports her into imaginary gothic landscapes and destroys her
relations with others.
As pain estranges Rachel from the ordinary world, her attention turns to the
‘hot, red, quick sights which passed incessantly before her eyes’. The effort to
‘grasp their meaning’ is of great importance and impressions from the previously
ordinary world become mere distractions: ‘[T]he faces, – Helen’s face, the nurse’s,
Terence’s, the doctor’s, – which occasionally forced themselves very close … were
worrying because they distracted her attention and she might miss the clue’ (VO,
362–3). The ‘sights’ are connected with the possibility of escape from heat into
cooler, unconfined spaces: ‘[N]ow they were on the sea; now they were on the tops
of high towers; now they jumped; now they flew’ (VO, 363). Her efforts to read
these sights and decipher a meaning behind her suffering fail, and she descends
into a liminal state:
At last the faces went further away; she fell into a deep pool of sticky water,
which eventually closed over her head. She saw nothing and heard nothing but
a faint booming sound, which was the sound of the sea rolling over her head.
While all her tormentors thought that she was dead, she was not dead, but curled
up at the bottom of the sea. There she lay, sometimes seeing darkness, sometimes
light, while every now and then some one turned her head over at the bottom of
the sea. (VO, 363)
Rachel’s illness also disrupts ordinary life for the other guests. Having determined
that her illness is no longer an ‘attack’ but a ‘real’ illness, Terence, Helen and the
other hotel guests embark on a ‘difficult expedition’ which consists of managing
and alleviating her suffering (VO, 355). Initially, life continues in the ‘ordinary
light of the sun, throughout the usual succession of hours’ for the other guests but
once it is determined that Rachel has a ‘real’ illness (VO, 353), their pattern of
everyday life is forced to change:
When Saturday came it was evident that the hours of the day must be more
strictly organised than they had been … As if they were starting on a difficult
expedition together, they parcelled out their duties between them, writing out an
elaborate scheme of hours upon a large sheet of paper which was pinned to the
drawing-room door … they found it unexpectedly difficult to do the simple but
practical things that were required of them, as if they, being very tall, were asked
to stoop down and arrange minute grains of sand in a pattern on the ground.
(VO, 355–6)
Earlier in the novel, Terence expresses his view that there is an ‘order, a pattern
which made life reasonable, or … of deep interest anyhow, for sometimes it
seemed possible to understand why things happened as they did’ (VO, 318–19).
104 Virginia Woolf
Rachel’s illness disrupts his ‘pattern’ and forces him to retrace its form and
meaning under new conditions.
The guests’ experience of time is altered as a consequence of Rachel’s fever. As
Woolf suggests in ‘A Sketch of the Past’ in her comments on Victorian traditions
of mourning, for Rachel’s friends, boredom is one of the negative effects of grief.
Days drag interminably and people start to desire some form of closure: ‘Thought
had ceased; life itself came to a standstill … The separate feelings of pleasure,
interest, and pain, which combine to make up the ordinary day, were merged into
one long-drawn sensation of sordid misery and profound boredom’ (VO, 357).56
In the latter stages of Rachel’s illness, St John Hirst feels guilty about his desire
for some kind of conclusion, irrespective as to what that might be: ‘[I]f only this
strain would come to an end … it seemed to him that he had no feelings left’ (VO,
371). In ‘On Being Ill’, Woolf suggests that people avoid the burden of imagining
the pain of another because of the fear that that burden would cause an end to
social progress and pleasure: ‘[B]uildings would cease to rise; roads would peter
out into grassy tracks; there would be an end of music and painting’ (E4, 319).
The ‘vast effort of sympathy’ attempted by the other guests in The Voyage Out
actualizes such fears. Normal life has come to a ‘standstill’ and lies beneath a ‘mist
of unreality’ (VO, 357; 372). The prolonged strain of managing another’s illness
renders the guests incapable of feeling and the normal scale of values has been
radically altered.
Pain is traditionally viewed as a subjective state. We talk of physical pain, like a
headache, which is a sensation, and mental or emotional pain, such as bereavement.
In The Voyage Out, Terence comes to view pain not only as a subjective state but
as a mode of being that lies omnipresent beneath the everyday and he sees this
as a threat to life: ‘He had never realised before that underneath every action,
underneath the life of every day, pain lies, quiescent, but ready to devour … eating
away the lives of men and women’ (VO, 366–7). He acquires ‘for the first time’
an understanding of words which had previously seemed empty: ‘the struggle of
life; the hardness of life’. He ‘would never believe in the stability of life, or forget
what depths of pain lie beneath small happiness and feelings of content and safety’
(VO, 367). Through Rachel’s fever, Terence begins to view illness and its physical,
emotional and social consequences not as remote possibilities, but as integral to
the everyday. The text also suggests that he acquires a greater appreciation for
simple, everyday pleasures, ‘small happiness and feelings of content and safety’ as
a consequence of his trauma and loss, but this is not to suggest that any redemptive
quality is attributed to Rachel’s physical suffering or death in the novel.
56
In ‘A Sketch of the Past’, Woolf comments upon the negative impact that Victorian
conventions of mourning had upon her and her siblings following her mother’s death: ‘…
a dark cloud settled over us; we seemed to sit all together cooped up, sad, solemn, unreal,
under a haze of heavy emotion. It seemed impossible to break through. It was not merely
dull; it was unreal’ (MB, 93); ‘We were made to act parts that we did not feel … It made one
hypocritical and immeshed in the conventions of sorrow’ (MB, 95).
The novel gestures towards the possibility of the couple’s disembodied

romantic union at the end of the chapter but this notion is abandoned in preference
of material, embodied presences. Sensing the imperfect nature of the happiness he
and Rachel had shared, Terence momentarily believes that they achieve a perfect
union at the moment of her death: ‘It was happiness, it was perfect happiness.
They had now what they had always wanted to have, the union which had been
impossible while they lived … “No two people have ever been so happy as we
have been. No one has ever loved as we have loved”’ (VO, 376). But this ideal
is short-lived. During her last moments of consciousness, while she recognizes
him and says his name, ‘a slight look of fatigue or perplexity came into her eyes
and she shut them again’. Rachel does not respond to Terence’s claims regarding
their happiness: ‘“But when we’re together we’re perfectly happy,” he said. He
continued to hold her hand. The light being dim, it was impossible to see any
change in her face’ (VO, 376). In the final stages of her illness, Rachel is unable to
bring herself back to the realm of ordinary life and desires only solitude:
All sights were something of an effort, but the sight of Terence was the greatest
effort, because he forced her to join mind and body in the desire to remember
something. She did not wish to remember; it troubled her when people tried to
disturb her loneliness; she wished to be alone. She wished for nothing else in
the world. (VO, 369)
As Woolf suggests in ‘On Being Ill’, Rachel’s voyage through illness is a solitary
one. Following her death, as Terence is led out of the room he sees ‘the cups and
plates’ on the table outside and it is this encounter with familiar, material things
that reveals to him the inadequacy of his abstract, romantic union: he must now
exist in a world ‘in which he would never see Rachel again’ (VO, 377). At its close,
the novel affirms the importance of bodies and embodied relations to our personal
happiness. While, as Mark Hussey observes, Rachel is presented as fearful of the
‘embodied world of heterosexual relations’ throughout the novel, the inadequacy
of disembodied unions is also suggested at its close.57 At the end of Jacob’s Room
Bonamy ‘cried’ Jacob’s name, as Lily cries out ‘Mrs Ramsay’ in To the Lighthouse,
in an effort to bring back the dead through language. Similarly, upon leaving the
bedroom, Terence tries to get back in and ‘shrieked’ Rachel’s name in a final,
failed effort to regain her through language (VO, 377).58
Through her analysis of common forms of illness such as headache and fever,
Woolf emphasizes the fragile status of the ordinary world of health and pain’s
omnipresence in everyday life. Her reflections on common illness in ‘On Being
57
Mark Hussey, ‘Refractions of Desire: The Early Fiction of Virginia and Leonard
Woolf’, Modern Fiction Studies 38, no. 1 (1992): 127–46; 133.
58
Woolf, JR, 155; TL, 244. The typescript version of The Voyage Out emphasizes the
physicality of Terence’s pain as he ‘shrieked in agony’ and ‘stumbled’ back into the room
‘crying’ ‘Rachel! Rachel!’, M34.
106 Virginia Woolf
Ill’ illustrate the problematic social positioning and treatment of the sick and the
dominant ideologies that she attributes to the ‘army of the upright’. Woolf also
alerts us to the need to redress the rupture that illness can create between subjects
and language, because to be outside of language and the circle of ordinary, social
life is to be disempowered and vulnerable, as the character of Rachel Vinrace
shows. We need, she suggests, a new language of the body or, at the very least,
more narratives that represent its daily experiences. The ‘daily drama of the body’,
its ‘unending procession of changes, heat and cold, comfort and discomfort, hunger
and satisfaction, health and illness’ (E4, 318), is one from which we can learn
more about ourselves and the world. But in order to do so, we must, Woolf argues,
embrace it as a valid and epistemologically valuable part of ordinary experience,
not only during times of health, but also in illness. While ‘[t]he wave of life
flings itself out indefatigably’, the body’s ‘daily drama’ will end and ‘Nature’ will
ultimately ‘conquer’, putting an end to the mechanisms and technologies we have
developed to manage our own bodies and the body of nature: ‘[S]tiff with frost
we shall cease to drag our feet about the fields; ice will lie thick upon factory and
engine; the sun will go out’ (E4, 322).
4
Motoring from Beauty to the Sublime
Then she got into the lift [at Marshall & Snelgrove’s], for the good reason that the
door stood open; and was shot smoothly upwards. The very fabric of life now, she
thought as she rose, is magic. In the eighteenth century, we knew how everything was
done; but here I rise through the air; I listen to voices in America; I see men flying
– but how it’s done, I can’t even begin to wonder. So my belief in magic returns.
(Virginia Woolf, O, 207)
Such is the shock that Orlando experiences when she is catapulted from the
nineteenth century into the present moment of 11 October 1928 to observe
‘truncated’ carriages ‘without any horses’, well-lit houses, department stores,
elevators, radios and aeroplanes (O, 205). The chaotic London traffic, bustling
crowds and intermittent tolling of a clock in her ear cause her thoughts and nerves
to become ‘taut’. Her sense perceptions quicken: ‘[H]er hearing quickened; she
could hear every whisper and crackle in the room … she saw everything more
and more clearly and the clock ticked louder and louder until there was a terrific
explosion right in her ear’ (O, 206). However, in the spirit of her time, the ‘shock’
of the present moment does not delay her, or the narrator’s story, for long: ‘But
we have no time now for reflections; Orlando was terribly late already. She ran
down-stairs, she jumped into her motor-car, she pressed the self-starter and was
off’ (O, 206).
Woolf describes Orlando’s sudden birth into the twentieth century in terms
of her encounter with new forms of technology and the modern city and their
impact on her now over-stimulated sense organs. Since the nineteenth century,
technology has continued to be one of the major aspects of modernity imposing
ongoing changes in the realm of everyday life. Indeed, in contemporary times,
technology increasingly defines the structure and nature of the everyday,
determining patterns of work, leisure, communication, socialization and therefore
subjectivity. Concern about the effects of technology on individual bodies and
minds, and the wider society, was expressed throughout the nineteenth century.
Marx famously critiqued the impact of technological modernity on the factory
worker’s mind, body and sense of self, ideas powerfully realized in Fritz Lang’s
Metropolis (1927) and documentaries such as Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Die
Sinfonie der Großstadt (Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, 1927). The steam-
engine train, one of the key symbols of nineteenth-century modernity, like the
motor car that followed it, transformed the nature of travel, structures of space and
time, physical landscapes and the very nature of human sense perception. Coping
with the changes that technology brought to daily life necessitated the adaptation
108 Virginia Woolf
of human sense organs to new kinds of experience. In 1858, G. Claudin expressed

concern about people’s capacity to adapt physically and morally to the new world
that science was creating:
These discoveries [such as the railroad] … bend our senses and our organs in
a way that causes us to believe that our physical and moral constitution is no
longer in rapport with them. Science, as it were, proposes that we should enter
a new world that has not been made for us. We would like to venture into it; but
it does not take us long to recognize that it requires a constitution we lack and
organs we do not have.
Unlike Orlando’s sense of excitement at the ‘magic’ dimensions of modern life,

Claudin’s comment signals ambivalence about humans’ capacity to adapt to this
‘new world’. Similarly, in his 1903 essay ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’, Georg
Simmel writes of the difficulty of psychologically adapting from the ‘slower, more
habitual, more smoothly flowing rhythm of the sensory-mental phase of small town
and rural existence’ to the ‘tempo and multiplicity’ of life in the metropolis, which
assaults the individual every time she or he crosses the street. For Simmel, the
sensory bombardment and over-stimulation integral to the economic, occupational
and social spheres of modern life create either a condition of nervous stress
comparable to that of the neurasthenic or, conversely, an attitude of indifference.
Rhoda in The Waves presents such a pathological response to over-stimulation in
the urban environment: ‘Reckless and random the cars race and roar and hunt us to
death like bloodhounds. I am alone in a hostile world. The human face is hideous’
(W, 120). However, Woolf’s novels are more often populated by characters who
thrive on such stimulation, like Jinny in The Waves and Clarissa Dalloway: ‘In
people’s eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar … was
what she loved; life; London; this moment of June’ (MD, 2).
The problem of managing an excess of stimuli and mastering it also formed the
basis for Freud’s theory of the stimulus shield. As Simmel views nervous disorder
to be one of the possible consequences of the heightened sensory excitation integral
to metropolitan life, so Freud understands a disruption or break in the normal
psychical barriers against stimuli to result in trauma and neurosis: ‘We may, I
think, tentatively venture to regard common traumatic neurosis as a consequence
of an extensive breach being made in the protective shield against stimuli.’ While
Freud distinguishes between his theory of the stimulus shield and what he calls the
G. Claudin quoted in Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey. The

Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1986), 159.

Georg Simmel quoted in Ben Highmore, Everyday Life and Cultural Theory: An
Introduction (London: Routledge, 2002), 42; 43.

Sigmund Freud, from Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in The Freud Reader, ed.
Peter Gay (New York: Norton, 1989), 608.
Motoring from Beauty to the Sublime 109
earlier ‘naïve theory of shock’, both are concerned with how the subject copes with
an excess of stimuli for which they are not properly prepared (Freud) or psychically
equipped (Simmel) and its effect on nervous and/or psychical structures.
Sensory ‘shock’ is also one of the defining features of Walter Benjamin’s
account of the experience of modernity, and he connects it to several of the
encounters that Orlando describes such as the crowd, traffic, commodities and
advertising, as well as the worker’s experience of industrial modes of production.
Sensory adaptation is one of the issues he also considers. In his 1936 essay, ‘The
Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, he discusses the relationship
between historical change and human sense perception:
During long periods of history, the mode of human sense perception changes
with humanity’s entire mode of existence. The manner in which human sense
perception is organized, the medium in which it is accomplished, is determined
not only by nature but by historical circumstances as well.
Hence, Benjamin is optimistic about our capacity for sensory adaptation, and later
in the essay he discusses the impact of the cinema on our visual sense as one
example of this historical process.
The experience of new technologies in everyday life and their impact on bodies,
minds and our sense of reality, are themes which feature prominently in several
of Woolf’s essays, notably ‘The Cinema’ (1926) and ‘Flying over London’, as
well as in Mrs. Dalloway, Orlando and The Years. ‘The Cinema’ discusses the
effect of technology on sense perception and the new aesthetic possibilities such
technologies present. Woolf opens the essay with a provocative statement about
prevailing philosophical views on modern life: ‘People say that the savage no
longer exists in us, that we are at the fag end of civilisation, that everything has
been said already and that it is too late to be ambitious.’ ‘But’, she argues, ‘these
philosophers have presumably forgotten the movies’ which, she claims, present
a challenge to our customary modes of perception and lead to all manner of
interesting discoveries about the world (E4, 348). If the ‘ordinary eye, the English
unaesthetic eye’, is purely practical in its everyday functions, when it finds itself
before a movie screen, it must appeal to the brain for assistance: ‘The eye is in
difficulties. The eye says to the brain, “Something is happening which I do not
in the least understand. You are needed”.’ In a comment that anticipates Jean
Baudrillard’s theory of simulacra, for Woolf there is a sense in which the images

Freud emphasizes the issue of preparedness: ‘[P]reparedness for anxiety and the
hypercathexis of the receptive systems constitute the last line of defense of the shield
against stimuli’, The Freud Reader, 609.

Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York:
Schocken Books, 1969), 222.

Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, part XIII,
Illuminations.
110 Virginia Woolf
on the movie screen are ‘more real’ if different from our perceptions in ‘daily life’
(E4, 348–9). Anticipating Andrew’s epistemological conundrum to Lily in To the
Lighthouse, movies, Woolf’s argues in ‘The Cinema’, seem to afford us the special
power of beholding things ‘as they are when we are not there’ (E4, 349). Woolf
finds in the cinema a new potential to stimulate our visual imagination and change
our relationship to real things:
But if so much of our thinking and feeling is connected with seeing there must
be some residue of visual emotion not seized by artist or painter-poet which may
await the cinema. That such symbols will be quite unlike the real objects which
we see before us seems highly probable … Physical realities, the very pebbles
on the beach, the very quivers of the lips, are [the film-maker’s] for the asking.
(E4, 351)
Woolf’s reflections on technology frequently return to these questions about

perception and how new technologies force us to reconsider the very nature
of reality and life. Contributing to explorations into the relationship between
modernity, technology and sensory experience offered by male theorists such as
Simmel, Benjamin and Freud, this chapter explores Woolf’s response to the motor
car and her account of its impact in early twentieth-century Britain on nature,
everyday life and human sense perception.
The two Woolf texts that form the focus of this chapter offer psychological
analyses of the effect of nature’s beauty on consciousness for the walker and car
passenger. The first, a diary entry composed in Sussex in 1929, has inter-textual
references to Wordsworth’s Prelude, which is itself an important account of the
experience of modernity in late eighteenth-century Britain. Woolf’s diary entry
examines how nature’s beauty, as seen from the perspective of the walker, bestows
an order and pattern to everyday life. Like Dorothy and William Wordsworth,
whose nature writing she admired, Woolf enjoyed observing and describing the
countryside and in her diaries she often presents nature as a source of mental
inspiration and regeneration. While, as A.O. Frank has argued, some of Woolf’s
novels express an unromantic view of nature, much of her fiction and non-fiction
echoes Romantic ideas about nature and reflects a Romantic valuing of that realm.
The latter part of the chapter considers Woolf’s views on cars during the 1920s
Frank discusses how Woolf’s representations of nature in The Waves highlight, in

the existentialist tradition, nature’s violence and apparent indifference to human beings;
A.O. Frank, The Philosophy of Virginia Woolf. A Philosophical Reading of the Mature
Novels (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 2001), 68. By contrast, Ellen Tremper argues that
Wordsworth’s Romanticism was one of the most significant influences on Woolf’s thought
and writing. She discusses Woolf’s engagement with his views on the relationship between
poetry and politics, and his theory of the imagination and creativity; Ellen Tremper,
‘Who Lived at Alfoxton?’: Virginia Woolf and English Romanticism (London: Associated
University Press, 1998).
and her account in the 1927 essay ‘Evening over Sussex: Reflections in a Motor-
car’ of the way motoring changed people’s experience of the landscape through
which they travelled. I argue that, in that essay, speed is shown to transform the
traditional experience of nature’s beauty into an instance of the romantic sublime,
thereby demonstrating that technology not only changes modes of sense perception
but also traditional categories of aesthetic experience.
Nature’s Beauty: Small Matters are Props to Thought
In her diaries, Woolf typically represents nature’s beauty as a source of pleasure,

continuity and mental regeneration. She often describes a tired or drained mind
being filled in a positive manner by nature’s beauty. In 1931, after completing The
Waves, the convalescent Woolf returned to her writing room, the Lodge, at Rodmell
in Sussex, ‘testing’ her weary mind with a little writing. She notes how her ‘brain
will be filling’ with impressions of the beautiful winter landscape surrounding her:
‘I’ve been pacing the terrace. The sun is flooding the downs. The leaves of the plant
in the window are transparent with light. My brain will be filling … All is again
released’ (D4, 56). In 1934 she describes her mind as a ‘well’ to be filled: ‘I shall lie
flat a little in brain, for a few days: until I feel the well full’ (D4, 226). Psychological
motifs of expansion and filling are integral to both the diary entry and essay that I
focus on here, but the expansion is experienced very differently in each case.
The mind’s positive interaction with nature’s beauty is described in detail
in Woolf’s diary entry of 22 August 1929. Her discussion of beauty and its
relationship to her mind is embedded in reflections on the importance of familiar
patterns and daily routines that provide continuity to thought and experience.
Although she argues that it is problematic to live life in a perceptual state of non-
being, meaning an inattentiveness borne of habit, she values the patterns and
routines that give shape to everyday life. Thus, in ‘Modern Fiction’ she celebrates
the ‘trivial’ and commonplace which give daily life its ‘pattern’ and continuity
(E4, 160). The relationship between daily patterns, small things and experiential
continuity is discussed in a passage from Book Seven of Wordsworth’s Prelude
that Woolf transcribed to her diary on that day in 1929. The first paragraph of
the entry provides a schematic outline of the day’s activities – waking, bathing,
dressing, eating, writing, walking, reading The Prelude, smoking, letter writing
and anticipating reading La Fontaine that evening. Such activities comprised a
typical day for her at Rodmell:
Today it was misty & I had been dreaming of Edith Sitwell. I wash & go into
breakfast which is laid out on the check table cloth … And then bath & dress;
& come out here & write or correct for three hours, broken at 11 by Leonard
with Milk, & perhaps newspapers. At one luncheon – rissoles today & chocolate
custard. A brief reading & smoking after lunch; & at about two I change into
thick shoes, take Pinker’s lead & go out – up to Asheham hill this afternoon … Tea
112 Virginia Woolf
at four, about; & then I come out here & write several letters … & then read one
book of the Prelude … we shall dine & then we shall have some music, & I shall
smoke a cigar; & then we shall read – La Fontaine I think tonight. (D3, 247)
These activities carved out a common pattern in Woolf’s days in Sussex and they
describe what she calls in the entry her ‘skeleton day’. At the end of the paragraph,
she quotes eight lines from Book Seven of Wordsworth’s Prelude, which she
had read that day and wanted to ‘remember’ as she considers them a ‘very good
quotation’:
The matter that detains us now may seem,

To many, neither dignified enough
Nor arduous, yet will not be scorned by them,
Who, looking inward, have observed the ties
That bind the perishable hours of life
Each to the other, & the curious props
By which the world of memory & thought
Exists & is sustained.
These lines suggest that ordinary events, ones that might not seem ‘dignified’ or
particularly difficult or challenging (‘arduous’), should not be dismissed or scorned
because they provide form and stability to life. They are ‘props’ which ‘bind’ ‘the
world of memory & thought’ and afford continuity to a life of ‘perishable hours’.
For Wordsworth then, the quotidian enables us to sustain a coherent life of thought
and memory.
Wordsworth’s sentiments about the role of the ordinary in thought and memory
are echoed in the Continental philosophy of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-
centuries. For example, Benjamin argues that memory is an important structuring
principle in the ‘pattern of experience’ in Bergson’s philosophy and that, in Matter
and Memory, memory for Bergson is based upon the ‘accumulated and frequently
unconscious data’ that comprises much of everyday experience rather than ‘facts’
that are ‘firmly grounded’. Thus Proust, writing under the influence of Bergson’s
philosophy of durée, views memory to be based not in acts of conscious recollection
motivated by the intellect, but in our unconscious reactions to material objects
(like the madeleine for Proust) and the sensations they evoke. Woolf also echoes
Wordsworth’s sentiments in ‘Modern Fiction’ through her valuing of the ‘trivial’
as well as the ‘fantastic’ impression or event. In order to ‘trace the pattern’ of the
mind, she suggests that we cannot assume that ‘life exists more fully in what is
These are lines 458–65 of the 1850 edition (D3, 247–8). I will subsequently quote

from the 1850 edition of The Prelude in The Prelude 1799, 1805, 1850, eds Jonathan
Wordsworth, M.H. Abrams, Stephen Gill (London: Norton, 1979), 251. Woolf has added
the ampersands.

Benjamin, Illuminations, 157.
commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small’, and she enacts this
sentiment in her diary writing, as well as in her fiction, by foregrounding the diurnal
and ordinary as significant subject matter (E4, 160–61). For Wordsworth, as for
modernists such as Woolf and Proust, the everyday is fundamental to the structures
and patterns of consciousness, and therefore to our sense of self and reality.
In The Prelude, Wordsworth argues for the importance of ordinary things and
the need to be attentive to what he calls ‘common things’. Gillian Beer comments,
in reference to this diary entry quoting Wordsworth, that Woolf ‘valued the
ordinary’, while Ellen Tremper argues that Woolf’s ‘insistence on the quotidian
and on the ordinary experiences and emotions of ordinary people’ is indebted to
Wordsworth’s poetry and politics.10 Like his friend and collaborator, Coleridge,
Wordsworth bemoaned the effect of habit and rationalism on perception and
believed that endless possibilities lay inherent within the everyday if we only
returned our attention to it. This Romantic attitude clearly informs Woolf’s
distinction between ‘being’ and ‘non-being’ (MB, 70):
I spare to tell of what ensued, the life

In common things – the endless store of things,
Rare, or at least so seeming, every day
Found all about me in one neighbourhood –11
Wordsworth alludes to a paradox in the nature of ‘common things’ which is echoed

in Lily Briscoe’s sense that one can be on a ‘level’ with ordinary things while
simultaneously experiencing their ecstasy; an awe at the very fact of existence
(TL, 272). Just as the modern-day Romantic, John, in ‘Solid Objects’ makes
various discoveries amidst the urban everyday, in Wordsworth’s ‘neighbourhood’
of nature, ‘common things’ contain an ‘endless store’ of possibility and potential.
In her 1929 diary entry, Woolf pays homage to Wordsworth’s sentiments in The
Prelude through detailing the prosaic and common features of her day. However,
she finds that this ‘skeleton day needs reviving with all sorts of different colours’
and sense impressions. Observations of nature revive and flesh out her skeleton
day. This passage follows the quotation from The Prelude in the 1929 diary:
Today it was grey & windy on the walk [up Asheham hill]; yesterday generous
& open; a yellow sun on the corn; & heat in the valley. Both days differ greatly;
both are among the happiest of my life – I mean among the happy undistinguished
days, ripe & sweet & sound; the daily bread; for nothing strange or exalted has
happened; only the day has gone rightly & harmoniously; a pattern of the best
part of life which is in the country like this; & makes me wish to command more
of them – months of them. (D3, 248)
10
Gillian Beer, Virginia Woolf: The Common Ground (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1996), 2; Tremper, ‘Who Lived At Alfoxdon?’, 37.
11
Wordsworth, The Prelude, book one, lines 108–111, 35.
114 Virginia Woolf
While finding these days to be ‘happy undistinguished days’ during which ‘nothing
strange or exalted happened’, Woolf notes that these two days nevertheless ‘differ
greatly’ in their particular details: ‘[t]oday’ was ‘grey & windy’, while ‘yesterday’
was ‘generous & open’. While ‘undistinguished’, in the sense that they fit easily
into the pattern of life that runs ‘rightly & harmoniously’ thereby affording Woolf
great contentment and happiness, she is aware that they are very different in terms
of their details. It is the opportunity to observe them that gives her pleasure, as
a day disrupted by ‘strange’ or ‘exalted’ events can draw attention away from
the ordinary. As the following chapter will show, Woolf’s ecstatic and traumatic
‘moments of being’, while valuable, often caused her distress and required great
efforts of creative and psychological synthesis in order to be made coherent and
understood in relation to a larger ‘pattern’ of life and experience. As distinguished
moments sometimes disrupt that ‘pattern’, the bare facts of each day are insufficient
to describe it. Such skeletons composed of facts about what one did must be
supplemented by the impressions and sensations that accompany them. Woolf
does this throughout her diaries, noting changes in the weather and the landscape
and the physical and emotional responses that they induce in her. The mental ‘ties’
and ‘props’ of the familiar that Wordsworth sees as the enduring structure amidst
the perishable and changing world provide, for Woolf, the harmonious and right
‘pattern’ that she has a strong sense of through attending to daily changes in her
surrounding environment at Sussex.
Although Woolf’s 1929 diary entry draws upon William Wordsworth’s
romanticism, her descriptions of nature also suggest the influence of Dorothy
Wordsworth, whose writing style she praises in her essay ‘Four Figures’. Woolf
admired Dorothy Wordsworth’s attention to her surroundings and her descriptive
skills: ‘Dorothy … noted what was before her accurately, literally, and with prosaic
precision … [she] never confused her own soul with the sky’ (CE3, 200). Unlike
Mary Wollstonecraft, whose writings Woolf also discusses in ‘Four Figures’,
Dorothy kept the egotistical ‘I’ firmly separate from her observations: ‘For if she
let “I” and its rights and its wrongs and its passions and its suffering get between
her and the object, she would be calling the moon “the Queen of the Night”; she
would be talking of dawn’s “orient beams”’ (CE3, 200). Dorothy Wordsworth’s
use of descriptive language and ‘plain statement’ was aimed ‘directly at the object’
while her ‘suggestive power’ belied, according to Woolf, the gift of the poet, not
the naturalist (CE3, 202). The literalness and attention to detail common to Woolf’s
presentations of nature in her diary therefore bear remarkable resemblance to
those in Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals. While Woolf admired her commitment
to ‘exact prosaic detail’, she also comments upon Dorothy’s poetic ability to relate
those details within a larger, ontological framework thereby giving her readers a
sense of the ‘vast and visionary outline’ (CE3, 202).12
12
Similarly, in her 1906 review of Wordsworth’s Guide to the Lakes, Woolf comments
upon his ability to combine myriad ‘details’ and present them as ‘living parts of a vast and
The autobiographical dimensions that infuse Woolf’s account of Dorothy

Wordsworth’s character in ‘Four Figures’ go still further: ‘Always trained and in
use, her powers of observation became in time so expert and so acute that a day’s
walk stored her mind’s eye with a vast assembly of curious objects to be sorted at
leisure’ (CE3, 202). Woolf describes a similar process of observation and image
storing in her 1929 diary entry. She explains how the ‘wringing & squeezing’ her
‘brain’ has endured from her intermittent headaches and composing The Waves is
counteracted through the ‘infinite number of things’ she observes when walking
in the country. Here, the mind is likened to a vessel that proceeds through an
endless cycle of expansions and contractions caused by the passive reception of
impressions and their subsequent expulsion, a ‘wringing’ and ‘squeezing’ out,
through writing:
Now my little tugging & distressing book & articles are off my mind my brain
seems to fill & expand & grow physically light & peaceful. I begin to feel it
filling quietly after all the wringing & squeezing it has had since we came here.
And so the unconscious part now expands; & walking I notice the red corn,
& the blue of the plain & an infinite number of things without naming them;
because I am not thinking of any special thing. Now and again I feel my mind
take shape, like a cloud with the sun on it, as some idea, plan, or image wells up,
but they travel on, over the horizon, like clouds, & I wait peacefully for another
to form, or nothing – it matters not which. (D3, 248)
Two metaphors, a sponge and an inflatable ball or balloon, describe the mind in
this passage and also feature in the essay ‘Evening over Sussex: Reflections in
a Motor-car’. Impressions of nature are a source of pleasure and create feelings
of lightness and peace. They affect both the ‘unconscious part’ of Woolf’s mind,
as well as her conscious mind which notices particular things, like the ‘red corn’
and the ‘blue of the plain’ and an ‘infinite number of things’ that she feels no urge
to name. Woolf does not want to affix them their normal labels but allows each
thought or image that ‘wells up’ and takes ‘shape’ to ‘travel on’ freely out of her
mind like a cloud over the horizon. The passivity of the mind before nature, and
the manner in which she finds pleasure in letting an infinite number of impressions
move through her mind without fixing them, is in contrast to the account of mind
and beauty described in ‘Evening over Sussex’. This essay hinges on the narrator’s
anxieties about naming and representation when confronted with an excess of
beautiful impressions. From the perspective of the car’s passenger, nature’s beauty
takes on a very different aspect compared to that of the walker described in the
1929 diary entry. The ‘ties’ and ‘props’ of the familiar, which Wordsworth argued
enable us to sustain a coherent sense of life, are made unstable by technology in
Woolf’s essay.
exquisitely ordered system’; that is, as an organic unity, ‘Wordsworth and the Lakes’, E1,
105–109; 106–107.
116 Virginia Woolf
Technology, Modernity and Everyday Life
In recent decades a number of studies have examined the impact of, and responses to,
technological modernity on various spheres of everyday life during the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries. In his book Literature, Technology, and Modernity, 1860–
2000, Nicholas Daly identifies two broad phases of industrial revolution and their
attendant technologies and cultural formations. The first industrial revolution
of the early nineteenth century was ‘built on iron, coal, and steam’, the railway
being the ‘iconic technology of Victorian modernity’. The second phase, which
began in the last decades of the nineteenth century, was based upon developments
in chemical industries and electricity, leading to new technologies such as the
telephone, automobile (through the development of the combustion engine) and
electric lighting. These are some of the changes Orlando excitedly observes and, as
Daly comments, they ‘alter[ed] the fabric of everyday life’ in a manner as dramatic
as the railway had in the nineteenth century.13 In the early twentieth century,
manufacturers and industries advertised the new experiences, opportunities and
futures that technological development offered, as Bernhard Rieger explains:
Public claims that technological breakthroughs filled society with unheard-of

delights emerged in a variety of contexts at the time. Automobile manufacturers
praised the car for initiating an individualized travel culture that freed drivers
from the constraints of the railways with their set routes and timetables. The
electrical industry staged spectacular light shows whose dazzling aesthetic
effects metaphorically supported pronouncements about the imminence of a
bright future. The entertainment sector, meanwhile, nurtured the most intimate
link between technology and pleasure.14
However, as Rieger comments and as my following discussion of Woolf will show,

such technological innovations were often met by the public with an attitude of
ambivalence.15 Such ambivalence marked Woolf’s initial response to the motor car,
but this attitude later shifted to one of excitement when she actively participated
in this new technology.
Woolf’s interest in the impact of technology on modernist aesthetics and
experience is the focus of the essay collection, Virginia Woolf in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction (2000), edited by Pamela L. Caughie. This collection
examines the ways in which ‘new technologies in the 1920s and 1930s produced
new sensual experiences, which in turn led to new concepts of national and
13
Nicholas Daly, Literature, Technology, and Modernity, 1860–2000 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2004), 56.
14
Bernhard Rieger, Technology and the Culture of Modernity in Britain and Germany,
1890–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 158.
15
Rieger, Technology and the Culture of Modernity in Britain and Germany, ch. 2.
personal identity and new understandings of the world around us’.16 As Makiko
Minow-Pinkney comments in her essay in that volume, 15 July 1927 marked
a transformation in Woolf’s experience of the car and nature, as it was on that
day that she and Leonard purchased their first (second-hand) Singer.17 The inter-
war period was the first era of mass motoring in Britain. The mass production
of motor cars by assembly-line methods from 1921 responded to, and created, a
booming mass market which brought a continuous fall in prices, making the car
increasingly accessible to the middle classes and a cultural commonplace.18 Melba
Cuddy-Keane and her students write that by ‘the mid 1920s, the car had become a
prominent feature of everyday life’.19 By 1939, one in five families had a car, and
from the 1930s second-hand cars made motoring a possibility for many working-
class as well as middle-class people.20
For most motoring Britons, cars were purchased for leisure, and one of the new
leisure pursuits to which they gave rise and which relates to my discussion in this
chapter is that of touring the English countryside. Sean O’Connell observes that a
fascination with, and idealisation of, rural life in Britain from the mid-nineteenth
century reached its zenith in the inter-war years with a movement to the ‘great
outdoors’. Counties such as Sussex, Kent, Surrey, Hampshire and Wiltshire were
promoted in rural tour guides and magazines aimed at middle-class motorists as
the perfect weekend or holiday retreats from the hustle and bustle of urban life.
Such literature promoted a romanticized view of rural English life as simple,
traditional and strictly hierarchical, yet harmonious – a view which obscured the
economic and social realities of agricultural occupants and workers. O’Connell
illustrates how country touring by car also facilitated a particular middle-class
form of cultural and landscape tourism during the inter-war period.21 While the
Woolfs did use their car for the purposes of rural motoring, particularly in Sussex,
from the early stages of their marriage they split their time between homes in
London and Sussex, thereby complicating any clear urban–rural divide in terms
16
Pamela L. Caughie, ed., ‘Introduction’, Virginia Woolf in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction (New York: Garland, 2000), xx.
17
Makiko Minow-Pinkney, ‘Virginia Woolf and the Age of Motor-cars’, in Virginia
Woolf in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, ed. Pamela L. Caughie (New York: Garland,
2000), 160.
18
Minow-Pinkney, ‘Virginia Woolf and the Age of Motor-cars’, in Virginia Woolf in
the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, ed. Caughie, 161.
19
Melba Cuddy-Keane, Natasha Aleksiuk, Kay Li, Morgan Love, Chris Rose, Andrea
Williams, ‘The Heteroglossia of History, Part One: The Car’, Virginia Woolf: Texts and
Contexts. Selected Papers from the Fifth Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf, eds Beth
Rigel Daugherty and Eileen Barrett (New York: Pace University Press, 1996), 71–80; 74.
20
Sean O’Connell, The Car and British Society. Class, Gender and Motoring, 1896–
1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), 11; 19.
21
O’Connell, The Car and British Society, see ch. 5, ‘Dealing with a contradiction:
the car in the countryside’.
118 Virginia Woolf
of their identities and lifestyle.22 Any idealized, Romantic visioning of the Sussex
landscape is rejected in Woolf’s essay ‘Evening over Sussex’, as are simplistic
divisions between the countryside (as nature) and modernity (as technology).
Prior to owning a car, Woolf’s response to them in the mid-1920s was quite
negative and her criticisms of them were representative of the anti-car, rural-
preservationist rhetoric of the period. Cuddy-Keane and her students suggest that,
despite their increasing affordability, Woolf associated cars with imperialism and
class privilege and saw them to threaten the rights of the pedestrian and the beauty
of the British countryside.23 A significant volume of anti-car literature appeared
in the first decades of the twentieth century, the key criticisms being the car’s
perceived threat to human life and its negative impact on the countryside and
traditional forms of life in rural England.24 In September 1924, Woolf expressed
her frustration about what she perceived to be the negative impact of cars on
country life in her contribution to the ‘From Alpha to Omega’ column titled ‘The
cheapening of motor-cars’:
The cheapening of motor-cars is another step towards the ruin of the country
road. It is already impossible to take one’s pleasure walking, and only inevitable
necessity impels the owners of children or dogs to venture their limbs upon
what is now little better than an unfenced railway track. On the line itself there
are at least rails and signals to ensure some kind of safety … The English road,
moreover, is rapidly losing its old character – its colour, here tawny-red, here
pearl-white; its flowery and untidy hedges; its quiet; its ancient and irregular
charm. It is becoming, instead … a mere racing-track for the convenience of
a population seemingly in perpetual and frantic haste not to be late for dinner.
(E3, 440)
The opposition between the modern and pre-modern worlds set up by Woolf in
this passage had been prevalent since the late eighteenth century. The beauty,
harmony, rhythms and character of the old world are, it was argued, destroyed
by the speed, transitoriness and latent violence of modernity. Such an opposition
between the modern and pre-modern is presented in Book Seven of The Prelude,
in which Wordsworth recalls travelling to London for the first time and finding it
to be a chaotic, obscene and alienating place. The disorder that he perceived at the
22
Lee confirms this view in her biography. She notes that from the time the Woolfs
purchased Monks House in 1919 they were ‘seasonal visitors’ not weekenders at Sussex.
They spent three or four months there during the summer as well as frequent weekends
and holidays, meaning that the Woolfs felt rooted to Sussex; Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf
(New York: Vintage, 1999), 415.
23
Cuddy-Keane et al., ‘The Heteroglossia of History’, 75.
24
O’Connell, The Car and British Society, 150. One of the most vitriolic assaults on
car travel in the ‘literature of rural preservation’ that O’Connell discusses is C.E.M. Joad’s
The Horrors of the Countryside (1931); 159.
heart of city-life was appeased by his memories of nature, which gave him a sense
of a deeper ‘Harmony’ and unity amidst the ‘press’ of ‘self-destroying, transitory
things’.25 A similar contrast and nostalgia for a pre-modern past are expressed by a
number of theorists of the everyday and ordinary, including Simmel, Lefebvre and
also Martin Heidegger in his later philosophy.26
Woolf’s commentary on motor cars in the above quotation expresses criticisms
and anxieties that had been made about the railway throughout the nineteenth
century. While Woolf compares these two forms of transportation in favour of
the railway, her concerns about the car’s impact on the English countryside, her
nostalgia for a pre-modern past and her anxieties about personal safety were themes
common to discussions of the railway in the nineteenth century. In The Railway
Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century, Wolfgang
Schivelbusch argues that the annihilation of space and time was the topos used in
the early nineteenth century to describe the transformation that the railway had
upon natural space.27 As well as the implementation of a standardized time zone
throughout England by 1880, the railway effectively shrunk people’s sense of
space, seemingly decreasing distances through its speed of travel. The English
landscape was also significantly altered as the railway cut linear pathways ensuring
the most direct and efficient route possible between destinations: ‘mechanical
regularity triumphed over natural irregularity’ in a typically rationalized, modern
fashion.28 Woolf’s contention in her 1924 commentary that motor cars were
ruining the country roads and spoiling the landscape echoes sentiments expressed
about the railway in the previous century. Similarly, as the train altered structures
and experiences of time, Woolf finds motoring to contribute to the modern cult
of speed and haste, a lifestyle increasingly dominated by clock-time rather than
natural or cyclical time. Just as the pleasures of walking are for Woolf superior to
those of motoring, Schivelbusch suggests that many people in the first half of the
nineteenth century looked nostalgically upon the stagecoach as a preferable mode
25
Wordsworth, The Prelude, book seven, lines 769–71, 267.
26
I referred above to Simmel’s contrast between the rhythms of rural life and the
metropolis. Throughout his Critique, Lefebvre laments the loss of the pre-modern everyday
in terms of its rhythms, styles and festivals. In later works such as Poetry, Language,
Thought, Martin Heidegger is critical of the impact of modernity on our relationship
to nature and objects and encourages forms of ‘dwelling’ that are more in accord with
other forms of being, both material and divine. He is particularly concerned with the
instrumentalism and rationalism of modern life and their impact on our relationship to
our environment. ‘Dwelling’ for him means an ethic of preservation and operating in a
harmonious relationship with the ‘fourfold’ of earth, sky, divinities and mortals which he
understands to be inextricably connected: ‘This simple oneness of the four we call the
fourfold. Mortals are in the fourfold by dwelling. But the basic character of dwelling is to
spare, to preserve’; Martin Heidegger, ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’, in Poetry, Language,
Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper Row, 1971), 150. Original italics.
27
Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey, 10.
28
120 Virginia Woolf
of transport which kept the individual in a closer and more intimate relationship to
both their mode of transport and the landscape.29
Personal safety is another concern that Woolf raises in her reflections on the car
in ‘The cheapening of motor-cars’. Speeding was a problem as motorists habitually
ignored the twenty mile per hour speed limit that was in place from 1903 to 1930,
and consequently the number of road fatalities and injuries in Britain during the
1920s was high.30 Similarly, railway accidents and the damaging impact of the
railway on workers’ and travellers’ spines and sense organs were common concerns
throughout the Victorian age.31 The car was, however, seen to pose a threat to the
pedestrian rather than the driver or passenger, who were more often the concern
in discussions about railway travel and personal safety. Woolf’s sentiments in her
commentary ‘The cheapening of motor-cars’ reflect the realities, as pedestrians
accounted for at least 45 per cent of all road deaths in Britain from the first year
of detailed statistical collection in 1926 until 1939, with cyclists accounting for
a further significant portion of road fatalities.32 Concerns regarding the safety
of pedestrians in the age of motoring were expressed by many. For example, in
Urbanisme (The City of Tomorrow, 1924), Le Corbusier claims that his radical
urban plans, which aimed to compartmentalize and rationalize Paris, doing away
with conventional streets in the process, were motivated by his fraught experiences
as a pedestrian navigating the chaotic traffic on the Champs-Elysées: ‘To leave our
house meant that, once we had crossed our threshold, we were in danger of being
killed by the passing cars.’33 Woolf’s comments indicate that by 1924 the threat
of injury for pedestrians in the country was equally present, country roads having
been transformed into a ‘racing-track’ for a population in too much haste.
As a new sense of space and time and attendant changes in the traveller’s
relationship to nature were key aspects of nineteenth-century descriptions of the
railway, so too were they in early twentieth-century literary representations of
motoring. In E.M. Forster’s novel Howards End, which was first published in
1910, a ‘motor-drive’ is ‘a form of felicity detested’ by Margaret Schlegel, one
which debilitates her sense of space: ‘The car came round with the hood up,
and again she lost all sense of space.’34 In contrast to the culture of landscape
tourism by car that was popular among Britons in the early twentieth century,
Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey, 13–14; 23.

29
O’Connell, The Car and British Society, 99. By the 1920s the average number
30
of annual road fatalities in Britain was 4,121, while the average number of road injuries
was 87,255; O’Connell, 116. These figures increased during the 1930s in relation to the
increasing number of cars on the roads.
31
See Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey, chs 8 and 9.
32
O’Connell, The Car and British Society, 116.
33
Quoted in Marshall Berman, All that is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of
Modernity (London: Verso, 1983), 165.
34
E.M. Forster, Howards End, ed. Oliver Stallybrass (London: Penguin, 1983), 198;
199.
throughout Howard’s End Forster presents motoring as destructive both to natural

landscapes and to one’s appreciation of them: ‘She looked at the scenery. It heaved
and merged like porridge. Presently it congealed. They had arrived’; ‘[T]heir
whole journey from London had been unreal. They had no part in the earth and
its emotions.’35 In 1837, Victor Hugo described his view from a train window in
a similar manner: ‘The flowers by the side of the road are no longer flowers but
flecks, or rather streaks, of red and white; there are no longer any points … the
towns, the steeples, and the trees perform a crazy mingling dance on the horizon.’36
Spatial disorientation and a visual field continually confronted with an influx of
formless impressions are also described by Paul Verlaine in the seventh poem
of his cycle La Bonne Chanson (1869–70), in which a technologically altered
landscape is inscribed upon the everyday one:
The scene behind the carriage window-panes

Goes flitting past in furious flight; whole plains
With streams and harvest-fields and trees and blue
Are swallowed by the whirlpool, whereinto
The telegraph’s slim pillars topple o’er,
Whose wires look strangely like a music-score.37
However, as Schivelbusch observes of the railway in the nineteenth century, it did

not take long for people in the twentieth century to adjust to the car and develop
a ‘new set of perceptions’ necessary to enjoy the new experience of car travel.38
While Woolf, like E.M. Forster, initially adopted a critical position towards the
impact of cars on her experience of nature, her 1927 diary records a very different
view on the matter after the purchase of her and Leonard’s first car. Like Le
Corbusier, Woolf comes to terms with, and is empowered by, the new technology
by actively participating in it:39
This is a great opening up in our lives. One may go to Bodiam, to Arundel,

explore the Chichester downs, expand that curious thing, the map of the world
in ones [sic] mind. It will I think demolish loneliness, & may of course imperil
complete privacy. (D3, 147)
Spatial metaphors such as ‘opening’ and expanding and the allusion to the motor
demolishing ‘loneliness’ express Woolf’s sense that motoring expands the map of
35
Forster, Howards End, 199; 213.
36
Quoted in Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey, 55.
37
Quoted in Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey, 32, translation by Gertrude Hall.
38
39
‘I was assisting in the titanic rebirth of a new phenomenon … traffic. Cars, cars, fast,
fast! One is seized, filled with enthusiasm, with joy … One participates in it. One takes part
in this society that is just dawning’, Le Corbusier quoted in Berman, All that is Solid, 166.
122 Virginia Woolf
personal experience as the railway did for many Britons in the previous century.
Driving offers her new experiences and an ‘additional life’:
Yes, the motor is turning out the joy of our lives, an additional life, free & mobile
& airy to live alongside our usual stationary industry. We spin off to Falmer,
ride over the Downs, drop into Rottingdean, then sweep over to Seaford, call,
in pouring rain at Charleston … return for tea, all is light & easy as a hawk in
the air. (D3, 151)
The ‘irregular and chaotic’ ‘procession of vehicles’ which alarmed Woolf the
pedestrian becomes an emancipatory experience for her as a motorist, ‘opening’
her life and adding new dimensions to her mental ‘map’. She likens her new-found
mobility to that of a ‘hawk’, ‘light’ and ‘easy’ in its movement. In these diary
entries, the speed of the car is presented as a source of excitement and potential,
not a threat. Like Orlando, Woolf copes with the changes inherent within everyday
modernity by participating in them.
Minow-Pinkney argues that the freedom of movement that Woolf attributes to
the car provided her with ‘a metaphorical device’ for narrative: ‘[The motor-car’s]
movement, which is flexible, individualistic, and self-destined in contrast to, for
example, the train, which is confined by the linear railway tracks, time tables, and
fixed destinations, provided, as Cuddy-Keane and her students argue, “a liberatory
trope for non-linear thought and narrative form”’.40 ‘Evening over Sussex:
Reflections in a Motor-car’ charts one such development to narrative form and the
‘map of the world in [Woolf’s] mind’ – the mind when ‘blown to its fullest and
tautest, with beauty and beauty and beauty’ (CE2, 290). While Woolf celebrated
the new life that motoring offered her, in as much as the motor made external
spaces more accessible, this essay records the process of the individual coming
to terms with new forms of perceptual experience mediated by technology; that
is, the individual dealing with the attendant challenge to internal, psychological
spaces. The trauma of perceptual excess and formlessness described by Hugo and
Verlaine in relation to railway travel is the very trauma the car passenger, like
Margaret Schlegel in Howard’s End, encounters in ‘Evening over Sussex’.
Moving from Beauty to the Sublime
In the ‘Manifesto of Futurism’ (1909), Filippo Tommaso Marinetti celebrates

technology and what he viewed to be some of its key characteristics and effects
– speed, violence upon nature, energy, revolt and innovation. Energetically
embracing technological modernity, the ‘Manifesto’ comments upon the impact
of technology on our aesthetic sense and suggests that speed makes possible a
40
the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, ed. Caughie, 162–3.
new kind of beauty: ‘We affirm that the world’s magnificence has been enriched
by a new beauty: the beauty of speed.’41 ‘Evening over Sussex’ is a meditation on
the relationship between nature and technology, and through that meditation the
narrator tries to come to appreciate a new kind of beauty created by speed, one that
moves into the psychological space of the sublime.
The essay begins with a description of the Sussex landscape at evening that
reflects a Romantic valuing of the pre-modern past and nature over culture. The
narrator describes how evening is ‘kind to Sussex’ as the various imperfections
of civilisation and modernity that mark the landscape, such as houses and shops
and placards, will be obliterated by nightfall, leaving only what would have
been there ‘when William came over from France ten centuries ago: a line of
cliffs running out to sea’ (CE2, 290). However, this particular Romantic reading
of the landscape cannot be sustained by the narrator and is ultimately revised at
the essay’s close, when the relationship between nature’s beauty and modernity
has been reconsidered. Observing the beauty of the Sussex landscape from the
comfort of her car, the narrator finds herself confronted with a sense of irritation
due to the overwhelming beauty of the moment. When ‘one looks up’ and out of
the car window one is ‘overcome by beauty extravagantly greater than one could
expect’. The mind is checked by a sense of ‘impotency’ due to its inability to
‘hold’ and ‘express’ the experience. Woolf describes the mind’s confrontation with
too much beauty through the metaphor of an air ball which is filled to its capacity
and then bursts:
[T]here are now pink clouds over Battle; the fields are mottled, marbled – one’s
perceptions blow out rapidly like air balls expanded by some rush of air, and
then, when all seems blown to its fullest and tautest, with beauty and beauty
and beauty, a pin pricks; it collapses. But what is the pin? So far as I could tell,
the pin had something to do with one’s own impotency. I cannot hold this – I
cannot express this – I am overcome by it – I am mastered. Somewhere in that
region one’s discontent lay; and it was allied with the idea that one’s nature
demands mastery over all that it receives; and mastery here meant the power
to convey what one saw now over Sussex so that another person could share it.
And further, there was another prick of the pin: one was wasting one’s chance;
for beauty spread at one’s right hand, at one’s left; at one’s back too; it was
escaping all the time; one could only offer a thimble to a torrent that could fill
baths, lakes. (CE2, 290)
A series of spatial metaphors represent the mind being filled by impressions

of beauty but being unable to hold or represent them. There is an excess of
information, an excess of beauty. This replicates the sensory stress experienced
41
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, ‘Manifesto of Futurism’, in Modernism: An Anthology
of Sources and Documents, eds Vassiliki Kolocotroni, Jane Goldman, Olga Taxidou
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998), 251.
124 Virginia Woolf
by the nineteenth-century railway traveller who strove to ‘grasp’ onto fleeting

impressions that continued to ‘escape’ their gaze.42 In Woolf’s essay, the narrator’s
sense of ‘irritation’ and ‘impotency’ at being presented with a large quantity of
beautiful impressions contrasts with the sense of peace and pleasure that Woolf
describes in her 1929 diary entry discussed earlier in this chapter. The diary
describes how she observes ‘an infinite number of things without naming them’
and lets all thoughts and images ‘travel on’. The filling and expansion of her mind
is, on that occasion, a source of pleasure. By contrast, looking at Sussex from her
car, Woolf is troubled by her inability to ‘hold’, ‘master’ and ‘express’ ‘what one
saw now over Sussex’.
Despite Woolf’s reference in this passage to the mind’s response to beauty,
her discussion concentrates upon two stages that are central to the eighteenth- and
early nineteenth-century sublime. Thus, rather than interpreting this experience
in terms of influential contemporaneous frameworks, such as Freud’s theory of
the stimulus shield or modern notions of nervous or sensory shock – contexts that
Minow-Pinkey examines in her fascinating analysis of ‘Evening over Sussex’43
– Woolf’s essay refers the reader back to the earlier philosophical and aesthetic
tradition of the sublime. In the first stage of the sublime, the object, here the Sussex
downs, resists or transcends representation and this creates a feeling of shock
and surprise. The sublime object is too big to be represented by the mind, which
momentarily feels ‘overcome’ by it. It is a moment of anxiety and exhilaration.
In the second stage, despite an initial sense of being checked or blocked by the
sublime object, the mind strives to represent it. The mind wants to master all that it
receives, ‘mastery’ referring to the ability to represent the experience in language
and thereby share it with another person. The third stage of the sublime is the point
at which this anxiety is overcome as the subject attains a sense of mastery over the
experience through ideas as opposed to representations of sense.
The narrator of Woolf’s essay asserts that this moment of mental ‘irritation’
is one that the ‘psychologists must explain’, and the major eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century contributors to discussions about the sublime, while in the main
philosophers or literary critics, took a psychological approach to the issue (CE2,
290). I will outline these first two stages of the sublime as they are discussed by
four of the most influential contributors to eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century
theories of the sublime; Joseph Addison, Edmund Burke, Kant and Wordsworth.
While Woolf did not read all of these authors (for example, there is no evidence
that she read Kant), they contribute to a discourse and a tradition of the sublime
with which Woolf was familiar through reading the Romantics, and with which
her 1927 essay engages.
Joseph Addison’s ‘Essays on the Pleasures of the Imagination’, which appeared
in The Spectator in 1712, was one of the earliest and most influential contributions

42

43
the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, ed. Caughie.

to theories of aesthetic experience and taste. In her 1919 essay entitled ‘Addison’,
Woolf discusses Addison’s essays from The Spectator and Tatler and comments on
their merits for contemporary readers. While Woolf accepts that modern readers
might find the essays ‘dull’, ‘others superficial’ or the ‘piety conventional’, she
maintains that they are ‘perfect essays’ from a literary point of view and prove that
‘the art of writing essays’ has been ‘lost’ (E4, 114–15). She does not specifically
mention ‘Essays on the Pleasures of the Imagination’, although this was one of
Addison’s most famous essays and his discussion of the great, the uncommon and
the beautiful pleasures of the imagination set the groundwork for the subsequent
distinction between the sublime and the beautiful which was developed by Burke,
Kant and the Romantics.44
Addison distinguishes between primary pleasures and secondary pleasures of
the imagination, the former arising from objects present to the senses, the latter
arising from our ideas of visible objects in memory. For Addison, ‘pleasure’ refers
broadly to the ‘action of the mind’, a qualification that enables him to account for
the pleasure that we receive from descriptions of disagreeable things.45 While an
object may inspire ‘horror or loathsomeness’, this ‘terrible or offensive’ sight is
still mixed with ‘delight in the very disgust it gives to us’ and therefore remains
a pleasure.46 This anticipates the mixture of positive and negative feelings that
become central to descriptions of the sublime experience. He outlines three
different sources of primary pleasure – the great, the uncommon and the beautiful
– the first of which is of interest to my present discussion.47 Addison’s description
of ‘great’ objects that are a source of pleasure refers to what Burke, Kant and
the Romantics later call ‘sublime’ objects in nature, although ‘sublime’ and
‘great’ are used interchangeably by Coleridge.48 Natural objects such as deserts,
44
In his notes to Addison’s Works, Richard Hurd comments that ‘Essays on the
Pleasures of the Imagination’ is ‘by far the most masterly of all Mr Addison’s critical
works’, the scheme ‘original’ and the style ‘finished with so much ease’; Joseph Addison,
The Works of Joseph Addison, notes by Richard Hurd, ed. Henry G. Bohn (London: G. Bell
and Sons, 1912), vol. 3, 393.
45
Addison, The Works, 418–19.
46
Addison, The Works, 397.
47
Addison suggests that uncommon objects please us due to our liking for newness
and variety, an idea that became central to the Romantics. Beauty provides us with a sense
of satisfaction and complacency through evoking feelings of joy, cheerfulness and delight.
Addison suggests that beauty is ideal, finding its source in the human mind not objects in
nature; The Works, 398–400.
48
Coleridge employs the terms ‘uncommon’, ‘beautiful’ and ‘great’ in his letters
describing the English landscape, which Woolf read in 1932, and this points to the continuing
influence of Addison’s aesthetic formulas into the early nineteenth century. In his letter to
Thomas Poole, written whilst touring Germany in 1799, Coleridge employs a range of
different aesthetic terms and theories, as he does in the letters written during his various
walking tours and travels around England. William Gilpin’s tradition of the picturesque,
which focuses on variety and intricacy in nature and scenes that are well suited to pictorial
126 Virginia Woolf
mountains, high rocks and precipices that, according to Addison, possess a ‘rude
kind of magnificence’ are, from the eighteenth century, the focus of discussions
about the sublime.49 Woolf’s awareness of the Romantics’ landscape terminology
is evident in her essay ‘Four Figures’, in which she imagines Coleridge debating
‘aloud the true meaning of the words majestic, sublime and grand’ while he and
the Wordsworths rambled across the Scottish highlands in search of a particular
waterfall (CE3, 205).
Addison argues that ‘[o]ur imagination loves to be filled with an object, or
to grasp at anything that is too big for its capacity’. ‘We are flung into a pleasing
astonishment’, he suggests, ‘at such unbounded views, and feel a delightful stillness
and amazement in the soul at the apprehension of them’.50 For Addison, great
objects in nature challenge and expand the mind through their unboundedness. His
psychological model of the sublime employs metaphors of cognitive space and
movement that are common to Edmund Burke’s theory of the sublime. Burke’s
Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757) was
widely read and, with Addison’s essay, was the most influential eighteenth-century
text on taste and aesthetic experience.51
Woolf does not refer to Burke’s Enquiry but she mentions his Reflections on
the Revolution in France (1790) (D5, 261). Burke’s theory of the sublime was so
influential during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century that it is highly
likely that Woolf would have had some knowledge of it.52 The model resonates
through women’s writing of the period, such as the early gothic, Emily Dickinson’s
poetry, and the prose and poetry of the Brontë sisters. Burke argued that the great
and sublime in nature cause a feeling of astonishment and a state of the soul in
which its ‘motions are suspended, with some degree of horror’ and the ‘mind is so
entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other, nor by consequence
representation, is evident in Coleridge’s letter to Poole from Germany, although Coleridge

became disaffected with picturesque theory in subsequent years. In other letters describing
various parts of the English landscape Coleridge refers to the ‘novelty’, ‘complexity’,
‘grand’ or ‘sublime’ qualities of different scenes, terms common to eighteenth-century
aesthetic discourse. See Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Unpublished Letters of Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, ed. E.L. Griggs, 2 vols (London: Constable, 1932), vol. 1, letters 61, 69, 73, 74,
83. Woolf refers to reading this volume of Coleridge’s letters in her diary on 14 July 1932
(D4, 117).
49
50
51
Walter John Hipple, The Beautiful, The Sublime and the Picturesque in Eighteenth-
Century British Aesthetic Theory (Carbondale: The Southern Illinois University Press,
1957), 83.
52
An 1808 eight-volume edition and the first 14 of a 27-volume edition of Burke’s
Works (1808–1827) were in the Woolfs’ library; ‘The Library of Leonard and Virginia
Woolf: A Short Title Catalogue’, compiled and edited by Julie King and Laila Miletic-
Vejzovic, intro. Diane F. Gillespie (Pullman, WA: WSU Press, 2003). Available at: www.
wsulibs.wsu.edu/holland/masc/OnlineBooks/Woolflibraryonline.htm.
reason on that object which employs it’.53 Ideas of cognitive movement are also
integral to Kant’s analytic of the sublime. He argues in the Critique of Judgement
that the sublime feeling involves a movement of the mind as it attempts to judge
the object. Whilst beauty involves a ‘restful contemplation’ of the object, for Kant
the sublime causes a mental ‘agitation’ or ‘vibration’ in which the mind feels an
‘attraction’ and ‘repulsion’ to the object.54 Kant’s idea of mental agitation as a form
of vibration anticipates notions of nervous agitation and over-stimulation which
become central to discourses of shock, stress and modernity from the latter half of
the nineteenth century.
Addison’s description of the sublime or ‘great’ object as one that fills the mind
to its capacity, and Burke’s view of the sublime object as one that suspends the
soul’s movement, are echoed by Woolf in ‘Evening over Sussex’. She presents the
beauty of the Sussex downs as filling the mind to its capacity: ‘[O]ne’s perceptions
blow out rapidly like air balls expanded by some rush of air, and then, when all
seems blown to its fullest and tautest, with beauty and beauty and beauty, a pin
pricks; it collapses’ (CE2, 290). As in the sublime, the mind has become filled by
its object. It is likened by Woolf to a ‘thimble’ that attempts to contain the beauty
of the Sussex downs, which is akin to a ‘torrent’, and these spatial metaphors
represent the imbalance between the mind and the sublime object that it attempts
to ‘hold’ or represent to itself. Whereas Addison suggests that great objects are a
source of pleasure, creating a ‘delightful stillness’ in the ‘soul’ – an idea suggested
in Woolf’s 1929 diary entry discussed earlier – ‘Evening over Sussex’ argues
that the sublime object initially creates a feeling of ‘irritation’, ‘discontent’ and
‘impotency’ that must be resolved. Thus, like Burke, Woolf views the sublime
object as causing a momentary blockage in the mind which creates negative
feelings. While Burke argues that the sublime suspends the motions of the soul,
creating a momentary feeling of ‘horror’, Woolf figures the mind as a balloon
or air-ball that has reached its capacity and then collapses, creating a feeling of
‘irritation’ and ‘impotency’.55 This latter word alludes to the masculine tradition of
aesthetics with which Woolf’s essay engages and it gains a double meaning as it
is, as I will show, not only the subject, but the very sublime–beautiful distinction
that is rendered impotent or lacking due to technology.
In his essay ‘The Notion of Blockage in the Literature of the Sublime’, Neil
Hertz argues that the chief problem in the sublime revolves around the organization,
blockage and release of ideas. While eighteenth-century writers do not use the term
‘blockage’, expressions such as ‘baffle’ or ‘difficulty’ suggest a mental opposition
53
Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime
and the Beautiful, ed. and intro. J.T. Boulton (London: Routledge and Paul, 1958), pt II,
§1, p. 57.
54
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis, IN:
Hackett Publishing, 1987), ‘Analytic of the Sublime’, §27, p. 115. Original italics.
55
Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry, pt II, §1, p. 57.
128 Virginia Woolf
or recalcitrance.56 For example, in a letter written to Samuel Purkis in 1800 from

Cumberland, Coleridge describes a ‘majestic Case of Mountains, all of simplest
outline’, each resembling a ‘Giant’s Tent’, and reflects on how ‘Nature’ can work
‘at once to gratify and baffle’ the mind and ‘Feeling’.57 Hertz argues that Romantic
writers represent this blockage as the mind being filled by the object, possessed
by it, with the object therefore blocking the mind’s further movement, and this is
the model that Woolf follows in ‘Evening over Sussex’. Wordsworth’s account of
crossing the Simplon Pass in Book Six of The Prelude is often cited as an example
of the sublime as a cognitive blockage that is resolved by the constitutive powers
of the imagination:
Imagination – here the Power so called

Through sad incompetence of human speech,
That awful Power rose from the mind’s abyss
Like an unfathered vapour that enwraps,
At once, some lonely traveller. I was lost;
Halted without an effort to break through;
But to my conscious soul I now can say –
‘I recognize thy glory’58
Wordsworth here describes the mind as an abyss, a cavity or void that is without
boundary or clear form. This idea of an abyssal mind is juxtaposed with his rather
paradoxical sense of being somehow constrained and blocked by it. ‘Halted’ in
his attempts to ‘break though’ this moment of cognitive crisis, the imagination
enables him to come to terms with the disappointment he experienced having
crossed the Pass.
Critics have been alert to the ways in which Woolf engages with, but also
interrogates, aspects of the Romantic sublime. For example, Kari Elise Lokke has
argued that Orlando presents a version of ‘the comic sublime that celebrates a
mystical union of human sexuality and spirit and radically rewrites the Romantic
sublime of Kant and Wordsworth’.59 Her analysis focuses upon the ways in
which the sublime in Orlando critiques the aggrandizement of the personal ego
traditionally associated with Wordsworth’s egotistical sublime, in favour of a
‘comic, pantheistic, and collective’ version of the sublime. ‘This mock sublime’,
Lokke suggests, ‘embodies Woolf’s modernist, feminist perspective and challenges
56
Neil Hertz, ‘The Notion of Blockage in the Literature of the Sublime’, Romanticism,
ed. Cynthia Chase (London: Longman, 1993), 78–97.
57
Coleridge, Unpublished Letters, vol. 1, letter 74, 149–50.
58
Wordsworth, The Prelude (1850), book six, lines 592–9, 217.
59
Kari Elise Lokke, ‘Orlando and Incandescence: Virginia Woolf’s Comic Sublime’,
Modern Fiction Studies, 38, no. 1 (1992): 235–52; 236.
the [gendered] dualisms at the heart of the traditional sublime aesthetic’.60 ‘Evening
over Sussex’ interrogates one of the dualisms central to eighteenth-century
aesthetic theory, as the aesthetic categories of the beautiful and the sublime are
conflated – indeed, rendered impotent. This rewriting of the beautiful–sublime
dichotomy in ‘Evening over Sussex’ stems from Woolf’s sense of the need for such
theories to be amended in order to accommodate historical and cultural change.
The breakdown between the two categories of aesthetic experience is linked in the
essay to a specific development in modern life – the motor car.
Travelling through a beautiful landscape by car transforms perceptions of
beauty, traditionally defined in terms of an object’s bounded and representable
form, into the sublime, the objects of which are associated with unboundedness.
Kant describes the sublime object as one that is ‘contrapurpose for our power of
judgement, incommensurate with our power of exhibition, and as it were violent
to our imagination, and yet we judge it all the more sublime for that’.61 That the
beautiful–sublime dichotomy breaks down in Woolf’s essay reinforces a view
stressed by Kant’s idealism: that natural objects are not in themselves sublime;
rather, as Kant puts it, ‘the object is suitable for exhibiting a sublimity that can be
found in the mind’.62 Woolf’s essay corresponds with this idealist approach and
goes on to describe how the narrator manages this moment of cognitive crisis as
she speeds through the Sussex downs. One might pause here and ask why Woolf
does not describe train travel in this way, and we might posit, following Benjamin,
that she, like her fellow Britons, had inherited a sense perception already adapted
to that particular form of experience.
The Season of Making up our Accounts
The psychological operations by which the moment of cognitive crisis is resolved in

Woolf’s essay recalls Kant’s analytic of the sublime and, more generally, his faculty
psychology. Although there is no evidence that Woolf read Kant’s philosophy,
several of her Bloomsbury friends who studied philosophy at Cambridge did.
As Andrew McNeillie has observed, various male members of the Bloomsbury
group were influenced by Kant’s epistemology, aesthetics and morality, and Woolf
would have become acquainted with aspects of these through reading the works
of Desmond MacCarthy, Roger Fry and Clive Bell.63 Furthermore, Kant’s theory
60
Lokke, ‘Orlando and Incandescence’, 242; 247. For another essay that argues for
Woolf’s critical response to the sublime tradition see Laura Doyle, ‘Sublime Barbarians in
the Narrative of Empire; or, Longinus at Sea in The Waves’, Modern Fiction Studies 42, no.
2 (1996): 323–47.
61
Kant, Critique of Judgement, part 1, book 2, ‘Analytic of the Sublime’, §23, p. 99.
62
Kant, Critique of Judgement, part 1, book 2, ‘Analytic of the Sublime’, §23, p. 99.
63
Desmond MacCarthy expresses Post-Impressionism’s debts to Kant in his 1912
essay, ‘Kant and Post Impressionism’, Eye Witness, 10 October 1912, 533–4, reprinted in
130 Virginia Woolf
of the sublime influenced English Romanticism through Coleridge, whose poetry

and philosophy Woolf read.64
For Kant, aesthetic judgements rely on a harmony between the cognitive
powers or the faculties of the mind, and a sense of the mind’s ability to present
objects in nature as formally purposive and coherent wholes. Such a mental
harmony is crucial to resolving the cognitive collapse and crisis presented in
Woolf’s essay. In the Critique of Judgement, Kant refers to this cognitive harmony
as a result of the ‘free play’ of the two mental powers – the imagination and the
understanding.65 A harmony between the presentational powers of the imagination
and the understanding is the basis of the pleasure we experience when making
aesthetic judgements about the beautiful.66 For Kant, the ground of aesthetic
judgement is based in the feeling of pleasure the subject receives in certain acts of
perception. An object is deemed beautiful when it is in harmony with the structure
of the understanding, whilst the sublime feeling arises when the imagination is in
harmony with reason’s transcendental ideas. Both forms of aesthetic judgement
result in a ‘mental attunement’.67
Kant’s formal view of the mind as comprised of different powers and faculties
in particular relations to each other is a view common to empiricists such as Hume
and Locke. For example, Hume distinguishes between different ‘powers and
faculties’ including the will, understanding, imagination and passions in his Enquiry
Concerning Human Understanding. He conceptualizes the mind in geographical
terms, describing philosophy as a project of tracing our ‘mental geography’ and
Post-Impressionists in England, ed. J.B. Bullen (London: Routledge, 1988), 374–7. Clive
Bell’s Art, which Woolf read following its publication in 1914, also engages with Kant’s
epistemology and aesthetic theory (L2, letters 694, 695, pp. 41–2). For a discussion of the
Bloomsbury group and Kant’s philosophy see Andrew McNeillie, ‘Bloomsbury’, in The
Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf, eds Sue Roe and Susan Sellers (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000). Jessica Berman also discusses the role that Kant’s Critique
of Judgement assumed in Bloomsbury theories of aesthetic experience in her essay ‘Ethical
Folds: Ethics, Aesthetics, Woolf’, Modern Fiction Studies 50, no. 1 (2004): 151–72.
64
Woolf read Coleridge’s poetry from her youth, and expressed a continued interest
in his poetry and criticism throughout her life. She reviewed Coventry Patmore’s edition of
the Table Talk and Omniana in 1918, which contains a broad cross-section of Coleridge’s
literary and philosophical views, and read his most famous philosophical work, the
Biographia Literaria, in July 1940; see the July entries for 1940 in volume 5 of the Diary.
65
Kant, Critique of Judgement, part 1, book 1, ‘Analytic of the Beautiful’, §9,
pp. 62–4. Original italics. In his theory of mind, the imagination provides the intuition
and comprehension of the manifold, whilst the understanding provides the concept as a
representation of the unity of this comprehension. The former functions in terms of intuition
whilst the latter functions in terms of concepts. The imagination schematizes freely whilst
the understanding functions in accordance with laws.
66
Kant, Critique of Judgement, part 1, book 1, ‘Analytic of the Beautiful’, §9.
67
Kant, Critique of Judgement, part 1, book 2, ‘Analytic of the Sublime’, see §25–7;
p. 112.
demarcating the ‘parts and powers of the mind’.68 Woolf also approaches the
mind spatially as a topography comprised of many parts or landscapes that are
transformed through our encounters with physical objects, other people, ideas and
books: ‘We remodel our psychological geography when we read Dickens’ (CE1,
193). In ‘Evening over Sussex’, Woolf suggests that in moments when the mind is
challenged in its representational powers the self ‘splits up’, but the divided self
she describes follows an empiricist not, as one might assume, a Freudian model.
The traumatized mind divides into four personae which do not correspond to
the Freudian id, ego and superego but to four philosophical points of view and
cognitive powers, each of which approaches the problem of too much beauty in
a different way. Woolf calls this process of dialogue in the essay between these
mental selves a ‘colloquy’, which means a conversation, and this is a further
instance of her preference for dialectical approaches to questions and problems.
The ‘colloquy’ staged in the essay can be read as an allegorical picture of the
theory of mind espoused by philosophers such as Hume and Kant. The four selves
each assume a different approach to the problem of the ‘wise course to adopt in
the presence of beauty’ in order to reconcile the subject’s sense of ‘impotency’
before the beauty which she cannot represent or ‘hold’ onto (CE2, 290–91). The
first ‘eager and dissatisfied self’, who longs to ‘hold’, ‘master’ and ‘convey’ the
moment of beauty, refers to the initial voice of the narrator who is subsequently
chastised by a ‘stern and philosophical self’. This second self represents an attitude
of scepticism regarding the limits of the mind to comprehend or analyse an object
of great magnitude:
[R]elinquish these impossible aspirations; be content with the view in front of

us, and believe me when I tell you that it is best to sit and soak; to be passive; to
accept; and do not bother because nature has given you six little pocket knives
with which to cut up the body of a whale. (CE2, 291)
This second self offers an empiricist view of the mind, as a receptacle for impressions
that are organized by the various tools, or operations, of the mind. These tools are,
however, inadequate. The mind’s power is limited to the effects of ‘six little pocket
knives’ which cannot properly cut up and organize the vast quantity of impressions
flooding it as it speeds through the Sussex downs. This picture of the mind as an
intellectual mechanism which cuts reality up into pieces, and the command to sit
passively and ‘soak’ up nature’s beauty, echoes Wordsworth’s lament regarding
the divisive and inadequate nature of the intellect in his conversational poem ‘The
Tables Turned: An Evening Scene On the Same Subject’, which continues the
exploration between forms of learning begun in ‘Expostulation and Reply’:
68
David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, in The Philosophical
Works. Essays Moral, Political and Literary, 2, eds Thomas Hill Green and Thomas Hodge
Grose (Aalen: Scientia Verlag, 1964), vol. 4, §4; pp. 9–10.
132 Virginia Woolf
One impulse from a vernal wood

May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.
Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;

Our meddling intellect
Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:–
We murder to dissect.69
The ‘stern and philosophical’ self in Woolf’s essay expresses a similar scepticism
about the ability of the intellect to master the scene before it.
A third ‘melancholy’ and ‘aloof’ self refers to the inadequacy of memory to
hold onto the moment, and is preoccupied with the passage of time and loss. This
self critiques the empiricist approaches of the first two selves, patronizing their
‘simple’ ‘occupation’ of ‘noticing everything’, ‘matching every colour in the sky
and earth from their colour box’ and ‘rigging up little models of Sussex barns’.
This melancholy and possibly Romantic persona laments the loss of the moment:
‘Gone, gone; over, over; past and done with, past and done with … We have been
over that stretch, and are already forgotten’ (CE2, 291).
By contrast, the fourth and distinctly modern self is wilful, looks towards the
future and is represented through descriptions of vital movement and energy. Like
the shock of modern life itself, this character ‘lies in ambush, apparently dormant,
and jumps upon one unawares’. While apparently disconnected with present
events, their remarks demand attention due to their very abruptness and create
an opening in the narrative for new thoughts about the present moment and its
relationship to the future. Directing the first self’s attention to the future, which
is here symbolized and made visible by the headlight of a car, the fourth self
seeks to understand the present experience in relation to the Enlightenment ideal
of progress, the future and technological development:
‘Look at that.’ It was a light; brilliant, freakish; inexplicable. For a second I

was unable to name it. ‘A star’; and for that second it held its odd flicker of
unexpectedness and danced and beamed. ‘I take your meaning,’ I said. ‘You …
feel that the light over the downs there emerging, dangles from the future. Let us
try to understand this. Let us reason it out. I feel suddenly attached not to the past
but to the future. I think of Sussex in five hundred years to come. I think much
grossness will have evaporated … Draughts fan-blown by electric power will
cleanse houses. Lights intense and firmly directed will go over the earth, doing
the work. Looking at the moving light on that hill; it is the headlight of a car.
69
Wordsworth, ‘The Tables Turned’ (1798), lines 21–8, in The Norton Anthology of
English Literature. The Romantic Period, 7th edn, eds M.H. Abrams and Jack Stillinger
(New York and London: Norton, 2000), 228.
By day and by night Sussex in five centuries will be full of charming thoughts,
quick, effective beams.’ (CE2, 291)
The ‘intense’ and playful lights that the narrator observes in the distance are
reminiscent of the spectacular light shows staged by the electrical industry for the
British public in the early twentieth century, which served as metaphors for the
bright future such technology promised. As the setting sun threatens to put an end
to the moment of beauty, to extinguish that escaping scene, a new kind of beauty
in Sussex is made possible through technology. The world’s natural source of light
– the sun – is replaced by electricity, the ‘headlight of a car’, which reveals a new
vision of Sussex in the future which is, as Orlando finds the present moment in
1928, magical: ‘I think much grossness will have evaporated … There will be magic
gates. Draughts fan-blown by electric power will cleanse houses’ (CE2, 291). Thus,
while the essay begins with a romanticized view of Sussex as it was ‘ten centuries
ago’ (CE2, 290) before the marks of modernity were visible, it ends with a vision
of Sussex in the future, one which does not try to impose simplistic distinctions
between the country (or nature) and modernity. While technology, in the form of
a car, disrupts traditional experiences of nature’s beauty, it becomes integral to
offering a new idea of Sussex in the future that is shaped by electricity. As Minow-
Pinkney observes, Woolf’s response to the ‘new experiences of the modern age
is sanguine and hopeful’ and it is one that seeks to bring human experience and
technology into closer alignment.70 Sussex in five hundred years is itself conceived
of as a psychic space in which the human and technological come together; it will
be filled with ‘charming thoughts, quick, effective beams’ (CE2, 291).
Minow-Pinkney argues that the landscape that emerges from the motoring
experience presented in ‘Evening over Sussex’ consists of multiple images that
are assembled under the movement of the car, not the amalgamating force of the
human mind. She suggests that ‘“I” has no control over the concatenation of the
images’ and that this offers an experience of landscape that resists ideas of unity
or aura she suggests were favoured by the Romantics and ‘romantic anticapitalist
modernists’.71 However, the final stages of Woolf’s essay detail exactly that; a
presiding ‘I’ who synthesizes these separate points of view and suggests a return to
the Romantic idea of symbol. A final act of cognitive synthesis is performed at the
end of the essay, one that centres upon the imaginative synthesis of the experience
and its unified representation through symbol. As Kant argued that aesthetic
judgements rely on a harmony between the cognitive powers, Woolf’s essay also
suggests that the mind strives to create coherent and unified representations of its
objects which rely on a mental harmony and attunement. However, Woolf’s essay
makes clear that this activity is conditional upon the body’s safety and comfort:
70
the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, ed. Caughie, 180.
71
the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, ed. Caughie, 177–8.
134 Virginia Woolf
‘We are perfectly provided for. We are warmly wrapped in a rug; we are protected
from wind and rain.’ It is this state of physical comfort that permits the act of
‘reckoning’. At the end of the essay, her reverie stops due to the ‘song’ of her
body which requests some dinner, a bath and rest, and she enjoys spending the
remainder of the journey in its ‘delicious society’ (CE2, 292). Although the essay
is an investigation into psychology, Woolf reminds us that ‘heart, body and brain
[are] all mixed together’, not ‘contained in separate compartments’ (AROO, 16),
and that the body’s comfort is necessary in order for acts of aesthetic pleasure and
reflection to be possible:
‘Now,’ I said, ‘comes the season of making up our accounts. Now we have got
to collect ourselves; we have got to be one self. Nothing is to be seen any more,
except one wedge of road and bank which our lights repeat incessantly … Now
I, who preside over the company, am going to arrange in order the trophies which
we have all brought in. Let me see; there was a great deal of beauty brought in
today: farmhouses … mottled fields … all that. Also there was disappearance
and the death of the individual … And then there was the sudden dancing light,
that was hung in the future. What we have made then today,’ I said, ‘is this: that
beauty; death, of the individual; and the future’. (CE2, 292)
Impressions of beauty and the idea of death and the future are brought together; the
various trophies garnered from the moment are arranged and organized. Woolf’s
approach here is idealist as she suggests that experience and ideas are not passively
received, but ‘brought in’ and ‘made’ by the subject’s synthesizing powers.
Gerald McNiece argues that, for the Romantics, symbol is the medium for
intuition, not the discursive intellect or understanding, and is the product and
expressive medium of the imagination.72 Following Wordsworth and Coleridge,
Woolf’s essay celebrates imagination and creativity. The creation borne of the
moment assumes the form of a ‘little figure’ which symbolizes human beings’
capacity to create meaning even when confronted by the threat of nature’s might,
magnitude and indifference:
‘Look, I will make a little figure for your satisfaction; here he comes. Does
this little figure advancing through beauty, through death, to the economical,
powerful, and efficient future when houses will be cleansed by a puff of hot wind
satisfy you? Look at him; there on my knee.’ We sat and looked at the figure we
had made that day. Great sheer slabs of rock, tree tufted, surrounded him. He
was for a second very, very solemn. Indeed, it seemed as if the reality of things
were displayed there on the rug. (CE2, 292)
72
Gerald McNiece, The Knowledge that Endures: Coleridge, German Philosophy
and the Logic of Romantic Thought (London: Macmillan, 1992), 11.
The humour in this passage suggests a degree of ambivalence about the vision
of the future offered in the text, and it is one that Woolf puts forward to the reader
for consideration.73 The essay celebrates our potential as creators of meaning and
value and our capacity to adapt to the ever-changing conditions and nature of
life. As Woolf’s essay revises the beautiful–sublime distinction, it also revises the
Romantic figure of the hero. The individual is not raised to the status of a god but is
heroic because of his vulnerability and immanence, his very humanness within an
indifferent and changing world. The ‘little figure’ is a product of the synthesizing
capacities of the mind when challenged in its powers of representation and it is
presented as a symbol of the real: ‘Indeed, it seemed as if the reality of things
were displayed there on the rug. A violent thrill ran through us; as if a charge of
electricity had entered into us. We cried out together; “Yes, yes,” as if affirming
something, in a moment of recognition’ (CE2, 292). Thus, the final moment of
the sublime is realized: the blockage has been released and the moment has been
mastered by the powers of the creative and adaptive mind. However, in Woolf’s
final modernist twist to the Romantic sublime, the moment of release is akin to an
electric shock.
‘Evening over Sussex’ examines how new technologies fostered additional
forms of sensory experience in early twentieth-century Britain, affected patterns
of daily life and changed people’s ideas about human being and reality. Like the
railway in the nineteenth century, the car altered people’s relationship to nature
and conceptions of space and time. In this and other essays and her diaries,
Woolf examines the negative and positive potentials that new technologies such
as electricity and the car presented for society. Traditional forms of aesthetic
experience such as the distinction between the beautiful and the sublime, one
which had retained an important position in theories of aesthetic experience since
the eighteenth century, are shown by Woolf to be altered by historical and cultural
change. To this extent, ‘Evening over Sussex’ reconfigures such traditional
aesthetic dualisms. Ultimately, while Woolf values the form and patterns of the
ordinary day, her ‘little figure’ celebrates our capacity to respond and assimilate
to new phenomena and experiences that initially threaten them. The following
two chapters examine further the relationship between ‘moments of being’ and
ideas of experiential and ontological ‘pattern’ in Woolf’s oeuvre, and consider the
important role that these ‘moments’ assume in her understanding and conception
of the ordinary.
73
The comic element here is also a function of Woolf’s representation of the Romantic
hero who she imagines propped on her knee, stoically advancing into the future. Lokke
argues that Woolf’s attitude towards Romanticism ‘hovers between amused, self-critical
identification’ and a ‘detached and distanced view of the Romantic illusions of absolute
transcendence and individual genius’, ‘Orlando and Incandescence’, 250.
5
Moments of Being: Little Daily Miracles
Woolf’s unfinished memoir ‘A Sketch of the Past’ was composed intermittently

from April 1939 to November 1940, during the early stages of another European
war. This text offers a particularly illuminating insight into Woolf’s broader
philosophy and her moments of being. While the memoir provided a break from
what she found to be the rather monotonous task of writing her biography of Roger
Fry, anxiety about the war and depression about the future of Europe might also
have influenced her desire to document her life, beginning with her first memories,
and discuss some of her philosophical ideas with uncharacteristic directness.
Moments of being are one of the most important categories of experience in terms
of both Woolf’s life and her art. As her memoir makes clear, she understands
them to be an integral aspect of ordinary life, regularly surfacing amidst more
mundane and unnoticed periods, which she likens in the memoir to a ‘nondescript
cotton wool’ (MB, 70). Moments of being feature in many of her essays and all of
her novels, and have been discussed extensively in the critical literature over the
decades. They are also connected to Woolf’s implicit philosophy: her ideas about
subjectivity, community, being and ethics are all informed by them. As I stated in
my introduction, Woolf’s moments of being have been described as ‘heightened’
experiences, whilst other critics have compared them to the modernist epiphany
and both Christian and secular versions of the mystical experience. The more
traumatic moments in Woolf’s writing have been linked to twentieth-century
existentialism. The feelings of alienation and anxiety and a sense of the absurd
that are expressed on occasion in Woolf’s diaries, and experienced by characters
such as Rhoda in The Waves, anticipate Sartre’s ‘nausea’ and Albert Camus’
philosophy of the absurd as described in his essay Le Mythe de Sisyphe (The Myth
of Sisyphus, 1942) and novella L’Étranger (The Outsider, 1942). The fact that the
Woolfian moment has been linked to such a variety of traditions – philosophical,
religious and literary – and encompasses various states of feeling, from ecstasy to
the absurd, highlights an issue I pursue here; namely, that ‘moments of being’ is a
phrase that refers to a diverse range of experiences that may not be equivalent to
any one of these traditions or terms.

Woolf, TL, 218.

Olson describes them as heightened experiences; I will discuss the epiphany and the
mystical experience in relation to moments of being below.

Douglas Mao has discussed similarities between Woolf’s treatment of the subject–
object relation in her fiction and Sartre’s existentialism; see Solid Objects: Modernism and
the Test of Production (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), ch. 1.
138 Virginia Woolf
Special moments comparable to those described by Woolf occur in the work

of a number of other modernists and they often take on a sacred significance,
albeit within secular frameworks. They comprise a part of modernism’s search
for alternatives to orthodox religion. In Psyche Reborn, Susan Stanford Friedman
proposes that a crisis of belief was the starting point of modernism, a view echoed
in Pericles Lewis’ claim that ‘the problem of what would replace revealed religion
remained a pressing concern’ for many modernists. This crisis was a product of
a tension between what Douglas Mao describes as an increasingly secularized
worldview and recollections of a religious past: ‘[A] baseline assumption of a
secular point of view (among the educated) coexisted with lively memories of an
age when religious piety was at least a putative form.’ While rejecting orthodox
religion, modernists were still searching for ‘answers to traditional religious
questions about the human condition, the nature of historical experience, sexuality,
death and ultimate realities’. In addition to this, modernists also sought to find
alternative ways of expressing and representing the idea and experience of the
sacred, apart from traditional Christian frameworks and narratives. There was
also uncertainty about the viability of faith and morality in a world that seemed
emptied of prior ideals of humanity and modernity after the First World War. For
many Europeans this world was, in Eliot’s words, reduced to ‘[a] heap of broken
images’, its old idols and ideals a pile of ‘stony rubbish’:
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow

Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images
Eliot’s poetry provides one example of the modernist crisis of faith and, in his
case, its restoration. The crisis of faith is most clearly expressed in The Waste Land,
from which the above quotation is taken, and the later poem Ash Wednesday (1930),
which again confronts anxieties about humans’ access to revelation and therefore
redemption: ‘Where shall the word be found, where will the word / Resound? Not
here, there is not enough silence.’ Despite Eliot’s conversion to Anglo-Catholicism
in 1927, later poems such as Four Quartets (1935–42), which describes the process

Friedman, quoted in Shari Benstock, Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900–1940
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005), 26; Pericles Lewis, ‘Religion’, in A Companion
to Modernist Literature and Culture, eds David Bradshaw and Kevin J. Dettmar (Malden,
MA: Blackwell, 2006), 19.

Mao, Solid Objects, 17.

Lewis, ‘Religion’, in A Companion to Modernist Literature and Culture, eds
Bradshaw and Dettmar, 20.

T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land, lines 19–22, part I, in Collected Poems 1909–1962
(London: Faber and Faber, 1974), 63.

Eliot, ‘Ash-Wednesday’, part V, Collected Poems, 102.
Moments of Being: Little Daily Miracles 139
of faith and unity restored, are thoroughly syncretic presentations of faith and the
sacred, drawing as that poem does on Western (Christianity and Greek) and Eastern
(Hindu and Buddhist) religious frameworks and narratives.
Lewis points out that an interest in mythology, folktales and primitive cultures
common to many European and American modernists was often linked to ‘religious
exploration’. H.D.’s poetry exemplifies such an interest in mythology, seeking as
it does to restore the sacred to the modern world through a reinvigoration of Greek
mythopoeic thought. While modernists such as Eliot were participating in a wider
cultural crisis of institutional religion and drew heavily upon Biblical imagery,
symbolism and narratives in their poetry, Woolf was an avowed atheist (her father
was an agnostic, her mother a lapsed Christian (MB, 90)) and, as such, her search for
answers to religious and metaphysical questions occurred outside of such traditional
frameworks. For Woolf and many of her contemporaries, a secular form of spirituality
and the sacred stemmed from, or was intimately connected to, the ordinary, material
world – a modernist version of the Romantics’ ‘natural supernaturalism’.10 For
example, H.D. understands each concrete object to partake of the divine and eternal,
as she writes in ‘The Walls Do Not Fall’, part of her later war poem, Trilogy (1942):
our joy is unique, to us,

grape, knife, cup, wheat
are symbols in eternity,

and every concrete object
has abstract value, is timeless

in the dream parallel11
In H.D.’s memoir The Gift, written whilst she was living in London during the
Blitz, she impresses the need to remain close to the ordinary and that its value is
not merely symbolic: ‘Yet we must not step right over into the transcendental, we
must crouch near the grass and near the earth that made us. And the people who

Lewis, ‘Religion’, in A Companion to Modernist Literature and Culture, eds
Bradshaw and Dettmar, 25.
10
This phrase was coined by Carlyle and refers to the secular philosophies of Romantic
poets, including Wordsworth and Coleridge, and German philosophers such as Schiller and
Fichte. Through constructing new mythologies that retained Christianity’s experiential
relevance and values whilst giving up its dogmatic under-structure, Romanticism sought to
naturalize the supernatural and humanize the divine. As such, for Romantics the supernatural
or miraculous could be made manifest in the common, everyday world. See M.H. Abrams,
Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York:
Norton, 1971), ch. 6.
11
H.D., Trilogy, introduction and notes Aliki Barnstone (New York: New Directions,
1998), part 15, 24.
140 Virginia Woolf
created us.’12 As many critics have discussed, James Joyce’s secular theory
of epiphany as described in Stephen Hero and Ulysses finds trivial gestures,
commonplace objects and sometimes the vulgar to be the source of spiritual
manifestation, beauty or insight:
This triviality made him think of collecting many such moments together in a
book of epiphanies. By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation,
whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of
the mind itself. He believed that it was for the man of letters to record these
epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate
and evanescent of moments. He told Cranly that the clock of the Ballast Office
was capable of an epiphany.13
D.H. Lawrence’s personal philosophy was, according to Lewis, an affirmation

of life, as expressed in his posthumous Apocalypse (1931) which is an extended
commentary on the book of revelation. His substitute for Christian religion
was what Woolf termed ‘life itself’, a worldview which emphasized the value
of embodied experience as opposed to the Christian renunciation of it: ‘[T]he
magnificent here and now of life in the flesh is ours, and ours alone, and ours
only for a time. We ought to dance with rapture that we should be alive and part
of the living, incarnate cosmos.’14 Moments of being form part of Woolf’s secular
expressions of faith. They are associated with her metaphysical speculations about
the self (or ‘soul’ as she sometimes calls it), being and ethics, issues I return to in
the following chapters. However, they are also very much a part of the ordinary
world – Lawrence’s ‘incarnate cosmos’ and H.D.’s abstract and timeless ‘concrete
objects’ – and never fully depart from that realm.
Reading ‘A Sketch of the Past’ suggests that broad definitions of moments of
being as mystical experiences or epiphanies are too narrow to account for a collection
of experiences that are quite diverse in both nature and intensity. As I discussed in
my introduction, in ‘A Sketch of the Past’ Woolf associates this term not only with
heightened or dramatic experiences but quite ordinary moments of pleasure, such as
walking through the country or the city, writing, or reading a book (MB, 70). Many
of the moments of being presented in her fiction and non-fiction are simple and
involve a sense of life’s harmony, like the 1929 Sussex diary entry that I discussed
in the previous chapter or Lily Briscoe’s pleasure in the way certain moments in a
day seem complete and satisfactory: ‘This, that, and the other; herself and Charles
H.D., The Gift, ed. Jane Augustine (Gainseville: University of Florida Press,
12
1998), 50.
13
James Joyce, Stephen Hero, ed. Theodore Spencer (New York: New Directions
Press, 1944), 211. Stephen Hero was an early and later abandoned draft of A Portrait of the
Artist as a Young Man. It was published posthumously in 1944.
14
Quoted in Lewis, ‘Religion’, in A Companion to Modernist Literature and Culture,
eds Bradshaw and Dettmar, 26–7.
Tansley and the breaking of the wave; Mrs Ramsay bringing them together’ (TL, 218).
Others are certainly dramatic and heightened, particularly some of the experiences
described in her diaries.15 Moments of being also reflect Woolf’s concept of truth,
as something plural and many-sided, like the ‘many-petalled’ flower of the dinner-
party scenes in The Waves which symbolizes the moment of community and diverse
unity that the group of friends share and mutually create: ‘[A] whole flower to which
every eye brings it own contribution’ (W, 95). Such revelations are apprehended
partially and sometimes intuitively, unlike the considered logical path that Mr
Ramsay pursues to his final truth symbolized by the letter ‘Z’ (TL, 47). Lily Briscoe
muses that there may not be any big ‘revelation’ of the kind Mr Ramsay seeks that
will disclose the ‘meaning of life’, but rather ‘little daily miracles, illuminations,
matches struck unexpectedly in the dark’ (TL, 218). Collectively considered, these
little illuminations do tell us a good deal about Woolf’s broader ontology and the
relationship between the ordinary and the numinous reality she refers to on several
occasions in her fiction and non-fiction.
That life is composed of phases of ‘non-being’ and ‘moments of being’ is an
idea Woolf acquired during childhood (MB, 70). As a child, weeks would pass by
and nothing ‘made any dint’ upon her, then, for no apparent reason ‘there was a
sudden violent shock’ which she remembered all her life (MB, 71). The following
parts of this chapter offer a close reading of the moments of being described in
‘A Sketch of the Past’, an approach motivated by the fact that Woolf’s description
of them in the memoir is extremely detailed and careful and therefore invites a
comparable critical approach. I separate these moments of being into two different
kinds – positive and negative – as the group of experiences she recollects elicited
very different emotional, physical and intellectual states and responses in her as
a child. Although the experiences themselves are dramatic, like the epiphany,
many have their source in ordinary things and contexts. While they are typically
viewed as intellectual or spiritual experiences, the first two sections of this chapter
approach them as empirical ones in which the body is, if somewhat paradoxically,
presented as a conduit to, or vehicle for, a numinous reality, what Woolf calls
the ‘real thing’ behind the ‘cotton wool of daily life’ (MB, 72). The final section
of the chapter considers some consonances between negative moments of
being and Wordsworth’s spots of time in The Prelude. Woolf was immersed in
Wordsworth’s letters and poetry during the period in which she was working
on her memoir, finding in them comfort from her depression about the war. My
reading considers the role of the body, sensory experience and everyday material
contexts in her childhood moments of being, issues that have been overlooked in
critical discussions on the topic. In the next chapter, I consider in more detail the
numinous reality Woolf believed she apprehended during moments of being and
the philosophy of a ‘pattern’ she developed from them, particularly in terms of
how she reconciled her valuing of the ordinary and her atheism with her belief in
a version of the numinous.
15
See, for example, the diary entry for 15 October 1923 (D2).
142 Virginia Woolf
Positive Moments of Being: Encapsulated in Life
Woolf understands the child to have a unique kind of perception that is not dulled by
custom or familiarity, but it is one that she finds difficult to recover in adulthood:
I cannot recover, save by fits and starts, the focus, the proportions of the external
world. It seems to me that a child must have a curious focus; it sees an air-ball
or a shell with extreme distinctness; I still see the air-balls, blue and purple, and
the ribs on the shells. (MB, 78)
The distinctiveness with which the child sees the world suggests that, for Woolf,
they have a greater facility for states of being. As she can only recapture the child’s
point of view in ‘fits and starts’ – in episodic fragments – her moments of being
are episodes in childhood that she recalls with particular clarity, although she
cannot fathom why some things are remembered whilst others are not (MB, 70).
Suggesting that we only remember that which is ‘exceptional’ there is, she reflects,
no reason why some things are exceptional and others are not: ‘Why remember the
hum of bees in the garden going down to the beach, and forget completely being
thrown naked by father into the sea? (Mrs Sanwick says she saw this happen)’
(MB, 69–70). Neither of these events is exceptional in the sense that they mark
a radical departure from ordinary life; rather their exception lies elsewhere – in
their experience at the time or the fact that she remembers them. The recollection
of childhood perception and experience is also central to H.D.’s wartime memoir,
The Gift (1941–44). The majority of the memoir is written from the perspective of
H.D. as a child and presents her perception as extremely vivid, carefully attending
to the details of her domestic, material surroundings. Composed whilst she was
living in London during the Blitz, such descriptions reflect an attempt to lay hold of
the safe, ordinary, domestic realm in an historical moment of chaos and existential
uncertainty at which her walls might literally fall at any moment:
What [Papa] had was the high walled-in book-shelves here and in the old study,
the same but with strips of trimmed leather with brass-headed tacks along each
shelf. There was the smell of leather, his old gloves had the fingers cut off
so that he could manage all those little screws that were so important on his
instruments.16
For Woolf, who was also penning her recollections of childhood in the very early
stages of the same conflict, childhood is a ‘space’ of time which she attempts to
H.D., The Gift, 96. Through acts of recollection and imaginative reconstruction,
16
H.D. describes numerous quotidian scenes from her childhood: at her homes in Pennsylvania,
at school, in the streets of the town of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. I am referring also to the
third part of H.D.’s poetic Trilogy, ‘The Walls Do Not Fall’, which was her poetic response
to her experiences as a civilian in London during the Second World War.
convey in the memoir through a series of ‘pictures’, noting however that ‘sight’
was always ‘so mixed with sound that picture is not the right word’ (MB, 67):
Many bright colours; many distinct sounds; some human beings, caricatures;
comic; several violent moments of being, always including a circle of the scene
which they cut out: and all surrounded by a vast space – that is a rough visual
description of childhood. (MB, 79)
Woolf’s moments of being are intimately connected to memory, but rather than
surfacing unexpectedly and unconsciously like Proust’s ‘involuntary memories’,
they form something of a substratum to daily consciousness and thought. They ‘cut
out’ a ‘scene’, leaving a vivid ‘circle’ in memory affording detail and particularity
to a small part of a day, the majority of which remains undistinguished.17
The child’s perspective is described by Woolf as aesthetic and sensuous. It is filled
with ‘bright colours’ and ‘distinct sounds’, as opposed to normal adult perception
during states of non-being in which the external world is undistinguished, like a
mass of cotton wool (MB, 79). The opening chapter of The Waves also presents the
dawning of consciousness in terms of ‘being’, as a series of sensory experiences
of sight and sound:
‘I see a ring,’ said Bernard, ‘hanging above me. It quivers and hangs in a loop
of light.’
‘I see a slab of pale yellow,’ said Susan, ‘spreading away until it meets a purple
stripe.’
‘I hear a sound,’ said Rhoda, ‘cheep, chirp; cheep, chirp; going up and down.’
‘I see a globe,’ said Neville, ‘hanging down in a drop against the enormous
flanks of some hill.’
‘I see a crimson tassel,’ said Jinny, ‘twisted with gold threads.’
‘I hear something stamping,’ said Louis. ‘A great beast’s foot is chained. It
stamps, and stamps, and stamps.’ (W, 5)
The freshness and vividness of perception described here recalls Romantic

representations of the child, particularly Wordsworth’s and Blake’s presentation
of the child’s superior capacity for states of awe and wonder at common objects.18
Wordsworth’s ‘Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’
refers to childhood as a time during which ‘meadow, grove, and stream, / The
earth, and every common sight’ seemed ‘Apparelled in celestial light, / The glory
17
Her ‘scene-receiving capacity’ is more spontaneous and uncontrolled in the manner
of Proust’s involuntary memories: ‘[W]ithout a reason, without an effort, the sealing matter
cracks; in floods reality; that is a scene’ (MB, 142).
18
For example, ‘Songs of Innocence’ from William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and
Experience, in The Norton Anthology of English Literature. The Romantic Period, 7th edn,
eds M.H. Abrams and Jack Stillinger (New York and London: Norton, 2000), 43–8.
144 Virginia Woolf
and the freshness of a dream’.19 However, the child’s perspective is not, for Woolf,
fixated on pleasure and the sensuous. It also encompasses understandings, moral
reflections and judgements. For instance, James Ramsay in To the Lighthouse
harbours special understandings that are associated with private languages:
James Ramsay, sitting on the floor cutting out pictures from the illustrated
catalogue of the Army and Navy Stores, endowed the picture of a refrigerator as
his mother spoke with heavenly bliss. It was fringed with joy. The wheelbarrow,
the lawn-mower, the sound of poplar trees, leaves whitening before rain,
rooks cawing, brooms knocking, dresses rustling – all these were so coloured
and distinguished in his mind that he had already his private code, his secret
language. (TL, 7)
Practical objects, like a refrigerator are, for James, aesthetic scenes. The divine is
visible in common things and people; his mother speaks with ‘heavenly bliss’, the
refrigerator he shapes is ‘fringed with joy’ like Wordsworth’s ‘common sight[s]’
that are ‘Apparelled in celestial light’. James also has his judgements, reflections
and ‘thought[s]’, for example, about his mother who is ‘ten thousand times better
in every way’ than his father, who drains her through his perpetual demands for
sympathy (TL, 8).
The positive moments of being described in ‘A Sketch of the Past’ similarly
reflect the child’s susceptibility to intense feelings, ‘private codes’ and ‘secret’
meanings. The first moment described in the memoir is Woolf’s ‘first memory’ as
a young child lying in her bed in the nursery at St Ives, Cornwall. The moment
centres upon sense impressions and feelings:
It is of lying half asleep, half awake, in bed in the nursery at St Ives. It is of

hearing the waves breaking, one, two, one, two, and sending a splash of water
over the beach; and then breaking, one, two, one, two, behind a yellow blind. It
is of hearing the blind draw its little acorn across the floor as the wind blew the
blind out. It is of lying and hearing this splash and seeing this light, and feeling,
it is almost impossible that I should be here; of feeling the purest ecstasy I can
conceive. (MB, 64–5)20
This moment of being involves a series of sense perceptions culminating in a state

of wonder at the fact of existence: ‘[I]t is almost impossible that I should be here.’
19
William Wordsworth, ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’, lines 1, 2, 4, in Norton
Anthology, eds Abrams and Stillinger, 287. See also book one of The Prelude (1850),
‘Introduction, Childhood, and School-time’, eds Jonathan Wordsworth, M.H. Abrams,
Stephen Gill (London: Norton, 1979).
20
This moment is used in several of Woolf’s novels. It is recast as a moment of terror
during Rachel’s fever in The Voyage Out. The yellow blind features as a central motif, the
‘yellow curtain’, in the party scene in Mrs. Dalloway, 149–50.
A sense of awe at the fact of existence is expressed on several occasions by Rachel

Vinrace in The Voyage Out, a text which recreates several of Woolf’s childhood
moments: ‘She was overcome with awe that things should exist at all’ (VO, 127).
Just as H.D. describes her own experience of the everyday as a child in The Gift,
for Woolf it is sometimes the source of feelings of ‘ecstasy’.21
The above quotation from ‘A Sketch of the Past’ suggests that the feeling of
‘ecstasy’ arises from a series of visual and auditory sense impressions that centre
on ideas of continuity and pattern, particularly the rhythmic movement of the
waves, which Woolf contrasts to her own immobility. Her positive moments of
being present images of the external world flooding into the subject, or a change in
the boundary between inner and outer, self and world. For example, this moment
of ecstasy is later compared to ‘lying in a grape and seeing through a film of
semi-transparent yellow’ (MB, 65), a foetal image of encapsulation and safety.
However a ‘film’ that is ‘semi-transparent’ also suggests a liminal space in which
the distinction between self and world is very fine and permeable. Her feeling of
‘ecstasy’ seems, then, connected to her sense of physical encapsulation and unity
with the world, and a permeability between the ‘film’ or skin that separates her
from, but also connects her to, it.
Metaphors of the subject as a vessel to be filled by experience occur throughout
‘A Sketch of the Past’ and recall the ‘shower of innumerable atoms’ that ‘shape’
the ‘envelope’ of consciousness in ‘Modern Fiction’ (E4, 160). Woolf views her
first memory in the nursery to be formative, akin to a structural base upon which
the rest of experience rests and relies. Imagining life as a ‘bowl that one fills
and fills and fills’, she claims this most ‘important’ memory is the ‘base’ upon
which her life ‘stands’ (MB, 64). Later in the memoir, she describes the feeling
of ‘pure delight’ that she experiences when recollecting St Ives, one that again
concentrates on her sensory responses to the physical world and presents another
bowl-like image:
The lemon-coloured leaves on the elm tree; the apples in the orchard; the
murmur and rustle of the leaves makes me pause here, and think how many
other than human forces are always at work on us. While I write this the light
glows; an apple becomes vivid green; I respond all through me; but how …
Figuratively I could snapshot what I mean by some image; I am a porous
vessel afloat on sensation; a sensitive plate exposed to invisible rays; and so
on. (MB, 133)
21
In The Gift, H.D. describes her sense as a child of curiosity and wonder at the
everyday, and recalls many experiences of joy and ecstasy at the ordinary: ‘Our-father is
half way between this lamp and the next lamp-post and Gilbert [her brother] has run out in
the road and is making a snow-ball … I will stand here by the lamp-post because I am so
happy’ (116). The early chapters of the memoir in particular reveal many such moments.
146 Virginia Woolf
The self as a ‘vessel’ reiterates ideas of enclosure and roundness that are common
to other images in the memoir of the self as a ‘container’ and life as a ‘bowl’
(MB, 67; 66). Like the matter inside a grape, external reality is aqueous and she a
‘porous vessel’ that absorbs it.22 It is this porousness that facilitates her periodic
sense of unity with the world. Thus, Woolf’s representations of subjectivity in her
memoir reflect an empiricist emphasis on sensory experience as the source of our
ideas. However, as I will show in the final part of this chapter, she also describes
the mind’s creative and organizational role in transforming incoherent sensory
experiences into unified concepts and aesthetic forms.
The second positive moment of being recalled in the memoir occurs in the
garden at St Ives and reiterates ideas of ontological unity and feelings of safety and
encapsulation within the world. It involves a series of intense physical sensations
and culminates in a singular feeling of ‘rapture’:
[The second memory] was much more robust; it was highly sensual. It was
later. It still makes me feel warm; as if everything were ripe; humming; sunny;
smelling so many smells at once; and all making a whole that even now makes
me stop – as I stopped then going down to the beach; I stopped at the top to look
down at the gardens. They were sunk beneath the road. The apples were on a
level with one’s head. The gardens gave off a murmur of bees; the apples were
red and gold; there were also pink flowers; and grey and silver leaves. The buzz,
the croon, the smell, all seemed to press voluptuously against some membrane;
not to burst it; but to hum round one such a complete rapture of pleasure that I
stopped, smelt; looked. But again I cannot describe that rapture. It was rapture
rather than ecstasy. (MB, 66)
The extent to which Woolf feels it necessary to record this scene in minute detail
reveals the central role that her perceptions and sensations assume in the feeling of
‘rapture’. Her sense of being glutted by sensations is transferred to her surrounding
environment; she imagines that the garden is a place of plenitude and fullness that
might burst its film or ‘membrane’. She feels contained within and a part of an
ontological unity: ‘to hum around one such a complete rapture’, ‘all making a
whole’. The feelings that she associates with these two moments – ecstasy and
22
Images of the self as a ‘bowl’, ‘vessel’ and ‘container’ in ‘A Sketch of the Past’
could refer to the Socratic image used in the Gorgias and Phaedrus of the soul as a
vessel or jar with liquid contents, an image of soul as water-carrier which appears in the
Delphic mysteries. In the Phaedrus, Socrates employs this image to describe his purported
forgetfulness regarding the subject of love which he received from an external source: ‘I
know my own ignorance; so I suppose it can only be that it has been poured into me, through
my ears, as into a vessel, from some external source, though in my stupid fashion I have
actually forgotten how, and from whom, I heard it’, Plato, Phaedrus, trans. R. Hackforth,
The Collected Dialogues of Plato including the Letters, eds Edith Hamilton and Huntington
Cairns (New York: Pantheon, 1961), 235c–d, p. 483.
rapture – are common to the discourses of religious and mystical experience and
reflect the spiritual aspect they take on for Woolf.23
The third positive moment of being also occurs in the garden at St Ives and
is based on an observation of nature that culminates in an idea as opposed to an
ineffable feeling:24
“That is the whole”, I said. I was looking at a plant with a spread of leaves; and
it seemed suddenly plain that the flower itself was a part of the earth; that a ring
enclosed what was the flower; and that was the real flower; part earth; part flower.
It was a thought I put away as being likely to be very useful to me later. (MB, 71)
The apprehension of unity is not experienced here in terms of physical sensations

but as a ‘thought’ that the child anticipates might be ‘useful’. Like the other
positive moments, it centres on ideas of connection and ontological unity, the child
perceiving the earth and the parts of the flower as essentially connected by a ‘ring’.
Although Woolf attributed a degree of novelty and excitement to St Ives as it was
the Stephens’ (i.e. her family’s) holiday home, these three moments of being occur
in ordinary spaces. Natural objects like the sea, the wind, a flower, some apple
trees or fragrances emanating from a garden become the source of very powerful
feelings and an apprehension of ontological unity and harmony.
The subjective passivity, feelings of ecstasy and rapture, and an apprehension
of ontological unity integral to positive moments of being have prompted several
critics to interpret them as mystical experiences and such readings approach
the Woolfian moment as predominantly intellectual or spiritual in nature. This
interpretation is supported by Woolf’s references in her diaries to ‘mystical’
feelings25 and her engagement, if sometimes ironic, with mysticism in her fiction.26
23
‘Rapture’ refers to being carried onwards by a force or movement, both literally
and intellectually or spiritually. ‘Ecstasy’ is associated with states of unconsciousness,
trance or a condition of physical inertia caused by the mind or soul’s fixation during an act
of contemplation, The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972), vol.
2, 1747; vol. 1, 628.
24
Woolf includes her description of this memory with two traumatic ‘violent shocks’,
but this shock is far more similar to her first memories as it consists of positive feelings and
an apprehension of ontological unity and coherence, hence my decision to discuss it here.
25
Woolf, 30 September 1926, D3, 113: ‘I wished to add some remarks to this, on the
mystical side of this solitude.’
26
For example, Mrs Ramsay’s religious reveries which are rendered ironic in ‘The
Window’, and the narrative critique of the ‘mystic’ and ‘visionary’ in the ‘Time Passes’
section of To the Lighthouse, 181–3. An ironic attitude is also expressed towards Mrs
Swithin’s mysticism in Between the Acts, which is referred to as her ‘circular tour of the
imagination – one-making. Sheep, cows, grass, trees, ourselves – all are one. If discordant,
producing harmony – if not to us, to a gigantic ear attached to a gigantic head’ (BA, 122).
This idea of the world as a harmonious, diverse unity is one Woolf supports on other
occasions, as I will discuss in the following chapter.
148 Virginia Woolf
Critics have suggested various sources and influences for arguments relating
to Woolf’s mysticism. Jane Marcus interprets Woolf’s ‘rational’ mysticism and
pacifism as being influenced by her Quaker aunt, Caroline Emelia Stephen.27
Madeline Moore also associates Woolf with Christian traditions through her
reference to Woolf’s pantheism, the view that all is in God.28 However, approaching
moments of being as a version of theological mysticism is complicated by Woolf’s
atheism: in ‘A Sketch of the Past’, she declares that ‘certainly and emphatically
there is no God’ (MB, 72). Attributing Woolf with a mystical view of the world also
needs to address the contradictory and often critical representations of mysticism
in her fiction, which Val Gough has explored in detail.29
Other scholars have interpreted the Woolfian moment in relation to secular
forms of the mystical experience. Stephanie Paulsell, for example, adopts R.C.
Zaehner’s term ‘pan-en-henic’, which refers to the view that all is one, but
that ‘one’ is not god.30 While secular versions of the mystical experience can
accommodate Woolf’s atheism, moments of being involve a powerful engagement
with, and affirmation of, the physical world. Furthermore, her concept of what
Mark Hussey calls an ‘abstract’ or numinous reality is intimately related to the
material world.31 That on many occasions the Woolfian moment not only affirms
but emphasizes and celebrates the reality and particularity of the physical world
distinguishes it from traditional accounts of the mystical experience which involve
a disengagement from, or disavowal of, the empirical world and the senses in
favour of a spiritual reality.
Marcus defines mysticism as ‘the purest religious concept … [that allows] access
27
to the community of saints without the dogmas and disciplines of organized religion’;
Jane Marcus, ‘The Niece of a Nun: Virginia Woolf, Caroline Stephen, and the Cloistered
Imagination’, in Virginia Woolf: A Feminist Slant, ed. Jane Marcus (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1983), 10–11.
28
Madeline Moore applies this definition to Woolf in The Short Season Between Two
Silences: The Mystical and the Political in the Novels of Virginia Woolf (Boston: George
Allen and Unwin, 1984), 9.
29
Val Gough, ‘“That Razor Edge of Balance”: Virginia Woolf and Mysticism’, Woolf
Studies Annual 5 (1999): 57–77; ‘“With Some Irony in her Interrogation”: Woolf’s Ironic
Mysticism’, Virginia Woolf and the Arts: Selected Papers from the Sixth Annual Conference
on Virginia Woolf, eds Diane F. Gillespie and Leslie K. Hankins (New York: Pace University
Press, 1997), 85–90.
30
Stephanie Paulsell draws on the definition between pan-en-henic and pantheistic
union provided by R.C. Zaehner in his book Mysticism Sacred and Profane (London:
Oxford University Press, 1961). Zaehner distinguishes between two conceptions of unity
in religious thought: Christian or Vedantin identity with God, which he calls ‘pantheistic’
meaning ‘all-in-God-ism’, and a monistic sense of identity with a universal principle or
nature, which he terms ‘pan-en-henic’ meaning ‘all-in-one-ism’; 28–32.
31
Fiction (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1986), 97.
Woolf’s moments of being have also been likened to the modern epiphany,
which seeks to negotiate between the empirical and the transcendental, without
disavowing the reality of one over the other. Both forms of experience typically
arise from trivial events and reflect a close engagement with the material world.
Morris Beja has located Woolf’s ‘moments of vision’ in relation to the tradition of
the epiphany in other modernist writers, such as Thomas Hardy, James Joyce and
Joseph Conrad.32 As Beja’s study was published in 1971, before the first edition
of Moments of Being in 1976, he develops his analysis of ‘moments of vision’
through Woolf’s fiction and diaries. He considers short stories such as ‘Slater’s
Pins Have no Points’ and ‘The Lady in the Looking Glass; A Reflection’, and
novels including Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse. Beja applies this term to
moments in Woolf’s fiction and diaries that involve a sudden insight, an increased
understanding about life, or textual climaxes in which various characters or themes
of the text are integrated and illumination is momentarily realized, as in the dinner-
party scenes in part one of To the Lighthouse and at the end of Mrs. Dalloway, and
in parts four and eight of The Waves.
For Beja, ‘moments of vision’ are intuitive and irrational experiences that
involve a sense of unity.33 He argues for their distinction from the mystical
experience due to their secular nature and intimate engagement with the material
world: ‘[W]hat most makes [Woolf’s characters] susceptible to little daily miracles
and illuminations: their intense sensibility to the material world, their desire to
fathom the full meaning of the trivia of experience.’34 While Beja lists certain
qualities or elements common to ‘moments of vision’, he argues that Woolf did
not develop ‘anything remotely like a theory’ about them, despite the fact that they
occupy a more central place in her oeuvre than that of Joyce or Proust.35 ‘A Sketch
of the Past’ is the closest Woolf comes to offering a ‘theory’ about her moments of
being, in terms of their origin and nature, and their effect on her thought and life.
It is also in that memoir that she recognizes the distinction between the positive,
or euphoric, and negative moments and tries to account for this difference. Beja’s
analysis concentrates upon what I have called positive moments of being. However,
negative moments differ in several respects from positive ones: they are not
euphoric or pleasurable, and like the experiences of existential anxiety described
later in the 1940s by Sartre and Camus, they often involve a sense of estrangement
or alienation from the world and centre upon anxieties about meaning. Beja draws
upon comments in Woolf’s diaries to support the view that ‘to her the moments
themselves are far more important than the meanings they involve’:
As Katharine says in Night and Day, quoting Dostoyevsky, it is “the process

of discovering” that matters, “not the discovery itself at all.” That is, it is the
32
Morris Beja, Epiphany in the Modern Novel (London: Peter Owen, 1971), 116–18.
33
Beja, Epiphany in the Modern Novel, 116.
34
35
150 Virginia Woolf
experience of revelation that matters, not what is revealed – which, as often as

not, is vague and mysterious. In this and in other respects, Mrs. Woolf is closer
to Walter Pater than to Joyce, for like Pater she believes that not the fruit of
experience, but experience itself, is the end.36
While I agree that process is important to Woolf, her comments about the nature
of her more traumatic moments of being in ‘A Sketch of the Past’ emphasize the
importance of discovering and creating meaning out of these experiences. A need
to make coherent sense out of such moments, and relate them to the pattern of
experience, is clearly expressed in the memoir. Negative moments are figured
in Woolf’s memoir as traumatic until meaning is realized and comprehension is
achieved. Discovering meaning is a process that engages the body as well as the
mind in a bid to relate the ‘real thing’ to the ‘cotton wool of daily life’ (MB, 72).
Negative Moments of Being: Beneath an Avalanche of Meaning
Like positive moments of being, the traumatic ones described in the memoir involve
intense physical sensations and powerful states of feeling. Woolf often refers to
them as ‘shocks’ or ‘violent shocks’ as they are marked by trauma and feelings
of physical vulnerability, as contrasted to the positive ones which evoke a sense
of enclosure and safety (MB, 71). Negative moments of being are also revelatory
experiences, and Woolf posits a relationship between the ‘pain’ associated with her
‘shocks’ and how its alleviation is related to the acquisition of coherent meaning
(MB, 72). While the instances of pain Woolf describes in her memoir are not like
those examined in relation to illness in Chapter 3, in the sense that they do not
all have clear physical sources, the intense physicality with which she describes
these shocks does afford the ‘pain’ she associates with them a physical intensity or
aspect. ‘A Sketch of the Past’ presents the body as a conduit or vehicle for moral
and metaphysical meaning during negative moments of being, a view that contrasts
with other critics who have suggested that the body is effaced in the memoir.
The first negative moment of being results in an awareness of the immorality
of violence. Her feeling, that to hurt another person is wrong, occurs when Woolf
is fighting with her brother Thoby as a child. It could be viewed as the foundation
for Woolf’s later pacifism:
I was fighting with Thoby on the lawn. We were pommelling each other with
our fists. Just as I raised my fist to hit him, I felt: why hurt another person? I
dropped my hand instantly, and stood there, and let him beat me. I remember
the feeling. It was a feeling of hopeless sadness. It was as if I became aware
of something terrible; and of my own powerlessness. I slunk off alone, feeling
horribly depressed. (MB, 71)
Beja, Epiphany in the Modern Novel, 114–15.

36
The moment of moral awareness is not empowering for Woolf as a child and
the experience here centres on feelings rather than clear cognitions. It results in
feelings of ‘hopeless sadness’ and ‘powerlessness’ at the ‘terrible’ awareness she
has come to learn, which is perhaps better expressed as the problem of violence
and suffering. This experience of physical assault is recounted shortly after Woolf
describes her sexual abuse by her half-brother, Gerald Duckworth (MB, 69), an
event that created in her feelings of self-consciousness in regards to her body and
appearance, a condition that she referred to as her ‘looking-glass shame’ (MB, 68).
While in the initial stages of the memoir ‘the image of the child’s body fantasizes
the body as enclosure’, Emily Dalgarno argues that from the ‘mirror experiences
onwards … Woolf figures a threatened body’ that is ‘helplessly cracked’ and a ‘site
of invasion’.37 Although figured as a site of vulnerability and potential invasion,
and sometimes as a source of shame, the body is a crucial point of mediation for
Woolf between consciousness and the ‘real thing’ behind the ‘cotton wool of daily
life’, and this can be understood as one way in which she reclaims and recovers
bodily experience in this text.
Woolf presents her capacity for moments of being as proof that the sense of ‘guilt’
and ‘shame’ she attached to her body ‘did not prevent [her] from feeling ecstasies
and raptures spontaneously and intensely … so long as they were disconnected
with [her] own body’ (MB, 68). She recalls a diminished sense of self during her
first two childhood moments of being: ‘I am hardly aware of myself, but only of
the sensation. I am only the container of the feeling of ecstasy, of the feeling of
rapture’ (MB, 67). Such statements have led some critics to argue that the body is
elided in ‘A Sketch of the Past’. For example, in her doctoral thesis ‘Auto-biology:
Metaphors of the Body in the Autobiographical Texts of Woolf, Duras and Barthes’,
Vanessa Evangelista argues that ‘Woolf’s own attempts at giving flesh and bone
to the body of woman seem not to materialize in Moments of Being’.38 Rather, she
argues that ‘Woolf’s project seems intent on draining the body of its organic life
by a process of disembodiment and self-effacement’ and aligns her autobiography
with the tradition of the spiritual or mystical autobiography.39 Although Woolf
speaks ambivalently about her relationship to her body at a few points in the
memoir, physical sensation and perception are consistently foregrounded in her
detailed descriptions of childhood moments. The memoir articulates Woolf’s
intimate relationship to her physical environment, which sometimes results in a
breakdown of the Cartesian subject–object dichotomy. While Evangelista argues
37
Emily Dalgarno, ‘Ideology into Fiction: Virginia Woolf’s “A Sketch of the Past”’,
Novel: A Forum on Fiction, 27, no. 2 (1994): 175–95; 186. Dalgarno’s article argues that
the mirror scene in ‘A Sketch’ ‘figures the process by means of which [Woolf’s] fiction both
challenges and accommodates the ideology of patriarchy’, 176.
38
Vanessa Evangelista, ‘Auto-biology: Metaphors of the Body in the Autobiographical
Texts of Woolf, Duras and Barthes’ (Doctoral thesis, University of Western Australia,
1996), 83.
39
Evangelista, ‘Auto-biology’, 83–4.
152 Virginia Woolf
that the body is drained of its organic life in this text, Woolf’s positive moments
centre on the body as a space that contains or absorbs organic life. In negative
moments of being, physical sensation operates in an equally central manner, with
the exception that these experiences centre on feelings of pain, not pleasure, and
anxieties about the body’s autonomy or control. As opposed to effacing the body,
Woolf’s memoir carefully records its experiences and reiterates the inextricable
connection between the mind and body, self and world, which she had argued for
in earlier texts, including A Room of One’s Own and ‘On Being Ill’.
One of the negative moments of being or ‘shocks’ discussed in ‘A Sketch of
the Past’ involves the child’s awareness of the fact of death, which culminates in a
state of physical petrification. Upon hearing her parents discussing the suicide of
a man named Mr Valpy, who had been staying at St Ives, Woolf recalls as a child
walking past an apple tree in the garden at night. The tree seemed to be ‘connected’
to the man’s suicide:
I could not pass it. I stood there looking at the grey-green creases of the bark
– it was a moonlit night – in a trance of horror. I seemed to be dragged down,
hopelessly, into some pit of absolute despair from which I could not escape. My
body seemed paralysed. (MB, 71)
The incomprehensibility of death is a cognitive trauma expressed through the body.

The body, like the mind, is checked by an unanalysable or unintelligible fact. This
incident appears in The Waves, when the ‘delicate’ Neville hears about the murder
of a man ‘found with his throat cut’. Neville designates this moment ‘death among
the apple trees’, the ‘immitigable tree’ symbolizing the incomprehensibility of
death, the ‘unintelligible obstacle’ that he ‘cannot surmount’: ‘I was unable to
lift my foot up the stair’ (W, 17).40 As Neville loses power over his body, Woolf
likewise describes a lack of physical control. She is ‘dragged down’ and cannot
‘escape’ from a pit of ‘despair’, feeling herself to be ‘paralysed’. This physical
trauma is associated with ‘horror’ and ‘absolute despair’ similar to the terror,
40
The tree is a recurring motif in Woolf’s fiction for the capacity of common objects
to appear strange. For Rachel Vinrace, this strangeness has a positive effect: ‘It was an
ordinary tree, but to [Rachel] it appeared so strange that it might have been the only tree in
the world … Having seen a sight that would last her for a lifetime, and for a lifetime would
preserve that second, the tree once more sank into the ordinary ranks of trees’ (VO, 180).
Later in the novel, during Rachel’s fever, a tree comes to symbolize Terence’s fear: ‘With
a mixture of fear and loathing he looked at the slim black cypress trees which were still
visible in the garden, and heard the unfamiliar creaking and grating sounds which show that
the earth is still hot. All these sights and sounds appeared sinister and full of hostility and
foreboding’ (VO, 366). A tree forms the centre of an existentialist meditation on purpose
and death in Jacob’s Room (25). A tree is also the catalyst for an experience of existential
anxiety for Roquentin, the protagonist of Sartre’s novel Nausea: ‘I was sitting, slightly
bent, my head bowed, alone in front of that black, knotty mass, which was utterly crude and
frightening’, trans. Robert Baldick (London: Penguin, 1965), 183.
‘hopeless sadness’ and ‘powerlessness’ she felt when being beaten by Thoby.
Thus, an inability to cognitively come to terms with or analyse the reality of death
is experienced as physical trauma.
Woolf observes this relationship in stating that the different feelings she had
during the incident with Thoby and the tree following Valpy’s suicide, as compared
to her sense of ‘satisfaction’ looking at the flower in the garden, were a result of
the fact that she was:
quite unable to deal with the pain of discovering that people hurt each other;
that a man I had seen had killed himself. The sense of horror held me powerless.
But in the case of the flower I found a reason; and was thus able to deal with the
sensation. I was not powerless. (MB, 71–2)
Thus, unanalysed or unintelligible meanings – about death and violence for

example – are felt as sensations of pain, and that pain is alleviated through the
discovery of meanings and reasons. As I will show, bodily states are also integral
to the process of making sense of external events.
The two final moments of being recollected in ‘A Sketch of the Past’ also
focus on feelings of physical threat and passivity and a lack of coherent meaning
or reason. The first, like the fight with Thoby and the tree on the path, centres on
a quotidian thing, a puddle, which instigates a feeling of existential alienation
and meaninglessness: ‘[F]or no reason I could discover, everything suddenly
became unreal; I was suspended; I could not step across the puddle; I tried to
touch something … the whole world became unreal’ (MB, 78, original ellipses).
This moment involves an epistemological crisis during which Woolf loses all
sense of the world’s reality. Her response to this is again expressed through her
body. The Waves represents this moment through the character of Rhoda, who
is sceptical about the stability of the material world and deems it a threat to her
physical integrity (W, 14):
I came to the puddle. I could not cross it. Identity failed me. We are nothing, I
said, and fell … Then very gingerly, I pushed my foot across. I laid my hand
against a brick wall, I returned very painfully, drawing myself back into my
body over the grey cadaverous space of the puddle. (W, 47)41
Suspended before the puddle, Woolf tries, like the child Rhoda, to reconnect with
the everyday, material world and its recuperation is necessary in order for both
Woolf and Rhoda to overcome the experience of existential and epistemological
crisis.
The other ‘violent shock’, described immediately after the puddle incident in
‘A Sketch of the Past’, refers to Woolf’s alarm when a mentally handicapped child
approached her for some of her sweets (MB, 78). The ‘horror’ of the encounter
41
See also p. 120, where the puddle episode is recalled.
154 Virginia Woolf
returns to her later that night, and her inability to rationalize her fear of the boy is
again experienced as a physical trauma:
[T]hat night in the bath the dumb horror came over me. Again I had that hopeless
sadness; that collapse I have described before; as if I were passive under some
sledge-hammer blow; exposed to a whole avalanche of meaning that had heaped
itself up and discharged itself upon me, unprotected, with nothing to ward it off,
so that I huddled up at my end of the bath, motionless. I could not explain it; I
said nothing to Nessa sponging herself at the other end. (MB, 78)
In this passage, the ‘meaning’ that Woolf cannot make sense of is imaged as a
threatening physical object, an ‘avalanche’. An ‘avalanche’ suggests a mass of
material that is undistinguished. Whereas the metaphor of the ‘cotton wool’ of non-
being implies an innocuous, homogenous mass, ‘avalanche’ evokes ideas of physical
discomfort, threat and suffocation. The physical passivity and sense of helplessness
integral to this and Woolf’s other negative moments are the result of her inability
to understand what these various events signify, or her inability to cope with the
meanings that they do signify. This excess of meaning, whilst left unanalysed, is
likened to external, physical threats that inflict pain and constraint upon her body.
This pain, Woolf notes, is only alleviated when those avalanches of meaning are
transformed, through the power of explanation and reason, from external physical
threats into internalized, coherent meanings. In her memoir, Woolf describes a
dialectical relationship between the physical trauma and meaning:
I only know that many of these exceptional moments brought with them a
peculiar horror and a physical collapse; they seemed dominant; myself passive.
This suggests that as one gets older one has a greater power through reason
to provide an explanation; and that this explanation blunts the sledge-hammer
force of the blow. (MB, 72)
As an adult, with the capacity to explain and make sense of these shocks through
the act of writing, they are welcome and valued. No longer perceived to be a
‘blow from an enemy hidden behind the cotton wool of daily life’, they are for
the adult Woolf a ‘revelation of some order … a token of some real thing behind
appearances’ (MB, 72).
The metaphors and images that recur throughout ‘A Sketch of the Past’ reveal
the extent to which Woolf understands the body to be a crucial medium between
her mind and the ‘real thing’ behind the ‘cotton wool’ of daily appearances. It is
the ‘vessel’ that alternately receives a flood of impressions or bears the burden
of an ‘avalanche of meaning’ that she later orders and coheres through writing
– also a physical activity. The moment of being is, therefore, not an intellectual
or spiritual experience unconnected to bodily states. Woolf describes the body’s
crucial role in these experiences and in understanding their significance.
The two previous sections have focused upon Woolf’s autobiographical

moments as empirical experiences. However, they also involve an apprehension
of a numinous reality apart from the empirical world, what she calls the ‘real thing
behind appearances’. The final part of this chapter explores consonances between
Woolf’s negative moments of being and Wordsworth’s spots of time as described
in The Prelude. Woolf read Wordsworth’s poetry, travel guides and letters, and
expressed an admiration for his thought and writing in her diaries, letters and critical
essays.42 While their mutual valuing of the ordinary was discussed in the previous
chapter, similarities also exist between their respective views on the relationship
between the quotidian and the numinous, and the individual’s apprehension of the
latter through the former.
Moments of Being and Spots of Time
Like Woolf’s moments of being, Wordsworth’s spots of time are autobiographical

experiences that informed his poetry. Upon first reading The Prelude in 1911,
Woolf wrote to Saxon Sydney-Turner asking if he did not consider it ‘one of the
greatest works ever written’: ‘Some of it, anyhow, is sublime; it may get worse’
(letter 565; L1, 460). Upon re-reading the poem in 1936, a few years prior to
writing her memoir, her admiration for it had increased.43 She wrote to Ethel
Smyth of Wordsworth’s superiority over modern poets:
O The Prelude. Have you read it lately? Do you know, it is so good, so succulent,
so suggestive, that I have to hoard it, as a child keeps a crumb of cake? And then
people say he’s dull! Why have we no great poet? You know thats [sic] what
would keep us straight: but for our sins we only have a few pipers on hedges
like Yeats and Tom Eliot, de la Mare – exquisite frail twittering voices one has
to hollow one’s hand to hear, whereas old [Wordsworth] fills the room. (letter
3173; L6, 73)
In May 1940, the second year during which she was periodically working on her
memoir, Woolf was reading ‘masses’ of Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s letters, and
in June she wrote that Wordsworth’s letters were the ‘only drug’ to relieve her
anxiety about the war and the threat of German invasion (D5, 289; 295).
42
See, for example, ‘Wordsworth and the Lakes’ (1906), E1, 105–109; ‘Wordsworth’s
Letters’ (1908), E1, 183–8; ‘Romance’ (1917), E2, 73–6.
43
There is no indication if Woolf was reading the 1850 or 1805 edition. Copies of
both were in the Woolfs’ library. A 1933 edition of the 1805 Prelude edited by Ernest D.
Selincourt was in the Woolfs’ library, and this edition was reprinted in 1936; ‘The Library
of Leonard and Virginia Woolf: A Short Title Catalogue’, compiled and edited by Julie King
and Laila Miletic-Vejzovic, intro. Diane F. Gillespie (Pullman, WA: WSU Press, 2003).
Available at: www.wsulibs.wsu.edu/holland/masc/OnlineBooks/Woolflibraryonline.htm.
156 Virginia Woolf
As Woolf celebrated phases of being in which ordinary life is approached with

perceptual awareness, Wordsworth’s poetry sought to recover the quotidian from
the dulling effects of habit and rationalism. Choosing ‘incidents and situations
from common life’, in his Preface to the Lyrical Ballads he describes his desire
to ‘throw over them a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things
should be presented to the mind in an unusual way’.44 Such an aim and practice
is evident in many of the Woolf texts I have discussed in the previous chapters.
In the 1917 essay ‘Romance’, she notes that the defining feature of the romantic
poet is not what he observes but how he observes, always ‘thinking more of the
effect of the thing upon his mind than of the thing itself’ (E2, 75). According
to Thomas Weiskel, Wordsworth ‘first attempted to assimilate the perception of
everyday reality to the affective structure of the sublime in his great program of
defamiliarisation’.45 Several of the spots of time discussed in The Prelude describe
sublime encounters with nature during Wordsworth’s childhood and youth. These
experiences, like Woolf’s moments of being, occupy a central place in memory
and have a redemptive quality and renovating power upon the subject: ‘There
are in our existence spots of time, / That with distinct pre-eminence retain / A
renovating virtue.’46 Ellen Tremper has argued that both Wordsworth’s spots of
time and Woolf’s moments of being reflect their shared interest in memory and
time and the transformative power of the creative imagination.47 The spots of time
described in The Prelude also resemble Woolf’s negative moments of being in
terms of the feelings of awe and fear that they inspire and their challenge to the
senses. Furthermore, negative moments of being and spots of time both centre on
problems of what I will call ‘cognitive excess’, and a crisis of representation and
meaning.
The previous chapter discussed how the sublime object threatens the mind’s
integrity and unity as a consequence of its magnitude. This sublime confrontation
with a vast object occurs in Book One of The Prelude, where Wordsworth recalls as
a boy rowing in a boat one evening. On his journey down the river he is confronted
by a ‘huge peak, black and huge’ on the horizon. This form seems to him to possess
preternatural powers: ‘As if with voluntary power instinct / Upreared its head.’48
This spectacle prompts him to row back to the shore in a state of terror. In the
following days, he reflects upon this sight which continues to haunt him:
44
Wordsworth, Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, Norton Anthology, eds Abrams and
Stillinger, 241.
45
Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology
of Transcendence (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 19.
46
Wordsworth, The Prelude (1850), book 12, lines 209–211, 429.
47
Ellen Tremper, ‘Who Lived at Alfoxton?’ Virginia Woolf and English Romanticism
(London: Associated University Press, 1998), 29; 44. My reading of Woolf’s moments and
Wordsworth’s spots of time was developed independently of Tremper’s study. I thank Jane
Goldman for alerting me to Tremper’s study of Woolf and Wordsworth.
48
…I left my bark, –
And through the meadows homeward went, in grave
And serious mood; but after I had seen
That spectacle, for many days, my brain
Worked with a dim and undetermined sense
Of unknown modes of being; o’er my thoughts
There hung a darkness, call it solitude
Or blank desertion. No familiar shapes
Remained, no pleasant images of trees,
Of sea or sky, no colours of green fields;
But huge and mighty forms, that do not live
Like living men, moved slowly through the mind
By day, and were a trouble to my dreams.49
Wordsworth reflects upon this incident in the following days ‘with a dim and
undetermined sense / Of unknown modes of being’. In the tradition of Kant’s and
Burke’s models of the sublime, for Wordsworth the sublime object baffles the senses
and intimates other ‘modes of being’. As occurs in several of Woolf’s negative
shocks, everyday material objects fail him. The ‘familiar shapes’ of ‘trees’, ‘Of
sea or sky’ are replaced by forms he cannot properly represent to consciousness.
Wordsworth refers to the anxiety and fear these alien ‘forms’ elicit in him. Similarly,
as a child Woolf viewed her ‘shocks’ to be ‘blows’ dealt by some ‘enemy’ lurking
behind the ‘cotton wool of daily life’ (MB, 72). Like Wordsworth, Woolf comes to
appreciate the significance of these traumatic moments retrospectively, and as an
adult has a greater power to explain and understand them.
In Book Six of The Prelude, Wordsworth records another spot of time which
describes retrospectively his initial disappointment at crossing the Alps as a
young man. His youthful expectations of the experience supersede the reality, as a
peasant informs him that he has already crossed the pass he anticipates and seeks.50
Wordsworth goes on to detail how the significance of the experience became
evident to him at a later time. Initially checked and baffled by the experience, the
mind is restored by the power of the ‘Imagination’:
Imagination – here the Power so called

Through sad incompetence of human speech,
That awful Power rose from the mind’s abyss
Like an unfathered vapour that enwraps,
At once, some lonely traveller. I was lost;
Halted without an effort to break through;
But to my conscious soul I now can say –
‘I recognize thy glory’: in such strength
49
50
158 Virginia Woolf
Of usurpation, when the light of sense

Goes out, but with a flash that has revealed
The invisible world, doth greatness make abode,
There harbours, whether we be young or old.
Our destiny, our being’s heart and home,
Is with infinitude, and only there;
With hope it is, hope that can never die,
Effort, and expectation, and desire,
And something evermore about to be.51
The mind is initially threatened; it is lost in an ‘abyss’ of incomprehension.

For Thomas Weiskel, the recurring image of the abyss throughout The Prelude
threatens stasis or death by plenitude.52 Wordsworth is initially unable to ‘break
through’ the ‘abyss’, but the imagination enables him to move beyond a state of
incomprehension and recognize the mind’s creative potential. As the ‘light of
sense’ failed his expectations when crossing the Alps, he now realizes in a ‘flash’
of revelation an ‘invisible world’ of ‘Greatness’ which is humankind’s shared
‘destiny’. This idea enables the mind to recover and move beyond the threat of
incoherence, transforming the negative abyss into a positive notion of infinity. The
‘destiny’ resists sensory representation as it is an ‘invisible world’, but through it
the mind or spirit attains a momentary sense of the infinite, its proper home, which
secures also the earthly needs of hope, desire, effort and a sense of continuing
possibility and promise; ‘something evermore about to be’. Wordsworth’s sublime
reveals the transcendent possibilities integral to human being, a transcendent
‘destiny’ and ‘home’, the origins of which are in the powers of the mind itself,
which constantly strives towards the infinite despite our finite nature. It is for him
therefore the mind, specifically the imagination, which provides this insight.
Like Wordsworth’s spots of time, negative moments of being are traumatic
for the period during which they resist comprehension and representation due
to the excess of undetermined meaning that they intimate. They threaten, like
Wordsworth’s sublime, a kind of death by plenitude. Whilst Wordsworth’s ‘abyss’
employs the dimension of verticality, Woolf presents a fear of plenitude by a reverse
metaphor of ‘physical collapse’ beneath an ‘avalanche’ of unanalysed ‘meaning’
which she imagines to be falling upon her: ‘[T]hat collapse I have described
before; as if I were passive under some sledge-hammer blow; exposed to a whole
avalanche of meaning that had heaped itself up and discharged itself upon me,
unprotected’ (MB, 78). In an important and often quoted passage from ‘A Sketch
of the Past’, Woolf describes moments of being as a crisis of comprehension and
signification. The respective feelings of ‘despair’ she associates with particular
moments of being and the ‘satisfaction’ associated with others relate to degrees

51
Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime, 27.

52
of comprehension (MB, 72). The resolution of this crisis relies upon the creative
organization of experience and its representation in language:
And so I go on to suppose that the shock-receiving capacity is what makes me

a writer. I hazard the explanation that a shock is at once in my case followed by
the desire to explain it. I feel that I have had a blow; but it is not, as I thought as
a child, simply a blow from an enemy hidden behind the cotton wool of daily
life; it is or will become a revelation of some order; it is a token of some real
thing behind appearances; and I make it real by putting it into words. It is only
by putting it into words that I make it whole… (MB, 72)
As Tremper observes, in ‘A Sketch of the Past’ Woolf explains that it is the act of
writing that can ultimately arrest moments that are ‘menacing with meaning’.53
Thus, for both Woolf and Wordsworth the creative imagination assumes a key
role in managing these experiences of existential crisis and incomprehension.
Woolf’s moments signify something apart from the realm of appearances, akin
to the ‘invisible world’ described by Wordsworth, and like spots of time are
understood latterly. This knowledge does not come only via sense experience,
as a physical shock or pleasurable impression, but has a revelatory aspect and an
intuitive component, the full meaning of which can only being realized through
the act of writing. Thus, while that unification can occur for Wordsworth at the
intellectual level alone, through the creative imagination, for Woolf it must be
realized in an act of signification.54 Only through writing do the fragments of
a moment of being become coherent and whole, and it is only then that it is
made real.
In one of her last essays, ‘Anon’, Woolf explains that the process of discovering
the right relations between things is physical as well as conceptual, and that
this capacity for creation is what gives us our being and counters the threat of
nothingness:
Only when we put two and two together, two pencil strokes, two written words,
two bricks do we overcome dissolution and set up some stake against oblivion.
The passion with which we seek out these creations and attempt endlessly,
53
Tremper is quoting here from Woolf’s review of Edith Birkhead’s The Tale of
Terror. A Study of the Gothic Romance. Tremper describes this relationship between the
trauma initiated by the ‘moment of being’ and writing as the process by which the ‘natural’
sublime is translated into a ‘textual’ sublime, ‘Who Lived at Alfoxton?’, 141.
54
Paulsell has discussed the association between Woolf’s moments of being, writing
and an apprehension of reality in relation to mediaeval women mystics such as Marguerite
d’Oingt, observing that for these women writing is not a ‘result of her mysticism but the act of
writing becomes central to their mysticism’, ‘Writing and Mystical Experience in Marguerite
d’Oingt and Virginia Woolf’, Comparative Literature 44, no. 3 (1992): 249–67, 252.
160 Virginia Woolf
perpetually, to make them is of a piece with the instinct that sets us preserving
our bodies, with clothes, food, roofs, from destruction.55
The synthesis she describes as central to the creative process is conceptual as it is

likened to putting two logical terms, such as two and two, together. However, it is
also material; our creations are physical objects, such as a building or a sentence.
Mark Hussey observes that in ‘Anon’ ‘the instinct to create literature’ is identified
by Woolf with the ‘instinct for preservation of the body’.56 For Woolf, ideas and
concepts are insufficient against the threat of oblivion; our ‘stake[s]’ must be a
part of the physical, social world. In ‘Anon’, Woolf demystifies artistic creation
by emphasizing its close relationship to more prosaic forms of creativity, such
as home-making and community building, as well as the practices of everyday
life. The manner in which she links these various forms of making and argues for
their shared importance reflects the very real threat war presented at that particular
historical moment to all forms of civilization – to being.
Moments of being are experiences that, like the epiphany and Wordsworth’s
spots of time, involve a mutual apprehension of the everyday world and a
transcendental reality, but which ultimately lead to an affirmation and greater
understanding of this material life and world. The next chapter considers the
relationship between Woolf’s idea of a numinous reality and the ordinary in more
detail. An analysis of her concept of a ‘pattern’, the ‘real thing’ behind the ‘cotton
wool’ of the everyday, shows that these two forms of being are not opposed to one
another but, in Woolf’s view, intimately related and interdependent.
55
Brenda R. Silver, ed. and introduction, ‘“Anon” and “The Reader”: Virginia
Woolf’s Last Essays’, Twentieth Century Literature 25, no. 3–4 (1979): 356–441, 403.
56
Mark Hussey, ‘How Should One Read a Screen?’, in Virginia Woolf in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction, ed. Pamela L. Caughie (New York: Garland, 2000), 252.
Part 3
The Ordinary, Being, Ethics
6
Tracing Patterns
I do this, do that, and again do this and then that. Meeting and parting, we assemble
different forms, make different patterns. (Virginia Woolf, Louis, W, 129)
While Woolf’s ‘novels experiment stylistically with how to represent …

“evanescent” incidents’, Liesl Olson has argued that ‘it is possible to understand
her entire oeuvre as committed to the representation of the ordinary’, which
Olson associates with habit – the ‘cotton wool of daily life’ or ‘non-being’. In her
analyses of modernism and the ordinary, Olson positions the ordinary in contrast,
and sometimes opposition, to the spiritual, privileged moments and literary
representation. She contends that literary modernists such as Woolf, Gertrude
Stein and Wallace Stevens depict day-to-day experience as a ‘satisfaction with the
material rather than the spiritual, the local rather than the exotic, the constant rather
than the unknown’. However, I would suggest that, for Woolf, the quotidian is not
devalued in moments of being, nor is the cotton wool of everyday life separate
from, or separable from, the numinous ‘pattern’ she finds behind it. Rather,
these two forms of experience and modes of being are intimately related for her.
Moreover, Woolf’s philosophy of a pattern relates to her broader social and ethical
views and, when properly apprehended, expresses and reveals the ordinary.
Woolf’s metaphors in ‘A Sketch of the Past’ of the ‘cotton wool of daily life’
and the underlying ‘pattern’ behind it suggest that, for her, reality is comprised of
two different, but related, aspects (MB, 72). Other critics have commented upon
dualisms of thought and being in her writing. In his influential study The Singing
of the Real World: The Philosophy of Virginia Woolf’s Fiction, Mark Hussey
observes the ways in which Woolf oscillates between expressions of faith in a

Liesl M. Olson, ‘Virginia Woolf’s “cotton wool of daily life”’, Journal of Modern
Literature 26, no. 2 (Winter 2002–2003): 42–65; 65.

‘“Modernism and the Ordinary” focuses on depictions of experience that are
neither traumatic nor wholly internal, arguing that literary modernism strives to present
and preserve the power of ordinary moments, untransformed by spiritual, psychological or
ethical signification’, Liesl M. Olson, ‘Modernism and the Ordinary: Joyce, Woolf, Stein,
Stevens’ (Doctoral thesis, Columbia University, 2004), i. On the paradox of attempting
to represent the ordinary, rendering its status as ordinary problematic through that very
activity, see 4; 15; 24.

Olson, ‘Modernism and the Ordinary’, ii.
164 Virginia Woolf
meaningful world and a sense that life is absurd. He finds that an apprehension
of a numinous reality is expressed in her fiction as the desire to transcend time
and death, and implies an ‘abstract “gap”’ in actual life that cannot be referred to
directly in language. Hussey also understands this reality to sometimes assume
the form of a transcendent beauty. While he comments upon Woolf’s periodic
expression of faith in a numinous reality that can transcend all modalities, Hussey
also observes her sceptical attitude towards religious or philosophical systems
that seek to impose a rational ‘order’ upon life: ‘From her perspective on human
experience, Woolf quickly arrives at the paradoxical character of human being
that inspires the invention of unifying systems.’ Arguing that she refuses to make
an absolute leap into religious faith or mysticism, Hussey finds Woolf’s novels to
affirm the possibility of conveying ‘reality’ through aesthetic, not rational, forms.
Woolf’s special sense of ‘reality’ is, according to Hussey, associated with the
apprehension of ‘pattern’ in life and such moments of insight involve states of
rest and stability: ‘Throughout the oeuvre a state of rhythmic rest gives rise to the
psychic perception of pattern.’ Many moments of being during which ‘reality’ is
apprehended involve acts of making or following patterns; for example, in certain
domestic activities like Clarissa’s sewing in Mrs. Dalloway and Mrs Ramsay’s
knitting and Lily’s painting in To the Lighthouse. For Hussey, such female
characters are attributed with the capacity to perceive a ‘pattern behind daily
life, a harmony that contrasts with male methodolatry, theorizing, and system-
making’. He finds that ‘[r]hythm, rest, and loss of identity, silence, darkness, and
namelessness are the common features of this primary experience in the fiction
and are common to “self-awareness” and an apprehension of “reality”’. Material
patterns, as in knitting, provide a metaphor for, or are a replica of, the ontological
patterns that Woolf finds in life at certain moments. Hussey associates Woolf’s
fictional representations of a numinous reality or pattern with negations; for
example, with silence, darkness, non-representation and an absent ‘presence’ at
the heart of life. This presence, he argues, becomes a part of the actual world
through the act of reading: ‘Thus it might be said that art (in Woolf’s sense) is a

Fiction (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1986), 96.

Hussey, The Singing of the Real World, 96; 100–105.

Hussey, The Singing of the Real World, 99.


Perry Meisel discusses metaphors and tropes suggesting pattern and interconnection
in Woolf’s major novels, including natural metaphors (such as smoke, mist, veins and
waves) and artificial and human-made ones (such as knitting, sewing, embroidery, figures
of fabric). While he identifies these metaphors and tropes in Woolf’s novels, he does not
provide a philosophical analysis of their significance as I attempt here; Perry Meisel, The
Absent Father: Virginia Woolf and Walter Pater (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1980), 164–217.

Tracing Patterns 165
product of the soul that gives access to that medium by which all life is surrounded
– “reality”.’10 While Woolf’s sense of a numinous reality is often shown to resist
language, it is not always associated with forms of negation or absence. I will
examine how her presentation of an ontological pattern is also expressed more
positively through forms of aesthetic and social unity, and trace the relationship
that develops through her oeuvre between her philosophy of a pattern, conceptions
of order and unity, codes of visibility and the everyday, material world.
Woolf’s use of the term ‘pattern’ operates on several levels. It suggests an
archetype or model deserving imitation; however, the expressions of that pattern
which she finds in the empirical world typically assume aesthetic and social forms.11
A philosophical conception of a pattern occurs throughout Woolf’s writing – for
example, in The Voyage Out:
According to [Terence Hewet], too, there was an order, a pattern which made
life reasonable, or, if that word was foolish, made it of deep interest anyhow, for
sometimes it seemed possible to understand why things happened as they did.
Nor were people so solitary and uncommunicative as [Rachel Vinrace] believed.
(VO, 318–19)
Terence Hewet alludes to his belief that there is a pattern to life. It is likened
to an ‘order’ which allows him to understand why things happen as they do. It
makes life ‘reasonable’ and interesting. His pattern is also associated with ideas of
community; it is proof that people are neither ‘solitary’, nor ‘uncommunicative’.
Hewet’s allusion to a rational order to life suggests that his pattern resembles the
classical conception of the logos. Logos is a Greek term that refers to a rational,
intelligible principle, structure or order that pervades something. In Western
philosophy the term refers to a rational order in the universe revealing the right
relation between the universal and the particular.12
Hussey, The Singing of the Real World, 154. Original italics.

10
The word ‘pattern’ means ‘[t]he original proposed to imitation; the archetype; that
11
which is to be copied; an exemplar’. It can also refer to ‘[a] model or design in dressmaking’
and ‘[a] decorative or artistic design, as for china, carpets, wall-papers, etc’, ‘Pattern’, The
Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon, 1961), vol. 7, 565–6.
12
Nicholas Dent, ‘Logos’, in The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, ed. Ted
Honderich (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 511–12. The cognate verb of logos
is legein, which means to say or tell. During Classical times a perfect correspondence was
thought to exist between words and things. During Biblical times, the assumed transparency
of words led to a belief in their truth-revealing capacity in the form of the divine Word or
divine logos. Woolf rejects this view of language in her essay ‘On Not Knowing Greek’, in
which she denies a simple correspondence between a sign and its signification due to the
plural signifying capacity of words and the plurality of truth they aim to represent; ‘On Not
Knowing Greek’, E4, 38–52; see also ‘Craftsmanship’, CE2, 245–51.
166 Virginia Woolf
In Woolf’s second novel, Night and Day, Mary Datchet, a young woman
dedicated to the Suffrage Movement, reflects upon the ‘scheme’ of ‘life’ in general
and her place within it as an ‘individual’. She wants to translate this ‘conception’
into a visible form on paper. Conceiving her life as a pattern of ‘lines’, this ‘vision’
provides her, like Terence Hewet, with a feeling of satisfaction and a sense of life’s
inherent ‘harmony’ and order:
From an acute consciousness of herself as an individual, Mary passed to a

conception of the scheme of things in which, as a human being, she must have
her share. She half held a vision; the vision shaped and dwindled. She wished
she had a pencil and a piece of paper to help her to give a form to this conception
which composed itself as she walked down the Charing Cross Road. But if she
talked to any one, the conception might escape her. Her vision seemed to lay out
the lines of her life until death in a way which satisfied her sense of harmony. It
only needed a persistent effort of thought, stimulated in this strange way by the
crowd and the noise, to climb the crest of existence and see it all laid out once
and for ever. (ND, 218)
Mary’s conception seems to resist representation through language, for if she

‘talked to any one’ it might ‘escape her’; the idea is more aptly presented through
visible form.
In Mrs. Dalloway – a novel that is fundamentally concerned with the individual’s
relationship to the community and the forces that connect and separate people
– Clarissa Dalloway imagines her self as akin to a ‘mist’ that participates in the
lives of other people and the existence of ordinary things and places:
… somehow in the streets of London, on the ebb and flow of things, here,
there, she survived, Peter survived, lived in each other, she being part, she was
positive, of the trees at home … part of people she had never met; being laid out
like a mist between the people she knew best … it spread ever so far, her life,
herself. (MD, 6)
Clarissa’s notion of a collective, inter-subjective mode of being informs the

novel’s central theme – the effects of ‘vibration[s]’emanating from events both
trivial, such as the ‘violent explosion’ from the motor car early in the novel, and
serious, such as the suicide of Septimus Warren Smith at the end (MD, 10–13).13
Narrative patterns, such as the interconnections Woolf weaves in the novel between
characters’ thoughts, movements and experiences, and visible patterns, such as the
It is part of the novel’s social critique that while the relatively unimportant explosion
13
from the motor car is noticed by, and affects, the crowd in the street (as there is speculation
it is the Prime Minister or a member of the Royal family travelling in the car), Septimus’
suicide (by throwing himself from a window) is largely overlooked or elided, except by
Clarissa Dalloway. I will return to this novel’s ethical concerns in the following chapter.
sky-writing episode at the start of the novel, which draws together the thoughts of
marginal and major characters, are all formal and aesthetic manifestations of the
underlying numinous pattern or structure that the novel proposes.
In Woolf’s eighth novel, The Years, Eleanor Pargiter finds music to be a form
that expresses her conception of an underlying pattern or structure to life:
Does everything then come over again a little differently? she thought. If so, is
there a pattern; a theme, recurring, like music; half remembered, half foreseen?
… a gigantic pattern, momentarily perceptible? The thought gave her extreme
pleasure: that there was a pattern. But who makes it? Who thinks it? Her mind
slipped. She could not finish her thought. (Y, 297)
Eleanor speculates that there might be a pattern to life, but rather than associating
it with rational order (as Terence does in The Voyage Out), she imagines it as an
aesthetic order, like a recurring theme in a piece of music. Over two decades after
writing The Voyage Out, in The Years the nature of Woolf’s pattern has shifted
from an emphasis on logical or rational order to aesthetic form, a transition that
suggests a shift from classical to romantic models of the logos.14
Eleanor’s idea of a pattern as an ideal form akin to a recurring theme is
described in Woolf’s 1903 journal. She imagines a ‘common mind’ that binds the
world together, and she finds the central meaning of this mind to be repeated in
various human creations. Central to Woolf’s description is the notion of a visible
form or pattern that unifies the world, like the ‘lines’ of Mary Datchet’s life that
spread out before her as she walks down the Charing Cross Road, or the ‘mist’ that
Clarissa Dalloway perceives connects her to other people and things. Although
Woolf’s notion of the nature of an underlying pattern to life oscillates between the
rational and the aesthetic, the idea remains consistent:
I think I see for a moment how our minds are all threaded together – how any
live mind today is of the very same stuff as Plato’s & Euripides. It is only a
continuation & development of the same thing. It is this common mind that
binds the whole world together; & all the world is mind. Then I read a poem say
– & the same thing is repeated. I feel as though I had grasped the central meaning
of the world, & all these poets & historians & philosophers were only following
out paths branching from that centre in which I stand. And then – some speck
of dust gets into my machine I suppose, & the whole thing goes wrong again. I
open my Greek book next morning, & feel worlds away from it all – worse than
that – the writing is entirely indifferent to me.15
14
Gerald McNiece, The Knowledge that Endures: Coleridge, German Philosophy
and the Logic of Romantic Thought (London: Macmillan, 1992), 19–46.
15
Virginia Woolf, A Passionate Apprentice: The Early Journals, 1897–1909, ed.
Mitchell A. Leaska (London: Hogarth, 1990), 178–9. A similar idea is expressed by Neville
in The Waves: ‘Thus we spin round us infinitely fine filaments and construct a system.
168 Virginia Woolf
Woolf imagines a trans-historical, collective consciousness or mind as again

akin to a visible pattern, each mind ‘threaded together’ bound by some ‘central
meaning’. The expressions of philosophers, historians and artists trace various
‘paths branching from that centre’, the centre that at the time she imagined herself
to occupy. Thus, many human creations are seen to be expressions of this ‘central
meaning’ and are imagined in terms of visible form and pattern. While emphasizing
the reality of ideas and what Plato called the ‘intelligible’ world, that region is, for
Woolf, intimately related to the physical world, as it takes only one ‘speck of dust’
to interrupt her idealist speculations.16
Woolf’s allusion in her fiction to an underlying pattern that enables a character
to make sense of everyday life is related to her idea of a reality subsisting behind
daily appearances. On several occasions in her fiction and non-fiction of the
1920s, Woolf expresses a version of Romantic pantheism, the view that the divine
inheres in, and emanates through, the physical world. As an atheist, her sense of
the numinous is secular and is ‘distinguished from mysticism by its rootedness
in lived experience’. This ‘immanent beyond’, Hussey suggests, ‘transcends all
modalities and gives them their being’.17 In her 1928 diary, this ‘rootedness’ takes
the form of ‘reality’ as inhering in nature:
That is one of the experiences I have had … & got to a consciousness of what
I call ‘reality’: a thing I see before me, something abstract; but residing in the
downs or sky; beside which nothing matters; in which I shall rest and continue
to exist. Reality I call it. And I fancy sometimes this is the most necessary thing
to me: that which I seek. But who knows – once one takes a pen & writes? How
difficult not to go making ‘reality’ this & that, whereas it is one thing. Now
perhaps this is my gift. (D3, 196)
Like her pattern, Woolf’s sense of an ‘abstract’ ‘reality’ here refers to a single,
non-material principle or essence. Although she comes ‘to a consciousness’ of it
through material things, like the ‘downs or sky’, she emphasizes their distinction
and the danger of ‘making’ that one ‘abstract’ thing into a plurality of other things
when writing.
A numinous reality is also discussed in A Room of One’s Own. ‘Reality’ is
deemed by Woolf in this essay to be ‘erratic’ and ‘very undependable’ because
it is made manifest in all kinds of things (AROO, 99). This recalls her warning
in ‘Modern Fiction’ that ‘life’, a word she makes synonymous with ‘reality’ and
Plato and Shakespeare are included, also quite obscure people, people of no importance
whatsoever’, 136.
16
For Plato’s distinction between the intelligible world of the Forms, apprehended by
reason, and the visible world, known through the senses, see Republic, trans. Paul Shorey, in
The Collected Dialogues of Plato including the Letters, eds Edith Hamilton and Huntington
Cairns (New York: Pantheon, 1961), book 6, 509d, p. 745.
17
‘truth’ in that essay, might contain ‘aberration or complexity’ and assume various
forms (E4, 160). In A Room of One’s Own, ‘reality’ is ‘found’ throughout the
ordinary world:
[It is] now to be found in a dusty road, now in a scrap of newspaper in the street,
now in a daffodil in the sun. It lights up a group in a room and stamps some
casual saying. It overwhelms one walking home beneath the stars and makes the
silent world more real than the world of speech – and then there it is again in an
omnibus in the uproar of Piccadilly. Sometimes, too, it seems to dwell in shapes
too far away for us to discern what their nature is. But whatever it touches, it
fixes and makes permanent. (AROO, 99)
In this passage, ‘reality’ is presented as occupying the visible and the invisible, the
audible and silent realms. As an ‘erratic’ subject, it is described in terms of activity
and movement; it ‘lights up’, ‘stamps’, ‘overwhelms’, dwells and touches.18 While
‘abstract’ in nature, ‘reality’ does not diminish Woolf’s sense of ordinary things,
but makes them more visible and definite.
For Woolf, ‘reality’ is paradoxically single in nature – the one, abstract pattern
behind appearances – yet it is also complex and multifarious in terms of the
numerous things in the material world through which she apprehends it and which
partake of that unity. Despite its ‘erratic’ nature, Woolf attributes this ‘reality’ with
the power to make ‘whatever it touches’ fixed and ‘permanent’(AROO, 99). While
‘undependable’ in the sense that she experiences it only periodically and in various
empirical forms, reality has the power to fix those things by virtue of revealing their
particularity in relation to a larger pattern or schema. As Laura Doyle suggests in
her analysis of Woolf’s ontology in A Room of One’s Own, ‘the experience of their
co-divergence is reality … to inhabit the spaces of divergence between things is the
only way to know their commonality’.19 Woolf must negotiate this paradox when
writing about ‘reality’, as she suggests in the passage from the 1928 diary quoted
earlier. While conscious that writing about ‘reality’ might dissipate its singularity
and wholeness, she believes that she has the special ‘gift’ which enables her to
represent the fragments of daily appearances in terms of their underlying unity, a
capacity to which she alludes in ‘A Sketch of the Past’: ‘I make it real by putting it
into words. It is only by putting it into words that I make it whole’ (MB, 72).
The association in A Room of One’s Own between an apprehension of reality
and a greater awareness of things and events in the ordinary world recalls Woolf’s
distinction between being and non-being. States of non-being, the source of the
18
As an ‘erratic’ subject that is hard to pin down, ‘reality’ is here animated like ‘life’
in her 1920 essays. See for example ‘Life and the Novelist’, CE2, 131–6.
19
Laura Doyle, ‘The Body Unbound: A Phenomenological Reading of the Political
in A Room of One’s Own’, Virginia Woolf Out of Bounds: Selected Papers from the Tenth
Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf, eds Jessica Berman and Jane Goldman (New York:
Pace University Press, 2001), 129–40; 137.
170 Virginia Woolf
cotton wool that surrounds much of our daily lives, are shown to be antithetical to
an apprehension of things in the ordinary world and entail a lack of attention to our
thoughts and actions: ‘I have already forgotten what Leonard and I talked about at
lunch; and at tea’ (MB, 70). By contrast, states of being entail an awareness of the
things we see and do in our day-to-day lives. While Woolf connects moments of
being to a conscious awareness of the ordinary and daily, she claims that they are
also the source of her idea of a pattern:
From this I reach what I might call a philosophy; at any rate it is a constant idea of
mine; that behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we – I mean all human
beings – are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are
parts of the work of art. Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast
mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven;
certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we
are the thing itself. And I see this when I have a shock. (MB, 72)
The ‘pattern’ described in ‘A Sketch of the Past’ is a connective principle that Woolf
likens to a visible form or structure that lies behind the amorphous ‘cotton wool’
of daily appearances; she ‘sees it’ when she has a ‘shock’ (a ‘moment of being’). A
pattern suggests one thing, as Woolf maintained elsewhere that the ‘it’ or ‘reality’
that she sees residing in the downs or the sky is one thing, and it is this unity that
she seeks to express in her writing. This pattern is revealed through certain works
of art, like Hamlet, and also through society, which is made analogous to a work
of art in the above passage.
Visibility is an important trope in Woolf’s descriptions of the relationship
between this abstract reality and empirical reality. She describes her abstract sense
of reality through visual metaphors as if it is something potentially apprehended
through physical vision. In her 1928 diary, ‘reality’ is a ‘thing’ she can ‘see’ before
her, while in ‘A Sketch of the Past’, her pattern is something that she also sees during
moments of being. Working in the Platonic tradition, Woolf represents intellectual
vision through metaphors of sight. Walter Pater discusses this quality of Plato’s
writing in Plato and Platonism (1893). Pater’s book was an important contribution
to scholarship on Plato’s philosophy and a copy was in Leslie Stephen’s library in
1898 when Woolf began her studies in Latin and Greek with Pater’s sister, Clara.
In 1905, Woolf purchased a copy of the Edition de Luxe of Pater’s works.20 As
Emily Dalgarno has observed in Virginia Woolf and the Visible World, Pater argues
in his chapter on the ‘Doctrine of Ideas’ that in Plato’s philosophy ‘it was as if the
faculty of physical vision, of the bodily eye, were still at work at the very centre
Emily Dalgarno, Virginia Woolf and the Visible World (Cambridge: Cambridge
20
University Press, 2001), 43. My understanding of Woolf’s engagement with Plato’s

discourses of the visible is indebted to Dalgarno’s study. For Woolf’s reading of Pater see
Meisel’s study which examines what he believes to be Woolf’s largely unacknowledged
debts to Pater, particularly his notions of art and personality, Meisel, The Absent Father.
of intellectual abstraction. Abstract ideas themselves became animated, living

persons, almost corporeal, as if with hands and eyes’.21
Dalgarno has suggested that Woolf’s reading of Plato’s dialogues, including
the Symposium, Euthyphro, Protagoras, Phaedrus and the Republic, ‘made an
important contribution to a representation of the visible world that she could not have
derived from the conventions of realist fiction’. She suggests that ‘[Plato’s] concept
of beauty as a divine Form manifest to the eye and mind allowed her to imagine a
visible world which includes the seen and the unseen, as well as the viewer who
under certain circumstances can see both and articulate their common ground’.22
For Pater, Plato’s genius was his ability to mediate philosophical abstraction and
the visible world. Woolf was reading Pater and Greek philosophy in the middle of
1939, a few months after she began writing ‘A Sketch of the Past’ in April of that
year. She refers to reading Pater in conjunction with Pascal in July 1939, while in
September, feeling distracted and depressed by the war, she returned to the Greeks
and was reading Theophrastus in a bid to ‘anchor her mind in Greek’.23
In his chapter titled the ‘Genius of Plato’ in Plato and Platonism, Pater
offers an interpretation of Plato’s philosophy which contradicts many traditional
interpretations of it, particularly in terms of his account of Plato’s engagement with
the sensible world. As I discussed in Chapter 3, Plato’s metaphysical dualism, as
described by the character of Socrates in the dialogues, is traditionally understood
to affirm the reality of the intelligible world and disregard that of the sensible world.
The physical world of appearances, known through the senses, is comprised of
shadows, images and reflections of ultimate realities, the Forms of the intelligible
world. This view is suggested through the myth of the cave, which is discussed at
the start of Book Seven of the Republic.24 Traditional interpretations of Plato argue
that, for him, the physical world is a realm of illusion and that the senses are not
to be trusted.
In contrast, Pater views Plato as intimately engaged with the sensible world
and understands the activity of intellectual insight and physical vision to be closely
related. Pater argues that Plato was a philosopher of the ‘unseen’ for whom ‘the
21
Walter Pater, Plato and Platonism (London: Macmillan, 1909), 170; Dalgarno,
Virginia Woolf and the Visible World, 43–4.
22
Dalgarno, Virginia Woolf and the Visible World, 43.
23
On 13 July 1939, Woolf refers to reading Pater in her diary but does not mention
any specific text, D5, 226. On reading the Greeks in September she writes: ‘The Greek has
his eye on the object. But its [sic] a long distance one has to roll away to get at Theophrastus
& Plato. But worth the effort’; D5, 236. This echoes Pater: ‘Yet even here [in The Republic],
when Plato is dealing with the inmost elements of personality, his eye is still on its object,
on character as seen in characteristics, through those details, which make character a
sensible fact’, Pater, Plato and Platonism, 130. Original italics. This notion of character as
revealed through particular, visible details is a theme I take up in the following chapter on
the ordinary and ethics.
24
Plato, Republic, trans. Paul Shorey, in The Collected Dialogues, book 7, 514, p. 747.
172 Virginia Woolf
visible world really existed’ and suggests that the dialogues reveal Plato’s ‘richly
sensuous nature’ and his sustained interest in physical things; ‘Nothing, if it really
arrests eye or ear at all, is too trivial to note’ for Plato.25 His engagement with the
visible world is reflected, Pater argues, through the lively imagery of people and
things in the dialogues. Pater also emphasizes the role that scenes from ordinary
life assume in many of the dialogues – for example, the Symposium and Republic
– and the manner in which the most abstract intellectual discourses are anchored
within scenes of enjoyment, humour and revelry drawn from everyday life.26
Such an association between moments of intellectual insight and social events
and festivals is reiterated in Woolf’s major novels, such as the party scene in Mrs.
Dalloway, the dinner party scenes in To the Lighthouse and The Waves, and the
pageant in Between the Acts.
In addition to Plato’s engagement with the visible world, Pater understands
Plato’s theory of the Forms as a response to the Eleatics’ preoccupation with the
relationship between the one and the many. Pater’s interpretation of this theory
is instructive in understanding Woolf’s idea of the relationship between her
single, unifying pattern and the multiplicity and diversity of the lived world. Plato
argued for the objective existence of universals, claiming that forms, essences
and abstractions exist independent of human perception. The Forms are perfect
prototypes or originals of general terms, like the Useful or Just, and ideals, such
as Beauty.27 Things and people in the world are known through the manner in
which they participate in the perfection of the Form of, for example, Beauty or
Justice. Pater interprets Plato’s ‘eternal Being’ as a kind of polytheism; Being
‘divided, resolved, refracted and differentiated’ into the world of ‘Ideas, a multiple,
numerous, stellar world’ in contrast to the idealist monism of the Eleatic philosopher
Parmenides.28 Plato’s polytheism, Pater contends, is a version of ‘animism’ and
he finds Romantic pantheism to be a residue of Plato’s theory of being. Woolf’s
conception of truth similarly emphasizes its various and ‘many-sided’ nature:
‘Truth, it seems, is various, Truth is to be pursued with all our faculties’ (E4, 47;
CE2, 251). It refracts and reflects the real in various ways, as Woolf finds ‘reality’
to reside in all manner of objects in the empirical world.
On several occasions, Plato describes the Forms as the original ‘patterns’ of
which particular physical things are copies. Woolf’s pattern and its social and
aesthetic analogues suggest a similar relationship. In the Parmenides, Socrates
discusses the relationship between the Forms and things, stating that the ‘forms
are as it were patterns fixed in the nature of things. The other things are made in
their image and are likenesses, and this participation they come to have in the
forms is nothing but their being made in their image’.29 In the Phaedo, Socrates
25
Pater, Plato and Platonism, 126; 127.
26
Pater, Plato and Platonism, 127.
27
28
29
Plato, Parmenides, trans. F.M. Cornford, in The Collected Dialogues, 132c–d, p. 927.
claims that the individual refers to the Forms in the soul as ‘copies to their
patterns’.30 Similarly, Woolf argues that ‘reality’, when apprehended, fixes and
‘makes permanent’ whatever material thing it ‘touches’ (AROO, 99). It therefore
gives things in the physical world clearer form. Similarly, she describes moments
of being as a ‘token of some real thing’; they are replicas of the ‘pattern’ which
she sees behind daily appearances and finds expressed in certain works of art and
social formations. It is also the idea or vision that she seeks to represent in her
writing. The pattern–copy model therefore expresses Plato’s – and, following him,
Woolf’s – sense of the relationship between an abstract, intelligible reality, the
Forms or pattern, and the particular, named world.
Woolf’s conception of a pattern behind daily appearances was one she
expressed throughout her fiction and non-fiction; an idea so instinctive that she
likens it in her memoir to an ‘intuition’ that was ‘given to’ rather than ‘made by’
her. It has given a ‘scale’ to her life ever since she was a child, and has remained
as the ‘background’ rod to which she is daily connected (MB, 72–3). Her special
facility for apprehending and expressing this ‘reality’ is her ‘gift’, one that entails
a social responsibility and purpose (D3, 196):
And this conception [of a pattern] affects me every day. I prove this, now, by
spending the morning writing, when I might be walking, running a shop, or
learning to do something that will be useful if war comes. I feel that by writing I
am doing what is far more necessary than anything else. (MB, 73)
As the following chapter will discuss, the social necessity and function that Woolf
attributes to the act of writing under the influence of her conception of a pattern
is often evidenced through her continued preoccupation in her fiction with the
possibility of community and relations between people.
Like Plato’s account of the relationship between the intelligible and visible
worlds, Woolf’s ‘pattern’ and the ‘cotton wool of daily life’ refer to two different
modes of being. While Woolf does not refer to this abstract reality or pattern by
more traditional names such as ‘spirit’, it does suggest a belief in the existence
of an objective, non-material reality that provides order and meaning to life. As
opposed to diminishing her sense of the reality and wonder of the empirical world,
the pattern, when properly apprehended, expresses and reveals the nature of the
ordinary things and people that comprise the cotton wool of daily life:
I have a great & astonishing sense of something there, which is ‘it’… then I
bump up against some exact fact – a letter, a person, & come to them again with
a great sense of freshness. And so it goes on. But, on this showing which is true,
I think, I do fairly frequently come upon this ‘it’. (D3, 62–3)
30
Plato, Phaedo, trans. Hugh Tredennick, in The Collected Dialogues, 76d, p. 60.
7
Woolf and the Ethics of the Ordinary
The question of what’s between us has ethical as well as aesthetic force.

(Laura Doyle)
Both in life and in literature it is necessary to have some means of bridging the
gulf between the hostess and her unknown guest on the one hand, the writer and
his unknown reader on the other. The hostess bethinks her of the weather, for
generations of hostesses have established the fact that this is a subject of universal
interest in which we all believe … The writer must get into touch with his reader by
putting before him something which he recognizes, which therefore stimulates his
imagination, and makes him willing to co-operate in the far more difficult business
of intimacy. And it is of the highest importance that this common meeting-place
should be reached easily, almost instinctively, in the dark, with one’s eyes shut.
(Virginia Woolf, ‘Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown’, CE1, 330–31)
The proximity of the omnibuses gave the outside passengers an opportunity to stare
into each other’s faces. Yet few took advantage of it. Each had his own business to
think of. (Virginia Woolf, JR, 53)
As critics have long observed, Woolf’s writing expresses a perennial concern with
community and our knowledge of others, and meditates on how the space between
people might be broached. This space between can assume many forms in her work
– ontological, epistemological, social and emotional. As Clarissa Dalloway muses
watching her long-time neighbour, an ‘old lady’ in the window opposite, separation
is ‘the supreme mystery’ that neither the religious Miss Kilman nor the love-struck
Pater Walsh can solve: ‘[H]ere was one room; there another. Did religion solve that,
or love?’ (MD, 112). As Laura Doyle observes in her introduction to a special issue
on Woolf in Modern Fiction Studies, the question of ‘what’s between us’ assumes
ethical as well as aesthetic significance in Woolf’s writing. Her philosophy of a
pattern, discussed in the previous chapter, is a good example of this. At the social
level, Woolf sees her philosophy of a pattern to be manifested in instances of
community, which invariably take on aesthetic forms, such as a flower (as in The
Waves), music (as in ‘A Sketch of the Past’) or a painting (as occurs at the end
of the short story, ‘Kew Gardens’). Motifs of designs, networks and mechanisms
populate her fictional and non-fictional representations of community. Here is one
example from A Room of One’s Own which uses the metaphor of the machine:

Laura Doyle, ‘Introduction: What’s Between Us?’ Modern Fiction Studies 50, no. 1
(2004): 2. This is a special issue on Virginia Woolf.
176 Virginia Woolf
‘London was like a workshop. London was like a machine. We were all being shot
backwards and forwards on this plain foundation to make some pattern’ (AROO,
24). Woolf’s representations of community present the idea of a diverse unity
which coincides with her philosophy of a pattern and her concept of ‘reality’ as the
one unifying principle made manifest in everyday particularities, ideas I discussed
in the previous chapter. In the preceding chapters I have examined Woolf’s
continued fascination with, and commitment to, the ordinary, and have argued that
it strongly informs many of her philosophical, social and political concerns, and
underpins her aesthetics of the novel. In this concluding chapter I turn to Woolf’s
idea of the relationship between the ordinary and ethics, one I see to be closely
connected to her concerns with inter-subjectivity and community. The ordinary
assumes an important role in mediating the ‘space between’ and therein, I suggest,
lies its ethical power and potential for Woolf.
In her analysis of moral character in Mrs. Dalloway in the context of
Aristotle’s theory of moral virtue, Patricia Curd argues that Woolf’s notion
of the ethical is not really concerned with universal rules or moral principles.
Rather, the ethical for Woolf is strongly linked to the capacity for feeling and
expresses a concern for particulars rather than universals. That Woolf’s ethical
outlook resists universalizing, rule-based models is not really surprising given
her dislike of philosophical systems (D4, 126). I also view Woolf’s idea of the
ethical as strongly grounded in feeling, the capacity for sympathy and empathy,
and a concern for particulars. Woolf’s preference for such a model of ethics is
reflected in broad patterns of characterization in her fiction. Characters associated
with feeling, intuition, ‘moments of being’ and an intimate engagement with
the ordinary (such as Mrs Ramsay and Clarissa Dalloway) are presented more
favourably than those who extol rationalist attitudes (such as Charles Tansley and
Hugh Whitbread). Similarly, the importance of sympathy, as the capacity to relate
to the feelings and experiences of another, accounts for Woolf’s continued critique
of egotism in her writing. If Woolf’s ethical concerns centre, as I will suggest, on

In her essay ‘“Each is part of the whole: we act different parts but are the same”:
From Fragment to Choran Community in the Late Work of Virginia Woolf’, Emily M.
Hinnov explores this concept of community as diverse unity. Hinnov examines moments
of communal awareness in Woolf’s late fiction that are ‘based upon convergence in spite of
difference’. Choran community for Hinnov is expressed in moments of community in which
there exists a ‘genuine interface between self and other’ which also involves an awareness
of a ‘larger, interconnective community’; Woolf Studies Annual, 13 (2007): 1–23; 1.
For another account of the central importance of community to Woolf and modernism
more broadly, see Jessica Berman, Modernist Fiction, Cosmopolitanism, and the Politics of
Community (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). See also Jeanette McVicker
and Laura Davis, eds, Virginia Woolf and Communities: Selected Papers from the Eighth
Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf (New York: Pace University Press, 1999).

Patricia Curd, ‘Aristotelian Visions of Moral Character in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs.
Dalloway’, in Feminism and Ancient Philosophy, ed. Julie K. Ward (New York: Routledge,
1996), 141–54.
Woolf and the Ethics of the Ordinary 177
relationships between people, then friendship and community find their basis in
common feeling in Woolf’s writing rather than shared ideologies, principles or
rules, which are more often divisive than binding. Miss Kilman’s religious beliefs
and Mr Ramsay’s dogmatic philosophical views are examples in her fiction of the
socially divisive effects of ideology.
So what do I mean by an ‘ethics of the ordinary’? How might the ordinary
be of import to ethics? The ordinary, I will suggest, obtains ethical significance
in Woolf’s writing in the sense that it invariably serves as the basis for moments
of sympathy, intimacy and understanding between people and therefore our
sense of connection to, and responsibility for, the other. It is such a moment of
‘intimacy’ between the writer and their reader, established through the familiar
and commonplace, that Woolf alludes to in the second epigraph to this chapter,
which is taken from ‘Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown’, an essay to which I will
return in detail below. The ordinary and seemingly trivial – a gesture, clothing,
an expression or action – is often the site from which an ethical relation with the
other is established in Woolf’s fiction and essays. To recognize or create – even
imaginatively – a common ground through an awareness of our mutual share in the
ordinary, while not denying or simplifying difference, is the space within which an
ethics of care for, and intimacy with, the other arises.
With the recent ‘ethical turn’ in the Humanities, a number of Woolf critics have
focused their attention on Woolf’s ethical concerns and commitments. The earliest
and most enduring context through which Woolf’s ethics has been examined is G.E.
Moore’s 1903 study Principia Ethica. Moore’s treatise exerted a well-documented
influence on the Bloomsbury Group, and Woolf herself read Principia Ethica
in 1908, although she expressed some difficulty with Moore’s style of writing
(L1, letters 435, 438, 444). From classic studies, such as J.K. Johnstone’s The
Bloomsbury Group (1954), to contemporary studies, such as Lee Oser’s The Ethics
of Modernism (2007), G.E. Moore’s definition of the good as complex wholes of
consciousness, and the highest goods as the pleasures of conversation with friends
and an appreciation of the beautiful in art and nature, have been viewed by many
critics as central to Woolf’s modernism and Bloomsbury’s ethics. In his recent study,
Radio Modernism, Todd Avery draws a connection between Woolf’s emphasis on
the ethical value of our relationship to words and truth, Moore’s ‘valorization of
conversation’, and the ethical writings of Emmanuel Levinas. Indeed Levinas’
poststructuralist ethical philosophy has informed a number of recent analyses of
Woolf’s ethics by Todd Avery, Jessica Berman and David Sherman, some of which
I will take up below. What Lee Oser describes as a revival of Aristotelian virtue

Todd Avery, Radio Modernism: Literature, Ethics, and the BBC, 1922–1938
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 54. See ch. 2, ‘Common Talkers: The Bloomsbury Group and
the Aestheticist Ethics of Broadcasting’.

Jessica Berman, ‘Ethical Folds: Ethics, Aesthetics, Woolf’, Modern Fiction Studies
50, no. 1 (2004): 151–72; David Sherman, ‘A Plot Unraveling Into Ethics: Woolf, Levinas,
and “Time Passes”’, Woolf Studies Annual 13 (2007): 159–80.
178 Virginia Woolf
ethics in the past few decades has also served as the basis for a number of readings
of the ethical Woolf. My discussion of Woolf’s ethics in relation to the ordinary
draws upon several theoretical contexts: feminist ethics of care; Hume’s moral
philosophy as outlined in his Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751);
and elements of Levinas’ ethical philosophy, particularly the way he presents the
encounter with the face of the Other as the basis for ethics. Before I turn to Woolf’s
essay ‘Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown’, which serves as the starting point for my
discussion of Woolf, ethics and the ordinary, it is necessary to first introduce some
of the arguments informing the first two of these ethical theories.
Care, Sympathy and the Ethical Relation
A broad distinction is often drawn in contemporary discussions of ethics between

a masculine tradition of theory in moral philosophy that emphasizes universal
rules and principles, invariably based in reason, and a feminist ethics of care
which sees the ethical to have its basis in intimate personal relationships, care
and emotions such as sympathy, compassion and love. The former model can be
aligned with the Kantian tradition which views morality to have its foundation
in rational principles which, because they are rational, are universal. Due to its
emphasis on rules and principles, in the Kantian tradition there is an attendant
emphasis on moral obligation and duty (so that one’s actions or moral judgments
might have nothing to do with how a person feels about a particular situation or
person). This kind of split in ethical and moral theory can be understood to both
reflect and potentially reinforce traditional gender dichotomies, such as reason
versus passion, and autonomy versus connectedness.
Two influential accounts of an ethics of care were published in the 1980s:
Carol Gilligan’s In a Different Voice (1982) and Nel Nodding’s Caring: A Feminine
Approach (1984). Gilligan’s analysis adopts a psychoanalytic framework and
argues that men and women approach moral problems and situations in
fundamentally different ways due to differences in their psycho-social development.
Gilligan argues, on the basis of her empirical research, that women (whose identity-
formation is more relational) tend to construct moral problems in terms of care,
responsibility and relations with others as opposed to men, who emphasize rights
and rules (an effect of their more autonomous ego-identity): ‘[T]he logic underlying

Lee Oser sees the reception of Aristotle as crucial to the ethical concerns of several
modernists, including Woolf; The Ethics of Modernism: Moral Ideas in Yeats, Eliot,
Joyce, Woolf and Beckett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). See also Curd,
‘Aristotelian Visions’.

Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s
Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); Nel Nodding, Caring:
A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1984).
an ethic of care is a psychological logic of relationships, which contrasts with the

formal logic of fairness that informs the justice approach.’ Drawing upon the work
of other psychoanalytic theorists such as Nancy Chodorow, Gilligan finds that, for
women, moral judgements are ‘tied to feelings of empathy and compassion’ and
are concerned with real (i.e. particular, concrete) as opposed to hypothetical moral
dilemmas.
While I strongly agree with the importance of emotions to morality, and perceive
the capacity for sympathy, empathy and compassion as crucial to moral judgement
and action, I am cautious of the gendered basis of such theories, which also reflect
the particular period of feminist thinking in which they were written. On the one
hand, a feminist ethics of care could be seen to re-invent the wheel of nineteenth-
century patriarchal moral theory, which maintains that women are naturally more
sympathetic, caring and fitted for a life of self-sacrifice.10 This is the angel in the
house that Woolf famously succeeded in killing and exorcising from her writing.
However, it does not commit her – or us as contemporary critics concerned with
ethical issues – to feel obliged to abandon attributes such as care and sympathy,
nor disavow their central importance to ethics. Furthermore, I would argue that
gendered accounts of ethics and the ethical relation that pit feminine feeling against
masculine reason, or female connectedness against male autonomy, suffer from a
certain historical amnesia. In addition to the fact that there are contemporary male
philosophers who advocate an ethics of care, feeling and care for the other feature
prominently in several historical moral theories authored by men.11 For example,
Aristotle sees ethics to depend not only upon the right reason but the right desire
(or motivation), and in the Nicomachean Ethics emotion plays a central role in his
account of virtue.12 In his Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, David
Hume argues that it is sentiment or feeling which serves as the basis for morality,
not reason. More recently, contemporary philosophers such as Justin Oakley have
argued for the intrinsic moral significance of emotions.13
Hume’s moral philosophy bears some striking resemblances to Woolf’s ethical
concerns as I understand them. Given her familiarity with Hume’s writings both
first hand and through her father’s philosophical writings, it is a useful context

Gilligan, In a Different Voice, 73.

Gilligan, In a Different Voice, 69.
10
However, in fairness to Gilligan, while her project seeks to legitimate women’s
tendency to base morality around considerations of responsibility, obligation and respect,
she does not advocate self-sacrifice, as caring must be enhancing for both the cared about
and the carer; In a Different Voice, ch. 3.
11
For example, Stan van Hooft, Caring: An Essay in the Philosophy of Ethics (Niwot:
University of Colorado Press, 1995).
12
In the Aristotelian tradition, the good life depends not only upon ‘doing good acts,
but performing such acts both out of good motives and for the sake of good reasons’; Justin
Oakley, Morality and the Emotions (London: Routledge, 1992), 39.
13
Oakley, Morality and the Emotions.
180 Virginia Woolf
through which to think about Woolf’s approach to ethical problems and issues.
Hume views matters of fact relating to moral assertions to be rooted in feelings, and
morality as constituted through our relations with others. As he states in his Enquiry
Concerning the Principles of Morals, ‘morality is determined by sentiment’,
the feeling of approval (‘approbation’) or disapproval (‘disapprobation’) that is
elicited in us by another’s ‘mental action or quality’.14 Hume does not perceive an
emphasis on feeling in the moral life to result in subjectivism as, according to him,
people have the same psychological makeup and are likely to respond to situations
in similar ways, generally approving socially useful acts and disapproving socially
detrimental ones.15 The concept of utility determines for Hume how we judge
another, human beings having an innate tendency to approve of things which add
to the pleasure and happiness of society, and to disapprove of actions that are
socially detrimental.16
A concern for others and sympathy or ‘fellow-feeling’ lie at the heart of
Hume’s moral philosophy, as it is upon this basis that we make moral judgements:
‘[W]herever we go, whatever we reflect on or converse about, everything still
presents us with the view of human happiness or misery, and excites in our breast
a sympathetic movement of pleasure or uneasiness.’17 As Terence Penelhum
explains, sympathy, in Hume’s use of the term, does not refer to a sentiment which
is merely one of its products. Sympathy is a ‘mechanism’ that assumes an integral
role in how we relate to another person in moral terms: ‘This principle is not to be
confused with the sentiment of compassion, which is merely one of its products.
The principle is the one that enables us to participate in the emotional life, and
the pleasures and pains, of others.’18 Through a principle of association with my
own past experiences, the pleasures or pains effected upon a person by another’s
actions is the basis upon which I in turn judge those actions:
The sympathetic mechanism enables me to share in the pleasures and pains that
are the effects, in the agent or others, of those character traits I am disinterestedly
surveying. The association of impressions causes me then to experience approval
David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, Appendix 1, §239,

14
in Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals,

reprinted from 1777 edition with introduction and analytical index by L.A. Selby-Bigge,
revised text with notes by P.H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 289.
15
Joseph Butler, ‘David Hume: Morality and Sentiment’, in Great Traditions in
Ethics, eds Theodore C. Denise, Nicholas P. White and Sheldon P. Peterfreund, 12th edn
(Belmont, CA: Thomson Wadsworth, 2008), 138.
16
Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, see §V, ‘Why Utility
Pleases’, 212–32.
17
Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, §180, 221.
18
Terence Penelhum, ‘Hume’s moral psychology’, in The Cambridge Companion to
Hume, ed. David Fate Norton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 134.
(when these effects are pleasant) or disapproval (when they are painful). I
express these sentiments in my moral judgements …19
Hume’s emphasis on fellow-feeling, sympathy and the inter-subjective nature of

morality coincide with ideas central to contemporary ethics of care. However,
unlike theories such as Gilligan’s, Hume’s account of sentiment is not gender-
specific, as he contends that fellow-feeling and a care for others is a principle of
human nature that does not require proof or further causal analysis: ‘It is needless
to push our researches so far as to ask, why we have humanity or a fellow-feeling
with others. It is sufficient, that this is experienced to be a principle in human nature
… No man [sic] is absolutely indifferent to the happiness and misery of others.’20
At times, Hume speaks of sympathy as a form of ‘active energy’ which is
elicited by the visible signs of happiness or suffering on the countenance of another,
which touches the observer in ‘so lively a manner’ that they cannot be ‘insensible
or indifferent towards [their] causes’.21 As our apprehension of positive qualities in
another, such as gratitude and beneficence, ‘transfuse themselves’ in the beholder,
so too the visible signs of emotion in another elicit like feelings in the observer.22
Hume’s emphasis on the particularity of a moral situation, and his suggestion that
our experience as moral subjects is constituted through a series of inter-subjective
exchanges of affect and ‘energy’, finds resonance in the descriptive language of
threads, draughts (CE1, 323), fountains (TL, 52) and mists (MD, 6) that Woolf
employs in her fiction and essays to represent moments of community and the
ethical encounter with the other (I will discuss some of these examples below).
Given Woolf’s preoccupation with the space between people, meditations on
the effect of distance on our relations with others populate Woolf’s fiction. As
she watches Mr Ramsay sailing out across the bay with the children towards the
lighthouse, Lily Briscoe reflects: ‘So much depends … upon distance: whether
people are near us or far from us’ (TL, 258). Ideas of proximity and perspective
also inform Hume’s ethics. With distance, the ties of sympathy and care weaken:
‘Sympathy, we shall allow, is much fainter than our concern for ourselves, and
sympathy with persons remote from us much fainter than that with persons near
and contiguous.’23 Similarly, a distance between our point of view and that of
another person presents a further obstacle to care and our sense of responsibility
for another, which we must strive to overcome: ‘[W]e every day meet with persons
who are in a situation different from us, and who could never converse with us
were we to remain constantly in that position and point of view, which is peculiar
to ourselves.’24 Hume’s emphasis on the role of sympathy and proximity in the
19
Penelhum, ‘Hume’s moral psychology’, 134 (original italics).
20
Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, §178, note 1, 219–20.
21
Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, §179–80, 221; 220.
22
23
24
182 Virginia Woolf
moral life and his consideration of the means by which we establish a sense of
connection with, and care for, the other, resonate strongly with Woolf’s ethical
concerns. Hume, like Woolf, expresses a preoccupation not only for our moral
relations with those we know, but also strangers, and how that space between
might be broached: ‘[H]ere was one room; there another. Did religion solve that,
or love?’ (MD, 112).
It is in this regard that I find Moore’s ethical philosophy to fall short for
Woolf. In Principia Ethica, Moore argues for the value of personal affections and
conversation between friends – social ties already established – and the incandescent
moments (organic unities) such relationships afford.25 No doubt these things are
highly valued by Woolf and celebrated in her fiction – we have only to think of the
dinner party scenes in The Waves. But Woolf and Hume are also concerned with
how the ethical relation is established between strangers in ordinary, inauspicious
moments: how one connects with and develops a sense of Mrs Brown as she sits
in the corner of the train carriage opposite. Given the increasing sense of social
alienation and anonymity that attended many people’s experience of the modern
metropolis in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, it is not surprising that
Woolf’s preoccupation with ethics extends to strangers as much as intimates, or
that her novels often focus upon social encounters in the anonymous public spaces
of modernity – the train, omnibus, park and street corner. It is to the stranger
opposite, Mrs Brown, and the associated essay, that we must turn to examine in
more detail how the ordinary becomes enmeshed in Woolf’s ethics.
Mrs Brown and the Ethics of Intimacy
As Rachel Bowlby observes, Woolf’s essay ‘Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown’ is ‘a locus
classicus for discussions of the journey’ between historical moments, novelistic
conventions and human relations.26 Targeting the Edwardian conventions of factual
realism – which she associates in the essay with the novels of Arnold Bennett,
H.G. Wells and John Galsworthy – Woolf offers a defence of character in modern
(Georgian) literature against Bennett’s claim that no young contemporary novelists
25
In Principia Ethica, Moore argues that ‘good’ is an unanalysable concept, but
argues that the greatest goods assume the form of certain states of consciousness (which he
calls ‘organic unities’), namely the ‘pleasures of human intercourse and the enjoyment of
beautiful objects’; Principia Ethica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959), 188.
For Moore, the value of such organic unities relies upon a fairly complex conjunction of
particular states of consciousness (cognitions about the object), feeling (about the object)
and true belief. His argument centres on what comprises the greatest goods – what things
are the most valuable – not on the nature of relationships or ethical responsibility as I
discuss here.
26
Rachel Bowlby, Virginia Woolf: Feminist Destinations (Oxford: Basil Blackwell,
1988), 11.
can create real and convincing characters (CE1, 319). On another level, the essay
is concerned with how we know and judge others, both in life and in literature, and
how the practices of writing and reading entail particular ethical responsibilities
to the other, who in this Woolf essay is called Mrs Brown. ‘Mr. Bennett and Mrs.
Brown’ describes the relationship that develops between the author, reader and
character, in terms of an ethics of intimacy and sympathy that has its ground in an
attention and fidelity to the ordinary. If character, like the other, eludes our desire
for complete knowledge and understanding, we must make do with ‘a scrap of her
dress or a wisp of her hair’ (CE1, 319). That Woolf’s ethics of intimacy depends in
part on an attention to and respect for the ordinary indicates the important role that
attitudes of ‘being’ assume in Woolf’s conception of the ethical.
I invoke the term ‘intimacy’ here, not only because it is one that Woolf uses
in this essay, but because it informs her idea of the space between and ethics
more broadly. Intimacy, in my use of the term, refers to close connection and/or
familiarity (which for Woolf does not necessarily depend on physical proximity or
a personal knowledge of another). For Woolf, the ordinary can facilitate intimacy
not only between friends and family, but between strangers. That intimacy is an
important aspect of Woolf’s ethics is reflected in other recent critical explorations
on the topic. For example, Jessica Berman has argued for the ethical significance of
intimate moments in Woolf’s fiction; Todd Avery suggests that Woolf’s ethical ideal
of language and communication centres on ‘intimate cooperation and cooperative
intimacy’; while Michael Whitworth argues that Woolf’s concept of the ‘group’ is
composed of people who ‘experience a sense of intimacy that does not necessarily
depend on the usual mechanisms of language or physical proximity’.27
In the opening pages of ‘Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown’, Woolf speculates that
what drives most novelists to write is their perpetual interest in character and
the desire to ‘create some character which has thus imposed itself upon them’
(CE1, 319). However, in one of various steps which gradually erase the boundary
between fiction and life in this essay, as well as the space between the author
and the common reader, Woolf rightly observes that the practice of reading and
judging character is not the special province of writers, but an art and skill that we
all regularly engage in: ‘Indeed it would be impossible to live for a year without
disaster unless one practiced character-reading and had some skill in the art. Our
marriages, our friendships depend on it; our business largely depends on it; every
day questions arise which can only be solved by its help’ (CE1, 320). Thus, Woolf
here pursues a theme that recurs throughout her fiction – the practice of character-
reading and its integral role in daily social life. Woolf’s reference in ‘Mr. Bennett
and Mrs. Brown’ to the process of judging character as well as reading character
(‘everyone in this room is a judge of character’, CE1, 320) is important, as much
of the essay describes an ethically charged situation – the aggressive harassment
27
Berman, ‘Ethical Folds: Ethics, Aesthetics, Woolf’; Avery, Radio Modernism, 55;
Michael Whitworth, Virginia Woolf: Authors in Context (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2005), 144.
184 Virginia Woolf
of Mrs Brown by Mr Smith on the train, an event Woolf claimed to have witnessed
a few weeks previous.
The novelist, Woolf argues, has an abiding sense of the ‘overwhelming
importance’ of character, and it is the complexity of one ordinary and marginal
woman, Mrs Brown, that the essay celebrates and recuperates (CE1, 321). Woolf’s
description of Mrs Brown and Mr Smith on the train from Richmond to Waterloo is
based upon a careful attention to the particular: gesture, stature, facial expression,
clothing, toilette and conversation. It is an enumeration of external detail that does
not efface character in the manner of the Edwardian novelist’s catalogue of facts.
On the contrary, such details illuminate character and lead Woolf to particular
judgements about character:
She was one of those clean, threadbare old ladies whose extreme tidiness –
everything buttoned, fastened, tied together, mended and brushed up – suggests
more extreme poverty than rags and dirt. There was something pinched about
her – a look of suffering, of apprehension, and, in addition, she was extremely
small. Her feet, in their clean little boots, scarcely touched the floor. I felt she
had nobody to support her; that she had to make up her mind for herself …
(CE1, 322)
[Mr Smith] was no relation of Mrs. Brown’s I felt sure; he was of a bigger,
burlier, less refined type. He was a man of business I imagined, very likely a
respectable corn-chandler from the North, dressed in good blue serge with a
pocket-knife and a silk handerchief [sic], and a stout leather bag. Obviously,
however, he had an unpleasant business to settle with Mrs. Brown; a secret,
perhaps sinister business, which they did not intend to discuss in my presence.
(CE1, 322)
The essay continues to describe an awkward conversation that ensues between

Mrs Brown and Mr Smith in Woolf’s presence, which reveals that Mrs Brown is
being aggressively pressured to pay some monies owing to Mr Smith (perhaps for
property) which she can ill afford. With a Humean emphasis on the ethical power
of visible emotion, Mrs Brown’s difficult predicament is communicated through
her countenance – specifically her tears – while her heroism is conveyed for Woolf
through her manner: ‘She was crying. But she went on listening quite composedly
to what he was saying, and he went on talking, a little louder, a little angrily, as
if he had seen her cry often before; as if it were a painful habit’ (CE1, 323). By
contrast, the character Smith becomes increasingly less favourable through his
aggressive gestures and ‘bullying, menacing’ manner (CE1, 323).
What Woolf maps out in her brief story is not just the author’s fascination with
character, but also the ethical relation that unfolds between Woolf (as narrator) and
this stranger. In the tradition of Hume’s moral philosophy, this relation is based
upon sympathy, a transfusion of sentiment and ideas of proximity. An apprehension
of Mrs Brown’s suffering through her expressions and mannerisms, combined
with attempts to imaginatively relate to the woman’s situation and point of view,
elicits sympathetic feeling in Woolf: ‘It might have been her son’s downfall, or
some painful episode in her past life … Obviously against her will she was in Mr.
Smith’s hands. I was beginning to feel a great deal of pity for her’ (CE1, 323). The
ethical relation is represented as a highly charged sensory experience, reminiscent
of a moment of being:
Mrs. Brown and I were left alone together. She sat in her corner opposite, very
clean, very small, rather queer, and suffering intensely. The impression she made
was overwhelming. It came pouring out like a draught, like a smell of burning.
(CE1, 323)
Woolf’s description of the ethical encounter in this essay suggests that the space
between (‘[s]he sat in the corner opposite’) is mediated by the capacity for shared
feeling, as it is Mrs Brown’s suffering that pours out, transfusing Woolf ‘like a smell
of burning’. Woolf invokes metaphors of lines, vectors and streams to represent
inter-subjective, ethical relations, metaphors which reflect her conception of an
underlying, connective pattern. In the scene in To the Lighthouse in which Mr
Ramsay silently demands from his wife her sympathy, Mrs Ramsay ‘seemed to
raise herself with an effort’ and ‘pour erect into the air a rain of energy, a column
of spray’, all the time ‘animated’, ‘burning and illuminating (quietly though she
sat, taking up her stocking again)’; and it is into this ‘spray of life’ that Mr Ramsay
plunges his ‘beak of brass’, confessing his sense of failure (TL, 52). While this is
not an equivocally positive example of the ethical relation, critiquing as it does the
Victorian patriarchal ideal of feminine sympathy, it again reflects Woolf’s tendency
to figure the ethical in terms of inter-subjective emotional/energy exchanges which
are represented through spatial metaphors.28
‘Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown’ presents the ordinary as the basis for an ethics
of intimacy which, when approached through an attitude of being, can support
the development of the reader’s sympathies (the reader here being both Virginia
Woolf as the observer on the train and we, the readers of the essay). The ordinary
and the particular serve as the ‘common meeting-place’ for Woolf, the reader
and Mrs Brown (CE1, 331). To recall again the second epigraph that began this
chapter, Woolf plays the part of ‘hostess’ to her reader, bringing them into a
comfortable relationship with a character through a focus on the commonplace in
order to engage them ‘in the far more difficult business of intimacy’ (CE1, 331).
Intimacy here takes the form of emotional proximity and sympathy, rather than
sexual or physical contact. Thus, the ordinary provides the basis for what Todd
28
The visual imagery in this passage also alludes to rape, but of an emotional rather
than physical kind. Rachel Bowlby suggests that overtones of rape are also present in
Woolf’s representation of the relationship between Mr Smith and Mrs Brown; Virginia
Woolf: Feminist Destinations, 9.
186 Virginia Woolf
Avery describes as Woolf’s ‘ethical ideal of intimate cooperation and cooperative

intimacy’.29
It is the capacity for literature to create an intimacy between readers, writers
and characters that affords both the act of writing and the process of reading
an ethical dimension and social function for Woolf. Literature, its creation and
reception, are mechanisms by which the space between is potentially broached.
The purpose of literature, Woolf writes in ‘Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown’, is not
to ‘preach doctrines, sing songs, or celebrate the glories of the British Empire’ but
to ‘express character’ (CE1, 324). The mark of ‘great novels’ is their capacity to
make us see the world from another’s point of view, ‘through its eyes’ (CE1, 325).
As David Bradshaw has commented, in the tradition of George Eliot, Woolf argues
that one of the primary functions of literature is to extend the reader’s sympathies
through its capacity to make us inhabit other points of view, a potential observed
by many moral philosophers, including Hume, G.E. Moore and Iris Murdoch.30
The importance of seeing the world from the point of view of others is reflected
in Woolf’s aesthetic of perspectivism, the device by which her conception of an
ontological pattern is often made manifest in her fiction. In Radio Modernism,
Todd Avery suggests another sense in which language, and the acts of reading
and listening, take on ethical significance for Woolf. In the radio talk, and later
essay, ‘Craftsmanship’, he finds Woolf proposes a theory of words that emphasizes
their strange, variable, but also cooperative nature which, through the appropriate
responsiveness of the reader or listener, can resist ‘the utilitarian employment of
Avery, Radio Modernism, 55.

29
David Bradshaw argues that it is ‘only relatively recently that the degree to which
30
[Woolf’s] novels seem conceived to extend our ethical and political “sympathies” has
begun to be recognised’. He begins his essay with George Eliot’s comment in ‘The Natural
History of German Life’ that ‘The greatest benefit we owe to the artist, whether painter,
poet, or novelist, is the extension of our sympathies’; David Bradshaw, ‘The socio-political
vision of the novels’, in The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf, eds Sue Roe and
Susan Sellers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 191. Hume discusses how
literature can evoke and enliven our sentiments and feelings in his Enquiry on morals
(§180, 221–2), a sentiment echoed by Woolf’s father, Leslie Stephen, and the Bloomsbury
milieu. Iris Murdoch discusses the moral function of literature on many occasions, but one
example would be the short essay ‘Salvation by Words’, which was part of her Blashfield
Address to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in May 1972. In that essay she writes:
‘Words constitute the ultimate texture and stuff of our moral being, since they are the most
refined and delicate and detailed, as well as the most universally used and understood, of
the symbolisms whereby we express ourselves into existence.’ In another passage, which
for me seems to channel Woolf, Murdoch states: ‘But the study of a language or a literature
or any study that will increase and refine our ability to be through words is part of a battle
for civilization and justice and freedom, for clarity and truth, against vile fake-scientific
jargon and spiritless slipshod journalese and tyrannical mystification’; Iris Murdoch,
Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, ed. Peter Conradi (New
York: Penguin, 1999), 241; 241–2.
words as conduits of fixed moral and cultural meanings’.31 Such responsiveness

to words in all their strangeness, which he relates to Levinas’ call of the other as
the ethical injunction, is an example of the ‘cooperative intimacy’ between words
and people that for Avery underpins Woolf’s ethics. For Woolf, he writes, ‘one’s
first ethical duty is to recognize the intrinsic interrelatedness of words and readers,
individuals and other individuals – the ways that meaning, identity, and value
emerge from this structural relation’.32
To continue with a Levinasian framework, one could say that for Woolf, the
novels of Arnold Bennett fail because neither he nor his words respond to the call
of the other – Mrs Brown (or Hilda Lessways, as the case may be).33 Mrs Brown,
a character of ‘unlimited capacity and infinite variety’ (CE1, 336), is elided by the
assimilating powers of Edwardian literary convention: ‘[Y]ou [the reader] allow
the writers to palm off upon you a version of all this, an image of Mrs. Brown,
which has no likeness to that surprising apparition whatsoever’ (CE1, 336).34
For Woolf, the novels of Bennett and his fellow Edwardians fail because they in
turn have failed Mrs Brown, writing her out of Utopian worlds (as she claims of
Wells) or ignoring her altogether in favour of discourses on upholstery and house
property (as she claims of Bennett). While acknowledging that Bennett employs
his own version of the common ground, such as houses, as the entry point for a
greater intimacy with the reader, Woolf feels such conventions no longer work
for her generation, as they leave her with very little sense of the characters he
purports to present. For all his ‘powers of observation’, ‘sympathy and humanity’,
Arnold Bennett does not look, and does not ask us to look, at ‘Mrs. Brown in her
corner’ (CE1, 330). In dismantling her own anecdote and playfully bewailing its
lack of clear ‘convention’, Woolf makes clear that in relaying her story she was not
concerned merely to convey her observations as to what Mrs Brown was wearing,
but how she made Woolf feel, that ‘overmastering impression’; how her subjectivity
was affected in the moment of that ethical encounter with a stranger (CE1, 331).
Woolf’s emphasis on the ordinary and seemingly trivial detail does not work in
the service of convention – literary or social – but foregrounds and celebrates the
complexity of both ordinary people and ‘daily life’ (CE1, 336), and she imparts to
the reader their mutual responsibility in their truthful representation:
31
32
33
In ‘Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown’, Woolf focuses on Bennett’s description of
Hilda Lessways, in his novel by the same name, as the target for her satirical attack on his
presentation of character.
34
In Levinas’ terms, her Otherness is reduced to the Same in an act of ontological
violence; Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso
Lingis (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991), see the section ‘Metaphysics
Precedes Ontology’, 42–8. While I am invoking some of Levinas’ terms and ideas here, as
I will discuss shortly, I think a Levanisian reading of this essay can only be maintained to
a point.
188 Virginia Woolf
You should insist that [Mrs Brown] is an old lady of unlimited capacity and
infinite variety; capable of appearing in any place; wearing any dress; saying
anything and doing heaven knows what. But the things she says and the things
she does and her eyes and her nose and her speech and her silence have an
overwhelming fascination, for she is, of course, the spirit we live by, life itself.
(CE1, 336–7)
As Rachel Bowlby observes, Mrs Brown is not just a ‘symbol of literary character’
but a figure of Woolf’s conception of ordinary experience as described in the same
essay:35
In the course of your daily life this past week you have had far stranger and more
interesting experiences than the one I have tried to describe. You have overheard
scraps of talk that filled you with amazement. You have gone to bed at night
bewildered by the complexity of your feelings. In one day thousands of ideas
have coursed through your brains; thousands of emotions have met, collided,
and disappeared in astonishing disorder. (CE1, 336)
The ordinary – as familiar yet also strange, commonplace yet complex – enables
an ethical relation of sympathy to be established with the other without denying
difference, what Levinas calls the irreducible ‘alterity’ of the other.36 In her
essay then, Woolf recuperates the character of Mrs Brown from the ill treatment
she experienced at the words of, first, Mr Smith, and then Bennett, Wells and
Galsworthy. While the ordinary serves as the starting point for a relation of
intimacy and sense of ethical responsibility, for Woolf it is also the site of Mrs
Brown’s irreducible difference and variety.
As I mentioned above, Levinas’ ethical philosophy has served as the framework
for a number of recent critical discussions of Woolf’s ethics, and while I have
been invoking terms and ideas central to his ethical philosophy in my analysis of
Woolf’s essay, I want to clarify what I perceive to be some important differences.
In Totality and Infinity, Levinas contends that the Western philosophical tradition
is largely an ontology – the ‘reduction of the other to the same’ – an act of violence
which makes ethics impossible.37 His ethical project proposes that the ethical has
its basis in my encounter with the radical alterity of the other, which is captured
for him in the face-to-face encounter. There can be no ethics, he argues, without
an apprehension of difference, that which is not-me: ‘A calling into question of the
same – which cannot occur within the egoist spontaneity of the same – is brought
about by the other. We name this calling into question of my spontaneity by the
35
Bowlby, Virginia Woolf: Feminist Destinations, 7.
36
Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 42.
37
Levinas, Totality and Infinity, see the section ‘Metaphysics Precedes Ontology’,
43; 42–8.
presence of the Other ethics.’38 This encounter with the other not only requires me
to defend my ‘right to be’ as an individual, but calls forth my responsibility for
the other, their right to be.39 The face of the other – the stranger – assumes certain
properties in this ethical relation as Levinas describes it: infinity (its irreducibility
and unknowability), nakedness (without protection), but also equality (I am a face
to the other as the other is a face to me, thus making the command equal on both
sides).40 His statement, ‘[t]he epiphany of the face is ethical’, could in isolation be
understood to resonate very strongly with the role of the everyday and embodiment
in Woolf’s ethics, of which the essay ‘Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown’ provides one
example.41 However, I would argue that such seemingly ordinary encounters
assume quite different functions and meanings for Levinas and Woolf.
For Levinas, the ethical relation (which is captured for him in the face-to-face
encounter) precedes metaphysics and ontology and transcends the particular. The
face-to-face is a ‘conjuncture’; ‘the inevitable orientation of being “starting from
oneself” toward “the Other”’.42 It does not depend upon particular psychological
dispositions or properties inherent in the I or the other, nor does the face present
itself as a representation or an image in the empirical sense (as this would be
akin to the kind of knowing as appropriation that Levinas is critiquing). In
contradistinction to a philosophy of sentiment such as that proposed by Hume,
‘the face’ is not manifest in expressions or a countenance as such, what Levinas
calls ‘those plastic forms’:
The proximity of the other is the face’s meaning, and it means from the very
start in a way that goes beyond those plastic forms which forever try to cover
the face like a mask of their presence to perception. But always the face shows
through these forms. Prior to any particular expression and beneath all particular
expressions, which cover over and protect with an immediately adopted face or
countenance, there is the nakedness and destitution of the expression as such,
that is to say extreme exposure, defencelessness, vulnerability itself.43
Levinas’ account of the ethical encounter with the face of the other describes a
relation that supersedes the empirical. It empties all particularity – all facticity
– out of this relation. It is not an ethics that I understand to be grounded in the
38
39
Emmanuel Levinas, ‘Ethics as First Philosophy’, in The Levinas Reader, ed. Seán
Hand (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), see part IV, 82.
40
These ideas are discussed in the section entitled ‘Ethics and the Face’ in Levinas,
Totality and Infinity.
41
42
Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 215, original italics.
43
Levinas, ‘Ethics as First Philosophy’, The Levinas Reader, 82–3.
190 Virginia Woolf
ordinary at all.44 In contrast to Levinas’ ethics of the face-to-face, Woolf’s ethics of

the ordinary centres upon embodied experience, particularity and social relations.
In her essay ‘Ethical Folds: Ethics, Aesthetics, Woolf’, Jessica Berman offers
a fascinating account of Woolf’s ethics in relation to Levinas’ ethics of radical
alterity, feminist ethics of care and Deleuze’s figure of the ‘fold’, but she also
takes issue with aspects of Levinas’ theory. Berman takes seriously ‘the notion
that the relationship between aesthetics, politics, and feminist ethics is one that is
elaborated in writing and is particularly visible in Woolf’.45 Through the figure of
the fold (which in Berman’s analysis takes the form of literal folds, as in fabric,
and narrative folds in Woolf’s novels), Berman argues persuasively for the role
of intimacy in Woolf’s ethics, and demonstrates how the fold operates as a space
of inter-subjective connection whereby private moments of intimacy open out
into the realm of the political and ethical in Woolf’s fiction. Berman argues that
Levinas’ emphasis on radical alterity leaves no space for intimacy as a viable
ethical relation, and following a number of other feminist ethicists, including Luce
Irigaray and Tina Chanter, she seeks to reconcile Levinas’ ethics with ‘the question
of intimacy’ and ‘women’s private ethical experience’ more broadly.46 While I
see Levinas’ emphasis on radical alterity to conflict with Woolf’s ideal of being
in common and philosophical ideas such as her pattern (which is a version of the
kind of ontology Levinas critiques), I agree with both Berman and Avery that
intimacy occupies a key role in Woolf’s ethics, and that its ethical significance
extends beyond the realm of the domestic, private and/or feminine into the realms
of the public and political.47 In this section I’ve suggested how the ordinary in
its facticity can serve as the ground from which such an ‘intimate ethics’ might
arise (Berman’s phrase). I want to consider how this nexus between the ordinary,
intimate relations and the ethical is evidenced elsewhere in Woolf’s fiction.
This is not a criticism of Levinas’ ethical theory. I am, however, arguing that it
44
would be misleading to suggest that Woolf and Levinas conceive of the ethical import of
the face-to-face encounter in the same way.
45
Berman, ‘Ethical Folds’, 151.
46
Berman, ‘Ethical Folds’, 152.
47
While, as I have discussed, Woolf’s philosophy of a pattern reflects the idea
of unity in diversity, and her politics celebrates difference, I do not think her implicit
philosophy reflects or even supports the kind of radical alterity for which Levinas argues
– which refuses any understanding of, or commonality with, the other. Berman discusses
other potential philosophical and ethical models that correspond more closely with Woolf,
such as Jean-Luc Nancy’s idea of being-with, which conceives of subjectivity as plural and
inextricably connected to the idea of community and intimate relations: ‘For Nancy there is
no question of a primary being who then responds to the call of an other or who enters into
social or family life … The self coexists with those around it, a primordial being-with that
Nancy calls community’; Berman, ‘Ethical Folds’, 155.
Shoes, Pen-knives and Knitting
The ordinary is central to Woolf’s ethics because of the important role it assumes
in her conception of identity and inter-personal relations. The problem of knowing
another recurs again and again in her fiction. In Mrs. Dalloway, Clarissa and Peter
share their sense of dissatisfaction at ‘not knowing people; not being known’ (MD,
134). Lily Briscoe feels that ‘fifty pairs of eyes’ are ‘not enough to get round’
Mrs Ramsay (TL, 266). In Jacob’s Room, a novel that challenges realist narration
and the efficacy of character-reading, the protagonist Jacob Flanders remains,
like Percival in The Waves, a ‘nebulous absent centre’.48 Amidst the numerous
scenes in Jacob’s Room in which strangers attempt to read strangers (such as Mrs
Norman’s observations of Jacob on the train), the narrator reminds us that ‘[i]t is
no use trying to sum people up. One must follow hints, not exactly what is said,
nor yet entirely what is done’ (JR, 24). While the problem of knowing another in
Jacob’s Room is connected to Woolf’s critique of the First World War (and the
millions of young men that were lost to it), patriarchy and the myth of the hero,
it is a theme that she returns to throughout her fiction. The difficulty of knowing
another is not limited to strangers but also friends, lovers and family, as Sally
Seton suggests to Peter Walsh in Mrs. Dalloway: ‘[F]or what can one know even
of the people one lives with every day?’ (MD, 170). Earlier in the novel, Peter
Walsh reflects that although he has been friends with Clarissa for many years, and
she is one of the most important people in his life, his knowledge of her is ‘a mere
sketch’ (MD, 68).
While there are occasions in Woolf’s fiction in which a character does not
identify their sense of self with the ordinary and everyday, as when Mrs Ramsay
casts off ‘[a]ll the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal’ leaving only
herself, a ‘wedge-shaped core of darkness’ that is invisible to others (TL, 85),
Woolf presents our knowledge or sense of others as having their ground in those
everyday, familiar surfaces. As Liesl Olson observes, Woolf views identity as
grounded in things very ordinary, such as habits, a practice Olson also connects
to Woolf’s ethics: ‘Chronicling the everyday becomes, for Woolf, an ethical
imperative. She elicits our sympathy for characters by virtue of the small detail.’49
The feminist cultural critic Rita Felski also argues that repetition is integral to
identity formation and inter-subjective relations: ‘[H]abit is not opposed to
individuality but intermeshed with it; our identity is formed out of a distinctive
blend of behavioral and emotional patterns, repeated over time.’50 For Clarissa
Dalloway, Peter Walsh’s habit of playing with a pocket knife is an integral part of
his being, his character: ‘“How heavenly it is to see you again!” she exclaimed.
48
49
Liesl M. Olson, ‘Modernism and the Ordinary: Joyce, Woolf, Stein, Stevens’
(Doctoral thesis, Columbia University, 2004), 17.
50
Rita Felski, Doing Time: Feminist Theory and Postmodern Culture (New York:
New York University Press, 2000), 92.
192 Virginia Woolf
He had his knife out. That’s so like him, she thought’ (MD, 34). By contrast,
Peter’s insecurities compel him during his reunion visit to Clarissa to inwardly
deprecate her daily life and habits as trivial compared to his heroic adventures as a
colonial administrator in India (which are of course ironically undercut at times in
the novel): ‘Here she is mending her dress; mending her dress as usual, he thought;
here she’s been sitting all the time I’ve been in India; mending her dress … going
to parties’ (MD, 35).
While our knowledge of others is, for Woolf, located in the ordinary and
mundane, a character’s sense of self can be understood as in part a function
of their relationship to the ordinary. Thus Clarissa, who receives so much joy
and pleasure from the textures of daily life, is a figure of content who, despite
being a part of the British upper classes and the workings of Empire, is, as a
woman, relatively powerless within those power frameworks. Moreover, she is
critical of many of the male figures of power who populate the novel (such as the
Prime Minister, the ‘Admirable’ Hugh Whitbread and the physician Sir William
Bradshaw). By contrast, the shell-shocked Septimus Warren Smith, who enjoys
life despite his decision to renounce it, has a relationship with the ordinary world
that is pathological – ecstatic and petrifying by turns:
He began, very cautiously, to open his eyes, to see whether a gramophone was
really there … He must be cautious. He would not go mad. First he looked at
the fashion papers on the lower shelf, then gradually at the gramophone with
the green trumpet … gathering courage, he looked at the sideboard; the plate of
bananas … (MD, 125)
Unable to effectively participate in the patterns of domestic, everyday life that his
wife Rezia tries desperately to build around them – ‘[h]at, child, Brighton, needle.
She built it up; first one thing, then another, she built it up, sewing’ (MD, 129)
– Septimus is lost and vulnerable. Similarly, Doris Kilman is a conflicted figure.
Feeling that her simple, daily ‘comforts’ such as ‘her dinner, her tea; her hot-water
bottle at night’ might be the only things worth living for (apart from her beloved
Elizabeth Dalloway), she cannot reconcile this with her Christian ethic of bodily
renunciation (MD, 114).
By contrast, Clarissa’s reverence for the everyday is connected to her ethics.51
She believes that the ultimate ‘mystery’ – the space between people – might be
resolved through the extension of our sympathy to others, which is established
through a sense of our mutual share in ordinary things and the connection between
the public and private, things large and small. Her theory of a collective subjectivity
or being, which I discussed in the previous chapter in relation to Woolf’s
philosophy of a pattern, speculates that there exists a form of being that transcends
51
On several occasions in the novel, Clarissa does criticize people for being
‘commonplace’ or ‘trivial’ (e.g. Peter’s lovers), however, this is connected to her snobbery
not her conception of ordinary life (MD, 112).
the visible world whilst participating in its everyday particularities (MD, 135).
Imagining herself to be like a ‘mist’ that is not restricted by the modalities of space
or time (i.e. death), this transcendental theory enables her to explain her sense of
participation in the lives of both intimates and strangers, as well as her everyday
material surroundings: ‘[S]he being part, she was positive, of the trees at home;
of the house there, ugly, rambling all to bits and pieces’ (MD, 6). Peter associates
this theory with Clarissa’s ‘[o]dd affinities’ with strangers and her capacity for
sympathy, an idea evidenced in the narrative through her feeling of affinity with
the tragic hero Septimus (MD, 135).
The relationship between the everyday, sympathy and community is also
suggested in the novel through a series of face-to-face encounters with Clarissa’s
neighbour, the old lady opposite, and these exchanges become implicated in the
novel’s larger concerns with ethical responsibility and moral character:
Big Ben struck the half-hour.

How extraordinary it was, strange, yes, touching to see the old lady (they had
been neighbours ever so many years) move away from the window, as if she
were attached to that sound, that string. Gigantic as it was, it had something to
do with her. Down, down, into the midst of ordinary things the finger fell making
the moment solemn. (MD, 112)
This scene, in which Clarissa observes at a distance the movements of her

neighbour, serves as a counterpoint to her previous encounter with Miss Kilman.
Reflecting upon the divisive nature of ‘love and religion’ (MD, 111), as reflected
for Clarissa in the figure of Miss Kilman, Clarissa feels connected to her
neighbour, not through ideology or love, but the quotidian. The everyday is here
positioned in opposition to such ideological and social forces, yet is also shown to
be bound to them, as Clarissa imagines the old lady to be attached to the ‘string’
of sound that emanates from Big Ben – the ‘leaden circles’ Michael Whitworth
argues ‘repeatedly draw attention to the theme of the radiation of power’.52 For
Clarissa, this prosaic vision assumes a solemnity and significance and it serves
as a bridge between her and the old lady opposite: ‘Clarissa had often seen her,
gain her bedroom, part her curtains, and disappear again into the background.
Somehow one respected that – that old woman looking out of the window, quite
unconscious that she was being watched. There was something solemn in it – but
love and religion would destroy that’ (MD, 111). A reverence for the ordinary, as
daily routine and the ‘privacy of the soul’, is associated in this part of the novel
with the possibility of individuality, as opposed to conversion or domination
by others. While Clarissa does not appear to have much actual contact with her
long-time neighbour, an intimacy has been established between them through
observing each other going about their daily lives through the window. That it
is a two-way process of observation becomes evident later in the novel when
52
Whitworth, Virginia Woolf, 136.
194 Virginia Woolf
Clarissa looks out of her window again, only to find the old woman looking back
at her (MD, 164). The narrative’s structure serves to emphasize that the intimacy
Clarissa shares with her neighbour at a distance is not replicated in her relations
with most of the guests at her party.
In the novel, a series of face-to-face encounters with relative strangers is
structurally built around Septimus’ death and Clarissa’s response to it, and these
encounters with strangers suggest an ethic of care lacking in many of the upper-class
professionals and politicians at the party, who are, to varying degrees, responsible
for Septimus’ death.53 In addition to the theme of social responsibility, these scenes
again explore the possibility of connection and community at a distance. The
moment before he jumps from the window, Septimus exchanges a look with an
‘old man’ opposite, one that takes on a strange intimacy when juxtaposed with the
forceful and violent entry of the physician Dr Holmes:
Life was good. The sun hot. Only human beings? Coming down the staircase
opposite an old man stopped and stared at him. Holmes was at the door. “I’ll
give it you!” he cried, and flung himself vigorously, violently down on to Mrs.
Filmer’s area railings.
“The coward!” cried Dr. Holmes, bursting the door open. (MD, 132)
Woolf leaves this moment of face-to-face encounter ambiguous, as the man’s

response or expression is not detailed in the narrative. The fact that the man is ‘old’
emphasizes the structural and thematic relationship between him and Clarissa’s
‘old lady’ opposite. Septimus’ face-to-face encounter is mirrored later in the novel
when the ‘old lady’ stares at Clarissa, as Clarissa comes to the window to reflect
upon hearing of the suicide. This exchange leads Clarissa to the resolve that she
does not ‘pity’ the young man but is ‘glad’ he did it while they went on living (MD,
165), reflecting her assertion of daily life over death and individual agency over
the oppressive mechanisms of social conformity and State power.54 Irrespective of
her lack of understanding of the realities of war, or her snobbery, Clarissa attempts
By this I mean that Septimus suffers because of his experience as a solider (an
53
agent of the State) and his shell-shock is totally mismanaged by medical professionals
upon his return home, which contributes to his suicide. At the party, Sir William Bradshaw
speaks to Richard Dalloway in hushed tones about Septimus not by name but as a ‘case’,
and the event is discussed in the abstract, political terms of Bill amendments (162). While
this might seem a noble response to the tragedy of a young man’s death, such a reading is
undercut by Clarissa’s preceding thought that both she and Richard ‘disliked’ Sir William,
and her reflections on her one experience at his clinic (162). He is to Clarissa ‘obscurely
evil’ (163). We must also remember that it is Sir William Bradshaw’s decision that Septimus
and Rezia ‘must be separated’ in order for his recovery to be possible, that seems to force
Septimus to take his own life, as both he and Rezia reflect upon this threat of separation in
the minutes before his death (130).
54
to identify sympathetically with Septimus’ situation. It is an ethical relation that,

as in ‘Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown’, is described in terms of a bodily exchange of
feeling and sympathy: ‘Always her body went through it first … Up had flashed
the ground; through him, blundering, bruising, went the rusty spikes’ (MD, 163).
Clarissa, feeling ‘somehow very like him’ (MD, 165), intuits that his ‘soul’ had
been forced by someone like Sir William Bradshaw, who made his life ‘intolerable’
(MD, 163). Thus, responding to the call of the other (Septimus) and resisting
oppressive conformity (here, the State and its institutions), an idea that Clarissa
had mused over while observing the old woman earlier in the narrative, returns as
the ethical framework through which she understands Septimus’ suicide.
Through the character of Lily Briscoe, To the Lighthouse also examines the
relationship between the ordinary, our knowledge of others and ethics. In contrast
to Mr Ramsay’s often socially abrasive rationalism and factualism, Lily Briscoe
expresses a conception of truth as emotional ‘intimacy’: ‘[F]or it was not knowledge
but unity that she desired, not inscriptions on tablets, nothing that could be written
in any language known to men, but intimacy itself, which is knowledge, she had
thought, leaning her head on Mrs Ramsay’s knee’ (TL, 70). Lily’s adoration of Mrs
Ramsay is expressed in the novel through Lily’s quiet observation of her every
move and gesture, and the intimate, domestic moments they share.55 Lily’s sense
of Mr Bankes’ being, like Clarissa’s of Peter’s, also turns around an unremarkable
physical gesture which culminates in a little moment of being:
Suddenly, as if the movement of his hand had released it, the load of her
accumulated impressions of him tilted up, and down poured in a ponderous
avalanche all she felt about him. That was one sensation. Then up rose in a fume
the essence of his being. That was another. She felt herself transfixed by the
intensity of her perception; it was his severity; his goodness. I respect you … in
every atom. (TL, 34)
The ethical relation (like Woolf’s positive moments of being in ‘A Sketch of the
Past’) is figured in terms of sensation and feeling. The seemingly trivial movement
of a hand is the catalyst for Lily’s sense of ‘respect’ for William Bankes’ character
– his ‘goodness’.56
The visible patterns that people create through habits, gestures and behaviour
are repeatedly linked to moral character and the process of moral judgement in this
and many of Woolf’s other novels and stories. Hence, character-reading begins
55
Jessica Berman offers an illuminating discussion of the conjunction between
intimacy and aesthetics and the political and ethical via Lily’s and Mrs Ramsay’s relationship
in her article ‘Ethical Folds’.
56
The sublimity of the moment is then undercut, however, as Lily remembers Mr
Bankes’ little gripes and faults (he ‘objected to dogs on chairs’ for instance). This minor
critique only serves to accentuate his humanness, his frailty, that there can be no ‘pure-
hearted, heroic man!’ (or person, 35).
196 Virginia Woolf
with the outward signs that in part guide our social and moral lives, as suggested
in ‘Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown’. In part one of To the Lighthouse, Lily wonders
upon what basis we ‘judge people, think of them’ (TL, 35), and it is physical
gesture and the way in which people operate physically in the domestic space of
the Ramsay house and its surrounding gardens that is presented as expressive of
moral character. For example, while one of William Bankes’ gestures serves as the
catalyst for Lily’s perception of his goodness, Mr Ramsay’s overbearing gestures
and articulations are repeatedly figured as socially divisive, a theme I examined
in Chapter 1: ‘Indeed, he almost knocked her easel over, coming down upon her
with his hands waving, shouting … Never was anybody at once so ridiculous
and so alarming’ (TL, 25–6). James Ramsay likewise resents the ‘exaltation and
sublimity’ of his father’s ‘gestures’ and the manner in which his ‘emotion …
vibrating round [James and his mother], disturbed the perfect simplicity and good
sense of his relations with his mother’ (TL, 51). The socially divisive gestures and
awkward mannerisms of Charles Tansley and Mr Ramsay are contrasted in part one
of the novel with Mrs Ramsay’s rhythmic, domestic activities (sewing, knitting),
her affectionate gestures, and her stable and meditative physical presence (sitting
in the window), which not only reflect her status as the mother, but as the only
person in the Ramsay household who can facilitate social cohesion and moments
of community.
If Woolf attempts to evoke the reader’s sympathy for, or critique of, certain
characters through her attention to the particular detail, the erasing of particular details
in favour of unsympathetic, two-dimensional ‘types’ comprises part of her critique of
patriarchy. As Rachel Bowlby has argued, Woolf often depicts patriarchal figures as
homogonous caricatures that cannot be read beyond the ‘mere surface’. ‘In order to
show up the devices of ordering and typing’ that in part facilitate patriarchal structures
of inequality, Woolf, Bowlby argues, ‘is obliged to engage in a kind of counter-
typing on the part of the outsider’.57 Thus, Percival, the anti-hero of The Waves who
embodies the patriarchal ideals of nation and Empire, is a blank canvas who attains no
depth or individuality. Similarly, the Prime Minister in Mrs. Dalloway is portrayed as
a ‘vacuous’ man, lacking difference: ‘Not only are [such men of power] all the same,
uniformly null, but they are machines, without any degree of individual agency.’58
Such male caricatures populate Woolf’s novels and short stories. The enumeration
of particular detail, or a lack thereof, is a strategy that Woolf uses to manipulate the
development of the reader’s sympathies, often in the service of the text’s underlying
political and ethical views. Whitworth argues that ‘Woolf addresses social questions
in her work … obliquely. She creates a fragmentary network of associations, hints
and connections, but leaves the reader to make the final connections’.59 Woolf’s use
of the ordinary as a central component in the representation of character constitutes
an important aspect of this political work.
57
58
59
Recovering the Ordinary
If life is composed of the patterns created by what we and others say and do – ‘“I
do this, do that, and again do this and then that. Meeting and parting, we assemble
different forms, make different patterns”’ (Louis, W, 129) – the narrator of Jacob’s
Room suggests that it is the rupture to patterns of everyday speech, expression
and gesture that is our primary source of grief and pain: ‘It’s not catastrophes,
murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it’s the way people look and laugh,
and run up the steps of omnibuses’ (JR, 69). This idea is supported by the recurring
ethic of mourning in Woolf’s novels. When Lily Briscoe returns to the long-empty
Ramsay household, many years after Mrs Ramsay’s death, the recuperation of the
lost loved one occurs at the level of those once everyday presences:
‘Mrs Ramsay! Mrs Ramsay!’ she cried, feeling the old horror come back – to
want and want and not to have. Could she inflict that still? And then, quietly, as
if she refrained, that too became part of ordinary experience, was on a level with
the chair, with the table. Mrs Ramsay – it was part of her perfect goodness to Lily
– sat there quite simply, in the chair, flicked her needles to and fro, knitted her
reddish-brown stocking, cast her shadow on the step. There she sat. (TL, 272)
Similarly, in the final lines of Jacob’s Room, the pathos of Jacob’s death is
presented through the humble things left behind: ‘“What am I to do with these, Mr
Bonamy?” She held out a pair of Jacob’s old shoes’ (JR, 155). Indeed, the manner in
which Woolf’s novels present mourning and loss in terms of the quotidian reflects
how Woolf was herself obsessed by the invisible presence of her dead mother,
Julia Stephen, until she wrote her elegiac novel, To the Lighthouse: ‘I could hear
her voice, see her, imagine what she would do or say as I went about my day’s
doings’ (MB, 80). For Woolf, the ordinary assumes a profound role in our sense
of another; their presence and their being. A look, a turn of the head, gestures,
habits, a shawl; these are not superficial appearances but the everyday foundation
that underpins love, friendship and loss in Woolf’s writing. It also serves as the
common meeting-place that reminds us of our responsibility to others. In this
concluding chapter I have argued that the ordinary assumes an important role in
Woolf’s ethics, particularly in terms of our relations with others. However, I would
suggest that the ordinary assumes ethical significance for Woolf in broader terms
also. It assumes, in Wordsworth’s phrase, a ‘renovating virtue’, and sometimes
redemptive power in Woolf’s writing. In particular, the ordinary is often figured as
a space of resistance against the negative features or effects of modernity, such as
instrumentalism, rationalism, patriarchy, social alienation and war.
This idea is implicit in a number of the Woolf texts I have analysed in the
course of this study. For example, in Chapter 1 I examined how in the short
story ‘The Mark on the Wall’, Woolf adopts the most mundane of objects as a
metaphorical point which the narrator recruits to challenge oppressive patriarchal
social hierarchies and customs, traditions of knowledge and cultures of aggression
198 Virginia Woolf
(i.e. war). Furthermore, this short story is one of many Woolf texts which present
knowledge and political/social critique as arising within the spaces of, and
activities connected with, the domestic everyday, thereby challenging traditional
patriarchal estimations of the domestic as trivial, personal and apolitical. In the
story ‘Solid Objects’, overlooked fragments and the detritus of modern everyday
life assume a ‘renovating virtue’ for the character of John amidst his surrounding
climate of political dogmatism, instrumentalism and the physical landscapes of
post-war Britain. As discussed in Chapter 3, in ‘On Being Ill’, common illness
is presented as a space that opposes the unimaginative and regimented nature of
everyday life when determined under the structures and ideologies of capitalism,
nationalism and imperialism (E4, 321). Convalescence provides the opportunity
to take stock of our daily surroundings of which the ‘army of the upright’ is
‘indifferent’ and ‘disdainful’, too intent on conquest, progress and material gain
(E4, 322). ‘On Being Ill’ positions common illness in opposition to motifs of war
that the essay attributes to the healthy army, which represents daily life for the
masses as determined under the dictates of State bureaucracies and institutions
(work, national defence, medicine, Empire). Woolf’s exploration of illness in that
essay is one example of the way she challenges conventional assumptions about
the nature of common experience and alerts us to the many different states of mind
and body, ‘trivial’ and ‘fantastic’, elusive and enduring, that can influence the
pattern of ‘an ordinary mind on an ordinary day’ (E4, 160). In doing so, she not
only examines the limits of habit, common sense and custom as frameworks for
understanding daily life, but legitimates the experiences and voices of those who
suggest that ordinary experience is something other than custom and convention
suggest.
In her autobiographical writing, Woolf often recruits the ordinary as a symbol
of value and sense during wartime. In the April 1939 section of ‘A Sketch of
the Past’ she claims that the daily practice of writing under the influence of her
conception of a pattern is more important and ‘necessary’ than ‘anything else’,
including ‘learning to do something that will be useful if war comes’ (MB, 73).
Rather than being a mode of escapism, Woolf returns to the everyday in order
to reinforce her sense of what is real and important in life. Writing in her diary
in September 1938, when a second war with Germany seemed imminent, she
comments on the unreality and undesirability of war for humanity: ‘Death & war
& darkness representing nothing that any human being from the Pork butcher to
the Prime Minister cares one straw about. Not liberty, not life’ (D5, 166). When the
fact of war pressed closely on her, Woolf would frequently foreground domestic
everyday life in order to reassert its reality and importance:
All these grim men appear to me like grown up’s staring incredulously at a
child’s sand castle which for some inexplicable reason has become a real vast
castle, needing gunpowder & dynamite to destroy it. Nobody in their senses
can believe in it. Yet nobody must tell the truth. So one forgets. Meanwhile the
aeroplanes are on the prowl, crossing the downs. Every preparation is made.
Sirens will hoot in a particular way when there’s the first hint of a raid. L & I no
longer talk about it. Much better to play bowls & pick dahlias. (D5, 167)
Woolf’s writing returns again and again to the restorative power of the ordinary,
and while the nature of the ordinary as Woolf conceives and presents it is of course
supple and shifting, it is frequently placed in opposition to all that threatens to
homogenize, dominate, coerce and destroy individuals and communities.
The ordinary assumes a central role in Woolf’s modernism, and her exploration
of this concept and realm of experience possesses a depth and sophistication
comparable to the more well-known and discussed theorists of the everyday
in the social sciences and cultural studies. Summing up Woolf’s account of the
everyday and ordinary experience is of course fraught with challenges because
of her resistance to closed conceptual systems and her own feeling that so much
of ordinary life escapes both our attention and our grasp. But it is, for Woolf, in
the complexity and elusiveness of the ordinary that its personal, philosophical
and aesthetic potential lie. The ordinary is invariably the ground from which
Woolf’s thought and writing proceed. It underpins representations of character and
human experience in her fiction and informs her aesthetics of the novel. Novels,
including Mrs. Dalloway, Between the Acts and To the Lighthouse reflect, through
their temporal structures, Woolf’s deep investment in representing the subtleties
and nuances of everyday life through narrating characters’ experiences within a
single or, in the latter novel, several days. Woolf’s valuing of the everyday is
further reflected in her lifelong commitment to genres of life writing such as the
diary, the letter, the memoir and biography. The ordinary also shapes Woolf’s ideas
about knowledge, being and ethics, and serves to give expression to her social and
political views in her fiction and essays. As opposed to some lay and theoretical
attitudes to the everyday, Woolf’s conception of it is not narrow. She challenges
assumptions about the nature of daily experience and alerts us to its potential and
possibilities. While often derisively defined as the residual and mundane, ordinary
life is that which individuals and communities defend and seek to restore whenever
it is threatened or disrupted – by illness, death, financial loss, war or mundane
events like a power outage. Ordinary is who we are, how we live and what we,
if often unconsciously, cling to. Woolf, more so than most writers, alerts us to its
richness, potential and value: ‘In the course of your daily life this past week you
have had far stranger and more interesting experiences than the one I have tried to
describe. You have overheard scraps of talk that filled you with amazement. You
have gone to bed at night bewildered by the complexity of your feelings. In one
day …’ (CE1, 336).
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Index
Addison, Joseph, 124–6, 127 Brown, Bill, 47, 50, 53

Aristotle, 176, 179 Burke, Edmund, 124, 125, 126–7, 157
Armstrong, David, 83, 84, 93
artistic vision, 49, 64 Camus, Albert, 137, 149
Avery, Todd, 177, 183, 186, 187 Caughie, Pamela L., 116
character, 5, 8, 14, 71, 171, 176, 180, 182,
Banfield, Ann, 18, 19, 33, 34, 61 183–4, 185, 186, 187, 188, 191,
Barthes, Roland, 2, 151 193, 195, 196, 199
Baudelaire, Charles, 6 class, 5, 6, 24–5, 43, 44, 47, 53, 56, 83, 84,
beauty/beautiful, 21, 38, 39, 52, 110, 111, 85, 86, 95, 117, 118, 194
115, 122, 123–4, 125, 127, 129, Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 13, 19, 23, 36,
130, 131, 133, 134, 135, 164, 171, 97, 113, 125, 126, 128, 130, 134,
172, 177, 182 139, 155
Beer, Gillian, 4, 14, 18, 22, 24, 26, 34, 35, collecting, 49, 51
113 colour
being, 14, 15–16, 113, 142, 156, 169, 170, and affect, 74, 77
183, 185 ‘Blue & Green’, 72–8
Beja, Morris, 15, 149–50 and language, 71–2
Bell, Clive, 49, 64, 129 philosophical approaches to, 59–61
Bell, Vanessa, 59, 63, 64 and Post-Impressionism, 61–4
Benjamin, Walter, 1, 6, 7, 12, 51, 53, 109, Woolf, and ordinary experience, 59
110, 112 see also Moore, G.E.
Bennett, Arnold, 8, 182, 187, 188 common experience, 16–25, 59, 87
Berkeley, George, 19, 30, 38, 65, 66, 67 in ‘Kew Gardens’, 53–8
Berman, Jessica, 130, 176, 177, 183, 190, common reader, 14, 24, 183
195 common sense, 14, 55, 65
Berman, Marshall, 4, 5, 7, 12 G.E. Moore’s defence of, 23–4
Blanchot, Maurice, 2 and Hume’s philosophy of common
Bloomsbury, 18, 23, 61, 66, 67, 129, 177, life, 19–21
186 modernism’s questioning of, 31–2
body, 81–2, 89–92, 97–8, 105, 106, 134; and the natural attitude, 18
see also illness and Russell, 30
Bowlby, Rachel, 4, 37, 182, 185, 188, 191, community, 25, 82, 86, 94, 95, 98, 137,
196 141, 160, 165, 166, 173, 175–6,
Bradbury, Malcolm, 5, 6, 10, 11 177, 181, 190, 193, 194, 196
British empiricism, 16, 18, 34; see also Conrad, Joseph, 29, 149
Hume, David; Locke, John; Moore, cotton wool
G.E.; Russell, Bertrand; Stephen, of daily life, 14–15, 137, 154, 163, 173
Leslie viscous, 15
Brontës, 88, 126
216 Virginia Woolf
Cuddy-Keane, Melba, 14, 24, 26, 117, 118, Fry, Roger, 31, 32, 48, 49, 50, 51, 59, 61,
122 63, 64, 71, 72, 74, 129
custom, 8, 9, 10, 11, 13, 14, 15, 20, 21, 22, Futurism, 31, 59, 72, 122, 123
32, 33, 45, 46, 58, 142
Galsworthy, John, 8, 182, 188
Dalgarno, Emily, 26, 90, 151, 170, 171 Gardiner, Michael E., 1, 2, 11, 13
Daly, Nicholas, 116 gender, 6, 129, 178, 179, 181; see also
Darwin, Charles, 6 women
De Certeau, Michel, 1 gesture, 101, 140, 177, 184, 195–6, 197
defamiliarization, 156 Gilligan, Carol, 178, 179
Deleuze, Gilles, 89, 190 Goldman, Jane, 41, 61, 63, 64, 74, 75, 156
De Quincey, Thomas, 88, 97, 102 Guattari, Felix, 89
detritus, 29, 51
domestic, 7, 39, 46, 47, 57, 142, 164, 190, habit, 3, 8, 12, 13, 14, 15, 20, 21, 25, 45,
192, 196, 198 47, 108, 111, 113, 156, 184, 191
Doyle, Laura, 129, 169, 175 H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), 55, 139, 140, 142,
145
Eliot, George, 34, 37, 88, 186 Hegel, G.W.F., 1, 68
Eliot, T.S., 7, 12, 17, 31, 86, 138, 139 Heidegger, Martin, 2, 119
epiphany, modernist, 15, 137, 140, 141, Highmore, Ben, 1, 2, 11, 12, 51
149, 160 Hume, David
ethics, 137, 140, see Chapter 7 association of ideas, 75
everyday and British empiricism, 25, 38, 65, 68
contemporary theories of, 1–2, 13 common sense, 18, 19–21, 23, 39
definitions of, 9–10 critique of metaphysics, 19, 38
difficulty of representing, 11–12, 163 custom, 20
as elusive, 9–10 mental geography, faculties, 130–31
and feminism, 2, 10 moral philosophy, 178, 179–81, 182,
relation to the ordinary, 2–3, 8–9 184, 186, 189
see also ordinary passions, 92
existentialism, see Camus, Albert; Sartre, and Woolf, 18–19
Jean-Paul Hussey, Mark, 12, 22, 56, 62, 105, 148,
160, 163–5, 168
fact, 8, 16, 20, 30, 31, 32, 33–6, 37, 38, 39,
40, 42–6, 47, 48, 52, 53–5, 58, 69, idealism, 23, 30, 33, 65–8, 69, 129, 134,
70, 100, 112, 171, 173, 180, 184, 171–2
195 illness
familiar, 1, 12, 13, 20, 21, 33, 36, 53, 57, and class, 84, 85, 95
105, 111, 114, 115, 157, 177, 188, and the critique of ordinary life, 92–5
191 eugenics, 96–7
Fauvism, 59, 62 health and the nation, 83–6, 96
Felski, Rita, 9, 10, 11, 12, 191 and literature, 88–9
First World War, 6, 17, 46, 55, 96, 138, neurasthenia, 108
191; see also illness, shell-shock ‘On Being Ill’, 86–98
Fletcher, John, 10, 11 pain and language, 87–8, 99–101, 105
Flint, Kate, 24, 77, 87 pain and perception, 102–3
Forster, E.M., 24, 66, 120, 121 as part of ordinary life, 17, 87, 104,
Freud, Sigmund, 6, 108, 109, 110, 124, 131 105–6
Index 217
shell-shock, 17, 55–6, 89, 94, 194 memory, 55, 112, 132, 143, 144, 145, 146,
social hygiene, 84–6, 91, 95, 96 156
and social marginalization, 82, 84–6, Minow-Pinkney, Makiko, 117, 122, 124,
93–4, 96–7 133
The Voyage Out, 98–106 modernity, 1, 3, 4–7, 9, 12, 24, 32, 51, 53,
and Woolf, 81, 86, 97, 101 63, 107, 109, 110, 116, 118, 119,
imagination, 16, 21, 35, 48, 68, 76, 77, 122, 133, 182, 197
110, 125, 126, 128, 129, 130, 134, moments of being
147, 156, 157, 158, 159, 175 in ‘A Sketch of the Past’, see Chapter 5
Imagism, 7 as diverse category, 137, 140, 149
inter-subjectivity, 166, 176, 181, 185, 190 and modernist crisis of belief, 138–40
intimacy, 175, 177, 183, 185, 186, 187, and modernist epiphany, 140, 141, 149
188, 190, 193, 194, 195 and mystical experience, 147–8
relation to ordinary, 137, 140–41, 160
Jameson, Fredric, 4, 89 role of the body in, 141, 145–7, 150–54
Joyce, James, 3, 7, 8, 24, 29, 140, 149 and spots of time, 155–60
and writing, 159, 173
Kant, Immanuel, 20, 35, 124, 125, 127, see also being
128, 129–30, 131, 133, 157, 178 Moore, G.E.
Keynes, John Maynard, 22, 66 ‘A Defence of Common Sense’, 18,
knowledge 23–4
of the external world, see Chapter 1 Principia Ethica, 22, 177, 182, 186
and gender, 36–8 ‘The Refutation of Idealism’, 60, 61,
and illness/pain, 91–3, 94, 97–8 64–70, 74, 75, 77–8
of others, see Chapter 7 and twentieth-century British
philosophy, 23, 30, 31, 35, 66
Langbauer, Laurie, 1, 2, 16 and Woolf, 22–3, 25, 34, 66
Lawrence, D.H., 25, 29, 140 motor car, 13, 107, 110, 116–22, 129, 166
Le Corbusier, 120, 121 mundane, 9, 10, 13, 89, 137, 192, 197, 199
Lee, Hermione, 81, 98, 101, 118
Lefebvre, Henri, 1, 2, 3, 9, 11, 12, 119 nature, 21, 70, 98, 106, 110–11, 113–15,
Levinas, Emmanuel, 177, 187, 188–90 119, 121, 123, 133, 134, 147
Lewis, Pericles, 138, 139, 140 Newman, George, 83, 84, 96
Locke, John, 38, 60, 65, 68, 130 non-being, 14, 15, 16, 21, 25, 48, 111, 113,
Lokke, Kari Elise, 128, 135 141, 143, 154, 163, 169
Lukács, Georg, 4
Lupton, Deborah, 91, 93 objects, 2, 6, 9, 13, 18, 26, 59, 60, 62, 63,
68, 70, 110, 131, 140, 143, 144,
MacCarthy, Desmond, 23, 63, 66, 129 152, 157, see also Chapter 1
Mansfield, Katherine, 7 O’Connell, Sean, 117
Mao, Douglas, 29, 137, 138 Olson, Liesl M., 3, 4, 14, 15, 137, 163, 191
Marx, Karl, 5, 6, 32, 107 ordinary
Mass-Observation, 1 aestheticization of, 3, 10–12
McFarlane, James, 5 definitions of, 2–3, 8–9
McLaurin, Allen, 62, 70, 72, 74 and modernism, 3–4, 7
McNiece, Gerald, 134 in modernist studies, 3–4
McTaggart, John E., 17, 23, 66, 68 as paradoxical, 9, 11, 12–13; see also
Meisel, Perry, 164, 170 moments of being
218 Virginia Woolf
providing stability and continuity, practical vision, 32, 44, 48, 49, 51, 55
111–13 Proust, Marcel, 55, 88, 112, 143, 149
relation to the everyday, 2–3, 8–9
as strange, 3, 12, 21, 29, 53–4, 57, 152, rationalism, 16, 17, 92, 98, 113, 119, 156,
188 176, 195, 197
Woolf’s conception of, 8–16 realism, 10, 22, 23, 31, 66, 182
see also ordinary experience; everyday; reality, numinous, and Woolf, 141, 155,
common experience 164–5, 168–70, 173; see also
ordinary experience patterns
and modernity, 4–7, 12, 115–17 Rhys, Jean, 7
as normative concept, Woolf’s critique Richardson, Dorothy, 7, 29
of, 16–18, 32–3, 57–8 Romanticism, 13, 16, 35, 58, 64, 88, 92,
paradoxical, 10–11, 12–13 94, 97, 98, 110, 111, 118, 123,
Woolf and the modern novel, 8–11 124, 125, 126, 128, 130, 133, 134,
see also ordinary; perception; common 135, 139, 143, 167, 168, 172; see
experience also Coleridge, Samuel Taylor;
outsiders, 16, 17, 24, 196 sublime, eighteenth-century and
Romantic; Wordsworth, Dorothy;
Pater, Walter, 23, 26, 90, 170–72 Wordsworth, William
patriarchy, 22, 86, 191, 196, 197 Rosenbaum, S.P., 18, 22, 74
patterns routine, 8, 14, 15, 193
aesthetic, 164, 166–7, 170 Russell, Bertrand, 22, 23, 30–31, 34, 35,
and domesticity, 164 60, 66
experiential, and the quotidian, 111–13
logos, 165 Sandywell, Barry, 9
and Platonic philosophy, 170–73 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 15, 137, 149, 152
and routine, 111–12, 113–14 Scarry, Elaine, 87
social and community, 165, 166–7, 170 Schivelbusch, Wolfgang, 119, 120, 121
Woolf’s philosophy of, and relation to Second World War, 6, 7, 142
the ordinary, see Chapter 6 Sheringham, Michael, 1
perception, of the ordinary shock, sensory, 12, 107–10, 124, 127
aesthetic, 49, 50 Simmel, Georg, 1, 11, 12, 108, 109, 110,
child’s, 35, 36, 49, 57, 141–5 119
customary or habitual, 32, 33 Situationist International, 1
instrumental, practical, 32, 48, 49, 109 Sontag, Susan, 88, 98
wonder, 16, 47, 58, 64, 143, 144 Stein, Gertrude, 3, 7, 32, 59, 163
see also artistic vision; being; habit; Stephen, Leslie
non-being; practical vision; shock, and British philosophy, 18, 25, 186
sensory; technology emphasis on fact and reason, 34–7,
perspectivism, 17, 29–32, 57, 186 38, 44
phenomenology, 32–3 influence on Woolf, 18–19
Picasso, Pablo, 31, 59, 62, 63 truth, 37
Plato, 16, 23, 26, 42, 82, 89–92, 93, 97, 98, Stevens, Wallace, 3, 163
146, 168, 170–73; see also Pater, Strachey, Lytton, 23, 66
Walter sublime, eighteenth-century and Romantic,
positivism, 25, 34, 35, 40, 54; see also fact 124–30, 133–5, 156–8
Post-Impressionism, 59, 61–4, 74, 75–6, Surrealism, 1, 2, 3, 62
129
Index 219
sympathy, 40, 94, 98, 104, 176, 177, ‘Modern Novels’, 8

178–81, 183, 184–5, 188, 191, 192, Moments of Being, see ‘A Sketch of
193, 195, 196 the Past’
Monday or Tuesday, 40, 60, 65, 72
technology, 24, 107–10, 116–22, 133, 135 ‘Monday or Tuesday’, 72
things, see objects ‘Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown’, 5, 6,
Tremper, Ellen, 110, 113, 156, 159 175, 177, 178, 181, 182–8, 189,
trivial, 8, 10, 11, 46, 50, 111, 112, 149, 195, 196, 199
166, 177, 187, 195 Mrs. Dalloway, 7, 8, 12, 14, 17–18,
truth, 8, 38, 40, 43, 71, 74, 141, 169, 172 55, 56, 58, 94, 96, 101, 108, 109,
149, 164, 166, 172, 175, 181, 182,
Victorianism, 25, 33, 34, 36, 37, 40, 44, 53, 191–5, 196, 199
104, 116, 120, 185 Night and Day, 149, 166
‘On Being Ill’, 82–98, 99, 100, 101,
Weiskel, Thomas, 156, 158 102, 104, 105, 106, 198
Wells, H.G., 8, 182, 187, 188 ‘On Not Knowing Greek’, 26, 165, 172
Whitworth, Michael, 24, 83, 183, 193, 194, Orlando, 61, 70, 71, 77, 107, 109, 128,
196 133
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 34, 87 ‘Phases of Fiction’, 21
women, 2, 16, 17, 36, 38, 43, 46, 47, 56, ‘Pictures and Portraits’, 71, 72
57, 81, 94, 178, 179, 190 ‘Professions for Women’, 81
Woolf, Leonard, 23, 66 Roger Fry: A Biography, 62, 63, 137
Woolf, Virginia ‘Romance’, 155, 156
‘A Positivist’, 40 ‘Solid Objects’, 26, 32, 34, 47–53, 54,
A Room of One’s Own, 16, 17, 81, 82, 58, 64, 75, 113, 198
86, 134, 152, 168, 169, 173, 175, spatial poetics, 16, 38, 48, 93–4, 97–8,
176 101–3, 111, 115, 123–4, 130–31,
‘A Sketch of the Past’, 14, 15, 16, 19, 145–6, 165–8, 170, 175–6, 181–2,
21, 36, 53, 55, 104, 113, 163, 169, 185, 192–4, 195–6
170, 171, 173, 175, 195, 197, 198, ‘The cheapening of motor-cars’, 118, 120
see Chapter 5 ‘The Cinema’, 32, 109, 110
‘Addison’, 125 The Diary of Virginia Woolf, 1, 19, 23,
‘Anon’, 159, 160 26, 60, 65, 66, 81, 86, 93, 97, 101,
Between the Acts, 147, 172, 199 111, 112, 113, 115, 121, 122, 125,
‘Blue & Green’, 60, 65, 66, 70, 72–8 126, 141, 147, 155, 168, 171, 173,
‘Craftsmanship’, 40, 165, 172, 186 176, 198, 199
‘Evening over Sussex’, 111, 115, 118, ‘The Leaning Tower’, 25
122–35 The Letters of Virginia Woolf, 49, 76,
‘Flying over London’, 109 130, 155, 177
‘Four Figures’, 114, 115, 126 ‘The Mark on the Wall’, 26, 32, 34,
‘Impassioned Prose’, 102 40–7, 54, 197
Jacob’s Room, 37, 38, 47, 49, 90, 105, ‘The Novels of George Meredith’, 25
152, 175, 191, 197 The Voyage Out, 29, 44, 57, 82, 98,
‘Kew Gardens’, 26, 29, 31, 32, 34, 47, 99–105, 144, 145, 152, 165, 167
53–8, 175 The Waves, 15, 17, 29, 31, 33, 59, 74,
‘Life and the Novelist’, 8, 169 87, 108, 110, 137, 141, 143, 149,
‘Modern Fiction’, 7, 8–9, 10–11, 12, 152, 153, 163, 167, 172, 175, 182,
50, 75, 111, 112, 145, 168, 198 191, 196, 197
220 Virginia Woolf
Woolf, Virginia (continued) ‘Walter Sickert’, 61, 71, 77

The Years, 65–6, 109, 167 ‘Wordsworth and the Lakes’, 114, 155
Three Guineas, 53 ‘Wordsworth’s Letters’, 155
To the Lighthouse, 7, 8, 12, 18, 33, 34, Wordsworth, Dorothy, 110, 114–15
35, 40, 42, 44, 46, 48, 53, 58, 66, Wordsworth, William, 13, 23, 110, 111–14,
67, 68, 105, 110, 113, 141, 144, 115, 118, 124, 128, 131, 132, 134,
147, 149, 164, 172, 181, 185, 191, 139, 141, 143, 144, 155–9, 160,
195–6, 197, 199 197

Virginia Woolf - The Patterns of Ordinary Experience

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The Patterns of Ordinary Experience

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Introduction – Virginia Woolf: The Patterns of Ordinary Experience  1

Part 1 Quotidian Things

1 Factualism and the Search for Ordinary Things  29

Part 2 Rethinking Ordinary Experience

3 Pain, Common Illness and Ordinary Life  81

Part 3 The Ordinary, Being, Ethics

6 Tracing Patterns  163

by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. My grateful

AROO A Room of One’s Own

The familiar is not necessarily the known. (G.W.F. Hegel)

of the everyday by considering the work of continental philosophers and writers

Modernism, Modernity and Everyday Life

The ordinary and everyday in modernism remain relatively unexplored topics.

of a ‘cataclysmic order’.22 A brief overview will serve to indicate at least some of

Of faint stale smells of beer

Virginia Woolf and Ordinary Life

Traditionally this passage has been viewed as an expression of Woolf’s disavowal

Although everyday life can display routinized, static and unreflexive

Similarly, through her fiction, Woolf attempts to convey the ‘polydimensional’

‘vivid’ do not necessarily undermine its everydayness in the process.44 Likewise, in

It is this process of returning to the ordinary, and moving beyond customary

Michigan Press, 1996), 2–4.

An account of the everyday and ordinary experience relies on certain assumptions

this literal presentation of denied access is made representative in the essay of

As with contemporary theories of the everyday, assumptions about ordinary

William’ (MD, 86). In Chapters 1 to 3, I examine Woolf’s treatment of cultural

Hume’s Philosophy of Common Life

Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, in The Philosophical

Works, sec. 5, p. 39.

The imagination of man is naturally sublime, delighted with whatever is remote

G.E. Moore’s Defence of Common Sense

Approaching Ordinary Experience

While resisting theories and systematic philosophies, Woolf’s writing self-

Beer, Virginia Woolf: The Common Ground, 4.

Who knows? Who has ever seen this before?

in which the ‘perceptual apparatus of the individual perceiver’ influenced their

Randall Stevenson, Modernist Fiction: An Introduction (Lexington: University

Press of Kentucky, 1992), 36.

I sat upon the shore

The commensurability of separate, private worlds and perspectives is a recurring

pointed to a cultural anxiety in early twentieth-century Europe about facts and

involves a process of phenomenological reflection, and a suspension of our

Victorianism, Facts and To the Lighthouse

As Ann Banfield notes in The Phantom Table, ‘fact’ is an important term in

facts in Victorian culture and in Leslie Stephen’s philosophy in particular, as these

The history of thought is in great part a history of the gradual emancipation of

While the Romantics understood childhood as a period in which special kinds of

To carry on the feelings of childhood into the powers of manhood; to combine

Stephen, History, §17, p. 17.

Mr Ramsay is affiliated in the novel with British Empiricism, particularly

Mr Ramsay’s commitment to facts is not presented in the novel as an innocuous

Thus, in To the Lighthouse, Woolf frequently positions the rational empiricism

He was a failure, he said … It was sympathy he wanted, to be assured of his

‘The Mark on the Wall’ and ‘the Standard Thing’

In ‘A Positivist’, her 1919 review of Frederic Harrison’s Obiter Scripta (1918),

The manipulation of narrative rhythm in this passage through forms of punctuation

Mr Ramsay is described as being as ‘lean as a knife, narrow as a blade of one’.

complaining that buying newspapers is futile in a world in which ‘[n]othing ever

Fry, ‘The Artist’s Vision’, Vision and Design, 47–8.

Introduction – Virginia Woolf: The Patterns of Ordinary Experience 1

1 Factualism and the Search for Ordinary Things 29

3 Pain, Common Illness and Ordinary Life 81

6 Tracing Patterns 163

The familiar is not necessarily the known. (G.W.F. Hegel)