You are on page 1of 53

Ideas of 'Race' in the History of the

Humanities 1st Edition Amos


Morris-Reich
Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://textbookfull.com/product/ideas-of-race-in-the-history-of-the-humanities-1st-editi
on-amos-morris-reich/
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant
download maybe you interests ...

Photography and Imagination 1st Edition Amos Morris-


Reich (Editor)

https://textbookfull.com/product/photography-and-imagination-1st-
edition-amos-morris-reich-editor/

Computation and the Humanities Towards an Oral History


of Digital Humanities 1st Edition Julianne Nyhan

https://textbookfull.com/product/computation-and-the-humanities-
towards-an-oral-history-of-digital-humanities-1st-edition-
julianne-nyhan/

A Global History Of Ideas In The Language Of Law 1st


Edition Gunnar Folke Schuppert

https://textbookfull.com/product/a-global-history-of-ideas-in-
the-language-of-law-1st-edition-gunnar-folke-schuppert/

The Mystery of the Exploding Teeth And Other


Curiosities from the History of Medicine 1st Edition
Morris

https://textbookfull.com/product/the-mystery-of-the-exploding-
teeth-and-other-curiosities-from-the-history-of-medicine-1st-
edition-morris/
Antarctica and the Humanities (Palgrave Studies in the
History of Science and Technology) 1st Edition Roberts
Peder

https://textbookfull.com/product/antarctica-and-the-humanities-
palgrave-studies-in-the-history-of-science-and-technology-1st-
edition-roberts-peder/

Vittorio Benussi in the History of Psychology New Ideas


of a Century Ago Mauro Antonelli

https://textbookfull.com/product/vittorio-benussi-in-the-history-
of-psychology-new-ideas-of-a-century-ago-mauro-antonelli/

The Game Console A Photographic History from Atari to


Xbox 1st Edition Evan Amos

https://textbookfull.com/product/the-game-console-a-photographic-
history-from-atari-to-xbox-1st-edition-evan-amos/

The Game Console A Photographic History from Atari to


Xbox 1st Edition Evan Amos

https://textbookfull.com/product/the-game-console-a-photographic-
history-from-atari-to-xbox-1st-edition-evan-amos-2/

Stamped from the beginning the definitive history of


racist ideas in America First Trade Paperback Edition
Kendi

https://textbookfull.com/product/stamped-from-the-beginning-the-
definitive-history-of-racist-ideas-in-america-first-trade-
paperback-edition-kendi/
PA L G R AV E C R I T I C A L S T U D I E S O F A N T I S E M I T I S M A N D R AC I S M

IDEAS OF ‘RACE’
IN THE HISTORY
OF THE HUMANITIES
Edited by
Amos Morris-Reich
and Dirk Rupnow
Palgrave Critical Studies of Antisemitism and
Racism

Series Editor
David Feldman
Birkbeck College - University of London
London, United Kingdom
Aims of the Series
Palgrave Critical Studies of Antisemitism and Racism considers antisemi-
tism from the ancient world to the present day. The series explores topical
and theoretical questions and brings historical and multidisciplinary per-
spectives to bear on contemporary concerns and phenomena.
Grounded in history, the series also reaches across disciplinary bound-
aries to promote a contextualised and comparative understanding of
antisemitism. A contextualised understanding will seek to uncover the
content, meanings, functions and dynamics of antisemitism as it occurred
in the past and recurs in the present. A comparative approach will consider
antisemitism over time and place. Importantly, it will also explore the con-
nections between antisemitism and other exclusionary visions of society.
The series will explore the relationship between antisemitism and other
racisms as well as between antisemitism and forms of discrimination and
prejudice articulated in terms of gender and sexuality.

More information about this series at


http://www.springer.com/series/15437
Amos Morris-Reich • Dirk Rupnow
Editors

Ideas of ‘Race’ in the


History of the
Humanities
Editors
Amos Morris-Reich Dirk Rupnow
University of Haifa University of Innsbruck
Haifa, Israel Innsbruck, Austria

Palgrave Critical Studies of Antisemitism and Racism


ISBN 978-3-319-49952-9    ISBN 978-3-319-49953-6 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-49953-6

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017937861

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017


This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the pub-
lisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the
material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The
publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institu-
tional affiliations.

Cover Image: © RMN-Grand Palais (musée du Louvre) / Gérard Blot

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature


The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Acknowledgments

In the different phases of preparing the manuscript for publication, we


were greatly assisted by the support of Bucerius Institute for Research of
Contemporary German History and Society at the University of Haifa.
In particular, we would like to thank Amir Bar-On, the current admin-
istrative director of the Institute, and his predecessor, Lea Dror, as well
as Katharina Konarek and Franziska Tsufim. We are greatly indebted to
Dr. Simon Cook for his significant contribution to our writing of the
Introduction.
We are proud that this volume is appearing in Palgrave Macmillan’s new
series Palgrave Critical Studies on Antisemitism and Racism. We would
like to thank David Feldman, the editor of the series, and the members of
the International Consortium for Research on Antisemitism and Racism
(ICRAR). We would also like to thank Emily Russell, Carmel Kennedy,
and the production team led by Rajeswari Rajkumar. We are also grateful
to the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.
Finally, the publication of this volume would not have been possible
without the generous support of the Hamburg-based Ebelin and Gerd
Bucerius ZEIT Foundation.

v
Contents

Introduction   1
Amos Morris-Reich and Dirk Rupnow

 ere Early Modern Europeans Racist?  33


W
Joan-Pau Rubiés

 ormal Analysis: Art and Anthropology  89


F
Margaret Olin

 ax Grunwald and the Formation of Jewish Folkloristics:


M
Another Perspective on Race in German-Speaking
Volkskunde 113
Dani Schrire

 acism and Anti-Semitism in the German Political Economy:


R
The Example of Carl Schmitt’s 1936 Berlin Conference
“Jewry in Jurisprudence” 139
Nicolas Berg

 heogony as Ethnogony: Race and Religion in Friedrich


T
Schelling’s Philosophy of Mythology 159
George S. Williamson

vii
viii Contents

 ace and Richard Wagner 195


R
Michael P. Steinberg

 he Concept of Race in Musicological Thought: From


T
General Remarks to a Case Study of So-called Gypsy
Music in European Culture 215
Anna G. Piotrowska

 n Racial Thinking and the Problem of “Oriental”


O
Prehistory 235
Suzanne Marchand

 Nordics” and “Hamites”: Joseph Deniker and the Rise



(and Fall) of Scientific Racism 251
Nigel Eltringham

 honocentrism and the Concept of Volk: The Case of


P
Modern China 273
Christopher Hutton

 The Creation of a Frustrated People”: Race, Education,



the Teaching of History and South African
Historiography in the Apartheid Era 297
Derek Charles Catsam

Afterword 317
Sander L. Gilman

Index 323
Notes on Contributors

Nicolas Berg is working as Chief Research Associate at the Simon


Dubnow Institute. Between 2003 and 2009 he was responsible for the
institute’s editorial department. Throughout 2015–16 he was Guest
Professor for Interdisciplinary Holocaust Studies at the Goethe University
in Frankfurt. In 2012 he was Visiting Scholar at the German Historical
Institute in London and in 2012–13 Fellow at the Center of Excellence
“Cultural Foundations of Social Integration,” University of Konstanz. His
publications include The Holocaust and the West German Historians.
Historical Interpretation and Autobiographical Memory (Wisconsin
University Press, 2015); Luftmenschen. Zur Geschichte einer Metapher
(Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008); (ed., with Dieter Burdorf) Textgelehrte.
Literaturwissenschaft und literarisches Wissen im Umkreis der Kritischen
Theorie (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014); (ed.) Kapitalismusdebatten um
1900. Über antisemitisierende Semantiken des Jüdischen (Universitätsverlag,
2011); (ed., with Dirk Rupnow) “Judenforschung. Zwischen Wissenschaft
und Ideologie, Schwerpunkt,” Jahrbuch des Simon-­Dubnow-­Instituts/
Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook (2006).
Derek Charles Catsam is Professor of History and the Kathlyn Cosper
Dunagan Fellow in the Humanities at the University of Texas of the
Permian Basin and spent 2016 as the Hugh Le May Fellow in the
Humanities at Rhodes University in South Africa. He is the author of
Freedom’s Main Line: The Journey of Reconciliation and the Freedom Rides
(University Press of Kentucky, 2009); Beyond the Pitch: The Spirit, Culture,
and Politics of Brazil’s 2014 World Cup (Amazon, 2014); and Bleeding

ix
x Notes on Contributors

Red: A Red Sox Fan’s Diary of the 2004 Season (New Academia, 2005). He
is currently working on books on bus boycotts in the United States and
South Africa in the 1940s and 1950s and on the 1981 South African
national rugby team’s tour to the United States.
Nigel Eltringham is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the
University of Sussex. He is the author of Accounting for Horror: Post-­
Genocide Debates in Rwanda (Pluto, 2004); editor of Framing Africa:
Portrayals of a Continent in Contemporary Mainstream Cinema (Berghahn,
2013); and co-editor of Remembering Genocide (Routledge, 2014). He is
currently working on a monograph on the International Criminal Tribunal
for Rwanda.
Sander L. Gilman is a distinguished professor of the Liberal Arts and
Sciences as well as Professor of Psychiatry at Emory University. A cultural
and literary historian, he is the author or editor of over ninety books. His
Illness and Image: Case Studies in the Medical Humanities appeared with
Transaction Publishers in 2015; his most recent edited volume, Judaism,
Christianity, and Islam: Collaboration and Conflict in the Age of Diaspora
was published with the Hong Kong University Press in 2014.
Christopher Hutton is chair professor in the School of English at the
University of Hong Kong. His research concerns the history of linguistics,
in particular the relationship between linguistics and race theory, linguis-
tics and colonialism, and linguistics and fascism. More recently he has
been working on the politics of language and interpretation in the context
of the law. His publications include Linguistics and the Third Reich
(Routledge, 1999); Race and the Third Reich (Polity, 2005); Word
Meaning and Legal Interpretation (Macmillan, 2014), and Signs, Meaning
and Experience (with Adrian Pablé, De Gruyter, 2015).
Suzanne Marchand is LSU Systems Professor of European Intellectual
History at Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge. She is the author of
Down from Olympus: Archaeology and Philhellenism in Germany,
1750–1970 (Princeton University Press, 1996) and German Orientalism
in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race, and Scholarship (Cambridge
University Press, 2009) as well as many articles on the history of the
humanities in Germany and Austria.
Amos Morris-Reich is a professor in the Department of Jewish History
and Thought and director of the Bucerius Institute for the Research of
Notes on Contributors  xi

Contemporary German History and Society at the University of Haifa. He


is the author of The Quest for Jewish Assimilation in Modern Social Science
(Routledge, 2008) and Race and Photography: Racial Photography as
Scientific Evidence, 1876–1980 (University of Chicago Press, 2016).
Margaret Olin is Senior Research Scholar with appointments at Yale
Divinity School as well as the Department of Religious Studies, the
Program in Judaic Studies and the Department of the History of Art. She
has published widely on art historiography, photography and theories of
Jewish Art. Her most recent book is Touching Photographs (University of
Chicago Press, 2012). She also co-edits, with Steven Fine, Vivian B. Mann
and Maya Balakirsky-Katz the journal Images: A Journal of Jewish Art and
Visual Culture.
Anna G. Piotrowska is mainly interested in researching sociological and
cultural aspects of musical life. She is the prolific author of books (in
English, e.g. Gypsy Music in European Culture [Northeastern University
Press, 2013]) as well as articles (in Polish, English, German, Slovak and
Georgian). She has held many internationally renowned fellowships and
awards. She also took part in the Balzan research project “Toward a Global
History of Music.” Currently she is associated with the Institute of
Musicology, Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland.
Joan-Pau Rubiés is ICREA Research Professor at Universiat Pompeu
Fabra, Barcelona. He was formerly Reader in International History at the
London School of Economics, and has also been Visiting Professor at the
École des Hautes Études et Sciences Sociales. His publications include
Travel and Ethnology in the Renaissance: South India through European
Eyes, 1250–1625 (Cambridge University Press, 2000) and Travellers and
Cosmographers. Studies in the History of Early Modern Travel and Ethnology
(Ashgate, 2007). He is currently writing two monographs, “Europe’s
New Worlds: Travel Writing and the Origins of the Enlightenment,
1550–1750” (Cambridge University Press) and “Misioneros etnógrafos:
entre la idolatría y la civilización” (Acantilado).
Dirk Rupnow is a Professor at and Head of the Institute for Contemporary
History at the University of Innsbruck. He is the author of (amongst oth-
ers) Judenforschung im Dritten Reich. Wissenschaft zwischen Politik,
Propaganda und Ideologie (Nomos, 2011) and Vernichten und Erinnern.
Spuren nationalsozialistischer Gedächtnispolitik (Wallstein, 2005); and co-­
edited (with I. Roebling-Grau) “Holocaust”-Fiktion. Kunst jenseits der
xii Notes on Contributors

Authentizität (Fink, 2015) and (with V. Lipphardt, J. Thiel and C. Wessely)


Pseudowissenschaft. Konzeptionen von Nichtwissenschaftlichkeit in der
Wissenschaftsgeschichte (Suhrkamp, 2008).
Dani Schrire is a lecturer at the Hebrew University with a joint appoint-
ment in the Program for Folklore and Folk-Culture and the Program in
Cultural Studies. He is the author of Collecting the Pieces of Exile: Zionist
Folkloristics in Face of the Shoah (Magnes, forthcoming). His current
research, which is carried out within the framework of Da’at Hamakom
ICORE Centre for the Study of Modern Jewish Culture, focuses on the
development of Jewish folkloristics in international networks in Europe,
Palestine/Israel and the United States between 1840 and 1970.
Michael P. Steinberg is President of the American Academy in Berlin.
He is the Barnaby Conrad and Mary Critchfield Keeney Professor of
History, and Professor of Music and German Studies at Brown University.
He previously served as Vice Provost for the Arts and Founding Director
of the Cogut Center for the Humanities at Brown. Between 2009 and
2013 he served as dramaturg on a joint production of Wagner’s Ring of
the Nibelung for the Berlin State Opera and the Teatro alla Scala, Milan.
For 2015–16 he was appointed a Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu
Berlin. He is the author of studies of Hermann Broch, Aby Warburg and
Walter Benjamin, and of Austria as Theater and Ideology: The Meaning of
the Salzburg Festival (Cornell University Press, 2000), for which the
German edition (Ursprung und Ideologie der Salzburger Festspiele [Anton
Pustet Verlag, 2000]) won Austria’s Victor Adler Staatspreis in 2001.
Current and recent books are Listening to Reason: Culture, Subjectivity,
and Nineteenth Century Music (Princeton University Press, 2004);
Reading Charlotte Salomon, co-edited with Monica Bohm-Duchen
(Cornell University Press, 2006); and Judaism Musical and Unmusical
(University of Chicago Press, 2007).
George S. Williamson is Associate Professor of History at Florida State
University. He is the author of The Longing for Myth in Germany: Religion
and Aesthetic Culture from Romanticism to Nietzsche (University of
Chicago Press, 2004), as well as articles and book chapters on idealist
philosophy, German religious history and the assassination of the play-
wright August von Kotzebue in 1819. His current book project is entitled
“August von Kotzebue: A Political History.”
List of Figures

Fig. 1 “Ein Neukaledonier im Messbild.” Source: Doegen, Unter


fremden Völkern91
Fig. 2 From Adolph Goldschmidt, Die Elfenbeinskulpturen
(Berlin, [1914]–1926) 93
Fig. 3 From Goldschmidt, Die Elfenbeinskulpturen94
Fig. 4 Walter Georgi, Höriger Mischling, 1916. From Leo Frobenius,
ed., Deutschlands Gegner im Weltkriege (1920) 95
Fig. 5 From Felix Luschan, “Introduction,” Hermann Struck,
Kriegsgefangene, 1916 96
Fig. 6 Illustrations of sea urchins. From Louis Agassiz, Methods of
Study in Natural History (1863) 100
Fig. 7 Illustrations of starfish. From Agassiz, Methods of Study100
Fig. 8 From Alois Riegl, Stilfragen (1893) 101
Fig. 9 From Riegl, Stilfragen (1893) 101
Fig. 10 From Riegl, Stilfragen (1893) 102
Fig. 11 Acanthus ornament. From Riegl, Stilfragen (1893) 103
Fig. 12 Photograph of Louis Agassiz drawing radiates, 1872. From
the archives of the Ernst Mayr Library of the Museum of
Comparative Zoology, Harvard University 105

xiii
Introduction

Amos Morris-Reich and Dirk Rupnow

In the decades following World War II and the Holocaust—years that wit-
nessed European decolonization and the African American civil rights move-
ment—the concept of race slowly but surely lost its legitimacy as a cultural,
political and scientific category. Nevertheless, for much of the nineteenth and
the first half of the twentieth centuries, concepts of race enjoyed widespread
currency, playing an integral role in numerous fields of knowledge, in some
cases even serving as an essential basis. This volume is concerned with the
hitherto neglected role of the humanities in the histories of the idea of race.
For reasons that we shall turn to shortly, contemporary scholarship has
by now firmly associated notions of race with late nineteenth-century biol-
ogy and physical anthropology rather than with the humanities. Thus the
scholarly imagination of today populates the racial studies of the past with
anthropologists dressed in white doctors’ coats and measuring the skulls
of dark-skinned and half-naked native subjects, but not with distinguished
historians, book in hand and ruminating in their armchairs. And yet recent
scholarship has documented notions of “race” within a wide range of fields

A. Morris-Reich (*)
Department of Jewish History, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel
D. Rupnow
Institute for Contemporary History, University of Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria

© The Author(s) 2017 1


A. Morris-Reich, D. Rupnow (eds.), Ideas of ‘Race’ in the History
of the Humanities, Palgrave Critical Studies of Antisemitism and
Racism, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-49953-6_1
2 A. MORRIS-REICH AND D. RUPNOW

of the humanities and across a wide range of national contexts—the his-


tory of art, history, historical economics, musicology and various forms of
Orientalism, to name but a few disciplines. To date, however, no collective
and comprehensive attempt to address the history of notions of race in the
humanities as a whole has been carried out. The aim of this collection of
essays is to begin to fill in this significant lacuna.
Of course, from the beginning of this intellectual venture it is crucial
to acknowledge the lack of any singular and essentialist idea of “race” (as
we shall see below, a not dissimilar point must also be made with regard
to the very idea of the “humanities”). In the early twenty-first century in
English-speaking countries, “race” is widely used as a social construct,
while in post-Holocaust Germany it is primarily understood as a biologi-
cal concept (Rasse). But “race” has always been understood differently in
different languages, historical periods and national contexts; indeed, its
meaning has always been contested and it has always been a more or less
diffuse and fuzzy concept. All this makes an undertaking such as the pres-
ent difficult—but also necessary.
Today, “race” connotes historical notions of descent, biological ideas of
heredity and cultural attributions.1 Research on the history of the concept
of race (for example in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe) usually distinguishes
a pre-scientific usage of the term from the sixteenth through the eigh-
teenth centuries (with forerunners reaching back to the thirteenth century
in the Romance languages: Italian razza, Spanish raza, Portuguese raça,
French race). In contrast to the later, “modern” connotation of the term,
its meaning in this early modern period was more that of a long ances-
tral heritage or line of descendants with exceptional quality. As such, the
term was not only applied to human beings but also to domestic animals
and cultivated plants. Important for the development of the term was the
Spanish Reconquista and the French debate on nobility. A more general
and sustained discussion of different forms of human beings commenced
in the late seventeenth century in the context of the colonization of the
New World. “Race” now became one of several terms used to describe
human diversity. Its modern meanings, however, were acquired only over
the course of the nineteenth century, when the notion of “race” became
associated with two of the most significant intellectual developments of
the age: on the one hand, “race” became mixed up with concepts of
“folk” and “nation” and hence bound to the development of compara-
tive philology, mythology and politics; on the other hand, Charles Darwin
used the term within the context of his evolutionary theory, connecting it
to the notion of “species.”
INTRODUCTION 3

Nineteenth-century German universities were particularly important


sites for the development of ideas of race, which were central to many
academic disciplines. Both sociology and anthropology, for example, were
greatly influenced by similar conceptual developments, such as Herbert
Spencer’s account of organic differentiation and Charles Darwin’s and
Ernst Häckel’s theories of evolution. Concepts of race, however, devel-
oped differently in different disciplines. In particular, anthropology was
conceptually, if not always empirically, differentiated from Ethnologie,
Volkskunde and Völkerkunde, and referred to the natural scientific study
of man and the species’ biological history. Hence it inherently entailed
concepts of race—in the plural, including concepts ranging from racial
determinism to the idea of race as at least in part a social construct. While
up to the turn of the twentieth century German anthropology was led by
anti-racist and anti-antisemitic liberals such as Rudolf Virchow, the sta-
tus of biology in general and race in particular came to be fiercely dis-
puted in German sociology.2 And yet, while all these nineteenth-century
developments have worked in one way or another to irreversibly shape
our understanding of “race,” the very categories of nineteenth-century
racial thought have today become problematic, and this impairs our abil-
ity to interpret the history of the concept of race. Complex matters of
translation (such as the crucial distinction between “Rasse” and “Volk” in
the German context and the mismatch between the former and “race” in
English, as Christopher Hutton shows in his contribution) further impede
our historical interpretations.
With its history of domestic slavery and its turn-of-the-century anxiet-
ies over mass European immigration, North America played a particularly
important role in the development of twentieth-century thinking about
race. Following the heyday of racial social science between around 1880
and 1920, the North American academic community found itself increas-
ingly divided between those who viewed race as a fundamental and neces-
sary foundation for the scientific study of humans and human societies and
those who saw race as a spurious category of pseudoscience.3 Then, during
the late 1940s and through the 1950s, and in the wake of the atroci-
ties and mass crimes committed by Nazi Germany in the name of and
guided by concepts of race, North American anthropology d ­ epartments,
now increasingly under the influence of the disciples of Franz Boas, trans-
formed race into a negative category that served as an object of criti-
cism as opposed to a valid anthropological category. Yet it was only in
the 1980s, in the context of the wider critical turn fostered by postmod-
ernism, that North American anthropologists turned to reflect upon the
4 A. MORRIS-REICH AND D. RUPNOW

history of their discipline’s intertwinement with ideas of race.4 From the


mid-1980s onward, significant work on the role of race in the history of
anthropology has been conducted, and it would not be an exaggeration to
say that this critical reflection has generated a fundamental transformation
of anthropology.5
While these developments in North American anthropology depart-
ments are to be welcomed wholeheartedly, they nevertheless generate two
distinct problems with regard to our understanding of the histories of
race. First and most obviously, the transformation of race from a valid
scientific into a negative and pseudoscientific category impairs our ability
to sympathetically engage with the work of students of race before World
War II. It is of course precisely the business of the intellectual historian to
overcome the anachronism that naturally attaches itself to our readings of
past texts, but in the case of “race” this task is made particularly difficult
by the profound emotions engendered by the bloody and brutal historical
events associated with ideas of race that occurred between the composi-
tion of such texts and our readings of them today. We will return to this
issue later on in this Introduction. But a second, more subtle and more
insidious interpretative problem must be addressed immediately: the criti-
cal turn taken by anthropology, generating as it has a host of studies asso-
ciating the scientific idea of race with the history of anthropology, has not
as yet been followed by the various disciplines that compose the humani-
ties. The result is that race is today far more associated with anthropology
than with the humanities. In other words, because the humanities have
yet to examine the role of racial thinking in their histories, the erroneous
impression has arisen that race has played a negligible or no role in these
histories. The present volume is intended as a first step toward rectifying
this profoundly problematic state of affairs.
But what do we mean by “the humanities”? In the Wealth of Nations
(1776), Adam Smith could write that the “general division” of ancient
Greek philosophy into the “three great branches” of natural philosophy,
moral philosophy and logic “seems perfectly agreeable to the nature of
things.”6 In a rough and ready manner of speaking we may today agree
with Smith, identifying his “moral philosophy” with our “humanities”
and noting the key contrast of both terms with what we now describe
as the “natural sciences” (Smith’s “natural philosophy”). But while the
simple designation of “not being natural science” may capture much of
what we take to be the subject of this volume, any simplistic identification
of moral philosophy with the humanities will obscure key elements of the
history that we wish to reconstruct. The term “humanities” appears to
INTRODUCTION 5

have been coined in North American universities as recently as the 1920s,


as an English-language equivalent to the German Geisteswissenschaften
(although, as we shall see below, the correspondence is not exact). It was
not until the mid-twentieth century that the term became common cur-
rency in Great Britain.7 For some years prior to this date the accepted
umbrella term would have been “moral science,” a contested designation
standing (very roughly) somewhere between the moral philosophy of the
Scottish Enlightenment and the humanities of the twentieth-century uni-
versity. These are not interchangeable terms and the distinctions between
them, as well as the various conflicting interpretations offered of each of
them at particular times, would need to be properly explored in any sys-
tematic survey of the place of ideas of race within the wider intellectual
history of the last few hundred years. For the purposes of the present vol-
ume, however, it is sufficient to provide but a brief glimpse of the geneal-
ogy of our present conception of the humanities.
Broadly speaking, contemporary presumptions of the universal signi-
fication of the term “humanities” are a manifestation of the dominance
of twentieth-century academic culture by a tradition of Kantian (or neo-­
Kantian) philosophy. One consequence of this dominance is that earlier
traditions have been obscured and effectively written out of intellectual
history. It is only relatively recently, for example, that modern scholarship
has unearthed the seminal role of the tradition of Protestant natural law
in the emergence of early modern moral philosophy.8 To provide but one
indication, it is now clear that divergent responses to Hugo Grotius’s dis-
tinction between perfect and imperfect rights generated the two opposing
traditions of moral philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment.9 The natu-
ral law framework was essentially discarded with Dugald Stewart’s formu-
lation of Common Sense philosophy, which exerted tremendous influence
in nineteenth-century Britain, North America and even (albeit indirectly)
France. Objecting to Smith’s agreement with the ancient division of phi-
losophy into natural philosophy, ethics and logic, Stewart insisted that
“Matter and Mind … are the two most general heads which ought to
form the ground-work of an Encyclopedical classification of the sciences
and arts.”10 Stewart here signaled the transition from eighteenth-century
moral philosophy, with its key concern with sociability, to nineteenth-­
century moral science, in which the nature of the individual human mind
became the central object of contention.
The great debates of nineteenth-century English-language moral sci-
ence turn upon the psychological question of whether mental introspec-
tion reveals innate powers and first principles (Stewart) or simply the play
6 A. MORRIS-REICH AND D. RUPNOW

of impressions and ideas (J. S. Mill). But whichever position was adopted,
the point is that the different moral sciences—and these included, at vari-
ous times, history, law, logic, ethics, psychology, political economy and
political science—were not simply defined as such by virtue of this posi-
tion, but they were also supposedly grounded in the correct account of
the human mind.11 This was still the situation at the turn of the twentieth
century. It was only in 1903, for example, that an Economics Faculty was
created at Cambridge University—hitherto economics had been taught
as but one of several moral sciences. In general, the disappearance of the
category “moral science” was the result not of intellectual development
but rather of the processes of academic specialization that witnessed, over
the course of about half a century, the establishment of separate facul-
ties and, consequently, independent identities for the various one-time
moral sciences. It was only in the wake of such fragmentation and subse-
quent intellectual amnesia that the term “humanities” could enter into the
vocabulary of the universities as a new catch-all label.
Even in the German context it would be quite wrong to regard
Geisteswissenschaften as a timeless category. In the German universities sig-
nificant innovation occurred as early as the years after 1825, when the new
and reformed universities restructured teaching and research along disci-
plinary lines. The new academics were increasingly specialists who wrote
primarily for their peers and taught mainly to create a new generation of
scholars in their subject.12 Many new disciplines like philosophy, history
and philology now came into existence as distinct social entities. The con-
ception of these various fields as all belonging to the Geisteswissenschaften,
however, had to wait until the introduction of that term, which occurred
as part of the intense methodological and ideological controversy that
took place in the third part of the nineteenth century. The term was intro-
duced by Wilhelm Dilthey, according to some accounts, as the German
translation of the term “moral sciences” that Dilthey found in the sixth
book of J. S. Mill’s System of Logic (1843).13 Literally, Geisteswissenschaften
means “sciences of the spirit,” and the term encompasses that which is
­authentically human and, as such, is in fact wider than the English-language
term “humanities,” at least if the latter are understood as predominantly
historical-­philological disciplines. At the heart of Dilthey’s thinking was
a distinction between Geisteswissenschaften and Naturwissenschaften;
between, that is, the sciences of the natural world and the sciences of
man. While the latter engaged with law-like causal relations, the former,
he insisted, must focus on understanding human beings by way of the
INTRODUCTION 7

recreation of their respective mental worlds through the method of ver-


stehen (“understanding”) the meanings and reasons that inform human
actions. Appearing in the Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften in 1883,
Dilthey’s theory reclassified, regrouped and reorganized the relationships
between various fields of knowledge and disciplines and defined their posi-
tions within or without the humanities.
But Dilthey’s was not the only theory around. Indeed, his notion of
the Geisteswissenschaften was developed as part of a wider controversy
involving, directly or indirectly, the likes of Moritz Lazarus and Heymann
Steynthal (to whom Dilthey was responding), as well as Georg Simmel,
Wilhelm Windelband, Heinrich Rickert and Max Weber, to name only
some of the most prominent names. Thus Geisteswissenschaften was but
one of several alternative differentiations and principles, more or less
close to Dilthey’s, but regrouping other fields of knowledge together or
insisting that the fields dealing with humans as a whole pertain to society
(Sozialwissenschaften) or culture (Kulturwissenschaften), rather than the
“spirit” (Geisteswissenschaften). In other words, even within nineteenth-­
century Germany the definition of the humanities, in its English rendition,
is neither stable nor definitive but subject to discussion and controversy.
Furthermore, we must not lose sight of the fact that we are here talking
about two different levels or registers, which are related but by no means
the same. The first level pertains to fields and disciplines (such as his-
tory, philology, pre-history etc.) and the latter to a theory that classifies
(and defines) different forms of knowledge and that, in one sense at least,
could be seen as a theory of knowledge or meta-knowledge structure. As a
theory of knowledge this is both an analytical structure and a theory laden
with values. Finally, it is also not sealed; it is easy to document instances of
the traffic of ideas in and out of fields that count as Geisteswissenschaften
into others that do not, or vice versa.
All of this should teach us to be wary of too easy an application of
the term “humanities” in any inquiry into the intellectual history of the
last few hundred years. Clearly, the terms “moral philosophy,” “moral
science” and “Geisteswissenschaften” are not synonymous, and even the
German term cannot be taken as an exact equivalent of “humanities.” The
example of economics may provide a useful illustration. It was under the
impetus of the neo-classical economist Alfred Marshall that, in Cambridge
in 1903, economics was taken out of the moral sciences and established
in its own faculty. Now, Marshall is usually regarded as one of the found-
ers of modern mathematical economics, and few people today would
8 A. MORRIS-REICH AND D. RUPNOW

classify modern economics as a member of the humanities; and yet in


1903 nobody questioned that economics was a moral science (the issue
was whether this particular moral science was important enough to merit
a separate faculty). Clearly, then, the criteria for membership in the moral
sciences differ from the criteria for membership in the humanities, and
the same point could just as readily be made with regard to eighteenth-­
century moral philosophy. Indeed, these varying (and contested) criteria
cannot but be regarded as potential elements in any intellectual history
of race (for it is an open question whether different classificatory schemes
are more or less amenable to the development of racial ideas). But as we
have already emphasized, the present project has not been conceived as a
systematic and comprehensive study; it is rather intended as a first explor-
atory step toward filling a fairly gaping lacuna in the literature. As such, we
feel it sufficient to draw attention to the problems inherent in the usage of
any one particular term to describe the kinds of intellectual groupings we
have in mind, but nevertheless to continue to employ the term “humani-
ties” on the practical ground that this is the recognizable and accepted
term within contemporary academic cultures.
In the first instance, the very notion of Geisteswissenschaften or humani-
ties would seem fundamentally incompatible with the history of preju-
dice, discrimination and exclusion that one typically associates with race.
But although the theorization of race was based in biology and used the
language of the natural sciences, it could never be reduced to a purely
scientific project: the racializers were, after all, attempting to devise a clas-
sification system that would naturalize cultural, intellectual and psycho-
logical characteristics as well as physical ones. Yet in racial discourses it is
almost never possible to draw a clear line of demarcation between physical
or bodily and mental or cultural attributes. Furthermore, there is flow
in both directions; that is, from the natural sciences to the humanities
and vice versa. This is why, to take a particularly concrete example, in the
Nazi “racial state” the humanities were equally as important as the natu-
ral sciences in defining race and justifying the implementation of racist
practices.14 But more generally, it is important to realize that the category
of race was prominent in comparative philology before it was taken up
by biology and anthropology, and ideas of race were appropriated from
philology not only by anthropology but also by many humanistic disci-
plines, such as art history, musicology, theology, religious studies, history,
literary studies, philosophy, architecture, folklore and archaeology. In
all these fields, notions of race were empirically present (for instance the
INTRODUCTION 9

distinction between Southern and Northern art) as well as intertwined in


complex ways with the guiding principles and methodological consider-
ations of different fields of knowledge (for instance Anschauung or Stil).
But what in one context belongs to the “surface” of scientific knowledge
as opposed to the “deep structure” can be reversed in another, as can be
seen in the contributions of Derek Catsam on race in the South African
humanities and in Nigel Eltringham’s chapter on the Hamitic theory from
nineteenth-century France and Britain to the Rwandan genocide of the
second half of the twentieth century. Notions of race were present in a
manner both specific to languages, national cultures, disciplines and fields
of knowledge and reaching across disciplines, fields of knowledge, and
cultural and national lines. In short, race has a long-standing, deep-seated
and complex history within the humanities, vestiges of which are still dis-
cernible in modern scholarship. The humanities, however, have never paid
special attention to the role of race in their history, and many scholars in
the humanities are unaware of the role of race even in their own fields of
knowledge.
The individualist nature of humanistic scholarship, the nature of dis-
course in the humanities and the typical forms of publication have all con-
tributed to the fact that the history of race in the humanities has not been
raised or addressed collectively. But these aspects intrinsic to scholarship
in the humanities have also been strengthened by the major dispute over
the scientific status of race that occurred in the 1920s and 1930s, as well
as the critical discourse that arose in the mid-1980s and which has to date
involved primarily anthropologists. Only in the last decade or so have indi-
vidual historians, operating in different fields, started to turn their atten-
tion to the history of scholarship in various branches of the humanities,
thus leading them to directly confront the role of race therein. Prominent
examples include the history of German Orientalists (Suzanne Marchand),
the discipline of history (Ingo Haar, Dirk Rupnow), art history (Margaret
Olin, Kymberly Pinder), musicology (Ruth HaCohen, Michael Steinberg),
linguistics (Christopher Hutton), theology (Susannah Heschel, Denise
Kimber Buell) and the study of religion (Stefan Arvidsson). These indi-
vidual studies have broken new ground with regard to the role of race in
specific fields of the humanities and have brought to light and sharpened
the pressing need to address the role of notions of race in the humanities
in a far more comprehensive and systematic manner.
Although the origin of this volume is a conference that took place in
Haifa in 2010, the volume differs significantly from that conference. The
10 A. MORRIS-REICH AND D. RUPNOW

idea for the conference itself was fired by the experience of both editors,
who had independently come to the conclusion that crucial aspects of
the history of race and racism had far more to do with an intrinsic his-
tory of the humanities than with that of the natural sciences or the politi-
cal sphere. We then started to look around and realized that there was a
growing body of literature that corroborated this intuition with regard
to specific aspects of the humanities, but no combined discussion across
the various contexts. Such a joint discussion, ranging from the eighteenth
through the twenty-first centuries and involving different national con-
texts and different linguistic and disciplinary skills, could only be pursued
through a collective endeavor, and the conference was intended to serve
as a first step in that endeavor.
We then issued a call for papers for the conference and received a large
number of applications. Many of these focused on critical perspectives
on the history of ideas of race in the humanities. Our interest, however,
lay not in critical and, to an extent, external perspectives on race in the
humanities, but rather in authors who were either committed in one way
or another to concepts of race or else viewed race as necessary for the
treatment of their subjects in certain respects. The conference, which was
much wider in scope than the current volume, was the first time these
aspects of the history of the humanities were discussed jointly.
The conference brought together some of the most distinguished
authors in their respective fields across the humanities, discussing different
continents, intellectual traditions, historical periods and political, social
and linguistic subjects and contexts. Only following the conference pre-
sentations and discussions did we begin to understand the sheer size of the
subject that the conference had opened up. And it was only after the con-
ference was over, in a long and arduous process facilitated by discussion,
reflection and review, that the ideas of the editors about the shape of the
volume and the required form of this introductory chapter crystallized.
What became increasingly apparent to us was that in opening up a
vast subject that had been greatly neglected by scholarship, we faced the
choice of either reifying a partial segment of its history, most likely the
more clearly racist end of the spectrum (about which both editors had
independently published extensively),15 or, on the other hand, opening
and historically deconstructing some of the different and shifting histori-
cal entanglements and underpinnings of ideas of race in the history of the
humanities. Each of these strategies, however, would come at a price: the
former would give the appearance of a clearer and more consistent role for
INTRODUCTION 11

ideas of race in the history of the humanities, but it would also entail his-
torical partiality and even misrepresentation; the latter, meanwhile, would
express a wider segment of the historical continuum, but the chapters col-
lected in the volume would seem more disparate.
It gradually became clear to us as historians that the latter strat-
egy was stronger and historically more productive. We then wrote this
Introduction, which seeks to reflect this strategy. Our insistence on de-­
reifying the history of ideas of race in the history of the humanities, on
emphasizing the entanglements between race and the humanities in par-
ticular contexts, on pointing out different modalities of relationship and
even on calling attention to the inability to fully fix and stabilize the mean-
ing of “race” and the boundaries of the “humanities” across history and
national context reflects this strategic choice. The contributions collected
here are thus not randomly chosen but express our growing conviction
that the first step, in this current state of research, should not be to artifi-
cially contract the field but, on the contrary, and even at the risk of having
the selection viewed as insufficiently historically defined, to move towards
demarcating an as-yet-uncharted field.
From all this it should be clear that the essays collected in this volume
do not attempt to exhaust the subject. Rather, they offer carefully selected
chapters that methodically study varying manifestations of ideas of race in
the history of the humanities. These chapters demonstrate race as a string
of notions in texts, images and music, in various branches of the humani-
ties ranging from linguistics to folklore, art history and musicology, in
their local contexts as well as in wider contexts that are arguably shared.
Despite the fact that both editors of this volume study, in one way or
another, National Socialism in its wider context and have a background in
German history, Nazism is purposely almost completely absent from the
volume. This decision was made because the editors feel that the subject
of race in the Nazi context has been thoroughly studied, as has the his-
tory of the humanities in Nazi Germany.16 The Nazi context is an obvious
and necessary one in the study of race because of the extremity of the
case, but because the aim of this volume is to kick-start a more systematic
and wide-ranging historicization of notions of race in the humanities in a
non-teleological and non-deterministic way, it seemed appropriate to cast
the net in less-charted waters and to seek out appearances of race in other
contexts. Having said this, it must immediately be conceded that Nazi
Germany remains as subtext in much of the discussion, and one of the
constant questions that undergirds many of the chapters pertains to the
12 A. MORRIS-REICH AND D. RUPNOW

relationship between politically and culturally distant periods and national


contexts as well as the relationship between notions of race and explicitly
political frameworks.
The aim of this collection of essays, then, is to historicize notions of
race in the humanities. Several questions run through the contributions
collected in this volume, addressing the historical sources of concepts of
race in the humanities, their functions and significance and their specifici-
ties. The first goal of this book is to begin the collection of an empirical
body of knowledge on the subject. But a second goal is to elaborate the
conceptual distinctions and historical and analytical assumptions that are
necessary for the study of this subject. Given the intimate relationship of
race with slavery, oppression, persecution and genocide, any such discus-
sion of concepts and historical assumptions is of course sensitive. In the
remainder of this Introduction, we attempt to elucidate the major ques-
tions that this history involves and to explicate some of the considerations
that we bring with us in approaching this subject.

Three Historical Arguments


Concerning the History of Race
The editors of this volume have not been guided by a “strong” thesis
concerning the history of concepts of race in the humanities. Indeed, we
do not believe that one gains a stronger understanding of this history if
one poses a quasi-deterministic account of a trajectory that, for example,
begins with its dissemination in the eighteenth century as a reflexive idea
for the categorization of human group differences, runs through hierar-
chical notions of the nineteenth century and culminates in Nazi crimes
justified on racial grounds. The trajectory of race afforded by this volume
is, by contrast, contingent, partial, relative to and dependent on external
variables, themselves dynamic and unstable. Our intention in this section
is to offer three historical arguments that may serve as a guide to the
interpretation of this history as a whole. Obviously, not all of these three
arguments are equally relevant to the various interpretations of the mani-
festations of race that follow, but we believe that they perform necessary
interpretative work in the understanding of the history of concepts of race
in the humanities as a whole.
Our first argument is that race, when looked at from the perspec-
tive of the humanities, is not primarily about physical but about cultural
and mental differences. In contemporary North America, and to a great
INTRODUCTION 13

extent in Europe as well, there is a widely shared belief that race is pri-
marily a category of physically observable superficial difference (“race is
skin deep”). This tendency is probably connected to the critical turn that
anthropology has taken towards race in its own disciplinary history, but
it is not helpful in the reconstruction and understanding of the history of
race in the humanities. One of the major accomplishments of the chapters
that follow is that they serve as a corrective to an entrenched focus upon
physical difference and point to the frequent (but by no means exclusive)
conceptualization of race as a deep structure that organizes human his-
tory and culture. This contrast, it may be noted, is not unrelated to that
between the visible and the invisible, where in some contexts race is essen-
tially about the visible and about visible differences, whereas in others it
is equally essentially about non-observable, almost hidden and in a sense
stronger or more threatening differences.
Our second argument is that it is necessary to draw distinctions between
several interrelated but independent genealogies of race as a concept (or
set of dynamic concepts). Thus one genealogical line of development
runs from Count de Gobineau—whose primary form of argumentation
as found in his Essay on the Inequality of Human Races was historical—
through to the Rassesystem of the twentieth century. In this line, racial
purity is the highest attribute, aesthetic as well as biological. Another
line begins with Charles Darwin and leads, by way of Francis Galton, to
modern eugenics. In this second genealogy, it is variability that plays the
crucial role: Darwin conceptualized species as by definition dynamic and
historical rather than stable, and as therefore lacking a fixed border; and
race therefore came to be conceptualized as, in principle, also lacking a
permanent and fixed border.
Finally, our third argument is that the discovery of the idea of race is
a specifically modern phenomenon, which cannot be separated from the
sense of the crisis of modernity which accompanied the belief in the period
as an era unlike anything that had preceded it, a veritable sui generis. In
this sense, ideas of race are inseparable from what could be termed a form
of reactionary logic as a response to modernity. That is, a structural rela-
tionship can be discerned between the belief in the natural division of the
human species into races and the belief that modern conditions increas-
ingly undermine and erode that boundary. Many writers on race were
responding to what they felt to be the disintegration of traditional forms
of social, community, family and natural life in the wake of serious, imme-
diate processes with irreversible implications. Race was thus established as
14 A. MORRIS-REICH AND D. RUPNOW

a natural category that was—at that very moment—disintegrating; race is


“discovered” as being on the verge of collapse as the laws of nature come
apart at the seams.

When Does the History of Race Begin?


Our third argument above, that race is a specifically modern phenomenon,
is contentious, and a word should be said concerning the wider debate sur-
rounding this issue. In several respects, the present volume can be seen as
taking on issues that were raised and discussed in the volume The Origins
of Racism in the West (2009), edited by Miriam Eliav-Feldon, Benjamin
Isaac and Joseph Ziegler.17 Our starting point was the fact that the term
race is a latecomer and there is no evidence for its existence in the ancient
or medieval world. Eliav-Feldon, Isaac and Ziegler, however, attempt to
push the beginning of this history of race and racism back to the ancient
world by retrieving evidence of what they term “proto-racism.” A discus-
sion of the historical origin of race is also a discussion of its conditions of
possibility and it is important, therefore, to bring to the surface what is at
stake in the determination of the terminus a quo of race as an idea, and as
a category that could then manifest itself in social and political life.18
While it is probably possible to find earlier evidence of proto-racism, and
even if the actual historical moment of its emergence cannot be determined
with any degree of certainty, the history of the notion of race and the massive
dissemination of intellectual, social and political practices that are directly
or indirectly justified in terms of race are genuinely modern phenomena.
As already indicated in the first section above, during the eighteenth cen-
tury race was not a clearly defined category with a well-­delineated reference;
indeed, the appellations “race” and “human varieties” were not conceived
solely or even primarily in terms of whiteness and blackness, nor were they
visually represented solely as such. In one respect the history of race, as with
many other scholarly and scientific concepts, is one of increasing differen-
tiation and exactness and receives more technical definitions only towards
the end of the nineteenth century. It is of the essence of race as a concept,
however, that while it seemed stable to contemporaries, and especially to stu-
dents of race, it was in fact an unstable, hybrid, contextual category operating
within the various sciences at the interface of the social and the biological.19
To accept that race is specifically modern has many ramifications,
because it places this history in relation to that of European enlighten-
ment; the emergence of modern sciences, colonialism and imperialism;
INTRODUCTION 15

the rise of nationalism; and ideas of secularism as well as the processes


of secularization. Ideas and representations can create objects—persons,
places, ideas—that is, a world with social dimensions. Enlightenment
philosophers attempted to define “man” not only as an endlessly varied
empirical being but also normatively, by seeking a common human nature.
If race is recognized as contemporaneous to the rise of Enlightenment
philosophy, it is difficult not to see that it appears as another facet of the
desperate attempt to save the normative in the face of the empirical. In this
vein, those disposed to think with readymade concepts may well identify
the history of race as not simply parallel to but in fact born out of what
is fashionably referred to as “the Enlightenment project.” By the same
token, the recognition of the modernity of race fosters the recognition of
its direct connection with the fortunes of religion in the modern world (as
shown in this volume by George S. Williamson in his chapter on Schelling,
and Dani Schrire in his chapter on the emergence of Jewish folklore).
Indeed, if modernity is identified with change and instability, then race
can be understood as providing a particularly important category allowing
for the relating of not only difference but also similarity, for talking about
what ties people together over time and space.

Intellectual History and Changing Assumptions


about Race

The very idea of notions of race in the humanities confronts the histo-
rian with several interpretative hurdles that arise from the massive changes
in assumptions about race that have occurred between the early modern
period and the early twenty-first century. From early in the second half of
the twentieth century onwards, historians have increasingly worked with
the epistemic assumption that races are not simple biological entities but
are rather, in one way or another, constructs, inevitably involving social
and political (that is, non-biological) considerations. Simultaneously,
commitment to notions of race has become a commitment to racism.
Consequently, historians tend to approach branches of knowledge com-
mitted to race from an external point of view, treating them as ideologi-
cal constructs—a tendency that complicates the study of these bodies of
knowledge by way of the normal tools of intellectual history. The specific
problem that we face here, however, is not so much with the moral or
ethical judgments themselves, but with what such judgments do to our
capacity to write this chapter in the history of the humanities.
16 A. MORRIS-REICH AND D. RUPNOW

Race is one of the strongest examples in modern intellectual history in


which contemporary historians are unable to fully identity with the object
of their research. Historians today simply cannot write a “positive” history
of race, devoid of ambivalences and tensions.20 This is, therefore, not the
task that we have set ourselves in this volume, although our chosen path
is in certain ways even harder, more sensitive and riddled with more ten-
sions. To reiterate: the task of this volume is to provide an empirical and
conceptual foundation for the history of ideas of race in the humanities.
We hope to achieve this goal in part by providing a first shot at a com-
prehensive body of positive historical evidence on the subject. While this
“positivist” intention might sound simple and straightforward, it is in fact
complex. The historian’s trade is based to a great extent on the notion of
“empathy,” that is, on the ability to identify with the subjects of history as
a necessary condition for their understanding. Full identification with the
writers of race is no longer an option for contemporary historians, nor do
we believe that it would contribute to a stronger historical interpretation.
But a history that is entirely external to the subject all too readily slides
into didacticism and moralizing, and is weak in the sense that it does not
capture the essence of the real questions at hand.
One possible solution, which we do not choose to take, is the sociologi-
cal one developed in the second half of the twentieth century. From our
perspective, the point of departure of the sociological solution is the fact
that ideas (in this case, of race) are always embedded in concrete social
situations and are always both the fruit and fuel of social relations. But late
twentieth-century social theorists took this approach one step further by
moving from restricted definitions of racism, directly related to notions
of race, to the study of racism according to its social effects, which they
increasingly found to conform to social relations between majorities and
minorities in stratified social and political power structures. This move
allowed for powerful insights into the social manifestations of racism that
escaped analysis tied to direct discourse about race. In a logical conse-
quence of this tendency, an influential definition of racism that arose in the
second half of the twentieth century went so far as to speak of “race-less
racism.”21
Whatever its merits, this sociological approach to racism is unhelpful
for the study of the history of race as an intellectual idea, string of ideas or
intellectual trajectory. According to the sociological perspective, various
kinds of power relations that can readily be detected across history are to
be defined as racism, even though they existed prior to the emergence of
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
The Project Gutenberg eBook of Mrs. Dalloway
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States
and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it
under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this
ebook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the
United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where
you are located before using this eBook.

Title: Mrs. Dalloway

Author: Virginia Woolf

Release date: October 13, 2023 [eBook #71865]

Language: English

Original publication: New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc, 1925

Credits: Carla Foust, Emmanuel Ackerman and the Online


Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
(This book was produced from images made available by
the HathiTrust Digital Library.)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MRS.


DALLOWAY ***
BY VIRGINIA WOOLF
Fiction

THE VOYAGE OUT


NIGHT AND DAY
JACOB’S ROOM
MRS. DALLOWAY
TO THE LIGHTHOUSE
ORLANDO
THE WAVES
THE YEARS
BETWEEN THE ACTS
A HAUNTED HOUSE

Biography

FLUSH
ROGER FRY

Criticism, etc.

THE COMMON READER


THE SECOND COMMON READER
A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN
THREE GUINEAS
THE DEATH OF THE MOTH
THE MOMENT AND OTHER ESSAYS
MRS. DALLOWAY
by

VIRGINIA WOOLF

HBMC

New York

HARCOURT, BRACE & WORLD, INC.


COPYRIGHT, 1925, BY
HARCOURT, BRACE & WORLD, INC.
RENEWED BY LEONARD WOOLF

All rights reserved, including


the right to reproduce this book
or portions thereof in any form.

Twenty-third printing

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA


Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.
For Lucy had her work cut out for her. The doors would be taken off
their hinges; Rumpelmayer’s men were coming. And then, thought
Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning—fresh as if issued to children on
a beach.
What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her,
when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now,
she had burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into
the open air. How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air
was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave;
chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as she then was)
solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the open window, that
something awful was about to happen; looking at the flowers, at the
trees with the smoke winding off them and the rooks rising, falling;
standing and looking until Peter Walsh said, “Musing among the
vegetables?”—was that it?—“I prefer men to cauliflowers”—was that
it? He must have said it at breakfast one morning when she had
gone out on to the terrace—Peter Walsh. He would be back from
India one of these days, June or July, she forgot which, for his letters
were awfully dull; it was his sayings one remembered; his eyes, his
pocket-knife, his smile, his grumpiness and, when millions of things
had utterly vanished—how strange it was!—a few sayings like this
about cabbages.
She stiffened a little on the kerb, waiting for Durtnall’s van to pass. A
charming woman, Scrope Purvis thought her (knowing her as one
does know people who live next door to one in Westminster); a touch
of the bird about her, of the jay, blue-green, light, vivacious, though
she was over fifty, and grown very white since her illness. There she
perched, never seeing him, waiting to cross, very upright.
For having lived in Westminster—how many years now? over twenty,
—one feels even in the midst of the traffic, or waking at night,
Clarissa was positive, a particular hush, or solemnity; an
indescribable pause; a suspense (but that might be her heart,
affected, they said, by influenza) before Big Ben strikes. There! Out it
boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The
leaden circles dissolved in the air. Such fools we are, she thought,
crossing Victoria Street. For Heaven only knows why one loves it so,
how one sees it so, making it up, building it round one, tumbling it,
creating it every moment afresh; but the veriest frumps, the most
dejected of miseries sitting on doorsteps (drink their downfall) do the
same; can’t be dealt with, she felt positive, by Acts of Parliament for
that very reason: they love life. In people’s eyes, in the swing, tramp,
and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars,
omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass
bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange
high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life;
London; this moment of June.
For it was the middle of June. The War was over, except for some
one like Mrs. Foxcroft at the Embassy last night eating her heart out
because that nice boy was killed and now the old Manor House must
go to a cousin; or Lady Bexborough who opened a bazaar, they said,
with the telegram in her hand, John, her favourite, killed; but it was
over; thank Heaven—over. It was June. The King and Queen were at
the Palace. And everywhere, though it was still so early, there was a
beating, a stirring of galloping ponies, tapping of cricket bats; Lords,
Ascot, Ranelagh and all the rest of it; wrapped in the soft mesh of
the grey-blue morning air, which, as the day wore on, would unwind
them, and set down on their lawns and pitches the bouncing ponies,
whose forefeet just struck the ground and up they sprung, the
whirling young men, and laughing girls in their transparent muslins
who, even now, after dancing all night, were taking their absurd
woolly dogs for a run; and even now, at this hour, discreet old
dowagers were shooting out in their motor cars on errands of
mystery; and the shopkeepers were fidgeting in their windows with
their paste and diamonds, their lovely old sea-green brooches in
eighteenth-century settings to tempt Americans (but one must
economise, not buy things rashly for Elizabeth), and she, too, loving
it as she did with an absurd and faithful passion, being part of it,
since her people were courtiers once in the time of the Georges,
she, too, was going that very night to kindle and illuminate; to give
her party. But how strange, on entering the Park, the silence; the
mist; the hum; the slow-swimming happy ducks; the pouched birds
waddling; and who should be coming along with his back against the
Government buildings, most appropriately, carrying a despatch box
stamped with the Royal Arms, who but Hugh Whitbread; her old
friend Hugh—the admirable Hugh!
“Good-morning to you, Clarissa!” said Hugh, rather extravagantly, for
they had known each other as children. “Where are you off to?”
“I love walking in London,” said Mrs. Dalloway. “Really it’s better than
walking in the country.”
They had just come up—unfortunately—to see doctors. Other people
came to see pictures; go to the opera; take their daughters out; the
Whitbreads came “to see doctors.” Times without number Clarissa
had visited Evelyn Whitbread in a nursing home. Was Evelyn ill
again? Evelyn was a good deal out of sorts, said Hugh, intimating by
a kind of pout or swell of his very well-covered, manly, extremely
handsome, perfectly upholstered body (he was almost too well
dressed always, but presumably had to be, with his little job at Court)
that his wife had some internal ailment, nothing serious, which, as an
old friend, Clarissa Dalloway would quite understand without
requiring him to specify. Ah yes, she did of course; what a nuisance;
and felt very sisterly and oddly conscious at the same time of her
hat. Not the right hat for the early morning, was that it? For Hugh
always made her feel, as he bustled on, raising his hat rather
extravagantly and assuring her that she might be a girl of eighteen,
and of course he was coming to her party to-night, Evelyn absolutely
insisted, only a little late he might be after the party at the Palace to
which he had to take one of Jim’s boys,—she always felt a little
skimpy beside Hugh; schoolgirlish; but attached to him, partly from
having known him always, but she did think him a good sort in his
own way, though Richard was nearly driven mad by him, and as for
Peter Walsh, he had never to this day forgiven her for liking him.
She could remember scene after scene at Bourton—Peter furious;
Hugh not, of course, his match in any way, but still not a positive
imbecile as Peter made out; not a mere barber’s block. When his old
mother wanted him to give up shooting or to take her to Bath he did
it, without a word; he was really unselfish, and as for saying, as
Peter did, that he had no heart, no brain, nothing but the manners
and breeding of an English gentleman, that was only her dear Peter
at his worst; and he could be intolerable; he could be impossible; but
adorable to walk with on a morning like this.
(June had drawn out every leaf on the trees. The mothers of Pimlico
gave suck to their young. Messages were passing from the Fleet to
the Admiralty. Arlington Street and Piccadilly seemed to chafe the
very air in the Park and lift its leaves hotly, brilliantly, on waves of that
divine vitality which Clarissa loved. To dance, to ride, she had adored
all that.)
For they might be parted for hundreds of years, she and Peter; she
never wrote a letter and his were dry sticks; but suddenly it would
come over her, If he were with me now what would he say?—some
days, some sights bringing him back to her calmly, without the old
bitterness; which perhaps was the reward of having cared for people;
they came back in the middle of St. James’s Park on a fine morning
—indeed they did. But Peter—however beautiful the day might be,
and the trees and the grass, and the little girl in pink—Peter never
saw a thing of all that. He would put on his spectacles, if she told him
to; he would look. It was the state of the world that interested him;
Wagner, Pope’s poetry, people’s characters eternally, and the
defects of her own soul. How he scolded her! How they argued! She
would marry a Prime Minister and stand at the top of a staircase; the
perfect hostess he called her (she had cried over it in her bedroom),
she had the makings of the perfect hostess, he said.
So she would still find herself arguing in St. James’s Park, still
making out that she had been right—and she had too—not to marry
him. For in marriage a little licence, a little independence there must
be between people living together day in day out in the same house;
which Richard gave her, and she him. (Where was he this morning
for instance? Some committee, she never asked what.) But with
Peter everything had to be shared; everything gone into. And it was
intolerable, and when it came to that scene in the little garden by the
fountain, she had to break with him or they would have been
destroyed, both of them ruined, she was convinced; though she had
borne about with her for years like an arrow sticking in her heart the
grief, the anguish; and then the horror of the moment when some
one told her at a concert that he had married a woman met on the
boat going to India! Never should she forget all that! Cold, heartless,
a prude, he called her. Never could she understand how he cared.
But those Indian women did presumably—silly, pretty, flimsy
nincompoops. And she wasted her pity. For he was quite happy, he
assured her—perfectly happy, though he had never done a thing that
they talked of; his whole life had been a failure. It made her angry
still.
She had reached the Park gates. She stood for a moment, looking at
the omnibuses in Piccadilly.
She would not say of any one in the world now that they were this or
were that. She felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged.
She sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was
outside, looking on. She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the
taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had
the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day. Not
that she thought herself clever, or much out of the ordinary. How she
had got through life on the few twigs of knowledge Fräulein Daniels
gave them she could not think. She knew nothing; no language, no
history; she scarcely read a book now, except memoirs in bed; and
yet to her it was absolutely absorbing; all this; the cabs passing; and
she would not say of Peter, she would not say of herself, I am this, I
am that.
Her only gift was knowing people almost by instinct, she thought,
walking on. If you put her in a room with some one, up went her back
like a cat’s; or she purred. Devonshire House, Bath House, the
house with the china cockatoo, she had seen them all lit up once;
and remembered Sylvia, Fred, Sally Seton—such hosts of people;
and dancing all night; and the waggons plodding past to market; and
driving home across the Park. She remembered once throwing a
shilling into the Serpentine. But every one remembered; what she
loved was this, here, now, in front of her; the fat lady in the cab. Did it
matter then, she asked herself, walking towards Bond Street, did it
matter that she must inevitably cease completely; all this must go on
without her; did she resent it; or did it not become consoling to
believe that death ended absolutely? but that 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; of the house there, ugly, rambling all to bits and
pieces as it was; part of people she had never met; being laid out
like a mist between the people she knew best, who lifted her on their
branches as she had seen the trees lift the mist, but it spread ever
so far, her life, herself. But what was she dreaming as she looked
into Hatchards’ shop window? What was she trying to recover? What
image of white dawn in the country, as she read in the book spread
open:

Fear no more the heat o’ the sun


Nor the furious winter’s rages.

This late age of the world’s experience had bred in them all, all men
and women, a well of tears. Tears and sorrows; courage and
endurance; a perfectly upright and stoical bearing. Think, for
example, of the woman she admired most, Lady Bexborough,
opening the bazaar.
There were Jorrocks’ Jaunts and Jollities; there were Soapy Sponge
and Mrs. Asquith’s Memoirs and Big Game Shooting in Nigeria, all
spread open. Ever so many books there were; but none that seemed
exactly right to take to Evelyn Whitbread in her nursing home.
Nothing that would serve to amuse her and make that indescribably
dried-up little woman look, as Clarissa came in, just for a moment
cordial; before they settled down for the usual interminable talk of
women’s ailments. How much she wanted it—that people should
look pleased as she came in, Clarissa thought and turned and
walked back towards Bond Street, annoyed, because it was silly to
have other reasons for doing things. Much rather would she have
been one of those people like Richard who did things for themselves,
whereas, she thought, waiting to cross, half the time she did things
not simply, not for themselves; but to make people think this or that;
perfect idiocy she knew (and now the policeman held up his hand)
for no one was ever for a second taken in. Oh if she could have had
her life over again! she thought, stepping on to the pavement, could
have looked even differently!
She would have been, in the first place, dark like Lady Bexborough,
with a skin of crumpled leather and beautiful eyes. She would have
been, like Lady Bexborough, slow and stately; rather large;
interested in politics like a man; with a country house; very dignified,
very sincere. Instead of which she had a narrow pea-stick figure; a
ridiculous little face, beaked like a bird’s. That she held herself well
was true; and had nice hands and feet; and dressed well,
considering that she spent little. But often now this body she wore
(she stopped to look at a Dutch picture), this body, with all its
capacities, seemed nothing—nothing at all. She had the oddest
sense of being herself invisible; unseen; unknown; there being no
more marrying, no more having of children now, but only this
astonishing and rather solemn progress with the rest of them, up
Bond Street, this being Mrs. Dalloway; not even Clarissa any more;
this being Mrs. Richard Dalloway.
Bond Street fascinated her; Bond Street early in the morning in the
season; its flags flying; its shops; no splash; no glitter; one roll of
tweed in the shop where her father had bought his suits for fifty
years; a few pearls; salmon on an iceblock.
“That is all,” she said, looking at the fishmonger’s. “That is all,” she
repeated, pausing for a moment at the window of a glove shop
where, before the War, you could buy almost perfect gloves. And her
old Uncle William used to say a lady is known by her shoes and her
gloves. He had turned on his bed one morning in the middle of the
War. He had said, “I have had enough.” Gloves and shoes; she had
a passion for gloves; but her own daughter, her Elizabeth, cared not
a straw for either of them.
Not a straw, she thought, going on up Bond Street to a shop where
they kept flowers for her when she gave a party. Elizabeth really
cared for her dog most of all. The whole house this morning smelt of
tar. Still, better poor Grizzle than Miss Kilman; better distemper and
tar and all the rest of it than sitting mewed in a stuffy bedroom with a
prayer book! Better anything, she was inclined to say. But it might be
only a phase, as Richard said, such as all girls go through. It might
be falling in love. But why with Miss Kilman? who had been badly
treated of course; one must make allowances for that, and Richard
said she was very able, had a really historical mind. Anyhow they
were inseparable, and Elizabeth, her own daughter, went to
Communion; and how she dressed, how she treated people who
came to lunch she did not care a bit, it being her experience that the
religious ecstasy made people callous (so did causes); dulled their
feelings, for Miss Kilman would do anything for the Russians, starved
herself for the Austrians, but in private inflicted positive torture, so
insensitive was she, dressed in a green mackintosh coat. Year in
year out she wore that coat; she perspired; she was never in the
room five minutes without making you feel her superiority, your
inferiority; how poor she was; how rich you were; how she lived in a
slum without a cushion or a bed or a rug or whatever it might be, all
her soul rusted with that grievance sticking in it, her dismissal from
school during the War—poor embittered unfortunate creature! For it
was not her one hated but the idea of her, which undoubtedly had
gathered in to itself a great deal that was not Miss Kilman; had
become one of those spectres with which one battles in the night;
one of those spectres who stand astride us and suck up half our life-
blood, dominators and tyrants; for no doubt with another throw of the
dice, had the black been uppermost and not the white, she would
have loved Miss Kilman! But not in this world. No.
It rasped her, though, to have stirring about in her this brutal
monster! to hear twigs cracking and feel hooves planted down in the
depths of that leaf-encumbered forest, the soul; never to be content
quite, or quite secure, for at any moment the brute would be stirring,
this hatred, which, especially since her illness, had power to make
her feel scraped, hurt in her spine; gave her physical pain, and made
all pleasure in beauty, in friendship, in being well, in being loved and
making her home delightful rock, quiver, and bend as if indeed there
were a monster grubbing at the roots, as if the whole panoply of
content were nothing but self love! this hatred!
Nonsense, nonsense! she cried to herself, pushing through the
swing doors of Mulberry’s the florists.
She advanced, light, tall, very upright, to be greeted at once by
button-faced Miss Pym, whose hands were always bright red, as if
they had been stood in cold water with the flowers.
There were flowers: delphiniums, sweet peas, bunches of lilac; and
carnations, masses of carnations. There were roses; there were
irises. Ah yes—so she breathed in the earthy garden sweet smell as
she stood talking to Miss Pym who owed her help, and thought her
kind, for kind she had been years ago; very kind, but she looked
older, this year, turning her head from side to side among the irises
and roses and nodding tufts of lilac with her eyes half closed,
snuffing in, after the street uproar, the delicious scent, the exquisite
coolness. And then, opening her eyes, how fresh like frilled linen
clean from a laundry laid in wicker trays the roses looked; and dark
and prim the red carnations, holding their heads up; and all the
sweet peas spreading in their bowls, tinged violet, snow white, pale
—as if it were the evening and girls in muslin frocks came out to pick
sweet peas and roses after the superb summer’s day, with its almost
blue-black sky, its delphiniums, its carnations, its arum lilies was
over; and it was the moment between six and seven when every
flower—roses, carnations, irises, lilac—glows; white, violet, red,
deep orange; every flower seems to burn by itself, softly, purely in
the misty beds; and how she loved the grey-white moths spinning in
and out, over the cherry pie, over the evening primroses!
And as she began to go with Miss Pym from jar to jar, choosing,
nonsense, nonsense, she said to herself, more and more gently, as if
this beauty, this scent, this colour, and Miss Pym liking her, trusting
her, were a wave which she let flow over her and surmount that
hatred, that monster, surmount it all; and it lifted her up and up when
—oh! a pistol shot in the street outside!
“Dear, those motor cars,” said Miss Pym, going to the window to
look, and coming back and smiling apologetically with her hands full
of sweet peas, as if those motor cars, those tyres of motor cars,
were all her fault.
The violent explosion which made Mrs. Dalloway jump and Miss
Pym go to the window and apologise came from a motor car which
had drawn to the side of the pavement precisely opposite Mulberry’s
shop window. Passers-by who, of course, stopped and stared, had
just time to see a face of the very greatest importance against the
dove-grey upholstery, before a male hand drew the blind and there
was nothing to be seen except a square of dove grey.
Yet rumours were at once in circulation from the middle of Bond
Street to Oxford Street on one side, to Atkinson’s scent shop on the
other, passing invisibly, inaudibly, like a cloud, swift, veil-like upon
hills, falling indeed with something of a cloud’s sudden sobriety and
stillness upon faces which a second before had been utterly
disorderly. But now mystery had brushed them with her wing; they
had heard the voice of authority; the spirit of religion was abroad with
her eyes bandaged tight and her lips gaping wide. But nobody knew
whose face had been seen. Was it the Prince of Wales’s, the
Queen’s, the Prime Minister’s? Whose face was it? Nobody knew.
Edgar J. Watkiss, with his roll of lead piping round his arm, said
audibly, humorously of course: “The Proime Minister’s kyar.”
Septimus Warren Smith, who found himself unable to pass, heard
him.
Septimus Warren Smith, aged about thirty, pale-faced, beak-nosed,
wearing brown shoes and a shabby overcoat, with hazel eyes which
had that look of apprehension in them which makes complete
strangers apprehensive too. The world has raised its whip; where will
it descend?
Everything had come to a standstill. The throb of the motor engines
sounded like a pulse irregularly drumming through an entire body.
The sun became extraordinarily hot because the motor car had
stopped outside Mulberry’s shop window; old ladies on the tops of
omnibuses spread their black parasols; here a green, here a red
parasol opened with a little pop. Mrs. Dalloway, coming to the
window with her arms full of sweet peas, looked out with her little
pink face pursed in enquiry. Every one looked at the motor car.
Septimus looked. Boys on bicycles sprang off. Traffic accumulated.
And there the motor car stood, with drawn blinds, and upon them a
curious pattern like a tree, Septimus thought, and this gradual
drawing together of everything to one centre before his eyes, as if
some horror had come almost to the surface and was about to burst
into flames, terrified him. The world wavered and quivered and
threatened to burst into flames. It is I who am blocking the way, he
thought. Was he not being looked at and pointed at; was he not
weighted there, rooted to the pavement, for a purpose? But for what
purpose?
“Let us go on, Septimus,” said his wife, a little woman, with large
eyes in a sallow pointed face; an Italian girl.
But Lucrezia herself could not help looking at the motor car and the
tree pattern on the blinds. Was it the Queen in there—the Queen
going shopping?
The chauffeur, who had been opening something, turning something,
shutting something, got on to the box.
“Come on,” said Lucrezia.
But her husband, for they had been married four, five years now,
jumped, started, and said, “All right!” angrily, as if she had interrupted
him.
People must notice; people must see. People, she thought, looking
at the crowd staring at the motor car; the English people, with their
children and their horses and their clothes, which she admired in a
way; but they were “people” now, because Septimus had said, “I will
kill myself”; an awful thing to say. Suppose they had heard him? She
looked at the crowd. Help, help! she wanted to cry out to butchers’
boys and women. Help! Only last autumn she and Septimus had
stood on the Embankment wrapped in the same cloak and, Septimus
reading a paper instead of talking, she had snatched it from him and
laughed in the old man’s face who saw them! But failure one
conceals. She must take him away into some park.
“Now we will cross,” she said.
She had a right to his arm, though it was without feeling. He would
give her, who was so simple, so impulsive, only twenty-four, without
friends in England, who had left Italy for his sake, a piece of bone.
The motor car with its blinds drawn and an air of inscrutable reserve
proceeded towards Piccadilly, still gazed at, still ruffling the faces on
both sides of the street with the same dark breath of veneration
whether for Queen, Prince, or Prime Minister nobody knew. The face
itself had been seen only once by three people for a few seconds.
Even the sex was now in dispute. But there could be no doubt that
greatness was seated within; greatness was passing, hidden, down
Bond Street, removed only by a hand’s-breadth from ordinary people
who might now, for the first and last time, be within speaking
distance of the majesty of England, of the enduring symbol of the
state which will be known to curious antiquaries, sifting the ruins of
time, when London is a grass-grown path and all those hurrying
along the pavement this Wednesday morning are but bones with a
few wedding rings mixed up in their dust and the gold stoppings of
innumerable decayed teeth. The face in the motor car will then be
known.
It is probably the Queen, thought Mrs. Dalloway, coming out of
Mulberry’s with her flowers; the Queen. And for a second she wore a
look of extreme dignity standing by the flower shop in the sunlight
while the car passed at a foot’s pace, with its blinds drawn. The
Queen going to some hospital; the Queen opening some bazaar,
thought Clarissa.
The crush was terrific for the time of day. Lords, Ascot, Hurlingham,
what was it? she wondered, for the street was blocked. The British
middle classes sitting sideways on the tops of omnibuses with
parcels and umbrellas, yes, even furs on a day like this, were, she
thought, more ridiculous, more unlike anything there has ever been
than one could conceive; and the Queen herself held up; the Queen
herself unable to pass. Clarissa was suspended on one side of
Brook Street; Sir John Buckhurst, the old Judge on the other, with
the car between them (Sir John had laid down the law for years and
liked a well-dressed woman) when the chauffeur, leaning ever so
slightly, said or showed something to the policeman, who saluted
and raised his arm and jerked his head and moved the omnibus to
the side and the car passed through. Slowly and very silently it took
its way.
Clarissa guessed; Clarissa knew of course; she had seen something
white, magical, circular, in the footman’s hand, a disc inscribed with a
name,—the Queen’s, the Prince of Wales’s, the Prime Minister’s?—
which, by force of its own lustre, burnt its way through (Clarissa saw
the car diminishing, disappearing), to blaze among candelabras,
glittering stars, breasts stiff with oak leaves, Hugh Whitbread and all
his colleagues, the gentlemen of England, that night in Buckingham
Palace. And Clarissa, too, gave a party. She stiffened a little; so she
would stand at the top of her stairs.
The car had gone, but it had left a slight ripple which flowed through
glove shops and hat shops and tailors’ shops on both sides of Bond
Street. For thirty seconds all heads were inclined the same way—to
the window. Choosing a pair of gloves—should they be to the elbow
or above it, lemon or pale grey?—ladies stopped; when the sentence
was finished something had happened. Something so trifling in
single instances that no mathematical instrument, though capable of
transmitting shocks in China, could register the vibration; yet in its
fulness rather formidable and in its common appeal emotional; for in
all the hat shops and tailors’ shops strangers looked at each other
and thought of the dead; of the flag; of Empire. In a public house in a
back street a Colonial insulted the House of Windsor which led to
words, broken beer glasses, and a general shindy, which echoed
strangely across the way in the ears of girls buying white underlinen
threaded with pure white ribbon for their weddings. For the surface
agitation of the passing car as it sunk grazed something very
profound.
Gliding across Piccadilly, the car turned down St. James’s Street. Tall
men, men of robust physique, well-dressed men with their tail-coats
and their white slips and their hair raked back who, for reasons
difficult to discriminate, were standing in the bow window of Brooks’s
with their hands behind the tails of their coats, looking out, perceived
instinctively that greatness was passing, and the pale light of the
immortal presence fell upon them as it had fallen upon Clarissa
Dalloway. At once they stood even straighter, and removed their

You might also like