Reflections upon Waves (10/24/12 & 10/31/12)

When the mirror is 'real', as is constantly the case in the realm of objects, the space in the mirror is imaginary — and (cf. Lewis Carroll) the locus of the imagination is the 'Ego'. In a living body, on the other hand, where the mirror of reflection is imaginary, the effect is real. Henri Lefebvre, Politics of Space, 182

At the opening of her article “Rhoda Submerged: Lesbian Suicide in The Waves ,“ Annette Oxindine states that Bernard is Rhoda’s “male counterpart” (203). Oxindine’s article is not centered on this relationship, and she makes this claim as though it is established and cannot be argued, but I think that much of what identifies Rhoda is seen in Louis as well. So I really think a case can be made that Louis is really Rhoda’s male counterpart.

Besides the obvious connection between the two – the short lived affair – there are other connections as well. One connection is that both characters feel like outsiders, or like they don’t fit in. To compensate for this feeling, each character consciously imitates or copies the other four characters. As we see with Rhoda, while she is observing Jinny and Susan at school, she thinks to herself

See now with what extraordinary certainty Jinny pulls on her stockings, simply to play tennis. That I admire. But I like Susan’s way better, for she is more resolute, and less ambitious of distinction than Jinny. Both despise me for copying what they do; but Susan sometimes teaches me, for instance, how to tie a bow, while Jinny has her own knowledge but keeps it to herself. (Woolf 29-30)

Woolf takes this opportunity to show the reader that Rhoda feels out of place, and thinks that only by copying the others will she appear “normal.” The others are aware of this, and (at least in Rhoda’s mind) “despise [her] for copying,” but Susan does sometimes make the effort to teach Rhoda how to be “normal.”

Louis feels that he doesn’t belong because he is from Australia and a lower class background. He says,

“I will not conjugate the verb,” said Louis, “until Bernard has said it. My father is a banker in Brisbane and I speak with an Australian accent. I will wait and copy Bernard. He is English. They are all English ... Now they suck their pens. Now they twist their copy-books, and, looking sideways at Miss Hudson, count the purple buttons on her bodice. Bernard has a chip in his hair. Susan has a red look in her eyes. Both are flushed. But I am pale; I am neat, and my knickerbockers are drawn together by a belt with a brass snake. I know the lesson by heart. I know more than they will ever know. I knew my cases and my genders; I could know everything in the world if I wished. But I do not wish to come to the top and say my lesson. My roots are threaded, like fibres in a flower-pot, round and round about the world. I do not wish to come to the top and live in the light of this great clock, yellow-faced, which ticks and ticks. Jinny and Susan, Bernard and Neville bind themselves into a thong with which to lash me. They laugh at my neatness, at my Australian accent. I will now try to imitate Bernard softly lisping Latin.”(Woolf 12)

Even though Louis knows the lesson (“could know everything in the world”), he is not willing to recite it to the other children until he hears someone else first, so that he may copy the “proper” pronunciation. He does not need to be taught like Rhoda does, but he does need the opportunity to copy/imitate the others. Even Neville associates the two when he says, “then Rhoda, or it may be Louis, some fasting and anguished spirit, passes through and out again” (Woolf 144).

Whether or not the question of who is Rhoda’s male counterpoint is important to the reading, another (arguable) connection between the two is Woolf’s use of leitmotifs. Louis is associated with poetry, and Rhoda with water. This connection may not be obvious, but with the inclusion of Shelley and Byron’s poetry, there can be a connection made between water (a part of nature) and the Romantic poets, who wrote prolifically about nature. There is also the symbolism of waves that can connect with poetry; the way they flow, crest, and fall is often compared with the rhythm of a poem.

That water is a leitmotif for Rhoda seems to be an accepted idea. Oxindine compares water with Rhoda’s sexuality, her examples can be generalized. Oxindine states that Rhoda is imagined as “‘the nymph of the fountain always wet’” (212), and her sexual gratification is imagined as “pulsating water” (213). Along with these examples, characters from the text associate Rhoda with water: Neville remembers Rhoda as "she rocked her petals in a brown basin” and says “Love is not a whirlpool to her” (Woolf 100). Woolf instead associates Rhoda with “dark pools,” and “Pools … on the other side of the world reflecting marble columns” (Woolf 75). It is even assumed that Rhoda commits suicide by throwing herself off a cliff, presumably the same on she looked from in Spain (Woolf 150-1). It is from this cliff that she sees the fleet, so if she has thrown herself off, the implication is that she would have landed in water. With all of the instances of Rhoda and water in the novel, the reader must figure that there is no other way for her to die.

The copying of others and reflections of pools lend themselves to the idea of a mirror. During the third interlude, Woolf subtly connects mirrors and water when she writes, the “looking-glass whitened its pool upon the wall” (Woolf 53). The reflection of the mirror is likened to a pool of water. Strangely, since Rhoda is associated with water, she does not like to see herself in the mirror. Oxindine claims that “as a young girl, Rhoda is unable to confirm her own existence in a looking glass” (205), and uses the quote “‘that is my face,’ said Rhoda, ‘in the looking-glass behind Susan’s shoulder — that face is my face. But I will duck behind her to hide it, for I am not here. I have no face. Other people have faces; Susan and Jinny have faces; they are here. Their world is the real world’" (Woolf 29). Rhoda will not face herself in the mirror, but she also doesn’t face herself in water’s reflection. Instead, water imagined as reflecting marble pillars. But while she does not see herself reflected, others do. Neville thinks, “Let Rhoda speak, whose face I see reflected mistily in the looking-glass opposite” (Woolf 100). She is “reflected mistily,” but she is reflected.

Looking back to the opening quote of this blog, we can apply Lefebvre’s words to Rhoda’s actions. When the mirror is “real,” her reflection is or seems imaginary. (She is either hiding behind the others to obliterate her reflection, or is reflected as a ghost-like being.) When “in a living body … where the mirror of reflection is imaginary, the effect is real” (Lefebvre 182), Rhoda creates herself by mirroring the other girls. Both she and the girls become mirrors, Susan and Jinny provide a reflection for Rhoda to contemplate, and Rhoda reflects back to them what she observes. Again, as Lefebvre writes:

One truly gets the impression that every shape in space, every spatial plane, constitutes a mirror and produces a mirage effect; that within each body the rest of the world is reflected, and referred back to, in an ever-renewed to-and-fro of reciprocal reflection, an interplay of shifting colours, lights and forms.  (Lefebvre 183)

The girls become an “ever-renewed to-and-fro of reciprocal reflection,” a two-way interaction, for each other.

Throughout the novel, Rhoda attempts to escape the real world by creating an imaginary one. Lefebvre’s examination of the mirror in relation to the body captures Rhoda’s attempts. He says,

If my body may be said to enshrine a generative principle, at once abstract and concrete, the mirror's surface makes this principle invisible, deciphers it. The mirror discloses the relationship between me and myself, my body and the consciousness of my body - not because the reflection constitutes my unity qua subject … but because it transforms what I am into the sign of what I am. (Lefebvre 185)

Rhoda prefers to live in the imaginary, so she is not interested in the possibility of a “unity qua subject.” And this explains her reluctance to see herself in a mirror. She does not want subjectivity, and Lefebvre says that “every form belongs to the subject. It is the apprehension of the surface by the mirror” (181). By seeing her reflection in a mirror, she would take form, become subject, and acquire a surface. The others, such as Neville, view Rhoda’s reflection in a mirror, and see only the sign of what she is. The others cannot reach the “real” Rhoda because they only see her second-handedly. 

Works Cited

Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford UK: Blackwell, 1995.

Oxindine, Annette. “Rhoda Submerged: Lesbian Suicide in The Waves .“ Virginia Woolf: Lesbian Readings. Ed. Eileen Barrett and Partricia Cramer. NY: NYUP, 1997.

Woolf, Virginia. The Waves. Molly Hite, annot. and intro. 1941: NY: Harcourt, 2008.

Windows Framed (9/26/12)

In his book Cinema 1: The Movement Image, Gilles Deleuze intermingles film studies with philosophy to study the idea of movement in a film. In the section titled “Frame and Shot,” he introduces the idea of framing. He states,

We will call the determination of a closed system, a relatively closed system which includes everything which is present in the image - sets, characters and props - framing. The frame therefore forms a set which has a great number of parts, that is of elements, which themselves form sub-sets. It can be broken down. (Deleuze 12)

The frame as a whole contains all that can be seen within, and what can be seen can be broken into sub-sets to explain the composition.

Not only can these items be sub-grouped, but a frame may contain another or many other frames. Of these “frames in frames,” Deleuze says,

As a general rule, the powers of Nature are not framed in the same way as people or things, and individuals are not framed in the same way as crowds, and sub-elements are not framed in the same way as terms, so that there are many different frames in the frame. Doors, windows, box office windows, skylights, car windows, mirrors, are all frames in frames. (14)

Frames may be infinitely framed. One only needs to think of looking in a mirror that is reflecting a mirror to see this concept.

But with the frame, the viewer is not only allowed to see what can be seen, but is prohibited from seeing what is outside the frame (at least the greatest frame).

In Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, the window frame is used in several different ways. The first section of To the Lighthouse is titled “The Window,” and this section provides a frame for the novel, and the over thirty references to a window or a pane within this section provide a frame for perspective.

In some cases, the window serves as a frame to what is contained, what resides inside with the viewer, such as when James sees “his father, stopping in front of the drawing-room window, [and saying] “it won’t be fine” (Woolf 8); when “Charles Tansley, clapping his hands together as he stood at the window with [Mrs. Ramsay’s] husband” (Woolf 11); or as Mr. Ramsay “at the window … bent quizzically and whimsically to tickle James’s bare calf with a sprig of something” (Woolf 35). The physical beings are on the same side of the window as the viewer, so that an illusion is created by the window frame of contained image, much like a portrait. Unfortunately for James, this containment with his father results in extreme negative feelings toward Mr. Ramsay.

In other cases, the window serves as a boundary, or a partition between two people. Woolf even illustrates this boundary when she uses parentheticals to mention the windows, as in these three passages: “(as she sat in the window which opened on the terrace)” (Woolf19); “(she glanced at the window with its ripple of reflected lights)” (Woolf 107); “(she was looking at the window)” (Woolf 112). By setting the mentions of the window within parentheses, Woolf creates the same boundary that the windows create.

But even this boundary can be transcended with the eyes; the physical body cannot move through the (closed) window, but the eye can see beyond to the other side of the window, at least what the frame of the window allows it see. Several times throughout the novel, Mrs. Ramsay and James are viewed through the window, generally by Mr. Ramsay and Lily. Mr. Ramsay spies the two as he walks along the terrace:

He stopped to light his pipe, looked once at his wife and son in the window, and as one raises one’s eyes from a page in an express train and sees a farm, a tree, a cluster of cottages as an illustration, a confirmation of something on the printed page to which one returns, fortified, and satisfied, so without his distinguishing either his son or his wife, the sight of them fortified him and satisfied him and consecrated his effort to arrive at a perfectly clear understanding of the problem which now engaged the energies of his splendid mind. (Woolf  36)

And later, as he was “stopping for one moment by the stone urn which held the geraniums, he saw, but now far, far away, … his wife and son, together, in the window” (Woolf 37) and imagining himself the hero who “puts his armor off and halts by the window and gazes at his wife and son” (Woolf 39). In these instances, Mr. Ramsay not only sees Mrs. Ramsay and James within the frame, he is also separated from them, relegated to the outside.

Lily views the two while she is painting: “Even while she looked at the mass, at the line, at the colour, at Mrs. Ramsay sitting in the window with James, she kept a feeler on her surroundings lest some one should creep up, and suddenly she should find her picture looked at” (Woolf 21); and “she saw … Mrs. Ramsay sitting with James in the window and the cloud moving and the tree bending” (Woolf 50). After seeing the two in the window, Lily decides that this is the view she should paint. This makes Lily’s painting a frame of a frame: the boundaries of the canvas form one frame, the edges of the painted window form another.

But interestingly, Mrs. Ramsay seems to focus on the importance of leaving windows open, doing away with the boundary of the window pane, and creating a space that can be traversed. When giving instruction to guests, she says “they must keep the windows open and the doors shut” (Woolf 17). And when she is contemplating the house, she takes inventory of open doors and windows: “the hall door was open; it sounded as if the bedroom doors were open; and certainly the window on the landing was open, for that she had opened herself. That windows should be open, and doors shut — simple as it was, could none of them remember it?” (Woolf 31) Mrs. Ramsay’s makes an impression on Lily as she “opened bedroom windows. She shut doors” (Woolf 52). By maintaining open windows (and closed doors), Mrs. Ramsay allows the inside and outside to mix, at least ethereally, erasing the boundary of a closed window pane.

Works Cited

Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam.  London: Athlone Press, 1986.

Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. Mark Hussey, annot. and intro. 1927: NY: Harcourt, 2005.

Room for All (10/3/12)

While A Room of One’s Own is generally viewed as a strong feminist writing, after reading the famous Woolf text, I was left with some questions: What kind of feminism does the text support? Does the text argue for equality, or does it advocate a “separate but equal” attitude? Can women only be equal to men if they step into masculine shoes?

Woolf may not be arguing for a Hegelian synthesis (mascinine/femuline?), or a deconstruction of the masculine/feminine dichotomy, but does having a “room of one’s own” do anything to promote equality? Some quotes from A Room of One’s Own do show an attempt to equalize men and women, for instance, Woolf tells the reader that men have difficulties similar to women when she says, “[t]hey too, the patriarchs, the professors, had endless difficulties, terrible drawbacks to contend with. Their education had been in some ways as faulty as my own. It had bred in them defects as great” (Woolf 38). And she muses toward the end of the essay about a synthesis of the sexes in the following passage:

The obvious reason would be that it is natural for the sexes to co-operate. One has a profound, if irrational, instinct in favour of the theory that the union of man and woman makes for the greatest satisfaction, the most complete happiness. But the sight of the two people getting into the taxi and the satisfaction it gave me made me also ask whether there are two sexes in the mind corresponding to the two sexes in the body, and whether they also require to be united in order to get complete satisfaction and happiness? And I went on amateurishly to sketch a plan of the soul so that in each of us two powers preside, one male, one female; and in the man’s brain the man predominates over the woman, and in the woman’s brain the woman predominates over the man. The normal and comfortable state of being is that when the two live in harmony together, spiritually co-operating. If one is a man, still the woman part of his brain must have effect; and a woman also must have intercourse with the man in her. Coleridge perhaps meant this when he said that a great mind is androgynous. It is when this fusion takes place that the mind is fully fertilized and uses all its faculties. Perhaps a mind that is purely masculine cannot create, any more than a mind that is purely feminine, I thought. But it would he well to test what one meant by manwomanly, and conversely by woman-manly, by pausing and looking at a book or two. (Woolf 96-7)

But rather than disperse with the hierarchy, and create an equality of the sexes, she instead leans toward a unity (which does not preclude that one is inferior to the other, only that the two come together) which leads to androgyny.

But Woolf does remind us of the existing hierarchy when she states, “ here again we come within range of that very interesting and obscure masculine complex which has had so much influence upon the woman’s movement; that deep-seated desire, not so much that she shall be inferior as that he shall be superior, which plants him wherever one looks” (Woolf 54). At this point, Woolf changes the perspective of the dichotomy – she isn’t inferior, but he is superior – which only leads to more activity on the part of the male.

The room is an isolated space, much like the patriarchal buildings, isolated from others, the Other, and the other sex. Whether or not the room belongs to a man or a woman, it is still designed to be isolating, keeping an other out. For equality, all rooms should be shareable, accessible, open to all. (Yes, I understand the need for a quiet space to write, and am not suggesting that anyone try to write in a crowded room.) But the connection of feminine with the room does not suggest that men and women are equal, only that by having a room of her own, a woman is now hierarchically above a man as she possesses a space that keeps him out. This overturns the masculine/feminine dichotomy, but we’re still left with a dichotomy.

Also, by having a room of her own, isn’t a woman just taking on masculine traits? As Tracy Seeley says in her article “Flights of Fancy: Spatial Digression and Storytelling in A Room of One's Own,” when explain an article by Julie Solomon, “A Room advocates gaining power as patriarchy defines it: through acquiring property and capital" (34). A woman is not becoming equal to a man, she is becoming like a man. This does not erase the dichotomy, but only moves certain individual from one position to another. Which leaves us still without equality.

Seeley, Tracy. “Flights of Fancy: Spatial Digression and Storytelling in A Room of One's Own.”  Locating Woolf: The Politics of Space and Place. Ed. Anna Snaitu and Michael Whitworth. NY& London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. Susan Gubar, annot. and intro. 1929: NY: NY: Harcourt, 2005.

Between the Borders of the Acts

In “‘Dispersed Are We’:Mirroring and National Identity in Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts,” Galia Benzimen examines the role of mirroring and national identity in pre-war England. She uses Lacan’s and Winnicott’s mirror stages to explain how Miss La Trobe has become the mother, using the mirrors in the pageant to help the audience form their identity as a united self. She claims,

“my claim is that although [Woolf] indeed deconstructs collectivity in Between the Acts and represents it as dispersed, fragmentary, illusory and potentially totalitarian, her consistent figurative portrayal of the community and the nation as an individual self foregrounds a contrasted yearning to see the dispersed fragments as belonging to a unified whole, which may save the national self from extinction at a moment when the apocalypse of German invasion still might seem an imminent event” (Benziman 55).

But Woolf seems to use mirrors throughout the text to show fracturing and fragmenting.

An important distinction between characters and their use of mirrors is the mention of “eyes.” Within the text, Woolf mentions “eyes” fifty-one times; ironically, she replaces “eyes” in a well-known saying with “books” when Isa remembers and quotes, “Books are the mirrors of the soul” (Woolf 12, 14). But this replacement does tie together mirrors, eyes, and literature as important themes in the text.

                While Woolf mentions mirrors sixteen times in the work, there are only two times that she seems to use the mirror to reflect a whole, or a soul. The first is when Isa is looking into the mirror and thinking of the gentleman farmer:

Inside the glass, in her eyes, she saw what she had felt overnight for the ravaged, the silent, the romantic gentleman farmer. “In love,” was in her eyes. But outside, on the washstand, on the dressing-table, among the silver boxes and tooth-brushes, was the other love; love for her husband, the stockbroker —“The father of my children,” she added, slipping into the cliché conveniently provided by fiction. Inner love was in the eyes; outer love on the dressing-table. But what feeling was it that stirred in her now when above the looking-glass, out of doors, she saw coming across the lawn the perambulator; two nurses; and her little boy George, lagging behind?” (Woolf 10)

Woolf uses the mirror in this case much like Foucault discusses, creating a utopia (a place that is not a place) inside the mirror, where Isa is “in love” and felt “inner love.” This love is much like the place inside the mirror, a love that is not love. But we see the duality, the whole, of Isa by being exposed to both her inner and her outer love.

The second mention of eye in a mirror comes when Mrs. Swithen is showing William around the house.

Standing by the cupboard in the corner he saw her reflected in the glass. Cut off from their bodies, their eyes smiled, their bodiless eyes, at their eyes in the glass” (Woolf 49).

This comes at a time when William feels that he is seeing Mrs. Swithen as a whole person, past and present. Again, the eyes paired with the mirror shows the reader a unity.

On the other hand, the rest of the uses of mirror in the text only show a fragment of a person. Mrs. Manresa is used four times to impart the importance of fracturing and fragmenting. When she is waiting for the pageant to start, “Mrs. Manresa had out her mirror and attended to her face” (Woolf 121). Then during the pageant, “Mrs. Manresa had out her mirror and lipstick and attended to her lips and nose” (Woolf 92). Neither of these occurrences mentions the eyes, and in fact only mentions the face, lips, and nose. The third mention comes during the “Ourselves” act of the pageant, when members of the audience “evaded or shaded themselves — save Mrs. Manresa who, facing herself in the glass, used it as a glass; had out her mirror; powdered her nose; and moved one curl, disturbed by the breeze, to its place” (Woolf 126). Not only is she participating in the reflection of the audience by the actors, she contributes her own mirror for reflection, a mirror that has only shown the reader fragments of Mrs. Manresa. And finally, after the play, When Giles is saying goodbye to Mrs. Manresa, he notices that, “But alas, sunset light was unsympathetic to her make-up; plated it looked, not deeply interfused” (Woolf 136). For all of her primping and preening, she is still fragmented, not interfused, not a whole.

               

As for the last act of the play, the actors use “[a]nything that’s bright enough to reflect, presumably, ourselves” (Woolf 125). Although “ourselves” would imply a unity of sorts – a group of individuals acting as a whole – the rest of the passage refers to only fragments of each individual: “Here a nose . . . There a skirt . . . Then trousers only . . . Now perhaps a face. . . . Ourselves? But that’s cruel. To snap us as we are, before we’ve had time to assume . . . And only, too, in parts. . . . That’s what’s so distorting and upsetting and utterly unfair” (Woolf 125); “And the audience saw themselves, not whole by any means, but at any rate sitting still” (Woolf 126). Woolf refers the audience  throughout the text as “scraps and fragments,” or “orts, scraps and fragments” (Woolf 84, 127, 128 (twice), 131, 146) and there is no change in this by the end of the novel. Only three pages from the end, Isa remembers only the “orts, scraps and fragments” (Woolf 146) message from the play.

Works Cited

Benziman, Galia. “‘Dispersed Are We’:Mirroring and National Identity in Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts.” Journal of Narrative Theory 36.1 (2006) 53-71.

Woolf, Virginia. Between the Acts. Melba Cuddy-Keane, annot. And intro. 1941: NY: Harcourt, 2008.

Cradle of Home (9/19/12)

Perhaps it is because I have been sick for the majority of this semester that Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space has resonated with me. Although Bachelard is talking about childhood homes when he says “for our house is our corner of the world... as has often been said, it is our first universe, a real cosmos in every sense of the word" (4), being surrounded by any space that feels like home is comforting.  Or, as Bachelard says later in the essay, "the house is a large cradle" (7). While I am not living in the house that I grew up in, my house is still a comforting cradle, especially when I’m not feeling well. I grew up in the North and now my house is in the South – two very different climates. But the “four walls” of both houses serve(d) as a protection from the outside world. It is not the plaster and brick walls that make us feel protected; instead “we shall see the imagination build ‘walls’ of impalpable shadows, comfort itself with the illusion of protection” (Bachelard 5). Of course, the opposite may happen as well, and the walls may become a prison of sorts. But for this blog, I want to focus on the comfort of home. Because even Bachelard would say “the chief benefit of the house: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace” (6).

This is not a simple relationship between house and housed. “The house of memories becomes psychologically complex. Associated with the nooks and corners of solitude are the bedroom and the living room in which the leading characters held sway” (Bachelard 14). While the kitchen and the dining room could elicit memories of gatherings, energy, celebrations, or special occasions, the more private rooms in the house such as the bedroom or the favorite spot on the couch in the living room is where we retreat for healing, recovery, and time alone. (Yes, gatherings often spread to the living room, but this room can be used for privacy as well. Especially when there’s a comfy couch, and warm blanket, and soft lighting perfect for reading, writing, or reflecting. Also, specific places with the house can elicit different daydreams and different feelings; some happy and protective, others might be frightening and suffocating.  While “each one of [the house’s] nooks and corners [is] a resting-place for daydreaming…and often the resting-place particularize[s] the daydream (Bachelard 15), sometimes it is not a place that brings forth strong emotions, but instead an object within the house.

For instance, for Virginia Woolf in “A Sketch of the Past,” it is the mirror that prompts shame (68). Woolf reflects that a “strong feeling of guilt seemed naturally attached to it. But why was this so?” (68). Within a page, the reader is told of an incident involving a

slab outside the dining room door for standing dishes upon. Once when I was very small Gerald Duckworth lifted me onto this, and as I sat there he began to explore my body. I can remember the feel of his hand going under my clothes; going firmly and steadily lower and lower. I remember how I hoped that he would stop; how I stiffened and wriggled as his hand approached my private parts. But it did not stop. His hand explored my private parts too. I remember resenting, disliking it- what is the word for so dumb and mixed a feeling? It must have been strong, since I still recall it. (Woolf 69)

Ironically, it is not the slab outside the dining room door, or the dining room itself which makes Woolf feel ashamed or guilty; it is a looking glass that was hung in the hall with the slab. The violation of a young girl is not attached to a nook or cranny in the home, but to an object hanging on the wall. (Psychologically, we could delve into the idea of the mirror reflecting her shame or showing her a world she doesn’t expect, but this is a humble blog and I am no psychologist.)

On the other hand, Woolf does associate a space within the house that was comforting: the nursery. Her first memory is

of lying half asleep, half awake, in bed in the nursery at St Ives. It is of hearing the waves breaking, one, two, one, two, and sending a splash of water over the beach; and then break blind draw its little acorn across the floor as the wind blew the blind out. It is of lying and hearing this splash and seeing this light, and feeling, it is almost impossible that I should be here; of feeling the purest ecstasy I can conceive. (Woolf 65)

Woolf does mention objects in the room: the bed, the blind, and the light, but she doesn’t refer to these things, she refers to “being here” – the nursery – with feelings of pureness and ecstasy. It was what she “felt in the nursery at St Ives” (Woolf 65), not what she felt being surrounded by the objects that stayed with her.

Once again we can turn to Bachelard and his view of the house. He says

Of course, thanks to the house, a great many of our memories are housed, and if the house is a bit elaborate, if it has a cellar and a garret, nooks and corridors, our memories have refuges that are all the more clearly delineated… [and]even when we no longer have a garret, when the attic room is lost and gone, there remains the fact that we once loved a garret, once lived in an attic. We return to them in our night dreams. These retreats have the value of a shell. (Bachelard 8, 10)

 Works cited Bachelard, Gaston. Poetics of Space. Translater Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon P, 1964. Woolf, Virginia. “A Sketch of the Past.”  Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings. Ed Jeanne Schulkind. NY: Harcourt, 1976.  

Reflecting on (Fictionalized) Reflected Space, Part II

Shall we inspect Virginia Woolf’s life to explore elements in her writings? Tracy Seeley does just this in her article “Virginia Woolf's Poetics of Space: ‘The Lady in the Looking-Glass: A Reflection’” when she compares “The Lady in the Looking Glass” with Woolf’s memoir “A Sketch of the Past” (99). For Seeley, Isabella is a projection of Woolf, who recalls when her step-brother “Gerald Duckworth lifted me onto this [slab], and as I sat there he began to explore my body. I can remember the feel of his hand going under my clothes; going firmly and steadily lower and lower” (Woolf, “Sketch” 69). Woolf recalls this incident as a way to “help to explain” the “feeling of shame” (“Sketch” 68) she felt when she looked into a mirror.

But Woolf herself asks her readers, in “How Should One Read a Book?”:

How far, we must ask ourselves, is a book influenced by its writer’s life — how far is it safe to let the man interpret the writer? How far shall we resist or give way to the sympathies and antipathies that the man himself rouses in us — so sensitive are words, so receptive of the character of the author? These are questions that press upon us when we read lives and letters, and we must answer them for ourselves, for nothing can be more fatal than to be guided by the preferences of others in a matter so personal. (3)

Instead of “shall we inspect a writer’s life to explore elements in her writings,” Woolf asks “should we inspect elements in a writer’s writings to explore her life?” I think that by using both techniques, we can glean new meanings from a text by taking into account both the writer’s writings and the writer’s life. For instance, we know from Woolf’s memoir about her shame of looking into mirrors, and we know her claim that this could be Gerald’s “inspection of her body,” but she also says “Though I have done my best to explain why I was ashamed of looking at my own face I have only been able to discover some possible reasons; there may be others” (“Sketch” 69). And if we take into account that “Sketch” was written almost ten years after “Lady,” we cannot assume that she was aware of a connection between the two. But it can make us more aware of the use of mirrors in Woolf’s other works, as well.

Following up from last week, and the examination of Foucault’s utopias and heterotopias, we can look at other instances of reflections in Woolf’s works. We have already looked at Queen Elizabeth’s breaking of her mirror in Orlando, but bringing Seeley’s idea that looking-glasses are a projection of a specific event in Woolf’s childhood, we can take a fresh look at it. If we look at Seeley’s interpretation of Louise deSalvo, and believe her argument that “Woolf probably watched her own violation in the mirror across the hall-which explains not only Woolf's dream, but the dynamics in her short story” (99), then we can assume that Woolf saw betrayal in this mirror, much like the Queen saw in her mirror. And pulling in Foucault, we have the idea that the reflection is a utopia, Woolf’s reflection is a “not-herself,” and that by turning her gaze back upon herself and Gerald, she is reconstructing her reality. The same could be said of “Sketch”, that the text is a utopia – place without a place – and the childhood Woolf is a “the person to whom things happen” (“Sketch” 69) – a “not-herself” – then the memoir is also a reconstituting of reality. We have only Woolf’s reflection on her past to (possibly) connect Gerald’s molestation to her shame of looking in a mirror, which leads to the connection of the looking-glass in her works.

This is an easy connection to make when we see that the first line of “The Lady in the Looking Glass” reads, “People should not leave looking-glasses hanging in their rooms any more than they should leave open cheque books or letters confessing some hideous crime (Woolf 1). Woolf equates a looking-glass with an open financial record or letter of confession, which carry with them a negative connotation, much like her shame of looking into a mirror. And we can connect the reflection with Foucault’s utopia with the first sentence of the third paragraph – “But, outside, the looking-glass reflected the hall table, the sun-flowers, the garden path so accurately and so fixedly that they seemed held there in their reality unescapably (Woolf 1, emphasis added). The hall table, sun-flowers, and garden path are held within a reality that is created by the looking-glass – a place that is not a place.

But if this all seems a little obvious, we can take things one step further. In “On Being Ill,” we can possibly replace the mirror with the body. The body becomes a reflective or creative surface; it is a mirror, with the mind residing in the utopia/heterotopia within the body. The mind becomes the viewer, the body is the instrument with which one views. The following quote illustrates this idea:

All day, all night the body intervenes; blunts or sharpens, colours or discolours, turns to wax in the warmth of June, hardens to tallow in the murk of February. The creature within can only gaze through the pane-smudged or rosy; it cannot separate off from the body like the sheath of a knife or the pod of a pea for a single instant. (Woolf, “Being Ill” 4) 

The “creature” (the mind) can only “gaze through the pane – smudged or rosy” (the body, which is related to a mirror through the use of “pane”). The body has created a utopia by blunting or sharpening reality, a “not-real” reality that the mind can only access through the body, like the place that is not a place that a viewer can only access through a mirror.

Woolf claims that in literature,

 People write always of the doings of the mind; the thoughts that come to it; its noble plans; how the mind has civilised the universe. They show it ignoring the body in the philosopher's turret; or kicking the body, like an old leather football, across leagues of snow and desert in the pursuit of conquest or discovery. (5)

In this case, it is the mind controlling the body. But when one is ill, the body takes control of the mind by creating a “not real” reality. But the two cannot be separated, “[the mind] cannot separate off from the body like the sheath of a knife” (Woolf, ”Being Ill” 4). The mind and the body are connected, a duality in the form of a singularity – the “I.” Much like Laura Doyle’s interpretation of Merleau-Ponty in “The Body Unbound: A Phenomenological Reading of the Political in A Room of One’s Own,” the mind and the body are similar to “‘when one of my hands touches the other, the world of each opens upon the other because the operation is reversible at will’ and this is so ‘because thev ... are the hands of the same body" and they belong to the same world (Visible 141 )” (Doyle 130). As one hand becomes the toucher, the other becomes the touched; as the mind becomes controller, the body becomes controlled (and the body is controlled when the mind is controller). We can equate all of this with the viewer and viewed in the mirror. As the “herself” is viewer, the “not-herself” is viewed in the utopia; as the “not herself is viewer, the “herself” is reconstituted as the viewed.

Reflecting on Reflected Space

In Michel Foucault’s essay “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias,” he lays out the argument about utopias and heterotopias as space or location. I will let Foucault’s words explain these concepts with his example of the mirror:

Between these two [utopias and heterotopias], I would then set that sort of mixed experience which partakes of the qualities of both types of location, the mirror. It is, after all, a utopia, in that it is a place without a place. In it, I see myself where I am not, in an unreal space that opens up potentially beyond its surface; there I am down there where I am not, a sort of shadow that makes my appearance visible to myself, allowing me to look at myself where I do not exist: utopia of the mirror. At the same time, we are dealing with a heterotopia. The mirror really exists and has a kind of come-back effect on the place that I occupy: starting from it, in fact. I find myself absent from the place where I am, in that I see myself in there.

Starting from that gaze which to some extent is brought to bear on me, from the depths of that virtual space which is on the other side of the mirror, I turn back on myself, beginning to turn my eyes on myself and reconstitute myself where I am in reality. Hence the mirror functions as a heterotopia, since it makes the place that I occupy, whenever I look at myself in the glass, both absolutely real - it is in fact linked to all the surrounding space and absolutely unreal, for in order to be perceived it has of necessity to pass that virtual point that is situated down there. (Foucault 352).

For Foucault, the mirror is both utopia – because it is a place without a place—and heterotopia –because it forces the viewer to turn back on himself and reconstitute reality. (Perhaps we should refer to the mirror as a “you-topia” since—unlike Foucault’s claim that he sees himself where he is not—he is really seeing a “not himself,” for this reflection becomes an Other, a “you” instead of a “me.” The reflection is not “himself where he is not,” it is another self, a being without being.

 Within Orlando, Foucault’s mirror appears as Queen Elizabeth sees Orlando kissing a girl.

Meanwhile, the long winter months drew on. Every tree in the Park was lined with frost. The river ran sluggishly. One day when the snow was on the ground and the dark panelled rooms were full of shadows and the stags were barking in the Park, she saw in the mirror, which she kept for fear of spies always by her, through the door, which she kept for fear of murders always open, a boy—could it be Orlando?—kissing a girl—who in the Devil's name was the brazen hussy? Snatching at her golden-hilted sword she struck violently at the mirror. The glass crashed; people came running; she was lifted and set in her chair again; but she was stricken after that and groaned much, as her days wore to an end, of man's treachery (Woolf 20)

Does she break the mirror as a symbol of her broken heart? If we look through Foucault's lens, then we can see that the Queen is only seeing a utopia (or dystopia) through the mirror, for the reflection is a space that does not exist. The fact that she kept the mirror "for fear of spies" only adds to the utopia: she expects to use the mirror to find betrayal – its sole purpose – and she does. But instead of finding spies, she finds lies.

Perhaps the breaking of the mirror is an attempt to erase this betrayal--since she's only seen the betrayal in the mirror/utopia, the destruction of the mirror/utopia will end the betrayal. Or, perhaps, if we move on to Foucault's mirror functioning as a heterotopia, the Queen began to "turn back" on herself and "reconstitute" herself in reality. The non-Queen in the reflection has no being; likewise, Orlando’s and the girl’s reflections have no being. It is the reconstituted Queen in reality, Orlando’s kissing of the girl in reality, that causes the Queen to break the mirror.

Foucault then goes on to describe different types of heterotopia. For the purposes of Orlando, we will look at two of these, those that relate to time – “In the first place there are the heterotopias of time which accumulate ad infinitum, such as museums and libraries. These are heterotopias in which time does not cease to accumulate, perching, so to speak, on its own summit” (Foucualt 355), and

Along with this type, bound up with the accumulation of time, there are other heterotopias linked to time in its more futile, transitory and precarious aspects, a time viewed as celebration. These then are heterotopias without a bias toward the eternal. They are absolutely time-bound. To this class belong the fairs, those marvelous empty zones outside the city limits, that fill up twice a year with booths, showcases, miscellaneous objects, wrestlers, snake-women, optimistic fortune-tellers, etc. (Focault 355).

These heterotopias function as the form of the novel and within the novel. Following is “how the two types of heterotopia, that of the festival and that of the eternity of accumulating time, come together” (Foucault 355).

Orlando in and of itself is a “heterotopia of time which accumulate[s] ad infinitum.” The book spans over three centuries, with “the idea of accumulating everything,... of creating a sort of universal archive, the desire to enclose all times, all eras, forms and styles within a single place, the concept of making all times into one place, and yet a place that is outside time, inaccessible to the wear and tear of the years, according to a plan of almost perpetual and unlimited accumulation within an irremovable place,” (Foucault 355) The time changes, but the characters remain the same throughout the change. Granted, some have superficially changed: Nick Greene has become wealthy (Woolf 203); Sasha may or may not have become fat and lethargic (Woolf 222); and of course, Orlando has switched genders. But none of them age or become someone else. After all, “Orlando has become a woman—there is no denying it. But in every other respect, Orlando remained perfectly as he had been. The change of sex, though it altered their future, did nothing whatever to alter their identity” (Woolf 102). The only characters who seem to be linked to time are members of the Royalty: Queen Elizabeth I ruled from 1558-1603; Queen Victoria ruled from 1837-1901, and King Edward ruled from 1901-1910.

Within the book, the heterotopia of festival is seen with the carnival of the Great Frost (Woolf 26). It is “absolutely time bound” for it can only last as long as the freeze; it is a “marvelous empty zone” that takes place on the river; and it has “fill[ed] up…with booths, showcases,” etc. in the form of “arbours, mazes, alleys, drinking booths, etc.” (Woolf 26).

By holding Orlando up to Foucault’s mirror, and seeing the utopias (dystopias) and heterotopias the text creates, we can gain new insight into the novel. 

Hours to Spare

In Andelys Wood’s “Walking the Web in the Lost London of Mrs. Dalloway,” the author discusses the time distortion that is associated with Clarissa, Peter, and Septimus’ walks in London, and how they amount of distance covered is not possible in the time allotted by Woolf (Wood). She cites this quote form Woolf’s Orlando:

An hour, once it lodges in the queer element of the human spirit, may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length; on the other hand, an hour may be accurately represented on the timepiece of the mind by one second. This extraordinary discrepancy between time on the clock and time in the mind is less known than it should be and deserves fuller investigation. (61)

 and goes on to say “Woolf had already started that investigation in Mrs. Dalloway” (Wood).  The relationship between timepiece and the mind is not one-to-one, but there are some important timepiece times noted in Mrs. Dalloway.

In reading Wood’s piece, I was reminded that time is an arbitrary, man-made concept. The timepiece, clock, or watch could be argued to be man’s attempt to control time. But in Mrs. Dalloway, we are also reminded that nature will follow its own time schedule.

When Clarissa is in the florist shop -- named Mulberry’s, which Wood points out is an “apparently invented name” – she is reminded of her youth in the country and the flowers associated with it. Clarissa remembers the evening primrose. This flower opens its bloom in approximately one minute, which can create a sort of time distortion for the watcher. (It is also known as a “colonizer,” which speaks to other themes in the novel.)

During this reflection, Clarissa is also thinking of 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” (Woolf 13). Later in the novel, the reader finds out that Septimus commits suicide at approximately six in the evening, and the reader might be reminded of the flowers that glowed, and the way their colors represent  death and violence (red, deep orange) and the loss of innocence (white, violet). Connecting Septimus’ suicide with the horrors he experienced in World War I, these flowers and colors attached to a certain time in the evening presents a foreshadowing of his death.

The fact that Peter hears the ambulance on its way to recover Septimus’ body and he thinks of it as a “triumph of civilization” (Woolf 147), may also lead the reader to think of what else is a “triumph of civilization.” Since Septimus’ identity throughout this novel is connected to World War I, we might think of war as, if not a triumph, at least a consequence of civilization. Following this train of thought, another important time in the novel is 11:00 am. This is when Peter and Clarissa reunite, argue, and seem to settle things in the drawing room. As their relationship was often tumultuous, it could be compared to a war. Knowing that at the same time – 11:00 am – World War I was officially declared on July 18, 1914, and officially ended on November 11, 1918, the reader can see a parallel drawn between Peter and Clarissa’s relationship and the Great War that Woolf so often included in her writing.

It's Greek to Me

While reading Jacob's Room, coupled with "On not Knowing Greek," I was struck by the problems of language and translation--not only of translating Greek, but of translating the body through writing. By reading the Greek plays, or letters from loved ones, the reader must translate the writer's body into the readers space to gain any understanding. Likewise, the writer must translate their body onto the page to be understood. The problems with translation are the gaps in understanding that are left through the navigation of time and space; whether that be a gap in understanding the language, the culture, or the "place" of the author upon writing.

Woolf opens her essay "On not Knowing Greek" with the following passage:

For it is vain and foolish to talk of knowing Greek, since in our ignorance we should be at the bottom of any class of schoolboys, since we do not know how the words sounded, or where precisely we ought to laugh, or how the actors acted, and between this foreign people and ourselves there is not only difference of race and tongue but a tremendous breach of tradition. All the more strange, then, is it that we should wish to know Greek, try to know Greek, feel for ever drawn back to Greek, and be for ever making up some notion of the meaning of Greek, though from what incongruous odds and ends, with what slight resemblance to the real meaning of Greek, who shall say? (Woolf, "Greek")

Ironically, she begins by saying that it is foolish for girls to want to learn Greek, as they would be at the bottom of a class of boys, and that they can't understand the "difference of race and tongue…[or] tradition." The same could be said for boys, who also can't get back to the original sounds and meanings. But she continues on in the essay describing Greek literature as though she has learned Greek, and has been able to "know [Electra], that we have picked up from little turns and twists of the dialogue hints of her character, of her appearance, which, characteristically, she neglected; of something suffering in her, outraged and stimulated to its utmost stretch of capacity," (Woolf, "Greek"). She hints at some understanding of Greek after having just told the reader that it is "foolish to talk of knowing Greek."

 Woolf also seems to claim that the time and space that have been traveled lends unintended meaning to the Greek. She says, when reading a Greek play,

at once the mind begins to fashion itself surroundings. It makes some background, even of the most provisional sort, for Sophocles; it imagines some village, in a remote part of the country, near the sea. Even nowadays such villages are to be found in the wilder parts of England, and as we enter them we can scarcely help feeling that here, in this cluster of cottages, cut off from rail or city, are all the elements of a perfect existence (Woolf, "Greek").

When translating a Greek play, the reader can’t help but to place the play in his or her current space. One does not imagine an Ancient Greek village, but a contemporary English village. The meaning of the play, the knowing of the characters, depends on the space in which they are read and understood.

In Jacob’s Room, Woolf also looks at the problems of translation. She states, “A strange this--when you come to think of it--this love of Greek, flourishing in such obscurity, distorted, discouraged, yet leaping out, all of a sudden” (Woolf, Jacob's Room 77). For Jacob, Greek is obscure, distorted, and discourage, and yet “Jacob knew no more Greek than served him to stumble through a play" (Woolf, Jacob's Room 78). The term “stumble” leaves the reader to believe that Jacob can’t get full meaning or understanding from the Greek, but can only get the meaning he creates for it based upon the space he occupies, where meaning “leap[s] out, all of a sudden, especially on leaving crowded rooms, or after a surfeit of print, or when the moon floats among the waves of the hills” (Woolf, Jacob's Room 77). By changing space – moving out of a crowded room – meaning becomes suddenly apparent.

 Much like Greek, the letters in Jacob’s Room must be translated. The difference in language and culture is presumably smaller, but the reader must keep in mind how words can hold different meanings for different people. Each person’s background and experiences shape how that individual understands the world. Woolf says of letters in Jacob’s Room

 Still, there are letters that merely say how dinner's at seven; others ordering coal; making appointments. The hand in them is scarcely perceptible, let alone the voice or the scowl. Ah, but when the post knocks and the letter comes always the miracle seems repeated -- speech attempted. (Woolf, Jacob's Room 97)

The translation of the letter’s conveying concrete information is simple—be ready for dinner at seven, bring this amount of coal, etc. But the translation of a writer’s body (hand) and voice is an attempt at speech, translating the written to spoken and attempting to recreate the author in the reader’s space.

White Space

In The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf, Jane Goldman claims the following:

Woolf is putting forward a model of the writer's mind as an 'ordinary' one, and one that is best understood as a blank sheet of paper, which absorbs mental impressions from the data of the outside world. (104)

This reminded me of John Locke’s concept of the tabula rasa, or blank slate. Locke believed that the mind upon birth was essentially a blank slate, devoid of rules or knowledge, and everything we learn is through sensory perception. (See Locke’s An Essay on Concerning Human Understanding.) While the analogy isn’t completely solid – I don’t believe Woolf thought the mind of an author was a blank page – it is clear from her stories The Mark on the Wall, Kew Gardens, and An Unwritten Novel that she is interested in impressions on the mind and stream of consciousness writing.

The previous quote seemed to connect with passages from Key Thinkers on Space and Place. In the editors’ introduction, Phil Hubbard, Rob Kitchin, and Gill Valentine give the reader some background on the theory of space and place, and show connections between different fields that can all contribute to space and place. They state, "until the 1970s, most human geographers considered space to be a neutral container, a blank canvas that is filled in by human activity" (Hubbard, et al 4). When I read this, I immediately thought of Goldman’s quote above. If Woolf thought of the mind a blank “space” absorbing impressions, and human geographers of the 1970s thought of space to be a “blank canvas” filled in by human activity, then we have an essentially one-to-one analogy, the difference being one of the inner self and one of the outer world.

But the editors go on to say that "not until the work of Marxist theorist Henri Lefebvre (1991) that this notion of space as socially produced was convincingly-(if sometimes obtusely) articulated" (Hubbard, et al 5). What led from Lefebvre’s work is the "idea that culture not only takes place, but makes place, [which] is now manifest in a bewildering variety of work" (Hubbard, et al 7). While this seems like a change in the theory, we still have almost a one-to-one analogy, but instead of impressions, or human activity creating from a blank space, we now have culture constructing place.

While I agree that culture does create space (and many other things as well), I am most disturbed by the idea that these spaces are created on a blank page, canvas, or other “white space.” (The racial implications are clear, but that is for another essay.) Whatever page, canvas, or place that impressions, human activity, and culture start out with are not without some construction of their own. A blank page is constructed from wood pulp and such, a canvas from cloth and wood, a place from wood, brick, cement, etc. Even a “blank page” on a computer screen is not really blank. Likewise, the impressions, activity, and culture are not creating from nothing, they are all filtered through past experiences, human schema, and cultural norms. So while an author may write from their impressions, he or she is not filling a blank page with pure impressions. Instead, that author is constructing upon a construction with impressions that are filtered through the past.

Works Cited

Goldman, Jane. The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf. Cambridge UP, 2006.

Hubbard, Phil, Rob Kitchin, and Gill Valentine, eds. Key Thinkers on Space and Place. London: Sage, 2004.