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.
