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.
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