An Impossible Immunity: Virginia Woolf’s Internal Resistance to Nazism in her Diaries
p. 105-112
Résumé
Although it is a piece of writing of the self that largely revolves around the private sphere, Virginia Woolf’s diary is far from being a self-sufficient, autonomous ivory tower cut off from the outside world. On the contrary, the diarist constantly responds to the public issues of her time, so that her diary is characterized by a to-and-fro movement between the inner and the outer worlds. The haunting presence of the public sphere in Woolf’s personal writings can be best felt in the diary entries written in the years 1933-1941, since the rise of fascism in Europe, and especially in Germany, had a great impact on the way she wrote in her diary. In this paper, I will examine the strategies she sets up in order to voice her anti-fascist commitment. This commitment takes the shape of an internal, intellectual resistance, based on the belief that the only battle worth fighting is that of the mind. Woolf satirizes the Nazi dictator and deflates his ideological discourse. Her resistance is also evidenced in her attempts to preserve the autonomy of the private sphere, which is inseparable from the freedom of the mind.
Texte intégral
1In a letter to her nephew, Julian Bell, Virginia Woolf wrote in 1935: ‘But I gather that politics are best avoided and in any case my views are likely to be inaccurate and perhaps partial—all politics be damned.’1 This position is echoed in her diary, where, by means of metadiscursive remarks, she presents herself as an a-political figure. This metadiscourse should not, however, be taken at face value. Indeed, while Woolf strongly resented belonging to any clear-cut group or party and was intent on retaining her autonomy as an outsider, she was by no means cut-off from the pressing public issues of her time. On the contrary, she was greatly involved in the ‘real world,’ as her lifelong pacifist commitment suggests.2 This involvement can be traced in her diaries. Indeed, far from being an ivory tower into which she could retreat in an escapist mode, her diary opens onto the socio-historical context. This is especially true of the entries dating from the year 1933 to her death in 1941. The reason for this is that, with the besieging voices of the fascist dictators, the fear of German invasion and the hardships of life in war-time Britain, what she calls ‘private separation’3 and ‘immunity’ (Woolf 1985, 5) had become impossible.
2In an essay written in May 1940 and entitled ‘The Leaning Tower’, she argues that one of the features of the writings of the nineteenth century are the remoteness of wars and an ‘immunity from war.’4 She contrasts this ‘immunity’ with the closeness of World War II. The writer’s private sphere is besieged by the voice of the fascist dictator: ‘Scott never saw sailors drowning at Trafalgar; Jane Austen never heard the cannon roar at Waterloo. Neither of them heard Napoleon’s voice as we hear Hitler’s voice as we sit at home of an evening’ (Woolf 1966, 164). This extract relates to her own experience of fascism and World War II. Indeed, fascism, for Virginia Woolf, was no abstract idea. On the contrary, it was something she saw, heard and felt, something she herself witnessed when she travelled to Germany in May 19355 and which had a great impact on the way she wrote, especially in her diary.
3The Woolfs were both well aware of the fact that a German invasion would mean a real danger, a real threat to their lives. As Alex Zwerdling points out in Virginia Woolf and the Real World, they had a good reason to think that they would then be amongst the first targets of the Nazis. They heavily suspected that they both were on the Sonderfahndungsliste GB, the Gestapo’s black list for Great Britain (Zwerdling 289). They therefore discussed suicide plans. However, Virginia Woolf did not yet ‘shut the garage doors,’6 in an ultimate resistance to fascism. She turned to writing instead.
4I will argue that, paradoxically enough, Virginia Woolf’s diary, for all its intimacy, is a battleground that enables her to voice her anti-fascist commitment. This commitment does not take the shape of an active, public political involvement but rather of an internal, intellectual resistance. This internal resistance allowed her to reconcile the commitment she considered to be her duty as a writer, an Englishwoman, and simply as a human being, with her desire for autonomy, in the sense of independence. Because of its loose, flexible and open form, and because of the fact that it was, supposedly, not meant to be read, let alone published, the diary can be considered as the form that gave her the greatest artistic freedom and autonomy. More than anywhere else, she could here set her own rules and be her own mistress. Yet fascism crept into the private sphere of her diary and affected every aspect of her writing. Her immune system thus had to set up defences to resist the attacks of these haunting public voices. In this paper, I will analyze the impact of the voices of fascism on Virginia Woolf’s writing in her diary and the different strategies she uses in order to resist fascism. I will first study the impact of the fascist threat on her style. I will then focus on the reverberation of Hitler’s voice in her diary, in order to examine how Woolf deflates the fascist discourse. Finally, I will try to show how her resistance is evidenced in her attempts to preserve the autonomy of the private sphere.
5On 28 August 1939, as World War II was imminent, Woolf wrote at the end of her diary entry: ‘How difficult, unexpectedly, to write’ (Woolf 1985, 232). This shows that the tensions in the public sphere permeate her diary to such an extent that writing threatens to become impossible. However, because of its flexible and open form, and the aesthetic of the fragment it entails, the diary proves to be particularly suited to times of crisis, when other, ‘more serious’ forms of writing, are impossible.
6Her diary entries from the years 1933-1941 are characterized by a feeling of urgency, a sense of an ending and a growing despair. These are conveyed by short elliptic sentences, which are closer to notes taken in a hurry than to actual sentences. Her style is telegraphic, especially from 1939 onwards, since the rhythm of her writing is in keeping with the tensions and lulls in what she calls ‘the European situation’ (Woolf 1985, 16). Thus, as the fascist threat draws nearer, her sentences become more and more jagged and dislocated. She recurrently resorts to ellipses. Her writing is also characterized by numerous interruptions, in the form of dashes, alongside with repetitions and the accumulation of heterogeneous elements: ‘War war—a great battle—this hot day, with the blossom on the grass’ (Woolf 1985, 284). As Hermione Lee remarks in her biography of Virginia Woolf: ‘Her diary notes, more than ever like the style of her new novel, fragmented into dislocated, jagged headlines, like telegrams from a disaster zone’ (Lee 704). This fragmentation and dislocation link the style of her diary to that of her last work, Between the Acts, as Woolf herself observes in a 1940 entry: ‘Scraps, orts & fragments, as I said in PH’ (Woolf 1985, 290).7
7The term ‘headlines’ that Hermione Lee uses in this quote, also associates Woolf’s notes in her diary with newspaper headlines. Woolf was a voracious reader of newspapers and she recorded what she read in the form of ‘little exact notes’ (Woolf 1985, 233). Her diary thus gives a precise day-to-day account of fascism in Germany and of the prospect of a German invasion. Very much like the cubist artists, she uses the technique of the collage, and inserts newspaper headlines in her diary entries. She thus wrote, in February 1940: ‘I will copy the days headlines—Towards a Settlement with Japan. The next phase in India; red rout in Finland. 5,000 killed & no room for the rest’ (Woolf 1985, 264).
8In Woolf’s diary, these stylistic features all show how permeable the private sphere is and to what extent Virginia Woolf’s writing in her diary depends on the historical context. This invasion of the private sphere also appears in Woolf’s choice of images which indicates what could be called a semantic contamination. As Hermione Lee points out, Woolf appropriates the public language of war for her own imaginative uses. This appropriation appears mainly in the form of puns. Woolf thus borrows the vocabulary of military invasion to refer to unwanted visitors at Monk’s House: ‘Thus our island will be invaded’ (Woolf 1985, 307)8 and calls her friend John Maynard Keynes ‘dear old Hitler’ (Woolf 1985, 163). This appropriation is one of the defence strategies set up by Woolf to resist fascism. Indeed, while it mirrors the disjunction and meaninglessness of contemporary history and thus reveals a lack of autonomy, Woolf’s writing is far from being merely mimetic. It serves a satire of fascism.
9Virginia Woolf expresses her anti-fascist commitment by resorting to the satirical mode. I will study the way in which she deflates the fascist discourse, by focusing on Hitler’s voice.
10Fascism is presented, in her diary, as the ruin of civilization in Europe and the triumph of barbarism, in the sense of a return to a primitive state, in which instinct prevails. By means of a recurrent animal imagery, the fascist dictator is portrayed as a savage beast about to devour its prey. His voice, which Woolf constantly hears on the radio, is referred to as ‘savage howls.’ She thus evokes Hitler’s speech at the Nuremberg rally in September 1938 as: ‘A savage howl like a person excruciated’ (Woolf 1985, 169). The adjective that is most often used to describe his voice is ‘frightening’ (Woolf 1985, 169). The reason why his voice should be so frightening is that it is felt to be ‘mad’ (Woolf 1985, 166), that is out of control. Woolf presents it as ‘hysterical,’ as in this 1939 diary entry: ‘we listened to the ravings, the strangled hysterical sobbing swearing ranting of Hitler’ (Woolf 1985, 245). By means of the alliteration of harsh sounds, Woolf imitates the raging voice of Hitler, in an example of derisive mimicry. As Natania Rosenfeld argues in an article entitled: ‘Monstrous Conjugations: Images of Dictatorship in the anti-Fascist Writings of Virginia and Leonard Woolf’, ‘derisive mimicry’ is one of the tactics used both by Virginia and Leonard Woof in order to ‘disrupt the litanies of the patriarchs, reactionaries, and dictators.’9
11By laying the emphasis on the way Hitler’s voice sounds rather than on the content of his speeches, Woolf deflates the fascist discourse by showing that it is an empty shell. It is nonsensical, it has no meaning, and it has therefore, Woolf argues, no reality: ‘that ridiculous little man. Why ridiculous? Because none of it fits. Encloses no reality. [...] If it were real, one cd. make something of it. But as it is it merely grumbles, in an inarticulate way, behind reality’ (Woolf 1985, 166). We thus get the impression of a flood of words devoid of meaning. This impression is enhanced by the cacophony that builds up in the diary. The voice of the fascist dictator reverberates, all the more so as it is diffracted. Indeed, it is mediated by the voices of various figures who appear in the diary, among which those of German and Austrian exiles, like Freud, for instance. The main topic of Woolf’s discussions with those she calls the ‘refugees’ (Woolf 1985, 202) is fascism. She carefully records these ‘incessant conversations’ (Woolf1983, 303), which are often based on references to Hitler’s words, thus indirectly causing his voice to echo and resonate in her diary.
12In order to counterbalance the haunting and threatening voice of the fascist dictator, Woolf repeatedly turns to the private sphere. Her diary is characterized by a constant to and fro movement between the public and the private spheres. This shift from the one to the other goes hand in hand with an alternation between serious matters and lighter, often trivial ones. It offers some comic relief and thus partakes in deconstructing the fascist discourse. The diary entry written on 30 January 1939 illustrates this alternation and the sense of comic relief it creates. In the previous entry, Woolf describes her meeting with Dr Freud in London, a meeting at which they mostly discussed Hitler. Woolf turns to their talk again at the beginning of her diary entry the next day, and more precisely, to the feeling of guilt she expressed: ‘Freud said it would have been worse if you had not won the war. I said we often felt guilty—if we had failed, perhaps Hitler would not have been. No, he said, with great emphasis; he would have been infinitely worse’ (Woolf 1985, 202). In the second paragraph, she unexpectedly and without any transition, goes on to depict the party given by her brother Adrian, and which happened to be a fancy-dress ball. This social event allows her to escape her usual self: ‘A kind of liberation caused by wearing a mask, tipsiness & abandonment at not being one’s usual self’ (Woolf 1985, 203). This passage has the same function in the text as it does for the diarist herself, in the sense that it offers some liberation and comic relief. However, in the next and final paragraph, she returns to the pressing public worries and the growing tension: ‘And we are all on tiptoe, waiting for Hitler’s speech tonight’ (Woolf 1985, 203). As the use of the pronoun ‘we’ suggests here, this to and fro movement is inseparable from an oscillation between the collective feeling and the individual feeling. This creates a wave-like effect: ‘The common feeling covers the private, then recedes’ (Woolf 1985, 231).
13In the diary entries written during the war, Woolf insists on the triumph of the ‘collective’ or ‘community feeling’ over the individual feeling. She suggests that there is no way to be immune to the collective feeling anymore. Whereas before the war, she used to establish some distance that enabled her to observe the national mood, this separation now seems to have broken down and her own feelings to be in keeping with the collective feeling. The ‘I’ seems to dissolve in the ‘we.’ She reflects on this experience in a diary entry written in April 1939 in which she defines: ‘the community feeling: all England thinking the same thing—this horror of war— at the same moment’ (Woolf 1985, 215). However, as the next lines suggest, the diarist tries to regain her autonomy and to retain her own voice: ‘Never felt it [the community feeling] so strong before. Then the lull & one lapses again into private separation—But I must order macaroni from London’ (Woolf 1985, 215).
14The last sentence may suggest that the autonomy which the private sphere enables the diarist to preserve only revolves around daily domestic concerns. It can however be argued that in such times of crises, everything that is private is at the same time eminently public. Going about one’s daily business in spite of the actual physical fear of being killed at any moment is in itself an act of resistance. Woolf places herself on the side of life and clings onto the joys, beauty and what she calls the ‘reality’ of everyday life as opposed to the ‘unreality’ of fascism and the ‘bombast’ of the war. In May 1940, she thus wrote, in the midst of an air-raid: ‘I’ve a wish for 10 years more, & to write my book wh. as usual darts into my brain. [...] its all bombast, this war. One old lady pinning on her cap has more reality’ (Woolf 1985, 285). Significantly enough, Woolf uses the term ‘reality’ to refer both to daily events and to the life of the mind. Indeed, if it can be argued that the private sphere is a guarantee of autonomy, it is not only because it glorifies daily life but because it is also the realm of the life of the mind. And the life of the mind, (i.e. here thinking, reading, writing), is in itself, according to Woolf, an act of resistance to fascism. Woolf’s diary writing in the years of the rise of fascism in Germany and the beginning of World War II is based on the belief that ideas and books have more reality than the war and the fascist discourse. This is conveyed by a series of polarities: reality/ unreality, body/mind, action/idea. Woolf opposes what she calls the ‘reality of ideas’ to the ‘unreality of force’ (Woolf 1985, 233-234). Force is said to ‘muffle everything’ (Woolf 1985, 234) and reduce feelings to mere ‘bodily feelings’ (Woolf 1985, 234). This polarity allows Woolf to reaffirm her internal and intellectual commitment as a writer. Similarly to the argument she puts forward in her 1940 essay ‘Thoughts on peace in an air raid’ where she claims that ideas are the ‘only efficient air-raid shelter’ (Woolf 1966, 173), she reasserts, in her diary, the primacy of the life of the mind and the need to ‘fight’ for freedom ‘with the mind’ (Woolf 1985, 173) along the following lines: ‘This idea struck me: the army is the body: I am the brain. Thinking is my fighting’ (Woolf 1985, 285).
15In an essay entitled ‘Craftsmanship,’ which was originally a radio talk broadcast in 1937, Woolf remarks that there is ‘something incongruous, unfitting, about the term “craftsmanship” when applied to words.’10 The main reason for this, she tells us, is that words are not useful, because they are suggestive and changing. They are meant to be free and autonomous. As Natania Rosenfeld suggests, fascism for both Leonard and Virginia Woolf is characterized by a ‘link between political dictatorship and verbal dictation’ (Rosenfeld 126). She goes on to argue that Woolf’s assertion that words are not supposed to be useful can therefore be read as an indirect denunciation of the way the fascist dictator uses words in his propaganda, as a way of deflating the fascist discourse without referring explicitly to what Woolf calls ‘the alien matter of politics’ (Woolf 1985, 267):
He [the fascist dictator] is, Virginia Woolf might say, the consummate craftsman. [...] The essay argues against the use of language as a means to an end. Woolf’s aim is to unfix words, insist on the limits to the writer’s or the speaker’s control over them. [...] Words cannot be used purposefully [...]. To deny their autonomy is to produce a monster. (Rosenberg 127)11
16I will argue that in her diary, Woolf found an alternative to the fascist discourse that is as different as can be from the way words were being used by fascist dictators. Diary writing, because of the looseness and flexibility it entails, but also because of its inherent uselessness, in the sense that it is not even meant to be read, is a way of restoring to words their essential autonomy.
Notes de bas de page
1 Letter from Virginia Woolf to Julian Bell dated 25 October, 1935, The Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol V, eds. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann (London: The Hogarth Press, 1975- 1980) 436.
2 For a discussion of Woolf’s pacifist commitment, see Alex Zwerdling, Virginia Woolf and the Real World (Berkeley: U of California P, 1986) 271-301; Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf (1996; New York: Vintage Books, 1999) 676-680.
3 Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol V, ed. Anne Olivier Bell (1984; Harmmondsworth: Penguin, 1985) 215.
4 Virginia Woolf, ‘The Leaning Tower,’ Collected Essays II, ed. Leonard Woolf (London: Chatto & Windus, 1966) 164.
5 For Virginia Woolf’s account of her journey to Nazi Germany, see The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. IV, ed. Anne Olivier Bell (1982; Harmmondsworth: Penguin, 1983) 310-311.
6 On 15 May 1940, Woolf wrote in her diary: ‘this morning we discussed suicide if Hitler lands. Jews beaten up. What point in waiting? Better shut the garage doors’ (Woolf 1985, 284).
7 Pointz Hall was one of the working titles of Between the Acts.
8 Or ‘The public world very notably invaded the private at MH. [Monks House] last week’ (Woolf 1985, 131).
9 Natania Rosenfeld, ‘Monstrous Conjugations: Images of Dictatorship in the Anti-Fascist Writings of Virginia and Leonard Woolf,’ Virginia Woolf and Fascism, ed. Merry Pawlowski (Hampshire: Palgrave, 2001) 122.
10 Virginia Woolf, ‘Craftsmanship’ (1937), The Crowded Dance of Modern Life, ed. Rachel Bowlby (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993) 137.
11 In her essay ‘Craftsmanship,’ Woolf argues that ‘ [...] to talk of craft in connection with words is to bring together two incongruous ideas, which if they mate can only give birth to some monster fit for a glass case in a museum’ (Woolf 1993, 137).
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