1Virginia Woolf has long been said to belong to the tradition of aesthetic writers whose work is supposed to be governed by purely formal considerations. In the first critical study of Woolf published in England in 1932, Winifred Holtby, voicing what would be the position of many Woolfian critics to come, writes: ‘This is [Woolf’s] test of disinterestedness. [... A work of art] must be an end in itself, as perfect and self-contained as a Greek vase.’1 Holtby adds that Woolf’s vision of art as autonomous is that ‘of Arnold, of Pater, of the French symbolists, and of almost all her own contemporaries, the Georgian critics’ and is antagonistic to the Edwardians who ‘were never interested in character itself, or in the book in itself. They were interested in something outside’ (Holtby 45).

2Woolf’s work has therefore been considered from the start as ‘existing in a sphere separate from the practical and the utilitarian and governed by purely, or largely, formal considerations.’2 As such, it has first been accounted for by aesthetic literary criticism, i.e., New Criticism and their followers. Then various forms of criticism (cultural, feminist, postcolonial studies, etc.) have exposed the preconceptions of New Criticism and pointed out that social and historical factors necessarily shape art and that the autonomy of art, in Woolf’s case as in others, is bound to be deceptive. Yet such a reading of the aesthetic tradition, challenging as it is, may well be, as Derek Attridge remarks, the reading of what he calls ‘instrumental criticism,’ a form of criticism that ‘judges the literary work according to a pre-existing scheme of values, on a utilitarian model that reflects a primary interest somewhere other than in literature’ (Attridge 13). And he adds: ‘there is no way [literature] can serve as an instrument without at the same time challenging the basis of instrumentality’ (Attridge 13).

3Those contradictory critical readings of Woolf’s work seem to match Woolf’s own apparent contradiction: indeed, although she was a woman of many commitments,3 she could lament, as she does in her essay ‘The Leaning Tower,’ ‘the pedagogic, the didactic, the loud-speaker strain that dominates [the 1930s] poetry’ which ‘feel [s] compelled to preach [...] the creation of a society in which everyone is equal and everyone is free;’4 she could regret, as she does in ‘The Artist and Politics,’ that ‘to mix literature with politics [is] to adulterate it’ (Woolf 1972, 230); ‘instead of bread made with flour, we [are] given bread made with plaster’ (Woolf 1972, 231). These words have generally been construed as conveying her refusal of all form of commitment in literature and her fiction has subsequently been read for many years as a form of art for art’s sake until, more recently, in the 1980s, feminist critics took hold of her work, most often her two long essays A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas, and exposed Woolf’s commitment to the women’s cause and acknowledged politicised aspects of her work.5 Yet few critics have shown, as Moi, Bowlby6 or Regard7 have done, that Woolf’s feminist, political and aesthetic commitments are not at odds but intimately connected.

4It is this long-standing apparent contradiction in Woolf that I would like to address here by looking at her short stories. Although quite a number of articles have been devoted to specific short stories, very few comprehensive studies have been published, except for Dean Baldwin’s, in 1989, and Nena Skrbic, in 2004.8 Woolf’s short stories have from the start been regarded as experimental texts, the most experimental in Woolf’s so-called experimental fiction; they have been called ‘sketches’9 and regarded as laboratories of her fiction, and Baldwin and Skrbic back this reading by concentrating on the texts’ formal experiments. Baldwin is interested in Woolf’s ‘restless experimentation with form and technique’ (3) and Skbric discusses in her first three chapters ‘the short story as form,’ namely ‘questions of genre, plot and principal narrative techniques’ before devoting her last three chapters to ‘the issue of genre’ and ‘the problematic question of definition in relation to Woolf’s stories’ (Skbric XIX). To my mind, such a reading is reductive and hardly coherent with, on the one hand, Woolf’s life, and on the other with what can be read in her other works of fiction. I will argue that these self-contained texts, autonomous as they are, display forms of commitment but, just as literature in general can serve, according to Attridge, both as an instrument and a challenge to instrumentality, there is no way the short stories can be committed without at the same time challenging the basis of commitment.

5While browsing through Virginia Woolf’s short stories, we find here and there a few allusions to the war (‘The Mark on the Wall,’ ‘Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street’), women’s rights (‘A Society’), religion (‘An Unwritten Novel’) or politics (‘A Society,’ ‘An Unwritten Novel’).10 However these scattered allusions to the external world are not enough to say that those texts are committed ones; indeed, there is no open protest or denunciation; except for ‘A Society,’ the short stories are not feminist or political pleas or pamphlets. It is also obvious they do not subscribe to the rules of representational literature. However, we may wonder whether texts that do not belong to the referential category necessarily make an intransitive use of language, which is supposed to be the hallmark of modernism. My claim is that it is through aesthetics, through the autonomy of the form, that Woolf’s short stories display some form of commitment.

6It is true that in her short stories Woolf indulges in formal experiments that enable her to redefine the very genre of the short story. She not only refashions the structural pattern of the short story by adopting the open beginning and ending of Chekhov’s inconclusive short stories but also redefines the generic boundaries of the short story by incorporating other genres.11 In her short stories, Woolf brings together elements from the three main literary forms, prose, poetry and drama, as well as elements from different art forms, music, painting, the cinema; she borrows from fictional literary genres (the epistolary in ‘The Symbol,’ the detective in ‘The Mysterious Case of Miss V.,’ the ghost story in ‘A Haunted House,’ etc.) and from non-fictional ones. I shall focus here on the way her short stories resort to non-fictional genres (such as the essay, the diary, history or biography) and show that this process consists in accommodating a genre; through accommodation, the aesthetic experiment, far from resulting in mere formal generic blurring,12 is turned into a form of political or ethical commitment.

1 Political commitment

1.1 The short story and the essay

7Some short stories, like ‘The Mark on the Wall’ or ‘An Unwritten Novel’ stage a fictional situation (a narrator gazes at a mark on the wall and tries to guess what it is; a narrator looks at the passenger sitting opposite her and imagines what her life is like) while accommodating the genre of the ‘essai-méditation,’ the essay as meditation being a tradition that goes back to Montaigne. Discontinuity and openness constitute, according to Adorno, the very essence of the essay, which Montaigne calls ‘cette fricassée,’ ‘cette rhapsodie’ (quoted in Angenot 57). And if the essay, unlike the scientific or Cartesian method, does not adopt an inductive or deductive method and a closed system, it is, Adorno goes on to explain, because it refuses the very idea of Truth or of totality. And Adorno concludes that heresy is the formal law of the essay.13 Woolf’s short stories that accommodate the essay adopt a zigzaging overall structure,14 an associative method15 resulting in a discontinuous development; they also become, like the essay and in Adorno’s words, ‘the theatre of intellectual experience,’16 ‘the point [being in the essay] not so much to unveil some content external to thought as to expose the intimate mechanisms through which thought selects its own objects’ (Angenot 57).17 Hence the genesis of the thinking process and consequently, of the writing or creative process is exposed in those texts. In other words, by accommodating the essay, the short story becomes metafictional. What remains to be determined is the role of metafiction. If we take as an example, ‘The Mark on the Wall,’ we see that it aims at defining fiction, the stuff modern fiction is made of. Modern fiction is about ‘phantoms,’ ‘the depths,’ i.e.: inner reality, the self and its numerous facets (‘There is not one reflection but an almost infinite number,’ writes the narrator [Woolf 1991, 85]), its variety, its truths: it introduces a world of freedom, ‘a sense of illegitimate freedom’ (Woolf 1991, 86). Modern fiction is neither a ‘description of reality’ (Woolf 1991, 86) nor historical fiction because external reality in the short story is equated with a set of rules, conventions, ‘standard things’ (Woolf 1991, 86) or norms, Truth, and is governed by a masculine point of view, that of professors, archbishops, policemen, Whitaker’s Almanack and Table of Precedency. Indeed, the narrator says: ‘Yes, one could imagine a very pleasant world. [...] A world without professors or specialists or house-keepers with the profiles of policemen’ (Woolf 1991, 87) and adds, while describing Whitaker’s Table of Precedency: ‘The Archbishop of Canterbury is followed by the Lord High Chancellor; the Lord High Chancellor is followed by the Archbishop of York’ (Woolf 1991, 88). Refusing to describe external reality therefore appears to be both a refusal of binding, authoritative literary norms (the norms of mimetic fiction) and a refusal of social conventions, of their authority, of the masculine authority of the Law, the University, the Church,18 and other patriarchal institutions: it amounts to a refusal of ‘the masculine point of view which governs our lives’ (Woolf 1991, 86).19 A literary decision is thus doubled by a political one.

8Whereas in her essay Three Guineas, published in 1938, Woolf openly and directly criticises British institutions, in her short stories, through the appropriation of the form of the essay and the introduction of metafictional reflections, she points to a strong connection between literature and the external world just as Adorno does when he chooses to define the essay as ‘heretical’ and refusing Truth and all form of totality. The same conventions and lack of freedom governing the world and the world of fiction, literature cannot be dissociated from the social and historical world. Woolf also implicitly suggests that by transforming literature, the world will be, if not transformed, at least questioned; by transforming literary conventions, social conventions will be challenged. Metafiction here is far from being the hallmark of a self-reflexive, narcissistic, intransitive literature; although in a very submerged way, it points out the political power of literature.20 We could say that form is politicised.

1.2 The short story and the diary

9If we now turn to another genre, the diary, there are at least two short stories which include it: ‘The Legacy’ and ‘The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn.’ In ‘The Legacy,’ through the inclusion of Angela’s diary, which her husband finds and reads after her death, the power of oppression of a society where women are voiceless non-entities is denounced. Angela is indeed the type of the transparent aristocratic wife who adorns the house of her husband, an M.P. involved in active political life. She is attracted to the Marxist ideas of Miller and to Miller himself, her secretary’s brother. Loving Miller is a way for her of rebelling against her husband and the society and class he stands for while committing suicide is a way of acknowledging the power of society and the impossibility of changing it through rebellion: a tragic admission. Angela’s diary and its confessions, while they come through blanks in the text, point at the power of a class-bound society where transgression of social classes is unthinkable; at the power of marriage and indirectly of religion and the Church that instil a dread of adultery. Angela’s suicide, such as it is conveyed in an elliptical way in the diary, gives a measure of the intolerance of British society.

10Accommodating the diaristic genre within the short story is a way of renewing the form of the short story and practising hybridisation; it is also a form of silent protest, of silent, indirect political commitment in favour of a more tolerant society. Silence is not only inscribed within the narrative through the blanks in Angela’s diary which end up in giving her husband the clue to her love for Miller and their common suicide; it is also a narrative strategy, a way for the author of countering the silence imposed by society, its diktats and taboos by using the same tool.

11Accommodating a different genre can finally be regarded as a way of welcoming the other (here, another genre), as a form of hospitality to the other synonymous with the valuing of impurity (here, generic impurity). And, according to Attridge, an openness to otherness—whatever the definition of the other we give—constitutes ethics itself,21 which takes us to our second point, Woolf’s ethical commitment in her short stories.

2 Ethical commitment

12Accommodating another genre can indeed be a way of giving voice to the other, of letting the other speak. Such is the case of ‘The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn,’ a short story in which a fictional diary of a fifteenth-century woman is inserted. Historically speaking, diaries or journals have often been the usual and sole mode of confession or expression for women in centuries past, the only way of escaping the closed world in which they lived, as the author of the journal points out: ‘the whole world is barred from us [...] I feel the pressure of all this free and beautiful place—all England and the sea, and the lands beyond—rolling like sea waves, against our iron gates’ (Woolf 1991, 45). Such journals are not much valued by the old school of historians, ‘la vieille histoire “chroniqueuse,”’ as Jacques Rancière puts it,22 and in the short story, they are not valued by the descendants of Joan Martyn. The only one interested in Joan Martyn’s diary is Rosamond Merridew, the new historian who retrieves the journal and gives it pride of place within her historical narrative. In the short story, the journal appears as a way of rewriting history by giving voice to the voiceless. Similarly in ‘Phyllis and Rosamond,’ an early short story, Woolf borrows from the art of biography and history in order to let us listen to the thwarted selves of two upper-middle calss young ladies who have been raised to please their father and catch a husband with their perfect tea-table manners. Far from being gratuitous aesthetic innovations, these generic experiments which consist in accommodating non-fictional genres, offer an opportunity to give voice to ‘obscure figures’ (Woolf 1991, 17), ‘not remarkable ones’ (Woolf 1991, 45), those who have been forgotten by history, the unknown ones, most of the time, women. Renewing the genre of the short story by inserting other genres in it is both a way of introducing ordinary characters, ordinary lives with banal and even ugly moments, and a way of introducing the other in the text. In other words, it is both a literary stance aiming at redefining the character as an anti-hero or heroine, as an ordinary anonymous character and an ethical move towards alterity. It is also a way of redefining both biography and history: in the new form of biography and history, ‘the periphery invades the centre’ (Rancière 89), the unknown ones become the heroes or displace them, as Tolstoï does in War and Peace.23

13What happens in the short stories mentioned can be related to the general intention that prevails through the whole body of the short stories: they can be regarded as heterogeneous pieces and as such be studied separately or they can be regarded as a ‘gigantic conversation’24 in which every man and every woman is in turn allowed to speak: from the passersby in ‘Kew garden’ to Mabel Waring, Mrs Dalloway’s poor relative in ‘The New Dress,’ or Mrs Gage, the penniless elderly widow in ‘The Widow and the Parrot.’ Woolf fulfils there her desire for impersonality, for doing away with ‘the damned egotistical self;’25 and as the (depersonalised) self gives way to various selves, impersonality is subsumed into personality. As in the essay ‘Street Haunting’ where the narrator voices her love for walking through the streets because it provides the material for writing, allowing her as it does to meet many people while remaining anonymous among anonymous people (‘we [...] become part of that vast army of anonymous trampers’),26 in the short stories, she can be anonymous while inhabiting one character after another, adopting the voice of the other: ‘In each of these lives one could penetrate a little way, far enough to give oneself the illusion that one is not tethered to a single mind but can put on briefly for a few minutes the bodies and minds of others’ (Woolf 1994, 490); it gives the narrator (and the reader) the illusion that one is many. Such a strategy favours diversity and dissimilarity, difference rather than uniformity, and erases the distinction between high and low characters or subject-matters. It partakes of what we could call Woolf’s democratic impulse (an impulse Melba Cuddy-Keane also traces in her essays27), a way of encountering the other, a form of ethical commitment.

3 Are there limits to the democratic impulse?

14However if we believe what some critics of the short story have written, there might be limits to Woolf’s democratic impulse since in some short stories, the encounter with the other turns into a rejection of the other. I am not referring to the short stories where the encounter with the other is presented thematically as a violent encounter and a moment of hatred, as in ‘The Introduction’ or ‘The Man who Loved his Kind’: those stories are either caricatures or in any case, clearly condemn the character who is guilty of hatred and cruelty or violence. I am referring to the stories where the other might be condemned as other by the narrative voice and implicitly by the author. Such is the case of ‘The Duchess and the Jew-eller,’ or at least of the reading of this short story that has been offered by various critics up to David Bradshaw in his latest edition of the text in 2001.28 For Bradshaw, this story is anti-Semitic and ‘comes as quite a shock’ (XXIX) describing as it does ‘the stereotype Jew’ (XXIX), and he is definitely ill-at-ease to account for what he feels to be ‘Woolf’s single most controversial piece of work, largely inexcusable, perhaps, definitely untypical, but well-crafted in spite of its offensive subject-matter’ (XXXI). Such an analysis introduces a contradiction and a blatant incoherence in Woolf’s short stories while creating great uneasiness in the reader. All the more so as Woolf has not been found guilty of such prejudice in the representation of Jews that she offers in other works of fiction, especially in The Years which Bradshaw himself analyses as ‘a philo-Semitic novel’ (XXIX).29

15A close reading of the short story might help us out of this critical difficulty. This short story was meant to be part of a book of caricatures and the two characters it stages, the duchess and the jeweller, are caricatured through animal similes: the duchess is compared to a peacock and the jeweller to an elephant, a hog, a horse and a camel. The jeweller is conceived as the typical self-made man who went from rags to riches, having ‘beg [u] n life in a filthy alley [...] selling stolen dogs to fashionable women in Whitechapel’ (Woolf 1991, 248) and having become ‘the richest jeweller in England’ (Woolf 1991, 249) with a shop in Picadilly and wearing clothes cut ‘by the best scissors in Savile Row’ (Woolf 1991, 248). He is also the stereotype Jew—although the word is never couched on the page—bearing the offensive name of Oliver Bacon, having ‘long pointed nails’ (Woolf 1991, 248) and a ‘nose, which was long and flexible, like an elephant’s trunk’ (Woolf 1991, 249)—all the attributes anti-Semitism has saddled Jews with. Such features may be construed as deeply offensive if they are taken at face value. However in the story, the jeweller is confronted with a duchess who is not only extremely ugly (‘she was very large, very fat, tightly girt in pink taffeta, and past her prime’ [Woolf 1991, 251]) but also clearly derided by the narrator as the epitome of what is most hateful in the aristocracy: ‘Then she loomed up, filling the door, filling the room with the aroma, the prestige, the arrogance, the pomp, the pride of all the Dukes and Duchesses swollen in one wave’ (Woolf 1991, 251). The duchess is also presented as a swindler who does not hesitate in selling false pearls to the jeweller in order to wipe off her gambling debts and recover her honour. The jeweller appears as the willing victim of the woman’s strategy since he accepts to be fooled by the pearls which he knows to be false, in order to be invited by the duchess and spend a weekend with her daughter with whom he is in love. The jeweller comes out as a tender-hearted noble man who can relinquish money for the sake of love and happiness whereas the duchess appears as the shrewd, dishonest money-lover. Just as the cliché of the necessarily noble aristocrat is taken to task, the cliché of the Jew as jeweller, money-lover, saddled with all the traditionally offensive features (long nose, pointed nails, etc.), is undermined as Woolf shows there is a human being, noble and tender-hearted behind the mask society has devised for Jews. But probably because the short story was written around 1932, in troubled times, and published in 1938, Woolf could not run the risk of having her main character misunderstood. She therefore repeatedly presents the jeweller as taking off his mantle when he is on his own: ‘But he dismantled himself often and became again a little boy in a dark alley’ (Woolf 1991, 248); ‘And again he dismantled himself and became once more the little boy playing marbles in the alley’ (Woolf 1991, 250). The mantle is like a mask Oliver wears when he is with the others. Climbing the social ladder, owning a successful shop, loving money is the mask the others make him wear. In private, he can take off the mask and become his own original self. Through this metaphor, Woolf exposes Jewishness as social construction, a construction that is so powerful that the Jews can only inhabit it; in other words, they can only conform to the clichés society has devised for them and escape them when far from the others’ gaze. The mantle and the dismantling also read as a metaphor of what Woolf herself does here and which, to my mind, is not different from what she does in other short stories: that is, just as she accommodates silence in ‘The Legacy,’ just as she accommodates various genres in her short stories, she accommodates here a cliché, the cliché of the Jew and she inhabits it in order to deflate it and subvert it from inside (exemplifying as she does so what Adorno explains about Kafka and Beckett and Modernist literature who have a much more efficient way of commenting upon the world than representational literature and are much more committed than openly committed literature: ‘the avant-garde abstraction [...] is a reflex response to the abstraction of the law which objectively dominates society [...] By dismantling appearance, they explode from within the art which committed proclamation subjugates from without, and hence only in appearance’30). The result is a story in keeping with her literary democratic impulse and, needless to add, her marrying a Jew. Rather than being an anti-Semitic story, it reads as a committed story but relying as it does on irony and indirection, it runs the risk of being misunderstood.31 What Woolf’s short stories finally call for is a responsible form of reading since the presence or absence of limits to Woolf’s democratic impulse is for the reader to decide. Woolf requires a respectful and inventive reader,32 in other words, an ethically committed one.

16The reading of Woolf’s short stories shows that they cannot be reduced to the generic features they display since Woolf’s formal choices exceed aesthetics and branch out into politics and ethics. Like Flaubert, she makes the choice of the ordinary and the anonymous, retrieving in a democratic impulse the voice of the voiceless. Through its refashioning of norms that realise new possibilities, through its openness to the other and to other genres, her short story writing displays an ethical commitment and results in ‘a form without formalism,’ to use Attridge’s own words (Attridge 2004, 119).33 Reactivating the etymological sense of commitment (‘bringing together’), Woolf’s commitment is neither action nor direct protest but connection, connecting as it does aesthetics with politics and ethics. The paradigm of modernism that equates modernist literature with an intransitive use of language, a pure and autonomous form of art, is thus questioned unless we remember with Rancière that in the word autonomy, ‘the Greek nomos has a plurality of meanings [referring] not only [to] the law but [to] the sharing on which it is based, and the melody, the song of the community on which it is grounded.’34 Autonomy would then read as an oxymoron referring both to its own law and to a law founded on sharing and the community. In other words, autonomy would meet commitment.