Radical Impersonality: From Aesthetics to Politics in the Work of Virginia Woolf

1Virginia Woolf’s essential feminist goal in A Room of One’s Own—‘the development by the average woman of a prose style completely expressive of her mind’1—suggests her fundamental aesthetic position as well. Throughout the work Woolf emphasizes that a successful work of art must issue into the world ‘whole and entire.’ (51) Woolf seems to suggest that books are conceived as complete entities in the mind of the writer. They gestate, develop, and are hoisted into the world as newborn births. Ideally, the work is robust and healthy. Ideally it is both a unique and authentic creation of the author’s mind and yet simultaneously an autonomous being, free from its parent’s whims or prejudices, and, in that sense, holistically complete.

2But Woolf’s prognosis for the successful birth of prose is dismal. Most novels, as she puts it, ‘come to grief’ somewhere. They are failures, ‘deformed’ and ‘disfigured’ births. (50) ‘[T]o write a work of genius is almost always a feat of prodigious difficulty,’ she tells us. ‘Everything is against the likelihood that it will come from the writer’s mind whole and entire.’ (51) Woolf therefore spends much of A Room of One’s Own detailing the formidable foes of practical logistics and material circumstances, culminating in her famous thesis that a woman must have 500 pounds a year and a room of her own to write fiction at all. But Woolf’s greater interest seems to be the immaterial factors that inhibit the successful birth of a work of art—factors which Woolf claims are more daunting than even the 500 a year and finding a room with a lock on the door. (52) Chief amongst these immaterial enemies is emotion itself.

3Despite Woolf’s advice that the most important thing is to be oneself, and despite her emphasis on unmitigated truth in writing, we find no call for emotional honesty in A Room of One’s Own. Woolf represents emotion as something exterior and threatening to the authentic self, calling it an ‘alien’ power which ‘disturbs’ the mind of the writer. Emotion is an insidious force which infects the writer’s psyche, and, by extension, the writer’s work. The inchoate work, like a fetus in the womb, is subject to the same maladies as its parent. If the mind of the writer is disturbed the work will necessarily ‘show traces of that disturbance’; if it is poisoned with alien emotions, the work, too, will be poisoned.

4These obstetric metaphors are crucial to understanding Woolf’s aesthetic. Hers is an organic philosophy of art, which sees writing as a living entity and represents it in terms of gestation, birth, growth, vitality, and successful—or, in many instances, unsuccessful—maturation. Passion is a force which inhibits rather than inspires the artist; that destroys rather than sparks creation. While it should be noted that Woolf speaks only of the negative manifestations of passion—anger, rancor, bitterness—her nonfiction suggests that she sees any focus on the emotive self, any form of personal writing which seeks to express private feelings and grievances, as doomed to failure. The writer cannot write of his or her personal battles; rather, she must perform a sort of midwifery for the work of art to enter the world whole and entire, to achieve the ultimate twin goals of autonomy and aesthetic longevity.

5In a diary entry dated November 18, 1924, Woolf clearly confessed her attitude toward emotion in writing: ‘if one lets the mind run loose it becomes egotistic, personal, which I detest.’2 Herbert Marder quotes Woolf as saying that there is ‘nothing so much to be dreaded as egotism.’3 Clearly, Woolf’s attitude has affinities with her contemporaries: we hear echoes of moderns from T. S. Eliot in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ to the New Critics’ condemnation of the authorial fallacy to Wallace Stevens’ directive ‘it must be abstract.’ For Woolf, the term ‘personal’ shades into narcissism; to indulge personal motives was to give in to a dangerous impulse to self-aggrandizement—dangerous because it threatens the integrity of the work of art itself, its autonomous existence as an artifact in the world, a ‘well-wrought urn.’ When Woolf says she detests personal writing, she means that she detests the ego that seems to loom over the page and cast everything else in shadow. Indeed, the metaphor of an obliterating shadow cast upon the page is one Woolf takes up in A Room of One’s Own: the shadow, she tells us, resembles something like an enormous capital letter ‘I.’ In the face of such totalizing egoism, everything else is ‘as shapeless as mist.’ (99) Like a sort of intellectual black hole, the ego that falls across the page effectively subsumes the finer points of the art. But once again it is the organic metaphor that best makes Woolf’s point: ‘Partly because of the dominance of the letter “I” and the aridity, which, like a giant beech tree, it casts within its shade. Nothing will grow there.’ (100) Personal writing, then, is barren writing, which either inhibits the work at its seminal stage, stunts its maturation in the mind of the writer, or causes disfigurement at birth.

6Woolf provides specific examples of gifted writers whose potentially brilliant work suffered aesthetic deformity. The 16th-century poet Lady Winchilsea’s work is marred by anger: ‘[her mind] is harassed and distracted by hates and grievances.’ (59) ‘[C]ould she have freed her mind from hate and fear and not heaped it with bitterness and resentment,’ Woolf concludes, she may have actualized the genius within her. An even more potent example is Charlotte Brontë. Although Woolf judges Brontë to have more innate talent than even Jane Austen, Woolf insists that Brontë’s unharnessed emotion thwarted the free expression of her own genius:

if one reads [Brontë’s words] over and marks that jerk in them, that indignation, one sees that she will never get her genius expressed whole and entire. Her books will be deformed and twisted. She will write in a rage when she should write calmly. She will write rashly when she should write wisely. She will write of herself when she should write of her characters. (69-70)

7Writing ‘in a rage,’ writing ‘rashly,’ writing of herself—that is, emotion, impetuousness, egotism—are Brontë’s cardinal sins. ‘[I]t is clear that anger was tampering with the integrity of Charlotte Brontë the novelist,’ Woolf declares, ‘... Her imagination swerved from indignation and we feel it swerve.’ (73) Raw emotion—anger—tampered with Brontë’s integrity, a crucial virtue in Woolf’s aesthetic: ‘What one means by integrity in the case of the novelist, is the conviction that he gives one that this is the truth.’ (72) Woolf directly opposes the ‘white light of truth’ to the ‘red light of emotion.’ (34) Her description of Brontë’s writing has all the heat and passion of the red light of emotion: indeed, she contends that Brontë’s rancor, her ‘buried suffering,’ (73) smoulders under her work and ultimately consumes it.

8Woolf’s use of the white light imagery, which we find again in Three Guineas where it is called ‘the white light of fact,’ is not only unemotional but anti-emotion, prizing the dispassionate, the disinterested. And the cool, clean, white light image is consistent with Woolf’s ultimate artistic virtue—incandescence.4 ‘[T]he mind of an artist,’ Woolf writes in A Room of One’s Own, ‘in order to achieve the prodigious effort of freeing whole and entire the work that is in him, must be incandescent... There must be no obstacle in it, no foreign matter unconsumed.’ (56)

9Woolf offers Shakespeare as the exemplar of the incandescent mind. Perhaps I should say she offers his work as the exemplary model, because, as Woolf points out, we actually know little of Shakespeare the man. For Woolf, this anonymity stands indeed as his prime asset. ‘The reason perhaps why we know so little of Shakespeare... is that his grudges and spites and antipathies are hidden from us.’ (56) With nothing to stand in the way, with no looming capital ‘I’ to cast his creation in the shadow of his own ego, Shakespeare’s poetry ‘flows from him free and unimpeded.’ (57)

10Of course, as the chapter on Shakespeare’s imagined sister famously argues, Shakespeare had not only incomparably greater material advantages than his female contemporaries, but also immeasurably superior immaterial circumstances—and therefore there was far less ‘foreign matter,’ far less potentially detrimental bitterness—for him to consume or exorcise. Women writers, Woolf contends, have always been ‘snubbed, slapped, lectured and exhorted,’ (55) and it is this reality which has fostered those alien emotions of which she warns—the anger and bitterness that threatens the integrity of their work, which disfigures their creations and prevents them from achieving artistic greatness. Clearly, such thwarted artists have a reason to be angry. And yet Woolf admonishes that such emotion—justifiable though it may be—must be excised if one is to write. The red light of emotion must be cooled, converted to the white light of truth. Woolf therefore demands both an artistic impersonality—and, quoting Coleridge, an intellectual androgyny—of any potential writer.5

11Woolf’s discussion of the androgynous mind again makes use of her organic, biological, and procreative metaphors for the production of art: ‘Some collaboration has to take place in the mind between the woman and the man before the act of creation can be accomplished. Some marriage of opposites has to be consummated.’ (104) ‘The writer... must lie back and let his mind celebrate its nuptials in darkness.’ (104) Impersonal and androgynous writing ‘explodes and gives birth to all kinds of other ideas.’ (101) Indeed, this vital writing has ‘the secret of perpetual life,’ germinating in minds over many generations. These images which characterize the androgynous mind and the impersonal writer—images of sexual unity, of consummation, of natural creation, germination, and growth—stand in opposition to pointedly personal, political, or conspicuously gendered writing—all of which Woolf associates with deformity and death. Woolf’s terms are specific and unequivocal: ‘it is fatal for any one who writes to think of their sex,’ she argues. (104) Sentences written with only one side of the brain, with what Woolf terms a ‘conscious bias,’ ‘fall[] plump to the ground—dead.’ (101) Thinking of one’s sex amounts to thinking of any other personal agenda, and ‘[i]t is fatal for a woman to lay the least stress on any grievance; to plead even with justice any cause.’ (104) Again, the private grievance, the upswell of emotion, the temptation to egotism, will cripple or kill the work of art as it was meant to be in its purest conception.

12Women writers then, must write as women, but as women who have forgotten that they are women. While many critics have been troubled by this claim, finding it a contradictory point in Woolf’s argument, the statement actually suggests a crucial point of intersection between Woolf’s aesthetic and political views. Just as women writers must paradoxically put aside their grievances as women to achieve a fully matured woman’s voice in their writing, an artist must in effect forget social realities in order to change them. When writing such an artist must not be fueled by indignation at political realities; she must think only of the work of art, of ‘the thing itself.’ Woolf therefore explicitly cautions against ‘protest writing,’ because such writing is born out of and necessarily impaired by heightened emotion; it is ‘impeded and inhibited and self-conscious.’ (101) The flaw at the center of such work is a failure not of social but of artistic integrity, an inability to think of ‘the thing itself,’ to prioritize artistic creation over social obligation. (74) Aesthetic success can indeed influence political reality, but not because, as Shelley would have it, poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. One can exert an influence on the ways of the world but only if it is a ‘disinterested influence.’ For Woolf, it is not what the artist says but the act of artistic creation itself that wields the power to change social and political realities.

13A courageous integrity is required to think only of one’s artistic vision, to birth it whole and entire, without being swayed by emotion, without being influenced by ‘snubs and chidings’ on the one hand, and ‘promises of prizes’ on the other. (75) These are themes explored at length in Woolf’s 1938 Three Guineas, a work which takes as its primary topic the prevention of war, rather than the creation of a prose style fully expressive of one’s mind, clearly a political rather than an aesthetic theme.6 Yet this shift emphasizes the crucial point—that for Woolf, the two themes are not unrelated, and the obstacles to the achievement of each goal are indeed the same. In each case, ego and emotion are the mortal enemies; the same forces which damage art also predispose men to war. Woolf takes pains to show that medals, decorations and titles, the same forces that could cajole a writer and ruin her work also ‘rouse competition and jealousy... emotions which have their share in encouraging a disposition towards war.’ (138)7

14Three Guineas is Woolf’s longest and most detailed defense of this thesis, but it is in the brief ‘Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid,’ an essay heretofore largely ignored by critics, that we find the culmination of Woolf’s ideas on these matter and an explicit connection between her views on art and her views on war.8 In this work, the stakes have been raised: written during August of 1940, the work suggest Woolf’s extensive first-hand experience with the dangers and devastation of war. Residing at Monk’s House in Rodmell that summer, Woolf could hear the Luftwaffe overhead each night and establishes this terrifying experience as the central trope of the essay.9 Indeed, the conceit of the work gives us a writer’s thoughts as though an air raid is actually underway: these are thoughts in an air raid. From the first lines of the essay, Woolf directs our attention to the destructive emotion she had warned against in her earlier work, most particularly, fear. The essay begins: ‘The Germans were over this house last night and the night before that. Here they are again. It is a queer experience, lying in the dark and listening to the zoom of a hornet, which may at any moment sting you to death.’ (154) Woolf’s authorial approach not only effectively conveys the illusion that she is writing during an actual air raid, but it also attempts to put the reader in that frightening circumstance. Woolf makes use of this strategy throughout the essay, as present tense interjections interrupt the flow of her writing with nearly palpable reminders of the ongoing Blitz. We hear the drones of the planes; ‘bombs drop,’ ‘windows rattle.’ These sounds of war reach their highest pitch in the eighth paragraph, where: ‘The sound of sawing overhead has increased. All the searchlights are erect. They point at a spot exactly above this roof. At any moment a bomb may fall on this very room. One, two, three, four, five, six.’ (156)

15Trailing off with ellipses, Woolf forces us as readers to wait with her. She creates the very suspense she seeks to represent. And that suspense is precisely her subject—the suspense that fosters destructive emotion, and suspends more productive thoughts in a helpless, anticipatory palsy. ‘During those moments of suspense all thinking stopped,’ she contends. ‘All feeling, save one dull dread, ceased.’ (157) Woolf’s construction gives the reader the briefest taste of the paralyzing fear and dread that millions felt on a nightly basis during the war. More to the point, it serves to demonstrate—and intensify—an essential theme that implicitly connects this work back to her earlier writing in A Room of One’s Own. While Woolf warns in A Room of One’s Own that emotion will deform a work of art, she contends in ‘Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid’ that emotion can utterly obliterate the ability to create, resulting in complete creative sterility.10 While Woolf’s writing in the essay does convey the imminent danger of the bombers, then, it also conveys the more insidious resulting danger—the dominance of paralyzing emotion during wartime and the threat that poses to art. Woolf likens the experience to a ‘nail fix[ing] the whole being to one hard board.’ (157) Returning to the metaphors of fertility she had established in A Room of One’s Own, Woolf declares again that ‘[t]he emotion of fear and hate is therefore sterile, unfertile.’ (sic)11

16But, we might argue, far from paralyzing the citizens of Britain, the emotions of fear and anger might serve to catalyze their support of the war effort against the Germans. Like A Room of One’s Own, ‘Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid,’ penned for an American symposium on women’s issues, is also intended for a female audience. And as early as the second paragraph, Woolf directly addresses the pervasive attitudes of the period toward women and their roles in the war:

Arms are not given to Englishwoman either to fight the enemy or defend herself. She must lie weaponless tonight. Yet if she believes that the fight going on up in the sky is a fight by the English to protect freedom, by the Germans to destroy freedom, she must fight, so far as she can, on the side of the English. How far can she fight for freedom without firearms? By making arms, or clothes, or food. (154)

17British propaganda tells her she must do what she can to make arms, and clothes, and food. But Woolf proposes an alternative to the direct political involvement the government advocates and in so doing maintains her emphasis on natural, organic responses to calls for emotion: ‘There is another way of fighting for freedom without arms: we can fight with the mind. We can make ideas.’ (154) Here Woolf proposes intellectual production in place of material fabrication. Woolf argues that women’s best weapons are their capable minds, and the best use for those weapons is not an emotional pledge to the war effort, but an impersonal, incandescent return to the fashioning of art and ideas.

18Certainly, this is an iconoclastic position. Woolf calls on women to ignore the ‘loudspeakers’ which held a frightened people in its thrall. But Woolf’s notion of radical impersonality and creativity had been iconoclastic from the first, as evidenced not only by her claims in A Room of One’s Own but also in her very manner of writing.12 Here again in ‘Thoughts on Peace’ Woolf quotes Blake who ‘will not cease from the mental fight,’ and reminds her audience that the ‘mental fight means thinking against the current, not with it.’ (155) But this necessitates both ignoring the loudspeakers, and, an even more difficult task, resisting one’s own emotive response to the war, allowing once again the white light of truth to usurp the red light of emotion. Though here she does not use the term, Woolf is again calling for incandescent minds to think the world out of war.

19The ‘loudspeakers’ to which Woolf refers, of course, are both literally the technical devices used to project news and propaganda and those men in power who are in fact loud speakers who drown out dissenting voices. In this way they are the aural equivalent of the looming letter ‘I’ she found objectionable in fiction: the force of emotive ego, casting all else in shadow, creating an arid climate in which nothing will grow—neither art nor peace.

20Understandably, the loudspeakers cry out univocally against Hitler. But Woolf employs rhetorical questions to demonstrate that Hitler is not merely a person but a force, not just a ‘who’ but a ‘what.’ ‘Who is Hitler?’ She asks, ‘What is he?’ (155) Her answer: ‘Aggressiveness, tyranny, the insane love of power made manifest’—a motley assemblage of pernicious emotions. But Woolf contends that Englishmen are just as vulnerable to these emotions as the Germans. The evil of Hitler, then, is both more diffuse and widespread than the English would have it. In fact, this essay, like Three Guineas before it, broadens fascism to link it with ever-pervasive sexism: both operate on the philosophy of domination; both are fueled by malignant emotion. Quoting Lady Astor, Woolf contends that ‘women of ability... are held down by a sub-conscious Hitlerism in the hearts of men’ everywhere. (155) The capacity for tyranny and aggression, then, knows no national boundaries. But Woolf goes one step farther, arguing that such a capacity not only exists on her native soil, but has deliberately been fostered there; that the ancient instincts of power lust, domination, anger, have been preserved and cherished by education and tradition. Woolf incorporates another quotation to support her position, this time the words of a young English soldier from the first World War: ‘To fight against a real enemy, to earn undying honour and glory by shooting total strangers, and to come home with my breast covered with medals and decorations that was the summit of my hope... It was for this that my whole life so far had been dedicated, my education, training, everything.’ (156)

21The men at war, then, are not so different from the male writers to which Woolf objects in A Room of One’s Own, not so different from any writer whose personal pride or personal grievance interferes with creativity. Egotism, fostered by tradition, both inhibits the organic production of art and creates in men the need for recognition and decorations, catapulting them into wars in search of heroic acclaim.

22Given this reality, Woolf argues, it is not true that the English are free, nor will they be even if victory is achieved in the war. ‘In the face of these words,’ Woolf challenges, ‘do the current thinkers honestly believe that by writing “Disarmament” on a sheet of paper at a conference table they will have done all that is needful?’ (156) Clearly, Woolf believes such action will result in merely a titular and ineffective peace. Her belief is that we cannot fight for freedom until we have freed ourselves from destructive emotion itself. Only a sort of egoless renunciation of such emotion, and of the tradition which has privileged it, will work to free men. They must ‘create more honourable activities for those who try to conquer within themselves their fighting instinct, their subconscious Hitlerism.’ (156) What is to replace those instincts and emotions? What can compensate the man for the loss of his gun, for his emotive need for aggression? For Woolf, only ‘access to the creative feelings.’ Yet again, Woolf looks to creativity to conquer egoism and emotion. Only creativity can counter destruction; impersonality quell emotion. Any creative efforts at all (Woolf offers recollections of a summer listening to Wagner or scraps of favorite lines of poetry) offer rejuvenation from the complete paralysis of the ‘dull dread’ created by war. For Woolf, even the memory of art is ‘more positive, reviving, healing, and creative’ than the sterile emotions of fear and hate. (157)

23Once more Woolf returns to the familiar metaphors she had developed in A Room of One’s Own, which, significantly, are juxtaposed with the mechanized images she employs to represent the soldier’s enslavement throughout ‘Thoughts on Peace.’ Indeed, Woolf contends that through ‘access to the creative feelings’ the soldier must be liberated from ‘the machine.’ Woolf’s diction emphasizes the harsh mechanization of modern warfare by incorporating sawing, rattling, stinging. These images are contrasted with the ‘natural sounds of the country’ at the end of the essay, associated with artistic creativity, and, ultimately, with peace. (157) In the final paragraph Woolf’s peaceful organic descriptions prevail: the falling bombs have been replaced with an apple which ‘thuds to the ground,’ the zoom of a fighter plane gives way to the hoot of an owl, winging its way from tree to tree. (157) Even the German pilot, shot down in the countryside, is described as a ‘potential seed.’ The world at the conclusion of the essay has literally become fruitful, has endured and overcome the sterility of negative emotion. And, most significantly for Woolf, such a world, in its natural, almost Edenic state is also an Adamic state in which man can name, can write, can produce art. This was perhaps Woolf’s most desperate and heartfelt wish amid the destruction of her world in 1940. And though she was to commit suicide only nine months after penning the essay, its existence suggests one last small but significant victory in favor of her holistic aesthetic, in favor of perennial creation over the destruction of war.