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    Plan détaillé Texte intégral The Garden in the mirror The lady and her private domain A modernist garden Bibliographie Notes de bas de page Auteur

    Le jardin et ses mythes aux États-Unis et en Grande-Bretagne

    Ce livre est recensé par

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    Table des matières

    The Strangeness of Phenomenology in a Modernist Garden, Reflecting on the Short Story. “The Lady in the Looking Glass: A Reflection” by Virginia Woolf

    Jacques Sohier

    p. 147-163

    Texte intégral The Garden in the mirror The lady and her private domain A modernist garden Bibliographie Notes de bas de page Auteur

    Texte intégral

    1The short story “The lady in the looking-glass: a Reflection” by Virginia Woolf was published in Harper’s Magazine in December 19291. The editor of The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf contextualises the inception of the short story. When Virginia Woolf visited her friend Ethel Smyth in Normandy she was intrigued by the fact that her friend did not look at her letters. Virginia Woolf wondered what this might imply. We will not be interested in what Henry James called this putting of people into books, but on the other hand, the fact that the letters are left unopened is a stimulating detail that found its way in this short story. We intend to explore this short story by reflecting on its numerous details from a phenomenological approach. On the face of it, it is a short story that has little intrigue to it as it is the narrative of a few hours in the life of Isabella Tyson, a spinster of fifty-five or sixty. She is depicted as looking after her garden, but the writing of the story displaces the traditional signposts of realism and insubstantiate them to offer a problematic portrait of a lady.

    2As the garden the lady is looking after is reflected in a mirror that stands in the hall of her house we will consider from a phenomenological point of view the entanglement of meaning in the different levels of reality that are rife with complex worlds. The analysis of these aspects will be our first point. Then, we will concentrate on the garden as it gradually takes on a symbolical dimension disclosing different modalities of being expressed through the secret garden of the lady. The intimacy of this lady is questioned as the essence of objects perceived in the garden and reflected in the looking-glass takes on strange aspects. The myth of the garden as a private sphere where being can reflect on itself ends up by dissolving into an uncanny void. This void will be correlated to modernism as seen by Virginia Woolf.

    The Garden in the mirror

    3Strangely enough, the protagonist who is named Isabella Tyson makes her appearance on the scene when the short story is already well under way. We will see in the second part all the attributes and quality this character has, but for the time being let us comment on the mediation of narrative information by an impersonal narrator that gives to the short story a unity which, at first sight in any case, corresponds to the requirements of phenomenology. This science means to clarify the sense of this world which everyone accepts as existing. We are meant to suspend belief in what we take ordinarily for granted. In many ways we take this world for granted and thus a so called “eidetic” reduction is needed to peal away the unnecessary layers. This reducing or “bracketing away” the question of existence in order to get at the “thing itself” is at the heart of phenomenology. The ways in which we experience things can become clear as daylight. We can encounter things “as they are in themselves” as Edmund Husserl says2.

    4Thus we first come against the presence of a long mirror that hangs in the hall and reflects the garden outside: “From the depths of the sofa in the drawing-room one could see reflected in the Italian glass not only the marble-topped table opposite, but a stretch of the garden beyond. One could see a long grass path leading between banks of tall flowers until, slicing off an angle, the gold rim cut it off3”. The repetition of the indefinite pronoun “one” in “one could see” constitutes a point of intentionality that perceives the world and conveys it to the reader without psychologising the perception in any way. The uncanny “slicing off an angle” and “the gold rim cutting off” the rest of the garden are similar to the bracketing of an object to perform what Husserl calls “epochè”.

    5The best instance of bracketing or disconnecting occurs when a great black form is reflected in the mirror and all meaning seems to founder as all views become drowned in a frightful blackness:

    “Suddenly these reflections were ended violently and yet without a sound. A large black form loomed in the looking-glass; blotted out everything, strewed the table with a packet of marble tablets veined with pink and grey, and was gone. But the picture was entirely altered. For the moment it was unrecognisable and irrational and entirely out of focus. One could not relate these tablets to any human purpose. And then by degree some logical process set to work on them and began ordering and arranging them and bringing them into the fold of common experience. One realised at last that they were letters. The man had brought the post4.”

    6Here we are given the impression that the mirror itself opens up or discloses the larger environment to encompass sociality coming into actuality in a vaguely threatening way. Because of this potential threat to the surface we cannot surely turn Virginia Woolf into a “pure” phenomenologist who would let the worldly go away in order to inhabit what is left of it. Nevertheless, the perception has a strange phenomenological quality. The outside world that is reflected is still perceived by a mediating conscience that is able to appreciate the sudden change in the reflection as “violent”, which Edmund Husserl would find as a term highly psychological as it connotes the forceful intrusion into the sphere of the mirror.

    7In any case, the alteration in the reflection is described as sudden, soundless and emptying the reflecting surface of all its habitual powers of reflecting, “blotting out everything” as a blotter would absorb a liquid. What is foregrounded is the gradual coming into focus of the objects perceived. Perception moves from invisibility and chaos, to visibility but with a disruption of the good distance to see and identify phenomena properly. When things are brought into sharp focus, simultaneously a cognitive process is set in motion and this reorders the world into meaningful patterns. It is a somewhat typical example of delayed decoding when objects are not seen all at once but come to make sense gradually. In this case, there is the added twist that this intruding force is masculine. We will later comment on this violent intrusion of the postman who is in fact not directly and simply “a postman” but rather “a man with letters” or to quote from the text, “the man had brought the post”.

    8What we experience in the reading is that with Virginia Woolf it is never a simple task to disentangle completely the value-judgment she suggests through her telling details from the pure and bare phenomena. There are always subtle immixtions, disorientation and entanglements between objects and the worlds she depicts depending on the angles the objects are viewed from. To approach things in themselves, Virginia Woolf invites the reader to identify with the naturalist and behave “like one of those naturalists who, covered with grass and leaves, lie watching the shyest animals—badgers, otters, kingfishers—moving about freely, themselves unseen5”. The comparison implicitly drawn between an abstract intentionality and that of a naturalist highlights both an amusing and fearful aspect. When another external point of view intervenes like that of the reader embracing both the naturalist and the shy animals, it is not the free animals one tends to see so much as the camouflaging as well as the hidden position of the naturalist all intent on what comes into his field of vision. This description suggests the dimension of a gaze keen on seeing without being seen. It is the position of a voyeur that is evoked and as all readers tend to be voyeurs themselves being led up the garden path by devious writers, we could say we have come full circle caught up in the reflexivity of the short story.

    9Another way to sidestep this self-reflexivity is to follow Virginia Woolf’s ways and to see the world laterally by intensifying the exchanges of qualities between worlds. Instead of bracketing the external world in pure phenomenological fashion, which she does to some extent, Virginia Woolf sees objects in terms that belong to another world. The lights and shadows for example acquire the living grace of ballet dancers, “they came pirouetting across the floor, stepping delicately with high lifting feet and spread tails and pecking allusive beaks as if they had been cranes or flocks of elegant flamingoes whose pink was faded, or peacocks whose trains were veined with silver6”. Shadows become dancers who in their turn by the miracle of an “as if” are then metamorphosed into colourful birds that nature has meant to be seen, perhaps to instil fear in the lookers-on as is the case with the trains of peacocks full of innumerable eyes.

    10At other moments the world darkens and takes on marine qualities through the magic trigger of the “as if” again, “as if a cuttlefish had suddenly suffused the air with purple”. At other times, the room itself is given affects. Since a room has become an objective correlative of a human subject, expressing the personality of the subject, the solution is to change the perspective. Instead of showing a character having tantrums in a room, it is more suggestive to displace the affects from the character to the room itself, “the room had its passions and rages and envies and sorrows coming over it and clouding it, like a human being”. However, the estrangement from reality is never complete as the reader never loses sight of a common ground through the simile.

    11There is a strong current of entwining and admixing of properties that gives a powerful poetic unity to the text. The room is “like a human being” while the lady herself is compared to her room, “her mind was like her room, in which lights advanced and retreated, came pirouetting and stepping delicately”. Of course, this poetical way of looking at the world can have its intoxicating writerly effects. When the lady is perceived in her garden, tending her flowers the flowers themselves rather monstrously tend to displace the lady herself:

    “She had gone presumably in to the lower garden to pick flowers; or as it seemed more natural to suppose, to pick something light and fantastic and leafy and trailing, traveller’s joy, or one of those elegant sprays of convolvulus that twine round ugly walls and burst here and there into white and violet blossoms. She suggested the fantastic and the tremulous convolvulus rather than the upright aster, the starched zinnia, or her own burning roses alight like lamps on the straight posts of their rose trees7.”

    12The comparison is so abstract that the suggestion tends to detract the reader from constructing a representation. Saying that the lady “suggested the fantastic and tremulous convolvulus” amounts to dissolve the qualities of the lady in a luxuriating imagination that depicts a metamorphosis. The narrative voice seems to be carried away with the power of the logos. We have come to the side of an unreasonable excess in the way the imagination is governed. Phenomenologically, the “noematic core”, what Husserl calls the “ideal essence” of the perceived object, the object to which the meaning refers, is lost sight of in a prolixity of compared objects. Different flowers with their own characteristics have come to usurp the “noesis” of the object, its real character.

    13Nevertheless, the flowers have their own language. They come to mean in unexpected ways. The expression “rather than” implies that the characteristics of the convolvulus “rather than” the zinnia or the aster or the roses cannot completely negate the flowers that are in the background. Theses flowers are associated with adjectives that connote not only physical but moral aspects. “Upright”, “starched” have both connotations implying righteous ness and snobbery, or in any case, a buttoned-up bearing complicated with straightlaced demeanour. Of course, the descriptive element, “her own burning roses”, shifts the perspective as it conjures up the image of a flame-like spirit with perhaps some presumptuousness. As a powerful metamorphosis is given free play by the narrative voice the qualities of Isabella Tyson tend to disrupt the work of elaboration by the reader rather than to facilitate it.

    14The lexis “fantastic and tremulous” makes things even more problematic for the reader as the adjectives tend towards vagueness. The adjective “fantastic” deliberately means we have entered another world that has little connection with the down-to-earth reality of concrete objecthood. And the term “tremulous” fails somewhat in its evocative quality when it is referred to a human subject, but it does concern the writing itself as it defines a wave-like succession of descriptive attempts that are in the end unsatisfactory, from the point of view of ontology. The description of the lady intensifies a vagueness that is meant to articulate the impossibility to define with any accuracy a human subject, what is later called in the short story “the woman herself”.8 Nevertheless, this writerly task has its captivating moments for the reader. We shall now try to see how Virginia Woolf manages to deal with this impossibility to get at the heart of things in themselves.

    The lady and her private domain

    15By placing the character in a garden of which she is the gardener, Virginia Woolf firmly correlates the two, the garden and the lady. Simultaneously, the writer performs a God-like gesture reminiscent of the Greek God Momus. According to Greek mythology, Momus was the god of censure and mockery. This last aspect should not be underestimated. Momus requested Jupiter that he should place a mirror in the heart of humans and that he should make a little door in their breast, in such a way that their true disposition and secret thoughts would be visible to all. Virginia Woolf is like Momus intent on being able to see the mystery at the heart of being and to provide the reader with an insider’s view of the lady’s private domain, but it is the mirror that becomes the privileged means by which the operation of seeing is carried out.

    16Thus, the reflection of the garden that is cut off by the rim of the mirror, “slicing off an angle, the gold rim cut it off”, implies that the portrait of this lady will of necessity be fragmentary. Likewise, the proliferating description of the flowers detracts from the essential that would enable the reader to pronounce a “this is it”. There is no “it” for the reader’s to grasp, no “real thing”, no “noematic sense”, but rather a complexity of an impossible centre of consciousness to imagine.

    17Virginia Woolf seems to lead phenomenology into a strange landscape as essences are repeatedly donated to the reader to be undercut in the same breath. For example, the flowers meant to express some characteristics of Isabella Tyson are in the end recognized as too analogical, “such comparisons are worse than idle and superficial—they are cruel even, for they come like the convolvulus itself trembling between one’s eyes and the truth”. A dual discourse constantly accompanies the descriptions. As the reader is carried away by the prolific imagination, he, or she of course, is brought back to the phenomenological act of the imagination. And this imagination by proxy is strangely moralising in tone. Comparisons are judged as “idle”, “superficial” and “cruel”. This curtness in tone amounts to saying that we are utterly wrong in our constructions of meaning based on an unreasonable distance from the object. Partial syntheses or hasty conclusions prove unsatisfactory in the end.

    18Although such imaginary constructions may be wrong it is never completely wrong as they can always be submitted to a constant process of revision and correction. In her writing style, Virginia Woolf repeatedly embraces several levels of being that are therefore intricated with different levels of reality. That makes for a complex portrait of being. Seemingly the mirror stands for the world of the universal essences, essences that are unchanging and invariable:

    “But, outside, the looking-glass reflected the hall table, the sunflowers, the garden path so accurately and so fixedly that they seemed held there in their reality unescapably. It was a strange contrast—all changing here, all stillness there9.”

    19The extraposition of the adverb “outside” at the beginning of the sentence is interesting. When according to all appearances the looking-glass is situated in the hall of an old country house this mention of an “outside” inside the house, points to the central role imparted to the world of essences. These essences are “fixed” as they belong to the world of immortality, “in the looking-glass things had ceased to breathe and lay still in the trance of immortality”. This last expression, “the trance of immortality”, nicely reconnects the world of the living with that of the ideal essences. As they are reflected in the mirror, the letters received by the protagonist also become “fixed”, “they [the letters] seemed to have become not merely a handful of casual letters but to be tablets graven with eternal truth—if one could read them, one would know everything there was to known about Isabella, yes, about life, too. The pages inside those marble-looking envelopes must be cut deep and scored thick with meaning10”. On this side of the world, the absolute is complete and replete with “eternal truth”. Absolute consciousness and knowledge of life are written in the ever-lasting materiality of the stone, or of pure phenomenology. On that other side of the same world, which is still “outside”, there are all the aspects that belong to the living unity of the stream of consciousness which is full of particulars.

    20It is in the sphere of the particular that we can best imagine the fictional character, Isabella Tyson, and connect the facta to the ficta, as Husserl might put it. One can associate the facts given in the short story to the ficta, elements like the flowers that captivate the imagination. In her portrait Virginia Woolf proceeds by dismissing facts which have always been a trompe-l’oeil for her, “As for facts, it was a fact that she was a spinster; that she was rich; that she had bought this house and collected with her own hands—often in the most obscure corners of the world and at great risk from poisonous stings and Oriental diseases—the rugs, the chairs, the cabinets which now lived their nocturnal life before one’s eyes11”. This factuality is transcended by the facticity that belongs to “the shared world”. We are never shown the character directly in relation with others, but her thoughts show she is concerned with others:

    “She was thinking, perhaps, that she must order a new net for the strawberries; that she must send flowers to Johnston’s widow; that it was time she drove over to see the Hippesleys in their new house. Those were the things she talked about at dinner certainly. But one was tired of the things that she talked about at dinner. It was her profounder state of being that one wanted to catch and turn to words, the state that is to the mind what breathing is to the body, what one calls happiness or unhappiness12.”

    21The being-in-the-world of this elusive character shows she is not only concerned with her own world, but more generally with the Mitwelt, the world where one finds oneself with others. Concern is shown about covering her strawberries with a net. The juicy fruits are to be protected from the ravenousness of the birds that might leave nothing to a meal. This is a basic form of concern for the world but one that has still an importance and a dignity, from the point of view of transcendental phenomenology in any case.

    22But other aspects are summarily dealt with as if there dwelt in the wider sociality what Heidegger has called an “inauthenticity” encouraging the forgetting of being, “one was tired of the things she talked at dinner”. The narrative voice is again formulating a value-judgment on conversations that Virginia Woolf always loved but found somewhat impure because of the ambiguous roles speakers can assume. Here however, it is the value of speech itself that comes in for censure. Speech, or the things one might say at dinner, fail to conjure up the essence of being in any way.

    23Nevertheless, the Mitwelt reveals the concerns Isabella Tyson has for others. Going to see the Hippeleys’ new house means she has an interest in the well-being of others while the flowers sent to Johnson’s widow show compassion of course, but it is a way to mark the belonging to a common humanity. The two modals “must” indicate not only that one is prone to forgetting things but reveals a “devotion” to the world. In one case, the semantic value of the “must” refers to the rituals surrounding death and the survivers. It is a “deontic” modal since it is the nature of a moral obligation to express one’s sorrow and sympathy at somebody’s death. On the other hand, the second “must” is an epistemological modal meaning that something needs to be done urgently to save the strawberries from being eaten up.

    24These descriptions are realistic sign-posts. They tend to authenticate the density of this character by showing the ways she is present to the world. It is Virginia Woolf’s manner of integrating in her narrative levels of reality, those closely belonging to the self of the subject, to her homeworld, as well as those that belong to the wider circles of the lifeworld. As the narrator points out, “it was her profounder state of being that one wanted to catch and turn to words”. Virginia Woolf strives to catch the inner, the essence of being by providing the reader with several outlines of this character that tend to accumulate as the elaboration proceeds.

    25In this process of construction of a hypothetical being, the profounder state is perhaps reached when it is the experience of the being-towards-death that is described when she is in her garden looking after it:

    “Avenues of pleasure radiated this way and that from where she stood with her scissors raised to cut the trembling branches while the lacy clouds veiled her face. Here with a quick movement of her scissors she snipped the spray of traveller’s joy and it fell to the ground. As it fell surely some light came in too, surely one could penetrate a little further into her being. Her mind was then filled with tenderness and regret… To cut an overgrown branch saddened her because it had once lived, and life was dear to her. Yes, and at the same time the fall of the branch would suggest to her how she must die herself and all the futility and evanescence of things […]. If fall she must, it was to lie on the earth and moulder sweetly into the roots of violets. So she stood thinking13.”

    26On the face of it this “mouldering” of being sounds morbid and conjures up undercurrents of melancholia in the Victorian poetry. But this experience of mortality by Isabella Tyson contributes above all to this portrait of a lady. Some light does come in as the character is shown in the grip of anxiety. She is present to herself as she stands thinking about her death but absent to the world. This is a moment of disclosure of truth, of existence, when being and the world are disunited. As Heidegger puts it: “In anxiety, Dasein find itself faced with the nothingness of the possible impossibility of its existence. Anxiety is anxious about the potentiality-of-being of the being thus determined, and thus discloses the most extreme possibility14.” And it is the scissors of the gardener that performs the cutting of the links to the world. This cutting is to be connected to the rim of the mirror that cuts the objects reflected in it. This is a dangerously cutting world that Virginia Woolf depicts as she heightens in the subtext of the story the fantasy of a threat to the living body.

    27As the famous heideggerian concept of the “being-towards-death” unfurls itself in its effects other moods assail the character such as “sadness” “tenderness”, “regret”. The anxiety provided by the thought of death is given pride of place in this extract because precisely it authenticates being as it takes away all firm ground to secure a fixity of being. This is the equivalent of what Virginia Woolf, in a different context, calls a “moment of being”. This moment is meant to be an epiphany when the truth of the self in the world is revealed. Of course, if such an experience is of paramount importance for transcendental phenomenology, it is only one side of the private domain of the character.

    28The description of this experience entails leading the reader into the world of the other, that of the character Isabella Tyson. Consequently, the work of empathy that it is necessary to perform becomes frought with tensions as “one could penetrate a little farther into her being15”. The verb “to penetrate” is a typically phenomenological word that is repeated later on in the following sentence, “the person into whose mind one had been trying to penetrate”. This penetration by the narrator is equated to an act of opening an oyster: “To talk of prizing her open as if she were an oyster, to use any but the finest and subtlest and most pliable tools upon her was impious and absurd. One must imagine16.” The tensions lie in the surprising comparison that seems to naturalize and make acceptable the work of empathy. It should be stressed that the tenor and the vehicle of the comparison establish an equivalence between, on the one hand, opening a molusc with a view to eating it and not simply to see if there is a pearl in it and on the other hand, opening a mind with something like a tin-opener in order to have access to it, to see what anyway cannot directly be seen. In both cases, the violent actions carry connotations suggesting rape or forceful intrusion like that of the postman and it amounts to a form of meaninglessness.

    29The sacredness of the interiority is exposed as a myth since it is explicitly mentioned in the narrative that this character chooses privacy, “she did not wish to be known17”. As the reader hovers between ontological, epistemological and moral tensions, this pleasure of the text that Roland Barthes has theorized can be experienced18. It is an intense experience because the narrative tendency of the text is to be relentless and unforgiving in its process of questioning being, what being might be, what the best, most subtle or most direct ways of approaching the unapproachable might be. In this gradual process of approaching an interiority, there are moments of self-illusion that turn in the end to a highly dramatic moment of what psychoanalysis has defined as “subjective destitution”.

    30At one time, the character is shown from within, “she thought life had treated her well19”. This amounts to a form of rationalisation that cannot stand the test of what we could call “the ordeal of the mirror”:

    “At last there she was, in the hall. She stopped dead. She stood by the table. She stood perfectly still. At once the looking-glass began to pour over her a light that seemed to fix her; that seemed like some acid to bite off the unessential and superficial and leave only the truth. It was an enthralling spectacle. Everything dropped from her—clouds, dress, basket, diamond—all that one had called the creeper and convolvulus. Here was the hard wall beneath. Here was the woman herself. She stood naked in that pitiless light. And there was nothing. Isabella was perfectly empty. She had no thoughts. She had no friends. She cared for nobody. As for her letters, they were all bills20.”

    31We have given at some length this passage without extracting anything from it because it is situated at the end of the short story and condenses in a showdown a dramatic face-to-face with being. This is an important moment that highlights, if we may say so, the encounter of a consciousness with itself. This confrontation has a dramatic turn because the light of truth takes away all the armour of being, all that makes life liveable and worthwhile. The clothes, the friends, thinking itself, wealth and all the subtle comparisons that the narrative agency had given to the reader in order to elaborate a portrait with nuances, all these elements cannot withstand this ordeal of truth. Everything carefully constructed is shown as falling apart in the subjectivity of this character as resistance is of no avail, since this light is described as “pitiless”. It is like a subjective destitution because this character is presented as having no support anywhere. There is nothing to save or to salvage the self. This subjectivity is all alone with itself, “and there was nothing”. Help will not be coming from anywhere nor is self-help envisaged21.

    32As the light reflected by the mirror is endowed with powerful effects of destruction it could be said the short story has entered the realm of myth. There is a mythic quality to this scene because the light of truth acts like an “acid”. This light corrodes being, “biting off the unessential” and leaving at the core of being an immeasurable void, “Isabella was perfectly empty”. For Virginia Woolf, it seems, beyond being there is only a “hard wall” and this hard wall is truth in its unsparing force. This description has a highly gothic quality as the other subjectivity that is inscribed in the text finds this “an enthralling spectacle”.

    33This spectacle is reminiscent of Edgar Allan Poe’s tales with its death-in-life or life-in-death uncanny effects. However, this frightful description in Virginia Woolf’s short story comes very late in the narrative. Until the very end of the story, the mystery of being was not associated with any bizarre or gruesome circumstances so it might be more apt to think of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray22. After a life of pleasure and an intense desire to live beautifully, the protagonist pays the price of his excesses. In the end of the novel, Dorian Gray stabs his portrait that until now had shown all the signs of age and corruption leaving the hero to lead a youthful hedonistic life. In a fantastic reversal, the stabbing produces an exchange of properties. The portrait regains youth and beauty while the character is shown as deteriorating and dying all of a sudden. This comparison between Virginia Woolf’s text and that of Oscar Wilde is made possible because after her ordeal Isabella Tyson comes to see herself as an old woman who has lost what was said to be at the beginning of the story, “a fine face23”. Now, although we are still in the same story-time, she has become, “old angular, veined and lined, with her high nose and wrinkled neck24”. The light of being, it seems, has taken its toll and has produced strange metamorphoses.

    34This lightning reflection is also reminiscent of the myth of the Gorgons. According to the Greek myth, the Gorgons had a stare that turned into stone anyone who dared cross their gaze. Only one of the Gorgons was mortal, Medusa. To vanquish her as part of his quest, Perseus had to use a polished shield given by Athena to deflect the lethal gaze and cut off the Gorgon’s head. Perseus is nowhere to be seen in Virginia Wool’s tale, but “the creeper and the convolvulus” might conjure up in a vague sort of way the snake-like hair of the Gorgon. Virginia Wool’s heroine, Isabella Tyson, is like a Gorgon who turns her deadly stare inwards, into herself. She transfixes herself, petrifies herself, by looking self-reflexively into herself. This unexpected turn towards the fantastic at the end of the story needs to be appreciated in the light of modernism since this garden has many facets. It is the garden of being, as we have just seen, but it is also a modernist garden we are now going to analyze.

    A modernist garden

    35By reading this short-story the reader has entered a modernist garden. To keep the moralizing tone of the opening of the story we could say, as readers, we are “trespassers”. We have entered a private domain, a private garden and might end up being prosecuted. The first sentence of the short story is also very explicit: “People should not leave looking-glasses hanging in their rooms.” As this statement is repeated at the very end of the story, it produces a frame-like effect that underlines the reflexivity of the story. Reflexivity is sometimes presented as one of the paramount characteristics of postmodernism, but modernism itself has already visited the field of self-consciousness in narratives. It is always a question of gradients and proportions, but we could say that in literary modernism, the self-consciousness of the narrative agency, the fragmentation of the story and the demise of the integrated individual subject go hand in hand with a critique of representation. These characteristics might be defined as the hallmarks of modernism. We may even go as far as to say, with Jean-Jacques Lecercle, that modernism is synonymous with literature and that modernism is even beyond post modernism, “we may even go further and state that post modernism, in the field of literature, cannot exist, as its positions are always already pre-empted by modernism25”.

    36Virginia Woolf herself theorized some of these characteristics of modernism in her famous essay, “Modern Fiction”, published in 1919.26 She insisted on the so-called “materialist” writers who leave much to be desired in their works because “they write of unimportant things; […] they spend immense skill and immense industry making the trivial and the transitory appear the true and enduring27”. Virginia Woolf sided with James Joyce’s Ulysses that she first read in manuscript form for the Hogarth Press and then acclaimed as a masterpiece. Mr Joyce, she writes, is “spiritual” because, “he is concerned at all costs to reveal the flickerings of that innermost flame which flashes its messages through the brain28”. It is noteworthy that the critique of conventional modes of representation occupies centre stage and is linked to a new perception of consciousness. In an often quoted passage modernism for Virginia Woolf is all about privileging “an ordinary mind on an ordinary day:

    “The mind receives a myriad impressions—trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel, she writes. From all side they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent fall differently from of old […] if the writer were a free man and not a slave […] there would be not plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style and perhaps not a single button sewn on as the Bond Street tailors would have it29.”

    37We shall begin by commenting on this last remark that seems, at first sight, flippant since Virginia Woolf does depict in her short story what her character Isabella Tyson is wearing. This character is described as wearing “a thin summer dress” and then the reader is made aware of her shoes: “One must put oneself in her shoes. It was easy to see the shoes in which she stood, down in the lower garden, at this moment. They were very narrow and long and fashionable—they were made of the softest and most flexible leather. Like everything she wore, they were exquisite30”. Along with the satirical thrust aimed at fashion and class privileges, it is the materialist writers who come under criticism since “it was easy to see the shoes”. In the short story, Virginia Woolf mocks the codes of realist fiction that she defines in her essay as “trivial”, “transitory” and “unenduring”. The amusing aspect of this is that as a modernist writer, Virginia Woolf works with the realist signposts but simultaneously she works against them, undermining them to a large extent.

    38“The fashion of the hour”, that she harps about further on in her essay, amounts to revealing the different linings that structure the text, its codes Roland Barthes would say. Literalizing an hackneyed phrase “to put oneself in someone’s shoes”, Virginia Woolf is able to focus on the shoes which are in fact much like the equivalent of the famous buttons of the materialists’ coat. Yet, those very shoes that are foregrounded in her story take on a materialist quality that Virginia Woolf dwells on as she leads the reader to perform Einfühlung, as Husserl says, that is to say a form of empathy, of experiencing the life of the other. It has the same flavour as Laurence Sterne who in The Life and opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman kept digressing from the main story line. Virginia Woolf herself admired Laurence Sterne’s works so much so that she briefly alludes to him in her essay, “Modern Fiction” by saying “did it not come with a shock to open Tristram Shandy31”.

    39Likewise, Virginia Woolf’s narrator in this short story can shock the reader as we are playfully but forcefully made to put oneself in someone else’s shoes, those of the main feminine character. The narrator calls on us to imagine: “To talk of ‘prizing her open’ as if she were an oyster, to use any but the finest and subtlest and most pliable tools upon her was impious and absurd. One must imagine32.” As this short story develops, it becomes Shandean in tone, style and spirit. The narrator flaunts his presence and opinions with much gusto, “Such comparisons are worse than idle and superficial—they are cruel even, for they come like the convolvulus itself trembling between one’s eyes and the truth. There must be truth; there must be a wall33.” The outspokenness of the narrator is surprising as he sounds very self-assured, very opinionated, as much as he is articulate and analytical. The narratorial presence tends to become so overwhelming at times that it displaces the main object of the narrative, the very insubstantial lady in the looking-glass.

    40Moreover, although this narrator does his utmost to create a space of being for the object of his interest, yet he remains throughout an impersonal, unidentified narrator. If we are not afraid of conceptual monster, we might call this narrator a “transcendental modernist” as he conjoins Virginia Woolf’s aesthetics and Husserl’s ideals of phenomenology. The more we advance towards the end of the short story, the more the garden is lost sight of in favour of the reflections in the mirror and the impersonal view-point. This is where Virginia Woolf performs a parting of the way with Laurence Sterne who exemplifies a very “personal” and identified narrator in his novel. Virginia Wool’s narrator is the equivalent of Husserl’s “transcendental subject”, a point of view but with no ego to refer it to. The narrator has very personal views on being and representation based on putting together fragments that range from what is known to what is guessed at, to what is seen from different angles. However, there is no visible body to refer those fragments in the text. This presence based on an absence creates an interesting and paradoxical space for the reader to inhabit. The narrator is as disembodied as he is loquacious and truculent. The character, on the other hand, is defined as reticent, “So she stood thinking. Without making any thought precise—for she was one of those reticent people whose minds hold their thoughts enmeshed in clouds of silence34.”

    41It seems it is in this very “trembling” of the reader’s perception, as the text says, that lies the critique of representation. How is language to be trusted if the referent turns out in literary modernism to exasperate the gap between the word and the thing? In other words, reading this short story we are made to inhabit the trembling space between the literal and the figurative, between an assertive narratorial presence that is disembodied and an elusive character whose visibility is only a reflection:

    “All the time she became larger and larger in the looking-glass, more and more completely the person into whose mind one had been trying to penetrate. One verified her by degrees—fitted the qualities one had discovered into this visible body. There were her grey-green dress, and her long shoes, her basket, and something sparkling at her throat. She came so gradually that she did not seem to derange the pattern in the glass, but only to bring in some new element which gently moved and altered the other objects as if asking them, courteously, to make room for her. And the letters and the table and the grass walk and the sunflowers which had been waiting in the looking-glass separated and opened out so that she might be received among them35.”

    42This visible body is an absence, a mere reflection in the looking-glass. Yet, the peaceful nature of this coming together of a world intensifies the representation and sustains its coherence. It should be contrasted with the violent intrusion of the postman who does not ring even once, the so-called “man with the letters” who forcefully enters a private space to disappear as soon as the letters are deposited on the table, or rather as the text evocatively says, “strewed the table”. We remember that this postman is described at first as a “large black form” which disrupts the calm ordering of the mirror. Contrarily, everything here is orderly and calm in the rearrangement of elements caused by gradual coming into view of the main character. Instead of a violent de-flowering of the visible we are given now the visible body in a flowering process. An approaching woman is presented in terms of a flower opening its corola. This flowering woman or woman-flower perhaps might constitute what we could call “feminist phenomenology” since both the world and the feminine character are perceived from an anonymous outside point of view. The metaphor of a flower opening its petals underpins the cultural association of femininity with flowers since even the letters kept by the heroine are “sprinkled with sticks of lavender or rose leaves”.

    43This representation is culturally founded on the association of femininity and flowers so much so that even the progressive perception fitting the known to the visible or “verifying by degrees” as phenomenologists also like to say, hardly breaks new grounds. The description tends to make sense of the representation rather than unsettle it. It shows the acceptable face of the character at home in her world. As the question of happiness is raised by the narrator, we could say happiness transpires in this scene made of a woman in a home of her own, if we remember that Virginia Woolf wrote A Room of One’s Own. The tone is euphoric and pleasant as the adverb “courteously” suggests, as well as the expression “making room for her”.

    44However, this visible body and world have their underside, their hidden sides as the end of the short story shows. The invisible inside of the heroine is unveiled in a moment of truth that leaves nothing untouched: “Here was the woman herself. She stood naked in that pitiless light. And there was nothing. Isabella was perfectly empty. She had no thoughts. She had no friends. She cared for no body. As for the letters there were all bills.” As Virginia Woolf ends her short story on a gothic note of horror as being is corroded by “the acid” of truth she parts way with Husserl’s concerns to depict the emptiness at the heart of being. Here, Virginia Woolf cultivates her modernist ethos. In her essay, “Modern Fiction”, she insisted that “for the moderns, the points of interests, lies very likely in the dark places of psychology36”. For Virginia Woolf, those dark places are not revealed by an endless string of words showing the unconscious of a character as in the final chapter of Ulysses. She seizes the essentials of the mimesis of consciousness to highlight a lack of specification in the inner world. In the dark places many things are surmised by the imagination. The semblance of the everyday captivates the eye but it is finally shown as being all a veil of appearances behind which lies nothing, “Isabella was perfectly empty”.

    45This “tragedy at the back of life” as Virginia Woolf once said of the Greek tragedies, she does mitigate by the assertive narratorial voice that comes full circle at the end and brings an uncertain comic relief with the suggested meaning that mirrors should reflect a bit more before they do their reflecting37. In Virginia Woolf’s words it sounds even more final: “People should not leave looking-glasses hanging in their rooms38.” This statement has the effect of regrounding the reflective capacity back into the commonsense of the everyday replete with rooms, looking-glasses and the risks of looking into mirrors. After an absolute reflection is reached at the end the reader needs to be brought back to the safe distance that synthethises the risks entailed in transgression. For to look into killing mirrors is tantamount to pass beyond the limits of phenomenologization. At the end of the short story total self-penetration is depicted by the means of the metaphoricity of a light that overcomes all separation. It produces a self-illuminating light without remainder to stand upon for the reader. Hegel has an interesting formula that fits the situation when he delineates the reflection that throws itself into the abyss of its own perfection, “in this night which is the noonday of life, common sense and speculation can meet one another39”. As in the short story, Hegel’s sentence nicely associates the final coincidence of reflexivity with itself. After this opposition of self to itself ends in self-destruction the reader requires a low-key reflection provided by the assertive narratorial voice, away from the light of Reason into the merely reasonable.

    Bibliographie

    Barthes Roland, Le plaisir du texte, Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 1973.

    Hegel Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, The Difference Between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy, trans. W. Cerf and H. S. Harris, Albany, State University of New York Press, 1977.

    Heidegger Martin, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh, Albany, New York Press, 2010.

    Husserl Edmund, Phénoménologie et logique, Courtine Jean-François (ed.), Paris, Presses de l’ENS, 1996.

    Lecercle Jean-Jacques, Badiou and Deleuze Read Literature, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2012.

    Wilde Oscar, The Picture of Dorian Gray,, New York, Norton Critical Edition, 1988 [1891].

    Reynier Christine, Virginia Woolf’s Ethics of the Short Story, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

    Woolf Virginia, “The lady in The Looking-Glass: A Reflection”, The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf, Dick Susan (ed.), London, Triad Grafton Book, 1991.

    Woolf Virginia, The Common Reader I, London, The Hogarth Press, 1984.

    Wulf Andrea, Founding Gardeners: The Revolutionary Generation, Nature, and the Shaping of the American Nation, London, William Heinemann, 2011.

    Notes de bas de page

    1Woolf Virginia, “The Lady in the Looking-Glass: a Reflection”, The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf, Dick Susan (ed.), London, Triad Grafton Books, 1991, p. 221-225.

    2Husserl Edmund, Phénoménologie et logique, études réunies et publiées sous la direction de Jean-François Courtine, Paris, Presses de l’ENS, 1996, p. 20, 35 and foll.

    3Woolf Virginia, “The Lady in the Looking-Glass: a Relfection”, op. cit., p. 221.

    4Ibid., p. 223.

    5Ibid., p. 221.

    6Idem.

    7Ibid., p. 222.

    8Ibid., p. 225.

    9Ibid., p. 221.

    10Ibid., p. 223.

    11Ibid., p. 222.

    12Idem.

    13Ibid., p. 224.

    14Heidegger Martin, Being and Time, trans. by Joan Stambaugh, Albany, State of New York Press, 2010, p. 254.

    15Woolf Virginia, “The Lady in the Looking-Glass: a Reflection”, op. cit., p. 224.

    16Ibid., p. 225.

    17Ibid., p. 223.

    18Barthes Roland, Le plaisir du texte, Paris, éditions du Seuil, 1973.

    19Woolf Virginia, “The Lady in the Looking-Glass: a Reflection”, op. cit., p. 224.

    20Ibid., p. 225.

    21For Jacques Lacan, for example, psychoanalysis is a long subjective ascesis at the end of which the analysand “can get help from no one”. Lacan Jacques, The Seminar. Book VII. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, trans. Dennis Potter, London, Routledge, 1992, p. 304.

    22Wilde Oscar, The Picture of Dorian Gray, New York/London, Norton Critical Edition, 1988 [1891]. For a very interesting reading of this novel, see Louvel Liliane, Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, le double miroir de l’art, Paris, Ellipses, 2000.

    23Woolf Virginia, “The Lady in the Looking-Glass: a Reflection”, op. cit., p. 224.

    24Ibid., p. 225.

    25Lecercle Jean-Jacques, Badiou and Deleuze Read Literature, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2012, p. 127. See also by Reynier Christine, Virginia Woolf’s Ethics of the Short Story, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

    26Woolf Virginia, “Modern Fiction”, The Common Reader 1, London, The Hogarth Press, 1984, p. 146-154.

    27Ibid., p. 148.

    28Ibid., p. 151.

    29Ibid., p. 150.

    30Woolf Virginia, “The Lady in the Looking-Glass: a Reflection”, op. cit., p. 224.

    31Woolf Virginia, “Modern Fiction”, op. cit., p. 152.

    32Woolf Virginia, “The Lady in the Looking-Glass: a Reflection”, op. cit., p. 225.

    33Ibid., p. 222.

    34Ibid., p. 224.

    35Ibid., p. 225.

    36Woolf Virginia, “Modern Fiction”, op. cit., p. 152.

    37This statement can be found in a reading note by Virginia Woolf held by the University of Sussex.

    38Woolf Virginia, “The Lady in the Looking-Glass: a Reflection”, op. cit., p. 225.

    39Hegel Georg W. F., The Difference between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy, trans. Walter Cerf and H. S. Harris. Albany, State University New York Press, 1977, p. 103.

    Auteur

    • Jacques Sohier

      Maître de conférences HDR à l’université d’Angers, où il enseigne la littérature britannique et américaine. Il a publié des articles sur Joseph Conrad, Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf et Henry James. Il s’intéresse tout particulièrement aux approches de la littérature qui s’inspirent des outils ou concepts propres à la linguistique, à la philosophie ou à la psychanalyse. il a publié Virginia Woolf, Le Granit et l’arc-en-ciel, Michel Houdiard, 2011 et Literature and Psychoanalysis : Reading Literature Differently, Michel Houdiard, 2016.

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    1Woolf Virginia, “The Lady in the Looking-Glass: a Reflection”, The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf, Dick Susan (ed.), London, Triad Grafton Books, 1991, p. 221-225.

    2Husserl Edmund, Phénoménologie et logique, études réunies et publiées sous la direction de Jean-François Courtine, Paris, Presses de l’ENS, 1996, p. 20, 35 and foll.

    3Woolf Virginia, “The Lady in the Looking-Glass: a Relfection”, op. cit., p. 221.

    4Ibid., p. 223.

    5Ibid., p. 221.

    6Idem.

    7Ibid., p. 222.

    8Ibid., p. 225.

    9Ibid., p. 221.

    10Ibid., p. 223.

    11Ibid., p. 222.

    12Idem.

    13Ibid., p. 224.

    14Heidegger Martin, Being and Time, trans. by Joan Stambaugh, Albany, State of New York Press, 2010, p. 254.

    15Woolf Virginia, “The Lady in the Looking-Glass: a Reflection”, op. cit., p. 224.

    16Ibid., p. 225.

    17Ibid., p. 223.

    18Barthes Roland, Le plaisir du texte, Paris, éditions du Seuil, 1973.

    19Woolf Virginia, “The Lady in the Looking-Glass: a Reflection”, op. cit., p. 224.

    20Ibid., p. 225.

    21For Jacques Lacan, for example, psychoanalysis is a long subjective ascesis at the end of which the analysand “can get help from no one”. Lacan Jacques, The Seminar. Book VII. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, trans. Dennis Potter, London, Routledge, 1992, p. 304.

    22Wilde Oscar, The Picture of Dorian Gray, New York/London, Norton Critical Edition, 1988 [1891]. For a very interesting reading of this novel, see Louvel Liliane, Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, le double miroir de l’art, Paris, Ellipses, 2000.

    23Woolf Virginia, “The Lady in the Looking-Glass: a Reflection”, op. cit., p. 224.

    24Ibid., p. 225.

    25Lecercle Jean-Jacques, Badiou and Deleuze Read Literature, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2012, p. 127. See also by Reynier Christine, Virginia Woolf’s Ethics of the Short Story, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

    26Woolf Virginia, “Modern Fiction”, The Common Reader 1, London, The Hogarth Press, 1984, p. 146-154.

    27Ibid., p. 148.

    28Ibid., p. 151.

    29Ibid., p. 150.

    30Woolf Virginia, “The Lady in the Looking-Glass: a Reflection”, op. cit., p. 224.

    31Woolf Virginia, “Modern Fiction”, op. cit., p. 152.

    32Woolf Virginia, “The Lady in the Looking-Glass: a Reflection”, op. cit., p. 225.

    33Ibid., p. 222.

    34Ibid., p. 224.

    35Ibid., p. 225.

    36Woolf Virginia, “Modern Fiction”, op. cit., p. 152.

    37This statement can be found in a reading note by Virginia Woolf held by the University of Sussex.

    38Woolf Virginia, “The Lady in the Looking-Glass: a Reflection”, op. cit., p. 225.

    39Hegel Georg W. F., The Difference between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy, trans. Walter Cerf and H. S. Harris. Albany, State University New York Press, 1977, p. 103.

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    Sohier, J. (2017). The Strangeness of Phenomenology in a Modernist Garden, Reflecting on the Short Story. “The Lady in the Looking Glass: A Reflection” by Virginia Woolf. In E. Vernadakis, J.-M. Yvard, & G. Yvard-Djahansouz (éds.), Le jardin et ses mythes aux États-Unis et en Grande-Bretagne. Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes. https://doi.org/10.4000/14mu3
    Sohier, Jacques. « The Strangeness of Phenomenology in a Modernist Garden, Reflecting on the Short Story. “The Lady in the Looking Glass: A Reflection” by Virginia Woolf ». In Le Jardin Et Ses Mythes Aux États-Unis Et En Grande-Bretagne, édité par Emmanuel Vernadakis, Jean-Michel Yvard, et Gelareh Yvard-Djahansouz. Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2017. doi:10.4000/14mu3.
    Sohier, Jacques. « The Strangeness of Phenomenology in a Modernist Garden, Reflecting on the Short Story. “The Lady in the Looking Glass: A Reflection” by Virginia Woolf ». Le Jardin Et Ses Mythes Aux États-Unis Et En Grande-Bretagne, édité par Emmanuel Vernadakis et al., Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2017, https://doi.org/10.4000/14mu3.

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    Vernadakis, E., Yvard, J.-M., & Yvard-Djahansouz, G. (éds.). (2017). Le jardin et ses mythes aux États-Unis et en Grande-Bretagne. Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes. https://doi.org/10.4000/14n7g
    Vernadakis, Emmanuel, Jean-Michel Yvard, et Gelareh Yvard-Djahansouz, éd. Le jardin et ses mythes aux États-Unis et en Grande-Bretagne. Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2017. doi:10.4000/14n7g.
    Vernadakis, Emmanuel, et al., éditeurs. Le jardin et ses mythes aux États-Unis et en Grande-Bretagne. Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2017, https://doi.org/10.4000/14n7g.
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