ABSTRACT
This chapter will examine the work of Virgina Woolf, whose writing, it seems to me, has consistently been misread purely in terms of an aesthetics of modernism. Such a reading prises her formal aesthetics away from their basis in a political feminist critique of the dominant patriarchal values which she saw reflected in the conventions of traditional nineteenth-century fiction. Moreover, it overlooks her commitment to the articulation of alternative modes of subjectivity which, in fact, place her close to the concerns of many contemporary women writers. This is not to argue that Woolf's writing does not share the intensely self-conscious scrutiny of form and dissatisfaction with nineteenthcentury realist aesthetics foregrounded in the work of Joyce, Eliot, Pound, and Forster. I would agree with Michelle Barrett that
it would be wrong to argue that Virginia Woolf ever subordinated her conception of the integrity of Art to the overt expression of her political views, and indeed there is a real tension in her work between these two. While much of her work is explicitly political in nature, and of course Three Guineas is highly polemical, she frequently resisted the intrusion of any attitude which, as she wrote to Lytton Strachey, 'gets into the ink and blisters the paper' of her novels. (Barrett 1979, p. 22) Taking a narrow formalist view, Woolf's technical strategies are
undeniably 'modernist', involving: presentation through intersubjective perception or a post-impressionist/Cubist dissolution
of the external shape of objects through multiple perspectives and reformulation of them in an internally associative 'spatial form'; erosion of the 'solidity of the specific' or the details of the external world presented through narrative description, summary, and plot; disappearance of 'character' as the expression in action of a fixed inner 'essence'; replacement of the conventional forms of causal and temporal organization with forms of spatial structuration such as mythic analogy, symbolic association, leitmotif, the condensation and displacement of primary process logic; loss of narratorial authority and reliability; metaphorical substitution or displacement foregrounding the creative process itself as it 'transfigures the commonplace'. To analyse Woolf s writing simply in such terms, however, encourages a critical tendency to interpret the political, philosophical, and broader human concerns of her novels in terms of self-reflexive aesthetic artifice: the view that they are novels 'about' the artistic process itself; 'about' form or 'fact' versus 'vision'; 'about' intimations of mortality and their transcendence through the symbolic order of significant form. When Mr Ramsay's philosophical work (in To the Lighthouse [1927]) is presented, ironically, in the 'impressive' terms of being about 'subject and object and the nature of reality' and in the absurd terms of getting to letter R in the alphabet, surely there lurks here a warning to the critic to avoid the reductionism of presenting Woolf s own writing in such arid and schematic binary terms and series. Very often, of course, such readings of Woolf are supported with biographical evidence of her periods of insanity, her obsession with death, and her final suicide. This material is offered to confirm the image of a writer who produces internally coherent and permanent symbolist worlds, designed to assert the transcendental power of art as fixing the significance of the human imagination in the face of temporality and mortality. They offer a view of her work, in other words, in terms of the historically recurring (masculine) ideal of the unified transcendental ego.
