ABSTRACT
A 1993 ad for Bass Ale features a reproduction of the well-circulated black and white photograph of a spectral Virginia Stephen, gazing ethereally beyond the frame, while beside her portrait stands a tall, foaming glass of ale, in full color (Figure 8.1). The caption above the photograph reads: “When Are Words Not Enough?” Beneath Woolf’s famous image rests the company logo: “Bass Helps You Get To The Bottom Of It All.” Despite the fact that both Woolf and Bass Ale are British imports, their juxtaposition is puzzling on a variety of levels: is ale being equated with Woolf in order to elevate its cultural status, or is Woolf being used to create a contrast between her seeming incorporeality and the drink’s own full-bodied presence? What, one might ask, is the intended relation between the line—“When Are Words Not Enough?”—and Woolf herself, a writer keenly aware of the inadequacy of language, particularly for women? Perhaps the ad is playing with this knowledge, thus anticipating a literate, possibly feminist, consumer who will link Woolf’s critique of language with the inarticulable flavor of Bass Ale? Surely this reading is too esoteric to function as the basis for a mass marketing beer campaign. The success of Bass Ale’s advertisement arguably hinges upon the consumer’s conflation of Woolf and “high culture,” an equation that works to enshrine the product in an ephemeral, timeless pantheon of British “greatness,” as it simultaneously dissociates Woolf from any relation to history or the body. That the attribution beneath the photograph dates the portrait as 1902, where other accounts claim 1903, is of little consequence to the ad’s success, as is the issue of whether or not Woolf herself would actually endorse or consume the product. Whereas the function of Bass Ale’s appropriation of Woolf’s ubiquitous image is to create a bridge between “high” and “low” culture, this is not in the service of eradicating the cultural hierarchy. On the contrary, Woolf must be recognizable as a modernist cult figure—her “Queen of Bloomsbury” (Silver, “What’s Woolf Got to Do with It?” 24) persona—for the ad to work, and crucial to this projection is her static association with a certain elitist linguistic and cultural status quo. At the same time, the popularity of Beresford’s photograph of a delicate, alluring, yet unapproachable young virgin—what Regina Marler calls “the corporate logo of Bloomsbury” (195)—ensures that the Bass Ale consumer need not have read Woolf’s books to register that her image is a marker of literary celebrity and a signifier of Englishness (Marler 137, 251). 1 Woolf in a 1993 Bass Ale advertisement. Used by permission. Created by Weiss Stagliano Partners, New York. © 1999 Bass Ale® is imported by Guiness Bass Import Company, Stamford, CT 06901. https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9781315052113/30c4f73c-fe7a-480d-972a-02df4c207aae/content/fig8_1_B.jpg" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/>
