ABSTRACT
Perhaps even more than in the case of most writers, Virginia Woolf's selves—expressed in her actions as recounted by others, her letters, and in her journal, for herself—are often quite distinct, even different. She of course maintains she dislikes herself in her letters, finding them artificial, redolent, "sprayed about" with the perfume of intention, from a mind of bubble and foam—whatever atmosphere she means to create. Vanessa Bell's The Tub of 1918, about which interpretations freely flow, brings up by its problematic character with the naked female figure standing in uneasy relation to the upended circular tub and the three flowers in the vase on the sill like some form of annunciatory signal, the specific and crucial question of self-portraiture and self-rendering, even through the figure of another. The actual tubs at Monk's House and at Charleston, paid for by writing in both cases, provide an immersion in the luxury of living, as of art.
