OTHER SUBJECTS

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was critically engaged all her life in the problem of writing lives and, in particular, the problem of writing women’s lives. An important modernist writer of fiction, she also questioned from a feminist perspective traditional accounts of the subject and prefigured and even helped to influence present-day debates about writing and sexual difference. She provides a good place to begin a chapter about ‘Other subjects’ and an important point of reference for all the debates about difference that follow. Virginia Woolf’s family connections – she was daughter of the

editor of that nineteenth-century monument to egregious lives, The Dictionary of National Biography, Sir Leslie Stephen, and the inheritor of a family tradition of autobiographical writing, stretching back several generations – ensured her fascination with life-writing as well as sharpening her resistance to many of its assumptions and values. Her great-grandfather, James Stephen, had written his memoirs in the 1820s ‘for the use of his children’; Sir

Leslie Stephen, devastated by the death of his second wife Julia, Virginia Woolf’s mother, similarly addressed his memoir of her, the Mausoleum Book, to their children, conceiving of it as ‘a little treasure to read for themselves when I have become a memory too’ (Alan Bell 1977: x). As Trev Broughton points out, though thus restricting its audience to ‘family’ and defining itself as ‘private’, the Mausoleum Book also dictates ‘the conditions and meaning of privacy itself’ (Broughton 1999: 5); it thus recalls the way the father dominated the household, defining the space and the boundaries, after Julia’s death. As Woolf was later to write, it was part of their ‘duty’ as children to encourage their father to talk and vent his grief, while they inhabited a ‘stifling’ silence: ‘One had always to think whether what one was about to say was the right thing to say’ (Woolf 1978a: 109). The Mausoleum Book sets out to commemorate Julia for her children but ‘incidentally’ turns the reader’s attention to Stephen himself: ‘I wish to write mainly about your mother. But I find that in order to speak intelligibly it will be best to begin by saying something about myself’ (Alan Bell 1977: 4). The masculine narrative takes precedence over the feminine one; indeed by depicting her role as domestic angel and celebrating her unobtrusive ‘feminine’ virtues of care, he also endorses his own centrality; he becomes simultaneously the object of her concern and his readers’. The piety of ‘remembering’ Julia is thus waylaid by another, more dubious motive: to claim his children’s sympathy for himself and reassert his central role as ‘paterfamilias’ for all the children, including, most crucially in terms of his future welfare, his stepdaughter, Stella (Broughton 1999: 67). If Stephen’s avowed aim to write about his wife as ‘the main

story’ is pre-empted by his own needs and masculine viewpoint, the hesitations and obliquities of the Mausoleum Book reveal that nineteenth-century assumptions of gender – and genre – were not entirely straightforward: the need to relate to, if not quite relate, the other’s story leaves traces which are never entirely expelled (Broughton 1999: 21). This is important when we come to consider Woolf’s own writing. One of her earliest attempts at autobiography, ‘Reminiscences’ (1908), emulates the family tradition by addressing itself to her sister Vanessa’s first child Julian, and

borrowing both scenes and language from her father’s text. Woolf, however, quickly realizes that by memorializing her mother her writing turns lapidary, making her into a statue by fixing her or enshrouding her in words:

Woolf experimented all her life, in both her autobiography and fiction, with this problem of how to allow the mother’s presence into a writing which has traditionally not permitted her a place. This carries echoes of Derrida’s pursuit of the ‘living feminine’ within a language which excludes both the body and the mother. To suggest an affinity between Woolf’s experimentation with language and literary form, and poststructuralist thinking, has become a commonplace in the last fifteen years: Woolf has emerged as a pre-eminent ‘deconstructionist’ feminist who, according to Toril Moi, ‘reveals a deeply sceptical attitude to the male-humanist concept of an essential human identity’ (Moi 1985: 9). As autobiographer, Woolf produced unstable or provisional writing, sketches rather than formal memoirs, letters and a diary. These forms, and in particular her diary, became a way of constructing a different subject, a ‘subject-in-process’, to use Julia Kristeva’s term, a subject which is not fixed but ‘constantly called into question’ (Kristeva 1989: 129). Her diary was conceived of by her as speculative, a writing towards a writing which has not yet happened:

By imagining her diary as an unbounded space, no longer under the control of the subject, she also creates a space for something new to emerge; she defers meaning, opening up a space of difference within discourse (Anderson 1997: 49). Woolf’s imaginings and reimaginings of space – the rooms and chambers of an uncharted unconscious – always relate to the possibility of thinking femininity beyond the certainty and closure demanded by what Woolf herself referred to as ‘the damned egotistical self’ (Woolf 1983: II, 14). It is only by thinking outside the dominance of the letter ‘I’ which she wittily figured in A Room of One’s Own (1929) as a ‘straight dark bar’, lying across the page and obscuring sight of anything and anyone else, that one can begin to glimpse a different subject; one can begin to open the question of the woman at the edges of the masculine text (Woolf 1977: 95). To backtrack for a moment: Woolf took her bearings from her

father’s work as biographer, but found herself intrigued by what she called ‘the lives of the obscure’, the forgotten lives, mostly of women, who had been marginalized by the Dictionary’s selection of ‘great men’. It was not always the case that these lives had gone unrecorded: they could be glimpsed, like the woman above, in existing documents, and Woolf imagined herself turning the pages of dusty and hidden volumes, rediscovering lives which had been relegated to the backwaters – or shadows – of history (Woolf 1967: 120). Nor was it a matter of making an alternative claim for their ‘greatness’; rather Woolf used their ‘obscurity’ to interrogate the very terms in which the biographical subject is thought, challenging notions of the ‘exceptional’ or ‘unique’ as self-evidently connoting value and questioning whether progress and achievement provided the only ways of structuring historical understanding.