Introduction
On 16 February 1931, nine days after Woolf had reached the end of her draft of The
Waves, Aldous Huxley and his wife Maria dined with the Woolfs at Tavistock Square.
The couple lived in France but were spending time in England while Huxley researched four articles for Nash’s Pall Mall Magazine on the fate of industrial Britain during the depression.1 David Bradshaw describes Huxley‘s ‗frequent sallies across the Channel‘ during this period ‗in order to monitor the effects of the slump at first hand.‘2
Far from ‗an aloof and absentee observer,‘ Bradshaw argues, ‗by the early months of 1931 ... [Huxley] became more intensely ravelled in the chronic social and political crisis which unfolded in the wake of the Wall Street Crash of October 1929 than any other British writer of his generation.‘3
Meeting with Huxley at this time Woolf was similarly struck by his critical engagement with contemporary socio-political upheavals and felt
intimidated by the couple‘s travels and involvement in public life. ‗And I feel us, compared with Aldous & Maria,‘ she recorded, ‗unsuccessful‘:
They‘re off today to do mines, factories .. black country; did the docks when they were here; must see England. They are going to the Sex Congress at Moscow, have been in India, will go to America, speak French, visit celebrities,—while here I live like a weevil in a biscuit.4
Woolf‘s discontent here stems in part from the sense of purposelessness and dejection that she often experienced after completing a novel. ‗Lord, how little I‘ve seen, done, lived, felt, thought compared with the Huxleys—compared with anyone,‘ she despairs.5
1
The articles were ‗Abroad in England,‘ Nash’s Pall Mall Magazine, May 1931, 16-19, 84; ‗Sight Seeing in Alien Englands,‘ Nash’s Pall Mall Magazine, June 1931, 50-53, 118; ‗The Victory of Art over
Humanity,‘ Nash’s Pall Mall Magazine, July 1931, 46-49; ‗Greater and Lesser London,‘ Nash’s Pall
Mall Magazine, October 1931, 48-49, 108. All are reprinted in Aldous Huxley, The Hidden Huxley: Contempt and Compassion for the Masses 1920-36, ed. David Bradshaw (London: Faber, 1994).
References will be to Bradshaw‘s edition.
2 David Bradshaw, introduction to Hidden Huxley, viii. 3 Ibid.
4
D 4: 11.
87
However, her portrayal of herself as static and inactive, ‗toss[ing] among empty bottles & bits of toilet paper,‘ while Huxley ‗is ―modern‖‘ and ‗takes life in hand,‘ also reflects a broader shift in Woolf‘s intellectual focus early in 1931, as she too became
increasingly interested in dissecting and analysing contemporary British culture.6 From a retrospective viewpoint, the early months of 1931 appear pivotal within the development of Woolf‘s late cultural criticism. It was at this moment that Woolf began to direct her attention away from experimental fiction, represented by the completion of The Waves, and towards feminist cultural analysis, signified by her conception of ‗an entire new book [...] about the sexual life of women‘ on 20 January 1931.7 Conceived a day before Woolf delivered a speech on ‗Professions for Women‘ to the Junior Council of the London and National Society of Women‘s Service
(L&NSWS), this new project, ‗a sequel to a Room of Ones [sic] Own‘ about which Woolf was ‗very much excited,‘ later evolved into the unfinished ‗novel-essay‘ The
Pargiters, her major literary endeavour of the 1930s, before finally emerging into the
public domain as The Years and Three Guineas.8 This shift from high modernist fiction to experimental social and political criticism was not anticipated or immediate. In fact, Woolf began 1931 with a resolution not to make resolutions, ‗Not to be tied.‘9 Her desire to resist restrictive intentions and to remain open to spontaneity and innovation reflects her contemporaneous work on The Waves, her most stylistically inventive novel, and serves to remind us that Woolf‘s cultural criticism in her late writings, the development of which this thesis aims to trace, evolved in response to numerous internal and external influences rather than according to a predefined plan.
Inspired by The Waves, images of the sea and of sea-faring proliferate through Woolf‘s diary during January-February 1931. These nautical motifs evoke a mood of movement, change, flux, and, conversely, as she draws nearer to finishing her draft, a fear of stasis. ‗This is the turn of the tide,‘ Woolf wrote of the lengthening days on 2
6 D 4: 12.
7 D 4: 6. Herbert Marder recognises the early months of 1931 as a turning point for Woolf and The Waves as ‗a transitional work‘ in his biography, The Measure of Life: Virginia Woolf’s Last Years
(London: Cornell University Press, 2000), 6. ‗Virginia Woolf‘s last decade forms a coherent and distinct stage of her development,‘ Marder asserts, as Woolf ‗now enter[ed] a phase in which ... [s]he would respond to the changed political climate of the 1930s‘ (6-7).
8 D 4: 6. 9
D 4: 3; on 2 January 1931 Woolf wrote a list of resolutions for ‗the next 3 months; the next lap of the year‘ of which the first and ‗most important‘ was, ironically, ‗to have none.‘
88
January 1931.10 ‗I‘m chopping & tacking all the time‘ she declared of her creative activity on 7 January.11 The death of three men in an aeroplane crash near Rodmell on 25 January reminded her of ‗that epitaph in the Greek anthology: when I sank, the other ships sailed on.‘12
Ten days after completing her draft of The Waves, following the visit from Aldous Huxley, Woolf recalled this classical allusion to express her sense of literary inadequacy: ‗My ship has sailed on.‘13
At a time when Woolf felt despondent and outdated, disillusioned both with the novel she had lately finished and with her wider oeuvre to date, she found her attention directed towards producing six essays for
Good Housekeeping magazine.14 Viewed in the context of her ‗Professions for Women‘ speech four weeks earlier, and with an awareness of the hybrid ‗novel-essay‘ project that ‗sprang out‘ of this paper, Woolf‘s Good Housekeeping essays clearly evidence her growing analysis of British patriarchal culture.15
Woolf‘s Good Housekeeping articles are often disregarded in discussions of her wider oeuvre yet they plainly reflect her turn to cultural criticism. Jeanette McVicker compellingly reads these essays and Woolf‘s ‗Professions for Women‘ speech in their historical context as indicative of ‗a vague but significant in-between moment of ... transition‘ between the two major phases of Woolf‘s career, the former ‗foregrounding the aesthetic and visionary,‘ the latter ‗foregrounding the political, social and
economic.‘16
The speech and the series represent ‗parallel texts,‘ McVicker argues,
10 D 4: 3. 11 D 4: 4.
12 D 4: 7; Woolf records witnessing the aftermath of the crash, ‗3 men dash[ing] from a blue car [...] a
silver & blue aeroplane in the middle of a field apparently unhurt, among trees & cows.‘ Her description anticipates the juxtaposition of ominous aircraft, fields and cows in Between the Acts. The ‗epitaph‘ to which Woolf refers is an elegiac couplet ascribed to the Syracusian poet Theodoridas: ‗I am the tomb of a shipwrecked man. Sail on; / when we went down, the other ships sailed on.‘ See The Greek Anthology:
And Other Ancient Greek Epigrams, trans. and ed. Peter Jay (London: Penguin, 1974), 111. 13 D 4: 12.
14 Woolf‘s six articles appeared in the following issues of the British edition of Good Housekeeping: ‗The
Docks of London,‘ December 1931, 16-17, 114-117; ‗Oxford Street Tide,‘ January 1932, 18-19, 120; ‗Great Men‘s Houses,‘ March 1932, 10-11, 102-103; ‗Abbeys and Cathedrals,‘ May 1932, 18-19, 102; ‗―This is the House of Commons‖,‘ October 1932, 18-19, 110-112; ‗Portrait of a Londoner,‘ December 1932, 28-29, 132.
15 D 4: 6. 16
Jeanette McVicker, ‗―Six Essays on London Life‖: A History of Dispersal,‘ 2 Parts, Woolf Studies
Annual 9 (2003): 143-165; and Woolf Studies Annual 10 (2004): 141-172; 1: 145. McVicker forcefully
argues that ‗within the constellation of work undertaken between May 1930 ... and October 1932 ... these essays take on interest and ... significance as a window on Woolf‘s thinking during the transition from finishing The Waves to beginning the complex project that would consume the next six to seven years of her life‘ (1: 148).
89
‗linked together by the death in each of an Angel in the House.‘17
When read not only in their historical context, I argue, but also in their original bibliographic context,
Woolf‘s Good Housekeeping articles evidence even more strongly her growing desire to set out on a new course and to redirect her creative and critical activities toward public life through developing her analysis of women‘s position within Britain‘s social, economic and political power structures. This chapter expands McVicker‘s insightful feminist-historicist contextualisation of these essays through a genetic unearthing of their textual history, or ‗pre-life,‘ within the Good Housekeeping editions in which they first appeared.
Written between February and April 1931, Woolf‘s six-article series for this popular woman‘s magazine presents the reader with a culturally-engaged fictional tour of London‘s major commercial, literary, religious and political landmarks. Her essays range from the Thames docklands to the former homes of Thomas Carlyle and John Keats; from Oxford Street‘s department stores to the Houses of Parliament; from St Paul‘s Cathedral to the drawing-room of a fictional cockney hostess, Mrs Crowe. The reader is guided around these different scenes by a discursive and imaginative narrative that often masks her essays‘ cultural criticism. The theme of Woolf‘s Good
Housekeeping series appears to have been inspired in part by her meeting with Aldous
Huxley. His visit to the London docklands is reflected in her choice of subject for the first article of the series. The similarities detailed later in this chapter between Huxley‘s docklands essay for Nash’s Pall Mall Magazine, ‗The Victory of Art over Humanity,‘ printed July 1931 and Woolf‘s ‗The Docks of London,‘ printed December 1931, are presumably coincidental as Woolf‘s own essay was submitted to Good Housekeeping before Huxley‘s text appeared. However, the presence of mammoth tusks in ‗The Docks of London,‘ a devalued commodity that becomes a motif in her text, echoes a letter to Clive Bell on 21 February 1931 in which Woolf reported: ‗[Huxley] spends his week in London visiting docks, where with Maria‘s help he can just distinguish a tusk from a frozen bullock.‘18
Woolf‘s visit to the Houses of Parliament to gather material for ‗―This is the House of Commons‖‘ similarly corresponds to Huxley‘s use of his attendance at a parliamentary debate on 11 February 1931 as the basis for his
17
McVicker, ‗Six Essays on London Life,‘ 1: 145.
90
forthcoming essay on the failings of modern democracy. It is impossible to
conclusively determine the extent of Huxley‘s influence on Woolf‘s choice of subject matter for her Good Housekeeping essays, yet her attempt to document the physical, social, political and commercial landscape of London in this series evidently owes something to their encounter and conversation on 16 February 1931. In the wake of The
Waves, as Huxley‘s visit made her painfully aware of her lack of public commentary on
current affairs, Woolf used her Good Housekeeping contract as an opportunity to try blending cultural analysis with lyrical narrative in order to present an experimental critical portrait of urban, industrial Britain.
Long disregarded as an incidental commission undertaken purely for money, the posthumous publication of Woolf‘s six London essays as a monograph later brought them to the attention of her critics and readers. Originally published in Good
Housekeeping between December 1931 and December 1932, the first five essays of
Woolf‘s London series were reprinted in a collected edition titled The London Scene in 1975, first published in America and then in Britain in 1982, before later appearing with the addition of the previously omitted sixth essay in a generously illustrated second edition with the same title published in Britain in 2004.19 Since their first publication as a monograph Woolf‘s Good Housekeeping essays have been read variously as a
feminist reclamation of the patriarchal city, an exploration of Englishness, a negotiation of ‗the differences between aristocratic and democratic eras,‘ a ‗reflection on the
transformation from a Victorian social order to … neo-imperialist commodity capitalism,‘ and an investigation into ‗the materialist construction of space.‘20
They have also been dismissed, as Woolf herself dismissed them, as merely ‗pure brilliant description‘ with ‗not a thought for fear of clouding the brilliancy.‘21
Even McVicker, whose shrewd analysis of these essays greatly informs this chapter, propagates the view
19 Virginia Woolf, The London Scene: Five Essays by Virginia Woolf (New York: Frank Hallman, 1975);
Virginia Woolf, The London Scene: Five Essays by Virginia Woolf (London: Hogarth, 1982); Virginia Woolf, The London Scene, illustrations by Suzanne Barton (London: Snowbooks, 2004). All references to The London Scene articles in this thesis will be to the versions printed in E 5.
20 See Susan M. Squier, Virginia Woolf and London: The Sexual Politics of the City (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 52; Sonita Sarker, ‗Locating a Native Englishness in Virginia Woolf‘s The London Scene,‘ NWSA Journal 13: 2 (2001): 1-20; Melba Cuddy-Keane, Virginia Woolf, the
Intellectual, and the Public Sphere (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 47; McVicker, ‗Six
Essays on London Life,‘ 1: 144; and Anna Snaith and Michael H. Whitworth, introduction to Locating
Woolf: The Politics of Space and Place, ed. Anna Snaith and Michael H. Whitworth (Basingstoke:
Palgrave, 2007), 24.
91
that ‗[r]eaders should not overvalue Woolf‘s journalistic writing.‘22
As Anna Snaith and Michael H. Whitworth observe, Woolf‘s ‗much-overlooked‘ London series requires further attention.23 Her fragmentary portrayal of the city in these essays and her glossy, evasive prose style encourage frustrated and multiple readings. Returning to these texts in their original site of publication reveals that Woolf never intended to publish her articles together as ‗The London Scene.‘ The second and third essays of her series were advertised on the cover of Good Housekeeping and headed inside as ‗The London Scene II‘ and ‗The London Scene III‘ respectively, but this label was absent from the first essay and dropped for the publication of the fourth, fifth and sixth.24 This pattern indicates that ‗The London Scene‘ was an editorial addition rather than an authorial classification, yet the use of these words to title the two posthumous collected volumes of Woolf‘s Good Housekeeping essays has transformed their reception and left later critics searching for a consistent critical position that they do not necessarily contain.
In Material Modernism: The Politics of the Page, George Bornstein insists that the way we understand a text is fundamentally tied to the context in which we encounter it.25 Drawing on the work of editorial theorist Jerome J. McGann, Bornstein emphasises that a work‘s meaning is derived from both ‗[its] words, or ―linguistic code,‖ and its physical features, or ―bibliographic code,‖ ... [such as] page layout, book design, ink and paper ... as well as broader issues ... like publisher, print run, price or audience.‘26
The bibliographic code of a text, Bornstein argues, ‗points to the work‘s ―presence in time and space‖‘; ‗Subsequent representations, particularly if they emphasize only the linguistic code ... tend to set the text free from its original time and place, locating it in
22 McVicker, ‗Six Essays on London Life,‘ 1: 148.
23 Snaith and Whitworth, introduction to Locating Woolf, 23-24.
24 Interestingly, the word ‗scene‘ had only recently begun to be employed in this sense, preceded by an
adjective to describe a particular place or sphere of human activity. The earliest usage cited by the OED is a reference to ‗the contemporary American scene‘ in the Times Literary Supplement on 15 October 1931, three months before Good Housekeeping used the term on the cover of their January 1932 issue to describe Woolf‘s articles; see Oxford English Dictionary, 2d ed. [Web site and database] (Oxford University Press, 2010); available from <http://www.oed.com >; accessed 2 March 2010.
25 George Bornstein, Material Modernism: The Politics of the Page (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2001), 1.
26 Ibid., 7; the terms ‗linguistic code‘ and ‗bibliographic code‘ are taken from Jerome J. McGann‘s The Textual Condition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), in which McGann argues that both the words and the diverse material elements of a literary work contribute to its meaning (57).
92
our own principally as an aesthetic rather than historicized object.‘27
Woolf‘s Good
Housekeeping essays have suffered acutely through such a process of editorial
relocation. The later monograph versions of these journalistic texts not only strip Woolf‘s essays of their original cultural and historical context, detaching them from the editorial, feature and commercial material alongside which the first readers of these essays encountered them, they also endow the series with an appearance of unity that the texts were never before required to exhibit. Written specifically for serial journal publication, Woolf‘s Good Housekeeping essays present not one ‗scene‘ but rather a collection of contradictory visions of Britain‘s capital past and present. Woolf omits to present a clear critical viewpoint in this series, instead drawing a likeness of the city to which she has access and outlining the changes she has witnessed, as a woman, in the social, political and economic centre of patriarchal, imperialist Britain. The linguistic content of these texts may be identical in each version, but to read Woolf‘s London essays in an edition of The London Scene is not the same as to read them within Good
Housekeeping.
Following the approach of periodical studies, a branch of literary scholarship which attempts to read magazines in their entirety as complex cultural objects, I aim to re-evaluate the cultural criticism of Woolf‘s London Scene series by resituating her essays within the publication in which they first appeared.28 Fiona Hackney notes the scholarly tendency to assume that British women‘s magazines of the interwar period contained nothing more than a conservative portrayal of domesticity.29 This mistaken assumption is regrettably visible in the scholarly reception of Woolf‘s Good
Housekeeping essays. Otherwise sensitive discussions of the series are frequently
hampered by the insinuation that Woolf was forced to dilute or ‗dumb down‘ her cultural critique of modern London for the middle-class, middlebrow readers of this
27 Bornstein, Material Modernism, 7; internal quotation taken from Walter Benjamin, ‗The Work of Art
in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,‘ in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), 222.
28 For an overview of the debates and approaches of this recently evolved field of critical study see Sean
Latham and Robert Scholes, ‗The Rise of Periodical Studies,‘ PMLA 121: 1 (2006): 517-531.
29
Fiona Hackney, ‗―Women are News‖: British Women‘s Magazines 1919-1939,‘ in Transatlantic Print
Culture: Emerging Media, Emerging Modernisms, ed. Ann Ardis and Patrick Collier (Basingstoke:
Palgrave, 2008), 115. Hackney argues that these magazines were far less conservative than critics have previously assumed, demonstrating that ‗from the early 1920s women‘s achievements in sports, the arts, and government, as well as the latest innovations in female dress, were regularly splashed across the media ... [and] were a favourite subject of popular editorial photo-features in women‘s magazines‘ (114).
93
publication. Susan M. Squier, for example, asserts that Woolf deleted social criticism from the first essay of her Good Housekeeping series in part due to ‗anticipation of the audience‘s probable negative response.‘30
Sonita Sarker similarly contends that these essays represent a ‗restrictive frame‘ for Woolf‘s writing because they were ‗intended … for a primarily North American and European bourgeois readership.‘31
McVicker is one of the few critics to date to recognise that although Good Housekeeping seems ‗an unlikely place of publication‘ for Woolf, the magazine offered a promising audience for her cultural criticism.32 As McVicker astutely observes, ‗the ―new women‖ readers of
Good Housekeeping in 1931-2 … were the women whom Woolf was, ostensibly,
addressing in her speech to the Society for Women‘s Service in January 1931.‘33
A closer look at the early history of Good Housekeeping reveals that this commission offered an ideal outlet for Woolf‘s developing feminist cultural analysis of patriarchal Britain. Less than two months after giving her speech on ‗Professions for Women‘ to the Junior Council of the L&NSWS, Woolf opportunely framed her Good
Housekeeping series as a six-part walking tour of industrial London through which she