MINISTERIO DE DESARROLLO ECONÓMICO

Most of the conventions of novel writing, however, remain intact in The Voyage Out. There were several intermediary steps, none more important than how Woolf’s own record of narrative innovation begins with a “discovery of technique.” Woolf recalls that unforgettable day in 1917, “…the day I wrote The Mark on the Wall—all in a flash, as if flying, after being kept stone breaking for months.”113 The quarry of her frustration was Night and Day, by Woolf’s own estimate her most conventional novel, useful to her as compositional exercise but possessing none of the immediacy or innovation of those first “little pieces”—the short stories eventually published in Monday or Tuesday (1921). Her diary describes this breakthrough as a “new form for a novel,” her three short stories—“The Mark on the Wall,” “Kew Gardens,” and “An Unwritten Novel”—taking hands and stretching to two hundred pages or so: “doesn’t that get closer & yet keep form & speed, & enclose everything, everything?”114 The result would be Woolf’s first experimental novel, Jacob’s Room; but the composition of Night and Day,

concurrent with the writing of the short stories, was nevertheless essential in the process. Writing Night and Day provides Woolf the formal outline and the structural blueprint from which she departs in “Kew Gardens” and the stories that ensued. It describes what her fiction might later accomplish.

113_{The Letters of Virginia Woolf, IV, ed. by Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann (New York: HBJ 1981) 231.} 114_{Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol. II, ed. by Anne Olivier Bell, (New York: HBJ 1980) 13-14.}

Night and Day all transpires in England, but like The Voyage Out, the short excursions

outdoors are crucial—these ventures are, at the furthest, to the English countryside, and most significantly to the city of London’s great repositories of wild nature: the zoological and botanical gardens. Towards the end of the novel, Woolf takes a quartet of lovers to the zoo to sort out the emotional attachments between Ralph and Katharine, on the one hand, and

Cassandra and William on the other. Instead of a “tea-tray” between them, Ralph sees Katharine against “a background of pale grottos and sleek hides.”115 No longer hostess to the eminent guests of the afternoons at the Hilbery residence, Katharine feeds a different relation that seems familiar enough: the giraffes observe her “from their melancholy eminence, and the pink-lined trunks of elephants cautiously abstracted buns from her outstretched hands.”116 The procession is impressive: pythons, camels, lizards, frogs, fish, alligators, caterpillars, snakes, a “lately emerged and semiconscious butterfly” and an array of flowers that together “produced an atmosphere in which human beings tended to look pale and to fall silent.”117 While not nearly the dangerous excursion undertaken in The Voyage Out, the consequences are the same. Communication is stifled and humanity feels less significant or self-assured, even in the artificially constructed and confined environs. By the monkey cages, where William fails to attract them by rattling the bars and offering an apple, Katharine sees him as “a wretched misanthropical ape.” The whole scene and the jealousy it induces in William “pulled her down into some horrible swamp of her nature where the primeval struggle between man and woman still rages.”118 Through this descent into evolutionary origins, the romance plot is settled— Cassandra and William go their own way, leaving Katharine free and available to Ralph.

115_{Night and Day 312} 116_.Ibid.

117_{Ibid. 312-313.}

In a large measure, what Woolf attempts to work through in Night and Day is how to allow her heroine the prospect of marriage without fettering her to the shackles of patriarchal society. Rachel must die in The Voyage Out, but what about Katharine? This is the first novel conceived after Woolf’s own marriage, and the adjustment by any biographical or biological account was neither smooth nor easy for either Leonard or Virginia. Part of the resolution, brilliantly elucidated by Molly Hite, is Woolf’s construction of the “visionary body” in fiction that enables “Woolf to create passionate and sensuous female characters without embroiling them in the societal consequences of female eroticism that had shaped the romance plot.”119 An intimation of this comes in the impersonal, unconscious detachment that Rachel Vinrace exhibits when she plays the piano, or when Terence Hewet notices that “existence now went on in two different layers,” after he and Rachel declare their love in the jungle and rejoin the party. “Here were the Flushings talking, talking somewhere high up in the air above him, and he and Rachel had dropped to the bottom of the world together.”120 In Night and Day, the impersonal

detachment of Rachel playing music is related directly to the rapturous, ecstatic feeling usually vouchsafed only for men and women in love.

Katharine’s passion is mathematics, physics in particular, and her daydreams often wander to the signs and numbers enumerating celestial bodies visible in the night sky. Molly Hite focuses upon a curious passage where Katharine’s attention is divided:

She was feeling happier than she had felt in her life. If Denham could have seen how visibly books of algebraic symbols, pages all speckled with dots and dashes and twisted bars, came before her eyes as they trod the Embankment, his secret joy in her attention might have been dispersed. She went on, saying, ‘Yes, I see…but how would that help

119_{“Virginia Woolf’s Two Bodies” Genders 31 2000, 3.} 120_{VO 319.}

you?… Your brother has passed his examination?’ so sensibly, that he had constantly to keep his brain in check; and all the time she was in fancy looking up through a telescope at white shadow-cleft disks which were other worlds, until she felt herself possessed of two bodies, one walking by the river with Denham, the other concentrated to a silver globe aloft in the fine blue space above the scum of vapours that was covering the visible world.121

What interests Hite is that Katharine’s division here is not conceived in the classical tradition of mind-body or soul-body splits. Instead, Katharine feels herself “possessed of two bodies,” the one engaging Ralph Denham in conversation just after he has professed to her that she is his ideal, and the other fully embodied in the acute sensations of her mental preoccupations with mathematics. Hite calls these two bodies social and visionary: “The social body walks Katharine Hilbery through the comic version of the romance plot with its sanctioned euphoric conclusion. The visionary body is the site of her most acute sensations,” the one “opposing Victorian

aesthetics with ‘vision’ and ‘aloofness,” the qualities of aesthetic detachment that became “hallmarks of her own modernist practice.”122 In this, the last of Woolf’s novels with a

conventional plot, Woolf attempts a resolution of the romance by giving Katharine a visionary body that evades the obstructions and interruptions and subjugations that the social body nonetheless must experience. Ralph in this sense is a suitable suitor because Katharine can at once be with him and be elsewhere, both present physically and physically absent amid the crowd of stars.

But part of this resolution does require some merging of the visionary and the social body that I read with different emphasis than Hite. Ralph is not oblivious to the meandering feelings

121_{Night and Day, ed. by Julia Briggs (New York: Penguin, 1992) 254.} 122_{“Virginia Woolf’s Two Bodies” 6-7.}

of Katharine. At their parting, he asks her to let him know the “decision.” When Katharine hesitates, “He guessed her difficulties; he knew in a second that she heard nothing…”123 In other words, Ralph discovers that her mind (if not her body) was elsewhere, and he immediately proposes that they discuss things at Kew Gardens, a place where the social and visionary bodies, the male and female beings, may be properly aligned.