MINISTERIO DE SALUD

Greek is more than an idea of fixed forms or ideals of truth impervious to time in Woolf’s fictional universe. To review, Woolf saw early on that the evolutionary aspects of time and change had inherent affinities with narrative and character. I have argued that much of Woolf’s early writing grapples thematically with the particular problems and challenges Darwin’s evolutionary theory poses after its impact had been absorbed and gradually accepted or domesticated into myth. Gillian Beer’s excellent essay, “Virginia Woolf and Prehistory,”

examines just how closely Woolf read Darwin, especially The Voyage of the Beagle, from which Beer finds many allusions to and correspondences with Woolf’s own Voyage.317 The previous chapters aver that Woolf’s growing subversion of conventional plot as a narrative structure, the kind of conventional structure which sustained her first two novels, has Darwin as a principle origin. It is one of Woolf’s great manifestic assertions that narration in her time had indeed become a problem, writing in 1919 that “…we go on perseveringly, conscientiously,

constructing our thirty-two chapters after a design which more and more ceases to resemble the vision in our minds.”318 Convention dictated the old Aristotelian unities and the Platonic notion of internal logic and artistic form, but if “one were free and could set down what one chose, there would be no plot, little probability, and a vague general confusion….”319

317_{“Virginia Woolf: The Common Ground, Gillian Beer, (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Mich. Press, 1996) 6-28.} 318_{“Modern Novels,” The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Vol. III, ed. by Andrew McNeillie (New York: HBJ) 33.} 319_Ibid.

Woolf, in doing so, did not simply shirk off Platonic or Victorian notions of artistic unity in embracing Darwin’s temporal upheaval. The ancient Greeks in general, and Plato specifically, come to represent major aspects of Victorian England in Woolf’s fiction, particularly the

patriarchal structures of English education and power that considered the acquisition and mastery of Greek as a prominent indication of distinction, gender, class, and accomplishment. Greek (and Latin) assured the English public schoolboy his rightful place as inheritor of British colonialism and empire. For Woolf, Queen Victoria notwithstanding, there were no heiresses vouchsafed a Greek education or pride in the empire. Nothing bears this out more than Woolf’s own childhood and educational experience. Learning Greek was a compulsory course of study but also a right that her brothers acquired through public schools and Cambridge, while Virginia Stephen as a woman did not. This male assumption to the glory that was Greece is often noted in Woolf, nowhere more satirically and succinctly than in her early Platonic sketch “A Dialogue upon Mount Pentelicus” (1906). A group of young Englishmen descending the mountain agree upon this sentiment: “For to call a man a tourist when you meet him abroad is to define not only his circumstance but his soul…Germans are tourists and Frenchmen are tourists but Englishmen are Greeks.”320 Later, they not only share wine with “the escort of dirty Greek peasant boys but condescended so far as to address them in their own tongue as Plato would have spoken it had Plato learned Greek at Harrow” (64).

And yet patriarchy and its engendered exclusions did not prevent Woolf from assiduously learning Greek on her own, beginning at the age of 15, or from reading and assimilating the ideas of Darwin on her own. Plato and Darwin, Greek literature and natural history were fields of study essential to Woolf’s intellectual and aesthetic development, and they become essential to her development of a feminist literature. Out of these dual and shifting engagements, what I will

ultimately establish in the ensuing chapters is that Woolf’s departures from conventional plot and narrative, her distinctive shaping of a modern poetics, significantly evolves from her acquisition and transformation of these two male university pursuits for the uses and advantages of women. In order to do so, it is important to also admit and acknowledge how, in agreement with Pamela Caughie and many of Woolf’s most astute critics, Woolf’s writings offer “a dynamic model for narrative rather than a dualistic one.”321 Woolf’s ambivalent, indeterminate, and sometimes contradictory figuration and use of Greek underlies her ambivalence over any set, determined structure to writing. Her valuing of process over conclusions and any straightforward

methodology requires multiple and multiform associations and meaning in regard to the “Greek” to be explored and related to her Darwinian narrative. There are many iterations of Hellenism in Woolf’s great passion and contemplation of the Grecian past and the social currency it occupies in British culture by the turn of the century, especially the private and public exchange of the Greek ideal that Woolf employs.

Two of her first four completed stories in particular— “A Dialogue upon Mount Pentelicus” and “Phyllis and Rosamond” both written in 1906—illustrate the formative role Greek would come to found in her fiction and her personal life. They establish how Woolf is beginning to think about the difference gender makes in the acquisition of learning Greek, and perhaps more importantly how appropriating her own idea (if not ideal) of Greek literature and antiquity required a necessary departure not just from the Greek past but the Victorian. This is what the most thoroughgoing scholar of Woolf’s Greek studies, Theodore Koulouris, has come to view as Woolf’s “Greekness” that early on merges the personal, the educational, and the

321_{Refiguring Modernism, Volume Two: Postmodern Feminist Readings of Woolf, West, and Barnes, ed. by Bonnie Kime Scott,} Indiana UP, 1995, p. 178.

socio-cultural.322 At play always is the serious, often satirical juxtaposition of classical Greece and contemporary England as Woolf came to know it though her own Greek studies and the exposure to this Cambridge Apostolic sect. The early works from the summer to fall of 1906, from which all of her very earliest unpublished forays at fiction begin appearing in her notebooks, anticipate and ultimately include the seminal September voyage to Greece. She would mine her travel journal entries from this trip for many stories to come, including most famously Jacob’s Room and The Waves. “A Dialogue upon Mount Pentelicus” and “Phyllis and Rosamond” are the early fruits of these labors—the former a richly textured and deeply informed satire that lays bare the masculine Greek ideal as it had been derived from all the educational and cultural accumulations of Victorian England; and the latter a fictional exposition on how a version of that Greek ideal could come home to England in the open exchange of ideas between men and women through dialogue, and how this might be applicable to women (and men) in the new century.