Table Of Content

Clemson University TigerPrints Woolf Selected Papers Clemson University Digital Press 2011 Virginia Woolf & the Natural World Kristin Czarnecki Carrie Rohman Follow this and additional works at:http://tigerprints.clemson.edu/cudp_woolfe Recommended Citation Virginia Woolf and the Natural World: Selected Papers from the Twentieth Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, edited by Kristin Czarnecki and Carrie Rohman (Clemson, SC: Clemson University Digital Press, 2011), xii, 246 pp. ISBN 978-0-9835339-0-0 This Book is brought to you for free and open access by the Clemson University Digital Press at TigerPrints. It has been accepted for inclusion in Woolf Selected Papers by an authorized administrator of TigerPrints. For more information, please [email protected]. Virginia Woolf and the Natural World Selected Papers from the Twentieth Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf Virginia Woolf and the Natural World Selected Papers from the Twentieth Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf Georgetown College Georgetown, Kentucky 3–6 June, 2010  Edited by Kristin Czarnecki and Carrie Rohman CLEMSON UNIVERSITY DIGITAL PRESS Works produced at Clemson University by the Center for Electronic and Digital Publishing, including Th e South Carolina Review and its themed series “Virginia Woolf International,” “Ireland in the Arts and Humanities,” and “James Dickey Revisited” may be found at our Web site: http://www.clemson.edu/cedp. Contact the director at 864-656-5399 for information. Every eff ort has been made to trace all copyright-holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked, the publisher will be pleased to make the necessary arrangement at the fi rst opportunity. Copyright 2011 by Clemson University ISBN: 978-0-9835339-0-0 CLEMSON UNIVERSITY DIGITAL PRESS Published by Clemson University Digital Press at the Center for Electronic and Digital Publishing, Clemson University, Clemson, South Carolina. Produced with the Adobe Creative Suite CS5 and Microsoft Word. Th is book is set in Adobe Garamond Pro and was printed by Standard Register. Editorial Assistants: Emily Kudeviz and Christina Cook. To order copies, contact the Center for Electronic and Digital Publishing, Strode Tower, Box 340522, Clemson University, Clemson, South Carolina 29634-0522. An order form is available at the digital press Web site: http://www.clemson.edu/caah/cedp/ SCRTh emed_Iss_VWoolf.htm. Cover design by Christina Cook. Frontispiece by Cathy Frank. iv Table of Contents Kristin Czarnecki and Carrie Rohman • Introduction to Woolf and the Natural World ....vii Acknowledgments .........................................................................................................xi List of Abbreviations ....................................................................................................xii Bonnie Kime Scott • Ecofeminism, Holism, and the Search for Natural Order in Woolf ....1 Carrie Rohman • “We Make Life”: Vibration, Aesthetics, and the Inhuman in Th e Waves ...........................................................................................................12 Diana Swanson • “Th e Real World”: Virginia Woolf and Ecofeminism .............................24 Cecil Woolf • Virginia and Leonard, as I Remember Th em ............................................35 Elisa Kay Sparks • “Everything tended to set itself in a garden”: Virginia Woolf’s Literary and Quotidian Flowers: A Bar-Graphical Approach ................................................42 Beth Rigel Daugherty • Taking Her Fences: Th e Equestrian Virginia Woolf ....................61 Laci Mattison • Th e Metaphysics of Flowers in Th e Waves: Virginia Woolf’s “Seven- Sided Flower” and Henri Bergson’s Intuition ...........................................................71 Erin Penner • Crowding Clarissa’s Garden .....................................................................78 Rachel Zlatkin• Th e Flesh of Citizenship: Red Flowers Grew ..........................................84 Jane Lilienfeld • Th e Besieged Garden: Nature in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Willa Cather’s One of Ours ..................................................................................90 Rebecca McNeer • Virginia Woolf: Natural Olympian: Swimming and Diving as Metaphors for Writing ............................................................................................95 Patrizia Muscogiuri • “Th is, I fancy, must be the sea”: Th alassic Aesthetics in Virginia Woolf’s Writing ...................................................................................................101 Gill Lowe • Wild Swimming ......................................................................................108 Vara Neverow • Th e Woolf, the Horse, and the Fox: Recurrent Motifs in Jacob’s Room and Orlando ......................................................................................................116 Jane Goldman • Th e Dogs that Th erefore Woolf Follows: Some Canine Sources for A Room of One’s Own in Nature and Art ..............................................................125 Diane Gillespie • “Th e Bird is the Word”: Virginia Woolf and W.H. Hudson, Visionary Ornithologist .......................................................................................................133 Jeanne Dubino • Evolution, History, and Flush; or, Th e Origin of Spaniels ...................143 Kathryn Simpson • “Lappin and Lapinova”: A Woolf in Hare’s Clothing? .....................151 Alice Lowe • “A Certain Hold on Haddock and Sausage”: Dining Well in Virginia Woolf’s Life and Work ..........................................................................................157 Kate Sedon • Moments of Aging: Revising Mother Nature in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway ...................................................................................................163 Barbara Lonnquist • Homeless in Nature: Solitary Trampings and Shared Errantry in Cornwall, 1905 ..................................................................................................169 Xiaoqin Cao • “Walking over the bridge in a willow pattern plate”: Virginia Woolf and the Exotic Landscapes ....................................................................................174 Diana Royer • Mining with the Head: Virginia Woolf, Henry David Th oreau, and Exploring the Self Th rough Nature ........................................................................180 Catherine W. Hollis • Virginia Woolf as Mountaineer .................................................184 Verita Sriratana • “It was an uncertain spring”: Reading Weather in Th e Years. .............191 v Elise Swinford • Transforming Nature: Orlando as Elegy .............................................196 Derek Ryan • “Nature, who has played so many queer tricks upon us”: Digging Granite and Chasing Rainbows with Virginia Woolf ..........................................................202 Dominic Scheck • Sundered Waters: Isolated Consciousness and Ostensible Communion in Woolf’s Narration ............................................................................................208 Emily Hinnov • “To give the moment whole”: Th e Nature of Time and Cosmic (Comm) unity in Virginia Woolf’s Th e Waves......................................................................214 Wayne Chapman • Spengler’s Th e Decline of the West and Intellectual Quackery: Checking the Climate with Leonard Woolf and W.B Yeats ......................................221 Luke Reader • Listening-in, Tuning Out: Leonard Woolf’s Criticism of the BBC During the 1930s ............................................................................................................228 Notes on Contributors ..............................................................................................236 Conference Program ..................................................................................................240 vi Introduction by Kristin Czarnecki and Carrie Rohman F or the 20th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, people from around the world gathered at Georgetown College, amid the bluegrass and horses of Cen- tral Kentucky, to explore the theme Virginia Woolf and the Natural World. Th e call for papers included a quotation from Th e Waves (1931)— “Sharp stripes of shadow lay on the grass, and the dew dancing on the tips of the fl owers and leaves made the garden like a mosaic of single sparks not yet formed into one whole. Th e birds, whose breasts were specked canary and rose, now sang a strain or two together, wildly, like skaters rollicking arm-in-arm, and were suddenly silent, breaking asunder”—that led scholars, students, common readers, and creative writers in myriad directions as they explored nature in the life and writing of Virginia Woolf. Panelists considered the nature of patriarchy, nature in the city, theories and philosophies of nature, nature as transformative, and science and technology as gateways into the natural world, among a host of other topics. As can be seen from the conference program (archived at http://www.georgetowncollege.edu/ Departments/English/Woolf/) and these Selected Papers, nature was vital to Woolf’s life experience and her conception and development of a modernist, feminist poetics. Th e conference included an array of special presentations, many of which we are pleased to publish here. In the fi rst of three keynote addresses, Bonnie Kime Scott discussed how Woolf’s natural imagery, particularly as framed by marginal female characters, and her representations of earth goddess fi gures off er holistic, ordered moments. Th is pattern resonates with various ecofeminisms, which Scott presented with an eye toward providing theoretical structure for discussions to follow. Scott also provided an invaluable synthesis of previous scholarship on Woolf and nature. Carrie Rohman explored how Th e Waves describes the nonhuman dynamism of vibrational forces at work in the human characters, Jinny in particular. Th rough this reading, she discussed Jinny’s “creativity” as something rooted in our animal nature and connected to cosmic patterns. Rohman’s approach suggests that the novel acknowledges life itself is an artistic performance, a claim that takes Woolf’s posthumanism quite seriously. Closing the conference was Diana Swanson, who off ered ideas about how Woolf’s writing can help further the quest to develop the non-anthropocentric and non-androcentric understandings of the world necessary to solving the environmental crises of the 21st century. Swanson off ered inspiring ideas about how what we do as Woolf scholars and teachers can help solve the ecological problems under discussion throughout the conference. Elisa Kay Sparks’s special presentation provided a botanical encyclopedia, or index, to plant references in Woolf’s works, which she found serving “as literal natural organ- isms, as artifi cial renderings of the natural, and as fi gurative strategies.” Accompanied by dozens of beautiful photographs and an architectural blueprint for a Virginia Woolf garden based on the frequency of specifi c fl owers, trees, bushes, and fruits in Woolf’s works, Sparks’s talk set the stage perfectly for the array of conference panels to come. Similarly, Beth Rigel Daugherty shared her discovery of Woolf’s surprisingly numerous references vii to horses. Finding “cart horses, dray horses, race horses, plough horses, runaway horses, dead horses,” and many others galloping across the pages of the novels, letters, and diaries, Daugherty discovered the “Equestrian Virginia Woolf,” one “who might, after all, be at home in the horse capital of the world” (nearby Lexington, Kentucky). We were also honored to have with us Cecil Woolf, publisher of the Bloomsbury Heritage monograph series, whose talk on his memories of his aunt and uncle was moving, funny, and also thought-provoking for reminding us that Virginia and Leonard Woolf, while “two people . . . whose lives have become public property,” were also “real human beings, not characters in some up-market soap opera.” Gardens, fl owers, and parks provided rich fodder for several conference papers. In analyzing the seven-sided fl ower in Th e Waves, Laci Mattison connects Woolf’s philoso- phy to Henri Bergson’s concepts of duration and intuition. Images like the fl ower reveal Woolf’s use of assemblage to create something at once multiple and whole, and Woolf’s conveying of our experience of time that goes beyond the self and even the human. Erin Penner complicates our understanding of nature in Woolf, suggesting that the natural is far from synonymous with “wild freedom” in her works. Rather, the garden in Mrs. Dal- loway (1925) is “a continuation of the social scene[s] that take place indoors, rather than an escape from it.” Rachel Zlatkin argues that in Mrs. Dalloway, Septimus Warren Smith’s connectedness to nature aff ords him a means of signifi cation denied him by the rhetoric of post-war England. Zlatkin draws upon ecocriticism to demonstrate how green space, such as Regent’s Park, may be contrived to heal or harm society’s most vulnerable citizens. Jane Lilienfeld also perceives the connections between natural imagery and war. In her paper on the work of Woolf and Willa Cather, Lilienfeld shows how the landscape at this historical moment is “perfect in propaganda” but “savaged in battle.” Moving from land to water, Rebecca McNeer highlights the numerous references in Woolf’s oeuvre to swimming and diving as metaphors for writing. Whether diving be- neath the surface to develop an idea, likening the rhythm of writing to that of the sea, or describing her brain as variously damp, bubbling, boiling, or freshly fl owing, Woolf found water imagery particularly well suited to depicting and understanding her creative pro- cess. Patrizia Muscogiuri also addresses Woolf’s water and sea references. Taken together, she states, they constitute “a groundbreaking thalassic aesthetics” instrumental in shaping Woolf’s political, philosophical, and feminist perspectives. Indeed, Gill Lowe examines the “wild swimming” of Rupert Brooke and Woolf, and defi nes this as “the liberation of entering what might be seen as an outlawed element; a secret ‘skinny dipping.’” Animals large and small roam throughout the Selected Papers. Vara Neverow con- textualizes the many references to horses and foxes in Jacob’s Room (1922) and Orlando (1928), noting that both animals “are intrinsically categorized as ‘Other,’ and references to them are embedded within discourses that justify abuse and persecution.” Neverow also considers each novel’s more subversive or metaphorical references to horses, which have strong sexual connotations, and foxes, which come to represent freedom, wildness, and danger. In her paper on canine sources for A Room of One’s Own (1929), Jane Goldman discusses Woolf’s adaptation of and departure from historical confi gurations of dogs in literature and art. Neither linking disparate species wholly nor reifying the ruptures between them, Woolf instead tests and complicates the human-animal boundary. Diane Gil- lespie gives us a sense of Woolf’s “familiarity and appreciation” for the work of naturalist viii W. H. Hudson, and specifi cally links the two writers through their intellectual attraction to birds. Jeanne Dubino’s close look at the “canine context” of Flush (1933) highlights the specifi c role of the spaniel. She notes that Woolf’s “serious and whimsical” account of the dog’s origin includes, among other things, “a deep appreciation and knowledge of Darwinism.” With similar attention to historical contexts, Kathryn Simpson shows how elements of “Lappin and Lapinova,” with its animalized fantasy world, off er ways to inter- pret the story in relation to “Woolf’s experience as a writer, her perception of her work in relation to the literary market and her political perspective, especially in relation to war.” Writers continue to explore aspects of Woolf, the body, and bodily experience. Alice Lowe updates our view of Woolf’s relationship to eating by emphasizing her appreciation and enjoyment of food and her own pleasurable experience of cooking. With special consideration of Woolf’s letters and diaries, Lowe suggests that “Woolf’s priorities, her loves, were writing and reading, her friends and family, and her daily life, which included her walks, nature and food.” Kate Sedon sees Mrs. Dalloway revising the Western world’s Mother Nature archetype of the youthful, fertile woman. Th rough the novel’s aging female characters, Clarissa Dalloway, Aunt Helena Parry, Lady Bruton, and the Battered Woman, Woolf privileges the experiences of aging women while also highlighting their socially and psychologically precarious position in a culture that devalues them. Woolf’s interactions with landscapes and the environment resonated throughout her life and work, with varying degrees of personal and political consequence. Barbara Lon- nquist discusses the profound eff ect on Woolf of her childhood summers at St. Ives along with her and her siblings’ return to Cornwall in 1905. Focusing on Woolf’s Cornwall diary, Lonnquist fi nds Woolf contending with a longed for yet illusory childhood stability and a beautiful, beckoning, yet aloof coastal landscape. Xiaoqin Cao explains the role of the exotic landscape in Woolf’s work through the lenses of orientalism, colonialism, and imperialism. While Woolf was not immune to the infl uence of Western attitudes, Cao argues, her work nonetheless functions as a harbinger of change in the perceptions of the Oriental among British artists. Diana Royer sees a connection between the ways in which Woolf and Th oreau “use nature philosophically to explore the self.” Catherine Hollis takes us into the world of the mountaineer and helps us to speculate about Woolf’s would-be relation to that sport, in part by looking at some of Woolf’s short stories. Hollis concludes that had Woolf “taken up mountain climbing, she would have found in the activity what her father did: mental and physical vitality, friendship, and pleasure.” Verita Sriratana understands the weather in Th e Years (1937) as a “technology of place.” By discussing the weather in relation to practical meteorology in England, she shows how the weather in Woolf’s novel can represent a site of resistance and empowerment. Several papers yield fresh insights into consciousness, subjectivity, and concepts of the self and the other in Woolf. Elise Swinford, for instance, views Orlando as a new kind of elegy. Although it is Woolf’s only novel with no deaths, its use of natural myth and imagery, its linking of literature, gender, and loss, and its would-be poet who must “fi guratively replace his predecessor by mourning him through the writing of an elegy” renders it an innovative evocation of melancholia. Derek Ryan addresses a crucial term in Woolf studies, “granite and rainbow,” noting that while many scholars believe Woolf used the term to denote a strict binary, primarily that of truth and fi ction, she in fact extends and complicates the metaphor throughout her writing. Dominic Scheck similarly revises ix