the daughter’s freedom. Quoting the following passages from Woolf’s essays, Fisher thus proposed that the kernel of the conflict was essentially inherent in the spirit of freedom:
First, Fisher adduced Woolf’s recollection of her father as the follower of John Stuart Mill’s liberal feminism:
The relations between parents and children today have a freedom that would have been impossible with my father…Yet if freedom means the right to think one’s own thoughts and to follow one’s own pursuits, then no one respected and indeed insisted upon freedom more completely than he did. His sons…should follow whatever professions they chose; his daughters, though he cared little enough for the higher education of women, should have the same liberty. If at one moment he rebuked a daughter sharply for smoking a cigarette…she had only to ask him if she might become a painter, and he assured her that so long as she took her work seriously he would give her all the help he could. He had no special
44 In Woolf’s memoir, Leslie Stephen was not only “a social father,” “a writer father,” but also “a tyrant father,” “the exacting, the violent, the histrionic, the demonstrative, the self-centred, the self pitying, the deaf, the appealing, the alternatively loved and hated father” (Moments 116).
love for painting; but he kept his word. Freedom of that sort was worth thousands of cigarettes. (Fisher 33; Woolf, Captain’s 74)
But then, Fisher reminded us, the same spirit of liberty might have also incited the daughter to go beyond her father and mentor. In a review on Sara Coleridge’s writing, for example, Woolf had criticized the master’s daughter as an “unfinished” writer:
[Coleridge’s] daughter, Sara, was a continuation of him, not of his flesh indeed, for she was minute, aetherial, but of his mind, his temperament.
The whole of her forty-eight years were lived in the light of his sunset, so that, like other children of great men, she is a chequered dappled figure flitting between a vanished radiance and the light of every day. And, like so many of her father’s works, Sara Coleridge remains unfinished.
(Fisher 33; Woolf, Death 111)
Oppositely, for Woolf, a “finished” writer should be independent or even rebellious and critical, like what she exemplified as follows:
When I read [my father’s] books I get a critical grasp on him; I always read Hours in a Library by way of filling out my ideas, say of Coleridge, if I’m reading Coleridge; and always find something to fill out; to correct;
to stiffen my fluid vision. I find not a subtle mind; not an imaginative mind; not a suggestive mind. But a strong mind; a healthy out of door, moor striding mind; an impatient, limited mind; […] It was a black and white world compared with ours; obvious things to be destroyed—headed humbug, obvious things to be preserved—headed domestic virtues. I admire (laughingly) that Leslie Stephen; and sometimes lately have envied him. Yet he is not a writer for whom I have a natural taste.
(Moments 115)
In this way, while receiving the seed of liberty from her father, Woolf
apparently had meanwhile cultivated the fruit of critical thinking which was now turning back to re-examine her father’s “black and white world.” Her rebellion against her father, accordingly, began with her acceptance of her father’s value. In Fisher’s words, “her father’s intervention in her education gave her the means of refuting him”
(46). And here, if we find in the father’s enlightenment (or more explicitly, his sharing of the power) an inevitable result of seducing the daughter into receiving his law and consolidating his paternal power, his seduction, in the end, paradoxically incurred the daughter’s usurpation of his power.
In The Daughter’s Seduction, Jane Gallop analyzed the necessity of the power transition (from the father to the daughter) from the perspective of dynamic power relationship. According to Gallop, seduction between the father and the daughter can be reciprocal, for if the father seduces the daughter into following his laws, the daughter may well reverse the power relationship by seducing the father into
revealing his desire for the daughter and thereby challenging the father’s authority. As such, unlike the son’s Oedipus complex based on the direct confrontation with the father, the daughter’s development depends mainly upon her compliance with the law of the father—but a compliance that can lead to a subversion of the law. The
daughter’s seduction, more specifically, requires that she dissemble, lie, and cajole in order to gain a share of the father’s power:
If the phallus is the standard of value, then the Father, possessor of the phallus, must desire the daughter in order to give her value…The
daughter submits to the father’s rule, which prohibits the father’s desire, the father’s penis, out of the desire to seduce the father by doing his bidding and thus pleasing him. (70-71)
And, for the father to preserve his seductive position as a power distributor, he needs to share his power with the daughter timely and duly—until the daughter has become
full-fledged and needs no more the father’s favor. Applied to Leslie Stephen and Virginia Woolf’s case, Gallop’s analysis not only accounts for how the father’s respect for liberty could seduce the daughter into receiving his value. More importantly, it illuminates how the daughter’s admiration for the father could eventually turn into an ideological breakup.
But the possession of the power did not bring the daughter to the supreme status as she expected she should have reached. Rather, as she overthrew the father’s
authority, she was confronted with the void of the power—not the lack of the power (as she thought she was in when she was still a subordinate daughter), but the illusiveness of the power relationship. That is, when she accomplished herself as an independent writer, she had also come to realize that there had been no transcendental hierarchy dominating all people. Much as her father’s authority could be merely a psychological effect, therefore, her identity as a “finished” writer did not guarantee her supremacy over other people. Moreover, the opposite positions between the self and the other, the seducee and the seducer were all illusory. As we may clearly grasp in the following lines, Woolf believed that all different identities in the world were equally parts, bearing no essential meanings for their lives, nor preconditioned relationship with others.
I make it real by putting it into words. It is only by putting it into words that I make it whole; this wholeness means that it has lost its power to hurt me; it gives me, perhaps because by doing so I take away the pain, a great delight to put the severed parts together. Perhaps this is the
strongest pleasure known to me. It is the rapture I get when in writing I seem to be discovering what belongs to what; making a scene come right;
making a character come together. From this I reach what I might call a philosophy; at any rate it is a constant idea of mine; that behind the cotton
wool is hidden a pattern; that we—I mean all human beings—are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art. Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself. And I see this when I have a shock. (Moments 72)
Indeed, simply by reintegrating the cotton wool of everyday life into a new work of art in writing, Woolf seemed to have governed the world and experienced the rapture. But beyond the created world, Woolf had also realized that “there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God.” The pattern on which she established the wholeness of the world, accordingly, was simply an illusion constructed on her own imagination. And, as the demarcations between the seducer and the seduced, the other and the self were eliminated, “the other face in the glass” proved to be indistinguishable from the writer. It was apparently the writer’s own mirror reflection. Though strange and even gruesome to her, the mysterious face appearing in the glass was indeed the writer’s double or exteriorized inner self. And, to get the clue of how the illusive pattern was formed, Woolf thus suggested entering into the real process of the infinite inter-reflections between the self and the others.
Woolf’s Mirror Literature
Now we find that we are coming back to the reality of the interpersonal
inter-reactions as Woolf once revealed in “The Mark on the Wall.” As Woolf observed in one’s exchanges of eye contact with others, one may easily fall into the vortex of infinite inter-reflections with others simply by glancing at their eyes and generate
from the infinite reflections a new world of contemplation. And for “the novelists in future,” Woolf believed, this world of contemplation was exactly “the depths they will explore,” “the phantoms they will pursue.” But since the created world is constructed purely on the basis of one’s subjective imagination, all the diverse identities in the world (as different as Shakespeare from Beethoven) can be merely expedient
disguises, taking on different meanings, functioning to compose the wholeness of the world. In fact, from the perspective of language structure, they were all equally parts, or purely signs, subject to changes of meanings and uses in different contexts. As we may read in Woolf’s “An Unwritten Novel” (1921),45 while the narrator of the short story had imagined a vivid and complete story about a passenger he accidentally encountered in a train, the whole story eventually proved to be mere fantasies built up on the narrator’s subjective assumptions. The illusive pattern of the generated world, in sum, is the mirror reflection of the narrator’s unconscious language structure.
In short, mirrors for Woolf, as I suggested, were something like the projection screen onto which the complete map of one’s life was displayed together with the traces of this mapping process. And since she treated mirrors as the essential interface for the exteriorization of one’s self, it is not surprising that mirror images permeate her works, from her short stories to her longer novels. Moreover, as I will demonstrate in the following chapters, as psychological mechanisms reflecting not only a subject’s self-image but also his/her very consciousness, in part a linguistic consciousness, of this self-image, the mirrors appearing in Woolf’s works are employed essentially in three ways.46
45 From The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf, 112-121.
46 These do not really correspond with, but might be looked at in relation to, the initial three stages in Hegel’s dialectic of “self- consciousness,” at the opening of his 1806 work The Phenomenology of Mind: (a) the subject presupposes his essential and unified “I” (without reflecting on it); (b) the subject sees/is consciousness of the object (the not-I, the other); (c) the subject reflects back on himself, taking himself now as his own “object,” i.e. becoming self-conscious: this third stage is the moment of Hegel’s aufheben or “sublimation” which moves to a higher level, negating but also including both of
1. In some cases, as in The Voyage Out, mirrors are used only via their first-level function as representational apparatuses of the external world, which render a faithful image of everything, just as it normally appears, that is reflected in them, no matter from what perspective it is viewed.
2. In other cases, as in The Waves, the mirrors take on their second-level function of representing the fluid stream of consciousness of those who look at/into them; that is, they now display not just the exterior forms of
“viewers” but their self-consciousnesses, now embodied as mirror reflections. Indeed we now enter a realm of inter-subjectivity where individual consciousnesses may seem to reflect one anther like the waves of the sea reflect light, and all these consciousnesses can be seen as parts of one larger flow or wave.
3. In still other cases, as in Between the Acts, the mirrors (like literature, like fictional narrative itself) function on a third, more fully dialectical level, representing (reflecting) the unconscious structure of viewers’ psychical operations, not just their manifest self-reflections (level 2) but what lies hidden from themselves in these self-reflections, though it may become clear to others. Such reflections or representations now taken on a deeper reality, as if they were the mirror reflections of characters’ real lives.
By showing how the early novel The Voyage Out, the middle-period novel The
Waves and the late novel Between the Acts can be read in the light, respectively, of the
above-mentioned three “functions of the mirror”: representing the external world, representing the internal world, and embodying the unconscious structure of human psychological operations, I do believe that the reading of Woolf’s autobiographicalthe earlier two stages. Lacan was of course influenced, like Sartre and Bataille, by Kojeve’s lectures on Hegel in Paris in the 1930s.
writing and fiction undertaken in this thesis will shed light on Woolf’s own techniques or praxes of writing as well as on—and in very close conjunction with these—some of her deepest and most subtle themes. For, as I believe, it is only through the interface of the mirror that we can approach Woolf’s self-reflective “moments” when she is composing her works.
Chapter 3
The Voyage Out of the Sphere of Mirror Reflection, Language Representation and Masculine Codes
I aspire to give no more than a faithful account of men and things as they have mirrored themselves in my mind. The mirror is doubtless defective; the outlines will sometimes be disturbed, the reflection faint or confused; but I feel as much bound to tell you as precisely as I can what that reflection is, as if I were in the witness-box narrating my experience on oath.
—George Eliot, Adam Bede47
I shall re-form the novel and capture multitudes of things at present fugitive, enclose the whole, and shape infinite strange shapes.
—Virginia Woolf, Letters48
47 George Eliot, Adam Bede 221.
48 From Virginia Woolf’s letter to Clive Bell, dated on Aug. 19th 1908, written as she was composing Melymbrosia, later The Voyage Out (The Letters of Virginia Woolf I, 356). For convenience, references to this source will be shortened as Letters in this article.
“The novel is an act of extrication.”49
The Voyage Out recounts the psychological growth of a young Englishwoman, Rachel Vinrace, who comes to a better understanding of herself, her life, and the external world after she embarks on a sea voyage to a foreign land, to her love, and even to death. As thematically the protagonist’s spiritual advancement depends upon her disengagement from her primary territory, whether the latter is her homeland (England) or, more metaphorically, her selfhood and her life, many critical approaches to this novel have been focused on the semantic explorations of the word “out,” an adverbial preposition which may concurrently indicate a sweeping movement away from the inside and a space marked by the gap between starting and ending point, their separateness.
In “The Voyage Out: Thematic Tensions and Narrative Techniques,” for example, Joanne S. Frye was engaged in investigating the possibility of incorporeity in the novel, i.e. the state of being outside physicality. To reveal Rachel “not as a defined physical being, but rather as a consciousness through which the reader apprehends Woolf’s thematic concerns,” Frye illustrated the protagonist’s gradual
“dissolution of self into a cosmic unity” (403). By showing the occasional fusions of Rachel’s internal consciousness with the external Nature and her personal voice with the impersonal narrator’s, Frye demonstrated that Rachel, especially in her “moments of ecstasy,” was a metaphysical being standing out distinctly from her corporeal entity (404). Essential to the author’s technical decomposition of Rachel’s corporeity in the novel, Frye finally suggested, actually was her venturing, her seeking for a cosmic unity outside an individual’s physical materiality.
49 Nice Montgomery, “Colonial Rhetoric and the Maternal Voice: Deconstruction and Disengagement in Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out 37.
Other research which has touched on the issue of incorporeity also includes the thematic discussions of Rachel’s death. While some critics took the protagonist’s death as a triumph of spirituality over materiality/physicality (Vlasopolos; Urstad), others treated it as a “feminine gesture” (Bayley 73), a radical resistance to being shaped and dominated by the masculine principle (Bayley; DeSalvo; Smith). For Michael Tratner, on the other hand, since Rachel’s voyage out signified an artist’s movement towards greater communion with the public, her death might symbolize an alternative for the artist when she found she had yet to confront the masses. In sum, although there are diverse accounts of the symbolic act of death, the termination of a mortal’s biological functions has been generally interpreted as the transformation of a material/physical being into something outside the domination of mundane
institutions. Death, in other words, was treated by Woolf not as the end of life, but rather as the commencement of a freer form which was emancipated from its corporeal confinement.
Other research has been devoted to exploring the novel’s themes of
communication and representation outside the sphere of language. In “Toward the Far Side of Language: Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out,” for example, E. L. Bishop undertook an investigation into Woolf’s attitudes toward language, arguing that language for Woolf functioned to suggest, not to contain, meaning. In order to understand Aeschylus as Bishop said, quoting from Woolf, it is thus not so necessary to understand Greek. Rather,
It is necessary to take that dangerous leap through the air without the support of words which Shakespeare also asks of us […] Connecting them in a rapid flight of the mind we know instantly and instinctively what they mean, but could not decant that meaning afresh into other words. The meaning is just on the far side of language. (Woolf, Collected
Essays I 7; Bishop 343).
To demonstrate that Woolf had been concerned about the suggestiveness of
language in her first novel, The Voyage Out, Bishop presented Rachel as an ineloquent girl who mostly relied on music, not language, to express her intense emotions.
Through Rachel’s restive questioning of the function of language, Bishop suggested that Woolf introduced what would become a persistent theme in all her later works:
the problem of how words could encompass and communicate human experience. In
“’This Curious Silent Unrepresented Life’: Greek Lessons in Virginia Woolf’s Early Fiction,” on the other hand, Vassiliki Kolocotroni took Terence Hewet’s (Rachel’s fiancé’s) endeavor to render women’s “curious silent unrepresented life” (VO 245)50 as the touchstone to analyze the function of language with which the author was concerned in the novel. And yet, as Kolocotroni poignantly pointed out, to the passionate young Englishman’s disappointment, his attempt to subsume the unrepresented life within the structure of language representation only “led her [Rachel’s] thoughts in a different direction” (317; VO 245). Unable to successfully speak for women like his fiancée, Terence on the contrary made them lose their
“freedom and become self-conscious” (317; VO 245). Tracing Rachel’s name from its Hebrew origin, however, Kolocotroni suggested reading Rachel as “the novel’s
“freedom and become self-conscious” (317; VO 245). Tracing Rachel’s name from its Hebrew origin, however, Kolocotroni suggested reading Rachel as “the novel’s