「鏡裡的另一張臉」：吳爾芙的鏡子情結及其作品中之鏡子意象

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(1)國立臺灣師範大學英語學系博士. 論文. Doctoral Dissertation Department of English National Taiwan Normal University. 「鏡裡的另一張臉」：吳爾芙的鏡子情結及其作品中之鏡子意象. “The Other Face in the Glass”: Virginia Woolf’s Looking-glass Complex and the Mirror Images in her Works. 指導教授：史文生 Advisor: Dr. Frank W. Stevenson 研究生：曾瑞華. 中華民國一 ○ 一年六月 June, 2012.

(2) 「鏡子裡的另一張臉」：吳爾芙的鏡子情結及其作品中之鏡子意象. 摘要. 本論文旨在探討吳爾芙藉鏡子意象探索意識如何透過反思機制之形塑與再現而以具體形象呈現於人面前之過程。探討範圍包括其一生對鏡子又愛又懼之複雜情結、其在鏡中所驚見之「另一張臉」(「一張動物的臉」)、以及其在作品中對鏡子之映射功能以不同形式在人一生中所產生之不同影響所作之探索。研究動機除對吳爾芙晚年在其回憶錄中所提及之鏡子恐懼與其於作品中多處以鏡子為意象探索反思機制所呈現之矛盾感到好奇，亦對其在回憶錄中所驚見之「另一張臉」感到興趣。綜合相關文獻對此神秘之臉之詮釋，(包含德薩佛所主張之「誘惑者之臉」、海門所提出之「其父之臉」、斯奎爾所言之「全天下男人之臉」以及豪爾德所持之「吳爾芙多元自我之投射」)，本論文除提出「『鏡子裡的另一張臉』即吳爾芙因受誘惑者之啟蒙而開發之多元自我」之論點，亦嘗試論證吳爾芙在其作品中多處藉鏡子意象探索多元自我所留下之足跡即其藉誘惑者之引誘/權宜深入慾望禁區所創作之文學。易言之，吳爾芙即其自身之誘惑者，而其藉書寫探索多元自我之媒介(即文學)即提供吳爾芙認識自我、探索自我與創作自我之最佳明鏡。其一生對面對鏡子與多元自我又愛又懼之複雜情結因而在文學創作的介面中找到了最好的轉移與出路。就理論架構而言，為論證「吳爾芙在鏡中所驚見如動物般之『另一張臉』即吳爾芙因受誘惑者之啟蒙而開發之多元自我」，必先確認「誘惑者與被誘惑者在心理機制上有著相當程度的認同關係」。為論證此點，論文第一章因而援引佛洛依德之「誘惑理論」，藉以導出「誘惑者在某種程度上實為被誘惑者之想像」之論點。誠然，對站在被誘惑者立場並為其伸張社會公平正義的評論家(如梅森)而言，佛洛依德之誘惑理論(尤其指其後來之發展)極可能因過於偏向對被誘惑者之 I.

(3) 主觀認知與其創傷記憶與形成之研究而忽略對誘惑事件與對誘惑者社會道德與法律責任之追究，然而，既然被誘惑者因誘惑事件而引發之歇斯底里症候(如自我否定與恐懼症)明顯屬於心理問題，本文故而主張暫時擱置對吳爾芙誘惑事件真實與否之探討，並採用佛洛依德心理分析之路徑分析吳爾芙如何由誘惑創傷走向對誘惑者之認同、並藉文學創作發掘多元自我之心路歷程。第二章以第一章所論證之「誘惑者與被誘惑者在心理機制上有著相當程度的認同關係」為基礎，正式進入吳爾芙一生與其鏡影邂逅並從中獲得省思之探討。以吳爾芙於其回憶錄中所提及之鏡子情結與其在鏡中所驚見之「另一張臉」為起點，本章要以論證「『鏡子裡的另一張臉』即吳爾芙因受誘惑者之啟蒙而開發之多元自我」，除此之外，本章並援引吳爾芙於〈牆上的記號〉一文中所揭櫫之「鏡射理論」，用以作為吳爾芙對現代文學創作所提出之見解與宣言：「當我們在公車或地鐵站彼此互視的那一剎那，我們即在彼此的鏡射中看到自己‧‧‧，未來的小說家將越來越了解這些鏡射的重要性‧‧‧，因為這些相互輝映之鏡射是無限的，它們所延伸之深度即現代小說家們所要探索的，它們所產生之幻影即現代小說家們所要捕捉的。」最後，本章並指出吳爾芙因對鏡射與反思機制之深刻省思，故而在其一生之文學創作過程中探索了鏡射之於人生之三層作用與影響：物質世界之表面鏡射、心靈世界之內在鏡射、以及鏡射過程之鏡射。自第三至第五章，本文即分別以吳爾芙早期之《出航》、中期之《海浪》、及其晚期之《幕之間》為例，揭櫫吳爾芙如何在這三部小說中展現她對鏡射與反思機制之於人生之三層省思。第三章以解讀《出航》之鏡子意象為研究重點。內容包括探討女主角瑞秋如何受只能反映外在物質世界之鏡影影響以致只能自卑自憐、最後甚而芳華早逝之悲劇、此單一鏡射(或反思機制)如何受父權價值之形塑、以及更多與瑞秋有相同命運的「維多利亞女兒」(如吳爾芙)如何能走出只能反射物質世界之單一鏡射以及受父權宰制之反思機制或語言結構，以獲得最後之解脫。在小說中，瑞秋甚不滿意自己的鏡影，當她反思她與達洛威先生之情慾邂逅便覺罪孽深重，而當她站 II.

(4) 在劍橋學子聖約翰(在小說中，他曾被明喻為一面鏡子)的面前，她更常因被當成無知的女人而感到自慚形穢，作為吳爾芙的第一部小說，《出航》確實反映作者在成為作家以前所受之創傷及其對如何能走出其「維多利亞女兒」之命運所作之深刻反思。第四章主要分析《海浪》之鏡子意象。不同於《出航》中反映單一物質表象之鏡子意象，在《海浪》中，鏡子主要反映人的內在意識。因每個人的內在意識只反映其自身之心靈/語言結構，故人與人之間的溝通與交流相當困難。以六個好友站在鏡前所自述之內在獨白為例，本章旨在揭櫫既然每個個體來自不同背景、有著不同思考邏輯與語言結構，其分別站在鏡前所作之獨白與呈現於鏡中之影像亦殊。透過鏡子意象，《海浪》因此可謂傳遞了吳爾芙(或甚至現代主義文學) 一向青睞的主題：意識的內在反射性與人與人之間溝通的困難性。第五章進入吳爾芙對鏡射功能與反思機制之第三層省思，亦即：具有再現功能之鏡射機制(在小說中曾被擴及為吳爾芙一向認定對戰爭形成有推波助瀾之功效的歷史劇、集體意識或國家意識)不應只呈現截去鏡射或再現形成過程之鏡影，而應同時呈現所有鏡射或再現形成之過程，即使如此真實之再現勢將使得最後呈現之鏡影繁雜無序、如「混雜品」一般。為論證吳爾芙在其一生最後的小說《幕之間》特意強調再現過程之再現，第五章分三方面陳述其理：第一，以深入生活現實核心之報紙對照威爾斯之《歷史綱要》，要以呈現報紙所鏡射之真實並不亞於歷史，第二，以伊莎於三面鏡中所窺得之面容全貌為例，說明人之多元複雜並非單一鏡射所能涵照，第三，以拉托普在其歷史劇最終幕〈我們自己〉所安排之多重鏡射為例，強調多數歷史劇均為單一觀點之鏡射，欲破解其單一性，唯有藉著拉托普所設計之多重鏡射，重現再現過程，才能提醒觀眾不陷入單一鏡影之迷思。總結而言，本論文要以探討吳爾芙一生對鏡射與反思機制之省思，綜合本論文之研究，本文結論並提出：綜合其一生對鏡射與反思機制之省思，吳爾芙認為反思機制既然對於形塑意識有具決定性之重要性，如何能藉創作與書寫達成多重 III.

(5) 反射、以解消單一反射所形成之僵固性因而成為是否能得到自我救贖的關鍵。文末，本文並援引西蘇於〈美杜莎之笑〉對當代女性之鼓舞作為總結：直視美杜莎之美，捨棄透過鏡子之反思機制看世界，因為反思機制固然形塑意識、美化真實世界，但不免失去其最真實的一面，唯有不斷書寫、不斷行動，才能不斷創造真實。吳爾芙不斷書寫的一生，亦即其以多重反思破解單一反思的一生。. 關鍵字. 吳爾芙、出航、海浪、幕之間、鏡子、鏡映/反思、誘惑理論、原初自戀、鏡像期理論、錯誤/自我認知、凝視理論、意識浪、歷史劇、三面鏡、滑稽理論. IV.

(6) “The Other Face in the Glass”: Virginia Woolf’s Looking-glass Complex and the Mirror Images in her Works. Abstract. This dissertation aims to explore Woolf’s encounters with the mirror both in her life and in her works. Relevant issues include her ambivalence with regard to confronting herself in the mirror (her desire to confront and her paradoxical fear of so confronting herself), her mysterious encounter with “the other face in the glass”—“the face of an animal”—while she was looking in a mirror as a young girl, and her reflections on the diverse roles of mirrors in her life and private imaginative world. My interest in investigating Woolf’s “mirror issues” was motivated by two questions she asked herself in her memoir regarding her fascination with the mirror. The first concerns her ambivalent attitude toward the mirror; the second concerns her mysterious encounter with “the other face in the glass” whether in her dreams or in her imagination. As for the first question, based on Woolf’s self-analysis in her memoir—i.e. her anxiety about the tomboy code she shared with Vanessa, her fear of violating the puritanical streak she inherited from her paternal ancestry, and her feeling of shame on looking at her own body after being seduced by her halfbrother— I argue that her looking-glass phobia may come down to her fear of confronting her self, a self that has in some way been debased by the male order or tarnished by male violence. Based on this argument, I propose to investigate Woolf’s second question, that is, “whose face is the other face in the glass?”, from the perspective of her traumatic encounter with and ambivalent attitude toward male violence, at least within the male-centered value system she received from her father. In a sense, to argue that the “the other face in the glass” is both Woolf’s V.

(7) seducers and her own double means assuming that the seducers are inseparable from the seduced. To argue this point, I thus devote my first chapter to an exploration of Woolf’s seduction mystery from the perspective of Freud’s seduction theory, since according to Freud the seduction “event” can be purely psychological. And then, based on the self-reflexivity of the whole seduction issue as discussed at the end of Chapter One, in the second chapter I propose that “the other face in the glass” is actually the exteriorization of Woolf’s inner double. In the first two chapters of this dissertation, then, I mainly deal with Woolf’s early traumas, especially those that are related to her looking-glass complex, and their impact on her. In Chapters Three, Four and Five, I mainly deal with Woolf’s mirror images in her three novels The Voyage Out, The Waves, and Between the Acts. I am interpreting these novels in terms of the three levels of the mirror’s function of “reflecting life” in Woolf’s writings. Thus 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 that is reflected in them just as it normally appears, no matter from what or whose perspective it is viewed. In The Waves, 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. In Between the Acts, mirrors function (like narrative fiction itself) on a more fully dialectical level, representing (reflecting) the unconscious structure of viewers’ psychical operations, not just their manifest self-reflections (level 2) but also what lies hidden from themselves in these self-reflections, though it may become clear to others (level 1); such reflections or representations now taken on a deeper reality, as if they were the mirror reflections of characters’ real lives. In the Conclusion, entitled “living and writing: a reflection on reflection,” I VI.

(8) argue that after following Woolf’s development from a Victorian daughter intrigued with her own mirror reflection into a mature woman who explored the diverse functions and influences of the mirror in/on life, and after looking at the multi-leveled functions of the mirror in these three novels, we can finally see the degree to which Woolf wants to “see through” the illusoriness of life as it appears to us and of the social and political discourses that dominate our thinking, for the latter too are in a sense nothing but mirror reflections, virtual images. Hélène Cixous in “The Laugh of Medusa” draws on the myth in which Perseus kills Medusa—the hideous witch who turns to stone any man who looks directly at her face—by seeing her reflected image in his polished shield, in order to argue that the illusory image (here of “woman”) created by the mirror is like the illusory power of logocentric male rationality. Here I follow Cixous in arguing that we should stop approaching the world via the mediation of the mirror, itself the reflective mechanism of (male, phallogocentric) ideology and socio-cultural conditioning. If the other face in the glass is her (our) multiple selves then like Cixous’ “laugh of the Medusa” it is not horrible; rather, it is beautiful and full of the energy of life.. Keywords. Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out, The Waves, Between the Acts, mirror, reflection, seduction theory, primary narcissism, mirror stage theory, méconnaissance, gaze theory, the waves of consciousness, pageantry, three-folded mirror, comic theory. VII.

(9) Acknowledgements. I am much indebted to many people who have contributed to the completion of this dissertation. First and foremost, I would like to express my profoundest gratitude to my advisor, Professor Frank W. Stevenson, whose comprehensive knowledge of literature and philosophy has provided me with an inexhaustible resource. Through the graduate courses I took with him he inspired me to pursue the study of literature. . Without his untiring help and guidance, this dissertation could not have been undertaken, let alone completed. I am also indebted to Professor Sun-chieh Liang, Professor Mary Goodwin, Professor Cheng-hsin Tsai, and Professor I-min Huang for their valuable suggestions regarding the further enrichment of this dissertation. Thanks to their close reading and their conscientious corrections given at the stages of the proposal hearing and oral defense, this dissertation can clearly be improved. I am also grateful to Professor Hsiu-chuan Lee, who has not only guided me into the field of psychoanalytic study, but also taught me how to construct a good thesis. When I began composing this dissertation, she gave me much help in developing the main argument. Without her precious advice and patient guidance, many of the main ideas of this dissertation would not even have been conceived. I also owe my thanks to many teachers in the Department of English at National Taiwan Normal University who have given me courses in different fields. Aside from Professor Stevenson and Professor Lee, they include Professor Han-ping Chiu, Professor Shou-cheng Lai, Ching-fang Tseng, and late Professor Po Fang. It is they who opened my eyes and inspired me in the field of literary theory and criticism, after I had suspended my academic studies for a decade upon completing my MA degree. With their guidance, I rediscovered my interest in literary studies and found the track I VIII.

(10) wanted to pursue in my doctoral dissertation. Thus their contributions to this dissertation are also important, as are sun and the water to the growth of a tree. I also am indebted to Mu-han Wang, the TA of the English Department, who has helped me handle the administrative affairs, to my classmates in the Ph.D. program who have contributed their knowledge and precious ideas both in class and in after-class discussions, and to many of my colleagues in the Dahan Institute of Technology, without whose untiring support I could not have completed this dissertation while working at the same time. Finally, I would like to express my sincerest gratitude to my best friends Ching-ping and Hsiao-yin and my family, my mother, my husband and my son Andy for their unreserved support, both spiritually and physically. Without their constant caring and encouragement, I could not have completed this dissertation.. IX.

(11) Table of Contents. Introduction…………………………………………………………………………..01 The (De-)Materialization of the Self: Woolf and Mirrors Chapter One………………………………………………………………………….14 Virginia Woolf, a Victorian Daughter: The Problem of Seduction and Virginia Woolf’s Seduction Mystery Chapter Two………………………………………………………………………….37 Woolf and Mirrors: Discourses on Mirrors and Virginia Woolf’s Encounters with the Mirror Chapter Three………………………………………………………………………...58 The Voyage Out of the Sphere of Mirror Reflection, Language Representation and Masculine Codes: The Mirror Images in Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out Chapter Four………………………………………………………………………….97 The Waves of Consciousness Flowing in the Mirror: The Mirror Images in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves Chapter Five………………………………………………………………………...140 “Books are the Mirrors of the Soul”: On the Mirror as Essential Comic Element in Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………..176 Living and Writing: A Reflection on Reflection References…………………………………………………………………………..180.

(12) Introduction. The (De-)Materialization of the Self: Woolf and Mirrors. As we face each other in omnibuses and underground railways we are looking into the mirror; that accounts for the vagueness, the gleam of glassiness, in our eyes. And the novelists in the future will realize more and more the importance of these reflections, for of course there is not one reflection but an almost infinite number; those are the depths they will explore, those the phantoms they will pursue, leaving the description of reality more and more out of their stories, taking a knowledge of it for granted, as the Greeks did and Shakespeare perhaps. —Virginia Woolf1. This dissertation aims to explore Woolf’s encounters with the mirror both in her life and in her works. Relevant issues include her ambivalent complex with regard to confronting herself in the mirror (her desire to confront and her paradoxical fear of so. 1. From Virginia Woolf’s “The Mark on the Wall,” The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf 82-83. 1.

(13) confronting herself), her mysterious encounter with “the other face in the glass”—“the face of an animal” (Moments 69)—while she was looking in a mirror as a young girl, and her reflections on, her explorations into the diverse roles of mirrors in her life and private imaginative world. My own investigation into Woolf’s “mirror issues,” which will range from biographical studies on her real-life mirror encounters to textual analyses of mirror images in her works, was motivated by two questions she asked herself in her memoir, composed later in her life, regarding her fascination with mirrors. First we have this one. There was a small looking-glass in the hall at Talland House. It had, I remember, a ledge with a brush on it. By standing on tiptoe I could see my face in the glass. When I was six or seven perhaps, I got into the habit of looking at my face in the glass. But I only did this if I was sure that I was alone. I was ashamed of it. But why was this so? (Moments 67-68) Like most people presumably, Woolf was intrigued by looking at herself, perhaps exploring herself, in the mirror. But apparently this natural instinct was also suppressed by a sense of guilt, which we might at first suspect had to so with the notion that in this special form of “intimacy” she was breaking some sort of (not quite specifically sexual) taboo. Might she have felt there could have been someone “else” back there, beside or behind her, a voyeur who was also getting this intimate view of her body and face? Of course we will also think of Freud on narcissism (among other things) and also of Lacan’s theory that the child’s initial sense of self-identity is closely tied to the realization that it is “her” (“him”) that she (he) sees in the mirror. We will come back to these issues presently. However, in her memoir Woolf discusses three possible reasons for her “looking-glass phobia”: her shame in confronting her own body caused by her childhood experiences of being “seduced,” which may be closely tied to the feeling that there was a voyeur (or predator) back there as well, 2.

(14) and/or that she herself was this voyeur; her fear of betraying the puritanical upbringing inherited from her paternal ancestors by indulging in this scene of sensual beauty (also somehow related to the above); and her fear of violating the toughness of the tomboy code she shared with her sister Vanessa by this indirect act of looking back at herself in the mirror, instead of looking straight out at the world, at other people. But in all of these cases it may perhaps be that Woolf’s neurosis, her lookingglass phobia, comes down to the writer’s fear of confronting her self, a self that has in some way been debased by the male order or tarnished by male violence. In fact, one of my main assumptions will be that while gazing at herself in the mirror, Woolf may have seen her image in the light of the male-centered value system, that is, as a male would have seen it. If so, then to escape being checked out, gazed at or surveyed by the male supervisory system, Woolf may have felt she should avoid looking at her own corporeal, fleshly image in the glass. Her looking- glass phobia, in short, I will argue in this dissertation, is to a certain degree indicative of her anxiety about male power and the male order, which is tied to her own anxiety or uncertainty about her gender-identity. Moreover, while restraining herself from looking at herself in the glass in real life, Woolf had a mysterious mirror encounter in a dream. Recollecting the dream in her memoir, she wrote: I dreamt that I was looking in a glass when a horrible face—the face of an animal—suddenly showed over my shoulder. I cannot be sure if this was a dream, or if it happened. Was I looking in the glass one day when something in the background moved, and seemed to me alive? I cannot be sure. But I have always remembered the other face in the glass, whether it was a dream or a fact, and that it frightened me. (Moments 69) 3.

(15) Here we come back to the idea that a key fear may be that of seeing or sensing there is another person beside one when one is looking at oneself in the glass. And this is where Woolf posed the second question concerning her mirror encounters: Whose face is “the other face in the glass”? We note that this has a certain symmetry with the first question: “But I only did this if I was sure that I was alone. I was ashamed of it. But why was this so?” Of course, she might have been ashamed because in some sense she felt or knew that she was not alone, whether the “other” might have been her male side or self or some monstrous creature that dwelled within her, the animal or monster that dwells in all of us, perhaps, regardless of gender. Paradoxically, then, for all her anxiety about the looking-glass, or rather because of this anxiety, Woolf has created copious mirror images in her works, ranging from her essays to her short stories and long novels. The questions she posed in “A Sketch of the Past,” composed in her later years, and never specifically returned to afterwards have aroused the interest of Woolf critics ever since. For Louise DeSalvo, for example, Woolf’s looking-glass complex is “undoubtedly related to her feelings of shame about her early incest.”2 Based on Woolf’s memoirs and biographical materials on her early seduction, DeSalvo argues that the ghastly animal face looming in Woolf’s looking-glass was the sexual seducer’s horrible reincarnation. For Virginia R. Hyman, however, Woolf’s uncanny encounter with the animal face in the glass should be interpreted from the perspective of her Oedipus complex. In “Reflections in the Looking-Glass: Leslie Stephen and Virginia Woolf” (1983), she argued that Woolf had expressed her ambivalence toward her father on many occasions. Drawing evidence of Woolf’s memory of her father’s “sinister, blind, animal savage” from her memoir (Hyman, “Reflections” 213; Woolf,. 2. Louise DeSalvo, Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse and Her Life and Work (New York: Ballantine Books, 1989) 13. 4.

(16) Moments 146), Hyman thus concluded that “the other face in the glass” was Leslie Stephen’s. On the other hand, for Susan Squier in “Mirroring and Mothering: Reflections on the Mirror Encounter Metaphor in Virginia Woolf’s Works” (1981), the horrid image showing over Woolf’s shoulder symbolizes man’s insatiable demand for nourishment from woman. Unable to endure her subordinate status and her unlimited exploitation by men, in Squier’s words, the “young girl” (that is, Woolf) thus turned “transfixed, cornered by the horrid mirror image of a beast” when she looked at herself in the glass (274). Finally, for Stephen Howard, “the other face in the glass” represents the multiple voices co-existing in Woolf’s inner world. Tracing the writer’s diverse mirror images from many of her works, Howard argued that Woolf had taken the subject’s identity to be fluid and changeable. To explore the various facets of her self, Howard suggested, Woolf was therefore eager to capture her own multiplicity through her mirror literature: [F]or Woolf, writing served as a mirror through which she could contemplate the subtlety and variability of identity; in accordance with her sense of the plural, fragmentary nature of the private self, Woolf refused to restrict her interpretation of selfhood to one, singular metanarrative. (53) My reading of this perplexing riddle is closer to Howard’s. That is, based on Woolf’s writings on “mirrors” from diverse perspectives in her works, I believe that “the other face in the glass” she encountered, whether in life or in dream, reflects the grotesque amalgamation of her multiple selves. In fact, if we take this from the perspective of a subject’s mental process—and assume that all objects must have already been internalized into this subject’s inner world, becoming parts or fragments of its/her inner self—we could say that Howard’s view of the writer’s multiple self/selves in 5.

(17) fact already “contains” all the other critics’ interpretations. Moreover, since I believe that it might have been possible for Woolf to have internalized all her seduction experiences—seduction by her father in a more sublimated sense, and perhaps also by her half brother either in imagination or in real life, and even by her male contemporaries whose desiring gaze she may have felt—and condensed all those seducers into a single “figure” as visualized in her dream, I would suggest the following interpretation. “The other face in the glass” refers not just to one specific seducer who has left an indelible impact on Woolf as a Victorian daughter; rather, it refers to all the seducers who, according to the critics, have influenced Woolf’s life in many different ways. Furthermore, since according to Freud’s seduction theory the seducer might be the phantasy of the seduced, the other face in the glass could possibly be Woolf’s own reflection. The animal face in the glass, in short, embodies all of Woolf’s traumatic seduction experiences. And its appearance in the mirror, either in her dream or in her life, means not just its omnipresent surveillance and constant pressure on Woolf but also Woolf’s unconscious identification with it insofar as a mirror functions to render one’s own reflection in the glass. In a sense, to argue that “the other face in the glass” is both Woolf’s seducers and her own double means assuming that the seducers are inseparable from the seduced. To argue this point, I thus will devote my first chapter to an exploration of Woolf’s seduction mystery from the perspective of Freud’s seduction theory since according to Freud, the seduction “event” can be purely psychological. I will approach Woolf’s early seduction from the perspective of psychological exploration because the traumatic memories and the ensuing sense of guilt regarding the self are essentially psychological issues, even if the “event” in question has remained controversial for decades. Based on Freud’s theory, I thus want to illuminate Woolf’s 6.

(18) “seduction mystery” by looking at it in terms of her possible identification with the role of her seducers. The claim that “the other face in the glass” is really, whether appearing in dream of imagination, the exteriorization of Woolf’s inner double will be further developed in the second chapter of this dissertation. Thus in the first two chapters of the thesis I will mainly deal with Woolf’s early mirror-related traumas and their impact on her. An important point in Chapter Two will be that by unconsciously exteriorizing her multiple inner selves in the grotesque form of an animal face in the mirror, Woolf seemed to have revealed a tendency to “materialize” her impalpable being in some visible, tangible forms, even in her dreams. And one way she materializes this self, this being, is of course by “writing” it. Indeed, as we know from her critical writings (e.g. “Modern Fiction”) as well as her stories and novels, she seems to never cease transcribing these impalpable “moments of being” or receiving “myriads of impressions” into words. In this way she seems to have fulfilled her desire to concretize or even “visualize” her “unspeakable” being. As she wrote in her memoir: 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. (Moments 72) After all, Woolf’s “other face in the mirror” is concretized in the first place as words, language, literature.3 3. Of course, this needing to “put it into words” also reminds us that the multiplicity of (perhaps fragmentary) selves is also closely related to the multiplicity of words to be found within the vast system of langue, language—even nonsensical fragments of words such as those sometimes found in 7.

(19) Indeed, knowing that the fluid consciousness of one’s mirror encounters might actually constitute a special form of one’s truth of being, Woolf had been knowingly pursuing such an awareness in her own fictional writing and even urged the writers of the future to do so. And in “The Mark on the Wall” she announced her view of what modern literature would or should be or become, and here we note the intimate presence of mirrors and reflections: As we face each other in omnibuses and underground railways we are looking into the mirror; that accounts for the vagueness, the gleam of glassiness, in our eyes. And the novelists in the future will realize more and more the importance of these reflections, for of course there is not one reflection but an almost infinite number; those are the depths they will explore, those the phantoms they will pursue, leaving the description of reality more and more out of their stories, taking a knowledge of it for granted, as the Greeks did and Shakespeare perhaps—.4 In short, Woolf’s mirrors might be seen as something like the projection screen onto which the complete map of one’s life is displayed together with the traces of the mapping process itself. 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, serving as psychological mechanisms reflecting not only the subject’s self-image but also his/her very consciousness, which is inevitably in part a linguistic consciousness. In the three main chapters of this thesis, the works of a stream-of- consciousness writer like Woolf, for example in her novel The Waves. For perhaps we did not really need Freud or Lacan to point out to us the close relationship between our dreams and language, our unconscious minds and language, our free flows of thought and language. In a sense we must have already known that the unconscious is like an unstructured or incomplete language, a flow of “signifiers lacking signifieds.” Near the beginning of Woolf’s The Waves (1931) we have, for example: “I see the beetle,” said Susan. “It is black, I see; it is green, I see; I am tied down with single words. But you wander off; you slip away; you rise up higher, with words and words in phrases.” “Now,” said Bernard, “let us explore. There is the white house lying among the trees. It lies down there ever so far beneath us.” 4 From The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf 82-83. 8.

(20) chapters three through five, I will show how these mirrors are employed in Woolf’s works essentially in three ways.5 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 another 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.. 5. 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 the earlier two stages. Lacan was of course influenced, like Sartre and Bataille, by Kojeve’s lectures on Hegel in Paris in the 1930s. 9.

(21) More precisely, to give an example, I explore Woolf’s use of the mirror in the third chapter of The Voyage Out in its first-level function as an apparatus for representing the external world. Here we also find one of the recurrent Woolfian themes, a kind of critique of the male-centered society (as we also get with Mr. Ramsay, that representative of the Victorian father in To the Lighthouse). Thus I take Woolf as using her mirror image in this novel to make clear how a patriarchal society might control a Victorian daughter like Rachel, that is, by making her the victim of her own reflective mechanism, one which has been constituted by the male-centered society. For this mirror reflects the external material reality totally from men’s point of view. In the novel, Rachel keeps feeling ashamed of herself. She feels depressed when she looks at herself in the mirror; she feels guilty when she reflects upon her impurity after her erotic encounter with Mr. Dalloway—despite the fact that many feminists today might defend her innocence by charging the man with seducing her. And she also feels that she is, that she is being reflected as, an ignorant woman in the eyes of the Cantabrigian St. John—who is compared to a mirror in the novel— only because she has not read anything written by Gibbon. Following Rachel’s tragic life, which finally ends with her death in a foreign country, I argue in this chapter that her problems are not just personal ones involving her narcissistic concerns with her own reflected image. Rather, they are cultural issues on a larger scale, one which involves the process of social conditioning that is part of society’s collective reflective mechanism. I thus interpret Rachel’s death at the end of the novel and her eventual disappearance from St. John’s reflection at the end of it as her eventual salvation, inasmuch as she has traveled beyond the sphere of mirror reflection, language representation and masculine codes. In the fourth chapter on Woolf’s The Waves, I mainly deal with her mirror in its second-level function, that is, as reflecting not so much an objective external reality as 10.

(22) a fluid stream of consciousness that incorporates within itself the six main characters of the novel. That is, I treat the mirror in The Waves as a mind-mirror which not only reflects diverse characters’ structural waves of consciousness, but is in itself the diverse characters’ (collective) unconscious which is, in Lacanian terms, structured like a language, a system which has been functioning to produce an infinite structural consciousness of the same order. More precisely, Woolf gives us here the monologic flows of the characters’ waves of consciousness as if there were flowing on the reflective surfaces of mirrors, for these consciousnesses are after all also mirrors. That is, while presenting the characters’ interior monologues in language and in a stream-of-consciousness style, she often places these characters in front of mirrors so that we see their thoughts as if they were fleetingly flashing through or from these mirrors. And yet, since the six characters come from different levels of the society and have distinct personalities and different psychological/ reflective/ linguistic structures, that is, since they are dominated by different “orders of language,” they seldom achieve complete or totally transparent communication with one another. While they utter their waves of consciousness one after another throughout the novel as if they were following some interlocutory order, the contents of their monologues seldom seem to cohere with one another, to be congruent, and yet in another way we might see their speeches as obliquely impinging on one another or “reflecting off of” one another.. In this chapter then I will mainly deal with another of Woolf’s most. recurrent themes, namely the self-reflectivity of the consciousness and the impossibility of true or total communication between two people, a theme often discussed by interpreters of Mrs. Dalloway. But in the case on The Waves, I will argue, it is through this image of the mirror and reflection that Woolf proceeds to explore the nature of consciousness itself and the very meaning and possibility of communication. 11.

(23) Finally, in the fifth chapter on Woolf’s Between the Acts, I see the author as mainly exploring the problem of the representational function of the mirror, more precisely the complex issue of the way and in which, and the extent to which, the mirror’s own reflecting process or dynamic should be included in that which it reflects or represents. For in this novel Woolf’s “mirror” seems to be representing not just the reflected object but the whole reflecting process itself. Woolf’s last novel (published posthumously in 1941) was composed at an embarrassing time when she had just completed her book-length essay Three Guineas (1938) on her antiwar standpoint, but also saw the Second World War inevitably approaching. Depressed to see that the calamity of war (as evidenced in the photographs of those violent consequences of war she had mentioned in Three Guineas) was once again imminent, Woolf nevertheless never lost her faith in the possibility of resisting, counteracting the overwhelming tide of discourses on chauvinist nationalism which had once again been nourishing the war movement. And yet, after analyzing how this fervent nationalism served to foment war in Three Guineas, she now resolved to adopt a different strategy and contrive a new kind of novel. Instead of being argumentative and analytic, always attacking pro-war ideologies as in Three Guineas, this time she took on a more playful role in “performing the performativity” of the prevailing heroism and nationalism by demystifying the apotheosized national heroes and legendary myths, showing that they were just that, legends and myths, essentially mythopoeic forms. The novel, in this sense, is somehow like Woolf’s Orlando: A Biography, a playful and exuberant novel which parodies the genre of serious, factual biography, not only by choosing a fictitious antiheroic figure rather than a prominent celebrity as the protagonist, but also by intermixing “granite-like solidity” with “rainbow-like” intangibility” and. 12.

(24) welding them into one seamless whole (“The New Biography,” 149).6 To analyze the function of Woolf’s “literary mirror” in Between the Acts as one that deliberately presents us with a medley comprising the entire reflecting process, I focus on three examples Woolf gives in the novel: the newspaper as a mirror of daily life in that era, Isa’s three-folded mirror as a multiple reflection of her complex love, and La Trobe’s play with mirrors in her pageant or historical play. “Play” in its different senses is a key term and idea in the novel, and I will be looking at Woolf’s “serious” reflection of/on the village history pageant’s role in propagandizing and promoting nationalism and wars; that is, I will be exploring her technique of parodying and critiquing this role. In short, 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 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 will be attempting to shed light on Woolf’s own techniques or praxes of writing and, closely tied to these, on some of her deepest and most subtle themes. For after all, perhaps finally it is only through the interface of the mirror that we can approach Woolf’s most self-reflective “moments”—those when she is thinking about or perhaps even actually composing her works.. 6. From Granite and Rainbow. 13.

(25) Chapter 1. Virginia Woolf, a Victorian Daughter: The Problem of Seduction and Virginia Woolf’s Seduction Mystery. They publish your diary And that’s how I got to know you The key to the room of your own And a mind without end —Emily Saliers7. Everything goes back to the reproduction of scenes, some of which can be arrived at directly, but others always by way of phantasies set up in front of them. —Sigmund Freud8. Virginia Woolf had the courage to go it alone. Her writing was her own particular life insurance, her own ticket to survival, even though it often caused her great pain. —Louise DeSalvo 9 7. Song Lyrics of “Virginia Woolf” from Indigo Girls’ album Rites of Passage, an audio CD released by Sony in 1992. 8 Quoted from Freud’s letter to Fliess on May 2, 1897. See Sigmund Freud’s “Extracts from the Fliess Papers,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, translated by James Strachey, Vol. 1 (London: Hogarth, 2001) 247. 9 See Louise DeSalvo’s Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse and Her Life and Work (New York: Ballantine Books, 1989) 13. 14.

(26) Woolf’s Seduction. Regarded as one of the greatest innovators in the history of English literature, Virginia Woolf has received the acclaim and attention of academics and of the popular culture. Her experiment with stream-of-consciousness writing in exploring the psychological depths of her characters also won her a reputation among other modernists. Her political remarks on war, gender issues and social reformation have aroused debates among feminists in diverse camps.10 Her works have been translated into over 50 languages, and one of her translators was the famous Spanish-language writer Jorge Luis Borges. In 2005’s Time’s listing of the 100 best English-language novels, her Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse were included.11 Woolf’s Orlando and Mrs. Dalloway were adapted as films. Her life and works were interwoven into a new story in Michael Cunningham’s 1998 Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Hours, whose 2002 film version won Nicole Kidman the Academy Award for Best Actress. On Indigo Girls’ album Rites of Passage, the author is even written into song by Emily Saliers, a Woolf fan in her college years. Indeed, Virginia Woolf can be viewed as one of our most fascinating “contemporary” writers when we consider the general public’s continuing intense interest both in her as a person and in her works. But if we explore into the writer’s inner world further, we may find that underlying her capacity to arouse our interest, or in this sense perhaps to “seduce” us, is her susceptibility to being seduced by some of the most eminent figures in the British literary tradition. 10. In Sexual/Textual Politics, Toril Moi provides a critical discussion over the two main strands of feminist criticism, the Anglo-American and the French, claiming the former as more political, while the latter, theoretical. By comparing different attitudes towards Virginia Woolf, Moi suggests that some political reading of Woolf, either Showalter’s faultfinding criticism or Marcus’s overestimated appreciation, are still trapped by the patriarchal ideology. Rather, as Moi continues to point out, it is the feminist reading of the male critic Perry Meisel that has “grasped the radically deconstructed character of Woolf’s texts” (18). 11 http://www.time.com/time/2005/100books/the_complete_list.html 15.

(27) But Woolf also experienced “seduction” in the more purely psychological and implicitly sexual sense. In order to pursue the connection between this latter sort of seduction, which forms an important part of her biography as she wrote about it in her journals, and the writer’s later literary achievements, I propose to take Woolf’s Victorian upbringing as my point of departure, with the emphasis on her seduction by the paternal power and her reversal of this into (or reflection of it as) her own “inward” seduction.. The Seduction of the Tradition and/or of the Father. In “The Art of Fiction,” Woolf expressed her anxious yearning for the eminent British literary tradition. By comparing fiction to a “poor lady” (125) in need of recognition by the civilized society, she revealed her ambivalent attitude toward the patriarchal tradition of English literature. […] if fiction is, as we suggest, in difficulties, it may be because nobody grasps her firmly and defines her severely. She has had no rules drawn up for her, very little thinking done on her behalf. And though rules may be wrong, and must be broken, they have this advantage—they confer dignity and order upon their subject; they admit her to a place in civilized society; they prove that she is worthy of consideration. (122) To rescue fiction (or the poor lady) from the mist of elusiveness and obscurity, there must be some “gallant gentlemen” (121) extending their hands, drawing up rules for her and fashioning her into a certain recognizable form. But Woolf also cautioned us against such “mistaken chivalry” (125).12 As we know from “Modern Fiction,” she 12. At the beginning of the essay, Woolf illustrated Walter Raleigh and Mr. Percy Lubbock as the representatives of such mistaken chivalry: “both were a little ceremonious in their approach; both, one felt, had a great deal of knowledge of her, but not much intimacy with her” (121). In contrast, as Woolf 16.

(28) thought the realistic 19th-century narrative fiction of her immediate predecessors like H.G. Wells was too rigid and traditional, and she was seeking to create new directions for this art form. There was thus a tension between the desire to become one with the civilization and the anxiety of being forced to accept its coarse rules. Virginia R. Hyman interpreted this ambivalent attitude as Woolf’s psychological projection of her complex fixation on her father. Based on her research on Woolf’s Victorian upbringing under her father’s guidance, Hyman reminded us that Woolf had acknowledged on many occasions her intellectual debt to her father. In fact, as Hyman pointed out, given her father’s claim that she had made full use of his library, Woolf had gained a sense of superiority over most of her other siblings. But while illustrating Woolf’s longing for “the guidance of a good critical parent” (151), Hyman has also reminded us of the daughter’s occasional doubts about her father’s moral viewpoints on some disputable points: “when she does quarrel with Stephen, she does it on his terms, using his values” (149). Insofar as such class and gender analogies as “poor lady” and “gallant gentlemen” were explicitly used by Woolf herself in her discourse on fiction, Hyman’s interpretation of Woolf’s ambivalent attitude toward the patriarchal tradition may be right. But since Hyman’s research was focused on the influence on her of her father’s Victorian legacy, it did not give an account substantial enough to show how the daughter could have expected her father’s enlightenment on the one hand while remaining ambivalent about his tradition on the other.. The Seduction of the Daughter. In “The Seduction of the Father: Virginia Woolf and Leslie Stephen,” Jane. continued to point out, it was only E. M. Forster who won the intimacy with the lady because his informal attitude allowed him the privileges of the lover. See Virginia Woolf’s A Woman’s Essays. 17.

(29) Elizabeth Fisher endorsed Hyman’s view that Woolf’s was fixated on her father. Furthermore, she construed such a father-daughter bond in the “family romance” as the effect of the seduction of the father commonly seen in the familial structure of the Victorian society: Due to the unbalanced relationship between the father and the daughter in the family, with the father’s dominant position being contrasted with the daughter’s subordinate condition, the latter could only be forcibly seduced by the former and the power he possessed. Illustrating Woolf’s worship to her “godlike” father as well as his “privileged position” in the family,13 Fisher remarked that “Woolf’s fascination with paternal power began with her own father, the eminent Victorian essayist Leslie Stephen” (32). And yet, “as both father and mentor,” Fisher has also reminded us, Stephen “occupied a position of dual and contradictory authority in her life and writing” (32). That is, though resembling her father both in her sensitive temperament and strong intellectual orientation, Woolf was sometimes inflicted with disturbing conflict of love and hate toward her father. As she wrote when relating such ambivalence to Freud’s theory about father-daughter relationship, “it was only the other day when I read Freud for the first time, that I discovered that this violently disturbing conflict of love and hate is a common feeling; and is called ambivalence” (Moments 108). And, recognizing Woolf’s allusion to Freud as the writer’s implicit acknowledgement of her own Oedipus complex,14 Fisher thus continued to analyze how the writer had undertaken her eventual rebellion against her father.. 13. Fisher cites a passage from Woolf’s “A Sketch of the Past” to demonstrate the writer’s admiration for her father and her inclination to imitate him: “He had a godlike, yet childlike, standing in the family. He had an extraordinarily privileged position. I twisted my hair, imitating him. ‘Father does it.’ I told my mother when she objected. ‘Ah but you can’t do everything your father does,’ she said, conveying to me that he was licensed, for he was somehow not bound by the laws of ordinary people” (Fisher, 32; Woolf, Moments, 111). 14 As Fisher reminds us, when Woolf describes the Oedipus complex in Three Guineas, she ignores the father-son bond central to Freud’s formulation and instead analyzes it in terms of the manipulative father-daughter relationship (44). 18.

(30) Based on Jane Gallop’s theory, which examined the possibility of the daughter’s reversal of this paternal seduction so that it became “her own” seduction given her irreplaceable position as the seduced,15 Fisher argued that seduction could be reciprocal in a father-daughter relationship: […] if the father seduces the daughter into following his laws, the daughter can also attempt to seduce the father into revealing the role his desire plays in the constitution of his laws and thereby challenge the origin of his authority. (41) In a sense, Fisher’s reading finally filled in what Hyman’s research had left open by explaining Woolf’s subversion of her father’s authority as her only literary mentor. That is, Virginia Woolf, according to her, emerging from her identity as “Leslie Stephen’s daughter” (Fisher, 41; Woolf, Moments, 174), had thus become a newly born woman of letters and created a literature of her own. Moreover, by providing a quite convincing account for what Hyman’s research leaves open, Fisher’s borrowing of Gallop’s theory had also helped to universalize the domestic father-daughter relationship into a more philosophical master-salve dialectic. However, as Elizabeth Wright reminds us, while Gallop derived her argument about the daughter’s seduction from Freud’s seduction theory, which in both its original and revised version was dealing with the hysteric’s early sexual traumas, she left the dark side Freud had first explored untouched (400-401). In her attempt to universalize the domestic power relationship into a more philosophical dialectic, therefore, Gallop’s reformulation of Freud’s theory might have ignored the key factors that motivated the seduced to reverse the power relationship, namely the traumatic sense of lack, and the ensuing envy and rage inherent in the process of seduction. And certainly, by jumping over Woolf’s traumatic experiences to the writer’s structural 15. See Jane Gallop, The Daughter’s Seduction. 19.

(31) reversal of her seduction relationship with her father, Fisher’s exploration into the issue of seduction seems to have also missed the whole process of Woolf’s seduction complex from the writer’s sense of lack, envy and rage to her final aspiration to obtain the paternal power and position. In Louise DeSalvo’s Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse and Her Life and Work, on the other hand, it was rather the dark visions of Woolf’s childhood and fiction that were mainly explored in the writer’s life and literature.. Woolf’s Seduction Mystery. DeSalvo’s research characterized Virginia Woolf as a victim suffering not only from patriarchal domination but also from the sexual violence inflicted on her by her half brothers in the family. In other words, the seduction the writer experienced in her childhood was both psychological and sexual in the Freudian sense. Based on biographical materials concerned with the writer’s childhood, DeSalvo decidedly pointed out that Woolf had been sexually abused by her brothers George and Gerald, since she was too young to understand what was happening.16 Moreover, DeSalvo’s investigation also indicated that incest, sexual abuse and other forms of violent behavior were not uncommon in Woolf’s Victorian family. Following the line of Judith Lewis Herman’s arguments about the after-effects of traumatic sexual abuse, DeSalvo claimed that the tendency in men toward sexually exploitative behavior, which included rape and incest, could best be understood as a logical outgrowth of the 16. For example, from Woolf’s recollection of her private parts being touched and explored by Gerald Duckworth in “A Sketch of the Past,” DeSalvo asserts that it is that resentful and shameful memory that makes Woolf have the dream of looking in a glass when a horrible face—the face of an animal—suddenly showed over her shoulder. As for Woolf’s obliterated memory about her having been thrown naked by her father into the sea, recollected by Mrs Swanwick in her autobiography I Have Been Young, DeSalvo, based on Judith Lewis Herman’s theory, interprets it as a psychological repression, a common protective mechanism, particularly of victims of traumatic abuse in childhood. 20.

(32) patriarchal family. The primary motivation in incest, therefore, was regarded as an enacting of masculine power and male dominance rather than sexual pleasure pure and simple.17 For Woolf, the oppressed Victorian daughter, the suffering and pressure she has born into in her early life thus were multidimensional: beyond physical trauma, she was also confronted with existential and ideological problems. That is, she was born as an inferior and subordinate Victorian daughter in a patriarchal family. But as DeSalvo says, the writer eventually transcended such traumatic memories, triumphing finally as a brave “incest survivor.”18 She writes: Virginia Woolf wrote about her sexual abuse in order to understand why it had happened and how it had affected her. She wrote about it in her fiction, in her essays; she wrote about it in her memoirs and in her letters. She did so before the support groups of today which encourage survivors of sexual abuse to speak out in a protected environment. Virginia Woolf had the courage to go it alone. Her writing was her own particular life insurance, her own ticket to survival, even though it often caused her great pain. (13) For DeSalvo, therefore, Virginia Woolf was never mad but only scarred, so scarred so that she transformed those repressed painful sufferings into a great capacity for perceiving things and her spectacular literary accomplishment could never otherwise have been achieved. Incest survivors, DeSalvo firmly believed, often display impressive strength, though they rarely truly enjoy the benefits of their hard labor or derived much satisfaction from their competence but “only press themselves on to further achievements.”19 And it is exactly at the point where the writer’s early. 17. DeSalvo, 8-9. For Herman’s original text, see Judith Lewis Herman and Lisa Hirschman’s Father-Daughter Incest 87. 18 The epithet DeSalvo repeatedly uses to describe Virginia Woolf in her book. 19 Ibid, 10. 21.

(33) traumas are closely related to her literary achievement that we find out the spark of fire that triggers the chain reactions of seduction we have been exploring in the writer’s career: Since central to the violence of early seduction is the manifestation of the unbalanced power relationship between the seducer and the seduced, the sense of lack and inferiority the writer experienced in the childhood seduction was crucial for her further seduction by the power and position possessed by the seducer. For Woolf, this meant to become a writer like her father. And it was only by putting her life and pains into words that she created a new reality in which she was the only dominator. In “A Sketch of the Past,” She once stated the meaning of writing as follows: 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. (Woolf, Moments, 72) In a sense, DeSalvo’s investigation into Woolf’s early seduction complements perfectly Fisher’s structural analysis of the writer’s psychological seduction by the paternal power. By combining the two diverse accounts of Virginia Woolf’s seduction experiences, it seems that a more complete picture about the writer’s seduction is looming ahead. But DeSalvo’s argument meets its challenge when the veracity of Woolf’s early seduction is put to question. In fact, except for some Woolf scholars who treated the writer’s traumatic experiences seriously,20 more critics simply took 20. For example, Quentin Bell, who recounts his aunt’s childhood memory by remarking that “George had spoilt her life before it had fairly begun” (Virginia Woolf: A Biography I 44); and Alice Miller, who illustrates Woolf’s life to demonstrate that the consequences of sexual abuse not only permeate one’s entire life but also undermine the most fundamental of one’s sense of dignity (320). See Quentin Bell, Virginia Woolf: A Biography, Vol. 1, and Alice Miller, Thou Shalt Not Be Aware: Society’s Betrayal of 22.

(34) those alleged accusations of sexual abuse as either unreliable memories or evidence of Woolf’s story-telling propensity. For example, in Sources of Madness and Art, Jean O. Love indicated that those alleged abuses could possibly be imaginative elaborations of some innocent action and therefore “exemplify Virginia’s tendencies to extend and embroider actual events” (195). In Woman of Letters: A Life of Virginia Woolf, Phyllis Rose has also blunted the effect of Woolf’s records of her incestuous experience by referring to them as “the set of stories she made up about her own experience” (ix). To the agnostic Lyndall Gordon, however, the only safe attitude toward those mysterious episodes was to maintain that “it is impossible to know what truly happened” (119). Moreover, on the other hand, in his latest book, Elders and Betters, Quentin Bell, one of the first influential accusers of those childhood abuses, even modified his previous censure against the Duckworth brothers by commenting that whatever George’s lust might have been, he never carried it to the extent of rape. And, in his Virginia Woolf published in 2000, having been presented by George Duckworth’s son with five letters as testifying documents for denying the long-imposed accusations, Nigel Nicolson has also put down his comments on the mystery of the abuses: “In recollection, Virginia made more of a drama of the affair than the facts justify” (13). Confronted with the debates over the veracity of the writer’s early seduction, our investigation thus requires further reconsideration. Paradoxically, sometimes nowhere does a theory manifest itself more than where it encounters a seemingly unsolvable problem. In this case, Woolf’s enigmatic traumas can possibly be the secret codes that may lead us to the fundamental nature of seduction. Unable to establish our argument of seduction on the ground of Woolf’s actual traumas, I therefore propose to confront directly the impenetrability of the traumatic memories. That is, since the recollection of early seduction is a the Child. 23.

(35) psychological process which deals with psychical reality, not material reality, the investigation into the veracity of the writer’s traumatic events would be doomed to failure if the research can not be support by more truthful, reliable or even scientific evidence. But since according to the writer’s writings, we know that Virginia Woolf was consciously affected by the impact of her early seduction, my inquiry would be oriented in the following two directions: First, how could those traumatic illusions possibly come about in the writer’s mind if her traumatic memories prove to be fantastic imaginations or neurotic hallucinations? And secondly, do those traumatic memories produce the same psychical effect on the writer even if their veracity can not be testified? Fortunately, we find the substantial ground of theory we need in the long evolution of Freud’s seduction theory. To construct our investigation on the solid ground, a further exploration into the Freudian theory is hence necessary.. The Problem of Seduction. When Freud initiated his discussion on seduction, he meant the childhood sexual abuse or molestation experience that he took as the necessary condition responsible for hysterical symptoms. As we may read in his letters to Fliess,21 Freud started to seek the origin of neurosis in the subject’s childhood sexual traumas as early as the year 1892. The results of the research were recapitulated in “The Aetiology of Hysteria,” a paper Freud delivered at the Society for Psychiatry and Neurology in Vienna in 1896. Finding almost all his clinical analyses on the childhood memories were “sexual in content,” Freud put forward the thesis in the much-discussed paper, arguing that “at the bottom of every case of hysteria there are one or more occurrences. 21. Freud, “Extracts from the Fliess Papers,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 1. 24.

(36) of premature sexual experience” (203). Moreover, since Freud also found that most of his patients had difficulty in recollecting their childhood, he further posited that the premature sexual experiences under discussion were either traumatic or forbidden and tended to be repressed deeply in the patients’ unconscious memories. Here is the much-discussed quote from Freud: While they are recalling these infantile experiences to consciousness, they suffer under the most violent sensations, of which they are ashamed and which they try to conceal; and, even after they have gone through them once more in such a convincing manner, they still attempt to withhold belief from them, by emphasizing the fact that, unlike what happens in the case of other forgotten material, they have no feeling of remembering the scenes. (204) It is to be noted in Freud’s research that what he meant by the sexual traumas were ambiguous in definition, ranging widely from the severe sexual assaults by adult strangers to the complicated amorous relationship between nursery maid and child or between brother and sister. He classified the childhood sexual activities in the following three categories: I can divide my cases into three groups, according to the origin of the sexual stimulation. In the first group it is a question of assaults—of single, or at any rate isolated, instances of abuse, mostly practiced on female children, by adults who were strangers, and who, incidentally, knew how to avoid inflicting gross, mechanical injury. In these assaults there was no question of the child’s consent, and the first effect of the experience was preponderantly one of fright. The second group consists of the much more numerous cases in which some adult looking after the child—a nursery maid or governess or tutor, or, unhappily all too often, a close 25.

(37) relative—has initiated the child into sexual intercourse and has maintained a regular love relationship with it—a love relationship, moreover, with its mental side developed—which has lasted for years. The third group, finally, contains child-relationships proper—sexual relations between two children of different sexes, mostly a brother and sister, which are often prolonged beyond puberty and which have the most far-reaching consequences for the pair. (208) The childhood sexual experiences under Freud’s discussion, in short, could be brutal violence or ambivalent intermixing of desire and pain. But since they commonly produce the pathogenic effects that in turn bring about the hysteric symptoms, the fundamental precondition for the traumatic impact on the hysteric patients must be something other than the sexual event itself. Finding that hysteria was more commonly seen among the higher strata of the population than among the lower, Freud thus traced the determinant factors of hysteria that were socio-cultural in nature. For example, in the case of a young girl who had been overtaken by hysteria, Freud found that the patient had kept blaming herself for having allowed a boy to stroke her hand in secret. Tracing the girl’s compulsive self-reproaches back to her early sexual experiences that were found to be forbidden only after she received education, Freud thus concluded that the girl’s hysteria was mainly caused by her pervading sense of guilt which was formed by her socio-cultural background (217-18). That is, by ascribing the aetiology of hysteria to the psychical functions such as repression and sense of guilt, Freud apparently transformed the event of sexual abuses into the psychological issue. As Freud commented on the significance of the psychical function in the traumatic events, “the matter is not merely one of the existence of the sexual experiences, but that a psychological precondition enters in as well” (211). Moreover, with his shift of focus from the seducer’s sexual initiation to the patient’s 26.

(38) inner conflicts, Freud seemed to have also implied that the seduced party was not so passive and full of pains as we might have thought what a sexual victim was like. Rather, the premature sexual experiences might be saturated with pleasures and expectations. And it was only when these experiences were finally realized by the subjects to be forbidden in the civilized society that they became traumatic in the patient’s recollection. The sexual seduction in the Freudian sense, in short, thus was no more than an act of sexual stimulation which propelled the seduced to take some form of participation in the interaction of sexual relationship. And the trauma involved in the seduction in question, accordingly, thus was taken as mainly caused by the bondage of civilization. As Freud once remarked on the traumas that were taken as the aetiology of hysteria in the paper: Sexual experiences in childhood consisting in stimulation of the genitals, coitus-like acts, and so on, must therefore be recognized, in the last analysis, as being the traumas which lead to a hysterical reaction to events at puberty and to the development of hysterical symptoms. (206-07) By the time lag for the hysterical symptoms to occur at puberty, Freud apparently meant the phase of education that transformed one from an innocent child into a civilized youth to realize his/her early guilt. In this view, Freud’s seduction theory at this stage thus can be taken as an accusation directed more against civilization than against those various seducers. But the public’s interests, it seemed, were mainly in the seducer’s premature awakening of the child’s sexual libido. As Freud recollected in “On the History of the Psycho-analytic Movement,” when he first proposed his aetiological research in Vienna in 1896, he apparently became “one of those who had disturbed the sleep of the world” (21). By disclosing many children’s improper sexual initiations even by 27.