[Vwoolf] Discovering Woolf

[Maggie Humm]

These memories of encountering Woolf are fascinating. For some time now, The Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain have published such memories in each Bulletin as 'Discovering Virginia'. It would be good to submit to the Bulletin. The editors were very kind to publish my memory in Issue 13, May 2003:

'It was, unjustly, a very hot summer the year my mother died, that summer when I first read Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. Sunbathing with my friends, my mother got in everywhere. My every word and movement was either a guilty pleasure, wrong to enjoy so soon after the funeral, or else carried a stinging similarity to my mother’s daily gestures. My mother also got into To the Lighthouse. Mrs. Ramsay had a bodily presence, a voice, and a face like my mother’s.
My mother died aged forty-nine when I was thirteen, the same ages as Julia Stephen and Virginia at Julia’s death. Scenes from To the Lighthouse and ‘A Sketch of the Past’ have an incredible resonance for me. But where, with my friends, I was haunted and depressed by my mother, when she turned into Mrs. Ramsay there was warmth and love and peace.
As Mary Jacobus argues, a mother’s early death means that she becomes the phantasmatic mother, that is a mother who exists only as an image in identificatory significations.[1]<https://dlwebmail.uel.ac.uk/owa/?ae=PreFormAction&a=ReplyAll&t=IPM.Note&id=RgAAAABazdGV%2fMUaTLQKp9QAClKVBwCOERDDysrwSK1YevkLzlR1AAAABu42AABRn4ijJz5RQLWCSSOInXe3AAAAAJQsAAAJ&pspid=_1377618144179_471347127#_ftn1> The figuration of the dead is a crucial trope in Woolf’s novels, most famously in the ‘Time Passes’ section of To the Lighthouse in which Woolf’s technique of prosopopoeia, or personification of the dead, keeps Mrs. Ramsay alive in the thoughts of others.
At age eighteen, Virginia’s Mrs. Ramsay, my mother’s image, helped me through ‘A’ levels. English Literature ‘A’ level examination papers used to contain unseen passages for comment and analysis. With amazing serendipity Mrs. Ramsay appeared again. The passage that year was from ‘Time Passes’. While ‘Time Passes’ is frequently praised as a masterpiece of description, for working class Newcastle secondary school pupils it was not an easy read. But for me the time of my mother’s death had never passed. ‘A’ level certificate in hand, I left Newcastle for university, the world of books and the chance to read even more Virginia Woolf'.

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[1]<https://dlwebmail.uel.ac.uk/owa/?ae=PreFormAction&a=ReplyAll&t=IPM.Note&id=RgAAAABazdGV%2fMUaTLQKp9QAClKVBwCOERDDysrwSK1YevkLzlR1AAAABu42AABRn4ijJz5RQLWCSSOInXe3AAAAAJQsAAAJ&pspid=_1377618144179_471347127#_ftnref1> Mary Jacobus, First Things: the Maternal Imaginary in Literature, Art and Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 1995).



Please consider submitting.

Maggie


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From: vwoolf-bounces at lists.service.ohio-state.edu [vwoolf-bounces at lists.service.ohio-state.edu] on behalf of Jeremy Hawthorn [jeremy.hawthorn at ntnu.no]
Sent: 27 August 2013 16:24
To: Marcia Childress; vwoolf at lists.service.ohio-state.edu
Subject: Re: [Vwoolf] Discovering Woolf

This makes me realize how fortunate I was. I did a bachelor's and a master's at Leeds University in England, and encountered quite a lot of Woolf on the way. One of my teachers was Arnold Kettle, who has a chapter on To the Lighthouse in his book on the novel, so that may have helped to get it on the syllabus. We were also advised to look at the chapter on the same novel in Auerbach's Mimesis, a chapter (and a book) that has more than stood the test of time. By the time I had finished my master's I had read Mrs Dalloway and The Waves as well. I suppose that the down side of starting in this way was that going on to Night and Day and The Years once I started teaching was something of an anti-climax. But Between the Acts I found wonderful. I think that some neglect of Woolf in the UK at this time may be related to Leavis's lack of enthusiasm for her, but that can hardly explain the neglect in the US. It may be that a comparable lack of enthusiasm on E M Forster's part (aimed especially at Woolf's feminism) also deterred some readers and teachers.

Jeremy Hawthorn
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From: vwoolf-bounces+jeremy.hawthorn=ntnu.no at lists.service.ohio-state.edu [vwoolf-bounces+jeremy.hawthorn=ntnu.no at lists.service.ohio-state.edu] on behalf of Marcia Childress [woolf at virginia.edu]
Sent: 27 August 2013 16:39
To: vwoolf at lists.service.ohio-state.edu
Subject: [Vwoolf] Discovering Woolf

Like many of you, I never encountered Woolf's writings in a college English literature course; she simply wasn't widely taught. Rather, midway through my senior year in college, in 1969-1970, two housemates--one a psychology major, the other studying philosophy--were suddenly raving about a novel they'd just read for a philosophy course (I don't recall which philosophy course). Since I was the English major in the house, they insisted I drop everything and read this novel too. It was To the Lighthouse. So, like many of you, I read it all in one day, in pretty much a single sitting, swept up and along by the powerful rhythms of Woolf's prose. What I recall about finishing the book is a shiver, then tears, then a strong impression of a blur of green and blue, like moving water. I'm not sure I could have said then and there what the book was about; I only knew that I had had an extraordinary life-experience through written words.

I next read Woolf the following year as a graduate student in literature, but she was assigned only in a course on comparative fiction, as an English writer whose stylistic experiments influenced twentieth-century Continental novelists. I recall the professor almost apologizing for making us read Mrs. Dalloway, as, in his view, Woolf was "a second-rate novelist." Compared to giants like Joyce and Tolstoy and Balzac, he maintained, Woolf was rather a poor hand at representing "the stuff of real life," like war and its aftermath, politics, urban life, and human relationships. (Oh.)

How good that we now see it otherwise. Thanks, Virginia!


Marcia Day Childress, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Medical Education
Director, Programs in Humanities
Center for Biomedical Ethics and Humanities
University of Virginia School of Medicine
PO Box 800761
Charlottesville VA 22908-0761
Voice:  434.924.9581
Fax: 434.982.3971
Email: woolf at virginia.edu<mailto:woolf at virginia.edu> OR mdf4e at virginia.edu<mailto:mdf4e at virginia.edu>









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