Defining Virginia Woolf

           I was having a difficult time trying to figure out what it was about Virginia Woolf that kept drawing me in. The writing style presented in each of the essays we read is so unique and creative, that all of those authors deserve to have a spotlight shone on them, highlighting the key features that encompass their writing, defining who they are. So then, what was it that made me specifically draw out Woolf? What made me want to take the spotlight and shine it on her out of all the other authors?

              With her impeccable ability to mold the English language in a way that allowed her to make the thoughts in her head take on physical existence, she accomplished in her writing, what I thought couldn’t be done in the constraints of an essay. So when I decided to satisfy this curiosity for Woolf and dig deeper into her essays, a light came on and life—for a spilt second at least—made sense. As with all epiphanies and “Ah ha!” moments, mine is best explained with a story:

             I was never much for writing about reality.

             Whenever I’m sitting in my room and decide to pick up a pen the words that materialize on the page would never appear in a history book or a documentary. Likewise, you won’t find me in the non-fiction section of Barns and Nobles or reading the Sunday newspaper—unless, of course, there is some breaking news that my well-being would benefit from reading. 

             My world was ruled by fiction, in which case all the rules could be broken. It never occurred to me just how far away reality was in my conscious when it came to writing until one day when my dad was joking around. We had landed on the subject of golf (his favorite sport), and he was expressing how that when he got old enough for the senior golf tour and became famous, he wanted me to write his memoir. Now, imagine driving down the road and after constant conversation an awkward silence creeps into atmosphere. This is exactly what happened when I couldn’t force myself to respond—I was too busy quivering in fear. The word memoir actually frightened me!

           The thought of writing a ten page research paper, something that has to be rooted in fact, doesn’t cause me to hyperventilate—well, at least the part about it having to be factual doesn’t cause me hyperventilate. Even the thought of a future career in writing for a magazine or newspaper, in which fictional words would never appear on my computer screen doesn’t produce a reaction as the one I had when the words: you (me), write, and memoir were all formed into one coherent sentence. But then it began to make sense.

                  I root my life in fact. I function within the boundaries of a step-by-step process in which there is no room for innovation, there is no room spontaneity because everything has already been planned out. When I pick up a pen those boundaries disappear. I can create a world where there are no step-by-step processes, there are no set in stone facts, there are no rules. Academic and career writing fit nicely into my boundaries of life; they are things that are necessary but at the same time are things that I don’t personally connect myself too.  But a memoir on the other hand—especially for a close family member—is something that is meant to be personal and enlightening, not something that should be set up in the form of a structured five-paragraph paper, complete with a thesis, body and conclusion. But I felt that sense it was situated in reality, I would end up turning it into such, because when fiction was involved I had all the freedom in the world, I had control, but once reality came into the picture that freedom went away; the control went away. Fiction was my outlet to free myself from the constricting boundaries I had set up in my life and now all of a sudden, outside of an academic or career setting, I was being asked to write something that I hadn’t placed in my category of free writing, and thus I felt those boundaries surrounding me again.

               So where does Virginia Woolf come in? What’s the point of my story? The point is that when I read my first Woolf essay, “The Moment: Summer’s Night”, the essay—you know, that structured thing with a thesis, body, and conclusion—maybe didn’t have to be so structured, maybe, just maybe I had more freedom than I thought, not only with writing style but with themes and ideas as well.

That’s what kept drawing me to Woolf; the way she presented an idea was her defining feature that I found a spotlight falling upon.  They were abstract ideas—ideas that may show up in a dictionary or in an account by Plato, but in reality they are ambiguous, they are not rooted in fact and they have no set definition because their definition is created by experience and experience is different with every individual.

               Woolf took an abstract idea—a moment, the essence of life, the struggle looming over every women writer—and through her writing style and personal experience personified it. She gave it an image; she gave it a story that it didn’t have before. I wasn’t just reading an essay; I wasn't just reading words; I felt dragged into a new perceptive like one might experience with fiction, but it was real! 

               Suddenly, reality didn’t seem all that constricting anymore.

What Others Have Said...

               There is much to be said about Virginia Woolf. One could explore her writing for a sufficient amount time just detailing how she uses style, let alone her themes and other aspects. Here are just a few individuals who had something to say about Woolf:

                  Robert Atwan, in his book Ten On Ten, gives a view of Woolf through examining her writing style. Style, he mentions, is one of those things that is hard to discuss, and in regards to Woolf’s essay one must take an “aesthetic approach” (Atwan 515).

Style is most definitely art; I doubt one would say differently, and just as painting comes with an instruction manual detailing different brush strokes and color schemes, style comes with an instruction manual detailing things such as different placements of a semicolon, but at the end of the day it’s your choice what to do with those brush strokes and colors; it’s your choice where the semicolon best fits in your ideas. So one has no choice but to view Woolf’s essay through an artistic viewpoint. And Atwan notes how “the writer’s style is nearly inseparable form her own notion of who she is, reading and essay by Woolf leaves us with the feeling of having been engaged in conversation with an utterly charming, utterly brilliant woman” (Atwan 515). This clearly states how Woolf writes, she doesn’t just give you words to read; she gives you something to actually interact with.

                  A second individual who gave insight on Woolf’s writing is Carl Klaus, a now English professor.  He describes a relationship that developed over a span of many years between him and one of Woolf’s essays, “The Modern Essay”, in which Woolf defines what an essay should be. Klaus gives an account of how when he first read this particular essay as an undergrad, he had the same view of the essay that most might have: “They were about literature and therefore couldn’t be literature. So, it didn’t seem especially important to hear what she had to about the modern essay” (Klaus 28). However, years later in his career he found himself once again face-to-face with this particular essay, and upon reading it again Woolf’s reference to the essay as something that should provide pleasure stood out to him, for it hadn’t occurred to him just how much joy he had in fact gotten out of the all the essays he had read thus far in his life (Klaus 29). This pattern of walking away from this particular Woolf essay and coming back to it continued on for some years, Klaus finding something new each time he re-read it. At the end of his account, going back to that essay one more time, he picked up on that defining feature of Woolf, a feature that he noticed Woolf even say was needed to produce an essay, and that feature was an idea (Klaus 34).

                  A third to express thoughts on Woolf is Elena Fillmon, who describes the topics that Woolf wrote about in her essays as being “presented in an original, sensitive and lucid way, and filtered by her unique personality” (Fillmon 26). Once again we see another commenting on how Woolf’s essays are writings to be thought about, to be experienced. Fillmon also notes how important style was to Woolf: “every single page emphasis the art of description, the minuteness of analysis, the beauty of the adjective and the originality of expression” (Fillmon 28). 

                 Woolf was to use a multitude of elements to create her images, and it’s her emphasis on style that made writing come alive. I think a good way to sum up what all three of these individuals have said is that Woolf’s writing isn't just words and sentences, it is stylistic elements that create life; is life.

Passage Analysis #1-"Professions for Women"

“Professions For Women”-Virginia Woolf 

What could be easier than to write articles and to buy Persian cats with the profits? (2) But wait a moment. (3) Articles have to be about something. (4) Mine, I seem to remember, was about a novel by a famous man. (5) And while I was writing this review, I discovered [that if I were going to review books] I should need to do battle with a certain phantom. (6) And the phantom was a woman, and when I came to know her better I called her after the heroine of a famous poem, The Angel in the House. (7) It was she who used to come between me and my paper when I was writing reviews. (8) It was also she who bothered me and wasted my time and so tormented me that at last I killed her. (9) You who come of a younger and happier generation may not have heard of her—you may not know what I mean by the Angel in the House. (10) I will describe her as shortly as I can. (11) She was intensely sympathetic. (12) She was immensely charming. (13) She was utterly unselfish. (14) She excelled in the difficult arts of family life. (15) She sacrificed herself daily. (16) If there was chicken, she took the leg; if there was a draught she sat in it—in short she was so constituted that she never had a mind or wish of her own, but preferred to sympathize always with the minds and wishes of others. (17) Above all—I need not say it—she was pure. (18) Her purity was supposed to be her chief beauty—her blushes, her great grace. (19) In those days—the last of Queen Victoria—every house had its Angel. (20) And when I came to write I encountered her with the very first words. (21) The shadow of her wings fell on my page; I heard the rustling of her skirts in the room. (22) Directly, that is to say, I took my pen in my hand to review that novel by a famous man, she slipped behind me and whispered: {‘My dear, you are a young woman. (23) You are writing about a book that has been written by a man. (24) Be sympathetic; be tender; flatter; deceive; use all the arts and wiles of our sex. (25) Never let anybody guess that you have a mind of your own. (26) Above all, be pure.’} (27) And she made as if to guide my pen. (28) I now record on that one act for which I take some credit to myself, though the credit rightly belongs to some excellent ancestors of mine who left me a certain sum of money—shall we say five hundred pounds a year?—so that it was not necessary for me to depend solely on charm for my living. (29) I turned upon her and caught her by the throat. (30) I did my best to kill her. (31) My excuse, if I were to be had up I n a court of law, would be that I acted in self-defense. (32) Had I not killed her she would have killed me. (33) She would have plucked the heart out of my writing. (34) For, as I found, directly I put pen to paper, you cannot review even a novel without having a mind of you own, without expressing what you think to be the truth about human relations, morality, sex. (35) And all these questions, according to the Angel of the House, cannot be dealt with freely and openly by women; they must charm, they must conciliate, they must to put it bluntly tell lies if they are to succeed. (36) Thus, whenever I felt the shadow of her wing or the radiance of her halo upon my page, I took up the inkpot and flung it at her. (37) It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality. (38) She was always creeping back when I thought I had despatched her. (39) Though I flatter myself that I killed her in the end, the struggle was severe; it took much time that had better have been spent upon learning Greek grammar; or in roaming the world in search of adventures. (40) But it was a real experience; it was an experience that was found to befall all women writers at the time. (41) Killing the Angel in the House was part of the occupation of a women writer.

             This paragraph shows up in Woolf’s essay “Professions for Women.” As a whole, this essay expresses what came to Woolf’s mind when she was asked to talk about her experience as a professional woman, and through this she brings up a common struggle woman writers might. This struggle has to do with women following a set standard for their writing that was acceptable for their gender (she is writing on a time when women were held by many boundaries), and by writing like this falseness is what appears on the page; ones real thoughts and feeling aren’t truly shown. In this particular paragraph, which appears third in the essay, Woolf personifies that struggle.

            The first thing that stands out about this paragraph is its size. Woolf is defining a struggle, a conflict. Conflicts aren’t short and sweet, they take time to figure out and resolve and thus the length in a way represents working out a problem. The next thing to stand out is this personified struggle. Woolf defines this struggle as being “The Angel in the House” (451), the woman who was always there whispering in her ear that she needed to put up a front when she wrote, and this is the women that Woolf set out to destroy.

            Some of the smaller elements I noticed was in sentence ten when she says how she will try to define The Angel in the House in a concise manner and then proceeds with five very short back to back sentences. She also switches from “I” to “you”, relating not only her own experience but at the same time making the reader feel as though the essay is directed at them.

           

Passage Analysis #2-"The Death of a Moth"

“The Death of a Moth”-Virginia Woolf

The same energy [which inspires the rooks, the ploughmen, the horses, and even, it seemed, the lean bare-backed downs,] sent the moth fluttering from side to side of his square of his windowpane. (2) One could not help watching him. (3) One, was, indeed, conscious of a queer feeling of pity for him. (4) The possibilities of pleasure seemed that morning so enormous and so various that to have only a moth’s part in life, and a day moth’s at that, appeared a hard fate, and his zest in enjoying his meager opportunities to the full, pathetic. (5) He flew vigorously to one corner of his compartment, and after waiting there a second, flew across to the other. (6) What remained for him but to fly to a third corner and then to a fourth? (7) That was all he could do, in spite of the size of the downs, the width of the sky, the far-off smoke of houses, and the romantic voice, now and then, of a steamer out at sea. (8) What he could do he did. (9) Watching him, it seemed as if a fiber, very thin but pure, of the enormous energy of the world had been thrust into his frail and diminutive body. (10) As often as he crossed the pane, I could fancy that a thread of vital light became visible. (11) He was little or nothing but life.

The selected passage comes from Woolf’s “The Death of the Moth.” As a whole this essay is underlining an essence or energy that Woolf takes notice of in nature and in life generally, which becomes highlighted in a little moth she sees hovering about a window. This particular paragraph appears second in the essay and works to define a struggle that she sees the moth enduring, and in defining this, she in turn ends up defining life.

 Plucking out the very first sentence and stripping it down its core, we are given two things: this concept of energy and a moth, and this energy is what’s dictating the moth’s actions. Moving forward with this in mind, the sentences start to mirror each other in different ways with the use of parallelism, and this parallelism relates ideas back to each other. For example, in sentence one we are given within the adjective clause a parallel list: “the rooks, the ploughmen, the horses, and even, it seemed, the lean bare-backed downs” (265), we are then given a similar list in sentence seven, but added is an “of the” to separate each thing, rather than just a “the”: “in spite of the size of the downs, the width of the sky, the far-off smoke of houses, and the romantic voice, now and then, of a steamer out at sea” (266). The added “of the” creates more weight for the words, giving these things a more heavier emphasis, and since this sentence appears when the moth’s struggle is really being defined, the added weight in a way could correlated with that struggle.   

This moth filled with energy is clearly on a journey, and as we come to the end of this paragraph we see this journey as essentially being life. This little moth is thus described as: “He was little or nothing but life” (266).

            This whole essay is depicting the circle of life; through taking interest in a little moth at her window, Woolf saw life. That life came in the form of energy and that energy gave this little moth determination through his struggles, for even though he was not able to see the vastness of the world this energy still takes him from corner to corner upon the windowpane.

Through the set up of this paragraph, Woolf gave us a visual of the inner workings of this little moth’s battles in a very big world. Through the set up of the essay, she took the idea of life, of the energy that encompasses everything and she gave it a physical persona by place it in the moth.