Woolf's Ambiguities

Molly Hite

Description

In a book that compares Virginia Woolf's writing with that of the novelist, actress, and feminist activist Elizabeth Robins (1862-1952), Molly Hite explores the fascinating connections between Woolf's aversion to women's "pleading a cause" in fiction and her narrative technique of complicating, minimizing, or omitting tonal cues. Hite shows how A Room of One's Own, Mrs. Dalloway, and The Voyage Out borrow from and implicitly criticize Robins's work.Hite presents and develops the concept of narrative tone as a means to enrich and complicate our readings of Woolf's modernist novels. In Woolf's Ambiguities, she argues that the greatest formal innovation in Woolf's fiction is the muting, complicating, or effacing of textual pointers guiding how readers feel and make ethical judgments about characters and events. Much of Woolf's narrative prose, Hite proposes, thus refrains from endorsing a single position, not only adding value ambiguity to the cognitive ambiguity associated with modernist fiction generally, but explicitly rejecting the polemical intent of feminist novelists in the generation preceding her own. Hite also points out that Woolf reconsidered her rejection of polemical fiction later in her career. In the unfinished draft of her "essay-nove;" The Pargiters, Woolf created a brilliant new narrative form allowing her to make unequivocal value judgments.

Sujets

• Reino Unido
• Literary theory
• United Kingdom
• Great Britain
• Royaume-Uni

Informations

• Publié par: Cornell University Press
• Date de parution: 15 décembre 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781501714474
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

WOOLF’S AMBIGUITIES

WOOLF’SAMBIGUITIES

TONAL MODE RNI SM, NARRAT I VE ST RAT EGY, F E MI NI ST PRECURSORS

Molly Hite

CORNELLUNIVERSITYPRESS Ithaca and London

Copyright © 2017 by Cornell University

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850.

First published 2017 by Cornell University Press

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Hite, Molly, 1947– author. Title:Woolf’sambiguities:tonalmodernism,narrative strategy, feminist precursors / Molly Hite. Description: Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017014440 (print) | LCCN 2017014833 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501714474 (pdf ) | ISBN 9781501714467 (epub/mobi) | ISBN 9781501714450 (cloth : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Woolf, Virginia, 1882–1941—Criticism and interpretation. | Ambiguity in literature. | Modernism (Literature) | English fiction—Women authors— History and criticism. Classification: LCC PR6045.O72 (ebook) | LCC PR6045.O72 Z6975 2017 (print) | DDC 823/.912—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017014440

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Virginia Woolfby Vanessa Bell (née Stephen), oil on board, 1912. © National Portrait Gallery, London.

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Co nte nts

Prefaceix

1. Woolf ’s Tone: Listening to Mrs. Dalloway 2. Tone and Modernism:Jacob’s Room, To the Lighthouse, andThe Waves 3. Not Thinking Back through Our Mothers: Elizabeth Robins and the Feminist Polemical Novel 4. Making Room forOne’s OwnA Room of 5. What Girls Should Know:The Voyage OutandMy Little Sister 6. The Professional and the Poet: A Dark LanternandMrs. Dalloway Epilogue:ThePossibilities ofThe Pargiters

Notes187 References207 Index219

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P r e f a c e

I began this study from two observations about the fiction of Virginia Woolf, one having to do with narrative strategy, the other with tradition and influence. My first observation was that the greatest innovation of Woolf ’s major modernist fiction is its tonal ambiguity. I mean by this that readers of the novels often cannot be sure what attitude at a particular point is textually warranted—how they are supposed to feel about an assertion, event, or character—a situation that leads to multiple conflicting interpretations and, indeed, a number of conflicting Virginia Woolfs. There are relatively few cleartonal cuesin much of her fiction—that is, indications of what attitude readers should take toward characters and events. Moreover, draft versions of the novels show a deliberate complicating, muting, or effacing of tonal cues as Woolf made the decisions that brought her works to final form. Some of her first feminist critics, in the 1970s and 80s, saw in these remov- als evidence of self-censorship, but the textual evidence should incline us to respect Woolf ’s choices and see in the minimizing of tonal cues a deliberate strategy to blur or withhold grounds for authorially sanctioned opinions. I argue that Woolf ’s distinctive experimental strategy lay in forcing on read- ers the difficult (and perhaps, in the most attentive readings, impossible) task of deciding how to “take” characters, events, passages of description and dia- logue, or an independent third-person narrator’s commentary. This process of “taking,” often unconscious or automatic, is crucial for a reading because it is the basis for assigning values to incidents or characters. Mysecondobservationwasthat,forallherfamoussympathieswith obscure or silenced women writers, Woolf as a critic was hard on women who actually succeeded in the literary marketplace and critical estimation. Except for Jane Austen, whom she treated as an exception operating within a limited aesthetic realm, Woolf regarded earlier female writers as flawed almost by definition, doomed not by gender stereotypes affecting ways their work is received but by a burning awareness of prejudice that actively dam- aged the quality of their writing. Woolf made clear in a number of her essays

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