Complicity, Capitalism, and Contagion: Imperialism in Virginia Woolf's Fiction
Virginia Woolf's novels have been read often as texts that speak only to the private sphere, the home, the parties, the inner lives, etc., and neglect the political realm. Many define Woolf as a timid writer who either could not or would not address the 'important' themes in her novel...
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| Language: | English English |
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Florida State University
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| Online Access: | http://purl.flvc.org/fsu/fd/FSU_migr_etd-7191 |
| Summary: | Virginia Woolf's novels have been read often as texts that speak only to the private sphere, the home, the parties, the inner lives, etc., and neglect the political realm. Many define Woolf as a timid writer who either could not or would not address the 'important' themes in her novels and who, when writing nonfiction such as A Room of One and #8223;s Own and Three Guineas, couched her commentary in fiction. Yet when we look closer at Woolf's novels, we realize that they are full of political and anti-imperialist discourse. True to her form, her political critiques are subtle and happen at and in the margins of the text where Woolf's critique of and complicity with empire intersect. I have selected Mrs. Dalloway (1925), The Waves (1931), The Years (1937), and Between the Acts (1941) in order to examine the ways in which Woolf advances her critique of and complicity with empire. I have selected all four novels because, as a collection, they represent both the familiar and unfamiliar (arguably, the neglected) Woolf texts and because, as a series, they progress from high modernist to late modernist (or as some critics argue, postmodernist). Thematically, these texts also overlap and complement each other in the particular ways in which my thesis is interested, namely: (1) female complicity with imperialism, as portrayed in Mrs. Dalloway and The Years; (2) consumer culture in relation to modernism, nationalism, and imperialism in The Years and Mrs. Dalloway; and (3) the relation between borders and contagion within the imperialist realm in The Waves, The Years, and Between the Acts. In her book Virginia Woolf Against Empire, a book central to my thesis, Kathy Phillips indicates the relation between Woolf's critique of patriarchy and her critique of imperialism. Phillips writes, 'One of her most interesting juxtapositions associates Empire making, war making, and gender relations in a typical constellation. Although these three elements might seem to cluster together as a random sign of the times, Woolf links the items in a complicated and shrewd critique' (vii). In Three Guineas, for instance, Woolf creates a fictional female voice to speak on behalf of the women of Britain who find 'no good reason to ask [their] brother[s] to fight on [their] behalf' (108-9). In this passage, Woolf expresses to the men of Britain that she sees the fault in their slippery logic. She questions the ideology behind war'fighting for the 'Mother Land' and the 'freedom'/ 'security' of women'and finds it not only lacking but also absurd. Woolf indicates that 'saving' (white) women is no excuse for the violence of imperialism (if there is an excuse for violence at all). In the first chapter of my thesis, I will examine the ways in which Woolf and #8223;s arguments in Three Guineas and, by extension, Phillip and #8223;s arguments in Virginia Woolf Against Empire work to resolve and/ or fail to resolve the 'problem' of imperialism and patriarchal violence. In Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf presents women who are obviously complicit with imperialism'Mrs. Perry, who dreams of orchids in Burma, and Clarissa Dalloway, who is wrapped up in a bourgeois life of parties and shopping. Yet if feminism is the beginning to a solution to the violence of patriarchy and imperialism, Woolf complicates this through her characterization of certain 'feminist' women in her later novel, The Years. Rose throws bricks through windows then joins the war efforts as a member of the Red Cross. Delia, who was enamored with Parnell and who upheld the cry for 'justice and liberty,' marries an 'Empire-admiring' Irishman. Our narrator tells us that one of the (contradictory) reasons Delia has married Patrick'whether consciously or unconsciously'is because he upholds the same Empire her father did. Patrick comments that England is the 'only civilised [sic] country in the whole world' and that Ireland's 'new freedom is a good deal worse than our old slavery' (399). He even expresses his (and presumably Ireland's) desire to rejoin the British Empire (401). (Woolf's comments on Ireland as chronicled in her Diary are certainly less than flattering.) Other female characters in The Years also complicate the simplified argument that Woolf is 'against' empire. Notably, Eleanor Pargiter'one of the novel and #8223;s wandering females'is both critical of and complicit with empire. In the last chapter ('Present Day'), Delia throws a party. An Indian man (who we are told wears a pink turban) also attends this party and appears to circle around the perimeter of the room. Throughout the last chapter, various characters refer to him as 'one of Eleanor and #8223;s Indians' (354). Eleanor has traveled all over the world and has recently returned from India. Undoubtedly, she has visited not India but British India. She has benefited from empire because she has been allowed to travel, to see the world. At one point, Martin sees Eleanor speaking to 'the Indian' and says: ''Just back from India,' he added. 'A present from Bengal, eh?' he said, referring to the cloak' (356). The narrator feels it necessary to clarify that the 'present from Bengal' is the 'Arab cloak' and not 'the Indian.' The characters not only refer to this man as Eleanor's possession but also view him as an outsider at the party'as an object to be seen and spoken of, unable to see or speak himself'present only in the margins of the text. Woolf allows no becoming for 'the Indian.' Instead, he remains turbaned in Orientalist stereotypes. The women, instead of relating to this man who is also an outsider, appear to define themselves as separate from and different than 'the Indian' and in this way participate in the Orientalist discourse. During the course of the party, we also learn (ironically) that Kitty's husband was the Viceroy of India while he was alive (393). The colonized, the colonizers, and the complicit have been brought together in the same room at Delia's party. As the characters attempt to 'know' each other, as they attempt to speak to each other, they feel limited. Peggy (Eleanor's niece) checks her watch at the party as she thinks, 'But the room was filling with people she did not know. There was an Indian in a pink turban' (354). In the end, even the women are unable to know the 'other,' relate to the 'other,' or participate in a non-dominant becoming. They fail to know even themselves or their immediate kin. Through her fictionalized history, Woolf upholds this disconnect as a mirror of British society. The solution she proposes in Three Guineas appears to fall short of any resolution between violence and peace in The Years. The book concludes on the brink of another World War, and Woolf again indicates the potential for a violent future. In the second chapter of my thesis, I will explore the ways in which commodity culture relates to Woolf's and her characters' critique of and complicity with imperialism. Lenin's Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism and Antonio Negri's The Porcelain Workshop: For a New Grammar of Politics coupled with Marx's Capital (Volume I) will provide a critical framework with which to examine these points. From the first page of Virginia Woolf and #8223;s The Years (1937), the narrator addresses commodity culture in specific relation to class and gender as shop women give 'neat parcels to ladies in flounced dresses standing on the other side of the counter at Whiteley and #8223;s and the Army and Navy Stores. Interminable processions of shoppers in the West end, of businessmen in the East, paraded the pavements' (3). The boundary lines are drawn: counters separate the workers from the shoppers, and women and men are regulated to opposite sides of the city. The third chapter of my thesis will explore the connection between borders and contagion under imperialism. Because The Waves deals explicitly with the boundaries of self and other, I will couple this novel with the points Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri advance in Empire. Building from the Marxist critique I intend in the second chapter, the third chapter will explore the relationship between measurability and borders/ containment. Woolf criticizes the idea of 'proportion' in many of her novels, and The Waves is no exception. There appears to be a relation between proportion (and in extension, order), measurability, and the self/other binary within modernism. Yet at the conclusion of The Waves, Bernard moves from measurability to immeasurability, away from the language of the Hegelian dialectic and into what Deleuze and Guattari identify as a becoming. Bernard recognizes the savage (the Other) as part of his network of self-differentiation. Woolf intended the six 'characters' of The Waves to be six voices'to be, as Bernard states in the concluding chapter, both one and multiple. At the conclusion of the novel, Bernard recognizes his epistemic violence and is able to take on a becoming-savage. In her two last novels, The Years and Between the Acts, Woolf concludes with a mention of the 'heart of darkness''a darkness found in the metropolis (The Years) and in the countryside of England (Between the Acts). In Empire, Hardt and Negri reference the imperialist view of the colonial Other. They state that this view is exemplified at the conclusion of Joseph Conrad and #8223;s Heart of Darkness in which Kurtz realizes the 'heart of darkness' has moved from the periphery to the center. They write: 'Once there is established the differential between the pure, civilized European and the corrupt, barbarous Other, there is possible not only a civilizing process from disease to health, but also ineluctably the reverse process, from health to disease' (135). In The Years, North, who has been in Africa, recognizes the 'heart of darkness' in London, also. In this passage, North and his sister Peggy indicate that 'heart of darkness' has been always already present in England but has not been recognized yet as such. In the last page of Between the Acts as Giles and Isa sit 'alone together,' the 'heart of darkness' again rises to the surface. The narrator writes: 'Before they slept, they must fight; after they had fought, they would embrace. From that embrace another life might be born. But first they must fight, as the dog fox fights with the vixen, in the heart of darkness, in the fields of night' (219). Again, the language suggests a differentiation between civilized and uncivilized (and, by extension, the colonizer and the colonized). At the conclusions of The Waves and Between the Acts, Woolf deconstructs the self/ other binary in order to locate the (colonial) 'other' as not separate and distinct but within the 'self. === A Thesis submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. === Summer Semester, 2009. === April 20, 2009. === Includes bibliographical references. === S.E. Gontarski, Professor Directing Thesis; Amit S. Rai, Committee Member; Robert J. Patterson, Committee Member. |
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