LECTURE 15

WOOLF/WEIL

It's hard to imagine two major twentieth-century intellectuals with less in common. To be sure, both were on the left politically, but Woolf, in theory a socialist, would never try to transcend her upper middle class origins, while Weil did her best to do so. It's impossible to imagine Woolf working in a factory for a year, or going off to fight in the Spanish Civil War, but Weil did both. Woolf is one of the exemplary feminist thinkers of the century, whereas Weil wrote as if her gender was a hindrance. But for all of their differences in sensibility and temperament, both wrote important analyses of the nature of war on the eve of World War II. And both committed suicide in large part because of their reactions to the horrors of that war.

1. THE BLOOMSBURY GROUP

Virginia Woolf's father, Leslie Stephen, was an editor and intellectual historian who was a leading figure in Victorian England's intellectual aristocracy. These men were not literally aristocrats, as Bertrand Russell was; they were a professional middle class bound together by ties of vocation, marriage, and conscience. The Stephenses, Macaulays, Frys, Darwins, Huxleys, Sidgwicks, Thorntons, and Trevelyans were among the principal family connections, and these names crop up again and again from one generation to the next as public servants, reformers, historians, and scientists. Many of them had roots in an evangelical (often Quaker) religious tradition that converted the zeal for salvation into campaigns for social reform: the abolition of slavery in the British Empire was their first great achievement. Another important influence was Utilitarianism or Philosophic Radicalism, with its emphasis on rationality, its valuing of common sense and clarity, its attempt to calculate the greatest good for the greatest number. In the 1860s these men worked tirelessly for intellectual freedom within the universities which, they thought, should admit anyone regardless of religious affiliation, and the creation of a public service open to talent through competitive examinations. Stephens became the editor of the Cornhill magazine, the leading literary journal of the period, which published the great Victorian novelists from Thackeray to Hardy. He was also the editor of the monumental Dictionary of National Biography, as well as the author of a brilliant work of history, English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century.

The Bloomsbury Group took its name from the neighborhood where the Stephens sisters, Vanessa and Virginia, moved in 1905 after their father's death. They shared an apartment with their Cambridge-educated brothers and mingled freely with their brothers' male friends. The crucial virtue in this circle was candor–unadorned honesty in conversation and personal relationships–and this proved to be a solvent of traditional Victorian values. This generation shifted from Victorian moralism to a cult of aesthetic sensation and personal affection. Theirs was a cultural and not an academic coterie: except for the great economist John Maynard Keynes most of the group lived from journalism and free-lance intellectual work rather than university appointments. Virginia Woolf hated the male-dominated universities: "I would rather sit in a cellar and watch spiders than listen to an Englishman lecturing." Members of the group imported French art–Cezanne, Gauguin, and Van Gogh–into England, arguing for the importance of "significant form" rather than narrative content in painting. They were also the first to translate and publish Freud's work in England and they greeted the great man himself when, over eighty and stricken with cancer, he fled the Nazis in 1939. They were among the pioneers in the modernization of aesthetic and sexual discourse in twentieth-century Britain.

They broke down high Victorian seriousness by tending to view life under the aspect of comedy. One even notices the bohemian or avant-garde tendency to shock the taste of the philistine public. In 1911 they organized a "Post-Impressionist Ball," and Vanessa and Virginia scandalized the press by appearing as Gauguin-like "savages" draped in African cloth. A few years later, on the eve of the First World War, they boarded a British battleship dressed in similar garb, pretending to be a diplomatic delegation from an African country. Even after the era of youthful pranks had passed, they never lost their taste for satire: Keynes wickedly satirized Lloyd George in his famous pamphlet about the Versailles Peace Conference after the First World War; Lytton Strachey wrote satirical history in Eminent Victorians; and Virginia Woolf constantly resorted to satire in her fiction and polemical writings.

2. A ROOM OF ONE'S OWN

But of course Woolf was very serious about her craft, and she became one of the great twentieth-century novelists and critics. At least three of her novels–Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and The Waves–are among the masterworks of twentieth-century English fiction. The novelist-critic David Lodge has succinctly described her renovation of the novel: "The structure of the traditional novel, with its rounded characters, logically articulated plot, and solidly specified setting, melts away; the climaxes of the plot are progessively pushed to the margins of the discourse, mentioned in asides and parentheses; the author's voice, narrating, explaining, guaranteeing, fades away as the discourse locates itself in the minds of the characters with limited knowledge and understanding; the unity and the coherence of the narrative comes increasingly to inhere in the repetition of motifs and symbols, while the local texture of the writing becomes more and more densely embroidered with metaphor and simile." The causal or chronological rendering of events is subordinated to the impression they make on the individual consciousness.

Having established herself as a critic and novelist, Woolf began, at the end of the 1920s, to write from an explicitly feminist position. A Room of One's Own may be the most enjoyable essay of its kind. She was writing at a moment when many of the external battles in the women's movement had already been won (but only recently): the right to vote, the right of entry into the universities and professions, the right to divorce, the right of married women to own property. Woolf translated the predominantly political, legal, and institutional tems of debate on women's rights and talents into psychological and economic ones. "She was interested," the critic Alex Zwerdling tells us," in the underlying psychological and economic causes of masculine dominance and feminine repressed anger or acquiescence.... Her method is consciously Freudian; her hope for reform is based on the psychoanalytic strategy of making the unconscious conscious." Her thesis is simple: in order to write creatively women must have leisure and space, money and privacy–"a room of one's own"–and the same educational and professional opportunities available to men. Women must also give up their roles as "looking-glasses possessing the magic and delirious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size." Her brilliant imaginary example of what might have happened if Shakespeare had had a sister as gifted as he was is the rhetorical climax of the work.

Three Guineas is the sequel to A Room of One's Own, and it extends the argument from the conditions of creative writing to a critique of the patriarchal social order that Woolf associated with militarism and even fascism. Like its predecessor the book began with a talk: this one entitled "Professions for Women." Here Woolf likens men's response to women earning their own living to that of a man who comes home one evening to find that his servants have suddenly changed: "He goes into the library–an august apartment which he is accustomed to have all to himself–and finds the kitchen maid curled up in the arm chair reading Plato. He goes into the kitchen and there is the cook engaged in writing a Mass in B flat. He goes into the billiardroom and finds the parlourmaid knocking up a fine break at the table. He goes into the bedroom and there is the housemaid working out a mathematical problem."

There is still a good deal of satire in Three Guineas, but there is also more overt anger, and less charm, than there had been in A Room of One's Own. Woolf had recently lost her favorite nephew, the gifted poet Julian Bell, in the Spanish Civil War, and the shadow of another great European war was looming. She had also done more research on the problems of educational and economic discrimination against women in English society. Hence the elaborate endnotes in Three Guineas. There is also a difference of emphasis: the earlier work had made an argument for equality and even androgyny, but Three Guineas makes what feminists now call a difference argument. The world would be a better place if there were less of the masculine spirit of aggression, conquest, and competition embodied in its institutions.

Women's financial independence from men, she now argued, is an essential precondition in the fight against war. Why? Michele Barrett, a sociologist who is also a Woolf scholar, summarizes the answer: "Militarism and fascism were bound in with men's insistence that women restrict themselves to serving the needs of fathers, husbands and families, and subject themselves to the often unreasonable demands of men. According to Virginia Woolf, the links between the tyranny of women's domestic servitude and the dictatorship of fascists had not been recognized. In the style of a much later feminism she insisted on the general point that 'the public and the private worlds are inseparably connected... the tyrannies and servilities of the one are the tyrannies and servilities of the other.' Virginia Woolf's key problem in Three Guineas was to prove, in particular to men, that the political processes of fascism were linked to the political exclusions of petty patriarchalism."

3. GRAVITY AND GRACE: SIMONE WEIL

Simone Weil (1909-1944) was a political theorist and a theologian. From accounts of her childhood it is clear that at an early age she began to manifest an unusual capacity for identifying herself with the suffering of others. She was five years old in 1914 when the sight of a wouded soldier made her refuse to touch sugar and insist that it should be given to the needy. (As a political thinker, she would stress the concept of needs rather than rights as the basis of political theory.) Her classmate Simone de Beauvoir at the famous Ecole Normale in Paris remembers her crying at news of a famine in Asia: "She had a heart that could beat across the world." When she worked as a teacher of philosophy and Greek she gave most of her salary to union funds and workers' periodicals.

She was born into a family of intellectuals of Jewish origin; her brother Andre became a famous mathematician at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study. She rejected every feature of her background–her class, her gender, her Jewishness–yet one of her major works would be entitled The Need for Roots. She seems not to have been interested in religious problems in her youth, but received an intensely philosophical education. Virginia Woolf once wrote an essay entitled "On Not Knowing Greek," and there is throughout Woolf's work an awareness of the expense that was lavished on the education of boys while girls languished in private tutorials or underfunded institutions. But Weil had the best education that was available to intellectuals in her period, including a firm foundation in classics as well as mathematics and physics. She was not lacking in intellectual self-confidence: when the great Bolshevik leader Trotsky was in exile–on the run from Stalin–in the early 1930s he visited her parents' apartment and within ten minutes she got into a tremendous argument with him. And she was far from being a feminist: "She declared a detestation of her own rudimentary femininity, and stridently suggested that philosophical and mathematical achievements of lasting force were the prerogative of men–that some disorder or weakness in the very grain of womanhood militated against the examined life as demanded by Socrates, by Descartes, or by Kant" (George Steiner).

In spite of bad health she worked for a year in a Paris metallurgical factory to acquire first-hand knowledge of manual labor: the experience, she said destroyed her youth and left the indelible mark of slavery on her. When the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, she went to Barcelona and enlisted in an anarchist brigade. She was horrified by the discovery that the republican side, and not just Franco's Nationalists, were guilty of atrocities against civilians.

In 1938 she was "captured by Christ," and came to believe strongly in the presence, real and not symbolic, of Christ in the Eucharist. Her religious thinking runs something like this: the world we inhabit is a world of necessity or "gravity" from which God is voluntarily absent. He only approaches in rare moments of grace when our souls annihilate egotism and turn toward God in pure attentiveness. There is a contradiction between our longing for the good and the cold determinism of the universe. One must refuse to worship the "Great Beast," the power of the state or the tyrant, by siding with the oppressed and by diminishing as much as possible the oppressive power of those who give orders. She never converted to Catholicism because she disliked the "Roman" part of Roman Catholicism: the persecution of heretics, the authoritarian pomp. But she was profoundly ascetic and mystical in her religious thinking.

4. THE ILIAD, POEM OF FORCE

It was characteristic of her, on the eve of the Second World War, to revisit the origins of Western thinking about war in Homer's Iliad. But in one respect it was an odd choice: her thinking is primarily vertical (gravity versus grace) in its orientation, whereas that of Homer is horizontal. In Homer's world the gods are on the same moral level as the humans and there is no transcendence of the world of force except in an awareness of our common mortality.

"In Homer she found the world of force 'contemplated; a world in which the misfortune of the defeated hero and the Nemesis attending the victorious hero are bound together as aspects of the same simple and implacable destiny; the world seen without any comforting fiction, without any consoling prospect of immortality, without the insipid halo of glory or patriotism" (Nicola Chiaromonte). Even if you do not know the great poem, her citations and quotations, along with her commentary, should be enough to convince you that it contains really profound insights into the nature of force in human affairs. Homer showed how violence dehumanizes the victor and feeds on its own momentum, how hubris and nemesis turn the tide of battle, how the atmosphere of war renders the warriors indifferent to human suffering and forgetful of their own mortality.

RECOMMENDED:

Michele Barrett, "A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas," in Virginia Woolf: Introductions to the Major Works, ed. Julia Briggs (London: Virago Press, 1994).

Alex Zwerdling, "Woolf's Feminism in Historical Perspective," in Virginia Woolf and the Real World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).

George Steiner, "Bad Friday," The New Yorker, 2 March 1992.