Female Embodiment and Subjectivity in the Modernist Novel

The Corporeum of Virginia Woolf and Olive Moore

Renée Dickinson

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136603525
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Literature
• Categoria: Literary Criticism

This studyconsiders the work of two experimental British women modernists writing in the tumultuous interwar period--Virginia Woolf and Olive Moore--by examining four crucial incarnations of female embodiment and subjectivity: female bodies, geographical imagery, national ideology and textual experimentation. Dickinson proposes that the ways Mrs. Dalloway, and The Waves by Virginia Woolf and Spleen and Fugue by Olive Moore reflect, expose and criticize physical, geographical and national bodies in the narrative and form of their texts reveal the authors' attempts to try on new forms and experiment with new possibilities of female embodiment and subjectivity.

1 The Shape of Modernism

Female Embodiment and Textual Experimentation in Mrs. Dalloway

At the beginning of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Clarissa Dalloway takes a well-known walk through London, encountering—along with many other Londoners—the grey car of (possibly) royalty that proceeds through Westminster to Buckingham Palace. Throughout the novel, the symbolism attached to the grey car demarcates it as a signifying landmark in the identity and identification of Clarissa, connecting her to both images of the landscape and ideologies of the nation. As the grey car passes a men’s club, the club is described as a still life that summons images of nation: “The white busts and the little tables in the background covered with copies of the Tatler and syphons of soda water seemed to approve; seemed to indicate the flowing corn and the manor houses of England” (18). It is as if the siphons and Tatlers not only approve of the royal car but approve of it and access it specifically, I argue, via English pastoral images.¹ Later in the novel, Peter tells us that Clarissa for him was always “recalling some field or English harvest” (153). Here, Clarissa is associated, at least for Peter, with the English pastoral countryside. In fact, he says that “he saw her most often in the country, not in London” (153). This passage is surprising in its correlation of Clarissa—such a well-known Londoner—with the English countryside, but in conjunction with the earlier passage on the grey car, it also serves to connect and extend Clarissa’s identity to the images of pastoral land and then to the nation as these same images of pastoral England are conjured by the royal grey car.² Clarissa’s identity then becomes collapsed not only with a kind of pastoral geographical identity but with an idealized national identity as well. There is a familiar trajectory here in the tracing of how women and women’s bodies become figureheads for nationalism, this time via geographical imagery. I argue that the novel’s depictions of the physical, geographical, and national bodies as well fail to provide alternative identifications for women outside of patriarchy and imperialism.

Yet, the textual body reverses the trajectory of these demarcations of the feminine in its exploration of the stream-of-consciousness form, heralding a new representation of the subject, including the female subject, through its acknowledgement of and access to women’s psychic (not just physical) interiority and leveling monolithic structures such as class and gender identity. After examining the text and its experiments with form, I argue that despite the exposure of the failure of women to escape the preestablished feminine embodiments of their physical form, their affiliation with land and landscape, and the ways they are depicted as necessary representations of, for, and within nation, Woolf exposes and criticizes these various demarcations of female embodiment in physical, geographical, and national bodies. Through her textual experimentation, specifically with her use of the stream-of-consciousness form, Woolf provides for alternative ways of thinking about, accessing, and, therefore, creating identity subjectivity for women and for the modern female subject.³

Within this chapter, I begin by looking closely at the portrayals of women’s physical bodies in Mrs. Dalloway and then at how these portrayals are both continued and contradicted in the text’s images of landscape, rhetoric of nationalism, and experiments in form.⁴ If I were only to consider the first three incarnations of female identity and subjectivity—physical, geographical, and national—as in previous paragraphs, this analysis would conclude by noting Clarissa’s affiliation via geography with nationalism and the complicit relationship between women’s bodies and national identity. But, with the additional analysis of the textual body, I argue that Woolf’s textual strategies provide an interiority and consciousness to the female body so often portrayed as only superficially inscribed with physical, geographical, and national identity markers. In essence, I argue that the text, through its use of stream-of-consciousness, provides alternate corporeal and psychic identities to those identities imposed upon and interpreted to be contained within women’s bodies, the English landscape, and British nationalism. The body of the text, in granting interiority and consciousness to women like Clarissa Dalloway, also grants a separate, specific identity and presence to women, and this consciousness constructs different possibilities for and perspectives on, as well as criticism of, the physical, geographical, and national bodies within the text.⁵ In extending the development of a new literary form into the psyches of women and the working class, Woolf makes it possible to imagine the form of women’s identity outside of their traditional physical inscriptions.

Female Embodiment: Clarissa’s Complicit Corporeality

As Clarissa Dalloway traverses London in the opening of the novel, she describes her body as follows:

But often now this body she wore (she stopped to look at a Dutch picture), this body, with all its capacities, seemed nothing—nothing at all. She had the oddest sense of being herself invisible, unseen; unknown; there being no more marrying, no more having of children, but only this astonishing and rather solemn progress with the rest of them, up Bond Street, this being Mrs. Dalloway; not even Clarissa any more; this being Mrs. Richard Dalloway. (11)

In this passage, several representations of and conflicts about female embodiment are immediately apparent from her adjacent statements that her body has “all its capacities” and yet “seemed nothing . . . at all” (11). First, Clarissa sees her body as something she wears, “this body she wore” (11), indicating that this is an external part of her identity, something such as a coat that she puts on over something else: her body acts as a cover to another, internal identity. In acknowledging that the body is something that she puts on, she recognizes that it is in a sense something that she performs or has a choice about wearing or enacting; it implies that her body is also something she can take off like a costume.⁶ This idea of conscious body performance is underscored by her reflection on the “Dutch picture” (11). Her body, like a painting, is a representation, a portrayal of an idea. Specifically, I argue, her body is the corporeal manifestation of patriarchal ideas of femininity, specifically those of marriage and maternity. Initially, this idea of her body performance denotes a type of freedom from the body and its inscriptions by implying that she has a choice of whether to and how to wear it. Unfortunately, she does not have the option of taking off her physical embodiment and its inscriptions.

In considering Clarissa’s relationship to her body in this passage, I refer to Elizabeth Grosz’s work on the slippery borders between psyche and body, or body image, in Volatile Bodies, where she states that:

the limits or borders of the body image are not fixed by nature or confined to the anatomical “container,” the skin. The body image is extremely fluid and dynamic; its borders, edges, and contours are “osmotic”—they have the remarkable power of incorporating and expelling outside and inside in an ongoing interchange. (79)

In other words, the body image is inherently involved in determining borders, specifically the borders that determine what is included and excluded in the body image. We see in the Bond Street passage earlier that Clarissa’s body image has become “nothing—nothing at all” (11). It is as if all meaning attached to her body has evaporated or been “expell[ed] outside” of her body so that she sees herself as “invisible, unseen, unknown” (11). Because of the inherent connection, or “ongoing interchange,” between the body and psyche that Grosz discusses, Clarissa reveals her sense of her interior identity as well as her physical identity so that she is “not even Clarissa anymore.” The correlation between body and psyche grants that Clarissa sees herself as absent in both her public or physical corporeality and her private or psychic identity.

Second, Clarissa’s description of being “invisible, unseen, unknown” relates directly to her body’s use and status in the institutions of marriage and maternity: “there being no more marrying, no more having of children” (11). Her body has fulfilled its use as wife and mother and is now used up; without an individual identity, she is instead incorporated into the social body with “the rest of them” (11). In a sense, she sees herself as without specific bodily form or identity unless it is a body defined as wife and mother. In particular, the sexual body becomes, through marriage, regulated and incorporated into a social rather than an individual ideal as Kathy Phillips argues, “marriage seems to have tamed sexuality itself into a tourist landscape of uniformity for all” (103).⁷ Marriage leaves Clarissa with no specific external physical or internal psychic identity. As Patricia Moran argues in Word of Mouth: Body Language in Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf, this condition of detachment represents “women’s orphaned state within the symbolic, an orphaned state Woolf connects to the cultural appropriation of the female body for the uses of patriarchy” such as marriage (149). The problem for Clarissa, of course, is that outside or after the body has been used, the body and the identity attached to it become unnecessary, discarded, or at the very least, unimportant, leaving her body and, therefore, her internal identity not only “orphaned” but also discarded.

As Clarissa asserts, through her joining of “marrying” and “having children” (11), the association between female embodiment and its use for patriarchy extends metaphorically and physically from the use of women’s bodies for marriage to include their use in maternity. In fact, as Makiko Minow-Pinkney argues in Virginia Woolf and the Problem of the Subject: “maternity is the only female identity which is valorized by patriarchy. Only as a mother is a woman allowed to have her sexuality as difference, to own her body and social place” (71). Thus, women are orphaned from their identity within the symbolic system except in their accommodation to/valorization by patriarchy through maternity. Women must then both embody the signs of femininity that accommodate patriarchy or face possible expulsion from the patriarchal system. For Clarissa, the description of her physical body as apart from the maternal or postmaternal leads to her conclusion about her identity as “Mrs. Richard Dalloway” (11) absent of any specific Clarissaness. Here we see her reluctant acknowledgment of her status in maternity, abandoning her sense of creating an individual identity because of her place in marriage, maternity, and their operations which require her complicity.

Clarissa must remain in this position of “Mrs. Richard Dalloway” (11) in order to avoid the status of what Julia Kristeva describes as the abject who, among other things, “disturbs identity, system, order” (Powers 4) or who becomes a “stray” (Powers 8) by wandering outside of the symbolic system (here of marriage, maternity, and patriarchy). In addition to Kristeva’s definition of the abject, Patricia Moran connects the abject to patriarchy when sees that “the abjection associated with female embodiment necessitates accommodation to the fathers’ law and the Father’s Word” (155), so that women must comply with or be exiled from the symbolic system. In order to remain within the symbolic system, Clarissa absents herself from any separate identity markers that would push her across the border of “the fathers’ law” (Moran 155) into abjection or expulsion from patriarchy.

The effects of this complicity emerge in Clarissa’s description of her body throughout the novel as absent or discarded. As Clarissa ascends the stairs to her attic room, she describes herself as: “a nun who has left the world . . . blessed and purified” (29), as “suddenly shriveled, aged, breastless . . . out of her body and brain which now failed” (31), and that “[s]he could not dispel a virginity preserved through childbirth which clung to her like a sheet” (31). All of these descriptions of herself show Clarissa to be physically or at least sexually absent as she is invisible, nun-like, breastless, with a body that has failed, and yet virginal. She is both pre- and postsexuality, but mostly she is outside of sexuality, outside of anything that would make her body sexually or physically present, namely maternity. In denying access to a present body, she denies any relation between her body and its potentially abject feminine status, but she also denies access to her own corporeal identity as well. As the abject is the undeniable presence of not only the body but the body’s filth, Clarissa is able to remove herself from her body’s transgression. Because she sees that both “her body and brain . . . now failed” (31), she also demonstrates that her body image replicates itself in the image of her psyche as Grosz’s argument about body image previously suggests. Thus, Clarissa attempts to remove herself from the “fail[ure]” of her body and mind and from the abject feminine inherent in each. Although this can be seen as a potentially subversive act, a resistance to the external meanings placed on her body, Clarissa does not take advantage of this subversion but rather accommodates her abject status through her acceptance of her marriage and the loss of her marriage bed.

At the same time that she exposes Clarissa’s reluctant complicity with her physical, and therefore, psychical, markers, Woolf also exposes the conflicted position for women who, like Clarissa, operate as both sexually reproductive and asexually pure. Clarissa describes her body as having “failed” (31) in its sexual relations with Richard, but it has succeeded in reproducing her daughter Elizabeth. Apart from this physical expulsion or abjection, her sexuality and physical presence must be denied in order for her to maintain the feminine ideal of purity. Hence, she also sees herself as “virginal” despite having had a child.

As a hallmark of Clarissa’s physical presence and sexuality, the following passage, while revealing the possibility of her own identity in her corporeality, ultimately also denies it. Upon describing how she has repeatedly failed Richard sexually, she then also describes how:

she could not resist sometimes yielding to the charm of a woman, not a girl, of a woman confessing, as to her they often did, some scrape, some folly. And whether it was pity, or their beauty, or that she was older, or some accident—like a faint scent, or a violin next door . . . she did undoubtedly then feel what men felt. Only for a moment; but it was enough. It was a sudden revelation, a tinge like a blush which one tried to check and then, as it spread, one yielded to its expansion, and rushed to the farthest verge and there quivered and felt the world come closer, swollen with some astonishing significance, some pressure of rapture, which split its thin skin and gushed and poured with an extraordinary alleviation over the cracks and sores! Then, for that moment, she had seen an illumination; a match burning in a crocus; an inner meaning almost expressed. But the close withdrew; the hard softened. (32)

Sexual arousal, despite granting her some access to patriarchal power as she “then did undoubtedly feel what men felt” (32), does not offer a position of sexuality or physical presence that she can maintain. It is instead “only for a moment” (32). Clarissa’s description associates sexual arousal to the abject through the oozing of her own interiority and sexuality as the blush spreads, expands, splits, and pours. Sexual contact with an/other body makes her body abject in the leaking of her body as it strays across her body’s borders. Although the homoerotic implications of this passage promises subversion to patriarchy and marriage as Clarrisa’s moments of bodily presence are alone or with women, away from the outside world of men/patriarchy she again does not pursue this course (either here or in her youth with Sally). Instead of following her body into a sexual but abject (or doubly abject) state, she recoils and contains her sexuality and potentially her physicality as “the close withdrew; the hard softened” (32).⁹ As the “inner meaning” is “almost expressed” (32), it indicates both the removal of her sexuality and physical presence, and of her possibility as a phallic, patriarchal power.¹⁰ As she withdraws any presence of sexuality, she also removes the possibility of a separate physical and internal identity apart from the symbolic system. And, as she chooses to remain within the system, she remains without agency for sexual or self-expression. She is both trapped within and complicit with the system’s requirements of her physical embodiment as chaste and, therefore, abjectless.

The text, though, does not just represent the conflicts of the external identity of her physical embodiment, but also reveals its conflicts with the internal identity of her psychic self by showing Clarissa’s physical/sexual presence and by showing Clarissa’s psychic interiority. Through Woolf’s use of the stream-of-consciousness form, the text reveals and represents the inner workings of Clarissa’s female embodiment in ways that show how Clarissa is not just physically, but psychically and textually present. The stream-of-consciousness form acts as a leveling agent that portrays both men’s and women’s psyches, that accesses the thoughts of upper and lower class citizens, and that transcends the physical barriers imposed by the rules and regulations of patriarchy on female embodiment: the text is not contained by the physical bodies of the characters and, unlike its portrayal of Clarissa’s sexuality, disregards concerns for abject leakage by freely moving across the borders of the characters’ minds and bodies. Specifically, except for two deviations—Peter’s walk through the park and Richard’s meeting with Lady Bruton—the Clarissa storyline (as opposed to the Septimus storyline) asserts the presence of the feminine by situating Clarissa at its center.

In the previous passages, the text grants interiority to Clarissa’s physical embodiment by accessing her thoughts about her physicality, her marriage, the uselessness of her body, her sexual arousal, and the choices she makes around them. These thoughts are interrupted when she sees a Dutch painting, walks in a crowd, sees her narrow bed and bed sheets, and shuts down sexual expression. Part of the leveling effect of stream-of-consciousness not only gra...