Religion, Secularism, and the Spiritual Paths of Virginia Woolf

Kristina K. Groover

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9783030325688
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Religion, Secularism, and the Spiritual Paths of Virginia Woolf offers an expansive interdisciplinary study of spirituality in Virginia Woolf's writing, drawing on theology, psychology, geography, history, gender and sexuality studies, and other critical fields. The essays in this collection interrogate conventional approaches to the spiritual, and to Woolf's work, while contributing to a larger critical reappraisal of modernism, religion, and secularism. While Woolf's atheism and her sharp criticism of religion have become critical commonplaces, her sometimes withering critique of religion conflicts with what might well be called a religious sensibility in her work. The essays collected here take up a challenge posed by Woolf herself: how to understand her persistent use of religious language, her representation of deeply mysterious human experiences, and her recurrent questions about life's meaning in light of her disparaging attitude toward religion. Theseessays argue that Woolf's writing reframes and reclaims the spiritual in alternate forms; she strives to find new language for those numinous experiences that remain after the death of God has been pronounced.

© The Author(s) 2019

K. K. Groover (ed.)Religion, Secularism, and the Spiritual Paths of Virginia Woolfhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32568-8_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction—Desire Lines: The Spiritual Paths of Virginia Woolf

Kristina K. Groover¹

(1)

Appalachian State University, Boone, NC, USA

Kristina K. Groover

End Abstract

Virginia Stephen was born into a family of skeptics and non-believers. Her father, Leslie Stephen, who descended from the Clapham Sect of evangelical Christians, renounced his religion and resigned his fellowship at Cambridge while he was still a young man. Virginia’s mother Julia lost her faith after the death of her beloved husband, Herbert Duckworth; thereafter she immersed herself in self-sacrificing caretaking for her demanding second husband, Leslie Stephen; her household full of children and stepchildren; and the poor and the sick in her community. As Virginia Woolf writes in her autobiographical essay “A Sketch of the Past,” she was “born into a very communicative, literate, letter writing, visiting, articulate, late nineteenth century world” (1985, 65). The Stephen family believed not in religion but in their own moral, intellectual, and social powers.

Upon leaving their father’s home in Kensington after his death, 22-year-old Virginia Stephen and her siblings formed what came to be known as the Bloomsbury group, a circle of artists and intellectuals who helped to define British modernism. Like many of their fellow modernists, those in the Bloomsbury circle rejected religion’s moralism, its anti-intellectualism, and its failure to explain or assuage terrible tragedies: in particular, the horrifying losses of World War I. Despite the Bloomsbury participants’ general rejection of the moral codes and sense of “duty” that guided the Stephens’ Kensington upbringing, they shared the Stephen family’s faith in the life of the mind and in their own powers to enact social and cultural reform.¹

Virginia Woolf’s atheism and her sharp criticism of religion have become commonplaces, well-established and regularly repeated in the critical literature. Woolf’s work is often scathingly critical toward religion, associating it with ignorance, sentimentality, and simple-mindedness. She reserves her harshest criticism for religion’s authoritarianism, its claims to truth and its bullying restrictions on individual freedom.²

Yet Woolf’s sometimes withering critique of religion belies what might well be called a religious sensibility in her work. Woolf’s entire oeuvre—her essays, fiction, diary, and letters—is replete with religious language and themes. Her characters often have heightened, even transcendent experiences that are not fully explained by their sensory and cognitive engagement with the world. She is preoccupied with the mysterious and the inexplicable. Woolf’s distinctive idiom—her unanswered questions, her frequent use of ellipses and other textual lacunae—probe what Judith Butler terms the “limits of knowability” (2003, 63).³ She poses weighty questions—about life’s meaning, the inevitability of death, the impossibility of knowing another person. As Christopher Knight writes, Woolf’s work is characterized by its “tone of enquiry, of questioning, wherein it is understood that if the object of the enquiry, of the quest, is to be imagined as worthy, it should admit of a full freedom of probing, of questioning, where even doubt and disbelief are not unwelcome” (2010, 83). Woolf’s rejection of religion, however vehement, does not answer the profound questions she poses; but neither does it foreclose her open and rigorous examination of them.

The chapters in this collection take up a challenge posed by Woolf herself: how to understand her persistent use of religious language, her representation of deeply mysterious human experiences, and her recurrent questions about life’s meaning in light of her sharply critical attitude toward religion. To overlook Woolf’s frequent use of religiously inflected language and her invocation of a world both enchanted and ensouled is to disregard a persistent pattern in her work.⁴ As Mark Hussey writes in The Singing of the Real World, Woolf’s body of work is “above all a literature of rigorous honesty in its exploration of what it is to be” (1986, xix); her work pursues not “an external, objective Reality” but “our experience of the world” (1986, xiii). A significant dimension of that lived experience, for Woolf, is spiritual. This is reflected, not in her espousal of religious ideas, but in her persistent investigation of those otherwise inexplicable experiences from which religious ideas emerge. As theologian Michael Novak writes, “the sacred does not define one class of things, while the profane defines another; the terms do not point to two different worlds, realms, or sets of objects.” Rather, Novak argues, “The terms sacred and profane refer…to the light in which things are regarded; they point to human interpretations of the real” (1971, 26, 27).

In her essay “Modern Fiction,” Woolf memorably criticizes novelists whom she terms “materialists,” who are bound by conventional novelistic form “to provide a plot, to provide comedy, tragedy, love interest, and an air of probability embalming the whole….” By contrast, she argues, modern novelists seek to convey “life or spirit, truth or reality, this, the essential thing.” While “spirit” does not necessarily convey a religious meaning, it does suggest an invisible and elusive quality of human experience. Throughout “Modern Fiction,” as in much of her writing, Woolf reaches for metaphorical language to convey this sense of mystery. “Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged,” she asserts; “life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end” (1986–2011, 4: 160). Woolf’s metaphors—the “luminous halo,” the “semi-transparent envelope”—challenge binaries that separate the physical and the spiritual. They suggest a porousness between internal and external worlds as well as a numinous quality found in that liminal, “semi-transparent” space. As Naomi Toth argues, Woolf’s metaphors “displace the accent of fiction not towards an intimate, private interior, but towards that which exceeds the consciousness while remaining contiguous with it” (2011). She is continually engaged, not in describing or responding to a pre-given world, but in depicting the world as a relationship in which the individual’s experience—of mind, body, spirit—is inseparable from the surrounding environment.

In writing of her own illnesses, in particular, Woolf often depicts illness as a liminal state that offers a heightened form of “knowing.” Woolf suffered throughout her life with both physical and mental illness—characterized by headaches, fevers, weight loss, hallucinations, and other debilitating symptoms—that sometimes confined her to bed for days or weeks. Writing about these periods of illness in her diary and in letters, Woolf blurs distinctions between body and mind, between the rational and non-rational. Recovering from a depression, she writes that “I feel unreason slowly tingling in my veins,” her words locating insight both in the body and in a place outside of cognition—in “unreason” (1977–1984, 1: 298). She describes a devastating bout of illness as “a plunge into deep waters; which is a little alarming, but full of interest….One goes down into the well & nothing protects one from the assault of truth” (1977–1984, 3: 112). Woolf’s language thus suggests that her illnesses, however harrowing, provide entry to otherwise inaccessible insights. Periods of convalescence are often followed by bursts of creativity: “Six weeks in bed now would make a masterpiece of Moths,” she writes in her diary in 1929, referring to her working title for The Waves (3: 254). The following year, after a week-long bout of influenza, she writes, “Once or twice I have felt that odd whir of wings in the head which comes when I am ill so often—last year for example, at this time I lay in bed constructing A Room of One’s Own…If I could stay in bed another fortnight…I believe I should see the whole of The Waves…” (3: 287). Woolf thus locates her creative power not in a disembodied mind, but a mind specifically connected to an ill body. And her insights, while related to her art, are not limited to the aesthetic. Rather, she frequently characterizes these experiences in spiritual terms: her illnesses are “queer spiritual states” which bring her “nearest a true vision” (1977–1984, 1: 298); they are “partly mystical” (3: 287). In a letter to E.M. Forster, she writes of her “insanities and all the rest...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction—Desire Lines: The Spiritual Paths of Virginia Woolf
• 2. “Some restless searcher in me”: Virginia Woolf and Contemporary Mysticism
• 3. A God “in process of change”: Woolfian Theology and Mrs. Dalloway
• 4. “The thing is in itself enough”: Virginia Woolf’s Sacred Everyday
• 5. Virginia Woolf Reads “Dover Beach”: Romance and the Victorian Crisis of Faith in To the Lighthouse
• 6. Woolf and Hopkins on the Revelatory Particular
• 7. “Perpetual Departure”: Sacred Space and Urban Pilgrimage in Woolf’s Essays
• 8. Quaker Mysticism and Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse
• 9. Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Dostoevsky: The Sacred Space of the Soul
• 10. “She heard the first words”: Lesbian Subjectivity and Prophetic Discourse in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves and Between the Acts
• 11. Sensibility, Parochiality, Spirituality: Toward a Critical Method and Ethic of Response in Woolf, Spivak, and Mahmood
• Back Matter