Virginia Woolf's Greek Tragedy

Nancy Worman

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781474277815
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Ancient & Classical Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In Woolf's writings Greece and Greek tragedy in particular shape an exoticized aesthetic space that both emerges from and enables critique of the cosy settings and colonialist conceits of elite (and largely male) British attitudes toward culture and politics. Rather than highlighting Woolf's exclusion from male intellectual purviews, as so many scholars have emphasized, this book urges attention on how her engagements with Greek tragedy both collude with and challenge modernist aesthetics and contemporary politics. Woolf's encounters with and uses of Greek tragedy fantasize an alternative perceptual capacity that correlates to feminine (and feminist) modes, which are depicted in her writings as alternately defiant and choral. In this scheme, Greek tragedy is something of a dreamland, the mysterious dynamics of which Woolf treats as transcending cultural attitudes that hinge upon imperialist adventuring and violence. As scholars have recognized, especially in recent decades, the exoticizing gestures central to the work of so many modernists have uncomfortable political underpinnings, since they frequently inhabit imperialist and colonialist perspectives while appearing to critique them. Unlike most scholars, Nancy Worman argues that Woolf is no exception, although the feminism and humour that inflects so many "Greek" elements in her work saves it from the worst offenses.

1

Gender and Primitivist ‘Greek’ Aesthetics

In 1922 Ezra Pound famously declared the Christian era over, with the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses. In England – as well as elsewhere in Europe and America – this new turn on ancient literature somewhat paradoxically provided key elements in advancing modernist aesthetics in the 1920s. In the decade that followed the end of the First World War and women securing the right to vote in England and the United States, many modernist writers centred their artistic efforts around such momentous changes in perspective and power. So in this pivotal decade, everything changed in Western politics and art. Which is also to say that foregrounding works from this decade could provide a forceful explanatory frame for studying Virginia Woolf’s aesthetic development as she was writing her most influential novels and essays: Jacob’s Room (1922), Mrs Dalloway and The Common Reader (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), A Room of One’s Own (1929) and The Waves (1931).

Of course, a decade is a small enough span that it can seem random. Because it is distinguished not only by the modernist advances sketched above but also by its post-war tenor, historicizing approaches have held sway in recent decades, particularly with feminist writers like Woolf. The suffragist movement had something to do with this, but so too did the strain in feminist literary theory that emphasizes female subjectivity, as I note in the Introduction. And again, the wealth of biographical information available to Woolf scholars further encourages this approach, as her letters and diaries are often treated uncritically as offering direct access to her thoughts, orientations and thus intentions. Such prospects can foster the uncritical historicist assumption – not, I should note, shared by everyone taking this approach – that the filling out of the historical record should serve as the primary means of interpretation.

From this angle it is compelling that, for instance, during the 1920s in particular, when Virginia Woolf was focusing on reading Greek and particularly Greek tragedy, taking copious notes, and writing about the experience, she was also using tragedy to craft a means of capturing post-war anguish. That said, the literary aesthetic she forged from this process also has much earlier roots and engages with broader modernist interests in exoticism and primitivism that are chiefly rooted in nineteenth-century Romantic and Victorian aesthetics. One particularly complex strand of Woolf’s work in the 1920s in this regard is the influence on it of conceptions of ancient ritual that Jane Harrison was formulating, since these also foster ideas about an originary universal feminine power that can seem from certain angles to have a primitivist cast.¹ Nothing could be more anti-historical than such concepts, and ideas like these do indeed colour Woolf’s relation to Greece in dominant ways, fostering a mystical strain in her aesthetics from early on in her writings.

This chapter pursues the earlier development of Woolf’s ‘Greek’ aesthetics and its gendering in ‘A Dialogue Upon Mount Pentelicus’ (1906) and The Voyage Out (1915), the latter of which includes a lighter version of Clarissa Dalloway than that developed in the novel. I also situate these early works in relation to the most central formulation of Woolf’s ideas about Greek styles and inhabitations, written in the decade of note: ‘On Not Knowing Greek’ (1925). As I remark in the Introduction, much of this essay focuses on tragedy, and particularly on Sophocles’ Electra, which Woolf treats – along with references to other tragedies – as a purer, simpler, more original and centrally human mode. Such are the basic coordinates of primitivism, which, again, has its roots in the literary and cultural criticism of European Romanticism. We do well to recall that this Romanticism entails the heady creation of a ‘world literature’ and ‘world history’ that hinged on the patronizing, sentimentalizing, and/or outright denigration of southern cultures, as well as often excluding African cultures altogether as so primitive as to be ‘pre-historical’ and thus essentially pre-human.² Modernist artists instead embrace these cultures, but they have been rendered so profoundly strange to them by their own intellectual tradition – precisely what Barthes terms the ‘Other within’ – that what they praise is often a series of token predicates (again, for example, original, simple, magic, stark, harsh) essentially forged by this same Romantic perspective.³ As scholars have emphasized, especially in recent decades, this perspective in modernist aesthetics also has uncomfortable political underpinnings, since it colludes with imperialist and colonialist perspectives while only appearing to critique them.⁴

In keeping with such conceits, Woolf’s preoccupation with Greek tragedy during this period emerges in her writings as an aesthetic and affective dynamics that is concertedly un-British, providing sun-drenched access to the ‘primary’ human, and so to the sensual and the dangerous. This prospect quite obviously carries its own imperialist inflections. Woolf’s ‘Greek’ sensibility is crafted by means of metonymies that both evince and critique this romance with and exoticizing of an original purity of form and emotion that lives elsewhere, in conquered lands. While this may sound like an unduly harsh assessment of Woolf’s engagements with Greek literature, I want to emphasize that her struggles with the British versions of triumphalist Hellenism remains familiar and dangerous territory for classicists. It is the rare student of Sophocles, for instance, who can resist the sense that something thrillingly, simply and essentially human underpins his dramas.

Woolf’s earlier depictions of the British colonizing of Greek literature are quite playful, not so hedged about by brutality and death as her later engagements. For instance, in the vignette ‘A Dialogue Upon Mount Pentelicus’, when the British tourists find that their Greek, learned ‘at Harrow’, is not understood by their local guides, they disdain them collectively as ‘the dusky garrulous race, loose of lip and unstable of purpose’ (64).⁵ This primitivist and often racializing slant shades Woolf’s classical aesthetic from early on in her writings, including her deployment of Antigone in her first novel The Voyage Out. And yet, even at this early point in her career, Woolf’s very funny characterizations face directly the downside of exoticizing attitudes; already in her first novel she wryly indicates her awareness of the pitfalls of this reductivist (not to mention racist) ‘appreciation’ of alien cultures, in an ambivalent navigating of British imperialist values.

In The Voyage Out the female characters say frivolous and bigoted things about Greek culture, Miss Allan (one of the hotel guests) being only the worst offender, with her envisioning of Greeks as ‘naked black men’ (114).⁶ While such lightly drawn, gently lampooning but also racializing caricatures of British receptions of Greece and Greek literature could be a mark of the youthful Woolf’s undeveloped political and aesthetic sensibilities, scholars have recognized that the sophisticated and nuanced complexities of her perspective marks this early work as well.⁷ Meanwhile the later ‘On Not Knowing Greek’ shares elements of this ‘exotic’ adventuring, if in a more serious vein. Here too Woolf treats Greece and Greek tragedy in particular as affording access to the ‘real’ or the ‘original’ human and thus participates in some similar ways with this dominant trend of modernism while also forging her own distinctively ‘Greek’ aesthetic.

In both the early works and the later essay Woolf also deploys Platonic dialogue as a central means of gendering these aesthetic coordinates. To put it provisionally and overly simplistically, she treats dialogue as a male province, while viewing tragedy as a setting that affords female characters and choruses some degree of knowledge, autonomy and even power. And this is no distortion: Platonic dialogue features no female interlocutors and only two female figures, both of whom are presented indirectly, their words quoted by Socrates; tragedy, in sharp contrast, stages many powerful female characters who dominate the stage and speak in their own voices, as well as many female choruses.⁸ That said, Woolf’s gendering of these genres is not without subtlety, ironizing and ambiguity – fittingly enough for both ancient modes. For instance, ‘A Dialogue Upon Mount Pentelicus’ is predominantly Platonic and male, while The Voyage Out features two female characters and plotting driven by potential tragedies born of sexual differences, with an actual one arising from the setting. ‘On Not Knowing Greek’ pits tragedy directly against dialogue, with the former featuring tragic female characters, in the flesh and outside in the Athenian sunshine, and the latter framed as a more cerebral, indoor mode dominated by men.⁹

Grouping these works in this way thus turns out to be quite challenging to developmental and periodizing historicist modes, since the most dominant structural through line from A Voyage Out to ‘On Not Knowing Greek’ is the use of Greece and Greek literature – again, especially Plato and tragedy – in order to flag gendered differences in relation to statuses and prospects. This is not true of ‘A Dialogue Upon Mount Pentelicus’; and the absence of distinctly tragic tonal and character inflections may point up the difference a decade can make, since Woolf crafts this role for it as a response to the devastations of the First World War. And yet it is also the case that early on the novel frames some female characters, including the young, sketchily educated Rachel Vinrace and the more frivolous Mrs Dalloway, with tragic references, in particular Sophocles’ Antigone. There may well be already in Woolf’s primitivist slant a provisional place for tragedy and dialogue, an inflecting of the female characters with the tragedy of their vulnerabilities and lacks, most especially of education and self-determination, in contradistinction to the learned male confines represented by dialogue. Even here, at the beginning of Woolf’s career as a novelist, she already recognizes that women are ‘so tightly bound’ – precisely what she will later say of Electra – and must elbow their ways into any serious conversation, victims of their own timidity or awkwardness. And as in tragedy (if not in Plato), violence lies just beyond or behind words and actions: as Rachel’s love interest Terence Hewet puts it, ‘If I were a woman, I’d blow someone’s brains out’ (221).

In the sections that follow I first offer details from these two ancient genres that become so essential to the ways in which Woolf genders ‘Greek’ elements in her works. I next consider the early sketch of a hike up Mount Pentelicus and the first novel as distinct but adjacent prospects on contemporaneous notions of the ‘primitive’ in relation to Woolf’s gendering of Greece, as well as where she situates Plato and tragedy in both texts. I then turn to the further developments of these ‘Greek’ strains in ‘On Not Knowing Greek’, which I frame with a brief preliminary look at the tragedies with which she was most engaged – ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Dedication
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: (En)gendering Greece
• 1 Gender and Primitivist ‘Greek’ Aesthetics
• 2 Electra and the Materialities of Tragic Language
• 3 Female and ‘Natural’ Choral Voices
• Epilogue: Antigone and her Siblings
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright