Reading Virginia Woolf Logically

Poetics Today ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 101-116
Author(s):  
Megan Quigley
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Marriage Plot ◽  
Cora Diamond

This article argues for a “resolute reading” of Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out, akin to Cora Diamond and James Conant’s reading of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. The resolute approach to the Tractatus contends that we should embrace Wittgenstein’s assertion that the Tractatus is finally nonsense. Accordingly, the Tractatus acts as a kind of therapy, enabling us to dispense with certain types of philosophical, linguistic, and analytical claims. I argue that Woolf’s The Voyage Out takes a similar approach to the nineteenth-century novel, fully investing in the conventions of the bildungsroman and the marriage plot only to ruthlessly dispense with them. Both works use a particular kind of modernist therapeutic pedagogy reliant on logic and form.

scholarly journals “How Beautiful It Sounds!”: The Lieder and Sonntagsmusiken of Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel

2018 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sabrina Rae Baeta
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Financial Security ◽  
Musical Life ◽  
Her Family ◽  
Musical Education ◽  
Adjacent Building ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Felix Mendelssohn ◽  
Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel

Throughout her lifetime, Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel was primarily known as the sister of the musical genius, Felix Mendelssohn, as the daughter of her distinguished parents, Lea and Abraham Mendelssohn and as the wife of her artistic husband, August Wilhelm Hensel. Today, Hensel is remembered for her remarkable musical talents and a wide breadth of compositions. Though often passed over as a woman in the nineteenth-century, Fanny Hensel played a key role in the musical life of the city of Berlin. Hensel’s musical voice was defined by her comprehensive musical education and through her Sonntagsmusiken (translated “Sunday Musicales”). In the next generation, British author Virginia Woolf shed light on the obstacles to a female artist’s life. In the essay, A Room of One’s Own, Woolf outlined the main elements necessary to create art: financial security and a room to one’s self. For Hensel, financial security was ensured through her family, yielding for her a rich musical education. Hensel was given a private space for her creative work in an adjacent building called the Gartenhaus. This paper investigates how Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel’s educational and performance opportunities shaped her compositional voice and circumscribed her influence on nineteenth-century Berlin musical society. 

scholarly journals ‘Grave-Paved Stars’: Comparing the Death of Two Artists in Nineteenth-Century Rome

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. LW&D108-LW&D131
Author(s):  
Kiera Lindsey
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Pulmonary Tuberculosis ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
John Keats ◽  
Historical Method ◽  
English Poet

Adelaide Ironside (1831–1867) is best known as the first Australian-born artist to train overseas. While her life offers a portal into Republican Sydney, Pre-Raphaelite London and Risorgimento Rome, the nature of her archive also highlights the limits of historical method and the need to employ what Virginia Woolf called ‘the biographer’s licence’ when researching and writing about subjects with problematic sources. In this article, I employ biographical license to contrast the better-known and better-documented death of the English poet John Keats (1795–1821), with the few records associated with Ironside’s death some forty years later, to speculate about the silences in her sources. There are several factors encouraging this approach. Both artists died in Rome of pulmonary tuberculosis. Both were patients of the famous doctor, Sir James Clark (1788–1870), and both died during winter in the care of the person with whom they are now buried. By situating Ironside within these broader nineteenth-century contexts, my biographical subject evolves from a shadowy historical representative of demographic and an era into a figure who is more flesh and blood than an accocount focused upon her accomplishments and acquaintances might otherwise allow.

Serena Partridge’s ‘Accessories’: Fabricating Uncertainty in the Brontë Parsonage Museum

2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 279-299 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amber Pouliot
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Charlotte Bronte ◽  
Domestic Life ◽  
Literary Celebrity ◽  
Celebrity Culture ◽  
Fictional Narratives ◽  
Critical Intervention ◽  
Domestic Cult

Abstract The 1861 sale of the Brontës’ personal effects sent relic hunters scrambling to collect the material remains of the famous family. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the collection, preservation, and veneration of relics, particularly those associated with a writer’s private, domestic life, were important aspects of literary celebrity culture and commemoration, and both the Brontë Society and the original Brontë Museum were established to collect material remains. Yet when Virginia Woolf visited the museum in 1904, she viewed Charlotte Brontë’s clothing, shoes, and accessories with considerable unease. Anticipating the concerns of the literary establishment, Woolf feared that access to Brontë’s material remains would encourage the domestic cult which had formed around her following the publication of Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857). She feared it would diminish the importance of Brontë’s writing by privileging a narrative of domestic rather than literary labour. This essay considers the creative-critical intervention of Serena Partridge’s ‘Accessories’ (2016), a collection of newly created pseudo-relics of Charlotte Brontë, framed by semi-fictional narratives that dramatize the construction, use, and significance of her personal possessions. I argue that ‘Accessories’ and biographical fiction are analogous modes of engaging with Brontë’s legacy. They respond to the anxieties articulated by Woolf through the fabrication – both literal and literary – of new pseudo-relics that (rather than emphasizing Brontë’s perceived conventional, domestic femininity) enable multiple interpretive possibilities while simultaneously acknowledging the contingent nature of our understanding of her experience.

Fashioning the Imperial Self

Black Land ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 72-89
Author(s):  
Nadia Nurhussein
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Turn Of The Century

This chapter introduces three incidents of Ethiopianist aristocratic impersonation or imposture. First is of Isaac Brown, a Jamaican man who successfully passed himself off as Menelik's nephew at the turn of the century. Second is that of Joseph Emanuel Blayechettai, who in the 1920s claimed to be the kidnapped son of a king of Tigre, an Abyssinian province. Then third is that of Virginia Woolf, whose participation in the Dreadnought hoax in 1910, during which she dressed as an Abyssinian prince, was notorious. The impersonations are dramatic illustrations of spectacular Ethiopianism, a variant especially prevalent in the first two decades of the twentieth century. The performances of spectacular Ethiopianism were preceded in the nineteenth century by the reciprocal costuming of Prince Alemayehu, the son of Emperor Tewodros orphaned by the Anglo-Abyssinian War, and his guardian, the eccentric English explorer Captain Tristram Speedy.

Addison and the Victorians

2021 ◽  
pp. 308-328
Author(s):  
Brian Young
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Feminist Criticism ◽  
Literary Biography ◽  
Republic Of Letters ◽  
Valuable Study ◽  
History Of

The masculine world of Addison’s eighteenth-century ‘republic of letters’ was mirrored by that inhabited by Victorian ‘Men of Letters’, and hence much of the lively interest taken in him by nineteenth-century cultural commentators and makers of (and historians of) public opinion. The agnostic manliness of such men as Leslie Stephen and W. J. Courthope informed the way they wrote about Addison, whose Christianity they tended to slight and who was described by them as ‘delicate’. Macaulay had been more admiring of Addison as a Christian gentleman, while Thackeray praised him as an English humorist. Pope and Swift continued to enjoy an ascendancy in eighteenth-century English literary history, with Addison and Steele appreciated more for having been ‘characteristic’ of their age than as acting in any way as intellectually innovative figures. Matthew Arnold was notably critical of Addison, whom he found provincial and narrow. Both Addison and his Victorian critics were subjected to feminist criticism by Virginia Woolf, who happened to be Stephen’s daughter, but she in her turn slighted the most significant early Victorian study of Addison, the life written by the Unitarian Lucy Aikin. The ‘long nineteenth century’ in the English literary history of the eighteenth century is thus bookended by studies of Addison by women, and it is time that justice was paid to Aikin’s pioneering and still valuable study, submerged as it has been by readers of Macaulay’s essay on Addison, which was ostensibly a review of Aikin’s exercise in literary biography.

Environmental Desire in: The Mill on the Floss

2021 ◽  
Vol 76 (2) ◽  
pp. 192-222
Author(s):  
Jayne Hildebrand
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Biological Medium ◽  
Ecological Role ◽  
Marriage Plot ◽  
Biological Concept ◽  
Herbert Spencer ◽  
Auguste Comte ◽  
Mill On The Floss ◽  
Relationship Of

Jayne Hildebrand, “Environmental Desire in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss” (pp. 192–222) This essay argues that George Eliot’s expansive use of landscape description in The Mill on the Floss (1860) represents an engagement with the emerging concept of a biological “medium” or “environment” in the nineteenth-century sciences. In the 1850s, scientific writers including Auguste Comte, Herbert Spencer, and G. H. Lewes redefined biological life as dependent on an abstraction called a “medium” or “environment”—a term that united all the objects, substances, and forces in an organism’s physical surroundings into a singular entity. Eliot in The Mill on the Floss draws out the ecological potential of this new biological concept by imbuing the described backgrounds of her novel with a lyrical affect I call “environmental desire,” a diffuse longing for ambient contact with one’s formative medium that offers an ethical alternative to the possessive and object-driven forms of desire that drive the plot of a traditional Bildungsroman. Maggie Tulliver’s marriage plot is structured by a tension between environmental desire and possessive desire, in which her erotic desire for Stephen Guest competes with a more diffuse environmental desire that attaches to the novel’s described backgrounds. Ultimately, the new environment concept enables Eliot to reconceive the Bildungsroman’s usual opposition between self and world as a relationship of nourishment and dependency rather than struggle, and invites a reconsideration of the ecological role of description in the Bildungsroman genre.

Earwitness

2019 ◽  
pp. 196-213
Author(s):  
Alyson Tapp
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Narrative Technique ◽  
War Zone

Tapp’s chapter considers one of the Crimean War’s most celebrated literary productions, Leo Tolstoy’s Sevastopol Stories. Through comparison with Virginia Woolf and her innovative narrative technique, it discusses the workings of wartime sound in Tolstoy’s famous text. In particular, it elucidates the representation of battlefield noise, whose valence changes as it approaches the war zone. In Tolstoy’s Stories sound becomes a cipher for unmediated reality and ultimately for truth: a means to gesture toward authentic experiences of combat. The chapter shows how Tolstoy cordoned off audible reality from its supposedly less immediate visual counterpart, reproducing an audiovisual split that was pervasive in nineteenth-century culture.

A Servitude of One’s Own

2015 ◽  
Vol 69 (4) ◽  
pp. 455-480 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nora Gilbert
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Women's Literature ◽  
Primary Source ◽  
Anne Bronte ◽  
Historical Criticism ◽  
Victorian Era ◽  
Domestic Servants ◽  
The Family ◽  
Almost All

Nora Gilbert, “A Servitude of One’s Own: Isolation, Authorship, and the Nineteenth-Century British Governess” (pp. 455–480) Much has been written, both during the Victorian era and in recent literary and cultural-historical criticism, about the plight of the nineteenth-century British governess, a plight that is largely attributed to her uncomfortable position of “status incongruence,” as M. Jeanne Peterson has usefully labeled it. Because the governess was deemed inferior to the family she worked for but superior to the family’s domestic servants, her free time was not uncommonly spent on her own—even, more specifically, in a room of her own. And, just as Virginia Woolf would envision in her landmark feminist treatise, the activity that this isolated, educated woman habitually and productively turned to was the activity of writing. Almost all resident governesses relied on letter writing as their primary source of connection to the outside world, but many also expressed their thoughts and opinions in the form of journals, diaries, memoirs, advice manuals, essays, poems, and works of fiction. Bringing together a diverse sampling of fictional and nonfictional accounts of the governess’s relationship to authorship (and paying particular attention to the novels and letters of Charlotte and Anne Brontë, our best-known and most culturally resonant governesses-turned-authoresses), this essay outlines the ways in which the governess, both as an iconic figure and as a real, writing woman, influenced the formal, stylistic, and thematic development of nineteenth-century women’s literature.

scholarly journals Aesthetics of Modernist Literature: a Style Analysis of Three Texts from T. S. Eliot, S. Beckett and V. Woolf´s Writings as Sample

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 38-47
Author(s):  
Nasr-edine OUAHANI
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Samuel Beckett ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Nonlinear Structures ◽  
Style Analysis ◽  
Modernist Literature ◽  
The World ◽  
The Human Condition

This paper explores analytical and stylistic tools in the discourse of modernist literature as epitomized in three canonical works of three influential modernist literary figures: Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot and Samuel Beckett. The paper shows how, upon meditation on the lived reality of Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, modernist literature writers resort to fragmented language, mythical usages, and nonlinear structures to respond to the much ravaging and grotesque events witnessed by the world in general and Europe in particular in this epoch. Reflecting the compartmentalized and Balkanized reality of the world through its dazzling stylistic and figurative innovations, modernist literature sought to shock audiences, to lead bare the inconsistency of the human condition. This goes in parallel with an emerging philosophy that turned conventions upside down in different domains: ethics and morals, religion, history, economy, politics, aesthetics, arts, and language among others.  

Virginia Stephen’s Uneasy Heritage: Lessons, Readers, and Class

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Beth Rigel Daugherty
Keyword(s):  
College Students ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Ethical Thought ◽  
Reading And Writing ◽  
Victorian Era ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
Three Guineas ◽  
Late Nineteenth

In “A Sketch of the Past,” Virginia Woolf says she was “born into a very communicative, literate, letter writing, visiting, articulate, late nineteenth century world” (65). Mark Hussey notes that her parents “knew many of the intellectual luminaries of the late Victorian era well” (ix). Yet Leslie Stephen thought his journalism and dictionary-making put him on the periphery of the “intellectual aristocracy,” preventing him from making a real mark in philosophical or ethical thought. And although Woolf saw her parents as well-to-do (not rich), Stephen was haunted by money worries most of his life. Acutely aware of being an outsider – from her mother’s social ease, her friends’ intellectual agility, and the working classes’ material experiences – Woolf used that outsider status to see and critique class assumptions in herself and others. Yet insider contradictions and compromises abound in her life and work, as many commentators have noted, with sober understanding, spiteful glee, or dismissive shouts. In this paper, I propose to examine Virginia Stephen’s class heritage from the angle Virginia Woolf insists on in Three Guineas, that of the educated man’s daughter. What did Stephen learn from her father about the writer’s “place” in the class system? What did reading and writing do about class barriers? What did Leslie Stephen himself have to say about class in his “Thoughts of an Outsider” columns and elsewhere? How did those lessons affect Virginia Stephen’s experiences with Morley College students? What does Virginia Stephen’s class heritage reveal about class in Virginia Woolf?

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