Virginia Woolf’s The Waves and hero-worship: Identity, masculinity and education

This article argues that Woolf’s depiction of masculinity in the school scenes of The Waves is informed by her critical relationship to educational discourses surrounding public-school hero-worship that encourages an abandonment of individual identity in favour of a form of masculinity sanctioned by the public-school system. It considers criticisms of the public school’s hierarchical, moralistic pedagogy on behalf of both Woolf’s family, including her father, Leslie Stephen and uncle, Fitzjames Stephen; and members of her Bloomsbury circle, notably Lytton Strachey and Bertrand Russell, to illuminate a reading of Dr Crane and Percival. It argues that the novel’s formal innovation is integral to its political critique, pointing to previously unconsidered literary allusions to Tom Brown’s School Days in Woolf’s portrayal of Dr Crane to suggest Woolf’s ironic relationship to the educational ethos of the public school. It further notes that Woolf’s narrative devices render Percival, the novel’s public-school hero, an ambivalent figure that exposes the gulf between heroic identity and true individuality.

Cambridge

Woolf went to Trinity College, Cambridge, to read Classics. There probably the more important part of his education was the close friendships he formed with Lytton Strachey and Clive Bell as well as John Maynard Keynes from King’s College, Cambridge. Leonard, Strachey, and Keynes were all members of the Apostles, a small select secret discussion group, very much under the influence of the philosopher G. E. Moore. This shaped his ideas about politics, art, and the importance of friendship. At Trinity he also became a good friend of Thoby Stephen, brother of Virginia and Vanessa Stephen. Through these friendships the Bloomsbury Group would come into existence some years later. He also began to write, but in the first instance largely poetry.

History Free Indirect: Reading Creative Techniques in Lytton Strachey's Queen Victoria

Situating itself in line with Max Saunders' thesis in Self Impression (2010), this paper is a literary-critical reconnaissance of the creative techniques Lytton Strachey employs in Queen Victoria (1921). My essay attempts to elicit the ways in which Strachey executes his modernist argument, intended to debunk Victorian perspectives, via a canny mix of traditional and modernist techniques of narration, usually associated with fiction. Showing how – in the way of an impressionist historian – he both inhabits the frame of his narrative as well as directs its very framing, I discuss his use of free indirect style and cognate methods of characterisation. I also discuss his novelistic ‘rhythm’, as he negotiates between personal and particular histories and wider more universal history; his psychological and psychoanalytic resources for biographical insight; and formal features of his narrative that make use of choric and stage-like structuring, as well as meta-historical tropes of fate and destiny. Literary critical methods deployed by Strachey, precociously, in the arsenal of his method, at a time before such literary critical methods had been overtly established are also discussed in brief as signifying features of his innovation. This paper hopes to offer a concrete interpretation of Strachey's well-known candidacy as the father, or one of them, of the ‘new biography’. Being a concrete analysis of only one of Strachey's works, less examined than others, the paper claims only to put traditional notions of the new biography and of modernism under the lens of this one particular but signal work.

Forster, E.M. (1879–1970)

One of the leading British novelists of the early decades of the twentieth century, Edward Morgan Forster is best known for his novels Howards End (1910) and A Passage to India (1924). Forster attended Cambridge University from 1897 to 1901, where he became a member of the Cambridge Apostles secret society, which included philosophers Bertrand Russell, G.E. Moore, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Membership in this society brought him into contact with several members of the Bloomsbury Group, including economist James Maynard Keynes, Virginia Woolf’s husband Leonard Woolf, and biographer Lytton Strachey. His work is best remembered for its use of realism to denounce the repressiveness of Edwardian British culture and it is often infused with liberal humanism. Additionally, his use of third-person omniscient narrative and abundant dialogue gave Forster a unique narrative style that influenced a number of later authors. Throughout his career Forster associated with a host of writers and artists including Siegfried Sassoon, Rupert Brooke, and Christopher Isherwood. Forster was highly influenced by his travels throughout the European continent and India. His works often illustrate this interest by focusing on settings outside of England. All of the novels published in Forster’s lifetime were published before 1925, after which Forster spent his life working on nonfiction, including biographies, travel narratives, and essays.

Bloomsbury

Bloomsbury is an area of Central London located in the Borough of Camden between Euston Road and Holborn. The neighborhood is home to the British Museum and the University of London as well as a number of Georgian residential buildings arranged around manicured squares and gardens. In the context of modernist literature, art, and culture, Bloomsbury is associated with a loosely defined social circle known as "the Bloomsbury Group," "the Bloomsbury Set," or simply "Bloomsbury," a gathering of writers, artists, and intellectuals who lived and worked in the area in the early part of the twentieth century. There is some critical disagreement about exactly who belonged to the group, but some of its key figures included Leonard and Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, E. M. Forster, Roger Fry, Vanessa Bell, Lytton Strachey, and Duncan Grant. Members of the group contributed to various aspects of modernist thought and culture including feminism, analytic philosophy, psychoanalysis, macroeconomics, progressive domestic arrangements, left-oriented politics, Post-Impressionist art, and literary experimentation.

Huxley, Aldous (1894–1963)

Aldous Huxley is an English writer who is best known for his dystopian novel Brave New World (1932) and his disquisition on psychedelic substances, The Doors of Perception (1954). In the inter-war years, Huxley commanded a formidable reputation, and his work was considered alongside the leading modernists. He was impressively prolific and wrote in a variety of genres, producing poetry, short stories, essays, novels, plays, biography, and travel writing. His work appeared in many of the modernist Little Magazines, such as Coterie, The Egoist and Wheels. Huxley was a zealous individualist: while he socialized with Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry, and Clive Bell (among others), he was never part of the Bloomsbury Group; likewise, though a regular guest at Garsington Manor, the home of society hostess Lady Ottoline Morrell, he was not regarded as a member of her pacifist coterie that included Lytton Strachey and Bertrand Russell. After moving to America, Huxley became increasingly concerned with mysticism, and his reputation declined; however, the work he produced during this period was championed by key figures in the New Age and counter-culture movements, and he played a vital part in popularizing Eastern religions in the West, such as Buddhism, Tantra, and Advaita Vedanta.

Strachey, (Giles) Lytton (1880–1932)

Lytton Strachey was an important twentieth-century biographer and literary critic, best known for his role as a founding member of the highly influential Bloomsbury Group. The group comprised key intellectual and creative figures whose controversial, avant-garde work contributed to the modernization of twentieth-century artistic doctrines. His best-known work, Eminent Victorians, published in 1918, helped reinvent life writing as a high literary art. His satirical representations of celebrated Victorians helped to destabilize nineteenth-century values and exposed the hypocrisy of Victorian morality. He identified as a homosexual, openly discussing his beliefs and values with his close circle of friends. This information was not made public until after his death, caused by undiagnosed stomach cancer, at the age of 51. Although overshadowed by his Bloomsbury contemporaries such as Virginia Woolf, he remains a popular and important figure.