All Boundaries Are Lost: Travel, Fragmentation and Interconnection in Virginia Woolf

Woolf’s childhood was characterised by contrasts between urban and rural, movement and belonging, past and future, domesticity and the outdoor landscape. These influences are evident in her work’s balance between nostalgic reflection and an acceptance of the inexorable transience of human existence and sensation. Woolf is interested in the ways in which new developments in travel and technology can defamiliarise us, and reveal interconnections with other beings. Her attentiveness to the sedimentary layering of the past within rural landscapes is applied to her reimagining of the urban environment; Woolf inverts urban-rural associations, and portrays the metropolitan world as a site within which both fragmentation and interconnection are made explicit. That sense of interconnection also extends to nonhuman animals in Between the Acts (1941). Ultimately, this portrayal of a world in which all experience and activity is part of a ‘work of art’ underlies the theme of unity in Woolf’s final novel; but that theme nonetheless remains balanced by the novel’s exploration of dispersal and fragmentation.

Introduction

Section One (Regions, Revenants, Reimaginings) contextualises the book’s approach by locating it within recent critical discourse, and emphasising commonalities between Lawrence, Powys, Butts and Woolf – particularly in terms of their powerful attachments to place and strong sense of the past. It notes that the book’s approach to these writers is underpinned, in part, by a sense that canonical understandings of ‘modernism’ can and should be expanded by their work. The common influence of Thomas Hardy (both in terms of style and themes) is also discussed. Section Two (Cosmopolitan and Technological Perspectives) stresses the impact that certain characteristics of the era have upon the four authors’ work, including the growth of urban cosmopolitanism, aerial photography and railway travel. Again, this section also provides critical context, discussing recent examinations of modernism and cosmopolitanism. Section Three provides a chapter overview.

The Pen of a Traveller, the Ink-Blood of Home: John Cowper Powys’ Imaginative Realism

John Cowper Powys’ relationship with the landscapes of Dorset and Somerset is explored in the ‘Wessex novels’. Wolf Solent (1929), A Glastonbury Romance (1933), Weymouth Sands (1934) were written in the United States, and this chapter examines the specific influence of a peripatetic, cosmopolitan existence upon the development of Powys’ literary style. Despite his opposition to increasing urbanisation and mechanisation, Powys’ novels tend to ironise such concerns, recognising the potential epistemological benefits of modernity. He resists essentialist notions of identity and rootedness; despite an intensely nostalgic affection for Dorset and Somerset in his work, there is an ever-present recognition that our sense of place is always a dreamlike, imaginative creation rather than an authentic mode of belonging. Consequently Powys emphasises the values of movement, marginality, liminality and comedy: his novels are not tragic narratives of human struggles to belong, but jumbled, bathetic, and ‘atmospheric’ worlds that deliberately lack a strong sense of linear direction. They engage with perspectival developments of modernity, and thus represent a distinctively rural form of modernism. Ultimately, this represents a specific type of engagement with place that stems, in part, from Powys’ unique sense of nostalgia, contrast and distance (geographical, temporal and cultural).

Expanding Modernist Communities

The conclusion revisits the threads of this book’s argument, emphasising both the commonalities and differences between the four authors in question. It contextualises these authors within ongoing debates regarding the legacies of modernism, and argues that they call for the central role of place and nonhuman life in what we understand as the ‘community’ of the period. They also draw our attention to the desirability of an expanded understanding of what modernism entails, incorporating broader ideas of innovation and experimentation, and challenging the idea of modernism as a purely metropolitan movement. Finally, the conclusion draws some links between the four authors under consideration and more recent writings by authors such as Iain Sinclair and W.G. Sebald, as well as movements such as psychogeography.

Strange Old Feelings Wake in the Soul: Ambivalent Landscapes in D.H. Lawrence

This chapter argues that D.H. Lawrence’s relationship with place and nonhuman life is profoundly influenced by underlying tensions and contradictions in his worldview, in terms of his relationships with family, religion, gender and class. It begins by tracing such tensions in The White Peacock (1911), before examining the development of a multiple perspective, dialogue-heavy approach in Sons and Lovers (1913). In his later work, as his focus shifts to nonhuman life, other tensions emerge, between two related pairings: unity versus fragmentation, and the individual versus the communal. The strain of misanthropy that runs through Lawrence’s writing lends itself to the development of these themes. In some ways, texts like Women in Love (1920) reveal a desire to reject the possibilities of a cosmopolitan, multi-voiced openness and liminality that much of Lawrence’s work otherwise suggests. His distinctive socio-cultural position means that his work initiates and explores many of the central themes and issues raised by the relationships between English modernity, modernism and place; but its multiple contradictions and dualisms are never satisfactorily resolved or overcome.

In Two Worlds at Once: Animism, Borders and Liminality in Mary Butts

Mary Butts’ examination of place derives its central vitality from a grounding in the landscapes of Dorset. Her attempts to re-enchant this world by drawing upon myth and mysticism often become ideologically problematic; her project is fundamentally ambivalent, combining a deep sense of attachment to her home region with a similarly strong desire to reinvent that area. Such reimaginings take complex forms: sometimes expressing a deracinated sensibility that reclaims rural England as a cosmopolitan zone in which marginalised socio-cultural groups can thrive; and emphasising the landscape’s animistic qualities. In such respects, the influence of modernity upon Butts’ distinctive vision of place is clear. In her later work, however, rather than blurring or transgressing boundaries, Butts draws upon her sense of living ‘in two worlds at once’ to create imaginary cultural, temporal and geographical realms that are beyond the influences and developments of her period, accessible only to initiates.