Sunday, December 24, 2023

The Waves: Chapter Three -- Catherine

While I was in Durham early in the week for a medical appointment, I visited my current favorite nearby bookstore, Regulator Books, where I bought, among other things, Elena Ferrante’s new collection of essays, In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing. I love Ferrante, so I almost immediately read the first essay (originally a lecture), “Pain and Pen,” where she writes about writing, and thinks about her own situation through some other writers’ work, including some quotations from Woolf. She describes her difficulty as a woman writer writing within the male tradition, and how that complicates her sense of herself writing:

I began to think explicitly of having two kinds of writing: ones that had been mine since my school years, and which had always assured me praise from the teachers (Brava, you’ll be a writer someday); and another that peeped out by surprise and then vanished, leaving me unhappy. Over the years that unhappiness took different forms, but in essence it’s still there. (28-29)

She plays around with that division and the way it extends into her being:

For much of my life I’ve written careful pages in the hope that they would be preliminary pages, and that the irrepressible burst [of the real writing] would arrive, when the I writing from its fragment of the body abruptly seizes all the possible I’s, the entire head, the entire body, and, so empowered, begins to run, drawing into the net the world it needs. (29)

There is this division between her body and her writing, and that division is what keeps her from breaking out of that male tradition and into something that feels more real, authentic, female.

            She turns to two passages from Woolf (A Writer’s Diary, but with no dates or page numbers, and I don’t have the volume, only the sequence of Diaries volumes), and I think it will get clearer why I’m writing about Ferrante in my Waves response. First, a shred of conversation with Lytton Strachey:

“And your novel?”
“Oh, I put in my hand and rummage in the bran pie.”

“That’s what’s so wonderful. And it’s all different.”
“Yes, I’m 20 people.”

Ferrante reads the bran pie image as a suggestion that “the act of writing is a pure tempting of fate,” and then seizes on this rejection of the singular writing I: “what writing captures doesn’t pass through the sieve of a singular I, solidly planted in everyday life, but is twenty people, that is a number thrown out there to say: when I write, not even I know who I am” (30-31).

            From there Ferrante gets to the second passage from Woolf’s diary:

It’s a mistake to think that literature can be produced from the raw. One must get out of life—yes, that’s why I disliked so much the irruption of Sydney—one must become externalized; very, very concentrated, all at one point, not having to draw upon the scattered parts of one’s character, living in the brain. Sydney comes and I’m Virginia; when I write I’m merely a sensibility. Sometimes I like being Virginia, but only when I’m scattered and various and gregarious. Now . . . I’d like to be only a sensibility. (qtd. 31)

Ferrante comments: “Woolf’s idea seems clear: writing is camping out in her own brain, without getting lost in the very numerous, varied, inferior modalities with which every day, as Virginia, she lives a raw life” (31).

            All that was in my memory when I started chapter 3, and encountered Bernard’s early remark, “Every hour something new is unburied in the great bran pie” (56). That weird image of a food I still need to Google, immediately resonated back to Ferrante’s essay, and it got me thinking about the writing self—something very much on Bernard’s mind too. He says:

 “I am not one and simple, but complex and many.” (56)

“They [other people] do not understand that I have to effect different transitions; have to cover the entrances and exits of several different men who alternately act their parts as Bernard.” (56)

“But you understand, you my self, who always comes at a call (that would be a harrowing experience to call and for no one to come; that would make the midnight hollow, and explains the expression of old men in clubs—they have given up calling for a self who does not come), you understand that I am only superficially represented, by what I was saying to-night.” (57)

“Very few of you who are now discussing me have the double capacity to feel, to reason.” (57)

Re the letter he is writing: “I must give her the impression that though he—for this is not myself—is writing in such an off-hand, such a slap-dash way, there is some subtle suggestion of intimacy and respect.” (58)

“But now let me ask myself the final question, as I sit over this grey fire, with its naked promontories of black coal, which of these people am I?” (60)

“Again, from some slight twitch I guess your feeling; I have escaped you; I have gone buzzing like a swarm of bees, endlessly vagrant, with none of your power of fixing remorselessly upon a single object. But I will return.” (64)

And some of Bernard’s search to find what I suppose people today might call “his own voice” is by reading Byron and then hoping his own writing will achieve the cadence, the rhythm, of Byron’s. There is that tradition that brings Ferrante dis-ease.

            It unsettles Neville, too. He says of/to Bernard: “You have been reading Byron. You have been marking the passages that seem to approve of your own character” (64). And then he says of himself, by contrast: “I am one person—myself. I do not impersonate Catullus, whom I adore” (65). Is this a difference between the lyric sensibility and that of a novelist? That in writing lyric one must (according to Neville) remain very much oneself (one self), although writing a novel cannot allow that?

            Aside: I paused at the white space between the section of the boys and the section of the girls, and took a nap, because my morning walk had tired me out. And I dreamed of these swirling voices and sensibilities. I’m going to stop here, because this is already so long.


The Waves: Chapter 3 -- Elisa

 

 

INTERLUDE

Despite its dark notes and elements of what Shilo calls “de-composition,” this is one of my favorite interludes.  I love the cinematic quality of movement: swooping in from the horizon over the ribs of the boat and the sea holly, across the waves, once more bringing in the girl, who is now wide awake, to the edge of the shoreline where the black tide-line of detritus now sharply defines the border between sea and land.  Then the movement (I can’t help but imagine swooping up the hill to Talland House) into the garden, now also marked with traces of delimiting black -- the predatory black cat, the cinders on the ash heap.  Then the zoom to micro-focus on the garden as seen from the ground as in Kew Gardens, including the snail who looms like a great cathedral and the vision of life among the flower stalks, arched over by the colors of flowers. (Have you read the paper I wrote abt snails in Woolf in 2013? I thanked you in the first footnote for suggesting the Marianne Moore ref that provides its title. It’s available on my academic.edu site.)  There is an even deeper descent, into the ground, a realm of decomposing horror inhabited by worms (what Philip K. Dick calls “the tomb world”).   Then the camera pulls out again to a wider focus, moving to the house, which, like the ocean edge, also seems to mark a boundary.  While light goes inside, we seem to be outside the windows, part of a curious doubling of reflections.  I also read the last paragraph as a first acknowledgement of the colonial implications scattered throughout the novel.  But it is also another intimation of danger, an awareness of death: the South Africans with their spears held high approaching upon the feckless white sheep, foreshadowing the final spear raised against death at the end of the novel.

 

EPISODE

Bernard’s soliloquy at the beginning of the chapter just seems to go on and on, and every time he gets the floor he holds forth for longer than others speak. But listening to this episode over and over, I began to notice that Bernard was in fact making up stories about himself, just as he says he does about people he sees (like Woolf in “An Unwritten Novel” and “Mr. Bennett to and Mrs Brown”).  He is “creating a face to greet the faces that he meets,” trying on different identities with a hilariously adolescent eye as to the their a/effect:  “I am sooo, complicated; my future biographer will of course recognize my complexity.  I am disparate, I am integrated; unlike the rest of you simple jerks, I can think and feel at the same time, dashing yet reflective (shades of Eliot again--thinking and feeling--a unified sensibility).  I do tend to think more about writing than actually write, and when I do write it only superficially represents the glorious complexity of my brilliantly spontaneous mind.”  I can barely read it now without snorting with amusement.  Of course he thinks-- more like wishes-- he is like Byron!

 

----------------------

Neville’s monologue reminds me of the emotional wave structure of the entire book: a leaf fall from joy! (58). That falling leaf is one of the markers of suspension/ interruption in Woolf.  Then the boats full of sculptural indolent unconscious young men (shades of Tonio Kroeger who loved and longed for those that didn’t fall down in the dance.  Which reminds me that I want to look into Woolf’s knowledge of Mann. Reading Hare with Amber Eyes, I heard that Thomas Mann wrote an essay “Thought upon War” and immediately thought of “Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid”). But I digress….  a horticultural note: the “fountains of the pendent streams…fine strokes of yellow and plum color” describes a mix of bright yellow laburnum (like yellow wisteria) and lilac which blooms at the same time (see herbarium https://woolfherbarium.blogspot.com/p/blog-page_86.html ). This color combo repeats on p.108 in the fifth Interlude, introducing Percival’s death.

 

Anyway, to get back to Neville’s rhythm: first is the joy, then the observation of the beloved, then the rising rhythm of words; then the frenzy collapses into insincerity and doubt; and finally is resolved by the approach of a friend. I see this pattern throughout the book; it is its emotional spine. p. 63:  Ah, another echo of Tonio Kroeger...”  I would rather be loved, I would rather be famous that follow perfection through the sand,” says Neville. 

A favorite quotation from Tonio Kroeger[1] (one of my high holy books in college; I have this passage more or less memorized):

“He knew from experience that this was love. And he was accurately aware that love would surely bring him much pain, affliction, and sadness, that it would certainly destroy his peace, filling his heart to overflowing with melodies that would be no good to him because he would never have the time or tranquility to give them permanent form.  Yet he received this love with joy, surrendered himself to it, and cherished it with all the strength of his being; for he knew that love made one vital and rich, and he longed to be vital and rich, far more than he did to work tranquilly on anything to give it permanent form.”

(I could have been a German double major, except for the Conversation course; I am so fluent in English that speaking German is a constant frustration to me--except when I am in Germany and slightly drunk). 

 

I love the meditation on friendship on pg 63: how our friends contract us into a single identity, how our connection to them is spun out over space (and I think of Alma and Suzann: over time). And at the same time, the limited self that we are to one friend after another opens up a whole variety of selves to be. 

 

I am very aware of the structure of this Episode; it really does feel like a series of soliloquies, each character defining their identity, often against the identities of the others.  The wave rises and then receeds.  Jenny unfurls, is rooted but flows (73), but then she loses consciousness of her body, but then regains it as someone approaches.

 

Except for Rhoda.  The tiger springs in the new year.  Us he devours.”—another TSE ref?  She is not whole, she is broken into separate pieces (“These fragments have I shored against my ruin”).  Like Neville, she has a vision of noble statues of the heroically unified people she cannot be. She is “at the hot gates” “on the verge of the fire.”    Wow.. this entire chapter seems under-woven with Eliot for me.

 

  

 



[1] Tonio K was written in 1901 and published in 1903; translation pub. in US in 1929).  WSU library has a review copy of Buddenbrooks. Also a copy of Death in Venice, but not of TK.  On Oct 30, 1938, VW mentions TM in the context of youth reading 3G’s. Someone gives her a copy of TM because he too explains “what we are doing”. I suspect this was a copy of The Coming Victory of Democracy (1938), a copy of which is at WSU.

 

The Waves: Chapter Two (Catherine)

I’ll start by responding to yours from last week:

 

I thought about that early memory from SOTP too, and the way that an awareness of the outside air coming inside resonates with the movement of the waves.

 

Thank you for the photo of Portminster Beach! I wondered last week as I listened to the SC waves what image of a beach and of waves might be in Woolf’s head, and I figured it would be St. Ives, but I’ve never been. And for the Sea Holly too—a flower I did not know.

 

And your evocation of a phenomenological approach seems just right. I’ve been thinking for a variety of reasons, largely coming out of the Salon and readings for that and in preparation for the conference that I would like to read more of the theory underpinning that approach, so that my understanding might be deeper.

 

I have a number of your materials from your blog flagged for reference and consideration as I go. Thank you for those!

 

I see that VW divides The Waves into nine chapters, which makes sense with what I have read connecting the book with maternity. I’m paying attention to how this means that the “day” presented by the interludes is also divided into 9 parts, not a framework through which I am used to seeing a day.

 

The thing intriguing me the most from chapter 2 is Neville’s thinking about Bernard turning their moments into stories. “Let him describe what we have all seen so that it becomes a sequence” (27). Yes, this is literally true, and indicative of the larger role that Bernard plays, and his complete dominance (I gather) of the last chapter. But here what strikes me is how this comment accentuates the present-ness of all the narration (?) thus far, how each character is so much in the moment that the “narrative” is more like a stringing together of moments in the consciousnesses of different characters present, witnessing, sensing (this chapter is still very sensory in its emphasis). A sense of time passing through a day, then a year, and then through school career comes through these moments strung together, and always with different characters looking back at one another. And of course through the characters’ reactions to Percival, what they adore and despise about him, how they understand him. And amidst all of this is Bernard trying to make sense of moments, feelings, experiences by finding just the right words, and then, presumably, listing them in his notebooks. “That will be useful” (26).

 

And of course Neville’s not wanting Bernard to use his feelings to ‘make a “story”’—not wanting to be material for the writer and so lose control over his own moments and emotions and situation.

 

In this chapter even more than in chapter 1 is the combination and contrast of characters’ inner worlds and how they are perceived by others—and in the case of the girls, how they think of others perceiving them.


The Waves: Chapter 2 (Elisa Sparks)

 

 

The Interlude (listening)

 

The spike of sea holly is very particular to me-- it’s a kind of thistle, often a mysterious blue or purple with an undertone of metallic shine so it looks like it is mailed or in some kind of armor.  While it does grow on beaches (there is some on Alki) it is unlikely to be growing below the tideline-- so I tend to read it semi-allegoically as an emblem of growing independence while still at risk of being washed away.

 

For the first time I heard the colors: first blue and green (waves) then red (clefts in the rocks).  This repeats a very common primary color triad in Woolf; well, she often repeats red, blue, and yellow, but red blue and green is the painter’s version. [1]  Then a bit later the birds have breasts of canary and rose (my paper on color in Woolf and O’Keeffe was titled “it was Yellow and Pink” -- as that color combo was particularly evident in post-impressionist painting.)

 

Speaking of color… then there is the movement INTO the house, and then INTO the lump of emerald green glass.  This lump appears several times in Woolf, so often that I suspect it of sitting on the mantelpiece at Monk’s House. Aside from the deep dive into color, what struck me anew here was the phrase “pure green like a stoneless fruit”. Aside from giving me a very vivid image of a kind of depthless paperweight, the idea of a “stoneless fruit” seemed so resonant with the stage the children were moving into: beginning to ripen, but not yet fully coalesced into a solid core of being.

 

Another thing that struck me -- faintly, like the memory of bells, was the re-evocation of geometrical shapes from the first Interlude, but here set into a kind of dichotomy: the fan shape and the pools of light, the stripes of shadow and the mosaic of sparks. (Someone has written a paper on Woolf and particle wave/theory..  I think it may be Gillian Beer.  Let me look. Nope. I’ll keep thinking)

 

Of course I also responded to the appearance of the flowers, which open from buds, have green veins, quiver, and have clappers inside their white walls.  I must admit I am stumped as to what these might be. (Canterbury bells, foxgloves, hyacinth, and white tulips don’t open at the arrival of the sun; the clematis and passionflower which grew up the sides of Talland house were purple, and also didn’t open or have clappers) Tempted to see them as not real flowers but another abstract allegory of the characters’ developmental stage: buds opening into flower, still white/ unstained, their voices dim, contained inside protective walls…. 

 

The Episode

 

Once again we begin with Bernard.  Is this always true? Must check…(all episodes begin wi B, except 5(P’s death) wh begins wi N,  and 6 wh starts wi L)… interesting that the narrative is always begun by male characters.

 

-------------------

As I lay in bed, listening to Chapter two, temporarily resigned from the army of the upright, I was drifting in and out of consciousness.  Nevertheless, I was stuck by how I didn’t really need my highlighting aids to tell who was talking.  Of course she makes that clear every time she switches speakers, but in my light-headed roving, I often didn’t notice until some phrase or attitude or preoccupation made me grasp on to a certainty: that must be Bernard because it is about words and writing, and language; that must be Neville because he is talking about the Classics; that must be Louis because he is talking about roots; here is Susan, spiteful and strong willed, immersed in the country; Jinny always whirling and flaming; and Rhoda without a face but wrapt in fantasies of queens.  I began to see this Chapter as being about identity-- each character rising on their own firm stalk, except for Rhoda who cannot find her face. 

 

This growing into selfhood also is accompanied by a recognition of the others. In Chapter One they seem aware of each other’s actions, but in Chapter Two they make comments about each other’s identities and emotions. Bernard comments on Neville and Louis’s admiration for the “horrid little boys who are so beautiful” (34). Rhoda like Susan better than Jinny because she is “more resolute and [is] less ambitious of distinction than Jinny” (29).

 

Looking at my plot summary for Chapter Two, I am also struck by how carefully this Episode is structured: Boys leave for school on train, girls at school; boys at chapel and cricket, girls getting ready for tennis; boys cricket and masculinity, girls longing for vacation and future as women; boys getting ready for vacation, girls on train; boys on train.  Very neat and symmetrical and circular.

 

Reponding to yr response:

Nine chapters= nine months!!! What a gift.  I had NEVER made that connection.  Thank you.

Yes, I too was very aware of Bernard making sequences/ stories as his way of controlling reality.  In that way he strikes me as very like Woolf.  I love what Neville says about him rolling his bread into pellets as a child.. Reminds me of cotton wool.  But. Enough.

 

 

 

 



[1] (I wrote a paper, never published, for a conference in 2005 on the early use of color in VW and O’Keeffe.  Here’s a relevant excerpt   and a link to the whole thing.

https://www.academia.edu/519216/It_Was_Yellow_and_Pink_The_Transition_to_Post_Impressionist_Color_in_the_Early_Work_of_Woolf_and_OKeeffe_2005_ ) 

 

The short stories Woolf wrote between 1917 and 1922 show similar patterns of experimentation.  It is not just that she is using color much more frequently than in Night and Day, she is also using much more abstract, non-mimetic color; her color combinations are now clearly informed by theoretical discussions of color theory, and she is beginning to use color as a kind of formal element, playing with the rhythm and frequencies as if she is composing a form of color-music. The most obvious example of Woolf's new interest in abstract color is her new near-obsession with the primary triad of red, yellow, and blue.  In the eleven short pieces that make up Monday or Tuesday the combination appears no less than eight times. Its six manifestations in "Kew Gardens" establish the triad's significance as a metaphor for the prismatic multiplicity of light, as the red, yellow, and blue colors of the petals are picked up and refracted onto the back of the snail, into a drop of water, and finally suffused throughout the atmosphere (CSF  90, 91, 95).  Woolf obviously liked this effect, using it again in "The Evening Party," to describe the "yellow and red panes" of light the ocean liners cast upon the blue ocean (CSF 96) and also in "An Unwritten Novel," where the roofs of Eastborne are "striped red and yellow, with blue-black slating" (CSF 114).

 

The Waves: Chapter 1 (Catherine Paul)

 

I’ve since read the intro to my edition (by Kate Flint) and the chapter in The Interrupted Moment (which you recommended—thank you!), but when I read the first chapter of The Waves, I tried to let the prose flow over me and not freak out about what I don’t understand.

 

I love the way that in the first part of chapter the voices of the different characters became  a kind of chorus, or like a variety of birdcalls, where I don’t recognize the voices of individual species but they all come together to make a beautiful environment. As the chapter goes on and I start to get small senses of who the characters are and what drives them, I enjoy going back to those initial short statements, to see what they tell me that I missed on the first, more flowy read. I like the way those initial voices move from something like pure observation to sentences that create something more like narration, little stories about the islands of light or grey-shelled snails. Then a movement to something more like individual consciousnesses, with feelings and lacks, and narration of what various characters are doing.

 

I love that the action happens in the present tense, so that it all becomes part of a scene rather than real time passing. I love the imperatives—“Put your foot on this brick. Look over the wall” and “Run!”

 

I love the way that even as their consciousnesses start to cement, so that Neville is the sickly one and Bernard creates imagined worlds and Susan is agonized by Louis and Jinny kissing, they can also blend together into one being. Louis: “When we are sad and trembling with apprehension it is sweet to sing together, leaning slightly, I towards Susan, Susan towards Bernard, clasping hands, afraid of much, I of my accent, Rhoda of figures; yet resolute to conquer” (18).

 

To come back to the italicized opening (what are these called?): I love the way Woolf describes the gradually more visible waves, and what it is to start to see that water before the sun is up. The gradually, gradually, gradually of the second paragraph. An image that stands out: “Gradually the figres of the burning bonfire were fused into one haze, one incandescence which lifted the weight of the woollen grey sky on top of it and turned it to a million atoms of soft blue” (3). I suppose that woollen grey resonates with the cotton wool of everyday life.

 

I love the way “The birds sang their blank melody outside” transitions into the initial statements of the main chapter.

 

And of course there are pauses: “As they neared the shore each bar rose, heaped itself, broke and swept a thing veil of white water across the sand. The wave paused, and then drew out again, sighing like a sleeper whose breath comes and goes unconsciously” (3). This resonates with Edmund de Waal’s description of a pause as “a turn of the breath.” The next pause appearance here is more a part of the narrative: “One bird chirped high up; there was a pause; another chirped lower down” (3). Or is this pause like that of the wave, a caesura (again, de Waal’s word) between chirps?

 

I think it helped me to start this book looking out over the ocean, to remind myself of how waves move—and something that I think you see and hear on your regular walks. This novelpoem is making me think a lot about time, patience, unfolding.

Saturday, December 23, 2023

OR: Spatial Thinking about Orlando and Mimesis

 

Spatial Thinking about  Orlando and Mimesis

 

As I re-read (re-heard) Orlando this time, I found myself focusing on how much the novel is a meditation/ reverie on identity—how identity is made through imagination, by language, by social and historical constructs.  The malleability of the body seems like a metaphor for the transformative process of identity formation, both affected if not determined by the expectations of the Spirit of the Age.  As I read McDowell in particular, I began to understand something crucial about how nature works into this convergence, Nature, like the self, seems like a given, a ground, but like the self it is in continuous process of being created/ re-created, largely through the uses of imagination, especially through language and literature.   That is why Nick Greene’s name is what it is: “Green in nature is one thing, green[e] in literature another” (14). Woolf’s assertion that “Nature and letters seem to have a natural antipathy; bring them together and they tear each other to pieces.  The shade of green Orlando now saw spoiled his rhyme and split his meter” (14) goes against conventional mimetic theory where Greene mirrors green.  Instead green interrupts Greene’s autonomy.   For Woolf, literature is not a mirror that reflects nature but its own system of meaning, which is distracted by attempts at mimetic fidelity.  As the interlocutor of the metaphorphosizing institution of Brit Lit, (he moves from being a poet to being a critic and an academic) Greene changes with the ages much as the weather and flora do.

 

This cracking of the mirror phase in the relation between nature and literature is connected to the way that gender and sexuality are treated in the novel, for here too the expected correspondence doesn’t hold: Orlando’s sex is only sometimes reflected in her gender.  We are used to the idea that gender is socially constructed and its manifestations and fashions change with the culture and the age; it is much more radical to assert that sex also responds to cultural imperatives.  The idea that sex changes is akin to the idea that nature changes; both evolve in mysterious synchronicity with the Zietgeist.  The fact that nature is so often symbolically gendered female only adds to this correspondence.

 

In recognizing this plasticity, Woolf anticipates some crucial aspects of Foucault— particularly the idea that the body and sexuality are also socially constructed.

 NOTES ON CRITICS

MCDOWELL

4 “soci-spatial practices…define spaces”  -- Is this true of Knole; it seems to be the one place that               stays always the same.  London continually evolves

7          “Gender may be seen from two perspectives: ‘either as symbolic construction or as a social relationship”  -- to what degree is this true of Orlando?  It seems to work with Orlando and Ma.. 

10        “protest against the available fiction of female becoming”

12        separate spheres—to what degree do we see this in O?  clear that gender controls what spaces O can be in.

17        is O ever subject to the domestic gender regime?

18        people take pleasure in their subject position… true of O in 19th C

22        Gender is constructed and maintained through  discourse and everyday actions.  

23        gender already dichotomized… (O’s dilemma, the two options don’t encompass her)  challenge hegemonic norms by subversive performances.  Exactly O

34  Bodies much more fluid and flexible..

38        transformation of intimacy

41        hexis—inscription of social world on the body

45        land as female

46        idea of one-sex (inverted)

49        natural body doen’t exit.

51        both men and women subject disciplinary regimes.

54        gender performance

55        confusion of categories

 

FOUCAULT on Heterotopias

Obsessive dread of 19thcà history ; out cent is age of simulataneous juxtaposition.  Net that creates its own muddle.  Take what has been sequenced chronologically and link them spatially

 353      is oak tree and hill Orlando’s sacred space of crisis?  Is time with gypises?   Heterotopia of the cemeteryà is Knole a heterotopia?

354      heterotopia has power of juxtaposing in a single real place diff spaces and locations that are incompatible—certainly true of Knole, especially at the end of the book.  The way that the House is creatd as a timeless place that opens out also into the space of the city makes the House a metaphor or Orlando herself who similarly occupies many times and spaces.  Garden is oldest example.  GARDEN ALSO HOLDS NAVEL OF THE WORLD—AS O TRIES TO FIND true, capitain self (227).  Garden metaphor linked to carpet (threads of association)

 Heterochronism. 

355      temporary celebratory heterotopias. Fairs, empty zones (The Great Frost)

Beginning to see whole book as set of vacillations from the heterotopia which is home. Knole, the great house to other heterotopias:  Home :: Great frost  :: home :: Constantinople :::Gipsies ::ship voyage  :::Home :: London ::Home :: London ::Home

 

HANKINS

182      O is a lesbian feminist novel, in which Woolf attempts to seduce/teach Vita the importance of feminism. 

183      spotlight various strategies for avoiding censor

184      heterosexual love continually interrupted throughout the book

186      husbands as censors (letter inside a letter)

191      narrator ostensibly male but also female in drag – CUSTOMS HOUSE

197      V as a coded signal btw V & V wild goose: lesbian elopement proposal

Student Insights

SHARON

Mirror breaking in Oà QE (p. 20)  Is it a symbol of her broken heart?   I can’t help but also read this as having to do with mimeticism—with a certain loss of epistemological virginity,  a rejection of the simple idea that art imitates reality.  When art is used as a mirror, it reveals betrayal: the promiscuity of a universe that reveals lovers other than oneself.

Heterotopias of time that accumulate=Orlando (see p. 225, stacked plates)

 

KRISTIE

Love letter— really? She is pretty critical abt Vita, lampooning her frequently

Transformation from male to female (see Hankins for discussion of how this dichotomy is fragmented by book)

Men are presence and women are insignificanceà this is true in London where there is a very clear distinction btw how males and female inhabit space, emphasized by female O’s cross-dressing escapade.  But at Knole she seems to be able to be the self which is both.

Does Woolf shows us the sameness of men and women?

 

MICHAEL

“our bodies are places that can be written on” – and can be created by writing

Foucaultà fluid process of becoming

Bourdieu à memory, social distinctions embedded in unconscious practices

Butlerà gender performance  (“heterosexual reflex”)

Dibattista à gynomorphosis: transformation of male bodies into their different female equivalents

Tension btw unfixed nature of gender and identity and pressure to conform to gender norms

 

 

 

OR: Gliederung/ Plot Outline

 

Orlando--My Outline

Annotated Hacourt edition

 

Chapter One [Elizabethan Frost]

11        Starts out wi Orlando in attic

15        Then he goes outside and lies under the oak all day

17        Has to run back and get dressed quickly to meet the Queen

19        Catches the eye of the queen and goes to court; becomes her favorite

21        Fools around with various women at court and also common women

25        Engaged to Euphrosyne

26        The Great Frost; King James holds court on the ice at Greenwich

28        Falls in love with Sasha;

36        they skate away to Russian ship; he finds her unfaithful

37        Return to London;

42        sees  Othello being performed

45        Plans to elope; Sasha never shows. 

46        Frost begins to break; river thaws. 

48        Russian ship gone.

 

Cha     Chapter Two [Orlando’s withdrawal]

 49        biographer duty; exiled from court—goes back to home

50        falls into trance

53        strange delight in death

54        reading Sir Thomas Browne

57        O a secret writer

58        memory stitches associations together

62        invites Nick Greene

68        Nick Greene tires of the country

71        O now sees literature and fame a farce;  burns all 57 works

72        TimePasses  (O turns 30)

76        choses obscurity over fame

79        becomes obsessed wi buying furniture for house

83        Lady Harriet shows up

87        O leaves to become ambassador to Constantinople

 

 

Chapter Three [Constantinople and Gypsies]

88        Lack of proper documentation for O’s diplomatic years

89        love of country

91        ritual ceremonies

92        O’s charisma

93        DUKEDOM and grand party with fireworks

97        riot

98        rumor of woman coming to his rooms TRANCE;  deed of marriage to Rosina Pepita

99        seventh day of trance: three sisters: Purity

100      Chastity, Modesty

102      transformation… He was a woman

104      goes to the gipsies

106      English disease—love of nature

107      starts to write again

109      gipsies see ancestral accumulation of land as shameful

111      vision of park at home

 

Chapter Four [Return to England; new sex. 18th Century]

114      problems with female clothing

117      vascillation btw sexes;  goes ashore in Italy wi Cpt

119      priase God I am a woman, but still loves women

121      cliffs of England; adieu to ladies of Spain

122      St. Paul’s—great dome: London streets

124      law suits

125      back to country house

130      mind  now able to hold an argument; begins writing “Oak Tree” again

132      Archduchess Harriet becomes Archduke Harry

134      courtship=watching flies set on sugar

135      cheats; drops toad down his back—laughs at him

137      goes to London in search of life and a lover;  dressed as a man

138      clothes transform us – she becomes a woman

142      age of Queen Anne—emptiness of society

146      salons—emptiness of talk (party consciousness)

148      meets Pope

153      substitute words for account of man

156      18th C misogyny

158      dresses as a man; goes to Leister Sq.

160      Nell and other prostitutes

164      storm clouds of the 19thC begin to gather

 

Chapter Five [19th Century]

167      changes to climate of England: damp. Chill

168      extreme fertility of 19thC

173      re-reads MS—thinks how little she and house have changed; but blots her work

175      cannot write; sudden urge for marriage

177      people all stuck together in pairs

178      O does not fit Spirit of the Age

180      need to lean upon someone

182      goes out in nature—lies in the grass

183      Marmaduke Bontrhop Shelmerdine appears on a horse

184      rook’s wing, silver pools;  both are both sexes

187      results of law suits…

189      O goes off in woods for solitude; Bonthrop: snail shells  (B=solitary)

191      Shelley—west wind

 

Chapter Six  [Modern Times]

194      goes inside

195      returns to writing (quote from Vita) spring

196      can now write because in tune wi spirit of age

197      long period of thinking leaves biographer little to write abt

200      finishes poem; take it to London b/c it wants to be read

202      experience of crowded monotony of London

203      runs into Nick Greene

205      NG now thinks eliz Age great; we are in degenerate times

208      bookstore and critics

211      toy boat on Serpinteine reminds her of Shel: ecstacy!

215      Kew will do

216      Hail Happiness, nature ( she is pregnant) (kingfisher)

217      Edwardian Age:  20thC –change in weather

219      present moment

222      shopping, whiff of Sasha

223      many different times in every human system

225      drive to country—unification of self

229      haunted by Sksp.. wild goose

232      exploring house (no longer hers—tourists)

237      through garden, into park: Oak tree

238      crooning song of wood, fritillaries

240      calls for husband—he arrives in aeroplane

241      the wild goose