The Solitude of Virginia Woolf

C. B. COX

Many important critics have argued that Virginia Woolf had not
the right talents for writing novels. Perhaps the most intelligent and
severe criticism is to be found in ‘Notes on the Style of Mrs. Woolf‘
by M. C. Bradbrook in Scrutiny, 1932. Dr. Bradbrook argues that
Virginia Woolf fails as a narrative writer because she cannot present
directly powerful feelings or major situations. She is afraid of com-
mitting herself to any statement of an important experience, and
when these are introduced into her work, she takes refuge in an
embarrassing kind of nervous irony. This is seen particularly in the
repeated asides, stressing time and place, which often make her
major characters seem slightly comic. For example, she writes of
Mrs. Ramsey in To The Lighthouse (1927): “Here, she felt, putting
down the spoon, here was the still place that lies about the heart of
.
things . .” The reference to the spoon enables the reader to remain
detached from Mrs. Ramsey, to feel that he is not required to en-
dorse the importance of her experience in anything more than a
qualified way.
Dr. Bradbrook further argues that there is no plot in the novels
in the normal Aristotelian sense, no beginning, development, crisis
and resolution. There can be no such plot because she has no
definite belief that people are progressing towards either happiness
or misery, for she is uncertain where these are to be found. Because
of this lack of dramatic development, her characters become de-
personalised, like sensations in a void. We do not see them changing
and developing as they come into contact with new experiences.
Instead of precise definition of character, we have only moods and
reverie.
Dr. Bradbrook’s arguments must be accepted, but this does not
mean that Virginia Woolf‘s experiments should be written off as
worthless. Her works are a valuable contribution to English litera-
ture, even though they ‘do not succeed as novels. She herself felt
the need for some new word to describe what she was doing. In
1925, when she was just beginning To The Lighthouse, she wrote in
her diary: “I will invent a new name for my books to supplant
‘novel’. A new -by Virginia Woolf. But what? Elegy?’ When
To The Lighthouse was completed, Leonard Woolf, her husband,
called the book “a psychological poem”. Many notes in her diary
show that the characteristics of her novels summed up by Dr.
Bradbrook were deliberately introduced. In 1923 she wrote: “I
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insubstantise, wilfully to some extent, distrusting reality-its cheap-
ness . . .”; and “Characters are to be merely views; personality
must be avoided at all costs . . .Directly you specify hair, age etc.
something frivolous, or irrelevant gets into the book.” When pre-
paring Mrs. Dalloway (1925), she first worked out what she wanted
said at Clarissa’s party, which ends the book, and then considered:
“Who shall say these things? Peter, Richard and Sally Seton per-
haps . . .”, thus showing that the reflections are more important to
her than the attempt to make her characters speak in an individual
way. And about The Waves (1931), she wrote: “Also I shall do
away with exact place and time . . .”
These comments show why she departed so much from the
traditional form of the novel. “Characters are to be merely views”,
views about the nature of the mind and its contact with reality.
She is famous for her use of the stream of consciousness technique,
but her purpose is not merely to achieve psychological realism, but
to examine certain fundamental questions. What is individuality?
What is the ultimate meaning of human identity? What significance
has the individual life? In The Voyage Out (1915), Rachel Vinrace
feels at one point that life is “only a light passing over the surface
and vanishing, as in time she would vanish . . .” The novel is in part
an exploration of this possibility. Much modern literary criticism,
and this is true of Dr. Bradbrook’s article and of Dr. Leavis’s many
attacks on Virginia Woolf, is positivist in its assumptions, that is,
it considers that great literature must be concerned with life as it
can be seen and analysed in this world, and that the successful
artist uses precise, concrete images and scenes, in which he conveys
his profound understanding of the contemporary scene. This type
of criticism cannot do justice to the work of Virginia Woolf, whose
purpose is to explore whether the positivist position is itself tenable,
whether we can be in any way sure that our analyses of life have any
real correspondence with the truth. It is for this reason that she
deliberately shows herself uncertain of the exact value to be given
to major experiences; her novels have no plot in the conventional
sense because her aim is to make clear her attitudes towards per-
sonality, not to show individuals developing dramatically in contact
with life. Many critics have argued that she turns her eyes away from
pressing social problems of her day, and that she deals with a very
limited area of experience; but, although this is true, she is dealing
with a major philosophical problem, and it is this that makes her art
of more than limited significance.
Positivist critics also fail to do justice to a certain sense of mystery
in her novels. In her diary she wrote of something which she believed
to be a true reality: “a thing I see before me: something abstract;
but residing in the downs or sky; beside which nothing matters; in
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which I shall rest and continue to exist.” She believed that words
can only partly convey this sense that in Nature and the mind there
is “something far more deeply interfused”. These qualities cannot be
precisely defined, but only hinted at. So, when discussing The
Waves she said that her purpose was never to make the images
completely coherent, only to suggest. This use of imagery has been
vigorously condemned by Dr. Leavis and many other modern
critics, but it has its own rules, and has resulted in great literature.
Virginia Woolf‘s first two novels, The Voyage Out and Night and
Day (1919), were written in a conventional manner, with a plot
bringing together two young lovers; but already in these works her
major concerns as an artist can be seen. In The Voyage Out, Rachel
sits in the garden on a hot day, listening to the small noises of
midday and the sound of a clock ticking. She is overcome by “the
unspeakable queerness of the fact that she should be sitting in an
arm-chair, in the morning, in the middle of the world. Who were the
people moving in the house-moving things from one place to
another? . . . She was overcome with awe that things should exist
. .”
a t all. . She forgot that she had any fingers to raise. . This wonder
and doubt about what is going on outside the mind is described
again and again in the novels, until in her last work, it becomes the
medium through which all the events are narrated. Virginia Woolf
often had a peculiar feeling of separateness. Her mind seemed
isolated, never sure of the meaning of the impressions received
through the senses. Her later novels have an unhealthy atmosphere,
for her characters are so absorbed in self-contemplation that all
exterior objects seem to exist only as images in the mind. All we
can know is that the consciousness is like a “pool of uneasy water,
in which clouds for ever turn and shadows form”. In Between The
Acts (1941), the minds of nearly all the characters seem lost in a
dream, from which they hear in the distance the sounds of other
people moving about in the world. When some person’s presence is
forced upon their attention, they feel a shock of surprise, and return
unwillingly to present-time contacts with reality.
This doubt about the meaning of sense impressions brings com-
plete uncertainty about the value of human life. Is the perspective
by which we attribute great importance to our moral decisions the
true one, or are we brushed aside by a fate which cares nothing for
our existence? In To The Lighthouse, Nancy, on the sea-shore, gazes
down at the life in a small pool. She casts “vast clouds over this
tiny world by holding her hand against the sun, and so brought
darkness and desolation, like God himself, to millions of ignorant
and innocent creatures, and then took her hand away suddenly and
let the sun stream down.” This symbol represents one of Virginia
Woolf‘s fundamental ideas, for she felt that we must remain for
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ever uncertain about the proportions in which our activities should
be viewed. What seems of great significance in the present is almost
forgotten in the perspective of time.
Just as the mind is uncertain about the nature of exterior reality,
so her characters find it difficult to make contact with other people.
Many of them are very lonely, and desperately strive to build up
relationships which will satisfy their longing to escape from separate-
ness. In The Years (1937), Sally describes men and women as
prisoners, scratching on the walls of their cells in their attempts to
make contact with other people. In Jacob’s Room (1922), Virginia
Woolf says that: “Talk in a restaurant is dazed sleep-walkers talk”,
and this might be said of many of the conversations in her own
novels. We never see two people arguing lucidly, proceeding step
by step through an argument. Conversation is made up of a series
of fragments, odd phrases, and unfinished sentences, all of which
suggest that we can never communicate completely with another
person. In Between The Acts, the mind of Lily seems in a dream
from which it cannot escape:
How then, she had asked herself, did one know one thing or another
thing about people, sealed as they were? Only like a bee, drawn by
some sweetness or sharpness in the air intangible to touch or taste, one
haunted the dome-shaped hive, ranged the wastes of the air over the
countries of the world alone, and then haunted the hives with their
murmurs and their stirrings; the hives which were people . . .
And these doubts often bring a feeling of emptiness and terror.
In The Years, Eleanor suddenly feels her life has no meaning:
She paused, looking down into the hall. A blankness came over her
Where am I? she asked herself, staring at a heavy frame. What is that?
She seemed to be alone in the midst of nothingness . . .
Eventually into this lonely world of the mind breaks knowledge of
suffering and death. A sense of fear underlies all the novels. Every
character seems like a potential Septimus Smith, in Mrs. Dalloway,
who goes mad after his friend has been killed in the Great War.
Yet Virginia Woolf‘s treatment of life is not wholly pessimistic.
At times her characters feel that some purpose lies behind the
beauty of Nature, and that, if only we could understand, some
pattern of meaning underlies the confused incidents of our individual
lives. Mrs. Ramsay feels this in To The Lighthouse:
It was odd, she thought, how if one was alone, one leant to things,
inanimate things; trees, streams, flowers; felt they expressed one; felt
they became one; felt they knew one, in a sense were one . . .
But, as usual, this description offers no definite answer to the mind’s
longing to understand. Virginia Woolf‘s purpose is to describe a
form of awareness, not to draw dogmatic conclusions. Thus Mrs.
Ramsay’s sense of unity with Nature is “an irrational tenderness”,
which exists but whose meaning is obscure.
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 Just as the mind can have these moments of communion with
Nature, so occasionally its feeling of separateness can be overcome
through personal relationships. Sensitive women such as Helen
Ambrose in The Voyage Out and Mrs. Ramsay use all their tact and
intuition to create harmony among their friends. Like E. M. Forster,
Virginia Woolf was fascinated by those rare moments when two
people suddenly experience a feeling of mutual sympathy and
understanding. To the Lighthouse is her most successful book perhaps
because for a time separateness is overcome, and harmony created
between people. The lighthouse symbolises the essential isolation
and independence of the individual, but the beams of the lighthouse
crossing the dark waters at night represent the love of Mrs. Ramsay
which unites all her friends and gives meaning to their lives. In the
first part of the novel, she gathers together the group around her
dinner-table, heals their tensions, and makes them for a moment feel
a joyful sense of union. At this time she feels:
there is a coherence in things; a stability; something, she meant, is
immune from change, and shines out (she glanced at the window with
its ripple of reflected lights) in the face of the flowing, the fleeting,
the spectral, like a ruby; so that again tonight she had the feeling she
had had once today already, of peace, of rest. Of such moments, she
thought, the thing is made that remains for ever after. This would remain.
Because Mrs. Ramsay is so successful in the difficult art of personal
relationships, she still influences the other characters after she is
dead. She has created something of beauty which time cannot destroy.
Virginia Woolf's most complicated examination of human charac-
ter is seen in The Waves. She describes the development of six
characters, who reflect various rhythms of life, the imaginative
impulse, the desire to impose order upon material things, delight
in personal relationships, pleasure of the body, joy in motherhood,
and the life of solitude. With a background of choral passages, in
which the waves represent the indifference of Nature, she tries to
represent all the rhythms which influence the development of the
individual mind, and, in a sense, the six characters are one. Rhoda,
who cannot escape from solitude, is of particular interest because
many of the images which describe her are taken from jottings
about herself in Virginia Woolf's diary. Rhoda experiences moments
of terror when she feels that the world outside her mind is a complete
illusion, and this type of apprehension is the medium through which
the whole of Between The Acts is narrated.
One of the repeated images in The Waves shows Virginia Woolf's
attitude at this time towards human identity. Bernard, the imagina-
tive story-teller, reflects:
Time, which is a sunny pasture covered with a dancing light, time,
which is widespread as a field at midday, becomes pendant. Time tapers
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 to a point. As a drop falls from a glass heavy with some sediment,
time falls, These are the true cycles, these are the true events. . . .
Life is seen as a continual progression towards moments of creativity,
the rounded drop of water, but, as time moves on, the moment
loses its roundness, tapers to a point, and drops, ready for the process
to begin again. Bernard feels: “I formed; a drop fell; I feel-that is,
from some completed experience I had emerged. . .” A movement
towards order and certainty followed by inevitable dissolution
seemed to Virginia Woolf typical of the flow of the mind.
Her novels are thus an exploration of uncertainty. Her career was
a long, exhaustive examination of the resources of her own mind,
eventually ending in despair and suicide. Her sense of beauty and her
mysticism place her with the Romantics, but her apprehensions
never went beyond the tentative. Wordsworth suggested that the
child is father to the man, and that his days might be bound each
to each by “natural piety”. Virginia Woolf could discover no such
link between past and future; for her “all bonds of union were
broken”, and she could but express the confusion in which she lived.
What can be said finally of her achievement? Certain adverse
criticisms must be made. There are moments when she is sentimental.
This is due largely to her technique of giving fragments of conversa-
tion together with isolated pictures. In present-time experience,
every fragment, a man walking through a door-way, a child playing
with its toys, is experienced as part of a whole. Every incident of the
day is seen in perspective, in relation to the routine of a home or an
office. Only in memory do these isolated pictures come to us without
the routine of which they are a part; and as we remember how
twenty years ago the light shone out on the lawn, we feel a nostalgia
and melancholy for the past. So often in Virginia Woolf‘s works the
mind looks at facts through this isolating quality of the memory,
and the continual retrospection gives a false, strained emphasis
to the value of the moment. In Mrs. Dalloway, for example, the
characters escape from their problems by reminiscing about the past.
Virginia Woolf is portraying not actual, present-time experience,
but the false valuations of the memory, and often the difference is
not made clear.
But this is true rather of Jacob’s Room, Mrs. Dalloway and The
Years than of To The Lighthouse and The Waves. To The Lighthouse
shows Mrs. Ramsay creating beauty in the present; The Waves is
concerned to describe present-day rhythms in the mind. In these
novels, we see expressed with beauty and power Virginia Woolf‘s
forlorn desire to link her mind to the outside world and to other
people, and her fear that every moment of union must end in chaos,
that, as at the end of the pageant in Between The Acts, life is orts,
scraps, fragments, nothing more.
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