All posts tagged patriarchy

Virginia Woolf and windows

My only contribution to Virginia Woolf scholarship would be to point out how regularly her characters stare out of windows, day-dreaming or observing people in the street, avoiding dialogue and interaction with other people in the room, retreating into their own little worlds.

It’s Woolf’s characters’ characteristic pose and suggests an author who spent her whole life looking at the world at one remove, through glass, separated and disconnected. Down there in the street, everyone else is busy, hurrying hither and thither, but Woolf and her characters are the disengaged ones, the still observers. Behind them in the room everyone is talking and chattering but she and her characters are the silent ones, staring out the window at some bigger, looming but never expressed reality.

Upstairs in the bedroom at the top of the house Kitty’s maid Baxter was looking out of the window, watching the guests drive off…

If I try to categorise them there are maybe seven types of this out-the-window looking, specific types of window looking, which can also be grouped under the meanings or interpretations which can be attributed to them.

Note: All the quotations are from The Years which is where I really noticed this mannerism.

avoidance – avoiding engagement with other people in the room, especially when it all gets too much, which it often does for Woolf’s women
dissociation – a metaphor for the character’s distance from life, the teeming world of people going about their business
observing – the utterly passive state of being a mirror, a camera
prison house – women in particular looking wistfully out the windows of the big, heavy, confining home where the patriarchy has imprisoned them, yearning for escape
to end a conversation
out the windows of moving cars and taxis
and trains

1. Avoidance

He [North] had only been back [from Africa] ten days, and his mind was a jumble of odds and ends. It seemed to him that he had never stopped talking: shaking hands; saying How-d’you-do? People sprang up everywhere; his father; his sister; old men got up from armchairs and said, You don’t remember me? Children he had left in the nursery were grown-up men at college; girls with pigtails were now married women. He was still confused by it all; they talked so fast; they must think him very slow, he thought. He had to withdraw into the window and say, ‘What, what, what do they mean by it?’

They stood at the window waiting for the cab. They stood there side by side, silent, looking out, because there was a pause to fill up, and the view from the window, which was so high over the roofs, over the squares and angles of back gardens to the blue line of hills in the distance served, like another voice speaking, to fill up the pause.

Peggy, bored at Delia’s party, has only one outlet, one recourse:

She was feeling reckless; nothing that she did mattered. She walked to the window and twitched the curtain apart. There were the stars pricked in little holes in the blue-black sky

2. Dissociation

Colonel Pargiter shut his mouth on the thing he might have said, and turned back again to the window overlooking Piccadilly. Everybody in the crowded street, it seemed, had some end in view. Everybody was hurrying along to keep some appointment. Even the ladies in their victorias and broughams were trotting down Piccadilly on some errand or other. People were coming back to London; they were settling in for the season. But for him there would be no season; for him there was nothing to do. His wife was dying..

3. Passive observation

She stood at the window looking up the street. There had been a shower of rain. The street was wet; the roofs were shining…

She turned to the window again. The street was empty, only the branches were tossing up and down in the lamplight…

She looked out of the window again. The rain was falling. When it crossed the lamplight it glanced in long strips of silver light…

Then she strolled over to the window that looked out onto the street. The houses opposite all had the same little front gardens; the same steps; the same pillars; the same bow windows…

For the moment the two girls stood at the window looking into the street…

She lay for a moment looking out of the window…

And there they are, still asleep, in their houses, she thought, standing at the window, looking at the green-grey grass, after their dances, after their parties… The thought pleased her.

4. Looking out from the prison house of home

Moments when Eleanor looks out of the windows at the big world outside which she is fated never to join so long as she has to look after first her mother, then her father i.e. is trapped in a family home which is more like a prison.

She should have finished her chapter for Lucy; but not tonight. She was too tired tonight. She turned to the window…

5. Ending conversations

There’s a fifth type which is going to the window to deliberately end a conversation. This is what Martin does to Crosby in the 1913 chapter.

Martin shook his head. He could not think what to say next. He hated talking to servants; it always made him feel insincere. Either one simpers, or one’s hearty, he was thinking. In either case it’s a lie… And then it was possible for Martin to take out his watch, step briskly to the window and exclaim as if he had suddenly remembered an appointment, ‘By Jove, Crosby, I must be off!’ and the door shut upon Crosby.

6. Out the windows of cars and taxis

Looking out the windows of coaches or cars, of moving vehicles, at the city passing by:

She [Eleanor] looked out of the window [of the chauffeur-driven car]. They were being held up by traffic at the Marble Arch…

7. Trains

And talking about the windows of moving transport, the classic attitude of looking out the window of a train. I think it’s in The Waves that various characters take long train journeys and the narrative describes the particular type of window-gazing you get on trains –watching landscapes, townscapes, telegraph cables dipping and rising between poles, that kind of thing.

For example in 1914 when Kitty, Lady Lasswade, takes a sleeper train the length of England to her family castle in the North, staring out the window most of the way.

Summary

So there are half a dozen or so definable types of window gazing but, generally, it’s a stock action Woolf has her characters resort to when she can’t think what else to do with them. If in doubt what to do next, have your character walk over to the window and soulfully observe random details of London life, the random often disconnected details which flood her stories.

Once you notice it, you realise the window motif is everywhere in her works. It is an important element in lending her stories that vague, undefined but powerful sense of fugitive meanings just escaping your grasp. Maybe if you stare out the window long enough, enlightenment will come…

Edward, leaning out of the window, could still see the trees in the college garden, whitened by the falling rain… Of all the moments in the day he liked this best, when he stood and looked out into the garden.

He stood by the window again. It was raining, but the whiteness had gone.

‘Lord! What a row there’ll be tomorrow,’ said Edward, going to the window and looking out at the rain that was still falling.

He crossed to the window. Red squares showed through the trees.

Maggie stood upright in the window. She watched the couples coming down the iron staircase…

Eleanor stood looking out of the window. The trees in the back garden were heavily lined with snow…

She turned round and stood at the window…

Virginia Woolf in soulful mood.

Related reviews

Virginia Woolf reviews

1 Comment

by Simon on May 2, 2025 • Permalink

Posted in English literature, Literary criticism

Posted by Simon on May 2, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/05/02/virginia-woolf-and-windows/

Selected Essays by Virginia Woolf – 3. Women and Fiction

The novel is the least concentrated form of art. (p.134)

Virginia Woolf’s writings about women, women and writing, women and fiction, are deeply felt and often inspiring, even if you’re not a woman or a writer of fiction. The one caveat is that, after you’ve read a certain number of her essays on the same subject, you find the same examples, anecdotes and arguments recurring. Bit samey. But then this is true of many other essayists. And if they’re good arguments and examples, why not?

Women and fiction

David Bradshaw’s selection of essays by Virginia Woolf for the Oxford World Classics is divided into four thematic areas.

Reading and Writing
Life-Writing
Women and Fiction
Looking On

This blog post summarises and comments on five of the six essays in the third section, ‘Women and Fiction’. The exception is ‘Memories of a Working Women’s Guild’ (1931), which I summarise in a separate post.

The Feminine Note in Fiction (1905) [book review]
Women Novelists (1918) [book review]
Women and Fiction (1929)
Professions for Women (1931) [a talk]
Memories of a Working Women’s Guild (1931) [introduction to a collection of letters]
Why? (1934) [article for a student magazine]

Obviously there is a strong feminist tone to Woolf’s essays about women and women writers and women and fiction but in my opinion none of the six are as powerful as Woolf’s book-length essay Three Guineas. Guineas is so seismic because it brings together such a wealth of scandalous evidence demonstrating the deep-rooted sexism and misogyny operating at every level of British society, not only in the dark Victorian days, but right up to its date of publication in the late 1930s. Reading it permanently changed my view of the plight of so many women in the Victorian century and on into Woolf’s time.

1. The Feminine Note in Fiction (1905: 2 pages)

W. L. (William Leonard) Courtney (1850 to 1928) was a philosopher, journalist and sometime fellow of New College, Oxford. He wrote a book called ‘The Feminine Note in Fiction’. You can read it online. This is very short review of the book which Woolf published the Guardian, 25 January 1905 i.e. right at the very start of her career, when she was just turning 23.

On page one of his book Courtney says there is a feminine note in fiction and studies eight women writers of the day to show it, but Woolf quickly points out that he doesn’t, in fact, succeed. (The women writers in question are Mrs Humphrey Ward, Gertrude Atherton, Mrs Woods, Mrs Voynich, Miss Robins, Miss Mary Wilson, along with the diaries of six other women from history.) And anyway:

Is it not too soon after all to criticise the ‘feminine note’ in anything? And will not the adequate critic of women be a woman?

She summarises some of Courtney’s propositions, that women:

are seldom artists, because they have a passion for detail which conflicts with the proper artistic proportion of their work – disproved by Sappho and Jane Austen
excel in ‘close analytic miniature work
are more happy when they reproduce than when they create
‘s genius is for psychological analysis

Woolf says this is all very nice but there have been too few successful women novelists to tell; we’ll need to come back in 100 years to see if any of it is true.

Courtney is surprised to find the women novelists in his study to be so varied, which is laughable.

He makes the characteristically stupid intellectual argument that his age is one of special and particular decline, the same thing idiot writers have claimed in every year of recorded history. Thus he says that more and more novels are written by women for women and that, as a result, the novel as a work of art is disappearing. What an arse, one of the legion of clever misogynist idiots Woolf cites to such powerful effect in Three Guineas.

To all of which Woolf (still a very young woman) sensibly replies:

The first part of his statement may well be true; it means that women having found their voices have something to say which is naturally of supreme interest and meaning to women, but the value of which we cannot yet determine.

The assertion that the woman novelist is extinguishing the novel as a work of art seems to us, however, more doubtful.

It is, at any rate, possible that the widening of her intelligence by means of education and study of the Greek and Latin classics may give her that sterner view of literature which will make an artist of her, so that, having blurted out her message somewhat formlessly, she will in due time fashion it into permanent artistic shape.

So this short review is really notable for this last bit, for her already feeling the need for art and artistry and ‘permanent artistic shape’ in the novel, things she was, of course, to go on and try to give it.

2. Women Novelists (1918: 3 pages)

Reginald Brimley Johnson (1867 to 1932) was a literary critic, editor, author and publisher. In 1918 he published a book titled ‘The Women Novelists’. This is Woolf’s review of it, published in the Times Literary Supplement.

She praises it. She says Johnson has read more novels by women than anyone had heard of. Also he doesn’t make sweeping generalisations, but is very cautious in his conclusions. She calls Fanny Burney the mother of English fiction. She laments the way the burden of proof remained with women authors to justify herself, and the practical difficulties they laboured under: Jane Austen slipping her papers under a book whenever anyone came into the drawing room; Charlotte Bronte leaving off work to pare the potatoes.

When she notes the criticisms of immorality George Eliot laboured under and how they continue to constrict women writers in the preset (1918) you realise it wasn’t that long since Eliot died. George Eliot died in 1880, just two years before Woolf was born. This essay is from over a hundred years ago. Many women, like Woolf, were alive who had been born in the reign of Victoria and still remembered the terrible stifled life women led.

She makes the point that Charlotte Bronte and George Eliot didn’t just adopt men’s names so as to get published; but also to free their own minds from the matrix of restrictions placed not just on women’s social, legal and financial freedom, but on their imaginative freedom.

She repeats a point made in A Room of Ones Own and Three Guineas which is that, above and beyond the suppression of women, it’s making women authors self conscious of themselves as women which so often undermines their efforts to produce art. The truly independent artist is sexless; the issue of their sex doesn’t enter into it. They just create art.

She agrees with Johnson that all women’s writing must be marked as feminine but wonders what ‘feminine’ actually means. She thinks Johnson is wise in not reaching a conclusion about this but accepting that women writers radically differ. She quotes several of Johnson’s generalisations which all feel like sexist rubbish:

Women are born preachers and always work to an ideal.
Women is the moral realist, and her realism is not inspired by any ideal of art, but of sympathy with life.
George Eliot’s outlook remains thoroughly emotional and feminine.
Women are humorous and satirical rather than imaginative.
Women have a great sense of emotional purity than men but a less alert sense of honour.

This is why I think no-one should every generalise about the sexes: it’s impossible not to sound like an idiot.

She thinks you can immediately tell the difference between a male and a female author and, after all, this might have been true in the 1920s. She thinks as soon as they start to describe a character you can instantly tell whether it’s a male or female author.

The motive of criticising men may have motivated many women writers to take up authorship.

There are sides of each sex which are only really seen and know by the opposite sex.

3. Women and Fiction (1929: 8 pages)

Why did women suddenly start writing fiction in the mid-18th century? Why did they start producing classic after classic of English literature?

A difficulty answering this is that history is about men so that ‘very little is known about women’.

But we do know that it requires special circumstances to be able to write, time, freedom from practical worries, a space or room of one’s own, and all these for most of human history most women have lacked or, to be clearer, have been deprived of.

And then motherhood: of the four great nineteenth century women writers – Jane Austen, Emily Bronte, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot – none had children and two were unmarried.

Why did they all write fiction, not epic poems or plays? Easy: ‘The novel is the least concentrated form of art’ (p.134). Readers are free to pick up and put down novels in a way you can’t do to poems or plays and the same is true of their authors, and she repeats the anecdote of Austen slipping her writings under a book or blotting pad when anyone came into the room or Charlotte Bronte breaking off writing to peel the potatoes.

Banned from undertaking any profession or work, middle class women were trapped in the home where they had precious little to do except observe the minutiae of each other’s behaviour. In other words, women were trained to become novelists.

She compares the maturity of George Eliot, disapproved of by society and locking herself away in St John’s Wood, with the wild life of Leo Tolstoy, soldier, playboy, traveller, thoroughly prepared by his society to be a novelist of astonishing breadth. (The Austen, Bronte and Eliot points are all made in A Room of One’s Own; they were obviously stock examples for Woolf.)

Being women writers led, in Woolf’s view, to impurity. What she means is that reading good women’s novels you’re always aware of an element of special pleasing; they protest against restrictions and lobby for the independence of their sex. However politically valid, this compromises their artistry, the work’s integrity. It needed a very strong mind to resist ‘the temptations to anger’ at women’s wholesale oppression, a feat only achieved by Jane Austen, whose work is pure and unsullied by resentment and grievance.

And so Woolf thinks the great change that has come over women’s writing in her days is the women are no longer angry and indignant. But many challenges remain.

One is the structure of language itself, which is male, made by men for men. The male sentence is ‘too lose, too heavy, too pompous’ for a woman’s use.

Then, men and women have different values, so that the very subject of the book, all its related smaller topics, descriptions and so on, are liable to clash with the values promoted by a male society. So that male critics are likely to find what women writers write about ‘weak or trivial or sentimental’ (p.136).

Nineteenth century women’s writing was likely to be skewed and impurified by special pleading for their sex and, in the same way, tended to by autobiographical, driven by the author’s need to share her suffering. Now, Woolf reckons, having passed through this phase, women are writing more about other women.

And in so doing she discovers that so much of women’s lives has been ephemeral, the meals cooked, the clothes washed, the children raised. Looking back there are no records or monuments. Thus women’s experience is like a dark continent, unexplored.

At the same time as this is being begun, legal impediments to women in the professions were being lifted and so current women novelists have this whole new subject to record: women coming in out of the shadows and entering the male world.

Thus she sums up contemporary women’s writing as brave, sincere. It is not bitter as the writing of the nineteenth century could be, and does not insist upon its femininity.

Again the essay ends with a description of her own practice. She says now women have won the vote and are allowed to enter the professions and earn a living, some women writers will become more socially conscious and critical and political. But there will be an equal and opposite reaction by which other women writers will reject the outside world altogether and cultivate their poetic facility. Be butterflies rather than gadflies.

Then she lets herself down a bit, and indicates the weakness of her position by saying this poetic turn will lead them to ‘examine the wider questions which the poet tries to solve – of our destiny and the meaning of life’ (p.138).

It’s odd that she’s so progressive in her analysis of the sociological situation of women and yet, when questioned on her artistic goals, steps right back into the nineteenth century, venerating a notion of The Poetic, The True and The Beautiful which hasn’t changed since the death of Keats in 1821.

She ends by saying more and more women have the leisure time and little money to write and out of this will hopefully come, fiction writing that is more poetic, but also women having the time to train for slightly more demanding genres such as essays, criticism, history and biography.

4. Professions for Women (1931: 5 pages)

In 1931 Woolf was invited to address the London branch of the National Society for Women’s Service. This is her talk.

She was invited to talk about her experiences in her profession. But her profession is an odd one, literature. So many women have been successful writers because there is such a low bar to entry: all you need to make a start is a pen and some paper.

She spends a couple of pages describing how the one thing she’s really proud of is killing the Angel of The House. This was the name of a hugely popular poem by the Victorian poet Coventry Patmore which, as the name suggests, depicted the stereotypical Victorian wife: selfless, kind, self-denying, retiring, modest, meek and pure. Woolf’s point is that when she began reviewing books she heard the voice of the Angel whispering over her shoulder, telling her to be modest, to respect the male author, not to say anything unbecoming an angel.

And so, in order to become herself, to become intellectually and imaginatively independent, she had to murder the Angel inside her.

Next she describes the demanding state a novelist has to cultivate:

I hope I am not giving away professional secrets if I say that a novelist’s chief desire is to be as unconscious as possible. She has to induce in himself a state of perpetual lethargy. She wants life to proceed with the utmost quiet and regularity. She wants to see the same faces, to read the same books, to do the same things day after day, month after month, while she is writing, so that nothing may break the illusion in which she is living–so that nothing may disturb or disquiet the mysterious nosings about, feelings round, darts, dashes and sudden discoveries of that very shy and illusive spirit, the imagination. (p.143)

The second big challenge she faced was writing truthfully about women’s physical experiences, ‘the truth about my own experiences as a body’, and she stumbled here. The problem is the severity of men’s criticism of such honesty. With the result that whenever she goes near the subject she can feel her censor kicking in. She still hasn’t solved the problem of honestly describing women’s physical experiences.

And she brings the talk back to her audience of young professional women by saying the obstacles she faced, which she’s just described, were psychological, the internalisation of society’s male values which she had to combat in her head. How much must her audience of young women, the first generation moving into the male-dominated professions, also be confronting their inner obstacles. That is why it is so important for them to share their stories and experiences.

6. Why? (1934)

In 1934 women undergraduates at Somerville College, Oxford, one of the two relatively new women-only colleges, launched a new magazine titled Lysistrata. (The name refers to the play of the same name by the ancient Greek playwright Aristophanes in which the women of the Greek city states, sick of the endless Peloponnesian War, go on a sex strike i.e. deny their men sex till they agree to make peace. Which makes me think of the contemporary 4B movement, originating in Korea which has spread to the US.)

Anyway, the editor of Lysistrata asked her to contribute a piece and here it is. What is it going to be about? Well here Woolf indulges one of those flights of fancy which you either find charming and beautiful, or irritating and obtuse, depending on taste.

The whole little essay turns out to be premised on the idea that, like most people these days (1934), Woolf is constantly assailed by questions, but couldn’t find any place to ask them until she received this invitation from Lysistrata for an article. At which point, she says, a fleet of questions thronged her head all clamouring for expression. From this throng she chose one relevant to the start of a new term at a university, namely: why lecture and why be lectured?

Unlike the other essays, it almost feels as if she’s being paid by the word in this one. It feels like she’s writing any old rubbish to fill the space (2,000 words). Anyway, she spends the middle of this little text sharing a memory of attending a lecture on the French Revolution in some non-descript public building. The account is chiefly notable for the way she describes being bored and wandering off, losing the thread of the lecture and becoming distracted by details, the look of the room, the appearance of other students and then a fly buzzing around. (As she so often does; exactly as she describes losing interest in the speeches of the women at the English Women’s Co-operative Guild in the preceding essay.)

And this is exactly the kind of easily distracted, wandering attention she attributes to the female protagonists of Mrs Dalloway, To The Lighthouse (Mrs Ramsay) and The Years (Eleanor Pargiter) and Between the Acts (Lucy Swithin). It seems fairly obvious – from the way it occurs in all those characters and that you meet it in so many of the essays – that she was describing herself in those characters.

And her description of it made me think of the over-diagnosed modern condition, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). The central attribute of this is ‘having a short attention span and being easily distracted’. QED.

Anyway, back in the argument about lectures, Woolf’s description of how bored she becomes in lectures turns into a plea that universities should drop lecturing altogether. She tells us that at the start of every term writers like her, and experts in every field, are bombarded with requests to come a deliver a lecture to this or that college. But she hates it. Doing so sets you up as an expert, a personage on a stage, and lures you into writing a long discourse with all the formal trimmings, guaranteeing it will be staggeringly dull.

So: why not abandon lectures. Why not invite speakers down from the stage and onto the floor among the audience and talk like ordinary men and women?

Good. Sorted. But she has more space to fill so she reverts to contrived metaphor that she is assailed by flocks of questions and has to choose just a few of them to include in this lecture, and chooses another one. This one is: Why learn English literature at universities when you can read it for yourself in books?

Instead of answering this in a logical way, Woolf takes a characteristically oblique and anecdotal approach by recalling a visit to a friend who is a publishers’ reader and who assailed her with a diatribe against students learning English. Does anyone write better for it, no. In fact, in her friend’s opinion, the big increase in teaching of English literature and writing books about English literature means all the manuscripts she’s sent end up sounding the same. In the long term it will end up by killing English literature off altogether.

Did that happen? No. More books, more novels and all other types of creating writing are published now, in 2025, than 90 years ago, despite the explosion in the teaching and studying of English literature, let alone the explosion of creative writing classes over the last half century. So it’s a snapshot of a grumpy woman from 90 years ago, grumpy and opinionated as any red-faced colonel at the bar of his club blustering about “young people these days”. Sort of interesting as social history; worthless as contribution to any debate.

This was by far the worst of the essays in this section because Woolf phoned it in. She was just going through the motions. It feels like she just cobbled together some fatuous ‘questions’ and made no serious effort to answer them. The conceit of being bombarded by questions and having to select a few is sort of interesting and maybe had the potential to be genuinely interesting, but felt squandered.

This little squib was only written for a student magazine but still, it feels weak.

Credit

‘Selected Essays of Virginia Woolf’ was published by Oxford World Classics in 2008. Most though not all of the essays can be found online. David Bradshaw’s introduction can be read on Amazon.

Related reviews

Virginia Woolf reviews

Leave a comment

by Simon on April 23, 2025 • Permalink

Posted in Essays, Feminism, Literature

Tagged 4B movement, ADHD, Aristophanes, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, British society, Charlotte Brontë, Coventry Patmore, David Bradshaw, Emily Brontë, English literature, Essays, Fanny Burney, Feminism, George Eliot, Gertrude Atherton, Jane Austen, Leo Tolstoy, literary criticism, literary history, Lysistrata, Memories of a Working Women's Guild, misogyny, Miss Mary Wilson, Miss Robins, Mrs Humphrey Ward, Mrs Voynich, Mrs Woods, National Society for Women's Service, Oxford, Oxford World Classics, patriarchy, Peloponnesian War, Professions for Women, Reginald Brimley Johnson, Sappho, Selected Essays of Virginia Woolf, sexism, Somerville College, the Angel of The House, The Feminine Note in Fiction, the novel, The Women Novelists, Three Guineas, Times Literary Supplement, Virginia Woolf, Why?, WL Courtney, women, Women and Fiction, women and writing, Women Novelists

Posted by Simon on April 23, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/04/23/selected-essays-virginia-woolf-3-women-and-fiction/

The Years by Virginia Woolf (1937)

‘What could be more ordinary?’ she said. ‘A large family, living in a large house…’
(Rose Pargiter, thinking back on her childhood, page 161)

He looked clean, he looked starched and ironed like his robes. But what did he mean by what he was saying? She gave it up. Either one understood or one did not understand, she thought. Her mind wandered.
(Typical behaviour from one of Woolf’s female protagonists [in this case, Delia], detached from male discourse and dreamily drifting into her own world)

Her mind was a perfect blank for a moment. Where am I? she wondered. What am I doing? Where am I going? Her eyes fixed themselves on the dressing-table; vaguely she remembered some other room, and some other time when she was a girl…
(Kitty Malone expressing the dissociation and bewilderment typical of so many Woolf women)

The Years is Woolf’s longest novel. The strange thing is how this big and traditional novel punctuated her run of much shorter, much more experimental works, coming after the run of Jacob’s Room (1922), Mrs Dalloway (1925), To The Lighthouse (1927) and before her last, normal-length work, Between The Acts (1941).

It’s a sad and mournful book, lyrical and nostalgic. I like the suggestion by Nuala Casey (see below) that it’s a sort of ghost story, the ghosts being Woolf’s own family who the Pargiter family are clearly based on.

‘The Years’ and ‘Three Guineas’

‘The Years’ had a long, complicated and painful gestation. It was intimately tied up with the long feminist essays which became Three Guineas. According to Wikipedia:

Although Three Guineas is a work of non-fiction, it was initially conceived as a ‘novel–essay’ which would tie up the loose ends left in her earlier work, A Room of One’s Own (1929). The book was to alternate between fictive narrative chapters and non-fiction essay chapters, demonstrating Woolf’s views on war and women in both types of writing at once. This unfinished manuscript was published in 1977 as The Pargiters. When Woolf realised the idea of a ‘novel–essay’ wasn’t working, she separated the two parts. The non-fiction portion became Three Guineas. The fiction portion became Woolf’s most popular novel during her lifetime, The Years, which charts social change from 1880 to the time of publication through the lives of the Pargiter family. It was so popular, in fact, that pocket-sized editions of the novel were published for soldiers as leisure reading during World War Two.

The soldiers’ version

Regarding its popularity and the publication of a pocket edition for soldiers, as I read through The Years I came to understand why. It is gentle and beautiful, sad and nostalgic. Each of the book’s 11 sections opens with a description of the English countryside or the busy London streets, in winter and in summer, in rain and shine, and these slowly build up into a composite portrait of the country those soldiers were fighting for.

And you can put The Years down and pick it up at any point, on any page, without worrying about forgetting the plot, because there is no plot. The characters waft around London in the same lyrical, detached, dreamlike state for hundreds of pages.

Similarly, although we know Woolf was incensed by the oppression of women by the patriarchy of her day, and although her fury is hinted at at various points in the narrative, ironically it is the very exclusion of women from education, the professions and public life, from activities of most kinds, which permits the novel’s lazy, hazy, dreamy tone.

The person who emerges as the central protagonist, Eleanor Pargiter, is the one who suffers most from patriarchal exclusion, finding herself obliged to stay at home to look after her widowed father, never benefiting from a proper school let alone university education, excluded from all the professions and any kind of paid employment. No wonder she grows up into the detached, dreamy, forgetful woman she’s depicted as – what alternative was there for women of her era and class?

There is also a pleasing irony that the great pamphlet The Years grew out of, Three Guineas, is furiously against war and against the entire patriarchal, masculinist system of hierarchy, competition and militarism which encourages it, and yet the fiction which evolved alongside it was mass published to help and succour… soldiers, becoming, in its particular way, part of the vast machinery of war which Woolf claimed to hate so much.

‘Three Guineas’ feminism

As explained, The Years was originally conceived to be interspersed with factual chapters detailing the oppression of women in England during the period covered (1880 to 1937). Eventually Woolf realised the two books had to be separated out and from her factual material created the great pamphlet, Three Guineas.

Three Guineas is a powerful feminist polemic. Reading it changed my opinions, shifting me to a markedly more feminist point of view of English social history and in particular the literature of this period, the late Victorian and Edwardian era. It is more difficult to read but, in the end, much more powerful than the shorter, more popular A Room of One’s Own.

Three Guineas is a searing indictment of all aspects of the patriarchal system developed during the Victorian era, which Woolf felt still strangled women’s aspirations in the 1930s. One aspect of this is her compelling portrait of the classic Victorian family home as a prison for daughters. Middle-class daughters were deprived of the private education given to their brothers, prevented from going to university, prevented by law from entering any of the professions, prevented from earning money and having any kind of financial or personal independence. Instead they were trapped in the prison of the Victorian family home ‘like slaves in a harem’, subject to the tyrannical whims of an all-powerful paterfamilias and, more often than not, confined to tending family members, especially if they were sick. Millions of women were forced to squander their talents, living lives blighted by endless legal, financial and cultural restrictions. This boredom crops up throughout the opening chapters.

‘I’ve nothing whatever to do,’ [Delia] said briefly. ‘I’ll go.’

This, then, is why the young women of Woolf’s day obsess about marriage and spend so much time fantasising about the young men they meet at this or that party or reception. Because marriage represents the only means of escape from the stifling family home. Deprived by law and tradition from all other channels of expression and achievement, pursuit of the perfect marriage is the only ‘profession’ allowed them.

She [Eleanor] wished Milly did not always bring the conversation back to marriage. And what do they know about marriage? she asked herself. They stay at home too much, she thought; they never see anyone outside their own set. Here they are cooped up, day after day… (p.31)

My reading of Three Guineas heavily influenced my reading of The Years, the weight of Woolf’s angry critique of Victorian oppression of women hanging very heavily over the text of the novel.

The character of the damaged, angry, unpredictable Colonel Pargiter is straight out of the essay, as is the permanent gloom caused by their mother’s long illness, the heavy curtains, the sense of trapment and stasis. Then, after the mother dies, Eleanor finds herself even more trapped in the role of her father’s carer and household manager, while all the time she watches the boys of the family go off to their private schools, then to Oxbridge colleges, and then on to professions in the army, academia or the law. All forbidden to the daughters of the family.

Presumably the dominance of this factual or even political agenda is one reason why the novel is so unlike her experimental ones, so much more conventional, much closer to the big novels about family dynasties which were so popular in the Edwardian era (for example, the series of novels by John Galsworthy making up The Forsyte Saga published 1906 to 1921).

Structure

How do you ‘chart social change? Well, Woolf picked a series of specific years, like snapshots in a family scrapbook. Hence the structure, the chapter titles and title of the novel as a whole.

1880 (82 pages)
1891 (37 pages)
1907 (15 pages)
1908 (12 pages)
1910 (29 pages)
1911 (20 pages)
1913 (8 pages)
1914 (52 pages)
1917 (20 pages)
1918 (3 pages)
Present Day (123 pages)

Curious to see if the section lengths indicated any sort of pattern, I turned them into a graph. No particular pattern emerges except the obvious fact that the first and last chapters are the longest, with the final chapter as long as all the short ones put together. The book is heavily weighted towards the ‘Present Day’

The Waves and The Years

Each of the 11 sections starts with a paragraph or so describing the time of the year and the weather, giving lyrical natural descriptions before the text zooms in onto the human characters. This tactic of natural setting followed by human interaction is very similar to the structure of The Waves, in which each of the sections is preceded by a description of the passage of the sun through the sky and the effect of the changing light, wind and weather on the sea beneath it – before moving on to focus on the lives of the characters. Not quite identical but a very similar idea.

And it’s not just using an introductory section about the weather that both novels have in common. The idea of following half a dozen or so characters, from childhood through to adulthood by giving snapshots of particular moments or events scattered over a period of 40 or more years, this is exactly the method of The Waves.

The similarity extends to the tactic of giving the children a couple of childhood events or moments, and then having these same events be remembered in each successive section, so that they slowly build up significance and resonance. Thus it was with the childish incident of Jinny kissing Louis in The Waves which gains significance as the various characters remember it throughout their lives. Here it is incidents like defiant little Rose sneaking out of the house to run along to Lamley’s shop or Maggie’s memory of the cheap necklace Eleanor bought for the Colonel to give her (Maggie) on her birthday.

1880. The Pargiter family at Abercorn Terrace wait for their mother to die (82 pages)

It was an uncertain spring. The weather, perpetually changing, sent clouds of blue and of purple flying over the land…

Colonel Abel Pargiter is in his 50s. He served in India where he lost two fingers during the Mutiny of 1857. He lives in a comfortable family home in Abercorn Terrace, off the Bayswater Road, north of Hyde Park.

An online article by Nuala Casey tells me that:

The Pargiter family home in Abercorn Terrace is a replica of 22 Hyde Park Gate where Woolf grew up with her father, the Victorian biographer Leslie Stephen, her mother Julia, a former Pre-Raphaelite model, her siblings Vanessa, Thoby and Adrian and step-siblings Stella, Gerald and George Duckworth.

The colonel’s wife is dying of some slow wasting illness, so he has taken a mistress, Mira, who lives in a dingy house near Westminster Abbey. Mira herself is no longer young, being about 40 and with a daughter at school.

Back at the family home wait the Colonel’s children – Milly, Delia (‘his favourite daughter’), Rose, Eleanor and Martin. They are all terrified of his bad moods. Eleanor, in her early twenties, is already the household manager and accounts keeper. Martin is 12, Rose is 10.

There are several servants. The main housekeeper is named Crosby, silent and efficient. The butler is named Hiscock, rarely talks, always mumbles.

Morris is another son but is old enough (after his private education) (in his early 20s) to have a job, as a junior in a barristers chambers (‘devilling for Sanders Curry’).

Cut to rooms in an Oxford college. Here we meet Edward Pargeter and his two friends, hulking great Gibbs and more effete Ashley. They’re not really friends, they don’t get along. When he’s got rid of them Edward hears laughter from the Lodge of the college and wonders who’s there with young Kitty who, presumably, he has a thing for.

Cut to the Malone household. Father is a don, Dr Malone. The interest is on young Miss Kitty Malone. She’s spent the day showing Mrs Fripp, the wife of American tourists, round Oxford. At the end of the day she undresses to go to bed. She’s a large girl who’s self conscious about her size.

Next morning she gets up and goes to see her tutor, Miss Craddock who’s tutoring her in history. Miss C is very harsh and says a child of ten could have written Kitty’s latest essay. We don’t even find out that the subject of the essay is, before their hour is up and Kitty goes on to visit the Robson family in Prestwich Terrace.

She despises their bad taste, their rooms cluttered with pretentious junk, and they’re all so small, until the son of the house, Jo, comes in from the back garden where he’s been repairing a hen coop. Kitty fancies him; she’d like him to kiss her. Jo thinks she’s a ‘stunner’.

She returns to the Lodge and sits with her mother as the latter reads The Times. Then a note arrives to say that cousin Rose has died. This is obviously Mrs Pargiter. Mrs Malone remembers sitting with Rose out on the moors in Yorkshire when young Abel Pargiter rode up from his barracks to propose to her (Rose).

Cut to the house in London, in Abercorn Terrace. it is dark and full of wreaths. The coffin containing their mother’s body is carried out. Rose’s funeral is seen through the eyes of Delia who loved and hated her. Delia feels excluded by her father and brothers who manage everything.

1891. Eleanor goes to watch brother Morris in the law courts, Colonel Pargiter visits his brother, Sir Digby Pargiter. Death of Parnell (37 pages)

The autumn wind blew over England. It twitched the leaves off the trees, and down they fluttered, spotted red and yellow, or sent them floating, flaunting in wide curves before they settled…

It is October. Kitty has married Lord Lasswade, has a little boy, lives at his grand house in the North of England. Milly has married Edward’s student friend, big Hugh Gibbs. She is pregnant. Edward is an academic at Oxford, in Classics. Morris is a barrister walking through the Inns of Court.

Eleanor, now in her early 30s, still lives at home with her father, still does the household accounts, as well as running round taking part in various committees and managing the family’s other properties, dingy rented houses called Rigby Cottages, dealing with dishonest traders; plus buying a last-minute present for her father to take to Aunt Eugénie for her little girl, Magdalena (Maggie)’s, birthday.

After a morning of chores and lunch with her father, Eleanor hurries off to the Law Courts to watch Morris prosecute a case. On the way she reads a letter from Martin who is 23 and serving in India. She rendezvous with Morris’s small, cat-faced wife in furs, Celia Chinnery.

I read the scene of Morris in court through the prism of Three Guineas. Woolf’s fierce condemnation of the way the patriarchy excluded women from all the professions brings out the outsiderness of Eleanor, excluded from a good education, prevented from attending university, she views proceedings as an outsider. She notes the palliness of all the barristers, their awe of the judge, but without following any of it, her head full of her own impressions and memories. All this makes a lot more sense if you bear in mind Three Guineas explanation of women’s exclusion from every aspect of public life.

Out in the busy Strand she reads a newspaper announcement that Charles Stewart Parnell, the Irish independence leader, is dead (6 October 1891). Her sister, Delia, was a supporter of Home Rule so she takes a cab out to the squalid square where Delia lives, but she’s not there.

Cut to Colonel Pargiter visiting Aunt Eugénie in her house in Browne Street. She is married to his younger brother, Sir Digby Pargiter, and her two young daughters, (Sara and Magdalena) are playing in the garden round a bonfire of autumn leaves. Sir Digby arrives, 5 years younger than the Colonel, though the Colonel has more money. After some chat and chaffing the children, the brothers have no more to say to each other, so the Colonel leaves.

En route to their house he’d read a letter to him from his old mistress, Mira, who’s now in her 50s and fat. She had gone off with some other chap who has now, predictably, dumped her and she wants money from him. The Colonel had wanted to tell Eugénie about her, Mira, to unburden himself of his secret life but the moment never occurs, and he leaves, frustrated.

1907. Digby and Eugénie attend a party then come home to their daughter, Sara (15 pages)

It was midsummer; and the nights were hot. The moon, falling on water, made it white, inscrutable, whether deep or shallow…

Each chapter opens with a bird’s eye description of London or the countryside. This one opens with a long description of all the carts of agricultural produce lumbering along roads into London towards Covent Garden (compare and contrast Oscar Wilde’s description of the same thing in Lord Arthur Saville’s Crime and D.H. Lawrence’s description in Aaron’s Rod).

Eugénie and Digby and their older daughter, Magdalena (Maggie) are riding in a coach through Hyde Park towards a party. Back in their house in Browne Street their teenage daughter Sara is too young to attend, so has been left behind. She’s trying to sleep but is kept awake by the waltz music from a nearby party. She opens a present from her cousin Edward, the Oxford Classics scholar, his own translation of Sophocles’ Antigone.

We know from Three Guineas that the Antigone was very, very important to Woolf. Of more than personal importance, it had a polemical, political significance, because Antigone stands for all women everywhere who stand up to dictators and tyrants as Antigone stood up to her tyrannical uncle, Creon. This carried not only an immense significance in the 1930s of the fascist dictators but, in Three Guineas, Woolf makes a direct link between the public tyranny of the dictators and the private tyranny of the Victorian paterfamilias. Even Antigone’s eventual fate was highly symbolic, not just being executed but being buried alive just like the daughters of the upper-middle-class like Woolf and her generation, were buried alive in the dark, curtained mausoleum of the patriarchal home. So this isn’t a casual reference.

Identities and selves

Anyway, the parents return and Maggie visits Sara in her room. Their conversation winds round to the central Woolf theme of identity, not in any profound ore worked-through way, just in a kind of girlish throwaway:

‘Would there be trees if we didn’t see them?’ said Maggie.
What’s ‘I’?…’I’…’ She stopped. She did not know what she meant. She was talking nonsense.
‘Yes,’ said Sara. ‘What’s ‘I’?’ She held her sister tight by the skirt, whether she wanted to prevent her from going, or whether she wanted to argue the question.
‘What’s ‘I’?’ she repeated.

As we know from the last chapter of Orlando, Woolf had evolved to a position where the whole idea of identity was problematical, where she imagines the so-called ‘I’ being made up of scores or even hundreds of ‘selves’. (This theme is picked up in the 1910 chapter, see below.)

Their mother comes into the room and there’s a lovely scene of mother-and-daughters warmth as they chat about the party. The girls (both now in their twenties) persuade their mother to show them how she used to dance, holding her Edwardian skirt out like a partner. Until Sir Digby calls her to come down and lock up, angrily, and when Maggie tiptoes downstairs it’s because there have been burglaries in the street, and Digby told Eugénie to get a new lock fitted and she’s forgotten. The sweet Edwardian mother and the angry Edwardian father.

1908. Martin views the Digby house then visits Eleanor looking after their father (12 pages)

It was March and the wind was blowing. But it was not ‘blowing’. It was scraping, scourging…

It’s March the following year and we learn that Eugénie died a year ago (can that be right? if she was going to parties in October the previous year?) and Digby is dead too. The family house in Browne Street has been put up for sale, and has been sold, as Martin (now in his 40s) discovers when he arrives to view it. The Malone children used to come here all the time. Martin is upset at the loss of this setting of his childhood.

So Martin pops round to the family home. Old Crosby opens the door. The Colonel’s had a stroke and is slow. Eleanor, now in her 50s, is still looking after him. Martin finds a newspaper obituary for Sir Digby among the cuttings that the Colonel nowadays has Eleanor cut for him, which leads to a mild disagreement about whether they preferred him or Eugénie.

(And there’s a joke. Woolf started in the 1930s collecting newspaper cuttings into scrapbooks, many of them to be used in Three Guineas. So it’s a sly joke against herself when Woolf has Eleanor think, about her father: ‘That was a sign that he had grown very old, Eleanor thought—wanting newspaper cuttings kept,’ p.143)

Martin goes to play chess with their father and Eleanor reflects that he, Martin, was right to quit the army.

Martin notes that Eleanor is reading a book by the French historian Ernest Renan. Left by herself Eleanor reflects that she knows so little, is so ignorant of so much. This, of course, is an understated reference to the way she (and so many women her age) were denied any formal education.

There’s a knock at the front door and their sister Rose arrives. She is in her 40s, lives in Northumberland, and is a well-established eccentric, giving to muttering quotes from poems and songs. Eleanor was expecting her to arrive on the 18th but Rose says this is the 18th and both she and Martin laugh at Eleanor for thinking it’s the 11th, for getting her dates mixed up, for being so forgetful and ditzy. (A lot later Woolf tells us ‘She could never do sums in her head at the best of times’ and ‘She never could remember names’.)

This is a trope familiar to Woolf readers, who often goes out of her way to describe the ignorance and lack of education and general ditziness of her central woman protagonists (Mrs Dalloway in the book of the same name, Mrs Ramsay in To The Lighthouse). Woolf describes their practical shortcomings in order to emphasise that it doesn’t matter so long as their heart is in the right place, and because they love life.

All this has much more meaning to me after reading Three Guineas in which Woolf is so angry about the exclusion from all forms of education of women of her class. It made me rethink these women characters as not so much feebly dim but as victims of patriarchal laws and traditions designed to exclude them from education and public life – to be blunt, to keep them ditzy and distracted with trivia.

This adds bite to the way that, as Martin goes to leave, he mentions that he’s dining out that night, again, and Eleanor is jealous that he dines out every night and meets all sorts of people, and here she is trapped at home with a dying old man. Again, reading Three Guineas gives a powerful feminist, political bite to all these simple events and thoughts.

We learn that Rose is very politically engaged and has been making speeches ahead of the 1907 general election. It is nowhere mentioned, but the OUP editors assume she is a suffragette.

1910. Rise visits Sara and Maggy, Kitty goes to the opera, death of Edward VII (29 pages)

In the country it was an ordinary day enough; one of the long reel of days that turned as the years passed from green to orange; from grass to harvest. It was neither hot nor cold, an English spring day…

A lyrical portrait of busy London leads into a description of eccentric Rose catching a bus south of the river to visit her cousins Maggie and Sally at a place called Hyams Place, near Waterloo. After both their parents died and the Browne Street house was sold off, Maggie and Sara had to fend for themselves.

Rose is dismayed by how shabby and poor their house is. When they try to make conversation about the old times she feels like she’s two different people (the Multiple selves theme).

They talked as if they were speaking of people who were real, but not real in the way in which she felt herself to be real. It puzzled her; it made her feel that she was two different people at the same time; that she was living at two different times at the same moment. She was a little girl wearing a pink frock; and here she was in this room, now (p.159)

Rosie persuades Sara to go with her to a meeting. Eleanor is already there taking notes and then Kitty Malone, now Lady Lasswade, arrives, inappropriately dressed in opera wear. We don’t learn what the meeting is about, and since half the people arguing are men I assume it’s not a suffragette meeting. Wikipedia says it’s just ‘one of Eleanor’s philanthropic meetings’.

The meeting breaks up and Kitty, Lady Lasswade offers Eleanor a lift in her magnificent chauffeur-driven car. She drops her where she wants to be dropped then continues on to the Opera. There’s a tasty description of the embarrassment of her and all the other posh types who are wearing evening dress, heels, cloaks and furs in the middle of the day because they are attending a matinee performance, dodging between the Covent Garden workers.

The opera is Siegfried by Wagner and Woolf gives a description. Lady Lasswade/Kitty is in a box with Edward and another young man, very in-the-know. She and they observe that the Royal Box is empty.

Cut back to Sara and Maggie back in their dingy home in the squalid street near Waterloo. There’s a pub just on the corner, children shouting in the street, a geezer yelling for any old iron. A drunk is thrown out of the pub and comes battering on the front door of the neighbouring door. Then along comes a man selling the evening paper and yelling that the king is dead. (King Edward VII was declared dead on 6 May 1010.) So that’s how the characters find out, one set at the Royal Opera, the other in their dingy digs.

1911. Eleanor visits Morris and Celia in Wittering (20 pages)

The sun was rising. Very slowly it came up over the horizon shaking out light. But the sky was so vast, so cloudless, that to fill it with light took time…

August, the holiday season. We learn that every year Eleanor comes to stay at Morris’s house on the south coast, at Wittering. There’s a nice description of the little town in the blistering August sun. We learn that old Colonel Pargiter has died and therefore the London house is locked up.

Morris is the barrister we saw in the courtroom scene where Eleanor soon lost interest in proceedings. Eleanor is greeted by Morris’s wife, Celia, who explains they’re all of a tizzy because other guests have only just left and yesterday they held a bazaar with a little play, a scene from Shakespeare, in support of the local church spire. Characteristically for a Woolf woman, Celia can’t remember which Shakespeare play it was. Because they don’t work – are barred from most work – Woolf’s women are notoriously indifferent about details and precision: everything is a drift and blur.

Eleanor washes herself and changes in the room she’s been given (the blue room). She’s been on a big trip abroad, maybe her first freedom after her father’s death, which included Naples, the Acropolis and, lastly, Spain – Granada and Toledo. Her skin is notably brown (though nobody uses the word ‘tanned’; they say burned; the concept of a suntan must have appeared later in the century. According to the internet the first use of ‘suntan’ as a commercial name for a light-brown skin colour was in 1937. The OED’s earliest evidence for the word ‘suntanning’ is from 1946).

Eleanor is 55. This is the first time the age of any of the Pargiters is mentioned. From it we can deduce that she was already 24 when the novel opened in 1880.

She went on this grand tour with her brother, Edward, the Classics scholar. Another guest is staying for the weekend, a man named Dubbin who they’ve known since they were children. He is now a balding old buffer called Sir William Whatney. He’s been out in India, ruling a province the size of Ireland ‘as they always said’.

Having read Three Guineas I detect the bite behind all this. Whatney and Eleanor’s brothers Edward and Morris have had careers, gone places, had responsibilities, competed over their achievements and status. From this, like all women of her class, Eleanor has been excluded by the entire system of patriarchy which condemned her to live at home with her father managing the household accounts.

She isn’t really jealous, just indifferent, so as Sir William tells another story about India in her booming voice Eleanor, like all the Woolf women, loses interest, drifts away, notices inconsequential details of the room around her, wonders about the passage of time etc.

More bite in the fact that, when Morris and Whatney start talking about politics, Celia takes that as a signal to ‘leave the gentlemen to their politics’, and to take Eleanor and the children out onto the terrace for coffee. Here we learn that 1) Rose is in court, again, for throwing a brick, so presumably she is a suffragette and 2) Maggie has got married to a Frenchman, René.

Morris and Celia have two teenaged children, Peggy and North. The daughter of this house, Peggy, is excited because they see an owl every evening at the same time and her excitement spreads to Eleanor. Celia wants Whatney to come and live somewhere close because he’s so good for Morris.

In the top floor of the house lives old Mrs Chinnery, Celia’s mother, a very ancient 90 years old. Her nurse brings her downstairs in her wheeled chair and Eleanor goes through the rigmarole of politely kissing her and trying to make conversation. As you strongly suspect Woolf did in these situations (because so many of her characters do), Eleanor finds herself going through the motions and acting the part of the dutiful guest.

Eleanor goes to bed and can hear old Whatney huffing and puffing round in the room next door. His life is over (he’s retired) while hers – liberated from caring for her father – is only just beginning. Where should she go? What should she do?

1913. The family home is locked up and Crosby moves to Richmond (8 pages)

It was January. Snow was falling; snow had fallen all day. The sky spread like a grey goose’s wing from which feathers were falling all over England…

It’s a snowy January and Eleanor is escorting an estate agent, Mr Grice, round the now-empty family house at Abercorn Terrace. All the furniture’s been removed, leaving empty spaces, stains on the walls. The point is it’s Crosby’s last day. She’s served the family for 40 years. Showing the estate agent round, Eleanor for the first time realises how low and dingy the cellar was where she spent those 40 years, and feels ashamed. Crosby cries as Eleanor sees her into the carriage which will take her and her dog, Rover off to a one-room apartment in Richmond.

So off Crosby goes to her new home in Richmond, sharing the house with Mr Bishop and Mrs Burt, But Rover doesn’t like the change, sickens and dies.

Crosby catches the Tube to Ebury Street and walks to the bachelor pad of Martin, I wasn’t sure from the text why. The Wikipedia article tells me it’s because she’s still doing his laundry.

Martin is now about 45 and still a bachelor. He is uneasy around servants, tries to sympathise when Crosby tells him about Rover. As he clumsily says his goodbyes to her, he reflects on the tradition of telling lies in their wretched family. After the Colonel died they discovered a batch of letters to him from Mira i.e. that he had a mistress. We’ve seen how the Victorian family house was a prison for girls, but Martin has just as negative a view.

It was an abominable system, he thought; family life; Abercorn Terrace. No wonder the house would not let. It had one bathroom, and a basement; and there all those different people had lived, boxed up together, telling lies. (p.212)

1914. Martin goes to the City, Hyde Park, then to a party (52 pages)

It was a brilliant spring; the day was radiant. Even the air seemed to have a burr in it as it touched the tree tops…

‘Martin, standing at his window, looked down on the narrow street’ (see my section on Windows, below). He heads off towards the City and bumps into Sara/Sally, now in her 40s, outside St Paul’s. He invites her for lunch at a chop house and is angry when the waiter tries to steal some of the change from the bill. They walk back along Fleet Street and catch a bus to Hyde Park. Here the beautiful sunshine gives him a transcendent moment, which revives the ‘multiple selves’ theme.

The sun dappling the leaves gave everything a curious look of insubstantiality as if it were broken into separate points of light. He too, himself, seemed dispersed. His mind for a moment was a blank. (p.230)

He’s accompanying Sara to meet her sister, Maggie – who’s gotten married (to René, a Frenchman) and recently had a baby – at the Round Pond in Kensington Gardens. I like reading about London because I myself stroll around these places; only a few months ago I went to an exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery then strolled along to the Round Pond then down to Kensington High Street where I popped into the Japan House. So all these London placenames aren’t vague abstractions but places where I myself have walked and strolled at different seasons, following in the footsteps of so many of Woolf’s characters.

Sara and the baby fall asleep and Martin finally gets to tell Maggie that his father had a mistress. It seems so silly and petty now, that he bothered to hide it. But this leads him on to ask Maggie if she thinks her mother, Eugénie, was in love with his father, the Colonel, her brother-in-law.

I know there are many readers for whom love – who in a novel is in love with whom, and who having affairs with whom, who is being unfaithful etc etc – is a subject of inexhaustible interest. For me it is a subject of ineffable boredom. But at the same time, I have to accept that this narrow, dull subject – the love lives of the bourgeoisie – is what this art form, the novel, is more often than not about.

Sara wakes up and breaks the odd intimacy he and Maggie had enjoyed. He leaves the sisters. A few hours later he’s wearing evening dress and riding in a carriage to a party in Grosvenor Square. It is hosted by Kitty, Lady Lasswade. It is dazzling how utterly indifferent Woolf is to dialogue. Martin is assigned a young women, Ann Hillier, to escort for the evening (to dinner) and their conversation is quite dazzling in its dullness and banality. One page of dialogue by Oscar Wilde outshines all the conversations in every novel Woolf ever wrote. She has a very poor sense of the difference between people. All her characters have the same dreamy inconsequentiality.

Kitty takes a train to her castle in the north

To our surprise Kitty is impatient for her guests to leave because, as soon they do (soon after 11pm) she rushes upstairs, gets changed into the clothes her maid has laid out, runs downstairs and into the car which the chauffeur drives fast to the station (Euston? King’s Cross?) and she just makes it onto her train, is shown to her sleeper compartment, undresses, lies in the narrow bed and sleeps.

Kitty wakes the next morning, looks out the train window, arrives in a northern station, alights with her bags, is collected by another chauffeur (in the new car) and is driven to the family castle, where she changes for breakfast.

This is an unusual bit of energy and excitement for a Woolf novel, but also serves to highlight the complete absence of plot. She is, after all, just travelling from her London home to the family castle in the North. The entire novel is the record of its half a dozen posh characters coming and going. This sequence is notable because it’s a rare passage set outside London, so Woolf shows off with a description of a train journey and the colder, harder landscape of the North.

1917. Eleanor goes to dinner with Renny and Maggie, there’s an air raid (20 pages)

A very cold winter’s night, so silent that the air seemed frozen, and, since there was no moon, congealed to the stillness of glass spread over England…

Eleanor goes to dinner with Renny and Maggie who have fled France to live in a shabby house in one of the obscure little streets under the shadow of the Abbey. Here she is introduced to a dark foreigner, Nicholas, talkative and philosophical.

Then Maggie’s sister, Sara arrives. Sara has always been portrayed as on the edge of madness, and she infects this dinner party with a kind of delirium. The characters talk and mention things but it’s hard to make sense of the conversation, it seems more a series of random observations. They argue but it’s hard to know what about.

This inconsequential conversation is interrupted by a German air raid. They all go down to the damp cellar while the sound of bombs gets slowly, closer, is overhead, then passes on.

Back in the living room, the meandering conversation turns to Nicholas and Eleanor talking vaguely about the future, about whether there will be a better world.

When, she wanted to ask him, when will this new world come? When shall we be free? When shall we live adventurously, wholly, not like cripples in a cave?

But Sara pours cold water on all this by pointing out the way that people always say the same thing: Nicolas always says ‘Oh, my dear friends, let us improve the soul!’, Eleanor agrees with everything, Maggie says nothing just sits and darns a sock, and Renny angrily says ‘What damned rot!’

Sara surprises the reader by saying Nicholas is gay. To be precise, she jokes that he ought to be in prison:

‘Because he loves,’ Sara explained. She paused. ‘—the other sex, the other sex, you see.’

Eleanor feels a moment of repulsion and then realises it doesn’t matter, at all. She likes him. She reacts like so many Woolf characters do, in so many situations, by going to the window and looking soulfully out.

She got up. She went to the window and parted the curtains and looked out. All the houses were still curtained. (p.284)

1918. Crosby and the armistice (3 pages)

A veil of mist covered the November sky; a many folded veil, so fine-meshed that it made one density. It was not raining, but here and there the mist condensed on the surface into dampness and made pavements greasy…

The last four years have aged old Crosby, the Pargiter family servant. She talks to herself, grumbling and complaining about the other occupants of the house near Richmond Green, especially a Belgian refugee from the war who calls himself a count and spits on the side of the bath, which Crosby has to clean up.

She hears guns bombing and a siren wailing. Woolf in her Woolfian way, tells us what Crosby sees, a man up a ladder painting windows, a woman walking by carrying a loaf of bread wrapped in paper. Someone in a shop queue tells her the war is over.

This is a classic example of Woolf’s technique of indirection and disassociation which can be interpreted in several ways.

Modernism: modernism was all about rejecting Victorian pomp and circumstance and addressing a subject in an obvious and relatable way; instead tackling everything obliquely and ironically.
Woolfian dissociation: in all her mature novels, characters tend to be dissociated and detached from events, even ones directly affecting them. How much more detached they are from supposedly big public events. Compare and contrast the oblique way King Edward VII’s death, though Kitty’s visit to the opera.
Woolfian feminism: the complete indifference of a muttering old lady to the Armistice exemplifies my reading of Three Guineas, which is centrally concerned with the question How to avoid war, and drips with mocking sarcasm about men’s obsession with competition, priority, hierarchy and status which she sees as one of the roots of war. Muttering old Crosby doesn’t give a monkeys about your war or peace or politics or diplomacy and maybe she is right to do so.

Present day (123 pages)

It was a summer evening; the sun was setting; the sky was blue still, but tinged with gold, as if a thin veil of gauze hung over it, and here and there in the gold-blue amplitude an island of cloud lay suspended…

As explained, each section opens with a description of the time of year and weather which largely sets the tone for what follows. As you can see this, the longest, section, opens with an image of mellow contentment, high summer gold, a thin veil, an island of cloud etc. So what’s become of our characters? And when is the present day?

Eleanor back from India, North back from Africa

Eleanor has just returned from a trip to India, brown skinned and white haired. She now in her 70s. She’s just had visitors at her little flat, including her nephew North, son of her brother Morris. North is back from years ‘in Africa’. (Characteristically, the narrative doesn’t tell us what he was doing there. We have to deduce from scattered references that he was a farmer and now he’s sold the farm.)

Eleanor shows North her jazzy new shower. He drives off in his nifty little sports car. He’s going for lunch with Sara, his aunt, now in her 50s i.e. 20 years or so older than him. He parks in a dingy street and has the characteristic Woolf experience of forgetting who he is or what he’s doing:

He mounted slowly and stood on the landing, uncertain which door to knock at. He was always finding himself now outside the doors of strange houses. He had a feeling that he was no one and nowhere in particular…

He knocks and enters Sara’s dingy house:

‘And you—’ she said, looking at him. It was as if she were trying to put two different versions of him together; the one on the telephone perhaps and the one on the chair. Or was there some other? This half knowing people, this half being known, this feeling of the eye on the flesh, like a fly crawling—how uncomfortable it was, he thought…

The uncomfortableness of being observed reminds me of Jean-Paul Sartre’s novels.

She’s on the phone to a man he met at Eleanor’s, the philosophical foreigner we first met in the previous chapter, ‘that very talkative man, her friend Nicholas Pomjalovsky, whom they called Brown for short.’ He is meant to be a great intellectual but the grandest thing he’s said, so momentous it’s repeated several times, is: ‘if we don’t know ourselves how can we know other people,’ which feels mundane and limp.

Come down in the world

A serving girl serves them undercooked mutton which bleeds. A theme in the last few chapters is how all the Pargiter siblings have come down in the world compared to the grand family home they lived in as children, paralleled by the warm Digby household at Browne. The children of both houses find themselves, in the modern world, living in dingy houses and pokey flats. Only their cousin Kitty Malone has done well for herself, marrying Lord Lasswell.

North and Sara have a dingy dinner, but the thing about their encounter is its staginess: he seems to be egging her on to perform her lines rather than have a conversation. Only from the notes did I learn that they were actually reading from a play.

Eleanor rings. She’s having dinner with her niece Peggy. Thus, by phone, two pairs of this extended family communicate. In their part of the narrative, Peggy thinks how old and forgetful Eleanor’s become but then we know she’s always been vague and easily distracted.

Eleanor loves hot water and electric lights but is not so keen on motor cars – one nearly ran her over the other day – and hates the wireless.

Eleanor sees a newspaper with the face of one of the dictators on it, Hitler or Mussolini, and swears and tears it in half, to the shock of her niece. The pair catch a cab to her sister, Delia’s house, who’s having a party. Which is an opportunity for Woolf to slip in a description of travelling into central London, Oxford Street by night etc.

Cut back to North and Sara reading this play, him egging her on to read her lines. I didn’t realise they were reading a play because Sara’s always been a bit cracked, much given to randomly (mis)quoting poems and plays.

Cut back to Eleanor and Peggy arriving at Delia’s party.

Cut back to North with Sara. Again they are creating a kind of joint fantasy, describing living on a desert island, when they’re interrupted by the arrival of Sara’s sister, Maggie, and her husband Renny. They’re all going to Delia’s party.

Cue Maggie, Miss Margaret Pargiter, being announced at the party and going to sit with deaf old Uncle Patrick, Delia’s husband.

The big party scene

I’ve seen commentary to the effect that this big long party scene is a sort of reprise of the big party which ends Mrs Dalloway, and to some extent of the big warm family meal at the end of part 1 of To The Lighthouse, with the implication of themes and variations across her career. What I take from it is how very little Woolf has to offer in terms of incident or plot. Characters wander round London, meeting up for lunch or dinner or attending parties, and that’s more or less it.

One way of reading her novels is as records of almost asphyxiating dullness. There was so little to do. In the real world people spend a lot of time at work, go and watch sports or take part in them, or amateur theatricals, have hobbies, tinker with their cars, go on cycling or walking holidays. Absolutely none of those worlds are in Woolf at all. Instead the trip to the opera house and Kitty’s train journey to the north are the only scenes with any life or colour in them, the only scenes outside the endless rounds of lunch and dinner, walks through the park, cab journeys here or there, the crushing mundaneness of life. I suppose the scene of the family taking shelter in the cellar during a German bombing raid in 1917 ought to be another example but somehow Woolf manages to downplay the danger, focus on the characters’ trivial conversations and make it sound very run-of-the-mill

So the climax of this long novel is this party at which various Pargiter relatives meet up and chat. It’s as excruciatingly boring as the kind of family do’s I had to go to as a boy. I wanted to run a mile from the feelings of claustrophobia, embarrassment and boredom, only leavened by the occasional nice conversation or moment of connection with a random relative. So why would I want to read 130 pages of characters expressing pretty much the same negative feelings? Although it’s the longest, it’s by far the worst chapter in the book and the only one which felt like a chore to read.

Facts: Rose is now ‘stout’ and deaf. Peggy is a doctor which is mentioned everso casually but, from the Three Guineas perspective, is a massive thing, a very big deal that women of her generation were allowed to study medicine at university, qualify and practice as doctors. Yet it is slipped very casually into the narrative. In fact Peggy is her Uncle Martin’s physician. He’s petrified of getting cancer.

Peggy is bored or impatient and, in the archetypal Woolf gesture, looks out the window (see below) and sees Maggie, North, Renny and Sara arriving. Up they come. Points of view alternate between the perceptions of Eleanor, North and Peggy who all experience more or less of the classic Woolf feeling of alienation and unreality.

North is bored he is as he interacts with all the members of his family. Milly is there with his big fat husband, Hugh Gibbs. North is appalled by how married couples learn to walk and talk like each other.

Eleanor falls asleep, then wakes up feeling rejuvenated, feeling that ‘life has been a perpetual discovery, my life, a miracle.’ She doesn’t want North to go back to Africa. He tells them he made four or five thousand from the sale of his farm.

Someone puts a record on the gramophone, they move the carpet out of the way and the young people dance. Peggy, finding herself marooned by the bookshelves, plucks a book at random. Eleanor calls her over and asks her, as a doctor, what dreams mean. Maggie and Renny appear and Eleanor candidly says that if she’d been younger she would have fallen in love with him.

Eleanor insists she is happy but Peggy, characteristically hard and pessimistic, wonders how anyone can be happy in such a world of poverty, depression, mass unemployment and the threat of war. Then again, she wishes she could just stop thinking all the time. Oh for a life of dreams. The conversation stumbles awkwardly and without wishing to, she finds herself being quite critical of her brother, North, critical of him writing book after book instead of ‘living’.

The moment is eclipsed when Aunt Milly appears, telling them everyone’s going downstairs to eat. Kitty, Lady Lasswade appears in the doorway looking majestic. North takes an instant dislike to her. She is widowed now. Everyone heads downstairs. North and Peggy recall childhood exploits but it’s to paper over the fact they now feel very antagonistic to each other.

Delia makes a big deal about getting spoons for everyone to eat the soup. We see inside her head and how she’s always loved bringing people together at parties like this. This is exactly the thinking of Mrs Dalloway, supervising her party.

North finds himself bunched up with Lady Lasswade and Uncle Patrick (husband of Delia who’s hosting the party). They all wonder why he came back from Africa and for the umpteenth time he explains that he’d had enough. The conversation drifts onto the threadbare topic of whether the present is better than the old days. Old Patrick thinks everything’s gone to the dogs, specially in Ireland where he’s from. Kitty on the other hand, welcomes women’s liberation; she remembers the old days when women weren’t allowed to do anything.

Delia lets North escape her pontificating husband but where to? He’s been out the country, he knows nobody. Woolf gives him the latest of several passages where she gently despises the young men of today (the 1930s) obsessed with talking politics but really just saying ‘I, I, I’.

He bumps into Edward, the thin, dried-out scholar of Sophocles. North feels like he’s being interviewed by the headmaster, when Eleanor, that ‘impulsive, foolish old woman’, calls them over. North admires the way the old brother and sister are at ease with each other, and Edward’s grace and precision.

Nicholas thumps a fork on the table to make a speech, which brings Rose to his side to support him but Martin mocks her and Eleanor intervenes, telling them to stop arguing. it takes a while for this family welter to die down and Nicholas to have another go at a drunken speech but they interrupt him again.

‘How can one speak when one is always interrupted?’ (p.404)

That’s what I always dislike about big family do’s, everyone interrupts everyone else so that nothing is ever finished. But this, arguably, is what the book is all about, all of Woolf’s books, maybe: about interruptions and things never completed, about absences and things that might have been, wistful dreamy memories and perceptions of people and events which always escape our understanding.

And so it is here, with the other siblings over-riding Nicholas who abandons his attempt, and the others toast Rose for having the courage of her convictions, smashing a window for the suffragettes and going to prison.

The music starts up in the room above and all the young people head upstairs, leaving the ruck of the Pargiter family to carry on remembering, blundering, talking at cross-purposes. According to the notes, one of the working titles for the novel was ‘Here and Now’, and here on the last few pages Eleanor has thoughts which use that phrase and would, in that case, have been the clear statement of its meaning. Here brother Edward says something to her nephew North but the end of his sentence is masked by someone else laughing and she is a little frustrated. Life is always like that.

There must be another life, she thought, sinking back into her chair, exasperated. Not in dreams; but here and now, in this room, with living people. She felt as if she were standing on the edge of a precipice with her hair blown back; she was about to grasp something that just evaded her. There must be another life, here and now, she repeated. This is too short, too broken. We know nothing, even about ourselves. We’re only just beginning, she thought, to understand, here and there. She hollowed her hands in her lap, just as Rose had hollowed hers round her ears. She held her hands hollowed; she felt that she wanted to enclose the present moment; to make it stay; to fill it fuller and fuller, with the past, the present and the future, until it shone, whole, bright, deep with understanding. (p.406)

Then something weird happens. It’s very late, in fact the sky is lightening for dawn, when Delia brings two small shy children into the room. She cuts them slices of cake. they are the caretakers’ children. Martin offers them sixpence to sing and if Woolf were fully sentimental, they’d sing some reassuring children’s song to round off this book of creams. But instead they sing in unison incomprehensible words in a tuneless screech. The dysjunction between their sweet innocent appearance and the horrible screech which comes out of their ears appals the middle-class listeners. Martin gives them their sixpences and off they toddle, leaving the Pargiter family, and the reader, perplexed.

Dawn is coming. In Woolf’s characteristic gesture, Delia steps to the window and opens the curtains. The party is over. Nicholas asks Maggie to wake her sister, Sara, and as Sara wakes, she has a monetary vision, of the Pargiter siblings all gathered in the window like a frieze.

‘How strange,’ she murmured, looking round heir, ‘…how strange…’
There were the smeared plates, and the empty wine-glasses; the petals and the bread crumbs. In the mixture of lights they looked prosaic but unreal; cadaverous but brilliant. And there against the window, gathered in a group, were the old brothers and sisters.
‘Look, Maggie,’ she whispered, turning to her sister, ‘Look!’ She pointed at the Pargiters, standing in the window.
The group in the window, the men in their black-and-white evening dress, the women in their crimsons, golds and silvers, wore a statuesque air for a moment, as if they were carved in stone. Their dresses fell in stiff sculptured folds. Then they moved; they changed their attitudes; they began to talk. (p.411)

For the most part Woolf eschews obvious symbolism so this feels like an unusually overt move, it feels fittingly beautiful, consciously beautiful, a very beautiful, understated and realistic climax to this long lovely novel. The siblings offer each other lifts and remember the last time they parties till dawn and so amid friendly chat and memories, the novel sweetly and beautifully ends.

Now it was summer. The sky was a faint blue; the roofs were tinged purple against the blue; the chimneys were a pure brick red. An air of ethereal calm and simplicity lay over everything.

Family members

Pargiter family

Live in Abercorn Terrace.

Colonel Pargiter is married to Rose, Mrs Pargiter, who has a long-term illness then dies.

Eleanor, remains single
Morris, becomes a barrister, marries Celia Chinnery, has three children:
- North
- Peggy
- Charles (who we never see, is mentioned once as having died in the war)
Milly, marries Edward’s university friend Gibbs
Delia, marries Patrick, hosts the party in the final chapter
Edward, remains single, turns into a silver-haired, dignified Classics don
Martin
Rose, the activist suffragette who goes to prison for her views and ages into a stout spinster

Digby family

Live in Browne Street.

Sir Digby Pargiter is the Colonel’s younger brother. He is married to the beautiful Eugénie — which makes them Uncle Digby and Aunt Eugénie to the Colonel’s children.

Magdalena (Maggie) marries the Frenchman René
Sara (Sally) becomes increasingly eccentric

Malone family

They are related because Kitty is a cousin of Edward’s, though I can’t figure out whether on her mother or father’s side. They live at the Lodge of an Oxford college.

Kitty Malone – marries the wealthy Lord Lasswade, becoming mistress of both his swanky London house, where she hosts a party, and his castle in the north

Seeing life through a window

My only contribution to Virginia Woolf scholarship would be to point out how regularly her characters stare out of windows, day-dreaming, or observing people in the street, avoiding dialogue and interaction with other people in the room, retreating to their own little worlds. I’ll be publishing a blog post on the subject.

Disassociation

Forever seeing life through windows is one example of the way the entire narrative, long though it is, feels beautifully detached from real life. Women in Woolf are not only – as she furiously points out in Three Guineas – legally and financially debarred from the wide world of the professions, of the British Empire, trade, finance, industry, and from the whole world of work – they are temperamentally or psychologically detached too.

At all the dinners and set-piece conversations (posh dinner at Lady Lasswade’s, dinner at Digby and Celia’s in Wittering, the cheap meal at Maggie and Renny’s) the female protagonist starts off by paying attention to the conversation but soon loses interest, loses track, drifts away, focusing on irrelevant details of the cutlery or the furnishings or what people are wearing, drifting off into a world of their own.

He [Morris the lawyer] looked clean, he looked starched and ironed like his robes. But what did he mean by what he was saying? She [Delia] gave it up. Either one understood or one did not understand, she thought. Her mind wandered…

Or, in the final chapter, Peggy the doctor, a bit more aggressively:

Why must I think? She did not want to think. She wished that there were blinds like those in railway carriages that came down over the light and hooded the mind. The blue blind that one pulls down on a night journey, she thought. Thinking was torment; why not give up thinking, and drift and dream?… I will not think, she repeated; she would force her mind to become a blank and lie back, and accept quietly, tolerantly, whatever came… She did not want to move, or to speak. She wanted to rest, to lean, to dream.

‘She wanted to dream.’ A Virginia Woolf novel is like a beautiful, lyrical, dreamy painting of the world with almost everything which makes up the real world – all the work and effort, the organisations, the companies, trade and labour, the practicalities and the hard thinking – taken out, excised, surgically removed – to leave a dream world through which her sensitive heroines waft in their long, trailing Victorian dresses.

The effect is very restful. The equanimity of Woolf’s calm, lyrical style, the lack of modernist tricks and tactics, the absence of any events liable to worry or disturb the reader, the absence of any plot and the deep sense of the whole thing being a beautiful dream, makes this by far the most readable and enjoyable of the six Woolf novels I’ve read.

Credit

‘The Years’ by Virginia Woolf was first published by the Hogarth Press in 1937. Page references are to the 2004 Oxford Classics paperback edition, although the text is easily available online.

Related reviews

Virginia Woolf reviews
1930s reviews

3 Comments

by Simon on April 9, 2025 • Permalink

Posted in Novel

Tagged 1930s, 1937, 22 Hyde Park Gate, A Room of One's Own, Aaron's Rod, Abel Pargiter, Abercorn Terrace, Adrian Stephen, Africa, air raid, Ann Hillier, Antigone, Ashley, Aunt Eugénie, Aunt Milly, Bayswater Road, Belgian refugees, Between The Acts, British Empire, Browne Street, Celia Chinnery, Charles Stewart Parnell, chess, classics, Colonel Abel Pargiter, Colonel Pargiter, Covent Garden, Creon, Crosby, D.H. Lawrence, Delia Pargiter, Digby Pargiter, Disassociation, dissociation, Dr Malone, Dubbin, Ebury Street, Edward Pargeter, Edward VII, Edwardian, Eleanor Pargiter, England, English literature, Ernest Renan, Feminism, fiction, Fleet Street, George Duckworth, Gerald uckworth, Gibbs, Granada, Great War, Hiscock, Hugh Gibbs, Hyams Place, Hyde Park, identity, India, Indian Mutiny, infidelity, Inns of Court, Ireland, Irish Home Rule, Jacob's Room, Japan House, John Galsworthy, Julia Stephen, Kensington Gardens, Kitty Malone, Lady Lasswade, Lamley's shop, Leslie Stephen, London, Lord Arthur Saville's Crime, Lord Lasswade, Magdalena, Maggie, Margaret Pargiter, Martin Pargiter, masculinism, Milly Pargiter, Mira, Modernism, Morris Pargiter, Mr Bishop, Mr Grice, Mrs Burt, Mrs Chinnery, Mrs Dalloway, Mrs Fripp, Naples, Nicholas Pomjalovsky, North, Northumberland, novel, novel–essay, Nuala Casey, opera, Orlando, Oscar Wilde, Oxford Street, Oxford University, Pargiter family, patriarchal system, patriarchy, Peggy, pre-Raphaelite, Prestwich Terrace, René, Renny, Richmond Green, Richmond upon Thames, Rigby Cottages, Robson family, Rose Pargiter, Rover, Sanders Curry, Second World War, selves, Serpentine Gallery, Shakespeare, Siegfried, Sir Digby Pargiter, Sir William Whatney, Sophocles, Spain, St Paul's cathedral, Stella Duckworth, suffragette, Suffragettes, tan, the Acropolis, the Armistice, The City, The Forsyte Saga, the Hogarth Press, The Pargiters, the patriarchy, the Round Pond, The Times, The Years, Thoby Stephen, Three Guineas, To The Lighthouse, Toledo, Uncle Patrick, Vanessa Stephen, Victorian, Virginia Woolf, Wagner, Waterloo, Westminster Abbey, William Whatney, Wittering, Women's Liberation, women’s fiction, women’s literature, World War One, World War Two

Posted by Simon on April 9, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/04/09/the-years-virginia-woolf/

Three Guineas by Virginia Woolf (1938)

Almost the same daughters ask almost the same brothers for almost the same privileges. Almost the same gentlemen intone the same refusals for almost the same reasons.
(The eternal patriarchy, skewered by Woolf in Three Guineas, page 147)

I think this long essay is Virginia Woolf’s most important book 1) for the subject matter itself 2) because it is a key which explains the attitudes and experiences of so many of the female characters in her novels.

First the basic fact that this long essay or pamphlet was originally conceived as an integral part of an experimental fiction. Wikipedia tells us that:

Although ‘Three Guineas’ is a work of non-fiction, it was initially conceived as a ‘novel–essay’ which would tie up the loose ends left in her earlier work, ‘A Room of One’s Own’ (1928). The book was to alternate between fictive narrative chapters and non-fiction essay chapters, demonstrating Woolf’s views on war and women in both types of writing at once. This unfinished manuscript was published in 1977 as ‘The Pargiters’. When Woolf realised the idea of a ‘novel–essay’ wasn’t working, she separated the two parts. The non-fiction portion became ‘Three Guineas’. The fiction portion became Woolf’s most popular novel during her lifetime, ‘The Years’, which charts social change from 1880 to the year of publication through the lives of the Pargiter family. It was so popular, in fact, that pocket-sized editions of the novel were published for soldiers as leisure reading during World War II.

‘Three Guineas’ is 127 pages long in the 2015 Oxford University Press version, compared to ‘A Room of One’s Own’s 83 pages i.e. half as long again. It is a far more serious, structured and well-argued book than its predecessor. It is also far more mocking and scornful of the many forms of sexism, chauvinism and misogyny current in 1920s and ’30s British society. It is far more angry and, in the final, third, section, far more radical.

Woolf did a lot of reading and research for it. Whereas ‘A Room of One’s Own’ has only a dozen or so footnotes, ‘Three Guineas’ has an entire section at the end devoted to extensive notes, references and quotations which make up 36 tightly printed pages in the OUP edition, some 124 notes in total, some as much as a page long.

These notes are well worth reading, in fact in one way they are more rewarding than the text itself. This is because they are extremely focused and to-the-point, whereas the text tends to demonstrate Woolf’s weaknesses: these include her own deliberate foregrounding of her own amateurishness and haphazard research; her temptation to wander off into lyrical passages, to paint a picture and populate her essays with fictional characters.

Most importantly, the overall premise of the essay (which is that she’s answering a series of letters from people who’ve written asking donations to their causes) and its structure – the way answering a pacifist’s request for her support leads into an extended and impassioned defence of women’s rights – these are sometimes hard to follow and can feel a little cranky. By contrast, her extended footnotes present the range, extent and impact of the anti-women animus of the patriarchy of her day with shocking clarity.

The essay is in three parts. Each part purports to answer a correspondent who’s written to Woolf asking for a donation to a good cause. After very extended, discursive and sometimes baffling arguments, Woolf ends each section by agreeing to give a guinea to their cause, but only on the basis of the conditions which she’s spent the section exploring. There are three parts, three causes and so three guineas. Neat.

Part 1. Women’s education

The master letter which gets the whole thing rolling and to which she returns throughout all three sections is a letter she’s received from a gentleman of her own class, a barrister, writing to ask Woolf ‘how can war be prevented?’

What the unnamed correspondent can’t have expected was that this apparently straightforward question would trigger this vast screed about the historic oppression of women throughout English history, described in such boggling details, and Woolf’s outraged calls for sweeping reform.

To kick off, Woolf explains that you can’t even begin to think about answering this question (‘how can war be prevented?’) until she has considered her place as one of a class and gender in a society which still restricts the education and life opportunities of millions of women like her.

First of all Woolf establishes the completely different ways of approaching and thinking about the issue taken by men and women, which is caused by the enormous discrepancies in their life experiences. She points out that all the men of their (her and the letter-writer’s) class have enjoyed expensive private educations topped off at the universities of Oxford or Cambridge, whereas both these (private school, Oxbridge) have been denied all through history to all women of her class.

While the men of her class enjoyed what she jokingly refers to as Arthur’s Education Fund (AEF), the daughters were given little if any formal education. Their plight is symbolised by the ethnographer, writer and explorer Mary Kingsley (1862 to 1900) who complained that she received no education whatsoever except a little bit of instruction in German. Woolf quotes a letter:

‘I don’t know if I ever revealed to you the fact that being allowed to learn German was all the paid-for education I ever had. Two thousand pounds was spent on my brother’s…’

(As in ‘A Room of One’s Own’, these initial ideas or quotes, fairly innocuous or random the first time you read them – in this instance the contrast between the fortunes English middle class families lavished on ‘Arthur’s Education Fund’ and the pitiful amount grudgingly spent on Mary Kingsley – will be repeated again and again, until they acquire a kind of mythic status, coming to symbolise the grotesque gender inequalities of English society.)

So – Woolf explains to her correspondent – it’s because of this and countless other differences in upbringing, education and opportunity between the sexes that her response will be different from an educated man’s. She thinks this massive difference in educational opportunities and women’s exclusion from all-male institutions explain why an educated woman’s response to calls for patriotism, and to the patriotic cliché of calling England ‘the home of freedom’, will be very different from a man’s. It’s for the simple reason that most women, through most of English history, have been radically, drastically unfree.

Her correspondent’s suggested ways of opposing war

Woolf tells us that the (unnamed) writer of the letter to her has suggested three ways of opposing war:

sign a letter to the newspapers
join a pacifist society
donate to the society’s funds

These seem laughably ineffectual to us, but Woolf takes them seriously and they in fact provide a structure for the whole essay.

Woolf’s blistering descriptions of the patriarchy

Possibly the main strength of the essay derives not from its sometimes confused, circular and even contradictory arguments (I try to give a critique of these shortcomings at the end of this review), but from Woolf’s vivid depictions of the plight of women, the numerous concrete examples she gives of women’s exclusion from so many elements of a patriarchal society, in the Victorian era through to her own day.

She starts by giving her innocent letter writer a basic explanation of women’s condition in 1930s England.

You [her male interlocutor], of course, could once more take up arms – in Spain, as before in France – in defence of peace. But that presumably is a method that having tried you have rejected. At any rate that method is not open to us; both the Army and the Navy are closed to our sex. We are not allowed to fight. Nor again are we allowed to be members of the Stock Exchange. Thus we can use neither the pressure of force nor the pressure of money. The less direct but still effective weapons which our brothers, as educated men, possess in the diplomatic service, in the Church, are also denied to us. We cannot preach sermons or negotiate treaties. Then again although it is true that we can write articles or send letters to the Press, the control of the Press – the decision what to print, what not to print – is entirely in the hands of your sex. It is true that for the past twenty years we have been admitted to the Civil Service and to the Bar; but our position there is still very precarious and our authority of the slightest. Thus all the weapons with which an educated man can enforce his opinion are either beyond our grasp or so nearly beyond it that even if we used them we could scarcely inflict one scratch. If the men in your profession were to unite in any demand and were to say: ‘If it is not granted we will stop work’, the laws of England would cease to be administered. If the women in your profession said the same thing it would make no difference to the laws of England whatever. Not only are we incomparably weaker than the men of our own class; we are weaker than the women of the working class. If the working women of the country were to say: ‘If you go to war, we will refuse to make munitions or to help in the production of goods,’ the difficulty of war-making would be seriously increased. But if all the daughters of educated men were to down tools tomorrow, nothing essential either to the life or to the war-making of the community would be embarrassed. Our class is the weakest of all the classes in the state. We have no weapon with which to enforce our will.

And:

Your class possesses in its own right and not through marriage practically all the capital, all the land, all the valuables, and all the patronage in England. Our class possesses in its own right and not through marriage practically none of the capital, none of the land, none of the valuables, and none of the patronage in England… Though we see the same world, we see it through different eyes.

Vivid and repeated descriptions of the extent, depth and power of the patriarchy in England.

Within quite a small space are crowded together St Paul’s, the Bank of England, the Mansion House, the massive if funereal battlements of the Law Courts; and on the other side, Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament. There, we say to ourselves, pausing, in this moment of transition on the bridge [where she imagines herself standing], our fathers and brothers have spent their lives. All these hundreds of years they have been mounting those steps, passing in and out of those doors, ascending those pulpits, preaching, money-making, administering justice. It is from this world that the private house (somewhere, roughly speaking, in the West End) has derived its creeds, its laws, its clothes and carpets, its beef and mutton.

And from all of which, all women, through all of English history, have been excluded.

Shortcoming 1. Lack of analysis of the causes of war

However, quite early on you become aware of various shortcomings in her approach. One is that the entire essay is triggered by that question, ‘how can war be prevented?’, but Woolf gives no analysis of the causes for the momentum towards war in the 1930s. No attempt to describe the triumph of fascism in Italy and, especially, Nazism in Germany. She gives no sense of the economic and social causes of the war i.e. the crushing of the German economy after the Great War and the confiscation of so much German territory by the Allies, which undermined the viability of the Weimar Republic and led so many Germans to vote for extreme populist parties offering magical solutions to their impoverishment and humiliation.

War is seen as some great looming threat (which it obviously was in 1938) but her analysis almost entirely omits the fact that the threat comes from abroad, in order to focus on the role of the patriarchy in England. That’s what I meant by saying that her blistering account of women’s suppression sometimes sits oddly with the essay’s nominal subject.

Men, status and silly costumes

Nothing that intellectual. Instead Woolf digresses into a long and amusing passage about the ludicrous ceremonial outfits which many men wear on formal occasions or as part of their ceremonial roles (judges, Chelsea pensioners, officials in Parliament) and the medals and titles men give each other. In her opinion these are all designed to flaunt their superiority over others. The book includes four contemporary photos of contemporary men dressed in regalia at formal ceremonies and very silly they look, too.

A university procession, from ‘Three Guineas’

She makes a simple point: men down the ages have ridiculed women for being so concerned about their clothes and dress; well, just look at these preposterous old buffers in their wigs and gowns and cloaks and gaiters.

But there’s also a serious point which is germane to her war theme: for she suggests that it is this flaunting of hierarchy and status, this cursed male wish to be superior, which is one of the roots of war. And so she thinks a good way to prevent war would be to attack this cause at the root and refuse to accept honours (as she did) or take part in silly ceremonies (a point developed at length in section 3).

Shortcoming 2. Over-reliance on biography as her primary evidence

The limitations of her education partly explain Woolf’s over-reliance on biography as evidence. She shows little sign of having read much history, economics, science or engineering, philosophy, psychology or sociology – some, but not much, and when she cites history books it’s rarely for the economic or social data.

Instead, what she does rely on to an overwhelming extent is biographies: all the damning evidence she assembles to demonstrate British society’s engrained misogyny and the power of the patriarchy is rarely drawn from history or sociology but relies exclusively on biographies and autobiographies and letters. The phrase you get in so many book titles, ‘Lives and Letters’, sums it up exactly. As an indication of her reliance on biography, here are quotes from just on one page:

‘The witness of biography — that witness which any one who can read English can consult on the shelves of any public library…’
‘Biography proves this in two ways…’
‘Of this, too, there is ample proof in biography…’
‘The study of biography… proves…’
‘Perhaps the greatest testimony to the value of education with which biography provides us is…’
‘You will find, if you consult biography…’

No need to consult facts and figures, assess data, decipher manuscripts, spend years in the archives. Again and again she takes the biography of an eighteenth century bluestocking or a nineteenth century hack writer like Mrs Oliphant off the shelf, and finds and pastes into her narrative their complaints about their limited lives and the dire condition of women in their time, which suit her argument.

(She does mention some histories but, when you look closely you see that she picks out of her historical sources the lives and opinions of her women witnesses: in other words, she selects the biographical elements of history and ignores the statistics, data, political history and so on.)

Late in the essay, rather as she does with her claims to be an amateur, untrained in academic enquiry, she turns an apparent weakness on its head. She tells us that she relies so much on (a very limited view of) history, on biography and newspapers, because they are the only sources of information open to a woman who has been denied a better, higher education, because of her sex; for:

history, biography, and… the daily paper [are] the only evidence that is available to the ‘daughters of educated men’.

Her very lack of scholarly rigour is itself an indictment of the patriarchal oppression which kept her excluded from the higher education her brothers and millions of men had benefited from.

And newspapers

She regards newspapers as ‘history and biography in the raw’. The excellent introduction by Anna Snaith tells us that Woolf kept three scrapbooks in which she gathered evidence for this book. It is striking how many of these snippets and excerpts are taken from newspaper articles or magazines, not the most in-depth kind of research. Newspapers are, by their nature, selective and biased and superficial. They sensationalise in order to sell copies. They are, in other words, the opposite of academic research into history, sociology and so on. This is a weakness in her evidence base.

On the other hand, newspapers are topical and up to date and give her useful snapshot of contemporary opinion – which makes them very interesting for the causal reader, 90 years later. Here’s a sample of the sources, taken from the numbered list of references at the back, which shows the combination of biography and newspaper cuttings which she overwhelmingly relies on as evidence.

‘Personal Reminiscences of a Great Crusade’ / a cutting from The Herald
a cutting from The Listener / ‘Reflections and Memories’ by Sir John Squire
‘The Life of Sophia Jex-Blake’ by Margaret Todd
Letter to The Times
Debretts
‘Life of Sir Ernest Wild, K.C.’ by R.J. Rackham
Lord Baldwin, speech reported in The Times
‘Life of Charles Gore’ by G.L. Prestige
‘Life of Sir William Broadbent’ edited by his daughter
‘The Lost Historian, a Memoir of Sir Sidney Low’ by Desmond Chapman-Huston
‘Thoughts and Adventures’ by Winston Churchill
Speech at Belfast by Lord Londonderry, reported in The Times

You get the picture: her main sources are lives, letters and newspapers.

The second letter: funding a women’s college

Since the essay is in three parts and the introduction says it addresses three letters, I thought it would be a part per letter, so I was surprised when the second letter pops up at the end of part one. It is from a women-only college writing to ask Woolf to contribute to their fund raising. Anna Snaith’s excellent notes tell us it was a real letter Woolf received from Joan Strachey, Principal of the women-only Newnham College in Cambridge, asking for a donation to renovate the college buildings.

Woolf shows with some doleful quotations and examples, how petty-minded, snobbish and fierce for their stupid rules and regulations the existing (men-only) universities are. She harks back to the notorious incident of being kicked off the grass by the beadle early in ‘A Room of One’s Own’, which clearly still rankles.

Therefore, she replies to this letter that she will consider contributing to a women-only college but only if it is drawn up on a completely different basis from the male colleges. She proceeds to lay out the principles for an experimental college, one which will eschew all competition and exams, be open to the poor, and teach the humanities in a spirit of openness and collaboration:

A place where society was free; not parcelled out into the miserable distinctions of rich and poor, of clever and stupid; but where all the different degrees and kinds of mind, body and soul merit cooperated. Let us then found this new college; this poor college; in which learning is sought for itself; where advertisement is abolished; and there are no degrees; and lectures are not given, and sermons are not preached…

She warns that if the women-only colleges model themselves along male lines, with all the snobbery and competition and status-seeking and petty rankings that entails… those are precisely the kinds of habits of thought, the endless seeking superiority, which create the war mentality and she will not contribute to it.

And no chapels. She is as vehemently against the all-women colleges having chapels as she is violently against the engrained misogyny of the Church of England.

No to teaching English literature

She has a fierce passage execrating the teaching of English literature and its packaging into classes and exams, which she describes as ‘vain and vicious’. This is why Woolf herself refused to accept honorary degrees or prizes, despite being offered many in the later part of her life, and turned down offers to lecture (the exception which proves the rule being the lectures which formed the basis of ‘A Room of One’s Own’).

Woolf explains women’s war patriotism as an escape from domestic oppression

In a wonderfully irrational peroration she thinks that it can only have been delirious joy at being released from the narrow, cramped, uneducated lives forced upon Victorian daughters and spinsters which explained the huge outburst of patriotic enthusiasm among women at the outbreak of the Great War in 1914.

So profound was her unconscious loathing for the education of the private house with its cruelty, its poverty, its hypocrisy, its immorality, its inanity, that she would undertake any task however menial, exercise any fascination however fatal that enabled her to escape. Thus consciously she desired ‘our splendid Empire’; unconsciously she desired our splendid war.

This is splendid rhetoric but it’s a symptomatic of her failure to understand the causes of war, her failure to understand the psychology of crowds and societies embarking on war, her failure to understand genuine feelings of patriotism or national pride which are such big motivators for large numbers of people in any country – in a nutshell, her failure to understand anyone outside her own narrow upper-middle-class milieu.

Shortcoming 3. Ignorance of the wider world

I think her failure to understand the patriotic zeal which accompanied the start of World War One is indicative of her broader failure to understand the range and complexities of human nature, of all human nature across all of society.

Of the narrow little world of upper-middle-class women whose lives are supported by fleets of nameless servants which allow them to pursue their tedious obsession with art and poetry, of this tiny privileged world, she was a brilliant painter.

Of the big wide world, of the thousands of occupations, jobs and livelihoods, in finance, business, economics, trade, law, science, technology and engineering, of the lives of the working classes with their labour in coal mines and iron works, building ships, sailing the oceans, building trains and cars, laying down telegraph cables – in other words, in almost all the wide world and its billions of inhabitants, she has little or no interest and makes no effort to understand.

As an artist, as a writer, it doesn’t matter. Her novels focus on her chosen terrain and are masterpieces. As an essayist, claiming to gather evidence in order to analyse large social issues, it is, to say the least, problematic.

Giving a guinea

Out of this rather convoluted flow of arguments, Woolf concludes that she ought to give a guinea to the building of the women’s college, because it was entrapment in the family home that led so many women to explode with patriotism upon the outbreak of war. Building a college for the public education of the same class will prevent that and so materially contribute to the prevention of war which, if you recall, was the aim proposed right at the start of the essay.

Part 2. The professions

How can we enter the professions and yet remain civilized human beings, human beings who discourage war?

Woolf says a woman like her has only one weapon at her command to use against war, ‘the weapon of independent opinion based upon independent income.’ Now she will try to use this to sway the men in the professions.

The pretext is another letter she has received, from a society supporting women in the professions, asking for another donation, this time to the support of hard-up professional ladies. For Woolf it begs the question why, 20 years after women were admitted to the professions (1919) so few have risen to the top rank and so many are hovering round the bottom.

Woolf’s answers are convoluted and involve replies to other letters and lengthy addresses to her fictional interlocutor, they but boil down to:

women have much shorter traditions of thriving in the professions and so lack the centuries-old networks of male patronage and preferral
there are no limits to educated men churned out by the public schools and major universities, whereas there are far fewer schools for girls, only four or five colleges for women, and even the numbers admitted to these are severely restricted (only 500 women students were permitted at Cambridge in her day)
exams in the professions advantage those who have spent their lives taking exams, i.e. privileged, privately-educated men, and bar women who have (as she shows) vastly less access to private education
the nearly universal sexism and misogyny found at all levels of English society

Sexism and misogyny

As mentioned above, the flow of Woolf’s arguments is sometimes hard to follow, especially when it feels like she’s twisting the flow in order to fit her broader feminist critique to fit the essay’s ostensible subject of how to prevent war – but what the essay indisputably does do is powerfully convey the deeply entrenched tentacles of the patriarchy in contemporary 1930s England. She presents a wealth of facts and figures about the systematic prevention of women being educated, getting jobs, entering the professions and so on.

In this second part, the essay builds up into a devastating demonstration of English society’s hair-raising sexism and misogyny. In the main text but especially in the extensive notes which illustrate it, Woolf gives extended quotes from a wide range of men in powerful positions expressing the most hair-raising prejudices and slurs. I can’t give brief quotations, you have to read the notes, and the extended stories she gives, of awful politicians, judges, professionals, writers and commentators taking every opportunity to demean and limit women.

Fascists and Nazis

Woolf cranks up the temperature a lot by comparing several terrible British chauvinists who pontificate that a woman’s place is in the home, with a quote from none other than Adolf Hitler saying the exact same kind of thing.

Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini have both often in very similar words expressed the opinion that ‘There are two worlds in the life of the nation, the world of men and the world of women’; and proceeded to much the same definition of the duties.

The juxtaposition of the two explains in a flash why Woolf is so resistant to all male talk about patriotism and ‘our country’. In what possible sense is it ‘her country’ when the Archbishop of Canterbury and the editor of the Daily Telegraph hold identical views about women’s place in society as Adolf Hitler? The same point is made in one of the long notes:

‘My husband insists that I call him “Sir”,’ said a woman at the Bristol Police Court yesterday, when she applied for a maintenance order. ‘To keep the peace I have complied with his request,’ she added. ‘I also have to clean his boots, fetch his razor when he shaves, and speak up promptly when he asks me questions.’ In the same issue of the same paper Sir E. F. Fletcher is reported to have ‘urged the House of Commons to stand up to dictators.’ (Daily Herald, 1 August 1926.)

Why, Woolf asks, all this fuss about opposing dictators abroad when every level of British society supports domestic tyrants at home?

Pay for housework

Men work in the public realm and get paid, sometimes a small fortune, often for jobs of dubious worth. Women labour in the home to raise families and manage households and care for the elderly, all unpaid. So: women’s domestic work should be paid.

The work of an archbishop is worth £15,000 a year to the State; the work of a judge is worth £5,000 a year; the work of a permanent secretary is worth £3,000 a year; the work of an army captain, of a sea captain, of a sergeant of dragoons, of a policeman, of a postman – all these works are worth paying out of the taxes, but wives and mothers and daughters who work all day and every day, without whose work the State would collapse and fall to pieces, without whose work your sons, sir, would cease to exist, are paid nothing whatever.

I wonder who first originated this call? Mary Wollstonecraft in ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Woman’ (1792)? Certainly Friedrich Engels mentions it in his 1884 book ‘The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State’. Anyway, Woolf makes a sustained case for it over many pages, 30 years before the issue was revived by second-wave feminists in the 1970s:

The History of Wages for Housework

Note: I was a househusband for eight years. I did all the childcare, running children round to nurseries, playgroups, parties, doing all the shopping, cooking and cleaning, changing thousands of nappies, giving bedtime baths and so on, while my wife earned the family income. So I have lived experience of issues like this. It’s this lived experience which feeds into my scepticism about feminism, not as a theory (fine and dandy) but in practice (complicated and compromised). I met plenty of women who were extremely happy to pack in office work and become full-time mums and housewives, who loved looking after their young children, dressing them up, holding parties, dropping them at nurseries or infant school and going to meet girlfriends for lunch or coffee.

Then again, some didn’t. Some felt trapped and needed support, would have welcomed free or cheap childcare, or just wanted to go back to work which they found more fulfilling than hanging round playgrounds or hosting rooms full of screaming kids.

I had many conversations with scores of mums about how the state should provide cheap childcare, or if only companies would allow more flexible work based around school hours, if only housework was recognised and paid for like other forms of work, and so on and so on. Hundreds of conversations on these and related subjects, over years and years.

So my scepticism about feminism is not ideological or temperamental. It’s based on the lived experience of being a housekeeper and child-rearer myself, and talking to hundreds of women in the same situation. The problem is not the top-level slogans and demands, anyone can come up with catchy slogans and carry banners – “Wages for Housework” – it’s figuring out the practical policies and application: where would the money come from? How would it be paid out? Who defines ‘housework’? Like child benefit would it go to anyone caring for a child or be subject to conditions? How would you prove that you do the housework and don’t sub-contract this or that part to cleaners or nannies? etc etc.

The procession

Back to the Woolf on the professions. She gives a vivid description of the processions of all the professions through London’s streets to the centres of law, finance and so on and asks her women readers: do we, in fact, want to be part of this procession? Do we want to do the same jobs but for less pay and more condescension? Or do we want to strike out on our own and lead our lives differently?

The facts… seem to prove that the professions have a certain undeniable effect upon the professors. They make the people who practise them possessive, jealous of any infringement of their rights, and highly combative if anyone dares dispute them. Are we not right then in thinking that if we enter the same professions we shall acquire the same qualities? And do not such qualities lead to war? In another century or so if we practise the professions in the same way, shall we not be just as possessive, just as jealous, just as pugnacious, just as positive as to the verdict of God, Nature, Law and Property as these gentlemen are now?

She gives a number of quotes from lawyers, clerics and politicians complaining they lead a dog’s life, and have sacrificed all their pleasures and family time to their work. Do modern women want to rush into exactly the same kind of wage slavery?

Woolf wonders if we can turn to the lives of nineteenth century women in the professions to help us find a more humane way to have one of these high-powered jobs and live properly? No, because there weren’t any women in the nineteenth century professions. They weren’t allowed. Instead:

We find, between the lines of their husbands’ biographies, so many women practising – but what are we to call the profession that consists in bringing nine or ten children into the world, the profession which consists in running a house, nursing an invalid, visiting the poor and the sick, tending here an old father, there an old mother? – there is no name and there is no pay for that profession; but we find so many mothers, sisters and daughters of educated men practising it in the nineteenth century that we must lump them and their lives together behind their husbands’ and brothers’.

The validity of housework and child-rearing, again, and the long buried, unrecorded of the scores of millions of women who spent their entire lives doing it.

Giving the second guinea

All these arguments have been contained, rather confusingly, in a very long letter replying to the letter she received asking for financial aid for impoverished women professionals. Woolf sums up her position by saying she will send the letter-writer one guinea ‘on condition that you help all properly qualified people, of whatever sex, class or colour, to enter your profession’, and in addition ensure that women:

must earn enough to be independent
must not prostitute their brain to their profession
must refuse all prizes, medals and awards, and be content with obscurity
must rid themselves of religious pride, college pride, school pride, family pride, sex pride and those unreal loyalties that spring from them

These are obviously very strict, probably utopian conditions, as with her demand for a completely different type of college which ended section 1. But:

If you agree to these terms then you can join the professions and yet remain uncontaminated by them; you can rid them of their possessiveness, their jealousy, their pugnacity, their greed. You can use them to have a mind of your own and a will of your own. And you can use that mind and will to abolish the inhumanity, the beastliness, the horror, the folly of war.

Antigone saying No to male tyranny

Part two rises to a very powerful invocation of Sophocles’ play, Antigone. Woolf studied this when young and it stayed with her all her life as a powerful story of female resistance to male tyranny. In the era of Hitler and Mussolini it was more than ever relevant. She comes back to it later.

No risk because of exclusion

Woolf ends part 2 with a grand fanfare of irony, saying there is no immediate risk of women professionals losing their souls and working themselves to shreds so long as the laws of England hold their nationality so lightly, prevent them from working in many professions, limit the numbers who can attend university, and ensure that so many women continue to live in the tradition of neglect and contempt, living gruelling lives of unpaid work in dark patriarchal homes.

Part 3. The Outsider Society

The sarcasm and irony which have been present throughout the essay rise to a real anger and bitterness in this, the longest of the three parts.

Woolf reverts back to the original letter she was sent, the one from the unnamed male correspondent asking her how they can prevent a war, and she repeats his three suggestions, namely that we should:

sign a manifesto pledging ourselves ‘to protect culture and intellectual liberty’
join a certain society, devoted to certain measures whose aim is to preserve peace
should subscribe to that society which like the others is in need of funds

Failure of the universities

She addresses these points one by one. First she is satirical about this idea of ‘protecting culture and intellectual liberty’. Isn’t this what the Great Universities have said they were devoting themselves to for centuries, the ones which have been teaching men these values and brutally excluding their sisters and daughters? Is the fact that these values now need such support from society an admission that all those centuries of learning have failed? And if they’ve failed, why should the impoverished, life-opportunity-deprived daughters and sisters suddenly rush to the help of their oppressors?

What is ‘culture and liberty’?

Anyway, what is this ‘culture and liberty’ the letter writer refers to? She knows what it isn’t. Characteristically, she turns to biography and uses the life of an author like Mrs Margaret Oliphant (1828 to 1897) who, after her husband died, churned out meretricious romances to support her children. Was this intellectual liberty? No, this was intellectual prostitution and Woolf angrily takes it as typical of the intellectual prostitution forced on so many women writers and artists who had to sell their souls and prostitute their art because of the patriarchy’s refusal to let them earn a living any other way.

So she mocks the letter writer’s suggestion that women, victims of centuries of repression, should suddenly rush to help the poor privileged men in their time of need. He wants her to join his pacifist society, does he? Well, no. The very word ‘society’ denotes the systematic exclusion of women from education and influence and power and money, so screw society.

The very word ‘society’ sets tolling in memory the dismal bells of a harsh music: shall not, shall not, shall not. You shall not learn; you shall not earn; you shall not own; you shall not – such was the society relationship of brother to sister for many centuries.

The Outsiders Society

She’s not going to join any boys’ club. Instead she proposes setting up a separate organisation, for women of her class and (lack of) education. It would be called The Outsiders Society. It would consist of educated men’s daughters working through their own class and by their own methods for liberty, equality and peace. Members would:

not fight
not work in munitions factories or nurse the injured
not encourage men to go and fight but maintain an attitude of neutrality, as fighting is a ‘sex characteristic which she cannot share’

She rises to real bitterness:

She will find that she has no good reason to ask her brother to fight on her behalf to protect ‘our’ country. ‘”Our country,”‘ she will say, ‘throughout the greater part of its history has treated me as a slave; it has denied me education or any share in its possessions. “Our” country still ceases to be mine if I marry a foreigner. “Our” country denies me the means of protecting myself, forces me to pay others a very large sum annually to protect me, and is so little able, even so, to protect me that Air Raid precautions are written on the wall [i.e. women are defenceless against modern warfare]. Therefore if you insist upon fighting to protect me, or “our” country, let it be understood, soberly and rationally between us, that you are fighting to gratify a sex instinct which I cannot share; to procure benefits which I have not shared and probably will not share; but not to gratify my instincts, or to protect either myself or my country. For,’ the outsider will say, ‘in fact, as a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.’

Wow. Very powerful. Furthermore, The Outsider will cultivate complete indifference to male nonsense about patriotism, war and fighting. On the contrary, she will:

take no part in patriotic demonstrations
not take part in patriotic praise
absent herself from military displays, tournaments, tattoos, prize-givings and all such ceremonies as encourage the desire to impose ‘our’ civilization or ‘our’ dominion upon other people

The idea is that this ‘indifference’ will damp down patriotic fervour in those around her and thus, in a tiny way, help to avoid war.

All this makes a sort of sense. But it feels like twisting logic when Woolf goes on to assert a link between these anti-war steps and the positive demands of her feminist programme. The connection feels tenuous and forced. Because she now switches to say that in order for their opinion or actions to matter, the outsiders must push for a raft of feminist requirements, being:

they must earn their own livings
they must press for a living wage in their professions
they must create new professions in which they can earn a living wage
they must press for press for a money wage for the unpaid worker in her own class – the daughters and sisters of educated men
they must press for a wage to be paid by the State to the mothers of educated men

Make the state pay for housework

This last is vital because until she has complete financial independence, a wife is dependent on her husband for money and will follow his opinions and men are for war. Therefore, in order to create an influential bloc of educated women who are against war, this class must be given financial, and so intellectual, independence. Women must be paid by the State for their work as mothers.

And she tells her male interlocutor that this step – paying women for their housework – would also liberate husbands, because by sharing the burden of earning an income they would no longer be wage slaves, slaves to the rat race. It would have an enlightening and life-enhancing effect all round.

I gave my thoughts on this proposal earlier. It sounds great, and you can see her logic – that women can only be truly independent and free if they have their own income, separate from their father’s or husband’s – but how would it be implemented in practice?

I’ll just make the additional point that its recurrence here is characteristic of how key themes and suggestions recur throughout the essay, building up power through repetition and echoes, not unlike her technique in her novels.

Outsider demands

But she hasn’t finished with her demands. The Outsiders would:

not only earn their own livings but become so expert that their threat to down tools would have power and influence
when they have earned enough to live on they would earn no more i.e. not pile up obscene wealth
they would reject any profession hostile to freedom such as the arms trade
they would refuse to take office in any institution which pretends to respect liberty but actually restricts it, such as Oxford and Cambridge

Outsiders will eschew all the stupid costumes and ceremonies so beloved by men (see the section about silly ceremonials in part 1).

Outsiders will eschew ‘the coarse glare of advertisement and publicity’ and prefer to work in honest obscurity.

The secret society already exists

Wandering into thriller territory, Woolf suggests that this Outsider Society already exists but is secret and underground in its activities. Her very dubious evidence for this far-fetched claim is a clutch of newspaper reports of various women officials making comments against war, opposing arms manufacture and the like. From random quotes and newspaper clippings she based the existence of a secret society operating across English society. Is this an example of her sometimes utopian or far-fetched argumentation – or an example of her dry sense of humour? Difficult to tell.

Against the Church of England

Outsiders will:

fearlessly investigate and criticise public institutions they are forced to contribute to, such as the universities, but especially the Church of England
by criticizing religion they would attempt to free the religious spirit from its present servitude and would help, if need be, to create a new religion based it might well be upon the New Testament, but, it might well be, very different from the religion now erected upon that basis

Woolf’s attitude to the Church of England had already been indicated in the passage about cited above about Antigone where she writes that ‘Antigone’s five words are worth all the sermons of all the archbishops’, those five Greek words (they total 11 in the English translation) being:

‘Tis not my nature to join in hating, but in loving.’

Pages 196 to 202 give a scathing account of how Jesus Christ’s own admonition that his followers are equal which promised equality between men and women was denied by St Paul, who invented the idea that women must be veiled in church and not speak. This bigotry hardened over the centuries into a church which forbids any positions of power or influence in the most powerful and prestigious organisation in the land, to women.

With the result that the salary of an archbishop is £15,000, the salary of a bishop is £10,000 and the salary of a dean is £3,000. But the salary of a deaconess is £150; and as for the ‘parish worker’, who ‘is called upon to assist in almost every department of parish life’, whose ‘work is exacting and often solitary…’ and who is most likely to be a woman, she is paid from £120 to £150 a year.

It’s a pattern mirrored in all the other professions and walks of life: women excluded from all the prestigious, well-paid higher positions, and forced to undertake the most menial and poorly-paid jobs.

Psychoanalysis, anger and fear

One of Anna Snaith’s excellent notes tells us that ‘Woolf’s brother Adrian [Stephen] and his wife Karin were trained psychoanalysts and were crucial in disseminating Freud’s work in England.’ This is relevant because Woolf quotes at length from the Archbishops’ Commission on the Ministry of Women (1936) and in particular from the appendix written by Professor Grensted, the Nolloth Professor of the Philosophy of the Christian Religion in the University of Oxford.

This professor concluded that there is no reason in theology (Christ’s teachings) why there should not be women priests, but there were strong objections to women priests among the clergy. Digging deeper he uses Freudian terminology to suggest the deep conviction held by many men of men’s superiority and women’s inferiority.

The causes are obscure but the outcome is obvious: that whenever a conversation lights on the topic of equality for women and women holding roles up till now reserved for men, many man become angry and many women become fearful. This imbalance leads women not to raise, mention or discuss the issue which, as a result, goes underground.

The infantile fixation

Woolf takes from Grensted the notion of the ‘infantile fixation’. I didn’t quite understand this and I didn’t see her defining it anywhere. Instead she gives three examples of what she means (taken, inevitably, from biographies), namely the wildly irrational anger and jealousy triggered in three classic Victorian fathers when their daughters asked permission to get married or (worse than that) to get a job. The fathers being:

Mr Barrett (father of Elizabeth who wanted to marry the poet Robert Browning)
the Reverend Patrick Brontë (father of Charlotte who wanted to marry)
Mr Jex-Blake (father of Sophia who was offered a small sum for tutoring mathematics to a friend)

By contrast, to show the impact of a father’s liberality, she gives the story of Mr Leigh Smith. It’s worth quoting at length because the impact is in all the details. Smith had a daughter, Barbara, who he loved.

When Barbara came of age in 1848 he gave her an allowance of £300 a year. The results of that immunity from the infantile fixation were remarkable. For ‘treating her money as a power to do good, one of the first uses to which Barbara put it was educational.’ She founded a school; a school that was open not only to different sexes and different classes, but to different creeds; Roman Catholics, Jews and ‘pupils from families of advanced free thought’ were received in it. ‘It was a most unusual school,’ an outsiders’ school. But that was not all that she attempted upon three hundred a year. One thing led to another. A friend, with her help, started a cooperative evening class for ladies ‘for drawing from an undraped model’. In 1858 only one life class in London was open to ladies. And then a petition was got up to the Royal Academy; its schools were actually, though as so often happens only nominally, opened to women in 1861; next Barbara went into the question of the laws concerning women; so that actually in 1871 married women were allowed to own their property; and finally she helped Miss Davies to found Girton. When we reflect what one father who was immune from infantile fixation could do by allowing one daughter £300 a year we need not wonder that most fathers firmly refused to allow their daughters more than £40 a year with bed and board thrown in.

The difference just one liberal father made. What if all Victorian fathers had been like that.

Sexist science

There follows a passage giving some examples of how even contemporary science is twisted to prove the inferiority of women. To be honest this section is neither very compendious nor persuasive. She doesn’t really go into the most basic accusation against women, that their bodies are designed for childbirth and child-rearing and this explains why their minds are limited to domestic subjects and childish logic. (I’m not saying this, I’m repeating the sexist, misogynist accusation.)

This is a failing but I think reflects the limitations of Woolf’s knowledge and education. Of science she knows next to nothing and so is simply incapable of unpacking all the biological and psychological aspects of woman-hating. She is much more at home in her comfort zone of education and literature, the lives of women writers.

She cites Bertrand Russell pointing out the sheer sadism of much medical science towards women (the medical profession’s reluctance to provide painkillers to women in childbirth) or the twisting of scientific knowledge to justify male superiority – but not as amply as this huge subject demands.

Cleons

Instead she reverts to literature again, and her obsession with Antigone. In the play the oppressive father is Cleon, the archetype for the Victorian paterfamilias and the modern fascist. Here is Cleon speaking dictator-talk:

‘Whomsoever the city may appoint, that man must be obeyed, in little things and great, in just things and unjust… disobedience is the worst of evils… We must support the cause of order, and in no wise suffer a woman to worst us… They must be women, and not range at large. Servants, take them within.’

Order and the oppression of women, Mr Barrett and Mussolini.

The personal and the private

In the essay’s last pages she brings things together by (rightly) saying that she has shown how male tyranny in the personal, domestic realm and in the public realm, are intimately linked:

that the public and the private worlds are inseparably connected; that the tyrannies and servilities of the one are the tyrannies and servilities of the other.

Despite the strangeness of the letter-answering structure and the oddly digressive, rambling flow of the argument, by the end she has presented a devastating barrage of evidence, as well as making a host of demands and suggestions.

The third guinea

So she refuses to sign the form her correspondent had sent her. She refuses to sign up to his society because of her opposition to all such male bodies, but she will send him a guinea to support it.

Their aims are the same, to oppose the tyrants in the name of Justice and Equality and Liberty. But, as this amazing book has explained, as a woman, as the patchily educated ‘daughter of educated men’, as someone with completely different life experiences and, consequently, utterly different perspectives from the male sender of the letter, she shares the same aim but insists that she will try to bring it about using, not the old male forms and words, but new words and new ideas appropriate for women.

Magnificent

For all its faults, ‘Three Guineas’ is a magnificent, powerful and very persuasive piece of work. Her assembly of a very wide range of evidence, facts and figures really bring home the historical endurance, depth and wide range of the legal, financial and cultural oppression of women throughout English history and the stupid, patronising and misogynist attitudes and opinions deployed to maintain that oppression.

The notion of the Outsiders Society is the crystallisation of the massive theme which emerges repeatedly throughout the text, the idea that women – not because of any biological or psychological differences – but purely because of the legal, financial, professional and cultural apartheid they have suffered for centuries, bring to the table a different perspective from men across a whole range of issues.

I think it’s a magnificent example of a polemical essay, of an impassioned political pamphlet.

Criticisms

There are a number of problems or issues with Woolf’s way of arguing. Initially I included them in my review where they occurred but they cluttered up the flow of my review, and gave an unduly negative opinion too early on. I mentioned three earlier on. Here are a few more.

Shortcoming 4. Woolf’s intellectual confusions

Periodically throughout the text Woolf freely admits to own intellectual shortcomings: for example, right at the start she admits being bewildered that there seems to be a wide range of opinions about whether war is good or inevitable. She herself tells us that the more she reads, the more opinions she discovers, the more confused she becomes. But… is that not the point of being an intellectual: to read all the opinions, weigh the evidence, and develop your own line of argument, based on the evidence you uncover and reacting to other people’s arguments?

This activity, intellectual activity, always puzzles and confuses Woolf. In ‘A Room of One’s Own’ there’s the section where she orders up some books in the British Museum and opens them up, expecting to discover The Truth staring her in the face.

Sometimes this is part of her general mocking irony, mocking the pretensions of pretty much all male activity, including the grand Pursuit of Truth. But at other times it can give you the worrying sense that she doesn’t really understand what intellectual enquiry is.

Her intellectual confusion as evidence of her case

In the opening and then at various transition moments, Woolf explicitly tells us that she struggles to marshal the evidence, is embarking on something too big for her abilities, and wonders if she’d be better off abandoning it. After a while I realised that maybe these passages are designed to dramatise the issue of women’s exclusion from formal education by using herself as an example.

Woolf’s brothers went to top private schools and Oxbridge whereas she more or less had to educate herself at home and mostly taught herself by browsing through her father’s extensive library. In other words, every time she shares how confused by the evidence or daunted by the challenge of answering big question she is, she is demonstrating the effect of the grotesquely unequal education of the genders, how women have been the victims of ‘tradition, poverty and ridicule’, and showing the reader how she (and we) are suffering for it.

Maybe that’s why she flaunts her own intellectual limitations so much: the intellectual inability she frequently laments is the result of her exclusion from higher education. It makes her case for her.

Shortcoming 5. Her analysis is restricted to a (relatively) small class

Her lack of real confidence in her own research, and her need to make her feminist points as categorical and powerful as possible, explain why Woolf makes the strategic decision of restricting her analysis to a relatively small class, to women like herself, to ‘the daughters of educated men’, as she describes them. As she puts it:

Our ideology is still so inveterately anthropocentric that it has been necessary to coin this clumsy term – ‘educated man’s daughter’ – to describe the class whose fathers have been educated at public schools and universities. Obviously, if the term ‘bourgeois’ fits her brother, it is grossly incorrect to use it of one who differs so profoundly in the two prime characteristics of the bourgeoisie – capital and environment.

She makes it quite clear on page one that she is only discussing upper-middle-class women, women like herself, women with immaculate manners who are used to managing servants and know which of the many forks and spoons to use at a formal dinner.

In order to avoid the confusions, contradictions and conflicting evidence I mentioned above, in order for her analysis to work, she has to reject the vast majority of the population (the working class and lower classes, of both sexes) and identify her cause with just this numerically small and limited class of posh ladies.

It isn’t just me pointing this out. The Wikipedia article about Three Guineas tells us that the noted academic Q.D. Leavis wrote a scathing review of ‘Three Guineas’ soon after it was published:

She denounces the essay because it is only concerned with ‘the daughters of educated men’, seeing Woolf’s criticisms as irrelevant to most women because her wealth and aristocratic ancestry means she is ‘insulated by class’.

And Anna Snaith’s notes in the Oxford University Press edition tell us that Woolf received letters from working class women readers who complained about being left out of her analysis, notably a long semi-autobiographical one from a working class woman named Agnes Smith.

This is closely related to what I called shortcoming 3, ignorance of the wider world. But it’s also a decision. She found it hard enough gathering the evidence for the sexist discrimination against her own type and class of woman. If she opened it up to the broader middle and working classes she’d never have finished it.

2025: the perils of intersectionality

Many of these criticisms are mentioned in Anna Snaith’s introduction to the Oxford University Press edition. Here she indicates the larger cultural and political problems the essay falls foul of. This is that there are, nowadays, so many grievances, so many groups claiming to be victims, so many communities and identities who feel that they, too, have been subjected to centuries of oppression, that it is hard to focus on just one, and it is especially hard to focus on the group Woolf defines as the ‘daughters of educated men’.

As you read Snaith’s account of Woolf’s life and social circle, with so many friends among England’s political and cultural elite, the idea of her as a persecuted outsider feels more and more ludicrous. She wasn’t a Jew in Hitler’s Germany, a Black in the American South, a kulak in Stalin’s Russia, an Aborigine in Australia, she grew up in a house full of books which she was actively encouraged to read and went on to become a centre of London’s literary and artistic elite.

This doesn’t invalidate any of the points she makes in the book or detract from the essay’s tremendous power. It’s just to say that the struggle for women’s equality takes its place among quite a few other struggles. I’ve a book about the Irish Civil War on my desk and Irish nationalists have quite a story to tell about 1,000 years of British oppression. Her husband was a Jew who had his own story about the legal and financial persecution of Jews. Something similar could be said of England’s Roman Catholics, prevented by law from holding official positions. Or – a group close to my heart – England’s non-conformists, banned by law from holding any positions of authority for 300 years after the civil war. Citizens from India or any of the colonies we ruled for centuries might have a thing or two to say about Britain’s oppression of their peoples and cultures.

Being a modern academic, Snaith is contractually obliged to drag in slavery – the progressive topic par excellence – to her discussion of ‘Three Guineas’, on the rather tenuous basis that guineas were, apparently, first used as currency in the British slave trade. Don’t know what Virginia would have made of that scholarly leap of imagination.

To repeat – this little digression about the modern over-abundance of historical grievances is not entirely my view but simply expanding points made by the book’s editor, Anna Snaith, in her introduction.

All these other issues don’t invalidate any of the points Woolf makes in the book but they place it in a much larger, real world context. If you’re a feminist, you can insist that your cause and your history of oppression is the real one, the big one, the important one and, convinced of your righteousness, overlook or downplay the grievances of all the other groups I’ve mentioned. In a sense, to get anything done, you have to focus on your issues and grievances; nobody can represent the issues of the whole world. You have to pick your battles. And this explains why Woolf realised that, in order to get her book written, she had to concentrate just on relatively privileged upper-middle-class women like herself, on ‘the daughters of educated men’.

Conclusion

It’s a very powerful book. Very. To repeat what I said at the start, from one point of view it may be her most important work. It’s a bit of a struggle, a bit meandering, a bit puzzling in places, her proposals such as for the Outsider Society are a bit eccentric – and yet so many of her main points drive right home, and the evidence gathered in the notes at the end is searing, blistering, eye-opening. It shook this old cynic. It materially changed my views about feminism. I strongly recommend it.

Credit

‘Three Guineas’ by Virginia Woolf was first published by the Hogarth Press in 1938. Page references are to the 2015 Oxford University Press paperback edition, edited and annotated by Anna Snaith, although the text is easily available online.

Related reviews

Virginia Woolf reviews
1920s reviews

2 Comments

by Simon on April 4, 2025 • Permalink

Posted in English literature, Essays, Feminism, Politics

Tagged 1920s, 1930s England, A Room of One's Own, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Adolf Hitler, Adrian Stephen, AEF, Agnes Smith, Anna Snaith, Antigone, Archbishops' Commission on the Ministry of Women, Arthur's Education Fund, Barbara Leigh Smith, Bertrand Russell, British Museum, Cambridge, Charlotte Brontë, chauvinism, Christianity, Church of England, Cleon, Debretts, Desmond Chapman-Huston, Elizabeth Barrett, English history, English literature, essay, fascism, Fascist Italy, Feminism, feminist essay, feminist ideology, folly of war, Freud, Friedrich Engels, G.L. Prestige, gender, gender inequality, Germany, Great War, Herr Hitler, hierarchy, House of Commons, how can war be prevented?, inequality, infantile fixation, irony, Jesus Christ, Joan Strachey, Karin Stephen, Lord Baldwin, male tyranny, Margaret Oliphant, Margaret Todd, Mary Kingsley, Mary Wollstonecraft, middle-class feminism, misogyny, Mr Barrett, Mr Jex-Blake, Mr Leigh Smith, Mrs Oliphant, Nazism, New Testament, Newnham College, non-fiction, notes, novel–essay, oppression of women, Oxford, patriarchy, patriotism, polemical essay, political pamphlet, Privilege, Professor Grensted, Psychoanalysis, Q.D. Leavis, quotations, R.J. Rackham, references, Reverend Patrick Brontë, Robert Browning, sarcasm, second wave feminism, sexism, Signor Mussolini, Sir E. F. Fletcher, Sir John Squire, Sir Sidney Low, Sophia Jex-Blake, Sophocles, St Paul, status, Stock Exchange, The Origin of the Family Private Property and the State, The Outsiders Society, The Pargiters, the patriarchy, the personal is political, The Times, The Years, Three Guineas, Virginia Woolf, Wages for Housework, war, Weimar Republic, white feminism, Winston Churchill

Posted by Simon on April 4, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/04/04/three-guineas-virginia-woolf/

Ann Veronica: A Modern Love Story by H.G. Wells (1909)

‘Cooped up!’ he cried. ‘Did I stand in the way of your going to college? Have I ever prevented you going about at any reasonable hour? You’ve got a bicycle!’
(Ann Veronica’s father explaining how liberal he’s been with her, page 22)

‘Ann Veronica’ is not, alas, an out-and-out comedy like ‘Mr Polly’. It is one of Wells’s first novels of ideas, the idea in this case being The New Woman, an ‘issue’ which is explored via a number of characters and situations.

The basic premise is simple enough. Ann Veronica Stanley is 21-and-a-half, the clever daughter of an upper middle-class widower. Her four older siblings have all left home and so she lives alone with her father and his sister, Aunt Mollie (aka Miss Stanley), in Morningside Park, an outlying suburb of London, something like New Malden, on the Wimbledon railway line.

Ann has had all the advantages in life that the protagonists of the social comedies (Mr Lewisham, Kipps, Mr Polly) distinctly lacked. She did excellently at school and wanted to study at Cambridge but her father refused to let her, claiming advanced study ‘unsexed’ a woman. After a lot of arguing she got a place at Tredgold Women’s College studying Biology. Understandably, she chafes against the restrictions put on her life by her father and Aunt Mollie, who both agree that Ann is too young, naive and inexperienced to be given greater freedoms.

The narrative opens when she has been invited to a fancy dress ball and to stay overnight in a hotel in London with student friends, and her father categorically forbids her to do so.

Wells sympathetically if critically depicts the characters of this father and the even more straitlaced aunt, he still hurting from the death of his beloved wife when Ann was just thirteen, the aunt engaged to a curate who died before they married – so both of them damaged by life and aware of the pain and unhappiness it can bring, something Ann has almost no idea of. By their own lights they’re trying to protect her.

The characters could be laid out in a mind map with Ann at the centre.

Peter Stanley – ‘a lean, trustworthy, worried-looking, neuralgic, clean-shaven man of fifty-three, with a hard mouth, a sharp nose, iron-gray hair, gray eyes, gold-framed glasses, and a small, circular baldness at the crown of his head’.

Aunt Mollie – Peter’s sister, at one stage engaged to a curate who died, so when Peter’s wife died, she came to live with him and look after the children.

Ann’s two sisters: the eldest, Alice, married a doctor, removed to Scotland, had lots of children and became a boring adult. Wells gives us an extended description of her wedding and wedding breakfast as seen through the child Ann’s eyes (having just read the wedding scene in Mr Polly made me think Wells has a thing for weddings).

The other sister, Gwen, ran off and married an actor, Mr Fortescue, such a shameful act that Father disowned her and when, in a few years, they started to receive letters asking for a reconciliation and then begging for money, refused to answer.

Attached to her father is a handful of business acquaintances of other male professional occupants of the snooty Avenue they live in and who he has nodding acquaintance with on the daily train up to London: Mr Ramage who Ann chats to on the train and finds her grown-up and intelligent, later revealed to be a sensualist and a libertine (p.58) and then a virtual rapist (pages 143 to 151); and Ogilvy who he lunches with at the Legal Club. Both echo and reinforce father’s fulminations about ‘young people today’, and listen to his (comic) hobby horse that it’s all the fault of modern novelists.

Attached to Aunt Mollie are two grand lady neighbours in the Avenue:

Lady Palsworthy was the widow of a knight who had won his spurs in the wholesale coal trade, she was of good seventeenth-century attorney blood, a county family, and distantly related to Aunt Mollie’s deceased curate. She was the social leader of Morningside Park, and in her superficial and euphuistic way an extremely kind and pleasant woman. With her lived a Mrs Pramlay, a sister of the Morningside Park doctor, and a very active and useful member of the Committee of the Impoverished Gentlewomen’s Aid Society.

Connected to these ladies is a Mr Hubert Manning, a 35-year-old civil servant and poet who keeps buttonholing Ann at the ladies’ garden parties. Ann can see the other guests looking at them and gossiping and realises that many consider him a very eligible catch, a pressganging she resents. With his minor poet hat on, Manning also represents another type which is the sexist man who insists on placing women on a pedestal, making them goddesses who should never descend into the sordid worlds of work or politics i.e. trapping them in a gilded cage.

In another direction, Ann is good friends with the Widgett family:

Mr. Widgett was a journalist and art critic, addicted to a greenish-gray tweed suit and ‘art’ brown ties; he smoked corncob pipes in the Avenue on Sunday morning, travelled third class to London by unusual trains, and openly despised golf. He occupied one of the smaller houses near the station. He had one son, who had been co-educated, and three daughters with peculiarly jolly red hair that Ann Veronica found adorable. Two of these had been her particular intimates at the High School…

It’s these two girls, Hetty and Constance who attend the Fadden Art School where the annual party is going to be, and who’ve invited Ann to go with them and stay overnight at the hotel with. Coming from an arty family, they hold ‘advanced’ views, i.e. are schoolgirl bohemians. They have a brother, Teddy, raised in a household of sisters and so ‘broken in to feminine society’, who nurses a puppy-like infatuation with Ann.

In an early chapter, when Ann goes round to complain about her father’s unreasonable attitude, in Hetty Widgett’s bedroom, there is also present slim, 30-year-old Miss Miniver who wears a lapel button reading VOTES FOR WOMEN and is given hard core feminist speeches which almost feel like they’ve been copied out of actual suffragette tracts:

Mrs Miniver’s beliefs

According to Miss Miniver, Women are victims of a patriarchy which runs everything and controls every aspect of their lives. The professions are all closed to women who have almost no employment opportunities (except being typists, teachers or writers) and so are trapped at home with their families, languishing until they can be married off to a suitable man. So millions of women rush rashly into marriage only to discover they have swapped prison for slavery. The only real way to get on in life is by ‘pleasing men’ who are brought up to regard women as a kind of expensive toy. ‘Women have no economic freedom because they have no political freedom.’ Hence her impassioned belief that nothing will change until women get the vote and therefore almost any crime is worth committing in order to liberate half the human race.

A final thought is that ancient society was a matriarchy, in fact going back into the animal forebears of humanity the female of the species plays the fundamental role of reproducing and males had to compete for the privilege of mating with them.

‘Among human beings, too, women to begin with were the rulers and leaders; they owned all the property, they invented all the arts. The primitive government was the Matriarchate. The Matriarchate! The Lords of Creation just ran about and did what they were told.’

Somehow, somewhere along the line, however, the female of Homo sapiens has been conned and hoodwinked into oppression…

‘Only in man is the male made the most important. And that happens through our maternity; it’s our very importance that degrades us.’

My beliefs

As you know, I’m a Darwinian materialist, unimpressed by most of humanity’s claims to superiority, astonished at fatuous conversations about ‘morality’, more impressed by our ability to enslave and kill each other and our current efforts to destroy the planet we live on.

Seen from this unsentimental perspective the truest thing Miss Miniver says is that ‘Maternity has been our undoing.’ Yes. Women are designed to bear and raise children and a certain proportion of women, throughout history, have apparently hated this plight. Men are designed to fight for territory, resources, kudos, and secure a safe habitat in which their woman or women can raise their children, and so many men have been killed in humanity’s endless wars. As far as we can tell, from all the historical records we have, this appears to have been the practice of humanity certainly since the birth of agriculture and cities, some 10,000 years ago. Miss Miniver acknowledges it without accepting that it might be the fundamental bedrock explanation for the situation she deplores and, if so, very difficult to budge. Instead she turns it into a cartoon, a theatrical stunt.

‘While we were minding the children they stole our rights and liberties. The children made us slaves, and the men took advantage of it.’

In fact the central focus of the entire novel is yet another proof of the centrality of reproduction in human affairs: Amazing how central the ‘love story’ is to the novel and to popular entertainment generally, in our day dominating pop music, movies, TV dramas and adverts. From my heavily biological point of view, this is simply explainable because the search for a mate with whom to make a nest and raise young is the prime aim of humans’ existence as of every other animals’. It is entirely predictable that these biological drives will be the central theme of virtually our entire ‘culture’. They’re certainly the central theme of all the ‘literature’ I’ve been reading. The struggle to find a mate, and the multiple mishaps and occasional disasters it triggers, is central to the Edwardian fiction I’ve been reading, to Wells’s social novels, to all E.M. Forster and to D.H. Lawrence. The struggle for money i.e. security, is central to the Agatha Christie novel I just read. It’s hard to find a TV show or movie in which the there isn’t a male and female lead who, the audience know right from the start, are destined to ‘fall in love’ i.e. pair off and mate. All of pop music is about it. Once you think clearly about this motif you realise it’s everywhere and underpins a vast amount of our contemporary and past culture.

Which is why Mrs Miniver simply wishing it wasn’t so, or her specific belief that passing this or that law in Parliament will somehow change the fundamental constitution of the human race works in the fiction, was probably admirable at the time, but looks like a tiny wave lapping against the Antarctic ice shelf in the perspective of biology and deep history.

Miss Garvice’s beliefs

Incidentally, Miss Miniver has an opposite in the novel, a Miss Garvice, ‘a tall and graceful girl of distinguished intellectual incompetence, in whom the hostess instinct seemed to be abnormally developed’. She’s one of the nine students at Imperial College who Ann meets when she returns to study there in the second half of the novel and she is against the suffragettes. She believes that ‘women lost something infinitely precious by mingling in the conflicts of life’ and:

Miss Garvice repeated again, and almost in the same words she used at every discussion, her contribution to the great question. She thought that women were not made for the struggle and turmoil of life—their place was the little world, the home; that their power lay not in votes but in influence over men and in making the minds of their children fine and splendid. ‘Women should understand men’s affairs, perhaps,’ said Miss Garvice, ‘but to mingle in them is just to sacrifice that power of influencing they can exercise now.’ (p.155)

Regardless of this as an opinion, the real point is the care with which Wells creates characters to cover off all points of view in this novel of ideas.

The plot

As you can maybe see from this summary of the dramatis personae, Ann Veronica is less a novel than a mechanism for the bringing together of a number of points of view dressed up as characters. It is designed to bring onto the stage a series of issues, and subsidiary topics, which Wells wishes to investigate, describe or discuss.

So Ann’s argument with her father about whether she can go to a fancy dress ball escalates to her being dressed up and ready to go but them actually fighting at the front door to open it. Dad wins and sends her back to her room in a rage. There’s a comic scene where she tries to climb down the drainpipe but discovers it’s not as easy to do that as a grown woman wearing fancy dress and a big cloak as it was when she was a little girl of 6 and she’s forced to spend the night in her room fuming. (It’s the kind of small psychological detail Wells captures so well, when he has her do a little dance of rage and frustration.)

Ann runs away to London

Next day, with the help of the Widgett friends, she packs a bag, smuggles it out of the house, strolls along to the station, and runs away to London. She takes a room in a cheap hotel and writes a letter to her father explaining that she’s stifling to death and needs to start a new life.

London disillusion

However, London is not all she expects. Wells writes a tour de force passage describing one long day in London, which starts with Ann arriving at Waterloo station early in the morning and experiencing a great feeling of light and space and freedom, but as the day progresses and she trudges the streets and stumbles into dirty slums thronging with very dodgy looking people, her mood drops and then, as dusk falls, she becomes aware of the sexual menace on the streets: she realises a lot of the women she’s walked past are prostitutes but, much worse, she herself is propositioned in a furtive way, by fairly decent looking men, in Piccadilly, in Mayfair, and then she’s pursued by, in effect a stalker (pages 69 to 75).

This is a) vividly and powerfully written b) fascinating because being followed, harassed and propositioned (‘the pursuit of the undesired, persistent male’) is still a highly publicised problem for women in public places today, 115 years later…

(The lost wandering through a world of vice reminded me of Dorian’s wanderings in the East End in chapter 7 of The Picture of Dorian Gray.)

People try to persuade her to return

Eventually she makes it safe and sound back to her lodgings where, over the following days, she receives a series of deputations – her father, her aunt, her brother Roddy, Mr Manning – all, in their different ways, arguing that she should go home and place herself back under her father’s supervision, a recurring theme being the social shame and stigma she’ll bring down on the family:

‘Think of what people will say!’ That became a refrain. ‘Think of what Lady Palsworthy will say! Think of what’ – So-and-so – ‘will say! What are we to tell people?… And what will Mr. Manning think?’

But she rejects them all:

‘I don’t care what any one thinks,’ said Ann Veronica. (p.83)

She is determined to start a new life. After a climactic confrontation, her father disowns her just as he disowned her disgraced sister Gwen, and exits the drawing room in the dingy hotel where she’s staying.

Mr Manning turns up and spouts his patronising view about women being Angels and Queens who the likes of him want to serve (he has, I forgot to mention, written her a long letter proposing marriage, which Ann spent a lot of time composing a calm negative reply to). She gives this Victorian bunkum short shrift.

Satire on the Fabians and ‘advanced thought’

Ann’s feminist contact, Miss Miniver, takes her to various meetings of progressives groups and societies. First a small tea party for eccentric followers of the Fabian Society:

Everybody seemed greatly concerned about the sincerity of Tolstoy. Miss Miniver said that if once she lost her faith in Tolstoy’s sincerity, nothing she felt would really matter much any more. (p.100)

Then onto an actual grand meeting featuring the leading Fabians themselves. Now Wells was himself a prominent member of the Fabians alongside George Bernard Shaw, Sidney and Beatrice Webb and many more. He refers to the others by name but gives himself the alias of ‘Mr Wilkins’. They are portrayed as fussy, high-minded, unfocused and utterly impractical. But the same goes for all the other progressive societies Miss Miniver takes Ann to, the Dress Reform Association and the Food Reform Exhibition, the Socialists and, of course, the Suffragettes. Everywhere she goes she finds high-minded people making grand speeches about how The Great Change is just around the corner, even if they all appear to want subtly different things and no-one gives any details about how the great change is going to come about. What emerges from the confusion of high-minded rhetoric is the notion that somehow, progressive or ‘advanced’ people will change the world by setting an example which all the rest of the population will be inspired to follow because of its rectitude and purity.

This implication, not only that the world was in some stupid and even obvious way WRONG, with which indeed she was quite prepared to agree, but that it needed only a few pioneers to behave as such and be thoroughly and indiscriminately ‘advanced,’ for the new order to achieve itself.

An immense emphasis on thorough-going purity of mind and body, which explains why so many were vegetarians or even vegans, and also why, although there was a ‘free love’ wing of ‘advanced’ thought, there were also many who were more strict in their morals than the Victorians, rejecting Victorian sexual hypocrisy (i.e. men could do anything as long as respectable appearances were maintained).

The more she enters into Miss Miniver’s world, the more Ann can see how all these groups feel they are trembling on the brink of some great change and yet, the more futile she realises their efforts are.

It did seem germane to the matter that so many of the people “in the van” were plain people, or faded people, or tired-looking people. It did affect the business that they all argued badly and were egotistical in their manners and inconsistent in their phrases. There were moments when she doubted whether the whole mass of movements and societies and gatherings and talks was not simply one coherent spectacle of failure protecting itself from abjection by the glamour of its own assertion.

Ann ran away from her father to gain independence, agency and self respect,

but when she heard Miss Miniver discoursing on the next step in the suffrage campaign, or read of women badgering Cabinet Ministers, padlocked to railings, or getting up in a public meeting to pipe out a demand for votes and be carried out kicking and screaming, her soul revolted. She could not part with dignity. Something as yet unformulated within her kept her estranged from all these practical aspects of her beliefs.

Ann takes a loan from Ramage

Meanwhile reality bites. Funds are running low and she discovers how little you get by pawning belongings. She goes to see nice Mr Ramage, who she met out walking and seemed so supportive, at his office. Ramage is solicitousness itself. His clerks smirk and nod when he escorts her past them out to lunch. We are left in no doubt that he is a predatory lecher and, behind his oily sympathy, he considers Ann a fine young woman to add to his list of conquests. Here, as elsewhere in the book, Wells tries to describe that odd aspect of female psychology which is that Ann senses she is being sized up but refuses to acknowledge or accept it. The result is she goes along with his invitations and plans and he, as a predator, knows exactly how to manage this kind of feminine self deception.

Anyway he runs down her employment prospects, which are very limited – does she want to become a typist? – and in the meantime offers a loan of £40 which, after some hesitation, she accepts. This, the reader understands, is all part of his powerplay but it suits her, too.

Ann resumes her study of biology

In contrast to the confused demands of suffragettes, vegetarians, socialists and the rest of them, is the calm cool biology rooms at the Central Imperial College where Ann resumes her study thanks to Ramage’s loan. Here every single element is subsumed to one purpose, to investigate the forms and structures of organic life. The leading figure in the place is a Mr Russell, a transparent pseudonym for Thomas Henry Huxley, who Wells studied under for a year in the 1890s. We don’t meet him just hear references.

The great figure of Russell, by the part he had played in the Darwinian controversies, and by the resolute effect of the grim-lipped, yellow, leonine face beneath the mane of silvery hair. (p.116)

Who the narrative does introduce us to is ‘Capes’, 32 or 3 years old, the fair-haired dissection demonstrator, who puts into practice the lessons of Russell’s daily lecture.

More advanced thought

Ann has been thrust into a world of ideas and movements. Among the many ideas she entertains the notion that the centre of a woman’s life is the problem of ‘love’ in a way it isn’t for men. She runs this by Miss Miniver who is disgusted and revolted, she espouses the high-minded puritanism of the movement, thinks men are disgusting beasts, thinks above all that sex is revolting disgusting filthy. That’s why she believes she and her people are ‘souls’, we are the pure, we are ‘advanced’ and ‘progressive’ precisely because they have left the sordid realities of the body behind. If she ever falls in love it will be utterly Platonic love.

‘Bodies! Bodies! Horrible things! We are souls. Love lives on a higher plane. We are not animals. If ever I did meet a man I could love, I should love him’ — her voice dropped again — ‘platonically.’ She made her glasses glint. ‘Absolutely platonically,’ she said.

(It’s the glinting glasses which make this so delicious, with its associations with hardness and inflexibility, dryness and sterility and, indeed, Miss Miniver is thin and wizened, not plump and procreative (unlike Flo in Mr Polly).)

The centrality of the reproductive function is forced on Ann because of her studies in biology, and the daily lectures from Darwin disciple Russel-Huxley, which harp on the central mechanism of evolution, namelyf reproduction with variation, combined with the constant battle for resources, territory and mates.

A debate about beauty

In this context Ann is puzzled by the human sense of Beauty (the obsession of late-generation Arts and Crafts puritans like Miss Miniver). This highlights a central problem with the worldview of the ‘advanced’ thinkers portrayed in novels like this, which is its lack of thought: surely a sense of Beauty can be explained in hundreds of ways and in no sense contradicts evolutionary materialism.

1) Breeding Beauty in people is obviously based on the fundamentals of breeding and fitness: Beauty is obviously culturally determined but some things seem common, in people we look for height and symmetry, not fat, old or wrinkled, a certain smooth sheen – these are obviously all based on good breeding criteria.

2) Beauty products now, in 2024, more than ever before, emphasise people’s, generally women’s, secondary sexual characteristics, high heels to create a sense of long legs and push out the buttocks (fertility), lipstick and eyeliner (to mimic sexual arousal i.e. slightly swollen lips and enlarged pupils). Our liberated times have seen a steady increase in the amount of cosmetic surgery people of both sexes are prepared to pay for.

3) The beautiful game I’ve heard plenty of sports fans talk about a ‘beautiful’ goal, a ‘beautiful’ tackle, a ‘beautiful’ game and so on, obviously in a way which isn’t directly about art and aesthetics but an appreciation of grace and proficiency and accomplishment, and anyone can see the Darwinian reasoning behind us punters being attracted towards the tallest, most handsome, most agile or skilful members of the tribe. Towards winners in every sphere.

4) Art Only a small proportion of the population spend their time discussing beauty in the sense of art and aesthetics. In 1910 I wonder if you could quantify the percentage, 10%, 5%, 1%? of the population. Certainly all the characters in E.M. Forster’s novels, which I’ve just finished reading, but how many others? I think it’s safe to say they’re not subjects which interest most people.

5) Class It’s a class thing. For most of human history art has been associated with the ruling class and great wealth. Poorer people may have made and crafted beautiful things for themselves but in the galleries and museums of the world, most of the objects were created for the rich and for rich connoisseurs, for emperors and monarchs and their courtiers. Appreciation of, let alone possession of, works of art has only percolated down to the new middle classes in, when would you say, during the nineteenth century with its newly rich industrialists? So that by the later century colonies of artists living bohemian lives could be set up and copied across (northern) Europe, groups like the pre-Raphaelites could make more affordable art for each other, and by the 1900s a group like the Bloomsburies could make and promote each other’s relatively affordable art.

But my point is snobbery. Art has always been connected with snobbery. Rich people have known they ought to appreciate art even when they have no real feel for it and art appreciation has always mixed genuine understanding with raw aristocratic aloofness. Art has always been a way for people to show off and assert their wealth or, by extension their intellectual or spiritual ‘wealth’. Witness the competitive art snobbery skewered in novels like ‘A Room with A View’ or ‘Those Barren Leaves’, or the Biggleswick section of John Buchan’s novel Mr Standfast.

In a snobbish society like England, in a society where people still quietly show off their actual wealth, or their lovely homes or second homes, their Range Rover Discoveries, their lovely little place in the country – discussing art is just another way of showing off your class, your aboveness, your specialness..

6) Art for failures. Then we descend to the social status of people like Miss Miniver and the social ‘failures’ who throng meetings of the Fabians and vegetarian societies, who’ve failed in the various obvious markers of social success (money, breeding, good family, big houses etc) but salvage their self respect with the delusory thought that they are:

a) more ‘advanced’ in their thinking about society, and thus helping to bring about the New World
b) have failed in conventional terms because they have devoted themselves to Art and the finer things in life

Thus endless, witless talk about Art and Beauty can be entirely empty of content but serve the main purpose of making the talkers feel better and giving them a spurious sense of superiority in a relentlessly competitive acquisitive society. (Compare and contrast Mrs Miniver with the character Aunt Juley in E.M. Forster’s Howards End, who is a leading figure in the Art and Literature societies of Swanage.)

Off the top of my head, those are just six ways the notion of ‘Beauty’ can be reconciled with an entirely Darwinian, materialist, sociological view of human beings and (western) society.

Ann falls in love with Capes

Anyway, thoughts of biology, burgeoning thoughts of love, exploring new ideas new freedoms, all these new sensations (unfortunately) become tangled up in Ann realising that she is falling in love with Capes the demonstrator in the lab. He is older and taller than her (tick), experienced and knowledgeable (tick), a deft demonstrator and patient explainer (tick), a good writer in the articles he’s published (tick), an all-round firm, fit love-object for a young, inexperienced, rather scared and insolvent women like Ann.

It’s disappointing. I was hoping Ann’s rebellion against the patriarchy, her exposure to all kinds of movements for social change, these would lead up to something interesting. Instead…she falls in love with an older man.

Back to discussions of ‘Beauty’ because Wells has Ann directly associate ‘beauty’ with sexual desirability which is, in my view, based on the primal need to mate.

She became aware of the modelling of his ear, of the muscles of his neck and the textures of the hair that came off his brow, the soft minute curve of eyelid that she could just see beyond his brow; she perceived all these familiar objects as though they were acutely beautiful things. They WERE, she realized, acutely beautiful things. Her sense followed the shoulders under his coat, down to where his flexible, sensitive-looking hand rested lightly upon the table. She felt him as something solid and strong and trustworthy beyond measure. The perception of him flooded her being. (p.130)

There now follow pages of her worries and anxieties and thoughts and lying awake at night while various bits of her mind try to reconcile themselves to the extremely situation which is that she wants Cape to make her his mate. Obviously she doesn’t put it like that because people don’t, people conceal the facts, the blunt facts of life behind thousands of years of guff about ‘love’.

The realization that she was in love flooded Ann Veronica’s mind, and altered the quality of all its topics…

We’re half way through the novel and we now enter the fuzzy world of love thought. It’s a moot point how much of this has ever been believed by any woman or is male projection or is Wells’s idea of what a young woman thinks.

She wanted to think of him as her beloved person, to be near him and watch him, to have him going about, doing this and that, saying this and that, unconscious of her, while she too remained unconscious of herself. To think of him as loving her would make all that different. Then he would turn his face to her, and she would have to think of herself in his eyes. She would become defensive—what she did would be the thing that mattered. He would require things of her, and she would be passionately concerned to meet his requirements.

Ramage assaults Ann

But then Ramage takes her out for an expensive dinner and on to the opera. Is it a form of sexism or misogyny or projection, or is it a plausible bit of novel writing, that Wells portrays Ann as being in radical denial of her relationship with Ramage, brushing under the carpet and repressing and ignoring every hint of a suggestion that he is seducing her and softening her up to become his mistress. She is depicted as knowing it but refusing to know it. Anyway the reader knows it so Wells is peering over the head of his characters and winking at us.

Ramage takes Ann to dinner with champagne and then onto the opera which is Tristan and Isolde, one of the great love operas, and when she comes back to her senses from being whirled away by the music, she discovers Ramage has his hand round her waist. All through dinner they discussed love and Ann thought she was having an abstract discussion and was also trying to conceal her love for Capes. She didn’t realise Ramage was making an increasingly obvious play for her.

When he finally bursts out that he loves her, worships the ground she walks on, will do anything for her, needs her, wants her etc etc, and she tries to tug her hand away and says in an urgent whisper, ‘Not here, not now, please stop talking like this’, I felt embarrassed, for them, for Wells, for the millions of men and women who have acted out the same pathetic scene, and for myself for reading this tripe. How many novels have been written about ‘love’, God help us.

The only flicker of interest is that Wells shows us just as much of Ramage, and his dialogue, to grasp what kind of man he is, but mostly the interior of Ann’s head with its immense capacity for repression (of what men are like) and self-deception (about what Ramage wants) and refuge in the threadbare phrases of the reluctant woman in this situation (‘Please. No. Not here’ etc).

Despite all this, the very next night when he begs to see her, Ann foolishly agrees. Ramage takes her to a secluded restaurant where he’s arranged a private room, with a sofa, and after dinner chatting about Wagner, closes and locks the door. It is obviously a seduction in the French manner but Ann, all unwary, doesn’t realise it, at least she doesn’t acknowledge to herself what might be happening. At least Wells tells us she isn’t acknowledging it.

At least when Ramage makes his move, grabs her and starts kissing her, Ann has had the benefit of a good education, including hockey and (Wells must have chuckled) ju-jitsu, so that she is able to punch Ramage very hard under the chin and he lets her go and staggers back. Good for her! Creepy old geezer.

Ramage’s theory of male entitlement

Ramage staggers back, they both regroup, and then he makes his position unmistakably clear. He regards the £40 he gave her not as a loan between friends but a payment upon which she became his mistress.

‘You’re mine. I’ve paid for you and helped you, and I’m going to conquer you somehow—if I have to break you to do it.’ (p.148)

When he took her for expensive meals, to the opera and then to a private room in a hotel, did she not realise these are the accepted and conventional steps towards her becoming his mistress? Of course, Ann doesn’t, because nobody has told her about this. Endless books and poems and vapid discussions of ‘Beauty’ and ‘Love’ – not one word from anyone in her life about how to handle a middle-aged man who wants to make her his mistress.

After more in the same vein, Ramage finally unlocks the door and lets her leave, and she staggers back to her lodgings, stunned. Wells is novelist enough to give Ann mixed and confused feelings about all this. She is a clever, curious if naive young woman with a scientific bent and so at first she is interested in what has taken place, it stirs up not only feelings but thoughts. Only as the evening wears on does she have an emotional reaction and start to feel disgusted and defiled, furiously trying to wipe away the feel of Ramage’s lips on hers. Nobody has ever kissed her on the lips before.

Ann’s rage against a man’s world

And she processes this into sweeping realisations about the position of women in a man’s world:

Ramage made it very clear that night that there was an ineradicable discord in life, a jarring something that must shatter all her dreams of a way of living for women that would enable them to be free and spacious and friendly with men, and that was the passionate predisposition of men to believe that the love of women can be earned and won and controlled and compelled. (p.150)

And:

For the first time, it seemed to her, she faced the facts of a woman’s position in the world — the meagre realities of such freedom as it permitted her, the almost unavoidable obligation to some individual man under which she must labour for even a foothold in the world. She had flung away from her father’s support with the finest assumption of personal independence. And here she was — in a mess because it had been impossible for her to avoid leaning upon another man. (p.153)

Ann sends Ramage’s money back

Anne goes to the post office and discovers she’s spent nearly £20 of the £40 loan. She scrapes together all the cash she can and posts it to Ramage with a promise to repay the rest. A day or so later she receives a letter back and she barely even reads the first sentence from Ramage before, in disgust, throwing it into the fire. Unfortunately it contains the £20 and before she can get it out again, the money has been burned. Well, that was stupid.

Married

From one of her fellow students at the college she receives the devastating news that Capes is married. Separated now but not actually divorced. This staggers her plans for love. (p.158)

Joining the suffragettes

The more she thinks about it the more infuriated Ann is at being trapped and cabined in a man’s world (‘savage wrath’). Also she needs a job. So she plucks up the courage to visit the suffragettes recruiting office, where she asks the usual starter questions and is shown the usual replies. Her main one is that women are economically subservient to and dependent on men, how will getting the vote change that. It’ll be a decisive start, is the reply (p.165).

There was something holding women down, holding women back, and if it wasn’t exactly man-made law, man-made law was an aspect of it.

The woman interviewing her, Miss Brett, is given quite an effective speech:

‘Oh! please don’t lose yourself in a wilderness of secondary considerations,’ she said. ‘Don’t ask me to tell you all that women can do, all that women can be. There is a new life, different from the old life of dependence, possible. If only we are not divided. If only we work together. This is the one movement that brings women of different classes together for a common purpose. If you could see how it gives them souls, women who have taken things for granted, who have given themselves up altogether to pettiness and vanity….’

The attack on Westminster

She is recruited into a squad which is sent that evening to be smuggled into Old Palace Yard from where they are to make a dash into the Palace of Westminster and try to make it through to the chamber of the House of Commons, yelling Votes for Women all the way. She is quickly intercepted, as are her comrades, by burly policemen who initially try to shoo her away but when she persists, and repeatedly strikes a copper, an inspector on horseback says she’ll have to be arrested.

According to Sylvia Hardy’s notes in the 1993 Everyman paperback edition I read, this attack on the Palace of Westminster was closely modelled on an attack carried out by the Women’s Suffrage and Political Union (WSPU) on 11 February 1908.

Ann in prison (for one month)

Wells describes the process of being held pending trial, then hustled in front of an exasperated judge who delivers the same speech as he’s given the other women before giving her a choice between being bound over to keep the peace for £40 or going to prison for a month. Since she doesn’t have any money she doesn’t have much choice.

She had vague visions of prisons as sterile houses of reform. This one is filthy. Her clothes are taken away, she’s washed in dirty water then made to put on dirty clothes reeking of their previous owner. Prison wears her down. The other inmates are scary, the food is dire, there is no privacy.

She tries to pray but knows she doesn’t have a religious bone in her body. She fantasises about Capes. She begins to repent. It dawns on her that all her behaviour has been privileged and self centred. She has made her father, aunt, brother, Teddy, Mr Manning, and Ramage unhappy and her, is she any happier? Has she discovered freedom?

She writes a letter to father asking to be forbidden and allowed to come home.

Ann returns home

Daddy relents. Aunt Mollie meets her as she leaves Canongate prison (though there is farcical comedy as both get caught up in other suffragettes being released and find themselves being hustled along to a vegetarian restaurant to take part in celebrations. It is 6 months since she ran away, 5 + 1 in prison.

The welcome home interview with her father is very frosty. She apologises. She admits to having debts but can only bring herself to mention £15 and says she borrowed from the Widgetts – telling the truth about Ramage would lead to terrible revelations.

Father even lets her resume her studies at Imperial, so no conflict there. If that had been chosen as the battleground, it would have been a bigger, more serious novel. As it was, making the trigger for her running away attendance at a fancy dress party a) makes it seem trivial and b) easy for all sides to forgive and forget.

Back at the lab

She returns to the college to find herself a heroine. Miss Klegg embraces her and shares her own determination to go to prison soon. (There’s a hint, I think, that Miss Klegg is a lesbian with a pash for Ann, p.196). Even the sceptical Miss Garvice is swayed. But most important of all is lovely Mr Capes who apologises for mocking her beliefs slightly at the last afternoon tea they all had before she went off. Everything is settled everything is happy – except she still owes Ramage and has no way of paying.

Ann gets engaged to Manning

Inexplicably – she gets engaged to her tall, mild, well-meaning fan Mr Manning. This is because, in a twisted way, she knows she loves Capes and wants to remain friends with him. When she shows Capes her engagement ring he is understandably thunderstruck.

This seems like a ludicrous development, conjured up solely to keep the plot going for another 60 pages. It doesn’t seem very like Ann though admittedly she has a wilful side. In fact what it reminds me of is of Mr Polly making his panic-stricken choice of the Larkins sisters to marry in The History of Mr Polly, the exact same sense of the character looking over the brink and diving in anyway.

Anyway, after a few pages of Mr Manning being wonderfully charming and chivalrous and promising to dedicate his life to her happiness and so on she realises he’s not listening to a word she says and she’s just a mannequin for him to hang his fine sentiments on and so she nerves herself, after a few weeks, to tell him flat, over strawberries and cream, that not only does she not love him, but that she loves another.

Manning takes this like he takes everything else about her with dramatic chivalrous sentiments, and refuses to stop adoring her, but in Ann’s mind it’s over. It’s not mentioned that she gave him his engagement ring back, presumably.

Ann declares to Capes

Having rolled back on her huge blunder of accepting Manning, Ann now has to negotiate declaring her feelings for Capes. This is more complicated and frustrating than you or I would imagine because of the Edwardian sensibilities around his marriage. After much stumbling she manages to spit it out one day in the lab and then they go for a long walk (he walks her to Waterloo station) to discuss.

Capes’s sexless marriage and affair

Capes tells Ann the story of his marriage which is that the beautiful wife he married young was (I think he’s saying) sexually reluctant or frigid, so that he had to discipline himself to a life of abnegation. Which explains why he fell in love with the wife of a good friend, who reciprocated his (sexual) passion. Here’s the passage in full so you can see how heavily it is censored and blunted, the characters themselves unable to be explicit. It’s a fascinating indication of how even two people in love, trying to be absolutely honest with each other, could not (apparently) bring themselves to be completely clear and explicit on these matters. (Or, is it an indication of the censorship applying to novels, and so an indication of the crippling constrictions placed on fiction?)

‘I married pretty young,’ said Capes. ‘I’ve got—I have to tell you this to make myself clear—a streak of ardent animal in my composition. I married—I married a woman whom I still think one of the most beautiful persons in the world. She is a year or so older than I am, and she is, well, of a very serene and proud and dignified temperament. If you met her you would, I am certain, think her as fine as I do. She has never done a really ignoble thing that I know of—never. I met her when we were both very young, as young as you are. I loved her and made love to her, and I don’t think she quite loved me back in the same way.’
He paused for a time. Ann Veronica said nothing.
‘These are the sort of things that aren’t supposed to happen. They leave them out of novels—these incompatibilities. Young people ignore them until they find themselves up against them. My wife doesn’t understand, doesn’t understand now. She despises me, I suppose…. We married, and for a time we were happy. She was fine and tender. I worshipped her and subdued myself.’
He left off abruptly. ‘Do you understand what I am talking about? It’s no good if you don’t.’
‘I think so,’ said Ann Veronica, and coloured. ‘In fact, yes, I do.’
‘Do you think of these things—these matters—as belonging to our Higher Nature or our Lower?’
‘I don’t deal in Higher Things, I tell you,’ said Ann Veronica, ‘or Lower, for the matter of that. I don’t classify.’ She hesitated. ‘Flesh and flowers are all alike to me.’
‘That’s the comfort of you. Well, after a time there came a fever in my blood. Don’t think it was anything better than fever—or a bit beautiful. It wasn’t. Quite soon, after we were married—it was just within a year—I formed a friendship with the wife of a friend, a woman eight years older than myself…. It wasn’t anything splendid, you know. It was just a shabby, stupid, furtive business that began between us. Like stealing. We dressed it in a little music…. I want you to understand clearly that I was indebted to the man in many small ways. I was mean to him…. It was the gratification of an immense necessity. We were two people with a craving. We felt like thieves. We WERE thieves…’ (p.218)

It was this inability of fiction and its characters to spit it out, to say what they meant, that it’s my understanding that D.H. Lawrence set out to address, in the process breaking the obscenity laws and eventually going into exile from a country so determined to censor the simple facts of sex and desire.

Back to the plot: they were found out and his wife demanded a separation but refused (as punishment?) to divorce him.

This explains why, although Wells shows us at least one scene which makes it perfectly clear that Capes is himself very much in love with Ann, he has, in the laboratory, been deliberately cool and standoffish toward her – because he knows that if she gets involved with him it will be difficult. So his coolness stems from chivalry and consideration for her. And this goes so far that he is cross with her for telling him she loves him. If she hadn’t, they could have gone on being good friends indefinitely. But now they have to do something about it.

He wants her to be quite clear that they won’t be allowed to be lovers in their society, in London. She can’t become the mistress of a married man. They’ll have to go away. He’ll have to chuck his job at the laboratory. She’ll have to pack in her studies. They’ll be poor. To which Ann says:

‘I want you. I want you to be my lover. I want to give myself to you. I want to be whatever I can to you.’ (p.220)

Again and again she reiterates that she places herself entirely in his hands. A week later he comes to her in the laboratory and says Now, Let’s go now, Let’s run away together. I’ve always fancies myself as a writer. I’ll chuck being a lab demonstrator and you’ll chuck being a student and we’ll run away together.’

They plan it for the end of that session or term. There’s lots of detail but the long and short of it is that they elope to Switzerland and spend the last 20 pages of the book climbing amid the beautiful scenery, telling each other how wonderful they are.

It’s a bitter disappointment that this book about a headstrong young woman who is continually infuriated at the man’s world which traps and limits her, in the end finds fulfilment in ‘a woman’s crowning experience’ of running off with the man of her dreams:

on a cultural level, falling back on the terrible tired old trap of defining herself by her relationship with a man
in their speech, falling back on terrible clichés about love beauty
on the biological level which I’m interested in, relapsing into being just another female animal finding its mate, looking up into his masterful face with lovelorn eyes, and talking about all the children she’s going to have (p.247)

What a letdown.

Capes delivers a manifesto on human nature, morality etc

Wells’s normal publisher turned the book down citing its immorality and it was damned by contemporary reviewers for the same reason. This was not only because of the immorality of the ending (young girl runs off with married man) but because the last 20 pages or so consist of them pondering and discussing their actions. And the point is that although they know what they’re doing is ‘wrong’, by the lights of social convention and morality and decency etc etc, nonetheless Capes, in particular, sets out to undermine all those conventions in a piece of sustained philosophising. It turns into a collection of anti-conventional or anti-social arguments:

– He claims there is an ‘instinct of rebellion’ which makes young people rebel against their parents – also thought of as a ‘home-leaving instinct’

– He doesn’t believe there’s a strong natural affection between parents and children; on the contrary, there is a ‘child -expelling instinct’, and he goes full throttle:

‘There’s no family uniting instinct, anyhow; it’s habit and sentiment and material convenience which hold families together after adolescence. There’s always friction, conflict, unwilling concessions. Always! I don’t believe there is any strong natural affection at all between parents and growing-up children. There wasn’t, I know, between myself and my father. I didn’t allow myself to see things as they were in those days; now I do. I bored him. I hated him…There are sentimental and traditional deferences and reverences, I know, between father and son; but that’s just exactly what prevents the development of an easy friendship. Father-worshipping sons are abnormal—and they’re no good. No good at all. One’s got to be a better man than one’s father, or what is the good of successive generations? Life is rebellion, or nothing.’

Capes continues, hoping for a time when the world faces the facts of human behaviour and doesn’t repress it, when the young won’t need to rebel ‘against customs and laws’, when both young and old generation are honest about their feelings, face the facts and so liberate themselves.

– And then he has a go at God and the notion of a supervising power or destiny:

It’s not a bit of good pretending there’s any Higher Truth or wonderful principle in this business. There isn’t… It was just a chance that we in particular hit against each other—nothing predestined about it. We just hit against each other, and here we are flying off at a tangent, a little surprised at what we are doing, all our principles abandoned, and tremendously and quite unreasonably proud of ourselves. (p.238)

– And then proceeds to give a biological or scientific justification for people doing as they please:

‘Men and women are not established things; they’re experiments, all of them. Every human being is a new thing, exists to do new things. Find the thing you want to do most intensely, make sure that’s it, and do it with all your might. If you live, well and good; if you die, well and good. Your purpose is done…’

No God. No morality. No family love. Instead, children in eternal rebellion against their parents. Individuals rebelling against society. People acting on impulse just as it pleases them. Anarchy!

– That’s not all. Capes goes on to speculate that human life is made up of two opposing elements, morality and adventure. Morality tells you what is right but it’s the spirit of adventure which moves people to action. Society requires morality but the individual longs for adventure. It’s a permanent opposition. Morality only makes sense insofar as it has to restrain people who want the opposite. Which leads him to a stylish paradox which would also have enraged Edwardian moralists:

‘There’s no sense in morality, I suppose, unless you are fundamentally immoral.’

Reaction

Forget any problems with the ‘free love’ plot. Surely it was this manifesto against all their social conventions which offended the central pieties of Victorian and Edwardian morality.

Now I realise why Wells gave Ann’s father, Mr Peters, several opinions. He is made to virulently dislike the Russell character (based, as I mentioned, on T.H. Huxley) for his impious atheistical beliefs and here, in Cape’s manifesto, you can easily see why. Capes attacks absolutely everything Ann’s father believes in and stands for.

Secondly, and more humorously, Wells gives Mr Peters an obsessive dislike of modern novels, modern novels precisely like this one, full of subversive opinions and rebellious characters. So the narrative internalised its critics by attributing to one of its characters the criticisms Well knew they’d make of it.

Mr Stanley was inclined to think the censorship should be extended to the supply of what he styled latter-day fiction; good wholesome stories were being ousted, he said, by ‘vicious, corrupting stuff’ that ‘left a bad taste in the mouth.’ (p.253)

But Wells couldn’t control his real-life critics and they uniformly castigated the book for its ‘immorality’.

Thoughts

I found it hard to read, probably out of boredom. It is a half-good novel on its chosen subject. Leaving to one side the imponderable question of whether Ann is or isn’t a believable portrait of a young Edwardian woman (how on earth would you judge or assess this?) it presents some very powerful spoken arguments against the terrible confinement and cramping of women during this period and dramatises these with enjoyable craft (I mean novelist’s skill) in the characters of the various men, from her controlling father to the weedy suitor Teddy, the outrageous semi-rapist Ramage who regards women as sex toys to the equally as controlling Tennysonian poet Manning who refuses to let a woman be anything but a mannequin on a pedestal.

But oh the falling-off of the ending. If he’d had the courage of his convictions, Wells would have had Ann say, ‘Blast all men’, realise her lesbian side and become an unapologetic devotee of not only suffagettism but other, maybe more important, women’s causes (changing women’s economic and legal positions etc).

Instead, he makes his heroine melt into ‘the strong embracing arms’ of her hero (p.226), ‘Capes, the magic man whose touch turned one to trembling fire’ (p.233) like the feeblest Victorian heroine. More than that, Wells paints her as becoming extremely, exaggeratedly submissive, with strong overtones of BDSM:

One of the things that most surprised him in her was her capacity for blind obedience. She loved to be told to do things… ‘I say,’ she reflected, ‘you are rather the master, you know.’ (p.242)

This feels completely out of kilter with everything we’ve learned about Ann in the preceding 240 pages and, what’s more, seems unpleasantly redolent of the master-servant flavour which Wells – according to his many lovers and biographers – deployed in his many real-life philandering relationships.

Lastly, the climax of the book is devoted to a collection of contemporary blasphemies and defiant beliefs, but they are all attributed to the male protagonist while Ann just sits and looks at her hero with lovestruck eyes.

What a dismal failure to carry through on the book’s initial premise and purpose.

Credit

Ann Veronica by H.G. Wells was published in 1909. References are to the 1993 Everyman paperback edition.

H.G. Wells reviews

Leave a comment

by Simon on December 30, 2024 • Permalink

Posted in Feminism, Novel

Tagged a man's world, Alice Stanley, Ann Veronica, Ann Veronica Stanley, Arts and Crafts, Aunt Mollie, Beatrice Webb, Beauty, Biology, Canongate, Central Imperial College, Committee of the Impoverished Gentlewomen’s Aid Society, Constance Widgett, D.H. Lawrence, Darwinian materialism, Dress Reform Association, emancipated woman, English literature, Fabian society, Fadden Art School, Feminism, fiction, Food Reform Exhibition, Free Love, free thinking, George Bernard Shaw, Gwen Stanley, H.G. Wells, Hetty Widgett, House of Commons, Hubert Manning, Ju-Jitsu, Lady Palsworthy, lesbian, London, male entitlement, Mayfair, Miss Brett, Miss Garvice, Miss Klegg, Miss Miniver, Miss Stanley, Morningside Park, Mr Capes, Mr Fortescue, Mr Ramage, Mr Stanley, Mr Wilkins, Mr. Widgett, Mrs Pramlay, New Malden, novel, Old Palace Yard, Palace of Westminster, patriarchy, Peter Stanley, Piccadilly, sex, sexism, sexual hypocrisy, Sidney Webb, suffragette, Suffragettes, Switzerland, Sylvia Hardy, the Matriarchate, the new Woman, the Women's Suffrage and Political Union, Thomas Henry Huxley, Tolstoy, Tredgold Women’s College, Victorian values, Votes For Women, Waterloo station, Widgett family, Wimbledon, WSPU

Posted by Simon on December 30, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/12/30/ann-veronica-h-g-wells/

The Wild Duck by Henrik Ibsen (1884)

‘Oh really! There’s no end to all these comings and goings!’
(Hjalmar Ekdal accurately summarising the busyness of an Ibsen play)

The backstory is carefully concealed and takes two acts to leak out but it is this: a generation ago Old Ekdal and Haakon Werle were in business together. Something happened whereby Old Ekdal was sent to prison, to do hard labour, and emerged a broken man, whereas Werle went on to become a business tycoon, managing a booming timber company. The play starts 20 or so years later and focuses on the sons of these two men, Hjalmar Ekdal, Old Ekdal’s son (who has become a photographer and lives in shabby poverty with his uneducated, former-serving girl wife Gina) – and rich old Werle’s son, Gregers Werle, who has grown up in a wealthy household but has a yen to improve the world. Feeling guilty for his unspecified role in Old Ekdal’s fate, Werle has given broken old Ekdel a sinecure of a job ‘copying’ papers which helps keep the Ekdal household afloat, but otherwise keeps him hidden away like a shameful secret…

Cast

Werle – merchant, factory owner and so on
Gregers Werle – his son
Mrs Sörby – Werle’s housekeeper who he plans to marry

Old Ekdal, broken, alcoholic fantasist
Hjalmar Ekdal – Old Ekdal’s son, a photographer
Gina Ekdal – Hjalmar’s wife
Hedvig – their daughter, 14 years old

Dr Relling – a doctor who lives downstairs from the Ekdals
Molvik – a former theology student who lives downstairs from the Ekdals

Graberg – book-keeper to Werle
Pettersen – servant to Werle
Jensen – hired waiter

Act 1

A grand dinner at Werle’s house which he is giving for his son, Gregers. The pair, father and son, don’t get on and only communicate via business letters. Werle is cross that Gregers invited his old schoolfriend Hjalmar because it took the number of guests to unlucky 13. We are introduced to two or three of the guests who are portrayed as fat and greedy (and named only as types – the bald guest, the fat guest, the short-sighted guest) although it is also repeated that they move in ‘Court circles’, strongly suggesting the ambience of wealth and influence which old Werle operates in.

The play starts in a studiedly indirect way: instead of going straight in with the main characters we are shown below-stairs chat between Werle’s servants, gossiping about the old man, about his reputation for being a lad when he was young and about the fate of Old Ekdal, hiw one-time business partner who ended up in prison.

The main events in Act 1 are:

1. Gregers talks to his old school-friend Hjalmar who he hasn’t seen for years and discovers that a) his training as a photographer was funded by Werle and b) Hjalmar married a former servant woman at the Werle house, Gina Hansen.

Interrupting this, Old Ekdal himself appears, he’s been working late with a colleague named Graberg the book-keeper and, the other gates being locked, the only way the pair can exit is via the living room where the grand party is happening. Old Ekdal’s appearance is like Banquo’s ghost, all the guests fall silent as he shuffles across the room and his own son, Hjalmar, turns to the fireplace in order to ignore him. Shame all round…once he’s gone conversation picks up and Mrs Sörby promises to play the piano to entertain the guests.

After interacting badly with the rich sophisticated guests (very pointedly he is made not to understand the idea that ‘vintage’ wines are older and more valued), Hjalmar makes his apologies and leaves. The other guests are being entertained by Werle’s housekeeper Mrs Sörby in the back room, which allows for:

2. A confrontation between Gregers and his father in which all kinds of things come out:

it was Werle who set Hjalmar up as a photographer, out of guilt at ruining his father
around the same time Werle fixed up for Hjalmar to marry the former maid Gina and this was because…
Gina was just the latest female servant Werle had been carrying on with, then tired off and so dismissed from his service, sent her home to live with her mother, but engineered her marriage to Hjalmar
Werle’s wife, Gregers’s mother, knew all about her husband’s infidelities and told Gregers

As to why Werle has given this whole party for his son, and invited so many outsiders, Werle says he wants to make Gregers a business opportunity, he wants to bring him into the family firm as a partner. But Gregers discerns the Machiavellian scheme beneath this – Werle is going to marry his housekeeper Mrs Sörby and so he set up this party because … he wanted to present a respectable face to the important people in his community – this is why the guests Gregers doesn’t know are at ‘his’ party, because it’s nothing to do with him, it’s to do with his father wanting to put on a show of happy father and son and, by implication, of his son happily accepting his (Werle’s) forthcoming marriage to Mrs Sörby. A tableau for public consumption.

Werle has, typically, used his son, as he always has, and as he always used and betrayed his mother. Gregers is beyond angry, he overflows with contempt for his father, who feels it.

In their final skirmishing Werle renews his offer of a partnership in the business but Gregers turns this down, revealing that he has just discovered a new purpose in life. The rest of the play reveal that this purpose is to save and redeem the much-abused Ekdel family…

Act 2

The setting switches to Hjalmar Ekdel’s photography studio, which is also the main room for Hjalmar and Gina. It’s the same evening as Werle’s dinner. Gina is sitting with their 14-year-old daughter Hedwig. Their conversation is designed to show how poor they are, not illiterate peasant poor but scrimping to make ends meet. Gina talks about the high cost of butter and both are thrilled that they’ve managed to let their spare room which will bring in a bit of extra money.

(Apparently, in the original language Gina’s speech is littered with grammar mistakes and malapropisms i.e. getting words mixed up, to indicate her lack of education, though English translations struggle to convey this.)

Old Ekdal appears with a bundle of documents to copy and shuffles across to his room. Although he tries to hide it Gina and Hedvig realise he’s got a bottle of booze. Years in prison broke him. He is an alcoholic.

Hjalmar arrives, he shows off some of the knowledge he acquired at the party (the banter about vintages) which impresses the girls but Hedvig had been telling Gina how excited she was because he promised to bring her something, but he forgot. He rummages around for the menu from the party to give her but Hedvig can’t help crying with disappointment.

Then Gregers arrives. He is rather shame-faced in front of Gina. His polite enquiries reveal that Hedvig is 14 and Gina and Hjalmar married 15 years ago. I think we are meant to deduce that Hedvig is old Werle’s child i.e. the old man got his serving maid pregnant, sent her home to her mum, who then engineered for her to be married off to the naive Hjalmar.

When she is out of the room fetching their guest a beer, Gina and Hjalmar also reveal that Hedvig has a degenerative disease of the eyes. They haven’t told her but a doctor has confirmed it. When Hjalmar says the doctor said it was hereditary Gregers starts in a way that suggests he realises it was inherited from his father. As in Ghosts, the implication seems to be that sexually transmitted infections are hereditary, which is incorrect. The symptoms of an STI such as syphilis would only be passed to Hedvig if the mother, Gina, had them but here she is apparently right as rain.

The act ends when, as part of telling them about the apartment, Gina and Hjalmar mention that there’s a spare room they want to let out. Now in fact, before the men arrived home, Gina and Hedvig had been gleefully celebrating that they’d managed to let the room and would thus be generating family income but had agreed not to tell Hjalmar till the following day. The result of this decision is that Hjalmar doesn’t know the spare room is let and when Gregers asks if he can have it, Hjalmar promptly says yes, although the girls look at each in mortification.

But the most important part of the act is when Old Man Ekdal insists on letting Gregers into their secret – this is that the entire back part of the loft, which they reveal by rolling apart two sliding doors, is a kind of menagerie: it contains hutches for rabbits and hens along with loads of pigeon roosts.

And Old Ekdal proudly displays his latest acquisition, a wild duck which was shot by Gregers’s father during a shoot, which was winged and fell into the lake and down into the water but was rescued by a plucky hunting dog. They took it back to Werle’s grand house where it didn’t thrive to Werle ordered it killed but his servant, Pettersen, who we met in Act 1, is friendly with Old Ekdal and saved it and passed it on to him. And now it’s been given pride of place in a special manger, here in the Ekdal attic.

Act 3

Same scene, the main room at Hjalmar Ekdal’s which is to be the setting of all the remaining scenes. Next morning. Hjalmar is grumpily getting on with touching up the most recent photographs. He snaps at Gina who has booked a couple to come and have their photo done. It becomes plain that he is a difficult man to live with, partly because he feels the weight of so many responsibilities.

Gregers and Hedvig: Gregers finds himself alone with Hedvig and finds out more about her, discovers that Hjalmar has stopped her going to school (because of the strain on her sight, though she doesn’t know that), promised to home school her but hasn’t found the time. Instead she helps out round the house and spends her spare time in the back room which, besides being a menageries is a lumber room full of old books which she loves to read or rather gaze at the pictures. Hjalmar realises she is a sensitive child full of untapped potential.

Gregers and Hjalmar: a lengthy exchange in which Hjalmar reveals that he doesn’t like photography and leaves most of that to Gina. His heart lies in his inventions. Some of this is tinkering, for example making not just the sliding doors which partition off the menagerie but also a kind of curtain which can be raised from the floor. He also likes stripping down, oiling and fixing his father’s antique rifle. He is, in other words, good with his hands, not with the aesthetics of photography.

And it’s now that Hjalmar reveals to Gregers he’s working on a marvellous invention which will restore the good name of the Ekdel family name. It’s only commitment to this project which keeps his head up above all these ‘petty things’ i.e. the shabby life he is forced to lead. We don’t get any detail about the invention but a strong feeling that Hjalmar is bonkers.

He also has a pistol, in fact to Gregers’ alarm he fires it in the menageries then, realising Hjalmar is here, emerges to explain that he indulges his father’s whim and fantasy that he is a still a proud lieutenant in the army. He places the gun on a shelf telling Hedvig to be careful with it as it still has a round in the chamber.

You don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to instantly suspect that a loaded gun, on a stage, must inevitably go off. From this point onwards the only question is who is going to get killed.

In fact talk of the gun triggers a monologue explaining how brave and proud Lieutenant Ekdel was in his prime, a hunter of bears, a commander of man but reveals that when he was sentenced there was a moment when he was alone with his pistol and put it to his head but… failed to pull the trigger. And then, even more upsettingly, tells Gregers about the time that he, Hjalmar, the son of a disgraced army officer, crushed by circumstance, also held the gun against his breast, but also bottled out – despite all his ill fate, determined to live (p.166).

Trying to make light of all this, Gregers says there’s something of the wild duck about Hjalmar, what with being shot and winged, and mauled by a hunting dog and plunged down to the depths of a lake. He continues the metaphor, telling his friend he is living in a poisoned atmosphere, a swamp (from which Gregers obviously means to save him) but Hjalmar becomes offended and asks him to stop (p.167).

Lunch. Gina has invited to the two men who live downstairs, Dr Relling, a doctor, and Molvik, formerly a student of theology. Lunch is, of course, the setting for several further revelations. Just as the two guests from downstairs are greedily tucking in, Old Ekdal emerges from the loft with a fresh rabbit skin, announcing that he’s just killed, skinned and salted a rabbit. Tender-stomached Molvik makes to vomit and rushes out the room.

But the main revelation is Dr Relling telling everyone that, when he was young, Gregers used to go among the cottages of the labourers up at his father’s works preaching about ‘the claim of the ideal’. In other words, Gregers is an inveterate idealist, preacher and saver of souls. This adds depth to his attempts to heal the Ekdel household.

Hjalmar has just offended everyone, especially Gina, by telling them he doesn’t like the poisonous atmosphere, when there’s a knock at the door. Just as in ‘An Enemy of the People’, the set is busier than Piccadilly Circus.

To everyone’s surprise it is the villain of the piece, old Håkon Werle. He asks to see his son in private so the others vacate the stage. Werle asks Gregers if there’s any chance of his returning home or accepting the partnership in the firm to which his son, inevitably, says No. What does he expect to achieve here? To open Hjalmar’s eyes to the truth. And does he expect Hjalmar to thank him for having his eyes opened?

Lastly the father asks his son if he’s going to return up to the works? No, he regards himself as having quit his employ. How is he going to live? Oh he has a few savings which will last as long as it takes. This exchange strongly confirms the sense that Gregers is going to carry out his mission then kill himself.

His father leaves, the other characters re-enter the stage and Gregers invites Hjalmar for a walk, he has a few things to tell him. Both Relling the doctor and Gina tell him not to go but Hjalmar asks what possible harm could there be?

Well, the audience realises, the vast harm of having the bottom ripped out of his world.

Act 4

Later the same day, Gina had handled the appointment with the couple who wanted to be photographed and is getting anxious about Hjalmar. He arrives home and is a changed man. Gregers has foolishly and selfishly told him everything. For a start he forgets that it’s his daughter’s 15th birthday tomorrow. When she mentions the wild duck he rashly says he wishes he could wring its neck which reduces her to tears. He hugs her and sends her off for her evening walk.

This allows Hjalmar to confront Gina with all the lies she’s told. She clarifies that she didn’t sleep with Werle when she was in her service, it was afterwards, when she’d gone back to live with her mother and her mother encouraged her to in order to make money. So Hedvig is old Werle’s child.

One last point: Gina has always done the household accounts so Hjalmar’s never realised how much money Werle contributed to them, allegedly pay for Old Ekdal’s copying work. Hjalmar thought he was supporting his family but turns out even this is a lie.

Gregers, in his idealistic stupidity, knocks and comes in expecting to find a scene of seraphic sweetness and light so is disappointed to find the couple in deep gloom. Gina curses him. Relling the doctor comes in, quickly learns the situation and warns them all that it’s the children who suffer most in broken marriage.

At which point there’s another knock on the door and it’s Mrs Sörby. She’s come to say goodbye because she’s going up to the works at Höidal because she’s getting married to old Werle. They all react surprised but Dr Relling reminisces when they knew each other when they were younger. At least Werle won’t beat her up like her first husband, now dead. Gregers toys with telling his father his new wife once had a thing for Dr Relling but Mrs Sörby says she’s told her husband-to-be everything about her past, no secrets at all.

She reveals she will be a useful housemeet to Werle considering that he’s going blind. Now we see the genetic link between Werle and Hedvig.

Hjalmar now invokes the same stupid idea Dr Relling accused Gregers of peddling to the labourers, ‘the claim of the ideal’, and in this spirit announces to Mrs Sörby that he pledges to pay off the entire ‘debt of honour’ i.e. all the money Werle has given to his household under cover of paying Old Ekdal. This is, obviously, a stupid and impractical thing to do.

Re-enter Hedvig who is girlishly excited because she met Mrs Sörby going out who gave her an advance present for her birthday, a letter. When she shows it the others realise it is addressed in Old Werle’s hand. Hjalmar opens it and it is a splendid gift from old Werle; that Old Ekdal need do no more work but will be awarded a pension of 100 crowns a month and when he dies, this sum will pass to Hedvig! Hedvig is, of course, thrilled and says she’ll give it to her mummy and daddy and asks why they aren’t happy.

Gregers asks Hjalmar what kind of man he is and, in effect, goads him until Hjalmar calmly tears the letter in two. He then asks Gina why the old man encouraged her to marry him and Gina reluctantly explains that Werle expected to be able to call by and shag her after her marriage. Hjalmar asks Gina point blank whether Hedvig is his child and she says she doesn’t know.

Hjalmar says he can’t stay in the same house a moment longer. Gregers says he must stay in order to win through to ‘that sublime mood of magnanimity and forgiveness’ which he is so obsessed with promoting, like all zealots, like all interfering busybodies.

Hedvig comes out of the kitchen as Hjalmar prepares to leave, he refuses to hug her, she clings on to him screaming, he can’t bear it, pushes her away and walks out. Gina says he’ll go fetch him back and exit.

This leaves Gregers along with Hedvig. She doesn’t understand why her Daddy has left, was it something she did? She mentions the wild duck and Gregers decoys the conversation onto that. Turns out she’s added the wild duck to her regular evening prayer for her father. Gregers makes the preposterous proposal that Hedvig should kill the wild duck as a sacrifice in order to win her father back, to show that she is ready to make the biggest sacrifice in her world for his love.

Gina comes back saying Hjalmar’s gone out with Dr Relling and Molvik on the piss, and ruing the interference of clever strangers.

Act 5

Next morning, heavy snow on the skylights. Gina discovers Hjalmar did go out with the boys the night before and spent the night at Dr Relling’s i.e. downstairs.

Dr Relling arrives and delivers a blistering reality check. he tells Gregers he has a bad case of inflamed scruples; he is addicted to finding heroes to worship who are not heroes at all, like this Hjalmar who was very plausible at college because he was handsome and could quote other people’s ideas and words but was always a hollow man.

Dr Relling goes on to deliver what may be the play’s Big Idea which is the crucial importance of the LIFE-LIE. This is the lie about ourselves which enables us to go on living. Dr Relling has invented a category, the demoniac, to describe Molvik, who wears it as a badge of pride which explains his behaviour. Old Ekdal has invented his own life-lie and treats the loft with its old Christmas trees and rabbits as if it’s a vast forest which the he-man hunter bravely treks through. And Hjamar had a life-lie of himself as Provider for his family who was on the cusp of making the Great Invention which would free his family, until Gregers came along to destroy it.

Gregers disapprovingly asks if Dr Relling equates his ‘life-lie’ with Gregers’ notion of ‘the ideal’ and Dr Relling says, Damn right he does.

Hedvig enters. When Gregers points out that she hasn’t killed the wild duck, Hedvig very sensibly says she woke up this morning and it seemed like a silly idea. Ah, says Gregers, that is because you are a mere child and haven’t learned the ‘joyous spirit of self-sacrifice’. He really is a sanctimonious wanker.

Gregers leaves and Old Ekdal enters from the loft. Hedvig gets him to describe how he would go about hunting and shooting a wild duck – in the chest, that’s the place, he explains. After he’s pottered out Hedvig goes over to the shelf where Hjalmar left the pistol with one bullet in it and is touching it when Gina enters and she quickly turns away.

Hjalmar knocks and enters. Hedvig runs crying over to him but he cruelly pushes her away. He’s only come for his scientific books. (It’s a telling detail that Gina tells him these books a) lack spines i.e. they’re knackered and old but at the same time b) haven’t had the pages cut i.e. he’s never read them. The entire inventor thing is a palpable life-lie.)

When Hjalmar goes to go into a bedroom to look for his autobiography and other papers he sees Hedvig again. She comes out and tries to cling to her but he pushes her away. It’s then that she starts to think about the wild duck, about Gregers’s suggestion to sacrifice it. She goes to the shelf, takes down the pistol, hides it and sneaks backstage into the loft without her parents noticing, as they fuss and fret about which suitcase Hjalmar can use to take his stuff etc.

Gina asks if he wants to take his flute but he says no, just the pistol. They both look for it but can’t find it and assume the old man’s gone off with it.

Gina is admirably restrained. With the common sense of the uneducated she doesn’t make a scene or listen to any of Hjalmar’s fluff about the ideal and instead makes him a hot breakfast and cup of coffee. Erst fressen, den der Moral. Even as he craps on with his typically male grandiloquence and self-flattering visions of going from door to door in the snow asking someone to give him shelter, Gina tops up his coffee, brings him butter and feeds the animal, and the animal softens and asks, well, would it be possible for him to maybe bunk down in the living room for a few days. A process of healing the mind through the body.

In a similar spirit he comes across the letter from old Werle which he tore up yesterday, fingers it a bit, then asks Gina to bring some glue and more paper, and pastes it back together. After all, what right does he have to deprive someone else (his father) of their property.

Unfortunately the meddling imbecile Gregers arrives but Hjalmar is tired of his guff. When Gregers tells him he has his invention to live for, Hjalmar pooh-poohs that there’ll ever be an invention; anything good has already been invented. He reveals it was Dr Relling who gave him the idea of making a Great Invention in Photography, at which Gregers and we the audience go, aha – so this was the life-lie Dr Relling gave him – and that it made Hjalmar intensely happy to have one.

Now his life is in ruins. Above all he wonders whether Hedvig has ever loved him or whether she’s overheard Mrs Sörby and the other women talking, has realised she isn’t Hjalmar’s child, and has played him for a fool, just waiting for the opportunity to get money from her real grandfather and leave. What if Werle and Mrs Sörby come along and entice her away with a better life. Now his love for his daughter has been crushed.

It’s at this point that the gunshot we’ve been waiting for ever since we saw the pistol rings out. Gregers explains that Hedvig got her grandfather to shoot the thing that means most to her, the wild duck, in order to prove her love for her father. Hjalmar takes this at face value and is transformed, saying everything’s going to be alright now.

Unfortunately Old Ekdal comes out his bedroom door wondering what the shot was about. Gregers is even more impressed, that Hedvig has shot the wild duck by herself, but when they throw open the door to the animal loft they, of course, see her lying on the floor.

They carry her out and lay her on the table while Gina shouts down the stairs for Dr Relling who comes running and, after an examination, declares her dead, shot in the heart.

Hjalmar is thrown into an absolute delirium of anguish, if only he could call her back just for a minute, just long enough to tell her how much he infinitely loves her, oh God God, why won’t you allow me to tell her etc.

They carry her body into her bedroom for privacy and Gina tells Hjalmar that now they are the child’s parents, united in sorrow.

Dr Relling tells Gregers it was suicide. The powder burn on the dress indicates it was pressed right up against her chest. Gregers tries to salvage something by saying at least the child’s death will have an ennobling effect on the parents. Dr Relling witheringly replies, Give it nine months. Hjalmar is no poet or hero. He will spend the rest of his life wallowing in sentimentality and self pity. And Dr Relling sums up, maybe, the moral of the story:

RELLING: Life wouldn’t be too bad if only these blessed people who come canvassing their ideals round everyone’s door would leave us poor souls in peace.

Comments

Secrets and lies in marriage (yawn), combined with two of the half dozen oldest stories in the world – the rich and powerful man who has adulterous affairs and children with his servants and the innocent man who is palmed off with someone else’s child.

As the play went on, the simple-minded religiose language of Gregers, who insists his friend is undergoing a great spiritual revival, began to really irritate me. He’s an interfering twat.

Similarly, I got tired of his repeated use of the key phrase ‘claim of the ideal’. a) It’s such a stupid phrase in itself, but b) Ibsen has Gregers repeat it in a totally unrealistic way, more like a parrot than a man. This obtrusive repetition of the play’s catchphrase reminded me of the over-use of the phrase ‘enemy of the people’ which dominates the second half of the play of the same name.

According to the introduction, many critics consider ‘The Wild Duck’ Ibsen’s greatest play and, certainly, all the backstories and information are released in instalments with great cunning and artistry. But, in my opinion, all this artistry is in support of a dull premise. A poor man discovers his child may not be his after all and that his family is secretly supported by wealthy man who’s probably the child’s real father…

The symbolism of the wild duck hung very heavy round the neck of the narrative from its first mention – is it a poor, delicate, wounded and vulnerable creature like the girl who adopts it? Yes.

On top of this is the sheer dumb obviousness of the loaded gun. Everyone knows if you bring a loaded gun onstage in a play it is sooner or later going to be fired, from the moment it appeared the only question was who was going to snuff it and Ibsen plays with this by having Hjalmar tell Gregers about both his and his father’s suicide attempts. But these turn out to be not-so-clever decoys from the true victim.

And I was very upset by the suicide which ends the play but not in the way Ibsen intended: rather than bursting into tears at the sacrifice of this sweet innocent I was upset by how flagrantly manipulative it was.

A digression about opera: in my late 20s and 30s I went to lots of operas, at the Royal Opera House and the English National Opera, at festivals and experimental theatres. All in all I went to about 100 operas. Eventually I started to get a bit fed up with several things about seeing opera, like how long they are and how hot it gets up in the gods at opera houses. But it was something very specific which made me stop buying tickets. I happened to see a run of four or five nineteenth-century operas in a row and in every single one the female lead died. Carmen, Tosca, Madame Butterfly, La Traviata, suddenly I had a kind of revelation. I looked around me and saw hundreds of people all being entertained by the spectacle of women being tortured, blackmailed, threatened, dying of disease or tormented into killing themselves and suddenly, in a flash, it disgusted me. The whole notion of women being subjected to grotesque suffering for my entertainment sickened me. I stopped and I’ve never been back.

So that is the mood in which I read the description of poor sweet Hedvig’s suicide and I felt that same revulsion all over again, that I was being emotionally manipulated and that a 14-year-old girl was the tool of my manipulation. Yuk!

In the same scene Hjalmar’s thrashing around begging for God to give him just one more minute so he could tell his daughter how much he loved her etc… I’d had enough.

It’s extremely well constructed, deeply pondered, the work of a master, but I didn’t like it at all.

Repelled by the exploitative melodrama of the climax, I realised I most enjoyed the opening scenes at old Werle’s party. I liked the banter between the servants Pettersen and Jensen. I liked the simple honest excess of the fat man and the bald man boasting about how much they could eat at a sitting. Gross but in a straightforward way which does nobody any harm except themselves.

A bit more subtly I liked the way Gina, with the wisdom of the uneducated, knew she didn’t have to engage in all this man talk about ideals and life-lies but simply had to lay on coffee and toast to begin to win her man back. I liked the subtlety of that scene and I think Gina emerges as the most sympathetic character, with almost all the men behaving like idiots.

But the constantly reappearing figure of Gregers, whose idiotic ‘idealism’ ruined every life he touched and killed a lovely little girl, left a very bad taste in my mouth.

James McFarlane’s introduction

In 1881 Ibsen began to draught an autobiography. He didn’t get further than his boyhood but that was enough to revive memories of: his sister, who was called Hedvig (!); his father who was bankrupted, suffering social ostracism and reducing the family to penury; the cramped attic where the Ibsen family was forced to live; the mess of furniture, old books and junk left by the previous occupants. In other words, there’s a surprising amount of autobiography in ‘The Wild Duck’.

McFarlane brings out how the world of the Ekdal household, although built on ‘a lie’ is a lovely fantasy. Hedvig lives a child’s fantasy of her father. Old Ekdal is away in his fantasies of hunting in the great pine forests. Hjalmar lives for his fantasy of becoming the Great Inventor, despite the complete lack of evidence for this. Only the down-to-earth Gina doesn’t live in a fantasy which is ironic because she is the one at the heart of the ‘lie’ i.e. the knowledge of how the entire fantasy world is sustained by Old Werle who used her as his mistress.

Like many of Ibsen’s plays ‘The Wild Duck’ comes ready-made for critical analysis. It is perfectly designed to be converted into a Sparks Notes summary of characters and themes. It is prime A-level material. ‘Discuss the role of truth and deception in…’ etc.

The central conceptual clash, I suppose, is between Dr Relling’s notion of the life-lie, the self-deceptions necessary to make the harsh realities of life bearable, to give life a meaning – and Gregers’ insistence on the claim of the wretched ‘ideal’, namely remorseless truth-telling at any cost. There’s enough there for a good essay. What McFarlane’s introduction made me realise was there’s a third big philosophy of life, which isn’t given a big name and is hiding in plain sight, and this is the worldly wisdom of Old Werle.

Werle makes no great speeches, wields no big ideas, but he represents the triumph of savoir faire, how to get on in the world, how to run a successful business for decades, how to arrange and manipulate everyone around you to suit your needs. As the play proceeds, what we see and sympathise with is the systematic destruction of all Hjalmar’s delusions: he thought he was happily married, he thought his wife was faithful, he thought he had fathered a beautiful little girl, he thought he was the provider and keeper of his little family – and he is wrong on every single on of those counts. Werle is presented as his nemesis, as the evil wizard behind all his woes. What’s not so obvious is to see it from the other end of the telescope, as a play about Werle’s triumph. This is what worldly wisdom looks like.

Apparently, we have Ibsen’s drafts of many of his plays and McFarlane explains what the drafts of ‘The Wild Duck’ tell us. This is that all the characters existed in early drafts but then he moved them around, gave them names or removed names, to create a sense of foreground and background characters. And the same with issues or events. McFarlane points out how the precise details of Old Ekdal’s crime, the murky references to Old Werle mistreating his wife, and above all the exact status of Hedvig’s paternity, these are all important but left deliberately vague and blurred, like the background in a painting.

Lastly, McFarlane devotes a page to the symbol of the wild duck itself which I found boring. He says it fulfils two functions: it means something but something different to every individual in the play; and it binds together the many strands of the play. Although it is never seen and not mentioned for long periods, in some sense it binds together not only the characters but the many themes of the play.

I can see how this is true and I can appreciate the extraordinary skill of the play’s construction. But it’s an entertainment based on the killing of a 14-year-old girl and I couldn’t overcome my simple revulsion at that fact.

Credit

I read ‘The Wild Duck’ in the 1960 translation by James McFarlane which was packaged up, along with his translations of ‘An Enemy of the People’ and ‘Rosmersholm’ into a World’s Classics paperback in 1988. I read the 2009 reprint.

Ibsen reviews

The Doll’s House (1879)
Ghosts (1881)
An Enemy of the People (1882)
The Wild Duck (1884)
Rosmersholm (1886)
Hedda Gabler (1890)
The Master Builder (1892)

Play reviews

Play reviews

Leave a comment

by Simon on October 4, 2024 • Permalink

Posted in Play, Theatre, Translation

Posted by Simon on October 4, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/10/04/the-wild-duck-henrik-ibsen/

A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen (1879)

‘Poor little Nora.’
(Torvald Helmer speaking to his wife, Nora, in A Doll’s House, page 6)

When this volume, Four Major Plays by the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen (1828 to 1906), was published by Oxford University Press as a World’s Classic paperback back in 1981, the translator and editor James McFarlane was able to claim that Ibsen was the most frequently performed dramatist in the world after Shakespeare; and that, in the early 20th century, ‘A Doll’s House’ was the world’s most performed play.

What lay behind Ibsen’s extraordinary success and dominance? Between 1850 and 1899 Ibsen wrote a staggering 27 plays but it is the run of 12 issue-led plays he wrote in the last quarter of the century which made him the father of a certain kind of earnest social realism and A Doll’s House is widely considered one of the first and best of his mature plays.

Plot summary

We are in the house of a bourgeois couple with two children. It is just before Christmas (a Christmas tree is delivered and decorated during the play) presumably to highlight bourgeois hypocrisy, because Christmas should be when a happy nuclear family celebrates itself, whereas here, of course, it is used to highlight the secrets and lies hidden behind the respectable facade.

Torvald Helmer and his wife Nora Helmer are happy because he has just been given a new job as manager of the local bank. Torvald treats his wife, Nora, with extraordinary condescension, referring to her as various types of harmless little animal – my little squirrel, my little singing bird, my pretty little pet, my pretty little songbird, the pretty little skylark, little frightened dove – and continually demeaning her. ‘helpless little thing that you are’ etc.

And Nora does indeed come across as an empty-headed noodle, given to casual fibs, pleasing herself without thought of the consequences, thinking that if she means well all will end well. Several characters refer to her as a ‘child’:

MRS LINDE: Nora! In lots of ways you are still a child. (p.38)
HELMER: The child must have her way. (p.60)

But the husband’s pet names and these references all go to beg the question, Who has kept Nora silly and childlike? And how much has she gone along with her own infantilisation?

The core of the play, the central storyline, is that some years earlier Torvald was very ill. Doctors advised him to travel to the South for his health (so was it tuberculosis?). Nora’s father was dying at the time and so Nora told Torvald that her father had given her the money necessary to go on an all-expenses-paid holiday to Italy, which they duly did, had a wonderful time, and Torvald made a complete recovery.

But she didn’t get the money from her father. She got a loan from a disgruntled employee at the bank, one Nils Krogstad, signing a document promising to make repayments with interest. During the second of the play’s three acts, this Krogstad comes calling at the Helmer family house and confronts Nora with the need to repay the money. Nora is morbidly concerned that her husband doesn’t find out her secret because she only did it for the best, for his health etc. She has been trying to pay back the loan instalments, continually asking Torvald for extra bits of housekeeping money which she then, mostly, passes on to Krogstad.

She has also been doing some work, ‘a bit of copying’ which she did late at night. In a thought which echoes through the play about the lack of rights and freedom for women, she tells Mrs Linde ‘it was almost like being a man’ (p.16).

What’s impressive about the play is the way all aspects and characters are focused on this central issue, of money and Nora’s honesty. Right at the very start Nora returns from a shopping trip where she’s been buying stuff for Christmas, and this includes her favourite treat to herself, macaroons. But when Torvald enters and they immediately go into pat-name-calling mode, she hides them from him and lies about buying any. The issue of truth and lies is made the dominant theme from the start.

This is all helped by the two other main characters, Mrs Linde and Dr Rank.

Mrs Kristine Linde pays a visit. Nora doesn’t at first recognise her, they were at school together years ago, Kristine married a man and moved away from town. Now she reveals that a) her husband has died b) his business, always shaky, collapsed and so c) she has scrimped and saved. She worked to support her mother and brothers but when her brothers grew up and moved away she felt her life was ‘unspeakable empty’ so now she has come to the capital looking for work. She is paying Nora a visit to ask if she can help.

It’s in Mrs Linde’s first visit that Nora (rashly, on impulse) admits that she didn’t use her father’s money to pay for the trip to Italy, but borrowed it – $1,200, 4,800 kronar. Obviously Mrs Linde wants to know who Nora borrowed this huge sum from but Nora is childishly mysterious about it. So this sets one plotline or theme running, with is Mrs Linde’s attempts to guess who lent Nora the money, which includes speculation that Nora might have had an affair with a man to get it, or wondering if it was off the other main character, Dr Rank.

The plot thickens in two directly connected ways. First, Nora works on Torvald and is delighted when he announces that he can find a role for Mrs Linde at the bank where he’s just been appointed manager. Second, Torvald announces that he is going to sack Krogstad. This is for a number of reasons: one is that they were both at school together which makes Krogstad believe he can act on equal terms with Torvald and refer to him casually in front of the bank’s staff and clients (p.43).

But it’s also because Krogstad, at some unspecified point in the past, was discovered to have committed fraud – forged a document – and ruined his reputation. The bank job was by way of being a second chance. To twist the knife, Krogstad’s wife has died leaving him to look after a (unspecified) number of children.

So these are all the facts which lead up to Krogstad paying Nora a visit and, while her husband is busy off in his study, being quite brutally frank with Nora. Krogstad explains that he needs the job at the bank to support his children, but also, psychologically, because he was kicked out of decent employment once, has clawed his way back ‘in’ and will not let it happen again. Therefore he blackmails Nora. He says he will tell Torvald everything about the loan he made to her and how she lied to Torvald back then (about the source of the money which paid for the Italy trip) and has lied about the money she’s been paying back ever since.

But, again, Ibsen twists the knife and takes the situation to a new level of fraughtness buy having Krogstad tell Nora that he knows she lied to him. Specifically, the IOU he drew up required a (male) guarantor and Nora swore she got her (dying) father to sign it. Krogstad has worked out that it wasn’t Nora’s father who signed it, from the simple fact (now he’s looked into it in detail) that the signature was dated three days after Nora’s father died. Conclusion: Nora faked her father’s signature on a legal document. This is fraud. She could be taken to court and, potentially, sent to prison.

So it’s no longer an issue of taking out a loan behind her husband’s back and then sustained lying about it. That would be enough to wreck Torvald’s trust in, and love for, his little squirrel. It’s now about breaking the law and plunging the whole household into ruin, destroying the family reputation and blighting her children’s lives.

So Krogstad presents his ultimatum: if he’s going to be sacked from the bank (as Torvald intends), if he’s going to be kicked out of respectable employed society for a second time, then he’s going to take Nora with him. He tells Nora that she must work on Torvald to let him keep his job, then stalks out.

With every development you admire how streamlined and focused the play is. Because a few moments after Krogstad leaves, Torvald comes in through the front door, having been out on business, and asks Nora if anyone called. She, anxious to cover everything up, lies and says ‘no-one’. But Torvald says that’s odd because he just saw Krogstad leaving. In other words, he catches her out in a lie and proceeds to deliver a pompous lecture about the wickedness of lying, in the context of Krogstad’s act of forgery and how it spread a web of lies and deceit in his own household.

HELMER: Just think how a man with a thing like that on his conscience will always be having to lie and cheat and dissemble…A fog of lies like that in a household and it spread disease and infection to every part of it. Every breath the children take in that kind of house is reeking with evil germs. (p.33)

So it’s because of Krogstad’s lies and deceit, and his over-familiarity with Torvald, that the latter wants to sack him. Obviously this powerful sermon against lies and forgery, and the ruinous impact it has on a family and on the children raised in a household of lies, has a shattering impact on impressionable, simple Nora, who tries to hide how shaken she is.

When Nora suggests that Krogstad keep his job, Torvald mistakenly thinks that from kind-heartedness, hence his lecture about Krogstad’s moral corruption, and how he could never accept that in an employee of the bank he’s just taken over.

The fifth character is Dr Rank. He visits the Helmer household almost every day, ostensibly to have a chat with his friend Torval but – you’ve guessed it – mostly because, as he reveals in the second act, he is in love with Nora. She, in that Victorian way, says, Oh I wish you hadn’t told me (p.49). Turns out he is unhappily married and has been ill and depressed but, the new thing revealed in this act is that he has had the diagnosis that he’s dying. He only has a short time to live (a month? p.45), hence his declaration of his love for Nora.

(Incidentally, Rank’s illness is repeatedly attributed to his father’s womanising i.e. we are to take it that his father infected his mother with some kind of sexually transmitted infection (syphilis?) which was passed onto him at birth and is now about to kill him. In other words, he is a walking embodiment of bourgeois sexual hypocrisy, pages 38 and 46.)

Back in the main plot, the Krogstad storyline, Nora tries everything she can to prevent Torvald sending Krogstad written notice of his dismissal, but her insistence only makes Torvald more determined to do it, and so he sends it by messenger boy. Then Rank visits and tells Nora he loves her. This scene is placed here to give enough time for Krogstad to receive the letter of dismissal and walk to the Helmer house and ring at the door. Nora sends Rank into Helmer’s study and receives Krogstad.

Furious at being dismissed, Krogstad is now more aggressive. He tells Nora he’s going to extract everything he can from the situation. It’s not even a matter of the money any more. He’s going to hang on to the IOU as a threat to betray her to the authorities, and he has in his pocket a letter to Torvald explaining the whole situation. What he wants now is not just his old job back but a higher ranking job, he wants to become Torvald’s right hand man. He tells Nora she can’t wriggle out of it now, even if she tries… and neither of them say the word but they have implied suicide as Nora’s only way out.

He leaves but not before popping the letter which reveals everything into ‘the letter box’. This is clearly a box attached to the inside of the front door but which, importantly for the plot, Nora cannot access. Only Torvald has the key to it.

Now Mrs Linde had been in a side room all this time because she had popped round on a social visit and had agreed to help Nora try on costumes for a fancy dress party the Helmers have been invited to attend that evening.

Now Nora is looking so flustered that she admits everything to Mrs Linde – that Krogstad is the man she borrowed the money off, but it’s worse than that, how she forged a signature on a document, how he’s blackmailing her, and how everything is described in the letter he’s just dropped in the (inaccessible) letter box.

Quickly sizing up the situation, Mrs Linde says the only solution is for Krogstad to be called to return and request the letter back from Torvald unread. To carry out this desperate plan, Mrs Linde asks Nora for Krogstad’s address (it’s on a card K gave her) and quickly hurries off to fetch him.

Torvald emerges from his study and goes to look at the fateful letter box but Nora desperately distracts him by saying she has to rehearse her dancing, of the tarantella, for that evening, and persuades him into the living room to play the piano for her.

This turns into the most visually and dramatically vivid thing in the play, as Nora takes up the tambourine which is part of her performance and dances faster and faster, more and more wildly, turning into a Maenad. Her aim is to do it so badly that Torvald has to commit to coaching her all evening, but she is taken over by her genuine despair.

When she finally stops Torvald agrees that he needs to coach her and then takes Rank into the dining room for dinner. During the dance Mrs Linde had arrived back at the house and snuck into the living room and, now the men have gone, tells Nora that Krogstad has left town for 24 hours but she left a note begging him to call (round). When she goes to join the men in the dining room, Nora is left onstage alone to ponder out loud that she only has hours until the game is up, her secret is revealed, her life will be over.

In Act 3 is complicated. It’s the night of the party and the Helmers are attending it. Mrs Linde is in their front room (the set of all three acts). Krogstad enters. 1) We learn that they used to be in a relationship but Mrs Linde threw Krogstad over because he was poor, in order to marry a man with a business, because she had a widowed mother and two brothers to support. But now she reveals she always kept her feelings for him and, astonishingly, proposes that they join forces: she can mother his children, they can work together.

2) Krogstad suddenly has an insight and accuses her of buttering him up solely so he will retrieve the incriminating latter and get her friend Nora off the hook. Again, surprisingly, Mrs L says no, she wants Torvald to read the letter, she wants the truth to come out: ‘These two must have the whole thing out between them’ (p.66). She can’t bear the lies and deceit she’s seen in the Helmer household over the past 24 hours.

Radiant with happiness that he is wanted by his old flame, Krogstad agrees to beat a retreat as the sounds of the tarantella (from the party upstairs) signal that the Helmers are about to return. Barely has he slipped out that Torvald and Nora return.

A married couple alone, he is rather drunk and inflamed by watching her dress and so he comes on to her, embraces her and makes it as plain as someone could in a Victorian play, that he wants to have sex. All backed up by the notion that she is his possession and that, as a husband, he has a right to sex. Nora is repelled and wriggles out of his grasp and puts the table between them.

But then Rank knocks on the door and enters. He is in a merry mood and explains to Nora that he had the final lab results today which were conclusive. He asks for a cigar, has it lit and staggers out the front door.

Torvald now opens the famous letter box, in doing so discovering that someone’s been trying to open it with a hairpin. Nora blames the kids but obviously it was her. There’s also some cards Rank slipped into it on the way out with a black cross against his name. Nora and Torvald discuss how this was always going to be the sign that he (Rank) was going to go home to die. And the shadow of death (and decay) casts a pall over Torvald’s lust and so he agrees they can go to their separate bedrooms.

Torvald goes into his study with the letters leaving Nora in an agony of anticipation and then…He emerges waving Krogstad’s letter and demanding to know if it’s true. He delivers a great long diatribe (pages 75 to 76) calls her a feather-brained woman, a hypocrite, a liar, a criminal, not fit to bring up their children. He says she takes after her father who was feckless and irresponsible. He dwells on how his life is ruined, he will be a failure. People will suspect him of being an accomplice. His reputation will be ruined. He decides he must appease Krogstad, the whole thing must be hushed up. They will go on living as man and wife but in private, the children will be brought up by someone else. All they can do is ‘preserve appearances’.

So you are impressed with the totality of his response, the complete collapse of his love for Nora, his insistence on giving in to Krogstad and hushing it up. But during all this he doesn’t notice Nora’s expression as it hardens.

And then…another dramatic development – a messenger brings a note, the maid brings it in, Torvald tears it open wondering if it’s even worse news but…It’s wonderful news: Kroigstad has sent round the IOU with regrets for what he’s done, Torvald rereads and double checks then throws IOU and letter into the fire.

And this triggers a dramatic volte-face in Torvald. He dances with delight and he reverts to the baby pet name language of earlier times. Let’s forget the whole dreadful thing and promises to teach her how not to be so silly in future:

I shall give you all the advice and guidance you need. I wouldn’t be a proper man if I didn’t find a woman doubly attractive for being so obviously helpless. (p.78)

A theme he then goes on to expand:

For a man, there’s something indescribably moving and very satisfying in knowing that he has forgiven his wife – forgiven her, completely and genuinely, from the depths of his heart. It’s as though it made her his property in a double sense: he has, as it were, given her a new life, and she becomes in a way both his wife and at the same time his child That is how you will seem to me after today, helpless, perplexed little thing that you are. Don’t worry your pretty little head about anything, Nora, just be frank and I’ll make all the decisions for you…’ (p.79)

What he doesn’t realise is that everyone one of these lines is setting up The Author’s Message. For his reaction to the whole thing has killed Nora’s love for him stone dead. Her central point (as I read it) is that she was hoping for a miracle to sort the situation, she was hoping that Torvald would take upon himself the scandal of the IOU, he would own it and stand up to Krogstad.

Instead he did the opposite: in an impassioned two-page rant he blamed Nora for everything, roped her father into his accusation, said he’d do whatever it took to appease Krogstad, and the whole thing had to be hushed up.

Nora realises that her husband is not the strong and gallant man she thought he was and that he truly loves himself more than he does Nora.

And so the scales fell from her eyes and Nora is a woman transformed. She suddenly realises her entire marriage has been a lie. She’s been living with a man who doesn’t understand her at all. And she proceeds to deliver a six-page manifesto of feminist freedom. Key points are:

– her father treated her like a doll, called her his baby doll, played with her like a doll

– in her life with Torvald she has been living hand to mouth, performing whatever tricks will keep him happy

‘I have been your doll wife, just as at home I was Daddy’s doll child.’

‘You and Daddy did me a great wrong. It’s your fault that I’ve never made anything of my life.’

– And so she must strike out on her own. She must educate herself. And not receive lessons in how to be a doll from her husband. And that is why she’s leaving him! She needs to understand herself, she needs to understand society, she needs to find out how she fits in and none of this can she do in the Doll’s House which is her marriage.

So she’s leaving. Now. Taking only her own possessions. ‘I don’t want anything of yours, either now or later.’ This is all incredibly sudden and brutally final. In a set piece passage Torvald accuses her of forgetting her ‘most sacred duty, to her husband and children’. And Nora, in a rebuttal which has had feminists leaping to their feet and cheering for nearly a century and a half, replies:

‘I have another duty equally sacred … My duty to myself!‘ (p.82)

Torvald says she is first and foremost a wife and mother but Nora simply rejects this. These are the roles and labels society has imposed on her. In reality ‘I believe that first and foremost I am an individual’.

Torvald tries to threaten her with religion but, again, Nora says all they hear about religion is the boring sermons of Pastor Hansen. religion, also, is something she has to find for herself.

He says she understands nothing of society. Well all the more reason, she replies, to find out for herself.

Nora says she doesn’t love him any more and never will again. Nothing he says or does can heal the breach. She expected him to take the guilt of the IOU upon himself but he let her down, he blamed her and thought only about himself. He is a complete stranger. Someone else can look after the children, they will do a better job anyway.

‘There must be full freedom on both sides’

Torvald takes off her ring and gives it back. Brutally, she says he may never write to her. He says can’t he even … but she says No before he can even finish the sentence. Only by a miracle of miracles but she doesn’t believe in miracles any more.

And she walks out the living room into the hall. Torvald slumps at the table with his head in his hands, then looks around, then has a wild moment of hope but … The play ends with the loud banging shut of the big front door which, in its way, has become a famous theatrical moment.

Comments

1) The play is superbly focused, assembled and streamlined in order to present its central dilemma unfolding with a horrible inexorable logic and then erupting in the powerful final set-piece speech from Nora. It moves from scene to scene with a grim relentlessness which distantly evokes the unyielding logic of the Greek tragedies. Initially I wasn’t sure I liked that. One of the appeal of novels is their scope for digression, or for the way completely new characters and storylines can just be added to give a new dimension, surprise and variety. Here everything is as focused as a German car design, sleek and immaculately assembled, making you feel horribly trapped and mesmerised.

2) In the same way, I didn’t, initially, warm to the very obvious prominence of the issues. Right from the start when Nora lies to Torvald about buying the macaroons, when he bombards her with animal pet names, when she plays up to him and insists that he knows best and only he can teach her (‘Oh, everything you do is right,’ p.69) etc, it feels like you’re being hit round the head with a male author’s version of Victorian feminism, with the issue of The New Woman, with the legal and cultural oppression of women, the babying and infantilisation of women, the tyranny of the patriarchy. It feels very manipulative the way all the lines of oppression converge on poor Nora who is not capable of bearing the burden.

3) But then, in the final ten pages, it stopped being a drama and became a manifesto, a piece of agit prop worthy of Brecht. Up till then I found it a bit too calculating to move me. But the blistering denouement of the final pages, as Nora makes her staggeringly unforgiving declaration of independence, blows away any reservations I had. It’s a phenomenal tour de force. You can see how it must have been vastly controversial at the time, and has provided a rallying cry to women readers and audiences ever since. Incredibly powerful and unforgiving, of Nora’s husband, of all men.

Credit

Four Major Plays by Henrik Ibsen, translated by James MacFarlane and Jens Arup, was published by Oxford University Press as a World’s Classic paperback in 1981.

Ibsen reviews

The Doll’s House (1879)
Ghosts (1881)
An Enemy of the People (1882)
The Wild Duck (1884)
Rosmersholm (1886)
Hedda Gabler (1890)
The Master Builder (1892)

Leave a comment

by Simon on September 27, 2024 • Permalink

Posted in Play, Theatre

Posted by Simon on September 27, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/09/27/a-dolls-house-henrik-ibsen/

Revelations by Judy Chicago @ Serpentine North

Judy Chicago is an American art celebrity, a feminist superstar, a ‘trailblazing artist, author, educator, cultural historian’, a godmother of modern American feminist art.

Born Judith Cohen in 1939, Chicago struggled against the patriarchal condescension of the art world in the mid-1960s and eventually made a number of drastic decisions. The most striking was, in 1970, changing her name to adopt the city of her birth, thus erasing the gender-controlling aspects of going by either her father or husband’s names. She assembled collectives of women artists and founded the first feminist art program in the United States at California State University, Fresno.

The Dinner Party

Her most famous work is ‘The Dinner Party’ which she began in 1974 and can be said to summarise many of her concerns and practices.

‘The Dinner Party’ is not a painting or sculpture but an installation made of multiple elements: most obviously it consists of a large triangular table on which are 39 elaborate place settings for 39 mythical and historical famous women such as Sojourner Truth, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Empress Theodora of Byzantium, Virginia Woolf and so on.

Google Images of The Dinner Party

So it is 1) an unconventional object, not painting, sculpture or quite installation, 2) setting out to address one of Chicago’s central concerns, which is the erasure and omission of eminent women from history, secular history, religious history, art history, all of it created and written by men.

It’s also a characteristic piece in that it was 3) a collaboration which required a lot of assistance from collaborating artists and assistants. Over the 8 years of its creation some 400 women worked on it, mostly volunteers.

Participants gather in The Dinner Party studio, Santa Monica, CA, 1978. Courtesy the Judy Chicago Visual Archive, Betty Boyd Dettre Library and Research Center, the National Museum of Women in the Arts.

‘The Dinner Party’ is also characteristic in that 4) it confronts women’s sexuality head-on by having all of the 39 plates being vulvar in shape i.e. based on the shape and pattern of a woman’s genitals, a pattern she came to call ‘butterfly-vagina’ imagery. Broadly speaking, this is consists of a vertical oval representing the vaginal opening, with the folds of skin surrounding it (the labia minoria, labia majora and so on [according to the anatomy diagram I’m consulting]) represented in different ways, from folds of fabric to entirely schematic geometric patterns. Each of the 39 plates is a variation on the butterfly-vagina motif but vulvar imagery re-occurs frequently throughout Chicago’s oeuvre.

Hildegarde of Bingen plate line drawing from ‘The Dinner Party’ (1977) by Judy Chicago © Judy Chicago/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo © Donald Woodman/ARS, NY Exhibition prints courtesy of the artist

‘The Dinner Party’ is also typical of Chicago’s work 5) in emphasising crafts, such as crockery and the needlework and fabrics which ornament the table, in foregrounding crafts which have traditionally, in the male-dominated art world, been relegated to a position inferior to painting and sculpture.

It is also characteristic in yet another way, in that 6) it went on tour, rather like a rock band, being shown in 16 venues in six countries on three continents to a viewing audience of 15 million. The very fact that the publicity around it emphasises these stats indicates the showbiz, world tour aspect of Chicago’s practice and reputation.

In this exhibition at Serpentine North ‘The Dinner Party’ has an alcove to itself, which, alas, doesn’t show the table itself (which has come to rest as a permanent installation at the Centre for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum, New York) but displays various resources about it. So there are print versions of the designs on each plate, along with early colour studies of the banners used in the finished work and sketchbooks that reveal the working process and components that led up to it. There are three video screens showing interviews with members of the studio, documentary footage and a film that takes visitors on a tour of the work led by Chicago herself.

Installation view of ‘Judy Chicago: Revelations’ at Serpentine North showing the alcove containing sketches and videos relating to ‘the Dinner Party’ © Judy Chicago/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Jo Underhill. Courtesy Judy Chicago and Serpentine

Maybe the last way in which ‘the Dinner Party’ is characteristic of Chicago’s work is that 7) it was made a long time ago, begun in 1974, half a century ago. Arguably, it speaks to a particular time and place and stage in the development of feminism as an ideology or collection of positions which have been eclipsed and superseded. Far from being occluded from history, nowadays you can’t go into a bookshop, turn on TV or radio, without encountering books, plays, films, documentaries and no end of other information about women in history, science, the arts and every other sphere of human activity. Which doesn’t detract from its power as a concept and a work and as a piece of feminist art history.

It’s interesting to read The Dinner Party Wikipedia article for the contemporary critical response among women critics and artists and then among Black women, to get a feel for how endlessly contentious these subjects are, and how the fiercest opposition often comes, not from the famous Patriarchy, but from members of your own movement.

Atmospheres

Talking of art from a long time ago, the second of Serpentine North’s ‘alcoves’ (or brick-lined passages) is devoted to an even older piece, or concept for multiple pieces, the use of coloured smoke.

Between 1968 and 1974, Chicago explored the male-dominated field of pyrotechnics and carried out a series of immersive, site-specific performances collectively known as ‘Atmospheres’. In these works Chicago moved right outside conventional artistic boundaries to use smoke as a medium to create expansive drawings in space. According to the curators:

Chicago saw ‘Atmospheres’ as a “gesture of liberation” that marked the release of colour previously contained within the “rigid structures” of her drawings and paintings and freed her from societal expectations.

She used smoke machines, fireworks, road flares and dry ice to ‘transform and soften the landscape’ and, crucially, to introduce ‘a feminine impulse into the environment.’ This would later become a central concern.

By their nature ephemeral, Chicago documented the smoke pieces through video and photography which is why a dozen or so photos and several videos projected onto hanging screens record the performances.

Installation view of ‘Judy Chicago: Revelations’ at Serpentine North showing the alcove/passage devoted to ‘Atmospheres’ © Judy Chicago/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Jo Underhill. Courtesy Judy Chicago and Serpentine

Apparently, 40-plus years later, Chicago was invited to recreate or develop the idea of pyrotechnic art so that alongside the 70s footage there are films of much more recent events where, in what look like big festival-style events, she set off smoke displays and what look like pretty standard firework displays, at night, in American and European cities, to the whoops and cheers of delighted crowds.

Comparing these movies from 2019 and 2020 with the original small-scale, delicate and evocative films from the 1960s shows you how far American or Western culture has fallen, how so much that was novel or strange has been sucked into show business at VIP prices, with little or no space for strange, eccentric, individual gestures and thoughts.

The footage of naked young women painted red and green dancing in the desert holding smoke canisters in their hands are powerful not only because of their youth and beauty, but because their mysterious gestures, designed to invoke women-only rites and rituals, along with the very grainy quality of the old 16mm footage, hark back to a lost age of innocence and optimism.

Then (sweet, amateurish and interesting)

‘Smoke Bodies’ from ‘Women and Smoke’ by Judy Chicago (1972) Fireworks performance performed in the California Desert © Judy Chicago/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York Photo courtesy of Through the Flower Archives Courtesy of the artist; Salon 94, New York; and Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco

Now (slick, professional and boring)

‘Purple Poem for Miami’ by Judy Chicago (2019) Fireworks performance commissioned by the Institute of Contemporary Art Miami in conjunction with the exhibition Judy ‘Chicago: A Reckoning, 2018 to 2019’© Judy Chicago/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York Photo © Donald Woodman/ARS, New York Courtesy of the artist; Salon 94, New York; and Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco

‘Turning rebellion into money’ as the Clash predicted, 50 years ago.

Revelations

But despite The Dinner Party’s central place in Chicago’s oeuvre and biography, this exhibition is not about it. The exhibition is titled ‘Revelations’ because this is the title of a book Chicago started working on in the early 70s and added to throughout the period of the creation of ‘The Dinner Party’, but which only now, 50 years later, is finally being published.

The idea is that this book expressed fundamental feminist and religious beliefs which have underpinned Chicago’s practice ever since (at one stage it was titled ‘Revelations of the Goddess’). We are told that only recently has she found the time to revise and complete the book as a kind of illustrated manuscript, a little in the style of William Blake’s self-illustrated books. To quote the blurb:

‘Revelations’ draws on Chicago’s extensive research into goddess worship and women’s history, offering readers a radical retelling of mythological creation and sharing Chicago’s lifelong vision of a just and equitable world.

Installation view of ‘Judy Chicago: Revelations’ at Serpentine North showing a display case containing pages from the illuminated edition of ‘Revelations’ © Judy Chicago/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York (photo by the author)

Not only did she complete it, but got it published. This exhibition is timed and designed to coincide with the official publication of ‘Revelations’ by quality art publisher Thames & Hudson. Which explains why the show a) displays selected pages from the final book b) is laid out according to the central concepts of feminist theology which Chicago develops in the book and c) of course, copies are stacked high for visitors to buy in the exhibition shop (or on Amazon).

Apparently, if you download the app using the QR code supplied on the wall labels, you can listen to Chicago reading excerpts from the book which vary as you walk around the gallery.

Feminist theology

‘Feminist theology’ I hear you ask? Yes, for although Chicago rejects the patriarchy and man-centric male control of the art world, of politics and the world in general, she nonetheless appears to believe in God.

As far as I could tell, this god is female. God is a woman. In this respect her thinking amounts to a mirror image of male theology: there is a God, but she is a woman and therefore created Woman first and Man simply to be her clumsy helpmate. Crucially – and a point she comes back to again and again – the most fundamental act of creation is female because it is giving birth. Only women give birth, in a shattering and dangerous and exhilarating process which has been both ignored, suppressed, rarely mentioned and never portrayed in patriarchal art. Addressing this glaring omission explains why the exhibition includes series of works addressing God the (Female) Creator and why the entire exhibition opens with a big, a really, really big wide frieze depicting the creation myth according to Judy, complete with text explaining the all-female creation of the universe in cod Biblical phraseology.

Installation view of ‘Judy Chicago: Revelations’ at Serpentine North showing ‘In the Beginning’, her feminist creation myth (1982) © Judy Chicago/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York (photo by the author)

This focus on the true, female nature of creation also explains why, later in the show, there’s a series of works depicting childbirth – not in realistically messy detail, not in blood-spattered photographs – but stylised into the mythological cartoon style Chicago developed and perfected in the later 1970s and 80s. This series is titled ‘The Birth Project’ and includes a number of finished works alongside preparatory drawings and sketches. Pretty much all of them show the act of birth from the business end, facing directly between a woman’s legs so as to see the parted thighs, the opening vulva and anus, with the breasts like two hills in the distance and, often, no head in sight.

The correlation between the female body and landscape is no accident – in this vision, women make the world and so are the landscape.

Evolution from abstract to cartoon style

The exhibition actually starts back before ‘The Dinner Party’ or ‘Atmospheres’ with a set of her earliest works, which are far more conventional drawings on paper consisting of lightly drawn geometric shapes shaded with pastel colours.

These are very soothing and calming. They reminded me a bit of the Hilma af Klimt abstracts shown at Tate Modern last year, or of the visionary drawings of Emma Kunz shown here at the Serpentine 5 years ago but much lighter and less cluttered than either. Simpler, airier. Maybe more like Agnes Martin.

Placed next to them are drawings from just a few years later which demonstrate a far more assertive use of colour, with the structure of the shapes more obviously defined, using bolder colours and with the grading of the colours from intense to pale, creating a more dynamic effect.

The curators make the point that the entire exhibition has a strong emphasis on Chicago’s drawings and sketches, maybe half the pieces here are drawings, and this is also the pretext for some quotes by Chicago on the centrality of drawing to her practice, before she gets near to the later, larger, more finished works.

Anyway I’m sharing these early pieces to highlight the next step in her development which is to treat human beings in much the same abstract shadow style, showing only the silhouette emphasised by dark shadowing, and using bold colours which shade away into pastel hues, which has the effect of making the images dynamic and, at the same time, simplified and cartoony.

There are a dozen or so images like this and I liked them, probably because I like cartoons, I like strong defined outlines which is why, for example, I worship Degas. The flexible distorted postures of the human figures also appealed because they reminded me of both Matisse and Picasso who, in different ways, did something similar to the human body, turning it into bendy dancing outlines (for example Matisse’s The Dance, 1910). Probably there’s a strong feminist message to this image, as to all the others, but after a while I stopped reading the wall captions and just enjoyed the pictures.

There’s a subset of these which appear to address how horrible men are, a series titled ‘PowerPlay’ (1982 to 1987) which, as the curators put it, ‘interrogate notions of power, social conditioning, and the construct of masculinity’ – or, as a normal person might put it, are entertainingly comic cartoons.

So, for example, we have an imagine of a muscly man grasping a steering wheel which has morphed out of a version of planet earth which is going up in flames – presumably showing how toxic masculinity has instrumentalised the earth and is driving it down the road to ruin.

There’s a comic image of one of her shadow silhouette man with his willy hanging between his legs, letting rip a flow of yellow pee onto the earth. Yes folks, toxic men pissing all over nature (presumably because women don’t pee or, if they do, it’s in a discreet, non-toxic and environmentally friendly kind of way).

Installation view of ‘Judy Chicago: Revelations’ at Serpentine North showing shadow drawings of toxic men from the early 1980s © Judy Chicago/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York (photo by the author)

Simplistic images conveying a simplistic message: man bad. Destroy environment. Woman good. Save planet.

The environmental turn

Which goes to show that, like many older artists, half-way through her career Chicago’s work began to incorporate environmental and green concerns. Probably it was there from the start, as the green movement was born around the same time as feminism and was part of the studenty-60s counterculture rebellion climate which Chicago came out of. But whatever the history of her engagement with the issue, this exhibition goes on from the cartoon men to show work in which she consciously focuses on green issues.

One wall holds 13 or so smallish prints, from 2013 and 2014, of endangered animals outlined in white on a jet black background, and each one is given a text, written in Chicago’s characteristic cursive script, pleading with us to save the planet.

These, we are told, are all part of the #CreateArtForEarth campaign which Chicago set up along with the artist Swoon and Jane Fonda (of all people) who, apparently already runs an environmental campaign called Fire Drill Fridays.

Judge for yourself but these images all seemed to me to be, well, er, a little amateurish. At about this point in the exhibition the thought occurred that a lot of Chicago’s mid-period and later art depends quite heavily on the worthiness of the cause as much as, or more than, its aesthetic quality.

A tell-tale indicator of this is the increasing presence – you might say dominance – of text in the images. By the 2010s many, if not most, of the works here contain texts which ‘educate’ – or hector and harangue – the viewer, depending on taste.

Anyway, you too can contribute to #CreateArtForEarth just by posting on social media using the hashtag. You can upload anything, paintings, photos, sculptures, writings, poems, symbols, every little helps, and you can see how this matches the collaborative and co-operational mindset which I pointed out 35 years earlier in the heady ‘Dinner Party’ days.

I don’t want to come over as unduly cynical but as I read all this it did strike me as a prime example of ‘slacktivism’, whose dictionary definition is: ‘the practice of supporting a political or social cause by means such as social media or online petitions, characterized as involving very little effort or commitment.’ Uptick ‘Save the planet’. Like ‘End consumption’. There. That’s my contribution.

Anyway, the shadow cartoon style I highlighted earlier is combined with the environmentalism in one of the most successful pieces here, ‘Rainbow Warrior’ from 1980, named after Greenpeace’s activist ship. Another of her stylised naked women, apparently giving birth to the creatures of the sea. (The ‘rainbow warrior’ is, apparently, an ocean goddess from Inuit mythology, so it’s not just a whimsical image but an ethnographically accurate one.)

‘Rainbow Warrior – for Greenpeace’ by Judy Chicago (1980) in ‘Judy Chicago: Revelations’ at Serpentine North. Collection of Paul and Rhonda Gerson © Judy Chicago/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo © Donald Woodman/ARS, New York

Digression: 1930s posters

As I processed all these images of the human form simplified down to stylised silhouettes with the heavy use of shading and often multiple outlines as if echoing or mirroring the central one, plus the use of slogans or good causes – I knew I’d seen something similar before. It took me a while to realise they were reminding me of a certain type of poster from the 1930s, generally depicting armed struggle, the classical examples being from the Spanish Civil War, but sometimes Nazi Germany or Stalin’s USSR.

It tickled me that these images of muscle-bound, toxic male warriors are pretty much the last thing in the world Chicago would want to be associated with, but hopefully you can see the stylistic similarities. Not suggesting any kind of indebtedness, just the visual similarity.

Snapshot from Google Images showing cartoon figures relying on strong outlines, shadow, ‘echoes’ of silhouettes and simple colour palettes

What if women ruled the world?

The exhibition builds up to a finale in the very big, interactive and collaborative piece, ‘What if women ruled the world?’

The main product of this is a massive quilted banner covered in images and text, lots of text. It was a highly collaborative piece. Chicago formulated 10 or so ancillary questions to the main central one, such as [if women ruled the world] ‘Would men and women be equal?’, ‘Would buildings resemble wombs?’ and so on.

Rather mind-bogglingly the first person to answer all 11 questions ‘during a call to action at the ICA Miami in December 2022’ was Nadya Tolokonnikova, founding member of the all-women Russian punk band, Pussy Riot. Her prompt and enthusiastic response resulted in her being recruited by Chicago, an inveterate collaborator, in this new project.

In the end thousands of people replied, from all round the world, and these responses were ‘digitally threaded’ together to create the finished tapestry. Here’s my photo of it in the Serpentine which shows how it is made out of panels. At the centre sits an embroidered portrait-shaped rectangle containing the master question. If you look closely you can see how scattered around the rest of the quilt are long narrow ‘letterbox’ panels, which contain the 10 ancillary questions. And all the rest of the quilt is made up of smaller, letter-shaped panels containing answers contributed by respondents around the world, most of whom are represented by photos of themselves.

You can see it in more detail, read more and watch the video, on the dedicated What if women ruled the world? website. (If you hover your cursor over the main image of the quilt it magnifies the individual panels so you can read the contributions and comments woven into it).

The exhibition here at the Serpentine includes, next to the main quilt, a set of decorated prints of each of the questions written out in Chicago’s attractive, cursive script.

A last-minute change

And with that you have completed your tour of the exhibition – laid out in Serpentine’s usual four long narrow galleries and 2 walk-through alcoves – and have arrived back at the massive frieze depicting her mythological depiction of the Female Goddess giving birth to the universe, which greeted us as we walked in the door.

But there is one last wrinkle. On the wall next to the quilt, Chicago has created a piece specially for this show. It uses what had, by the 1980s become her characteristic rainbow palette, using her trademark Prismacolor pens, across which is written a text in her (just as characteristic) cursive hand saying: ‘And God Created Life.’

Beneath this is a normal-sized print depicting God as a hermaphrodite, displaying the primary and secondary characteristics of both a woman and a man (i.e. a vulva and a penis).

What??? Right next door is the huge frieze saying that God is a woman and created the universe using female techniques, body parts and substances (breast milk becoming rivers etc) and asserting that the fundamental act of creation, suppressed by millennia of patriarchy, is the unique ability of women to give birth. God. Woman. Universe.

But now, according to the curators:

Foregrounding a shift in the artist’s perspective from an inherently female position to an all-encompassing view, the exhibition culminates in ‘And God Created Life’ (2023). This is Chicago’s most recent work included in the exhibition and calls for an expanded and inclusive concept of God, one that is neither distinctly male or female.

Here, right on the very last wall, as it were on the last page of the book, in the last frame of the movie, with no further explanation, Chicago appears to revise and contradict pretty much everything the entire previous 50 years of her art was premised on. After spending 40 years telling us God is a woman now she’s telling us that…maybe our religious thinking should transcend the simplistic binary of male or female, for something less divisive and more inclusive…

It’s a weird curveball to throw right at the very end of the entire show and begs loads of questions which remain completely unanswered.

If you like vexatious questions about feminist mythology, God and the universe you can go away and worry about this puzzling turn of events at length. Or if, like me, you like pretty pictures and enjoy seeing how an artist’s style and ideas change and develop over time, then this a stimulating, often very beautiful, sometimes funny, sometimes a bit meh, but always interesting exhibition – with a mysterious sting in the tail!

And like all the shows at the two Serpentine galleries – it’s FREE! Go and enjoy, be inspired and, maybe, a little puzzled.

Other London exhibitions which featured Chicago

Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art @ the Barbican (February 2024)
RE/SISTERS: A Lens on Gender and Ecology @ the Barbican (October 2023)
Feminine power: the divine to the demonic @ the British Museum (May 2022)
Pushing paper contemporary drawing from 1970 to now @ the British Museum (September 2019)
The World Goes Pop @ Tate Modern (November 2015)

More Serpentine reviews

More Serpentine reviews

Feminist reviews

Women in Revolt! Art and Activism in the UK 1970 to 1990 @ Tate Britain (2023)
Complete list of my women artist reviews (104 reviews and counting)
Women, Art and Society by Whitney Chadwick (2012)

Leave a comment

by Simon on May 25, 2024 • Permalink

Posted in America, Art, Exhibition, Feminism

Tagged #CreateArtForEarth, 1930s posters, America, Atmospheres, banner, butterfly-vagina imagery, Cartoon, Chicago, crafts, drawing, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Emma Kunz, Empress Theodora of Byzantium, fabrics, Female Goddess, Feminism, feminist art, Feminist theology, Fire Drill Fridays, gender, Greenpeace, hermaphrodite, Hilma af Klimt, Jane Fonda, Judith Cohen, Judy Chicago, Judy Chicago: Revelations, Nadya Tolokonnikova, needlework, patriarchy, penis, PowerPlay, Prismacolor pens, Purple Poem for Miami, Pussy Riot, quilt, quilted banner, Rainbow Warrior, Revelations, Serpentine North, sexism, sketchbook, smoke art, Smoke Bodies, Sojourner Truth, Stranded, SWOON, The Birth Project, The Dinner Party, The environmental, USA, vagina, Virginia Woolf, vulva, What if women ruled the world?, William Blake, Women and Smoke, Wrestling with the Shadow for Her Life

Posted by Simon on May 25, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/05/25/revelations-judy-chicago-serpentine-north/

Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2024 @ the Photographers’ Gallery

The annual Deutsche Börse Photography Award celebrates outstanding bodies of work that have been exhibited or published in Europe in the previous twelve months. All the nominated artists are acknowledged for their major achievements and innovations in the field of photography and contemporary culture. All the entrants are whittled down to just four artists who are displayed every spring at the Photographers’ Gallery in Soho, Central London.

This year’s four finalists are Lebohang Kganye, Gauri Gill & Rajesh Vangad, Hrair Sarkissian and VALIE EXPORT.

Lebohang Kganye (born 1990, South Africa)

Kganye’s display is the simplest. It looks like a junior school project. She has selected photos from her family album, blown them up and then stuck them on plywood stands. She’s then arranged them into four groups. The overall title is Mohlokomedi wa Tara and the four settings are: the inside of her grandmother’s kitchen; an outdoor scene with her grandfather sitting in a chair; a landscape with a herd of cows; a farm landscape with a mud house in the background.

Installation view of ‘Mohlokomedi wa Tara’ by Lebohang Kganye (2018) Photo by the author

You can’t possibly deduce it from the installation itself, but the piece is intended to commemorate, among other things, the fact that the family was forced to migrate and to change their surname by the Apartheid regime’s Land Acts and Apartheid laws. According to the curators:

Using her family archive, Kganye skilfully explores and reimagines notions of home and belonging. Her fusion of images and words not only navigates the complexity of the South African experience but also contributes to the process of decolonisation through the visualisation of personal and collective memories and knowledge.

When I was in the room before it, I noticed people going into the Kganye room and spending as little as a few seconds in it. In, look around for 10 or 15 seconds, out. There’s nothing more to see or interact with than these wooden stands displaying family photos. It’s a neat gimmick or brand, but do you think they’re contributing anything ‘to the process of decolonisation’ in South Africa?

Lebohang Kganye’s website

Gauri Gill and Rajesh Vangad

This is the most complex display, spread across two spaces and 6 or 7 walls. It is a collaboration between the photographer Gauri Gill (born 1970, India) and the painter Rajesh Vangad (born 1975, India). Over the years Gill has taken photos of rural Indian life in and around the village of Advasi and Vangad has used the techniques of the Warli culture he was born into to paint over them. The results are a fusion of photography and painting, documentation and art. Or, recognisable photos of rural India with lots of fiddly lines and details drawn onto them.

Installation view of photos from ‘Fields of Sight’ by Gauri Gill and Rajesh Vangad (2023). Photo by the author

The criteria for inclusion in the prize are not only to be featured in an exhibition in Europe but also for any books of photography published in Europe during the previous twelve months and it’s for their joint book, published in 2023, that Gill and Vangad have been nominated, and copies of it are on display here.

Installation view of copies of ‘Fields of Sight’ by Gauri Gill and Rajesh Vangad (2023). Photo by the author

Tate have bought one of their photos, ‘The Eye in the Sky, and devote a long web page to it, which explains their aims and techniques better than I can.

Hrair Sarkissian (born 1973, Syria)

Sarkissian’s works is about war and conflict. As his name suggests, he is of Armenian heritage, scion of a family which lost members in the Armenian Genocide during the Great War and the trauma of war and state repression ring through his work. Thus one of his first major projects, Executions Squares (2008 to 2010) depicts deserted public spaces in Syrian cities which were once sites of execution. The two works on display here are on the same theme of state repression.

Last Seen (2018 to 2021) is a set of 50 photos showing the locations where 50 people who were removed, arrested, interned, disappeared or abducted were last seen by their loved ones. Sarkissian travelled far and wide to locations in Argentina, Brazil, Bosnia, Kosovo and Lebanon. Some images have the appearance of a shrine where every detail has been left exactly as it was when the loved one vanished.

‘Last Seen’ (2018 to 2021) by Hrair Sarkissian

The second work is an installation which contains no photographs at all. You pass into a smallish room which is complete darkness, the walls painted black, no light, so dark I worried I might bump into one of the other visitors. No visuals just audio. Speakers on the walls play a soundscape. You totally have to have read the wall label to understand what’s going on.

First of all it’s called Deathscape and it is the recordings of forensic archaeologists exhuming bodies from the mass graves of the Spanish Civil War (1936 to 1939). Over 2,000 mass graves survive from the period in which over 100,000 civilians are buried. The soundscape of the installation mixes the sounds of shovels breaking the soil with brushes clearing away the dirt mingled with the heavy breathing of the excavators.

Quite obviously this isn’t a photograph and doesn’t include any photographs so what it is doing in a photography prize exhibition is open to question. For the tragic seriousness of the themes this is the most important display, but weighed solely as photography, it’s probably the weakest.

Hrair Sarkissian’s website

Trigger warnings

More and more art galleries post warnings at the entrance to warn visitors about dangerous material which might ‘trigger’ them. There are visitor warnings at the Royal Academy slavery exhibition and there’s a warning at the entrance to this exhibition, too.

The exhibitions have potentially triggering content including nudity, depictions of violence, and other sensitive matter.

Nudity!? The naked human form is now regarded as dangerous because it might ‘trigger’ viewers? Wow. This growing super-sensitivity can’t help but feel like a big step backwards into the Victorian era. Maybe galleries should cover up the legs of their pianos in order to prevent any suggestive thoughts. Maybe books ought to be rewritten to remove offensive material and anything which might ‘call a blush into the cheek of a young person,’ as Dickens put it in 1864. But then it’s already happening – Roald Dahl books rewritten to remove language deemed offensive (Guardian).

There are no warnings about the warnings, though, to help people who are triggered by trigger warnings. These might read: ‘This is a warning that the exhibitions contain warnings which might trigger people who are triggered by warnings about being triggered.’

VALIE EXPORT (born 1940, Austria)

All these warnings are to prepare you for the room devoted to VALIE EXPORTt, a ‘radical’ feminist artist from the late 1960s and 1970s. EXPORT became notorious ‘for her radical performances and critical examination of women’s role in society and the arts’ i.e. taking her clothes off in order to subvert the male gaze, challenge the patriarchy, reclaim her agency etc etc or, as the curators put it:

‘Pointing out entrenched patriarchal structures in mass media image culture, her fearless artistic practice exposes the role representation plays in the construction of gender, sexuality and social norms. Through photographs, filmic works, performances and installations, EXPORT deals with key issues including the body and the gaze, performance and the image, and subject and environment. For over 50 years, VALIE EXPORT has influenced generations of female artists, contorting, cutting and deforming her body to expose the profound social oppression of women – a theme that continues to resonate today.’

The single most striking thing about the EXPORT display is how old it is. It amounts to about a dozen black-and-white photos from her golden era in the 1970s and one small video installation from 1983.

In some of the photos she is shown embracing the stone walls of libraries and public buildings, dramatising the way women are forced to bend and distort themselves to fit into Patriarchal Society (Body Configurations, 1972). In several others she’s stripped naked and is crawling through a maze of electrified wires set up in her studio, acting out the snares and mazes which women have to navigate in a Patriarchal Society (Hyperbulie, 1973).

In 1970 she had a tattoo of a garter belt done on her thigh, where the garter would actually be, and then had it photographed from different angles. This is BODY SIGN ACTION from 1970 and by:

‘juxtaposing the garter with her exposed body EXPORT confronts society’s notions of female sexuality as repressed and shameful. Her work demonstrates female sexuality as liberated and prompts discussions about gender equality and autonomy.’

A pretty clear indication that, for curators, whether a photo is well composed, well shot, well lit, well developed, well framed, whether it is beautiful, evocative, emotionally powerful or aesthetically pleasing are all irrelevant; all that matters is whether it prompts discussion.

Installation view of VALIE EXPORT at the Photographers’ Gallery, showing stills from ‘Hyperbulie’ (1973) on the left, and ‘BODY SIGN ACTION’ (1970) on the right. Photo by the author

The most striking image, probably EXPORT’s greatest hit, is from a shoot when she dressed up as a wild-haired terrorist holding a machine gun, dressed in Velvet Underground-era leather, apart from the crotch, which has been removed to display her pubic hair and pudenda.

‘Aktionshose: Genitalpanik, Motiv’ 1969/2001 by VALIE EXPORT

This is by far her most famous work, so much so that it’s on the front page of her website and all across the internet if you Google the word ‘Aktionhose’. The German title translates as ‘Action Pants: Genital Panic’. Action Pants. There’s an idea for Ann Summers or Victoria’s Secret, although it also sounds like a character from Viz.

The photo records a performance where she walked into an independent cinema dressed like this, her exposed pubes at everybody’s eye level. This intervention was intended as:

‘a critique of the sexist voyeurism in film and cinema…Her unwavering gaze into the camera amplifies her challenge against a culture that objectifies and oppresses women, transforming her rage into a bold statement of empowerment and resistance.’

She did this on 22 April 1969, a few months after The Beatles released The White Album, which raises a pretty obvious question which is, Why has an artist whose heyday was fifty years ago been entered in a competition about the best photography exhibitions of 2023? This is the kind of baby boomer cultural imperialism which drives my kids nuts and some of the younger people at work occasionally complain about, too. There’s nothing in EXPORT’s display more recent than the 1980s. I guess it’s like giving a worthy old actor a Lifetime’s Achievement Award at the Oscars.

(Incidentally, this is an award for photography not performance and yet most of the photos of EXPORT – crawling through the wires or showing off her garter tattoo or wearing her crotchless trousers – weren’t taken by her, but my male photographers, in the crotchless case by Peter Hassmann. No award for him.)

VALIE EXPORT’s website

Your call

The winner of the £30,000 prize will be announced on 16 May 2024, with the other finalists each receiving £5,000. Who do you think should win and why?

Photographers’ Gallery reviews

More Photographers’ Gallery reviews

1 Comment

by Simon on March 22, 2024 • Permalink

Posted in Exhibition, Photography

Tagged 1970s, Action Pants: Genital Panic, Advasi, Aktionshose: Genitalpanik, apartheid, Armenian genocide, Austria, baby boomer, Body Configurations, BODY SIGN ACTION, Conflict, crotchless trousers, Deathscape, Deutsche Börse Photography Award, Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize, Dickens, Executions Squares, Feminism, Fields of Sight, forensic archaeology, Gauri Gill, Gauri Gill & Rajesh Vangad, Gauri Gill and Rajesh Vangad, Great War, Hrair Sarkissian, Hyperbulie, India, Last Seen, Lebohang Kganye, male gaze, mass graves, Mohlokomedi wa Tara, Motiv, nudity, patriarchal society, patriarchy, Photographers' Gallery, photography, photography prize, Politics, post-colonial, radical feminism, Rajesh Vangad, Royal Academy, South Africa, Spanish Civil War, Syria, tattoo, the beatles, The White Album, Trigger warnings, Valie Export, war

Posted by Simon on March 22, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/03/22/deutsche-borse-photography-foundation-prize-2024-the-photographers-gallery/

Soulscapes @ Dulwich Picture Gallery

Landscape painting is associated with the classical tradition, with nostalgic views of often idealised landscapes (in England, by painters such as Gainsborough and Reynolds in the 18th century, via Constable in the 19th, and onto 20th century artists as varied as Ravilious or David Hockney). Above all it is associated with white, male, historical artists, and Dulwich Picture Gallery is home to numerous works by masters of landscape painting, in Britain and Europe.

And so the thought naturally arises: why not gather together works by non-white artists, by contemporary living artists who, in a host of different ways, can offer new and interesting perspectives on a well-worn subject? Hence this exhibition, ‘a contemporary retelling of landscape by artists from the African Diaspora.’

It sounds like a simple enough proposition but raises a surprising number of questions and issues, problems and perplexities, which I try to address through the course of this review.

Scope

‘Soulscape’ features about 33 works (20 paintings, 2 textiles, 10 photos and 2 videos and a video installation) by 21 contemporary Black artists. The works include large-scale pieces, a site-specific installation, and a big new painting commission from Michaela Yearwood-Dan. They cover a wide variety of media including photography, film, tapestry and collage. And they are all very 21st century. The oldest work is from 2012 but that’s an outlier, most are much more recent. I counted five a piece from 2020, 2022 and 2023. It’s up-to-the-minute stuff.

Some of the artists I’d heard of before, namely the film-maker Isaac Julien, photographers Marcia Michael and Mónica de Miranda because I’ve been to exhibitions of their work at the Black gallery, Autograph ABP (and de Miranda also features in Tate Britain’s current Women in Revolt! exhibition). But most of the rest were, to my shame, completely new to me.

As you might expect the show goes way beyond traditional limited interpretations of ‘landscape’ to bring in a host of weighty themes and ideas. Dulwich Picture Gallery is a relatively small space, made up of four consecutive galleries (with a small broom cupboard of a mausoleum at the break between rooms 2 and 3) and the rooms have each been assigned themes or topics, being: belonging, memory, joy and transformation.

1. Belonging

Room one is arguably the best room in the show. It contains just four big works, but I liked them all. They have been selected to illustrate the theme of belonging. I’m going to quote the curators’ introduction in full:

Belonging is fundamental to the human experience. It is intrinsically linked with our relationship to landscape and our place in the world. We can feel an emotional affinity to a place through shared histories, as well as being rooted somewhere through a collective identity.

Each artist here offers a unique perspective in the way their work draws links between self and nature. They reflect on the intersections of felt experience and the traditional understanding of belonging, often against the backdrop of colonial history, migration, and the complexities of disputed territories.

‘Limestone Wall’ (2020) is a large-scale painting by Hurvin Anderson, which depicts the tropical foliage of Jamaica and explores the artist’s relationship to his ancestral homeland. The curators write:

Anderson is the youngest of eight children born to Jamaican parents, the only one born in England. His work reflects an attempt to reconcile his inherited and imagined knowledge of Jamaica with his own limited experience of the landscape. ‘Limestone Wall’ invites us to consider the liminality of belonging through a landscape that was inspired by photographs taken on a visit to Jamaica.

Limestone Wall by Hurvin Anderson (2020) © Hurvin Anderson. Courtesy the artist and Thomas Dane Gallery. Photo by Richard Ivey

‘The liminality of belonging’. For those not familiar with curatorspeak, liminality means ‘the quality of being in between two places or stages, on the verge of transitioning to something new’. It’s a term taken from anthropology where it indicates ‘the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of a rite of passage, when participants no longer hold their pre-ritual status but have not yet begun the transition to the status they will hold when the rite is complete’ (Wikipedia).

This is, as you can see, a big and complex idea to attach to a painting of what looks like some kind of terrace (of a café, maybe?) set against a lush green tropical jungle.

The idea that immigrants, emigrants, the children of people who have emigrated from one society to settle in another and who remain, in some sense, between two worlds, and two identities, is a Central Issue of Our Times, and runs like a thread through all the rooms in the exhibition.

The question which this first room raised for me was not the one the curators intended, about belonging or identity etc, but more like: Does the knowledge about the artist’s family background and immigration status (I apologise if this is insensitive phrasing, all I mean is knowledge of whether the artist comes from a family which has emigrated from an African country to somewhere in the West, Europe or America), does and should this knowledge affect our appreciation of their art?

On one level it doesn’t matter at all to me, I don’t care where any artist comes from or what their ethnic background is. I’ve come to an art gallery, I’m looking at 30 or so paintings (and a couple of videos) and deciding which ones I like purely on the basis of how they look and how they make me feel. But it matters a lot to the curators. It’s the curators who’ve made it an issue, because it’s the curators who include this ‘immigration information’ in almost every wall label, as well as in the articles which accompany the show in the Dulwich Gallery magazine.

This is the room which hosts the pieces by Marcia Michael and Mónica de Miranda. Of the Miranda triptych of photos, the curators write:

De Miranda, a Portuguese artist with Angolan ancestry, explores the poetry of belonging throughout her work. This piece, from the series ‘The sun does not rise in the north’, investigates the physical and mental concept of borders and migration. Depicting landscapes that witness hope, de Miranda examines the complexity of migrant histories in Europe in relation to the politics of land. The three figures, standing amid breaking waves, lead us to consider the limitations of belonging.

Sun rise (detail) by Mónica de Miranda (2023) Courtesy of the artist and Sabrina Amrani Gallery, Madrid

She’s also represented by ‘When words escape, flowers speak’, massive digital photos of twin Angolan sisters standing in the seemingly natural but carefully constructed landscape of the botanical gardens of Floresta da Ilha (Island Forest) in Angola’s capital city, Luanda. The curators describe this city, Luanda, as bearing ‘a history of colonial presence’. Well, yes, Luanda ‘bears’ quite a bit more than that, since Angola gained independence in November 1975 and was immediately plunged into a devastating civil war which lasted, with interludes, until 2002, leaving up to 800,000 dead and the country’s economy and infrastructure in ruins. See my reviews of:

As so often, as in Tate Modern’s excellent exhibition of African photography, the (white liberal) curators bang on at great length about the evils of the colonial period, and simply ignore the 60 years of civil wars, military coups, famines and kleptocratic dictatorships which have ravaged Africa since the end of the colonial era.

On the big wall facing the entrance is Marcia Michael‘s 2022 work, ‘Ancestral Home 45’, from the series ‘The Object of My Gaze’. It’s a photograph of a jungle scene which has been mirrored vertically and horizontally to create a dazzling image of a tropical landscape.

Kaleidoscopic and mesmerising, this photographic work is a meditation on the sense of belonging that can be evoked through immersion in nature. It was created from a series of images captured by Michael on a visit to her late mother’s homeland in Jamaica.

2. Memory

Room two is devoted to memory. The curators, again, make a number of sweeping claims:

Landscapes have the power to unlock feelings that only a particular place can activate. Sometimes these memories are nourishing and affirming and at other times they are challenging, making us feel unwelcome or excluded. The artists in this section explore the space in between these extremes.

Do landscapes ‘have the power to unlock feelings that only a particular place can activate’? Maybe. It’s a big claim, a big thought.

This room contains the most works, with 8 or so paintings and fabrics, 6 photos, plus a video and a still from a video.

The video is by Harold Offeh, is titled ‘Body Landscape Memory. Symphonic Variations on an African Air’ (2019) and is 20 minutes long. It consists of very calm, quiet shots of one, two or three Black people sitting on log benches in what looks like a typical (and typically boring) English park. There’s no dialogue or interaction. The calm scenes are accompanied by music from the early twentieth-century Black British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. There’s a web page which gives more explanation, stills and a clip from the video.

The curators give an explanation which is presumably the artist’s, namely that:

These figures are liberated from any racialised notions of victimisation, or suffrage, to reimagine the inclusive possibilities of this romanticised environment.

The complete lack of action or dialogue is the point, and I (think I) understand the political or polemical aim, to show Black people in a nice park, with none of the melodrama or negative stereotypes which usually accompany Black people in TV dramas or movies. Bit boring, though.

In a similar vein, of normalising Black figures in non-urban settings, are two big digital photos by Jermaine Francis.

‘A Pleasant Land J, Samuel Johnson, & the Spectre of Unrecognised Black Figures’ by Jermaine Francis (2023) Courtesy of Artist Jermaine Francis

According to the curators Francis:

considers the issues that arise out of interactions with our everyday environments, positioning the Black figure in rural settings to instigate conversations around power, identity and the history of the English Landscape.

‘Conversations around power, identity and the history of the English Landscape.’ These are hefty topics, walloping great ideas, to simply mention and then leave hanging. For me they are like lead weights which have been hung on the photos, which drag down your response, which channel whatever initial response you have to them as works of art, into an urgent-sounding, political-sounding straitjacket.

And the ideas are just too big to engage with. Am I meant, somehow, to review the entire history of the English landscape based on just these two photographs?

I mentioned Isaac Julien. He’s represented by a big colour photograph, a still from a 2015 film installation Julien made titled ‘Onyx Cave (Stones Against Diamonds)’. The film aimed to celebrate the beauty of natural elements. The sequence the still is from was filmed in the rarely accessible ice caves in the Vatnajökull region of Iceland. It shows a Black figure standing in a beautiful ice-white and azure cave. It is accentuated by the presence of the onyx figure, dwarfed by the magnificence of the backdrop.

But this beautiful, awesome image isn’t enough. Again the curators corral it into one of their polemical concerns about Black inclusion/exclusion from the tradition of landscape art.

Historically, these depictions of cold-climates excluded the Black figure, so its presence here challenges notions of belonging and memory.

Obviously this is an idea implicit in the image, if you choose to read it this way. But if Julien really did intend his piece to be first and foremost a celebration of the beauty of nature, I wonder how he feels about this broad aim being straitjacketed into yet another discussion about Black figures in art. It made me wonder what any of these 21 artists thought about being chosen for this exhibition primarily for the colour of their skin rather than the quality of their work.

Interlude: the Mausoleum

It’s a quirk of Dulwich Picture Gallery that half way through, between rooms 2 and 3, off to one side, there’s a smallish circular room which is actually the mausoleum of three of the founders of the gallery. It is shaped to recall a funeral monument, with urns atop the building on the outside, sarcophagi above the doors and sacrificial altars in the corners.

The back wall is flat and it’s onto this wall that Phoebe Boswell has created a ‘site-specific installation’, namely a big door-shaped projection of a video titled ‘I Dream of a Home I Cannot Know’ (2019). This is a kind of visual collage depicting everyday activities of (Black) people in a beach in Zanzibar. It’s happy and innocent and lovely, with a low soundtrack of laughter and conversation and chat as holiday makers and day trippers runs, skip, play, go swimming, handle fishing boats etc. There are four attractive stools carved from a gnarly old tree because they contain gaps and holes, for visitors to sit on and be nicely lulled. It’s more or less the only piece in the show which really does convey a sense of the happiness and relaxing quality of being out of doors. However, the curators rope it back into their concern with migration, disaporas and the artist’s multi-country identity:

The work is a reflection on belonging, community, freedom, and migration. Boswell is informed by her own history, which spans various geographies and landscapes, and her work navigates the spaces between.

3. Joy

Room 3 is devoted to the theme of Joy. It contains nine works.

The joy that that comes from connecting with nature is a deeply personal and emotional experience. Whether experienced in solitude or socially with others, this feeling is often underlined by the nourishment and release that arises from being at one with the natural world.

The artists here invite us to join with them in sharing this moment of euphoria. For some, this is conveyed through evoking the sensory delight that comes from an immersion in the beauty of nature; the smell of fresh flowers, the feel of petals between one’s fingers. For others, depicting scenes of familial joy that place Black figures into classical pastoral scenes is a way of expanding the possibility for Black bodies to experience true ease and freedom.

‘…expanding the possibility for Black bodies to experience true ease and freedom’ rather begs the question: Do Black bodies currently not experience true ease and freedom? Anywhere? What would it take for Black bodies to experience true ease and freedom? The wall labels begged loads of questions which I found worried and distracted me from the art.

Anyway, I’m afraid I found most of the pieces in this room pretty meh. After strolling through the four rooms four or five times, I came to the settled conviction that I only really liked about ten, about a third of the 33 or so works. Some I found so horrible that I could barely look at them. It would be invidious to single out the really bad ones, but here are some I thought were very average.

‘Unforeseen Journey of Self-Discovery’ by Kimathi Mafafo (2020). The medium is interesting – it’s a hand- and machine-embroidered fabric so that when you get up close, you can see the individual threads and appreciate the extraordinary amount of time and patience it must have taken to make. I just didn’t like the final image very much. Maybe you do. Tastes vary.

‘Unforeseen Journey of Self-Discovery’ by Kimathi Mafafo (2020) Image courtesy of the artist / Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery

However the curators load the work with some rather scary issues.

Mafafo explores the joyous embrace of nature as an act of resistance. The woman emerging from a cocooned veil of white muslin peers out with an air of excitement and wonder. The veil, once a sanctuary of peace and introspection, billows around her playfully as she rediscovers her world, uplifted by the natural beauty that defies the weight of patriarchy and racism.

Looking at the image cold, was your first response be that it is an act of resistance to patriarchy and racism? Maybe it was. But these struck me as being huge, troubling issues to load onto what (I think) is intending to be an image of innocence and natural beauty.

Another work which didn’t light my fire was a set of four paintings by Kimathi Donkor from her ‘Idyl’ series (2016 to 2020).

‘On Episode Seven’ by Kimathi Donkor (2020) Courtesy of the Artist and Niru Ratnam, London. Photo by Kimathi Donkor

These depict:

The concept of Black joy is a central theme of Donkor’s Idyll series. The figures in his painting display gestures of ease, relaxation and shared play between friends and family members. The pleasures of public green space and balmy weather are celebrated as precious gifts of nature, available to uplift us all.

‘Black joy’? Is this a lot different from white joy? Chinese joy? Latinx joy? Asian joy? Then comes then the polemical kicker:

For Black communities, this joy is also a form of resistance against being excluded, silenced or classed as victims.

OK, if this picture is something as serious and politically committed as ‘a form of resistance…for Black communities’, am I even allowed to have a view of whether I like it or not? The other three in the series were all in the same style and, well, I just didn’t like them very much.

On the plus side, the room contained two very good works. Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s lush multimedia piece, ‘Cassava Garden’ (2015), layers images from fashion magazines, pictures of Nigerian pop stars, and samplings from family photo albums to represent a hybrid cultural identity.

‘Cassava Garden’ by Njideka Akunyili Crosby (2015) © Njideka Akunyili Crosby. Courtesy the artist, Victoria Miro, and David Zwirner. Photo by Robert Glowacki

I always like collage, whether in its 1910s Cubism, 1920s Weimar or 1960s Pop guides, so I straightaway liked this. But I just responded to the size and feel of this work, it’s big and striking. I liked the way the repeated face of the women embedded in the fabric on the right is at right angles to the picture plane. You can’t really see them in this reproduction but in the two big green leaves at the top are embedded (from left to right) the faces of an African woman and man and they are both stunningly vivid and realistic. Maybe they’re photos somehow worked into the piece. If they were painted they’re extraordinary. And the off-centre positioning of the stalk of what is, presumably, the cassava plant. It all combines to make this one of my favourite pieces from the show. According to the curators:

The Nigerian-born American artist Njideka Akunyili Crosby uses an abstracted collage to engage with the idea of memory. The main feature is the cassava plant, whose broad leaves extend across the canvas and are layered with photographic images of the artist’s family life.

The collage is a reflection on Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s childhood trips to her ancestral land which were marked in her memory by the presence of cassava plants. She also references traditional West African material and patterns, signifying the duality of her cultural identity since making a new life in the USA.

Nearby are two more really good pieces, ‘The Climber’ (2022) and ‘Moonlight Searchers’ (2022) by Che Lovelace which depict the flora, fauna, figures, landscapes and rituals of the Caribbean. Again this catered to my slightly Asperger’s taste for squares and geometric shapes. I immediately responded to the way it consists of four rectangles bolted together, each signalling a different perspective or colour palette on the main composition. And then I liked the rather Cézanne-like way the two naked women are turning into geometric shapes or geometric shapes are emerging from their bodies, beginning to schematise or diagrammatise them. And I liked the colours, especially the green fronds of the palm tree leaves on the left.

‘Moonlight Searchers’ by Che Lovelace (2022) private collection. Courtesy of the artist, Corvi-Mora, Various Small Fires and Nicola Vassell Gallery

According to the curators:

Lovelace reflects on the loving embrace of the landscapes found in his homeland, Trinidad. His depictions of the rhythms of life on the Caribbean island are informed by his rootedness there. The result is a complex and nuanced expression of his sense of identity, as well as an exploration of postcolonialism, resistance, freedom and joy. The division of the canvases into quadrants reflects the interactions between different cultures on Trinidad. Both works show bodies at ease with nature, exploring and connecting with their surroundings.

Once again the wall label raised questions in my mind: Is this painting ‘an exploration of postcolonialism, resistance, freedom and joy’? Or are those just fashionable words thrown at these paintings, combined and recombined in an impressive number of ways but, at bottom, representing just a handful of ideas, none of which actually is actually ‘explored’. Are these terms like confetti thrown at a wedding, bouncing off the central figures and then lying around on the floor till swept up and thrown away?

4. Transformation

The Gallery often reserves the fourth and final room for Big works, acting as a climax to what came before and this exhibition is no exception, the fourth room containing four big, big paintings. The curators explain the theme of transformation thus:

Nature can be a powerful force that changes the way we see the world and its history, as well as equipping us with tools for healing physical and emotional wounds.

This begs so many questions, it left me dizzy. Is nature ‘a powerful force’? What does that mean, exactly? Surely we are part of ‘nature’, every organic thing, plus the geographical and geological environment, surely these are all part of nature? So what does it mean to say that ‘nature’ can change ‘the way we see the world’? How are these terms, ‘nature’ and ‘world’ different? Is it because the curators are assuming that ‘world’ gestures more towards the world of humans the world of culture and technology we surround ourselves with?

And what does it mean to say that ‘nature’ can change ‘the way we see…history’? How, exactly? Does walking through a park change my view of the French Revolution or the Rwanda genocide? I don’t really see the connection?

And these are all implications of just the first half of that sentence. the second half goes on to make the huge claim that ‘nature’ equips us ‘with tools for healing physical and emotional wounds’. Does it? What tools? How?

So I found myself hugely distracted by this simple couple of sentences, my mind buzzing with an explosion of implications and issues, so it took quite a while to settle down and actually look at the works in the room.

These include the one specially commissioned for the show, by Michaela Yearwood-Dan, ‘Another rest in peace – from a holy land in which we came’. It’s a huge landscape-shaped canvas filled with swirling paints, with ceramic petals and other matter stuck to the surface, and I actively disliked it. It looked like an abortion on a canvas and had absolutely no healing impact on me.

Next to it is an equally huge painting of a tropical rainforest which appears to be hanging over a river, although the paint is handled in such a way that it looks like it is melting into the river, an uncomfortable image of distortion, reminding me of the cover art for a science fiction book where some horrible radioactive disaster has struck the world. the grey blobs on the right, from a certain angle, looked like distorted skulls.

‘There Is Water at the Bottom of the Ocean’ by Ravelle Pillay (2023)

This is ‘There Is Water at the Bottom of the Ocean’ by Ravelle Pillay (2023) and, according to the curators:

In this moody and evocative painting, Pillay explores the legacies of colonialism and transformation of painful colonial histories alongside the conflicting nature of historical memory. The lush shoreline sits against the backdrop of a jungle made up of palm trees that appear weighted and changed by the histories they have witnessed. The water seems to hold spectral energy. The artist allows us to consider the way history can affect a landscape and reveal wounds that call for healing and change.

None of that was obvious to me. I just found it huge, overpowering and depressing. Maybe you think differently.

And, finally, a pair of enormous paintings, dominated by orange and browns, by Christina Kimeze, namely ‘Wader (Lido Beach)’ and ‘Interior I’, both painted in 2022. Here’s a link to the Wader, and to the Interior on Kimeze’s website. Actually, in small reproduction they scrub up quite well, the orange palette coming across very powerfully. Also, on the internet you can see installation shots of exhibitions with lots of her works together, which I imagine give a strong cumulative effect.

But here, the context of two other huge and not very appealing works dragged my reaction down into negativity. In the ‘Interior’ I found the space (is it inside a hut?) offputtingly square and rigid, and the depiction of the woman’s shape or outline disconcertingly clumsy and unappealing.

The figure of the pregnant woman in ‘The Wader’ is a lot more appealing, as is the liberal use of purple marking or strokes but, in the flesh, huge and oppressive in a small room, I found both these works the exact opposite of healing or transformative. I couldn’t wait to get away from their looming presence.

Summary

After carefully reading the 40 or so wall labels which repeatedly invoke troubling social and political issues around racism, ethnicity, migration, identity, Black oppression, Black suffering, Black exclusion and Black exploitation, I felt anything but soothed and healed by nature. I felt very troubled and anxious about some of the hottest hot-button issues in modern society. The labels of almost every work have the harassing, hectoring tone of a Guardian article lecturing you about your white privilege and asking what you are going to do for the Black Lives Matter movement. Quite stressful.

As to the healing, joyous and transformative power of nature which the main room captions repeatedly invoke, one minute in the lovely gardens surrounding Dulwich Picture Gallery, amid the deckchairs and playing children and picnicking families, was more instantly and deeply healing and calming than anything I saw in the challenging hour I spent in this difficult and very uneven exhibition.

Exhibiting artists

Njideka Akunyili Crosby
Hurvin Anderson
Michael Armitage
Phoebe Boswell
Kimathi Donkor
Jermaine Francis
Ebony G. Patterson
Alain Joséphine
Isaac Julien
Christina Kimeze
Che Lovelace
Kimathi Mafafo
Marcia Michael
Mónica de Miranda
Harold Offeh
Nengi Omuku
Sikelela Owen
Ravelle Pillay
Alberta Whittle
EVEWRIGHT
Michaela Yearwood-Dan

Promotional video

Related reviews

More Dulwich Gallery reviews

2 Comments

by Simon on February 17, 2024 • Permalink

Posted in Africa, Art, Exhibition

Tagged Africa, African diaspora, Alain Joséphine, Alberta Whittle, art, Autograph ABP, belonging, Black art, Black artists, Black communities, Black joy, Body Landscape Memory, Caribbean, cassava, Che Lovelace, Christina Kimeze, collage, contemporary art, cultural identity, Dulwich Picture Gallery, Ebony G. Patterson, emigration, English landscape, EVEWRIGHT, exhibition, film, gallery, Harold Offeh, Hurvin Anderson, I Dream of a Home I Cannot Know, Iceland, identity, immigration, Isaac Julien, Jamaica, Jermaine Francis, Joy, Kimathi Donkor, Kimathi Mafafo, landscape painting, Marcia Michael, Mónica de Miranda, memory, Michael Armitage, Michaela Yearwood-Dan, Nengi Omuku, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Painting, patriarchy, Phoebe Boswell, photography, racism, Ravelle Pillay, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Sikelela Owen, site-specific installation, Soulscapes, tapestry, textiles, The liminality of belonging, transformation, Trinidad, Vatnajökull, video, West Africa, Women in Revolt!, Zanzibar

Posted by Simon on February 17, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/02/17/soulscapes-dulwich-picture-gallery/

Search for:
Follow

Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Email Address:

Join 744 other subscribers
Topics
Africa America Ancient history ancient Rome art book British Empire British Museum China Christianity Cicero Cold War colonialism comedy Communism drama Egypt English literature exhibition Feminism fiction First World War France Freud Germany Great War H.G. Wells history Hitler imperialism India Italy Julius Caesar literary criticism Literature London love murder narrative Nazis New York novel Oscar Wilde Painting Paris photography Play poetry Politics religion Roman Empire Rome Royal Academy Rudyard Kipling Russia Samuel Beckett Satire science fiction sculpture Second World War sex Shakespeare Sherlock Holmes short stories Slavery South Africa Spain Stalin suicide Surrealism Tate Britain theatre thriller Translation war
Categories
- Adventure (148)
- Africa (118)
- America (105)
- American literature (32)
- Ancient history (145)
- Anglo Saxon (24)
- Antisemitism (4)
- Archaeology (3)
- Architecture (27)
- Art (619)
- Australia (11)
- Autobiography (32)
- Biography (84)
- Biology (10)
- Black art (5)
- Books (780)
- British Empire (19)
- Buddhism (2)
- Cartoon (14)
- Chemistry (4)
- Childrens (22)
- China (15)
- Christianity (77)
- Classical music (20)
- Comedy (194)
- Communism (27)
- Concert (15)
- Contemporary classical music (21)
- Cosmology (4)
- Crime (32)
- Crusades (9)
- Design (7)
- Detective stories (70)
- drawing (5)
- English literature (182)
- Environment (9)
- Essays (31)
- European History (176)
- Evolution (4)
- Exhibition (584)
- fairy tale (3)
- Fantasy (32)
- Fashion (6)
- Feminism (48)
- Film (23)
- Flowers (4)
- France (64)
- French literature (52)
- German literature (4)
- Germany (26)
- Graphic novel (3)
- Great War (77)
- History (482)
- Holocaust (15)
- Horror (12)
- Illustration (13)
- imperialism (28)
- India (8)
- Irish literature (36)
- Islamic terrorism (8)
- Italy (4)
- Japan (18)
- Latin America (13)
- Latin literature (3)
- Law (4)
- Literary criticism (97)
- Literature (173)
- Marxism (1)
- Mathematics (6)
- Mexico (14)
- Middle Ages (72)
- Middle East (16)
- Museum (14)
- Music (1)
- Mythology (18)
- Nature (8)
- Noir (18)
- Novel (703)
- Novella (12)
- Old English (23)
- Opera (1)
- Painting (64)
- Philosophy (42)
- Photography (133)
- Play (130)
- Poetry (103)
- Politics (115)
- Prints (12)
- Psychoanalysis (19)
- Psychology (5)
- queer (1)
- Radio (3)
- Rock music (6)
- Russia (19)
- Russian literature (18)
- Saga (39)
- Satire (1)
- Science (29)
- Science Fiction (130)
- Sculpture (57)
- Second World War (111)
- Sex (42)
- Short stories (167)
- Slavery (48)
- Spain (2)
- Spy novel (71)
- Sweden (4)
- Theatre (141)
- Theology (4)
- Thriller (239)
- Tragedy (2)
- Translation (93)
- Travel writing (18)
- Turkey (3)
- TV (11)
- Uncategorized (11)
- Vietnam War (7)
- Walks (14)
- War (267)
- World War One (19)

Books & Boots

All posts tagged patriarchy

Virginia Woolf and windows

1. Avoidance

2. Dissociation

3. Passive observation

4. Looking out from the prison house of home

5. Ending conversations

6. Out the windows of cars and taxis

7. Trains

Summary

Related links

Related reviews

Share this:

Selected Essays by Virginia Woolf – 3. Women and Fiction

Women and fiction

1. The Feminine Note in Fiction (1905: 2 pages)

2. Women Novelists (1918: 3 pages)

3. Women and Fiction (1929: 8 pages)

4. Professions for Women (1931: 5 pages)

6. Why? (1934)

Credit

Related links

Related reviews

Share this:

The Years by Virginia Woolf (1937)

‘The Years’ and ‘Three Guineas’

The soldiers’ version

‘Three Guineas’ feminism

Structure

The Waves and The Years

1880. The Pargiter family at Abercorn Terrace wait for their mother to die (82 pages)

1891. Eleanor goes to watch brother Morris in the law courts, Colonel Pargiter visits his brother, Sir Digby Pargiter. Death of Parnell (37 pages)

1907. Digby and Eugénie attend a party then come home to their daughter, Sara (15 pages)

Identities and selves

1908. Martin views the Digby house then visits Eleanor looking after their father (12 pages)

1910. Rise visits Sara and Maggy, Kitty goes to the opera, death of Edward VII (29 pages)

1911. Eleanor visits Morris and Celia in Wittering (20 pages)

1913. The family home is locked up and Crosby moves to Richmond (8 pages)

1914. Martin goes to the City, Hyde Park, then to a party (52 pages)

Kitty takes a train to her castle in the north

1917. Eleanor goes to dinner with Renny and Maggie, there’s an air raid (20 pages)

1918. Crosby and the armistice (3 pages)

Present day (123 pages)

Eleanor back from India, North back from Africa

Come down in the world

The big party scene

Family members

Pargiter family

Digby family

Malone family

Seeing life through a window

Disassociation

Credit

Related links

Related reviews

Share this:

Three Guineas by Virginia Woolf (1938)

Part 1. Women’s education

Her correspondent’s suggested ways of opposing war

Woolf’s blistering descriptions of the patriarchy

Shortcoming 1. Lack of analysis of the causes of war

Men, status and silly costumes

Shortcoming 2. Over-reliance on biography as her primary evidence

And newspapers

The second letter: funding a women’s college

No to teaching English literature

Woolf explains women’s war patriotism as an escape from domestic oppression

Shortcoming 3. Ignorance of the wider world

Giving a guinea

Part 2. The professions

Sexism and misogyny

Fascists and Nazis

Pay for housework

The procession

Giving the second guinea

Antigone saying No to male tyranny

No risk because of exclusion

Part 3. The Outsider Society

Failure of the universities