The Blotted Line

Woolf, Virginia. The Years. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973.

The Years, during her lifetime Virginia Woolf’s most popular novel, is one of the most powerful indictments of ‘Victorianism’ ever written. Its first part follows the fortunes of the Pargiters, a middle-class London family, from 1880 to 1917: Colonel Abel Pargiter, hag-ridden by his invalid wife and fly-blown mistress; and all his children, fighting to escape a social system with a fixed pattern of repression.

The second part finds the children grown up in the 1930s, ostensibly independent, but spiritually maimed by their upbringing…the Victorian patriarchy has died to leave its successors willing to re-make society, but drained of the power to formulate a new system.

This description, which I’ve taken from the back cover of the Penguin edition, was the determining factor in following my reading of Orlando with The Years. Intrigued by the former work’s brief portrayal of the Victorian period, The Years seemed the most likely text to expand upon that critique. As with most of Woolf’s writing, however, The Years cannot be easily summed up in 150 words or so. This work is much more than a critique of Victorianism.

To begin, I would suggest that The Years is divided into three, rather than two distinct sections[i]: the first third of the work (104 pages) covers the years 1880 to 1891, the second third of the work (140 pages) covers the years 1907 to 1918, while the final third of the work (101 pages) covers a single evening in the “Present Day” (likely indicating c.1937 when The Years was first printed). The text, then, can be roughly divided into “Victorian,” early modernist, and late modernist “eras”.

The “Victorian” segment of the book takes as its central characters Colonel Pargiter, his wife Rose, his mistress Mira, and his seven children: Eleanor, Edward, Rose, Delia, Martin, Milly, and Morris. Among others introduced are Pargiter’s niece Kitty, his sister Eugenie (her husband Digby, and children Sarah/Sally and Maggie) and the Pargiter servant, Crosby. The early “modernist” section of the book shifts to focus on the seven children, their own spouses and children, Maggie and Sarah, and Eleanor’s friend Nicholas. The text, then, critiques not one, but two distinct generations of the extended Pargiter family (its servants, in-laws, and friends), bringing them together in the final party in “present day” (by this time Eleanor, the eldest of the Pargiter children, is in her eighties, and grandchildren Peggy and North, who observe most of the evening, are well in their thirties).

The physical juxtaposition of two generations in a single house during the final party mirrors the juxtaposition of the two generations in the first two segments of the text, and allows the reader to contrast two distinct versions of “spiritual maim[ing]” which the cover summary identifies as the result of Victorian patriarchy.

Certainly, the Pargiter children’s ability to meaningfully communicate with each other is destroyed by their Victorian upbringing. The text formally reveals this inability to communicate: most of the work is divided into segments of third-person present accounts of each character’s thoughts (that is, through an omniscient narrator, the reader learns what they are thinking, but none of the other characters are allowed this knowledge). When the characters do “speak” with each other, it comes in the form of impersonal pleasantries and truncated thoughts in which nothing critical is communicated:

‘I know,’ she said guiltily. I haven’t been to Papa lately. But then there’s always something –’ She hesitated.

‘Naturally,’ said Mrs. Malone, ‘with a man in your father’s position…’ Kitty sat silent. They both sat silent. They both disliked this petty bickering; they both detested these recurring scenes; and yet they seemed inevitable. Kitty got up, took the letter she had written and put them in the hall.

What does she want? Mrs. Malone asked herself, looking up at the picture without seeing it. When I was her age…she thought, and smiled. (67)

Frustrated by their inability to communicate, and yet unable (or unwilling) to break their silence with each other, the children retreat into an internal space of selfish cynicism. This retreat, however, leaves them unable to cope with trauma. Preoccupied with the looming death of their mother, Eleanor finds herself unable to comfort her sister Rose (“‘Have you been chasing cats again?’ she asked [...] they mind it just as much as you would,’ she said. But she knew that Rose’s fright had nothing to do with the cats.” 35). Similarly, young Delia, unable to communicate her confusing anger towards her dying mother (“You’re not going to die — you’re not going to die!’ said Delia bitterly, looking up at her,” 38), becomes almost completely alienated from her family in the remainder of the work (of the seven children, she appears the least in The Years).

When the children are grown, they find themselves clinging to fleeting memories of their siblings as children (the image of Milly spreading the candle wick with her hat-pin is a recurring one), and when they meet it is as strangers (And who’s that [Martin] thought, looking at someone who was standing against one of the pillars. Don’t I know her?’ Her lips were moving. She was talking to herself. ‘It’s Sally! he thought”, 184).

Yet Woolf does not portray these characters with pity or contempt only; amongst the heaps of references to the parties and fashions (and fashionable parties for various “causes”) that characterise the children’s lives, the reader has the sense that they are also part of the social and political revolutions of the time: Eleanor’s volunteer work for the poor during her youth, her brief visit to a low-income apartment block she oversees, details of Rose’s apartment in a poor London neighbourhood where she works on behalf of the Irish cause, or the children’s dismay that “Parnell* is dead!” (92) all indicate their interest in social reform. [ii]

The Pargiter children’s engagement with social and political reform, while limited and (at times) superficial, contrasts with the attitudes of the following generation who, in their thirties, seem incapable of participating in any type of reform at all. The third generation of the Pargiter family is mainly represented by Peggy and and her brother, North, during the final segment of the text. Peggy, freed from the Victorian period’s oppression of women, is a doctor, yet spends the evening scrutinising the party with derision, denying even the worth of her own achievements (‘Oh, doctors are great humbugs,’ she threw out at random,” 287), until she finally bursts out in angry futility:

‘Here you all are — talking about North –’ He looked up at her in surprise. It was not what she had in meant to say, but she must go on now that she had begun. Their faces gaped at her like birds with their mouths open. ‘…How he’s to live, where he’s to live,’ she went on. ‘…But what’s the use, what’s the point of saying that?’ [...] ‘What’s the use?’ she said, facing him. ‘You’ll marry. You’ll have children. What’ll you do then? Make money. Write little books to make money….’ (314)

Peggy denies any possibility of social change. The reader might attempt to justify Peggy’s views as realistic and generative: perhaps in revealing the naiveity of the previous generation’s optimism she creates a space where real revolution can begin. This outcome doesn’t seem likely, however, given her family’s willingness to ignore her outburst. Too, Peggy’s pessimism seems a bit of a disservice to the feminist reform that has succeeded in creating the opportunity to enter the medical field. Peggy begins to look less of a realist and more of an outright cynic, one who is far angrier than any of the Pargiter children are throughout the text.

One wonders if the war, rather than patriarchy, is not the main cause of Peggy’s cynicism. This event, which marks the end of the second segment of the book, is barely mentioned while it occurs: when it is mentioned, as in “1917,” the children seem inured to it, more worried about the inconvenience of not having servants during the London bombings. The Pargiter grandchildren, however, seem entirely broken by the event. North, having served in the war, questions the value of his education and, more quietly than his sister, queries “the point” of his existence. Peggy sees the violence of the war reflected in the every day:

how can one be ‘happy’? she asked herself, in a world bursting with misery. On every placard, in every street corner was Death; or worse — tyranny; brutality; torture; the fall of civilization; the end of freedom. We here, she thought, are only sheltering under a leaf, which will be destroyed. And then Eleanor says the world is better, because two people out of all these millions are ‘happy’. (312)

Yet Peggy’s catalogue of the miseries of the world are not generated by the war, nor limited to her era: the tyranny of wealthy over the poor, the oppression of women, English brutality towards the Irish exist in the Victorian period, just as the tyranny of English Colonialism in Africa, and the brutality of World War One exist in Peggy’s time, and Peggy and North’s frustration at their inability to express these outrages parallels the Pargiter children’s inability to express their shared grief and anger during their mother’s extended death.

Humans, The Years suggests, will always find themselves unable to communicate (let alone combat) their suffering because, once one has acquired the wisdom to understand suffering, and the vocabulary to express it, one is already too old: life, as Eleanor realises, is “too short, too broken” (343). Finally, humans will only rarely, as North realises, acquire the courage to attempt to express their loneliness and suffering:

He can’t say what he wants to say; he’s afraid. They’re all afraid; afraid of being laughed at; afraid of giving themselves away. [...] We’re all afraid of each other, he though; afraid of what? Of criticism; of laughter; of people who think differently….He’s afraid of me because I’m a farmer [...] And I’m afraid of him because he’s clever. [...] That’s what separates us: fear, he thought. (333)

Like Peggy’s catalogue of miseries, North’s catalogue of the things of which humans are afraid is neither limited to, nor produced by, any particular era, whether Victorian, modern, or contemporary. The text’s critique, then, is universal, rather than an indictment of a particular time.

The Years, then, is essentially a rewriting (and extension) of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Indeed, she quotes the title phrase in the third segment of her work, transposing the Nelly’s descent into the Congo jungle onto North’s descent into the final party: “He felt that he had been in the middle of a jungle; in the heart of darkness; cutting his way towards the light; but provided only with broken sentences, broken words, with which to break through the briar bush of human bodies, human wills and voices, that bent over him, binding him, blinding him” (330-331). While Conrad’s novella, however, critiques a problem that is “over there,” though possessing an identifiable cause (the terror of uncontrolled colonial power free from law), Woolf’s text suggests that the political, legal and social institutions which cause suffering can be endlessly replaced: the real cause is, as Conrad chillingly states in book one of his novella, that “we live, as we dream — alone.” [iii]

Despite the fact that humans will never be able to fully communicate with each other, and despite the flawed institutions which will always exist, causing suffering, and further hampering communication, it is important, Woolf’s text also seems to urge, not to “live in dreams [...] alone” (The Years, 298). To divorce oneself from one’s environment and live (as Sarah does [iv]) in an idealised fiction or (as Peggy does) as a detached cynic, is irresponsible. The Years, however, does not seem entirely certain of how to live responsibly. Though the party creates a space for a dying Eleanor to realise that “There must be another life [...] Not in dreams; but here and now, in this room, with living people” (343), for most of the guests, the party is a frivolity. Finally, though Eleanor may leave to the light of the early morning, it is also the light of a dying autumn, and one which leaves her — and the reader — wondering in a melancholic fashion : “And now?” (349)

End Notes:

[i] distinct sections. This divide is somewhat arbitrary considering Woolf does not divide the text into “sections”. The largest leaps forward in time however, occur between the years 1891 and 1907, and 1918 and c.1937, and are marked, too, by the alterations I’ve indicated in the “cast of characters”.

[ii] social reform. This interest is marred, though, by details like Eleanor’s shortsightedness in letting their elderly and deformed housekeeper, Crosby, go without providing her a substantial pension. Crosby is forced to make her living manually cleaning apartments for wealthier residents.

[iii] dream– alone.” My 19th-century books are currently buried under an infestations of interlibrary loans; I’ll settle for referring to the Project Gutenberg online version here.

[iv] as Sarah does. No, I can’t distinguish between all these names either. Sarah is one of Colonel Pargiter’s nieces and Peggy and North’s Aunt (making Eleanor, Rose, Martin, etc. their first cousins, once removed). If Martin can’t keep track, though, we needn’t worry about it, overmuch.

27 July 2008 ~ St. Catharines

Glossary of Terms:

Parnell, Charles Stewart. n. nom. (1846-1891). Founder of the Irish Parliamentary Party in the UK, and advocate of Irish Home Rule.

Woolf, Virginia. Orlando. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967.

How does one begin to review Virginia Woolf? Both her wit and her prose styles [i] are intimidatingly brilliant. Too, a text like Orlando, like most of Woolf’s novels, does not so much possess a “plot” (in the conventional sense of that word) as a series of observations about life. Indeed, the cover of the Penguin edition I read [ii] claims that Orlando depicts “a brilliant panorama of changing society.” I thought this was awfully vague until I got about forty pages in to the text.

The premise of Orlando, you see, is that a young lord named Orlando, born in later 16th century England, lives through the major political, literary, and social events of the 16th and 17th centuries. It would be incorrect to say that he then lives through the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries, because even though Orlando does live these next 300 years, “he” has become a she: the Lady Orlando.

This change of gender (which no one in the novel finds at all odd) allows Woolf, expectedly, to provide commentary on gender roles throughout the centuries: the Lady Orlando must give up her position in the military, learn to flirt, and to be a hostess for her male patrons. Though she has money and her ancestral manor, she is not wholly autonomous: indeed, one of the few questions London society raises about her change in gender is the question of whether she ought to be entitled to continue holding the legal rights to her property. Despite the outer change in Orlando, however, the reader who has seemingly direct access to the Lady’s thoughts, notes that the protagonist’s mind remains unchanged: at least, it does until Orlando begins to consciously perform as a woman. Even then, upon self-reflection, the Lady Orlando is able to reclaim her “male” thoughts and personalities.

One cannot help but read this text alongside Woolf’s famous conclusion to A Room of One’s Own, where she proposes the social cultivation of the “androgynous mind”. It may be more accurate, though, to simply read Orlando alongside itself[iii]. The Lord/Lady Orlando cannot be reduced to a mere duality:

For if there are (at a venture) seventy-six different times all ticking in the mind at once, how many different people are there not — Heaven help us — all having lodgement at one time or another in the human spirit? Some say two-thousand and fifty-two. So that it is the most usual thing in the world for a person to call, directly they are alone, Orlando? (if that is one’s name) meaning by that, Come, come! I’m sick to death of this particular self. I want another. Hence the astonishing changes we see in our friends. (217)

With multiple protagonists, multiple eras, and multiple fashions, societies, and cultural events occurring in a text shorter than 250 pages, one might begin to imagine the sheer amount of observations speedily condensed into this “panorama” of England, a panorama which takes the place of a single streamlined plot.

Reading Orlando is a strange experience: I found myself entertainingly caught up in Orlando’s daily visits with friends, politicians, and poets, with her walks about town, and her extended musings with her housemaid — with her daily life — but when I stop to think about why these mundane events are entertaining, I find myself pausing: because nothing truly notable happens, you see. Even notable events, like Orlando’s loves, are quickly forgotten. For twenty pages or so in the first chapter, Orlando falls in love with a Russian noblewoman, who jilts him, making him renounce love. While the event causes a change in his temperament (he grows a little), the event is seemingly forgotten until recalled as one of Orlando’s selves in the final chapter. That is, there is not much consistency of cause-effect in Orlando’s narrative – much like in real life.

Too, though we are party to Orlando’s thoughts, often s/he slips so gradually into a different person it’s difficult to notice the change, until, Woolf, recalling an earlier self, reminds us of how different Orlando has become. All that time, too, spent in Orlando’s mind, tends to obscure the changing time, since Orlando herself, having endless time at his/her disposal doesn’t seem aware of the passing time (too, being much like the rest of us, too caught up in her own life to make much observation of such things). Since the biographer narrating Orlando’s life only rarely makes notice of the changing time[iv], the reader must guess through details like changing styles, the reigning monarch, and the reigning poets. Even so, it’s a difficult task: we know, for example, about when the 18th century begins by the revelation that “Addison, Dryden, Pope” (118 ) are the wits and poets of the day, but as Alexander Pope’s life crosses the 17th and 18th centuries — and Orlando is friends with the poet for much of this time — it is difficult to pinpoint exactly what year it is at any given time. Too, as Orlando’s friendship with the poet waxes and wanes, Pope is not always present to mark the changing time, and Woolf does not mark for us the instance of his death.

The one persistent relationship in Orlando’s life is the one s/he maintains with his/her poem “The Oak Tree”: and while the relationship is not always the same — at times Orlando must write constantly, at times s/he renounces it altogether, sometimes she writes just for herself, and at others urgently feels the need for readership and discussion of her work — it remains constant (even when she has renounced writing altogether she carries the poem with her). Writing and texts, then, are a simply a part of Orlando’s ontology.

Orlando’s relationship with text allows Woolf to make extended commentary on the development of text, the print trade, and criticism, and is, for me, one of the most fascinating parts of the novel. It is interesting to note the novel’s literary preferences: Woolf is most satirical when writing of Addison, Dryden, and Pope [v], and most unchallenging of the works of Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Jonson[vi]. Of the 19th century, Woolf seems to have mixed feelings:

Accustomed to the little literatures of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, Orlando was appalled by the consequences of her order. For, of course, to the Victorians themselves Victorian literature meant not merely four great names separate and distinct but four great names sunk and embedded in a mass of Alexander Smiths, Dixons, Blacks, Milmans, Buckles, Taines, Paynes, Tuppers, Jamesons—all vocal, clamorous, prominent, and requiring as much attention as anybody else. Orlando’s reverence for print had a tough job set before it but drawing her chair to the window to get the benefit of what light might filter between the high houses of Mayfair, she tried to come to a conclusion.

And now it was clear that there are only two ways of coming to a conclusion upon Victorian literature—one is to write it out in sixty volumes octavo, the other is to squeeze it into six lines of the length of this one. Of the two courses, economy, since time runs short, leads us to choose the second; and so we proceed. Orlando then came to the conclusion (opening half–a–dozen books) that it was very odd that there was not a single dedication to a nobleman among them; next (turning over a vast pile of memoirs) that several of these writers had family trees half as high as her own; next, that it would be impolitic in the extreme to wrap a ten–pound note round the sugar tongs when Miss Christina Rossetti came to tea; next (here were half–a–dozen invitations to celebrate centenaries by dining) that literature since it ate all these dinners must be growing very corpulent; next (she was invited to a score of lectures on the Influence of this upon that; the Classical revival; the Romantic survival, and other titles of the same engaging kind) that literature since it listened to all these lectures must be growing very dry; next (here she attended a reception given by a peeress) that literature since it wore all those fur tippets must be growing very respectable; next (here she visited Carlyle’s sound–proof room at Chelsea) that genius since it needed all this coddling must be growing very delicate; and so at last she reached her final conclusion, which was of the highest importance but which, as we have already much overpassed our limit of six lines, we must omit. (205-206)

For the first time in the novel, Woolf mentions a female writer: Christina Rossetti, and also notes the growing democracy of print: for the first time in the novel, too, reading and writing is not restricted to males with wealth and “genius”; writing, however, also seems to values the opinions of pompous critics like Woolf’s fictional Nick Greene, who, two centuries later, has reversed his opinions of the genius of the Elizabethans, but who still seems to value only the old ways, allowing him to endlessly detest everything presently available to the everyday reader: there is an elitism in his criticism.

Yet Woolf seems to admire the multiplicity of voices available, and the merging of criticism and fiction. Though she makes no comment on the literature of the present day (where the novel ends), her own novel with its several voices, its combination of social, literary and political criticism, and fictional forms (including verse, conventional prose and languages, and a proto-stream-of-consciousness style), encapsulate the literary trends developing in the nineteenth century into a single text. Yet, because of the text’s awareness of its own limitations (in the form of the hesitant biographer), the text avoids the egotism of the 19th-century critic.

Woolf’s interest in 19th-century criticism has me intrigued: in pursuit of this intrigue, the next Woolf novel I plan to read is The Years, which, my Penguin edition tells me, is “Woolf’s most popular novel [in her lifetime and] is one of the most powerful indictments of ‘Victorianism’ ever written.” Before I embark on that venture, however, I’m going to go back and reread Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, if only so I can brush up a bit on her politics and poetics. Before I do that, however, I’m taking a Woolf break and finishing Marston’s The Insatiate Countess [vii]and then reading some Henry James for the first time.

End Notes

[i] prose styles. I do admire Woolf’s ability to write in very different styles: bits of Orlando read like Voltaire or Austen or Johnson* (that is, orthodoxically structured, with long clauses), while other bits (mostly in the final chapter), or a text like The Waves is fragmented and subjective.

[ii] Penguin edition. This is somewhat of an inauthentic reading experience, as Woolf’s usual publisher was Hogarth Press (she even mentions it in Orlando: page 188)!

[iii] alongside itself. Also, as I haven’t read A Room of One’s Own in its entirety in three years or so, I have a fear of misusing it.

[iv] changing time. I can recall only two instances in which the time is exactly noted: at the end of chapter four, when the biographer notes “The eighteenth century was over; the nineteenth century had begun” (159), and at the moment when “it was ten o’clock in the morning. It was 11 October. It was 1928. It was the present moment” (210-211).

[v] Addison, Dryden, and Pope. Of these men, Woolf writes the following:

‘Lord,’ she thought, as she raised the sugar tongs, ‘how women in ages to come will envy me! And yet—’ she paused; for Mr Pope needed her attention. And yet—let us finish her thought for her—when anybody says ‘How future ages will envy me’, it is safe to say that they are extremely uneasy at the present moment. Was this life quite so exciting, quite so flattering, quite so glorious as it sounds when the memoir writer has done his work upon it? For one thing, Orlando had a positive hatred of tea; for another, the intellect, divine as it is, and all–worshipful, has a habit of lodging in the most seedy of carcases [...] Added to which (we whisper again lest the women may overhear us), there is a little secret which men share among them; Lord Chesterfield whispered it to his son with strict injunctions to secrecy, ‘Women are but children of a larger growth…A man of sense only trifles with them, plays with them, humours and flatters them’, which, since children always hear what they are not meant to, and sometimes, even, grow up, may have somehow leaked out, so that the whole ceremony of pouring out tea is a curious one. A woman knows very well that, though a wit sends her his poems, praises her judgment, solicits her criticism, and drinks her tea, this by no means signifies that he respects her opinions, admires her understanding, or will refuse, though the rapier is denied him, to run her through the body with his pen. All this, we say, whisper it as low as we can, may have leaked out by now; so that even with the cream jug suspended and the sugar tongs distended the ladies may fidget a little, look out of the window a little, yawn a little, and so let the sugar fall with a great plop—as Orlando did now—into Mr Pope’s tea. Never was any mortal so ready to suspect an insult or so quick to avenge one as Mr Pope. He turned to Orlando and presented her instantly with the rough draught of a certain famous line in the ‘Characters of Women’. (150-151)

[vi] Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Jonson. Of whom the foolish critic Nick Greene makes light of:

Orlando was shocked by these doctrines; yet could not help observing that the critic himself seemed by no means downcast. On the contrary, the more he denounced his own time, the more complacent he became. He could remember, he said, a night at the Cock Tavern in Fleet Street when Kit Marlowe was there and some others. Kit was in high feather, rather drunk, which he easily became, and in a mood to say silly things. He could see him now, brandishing his glass at the company and hiccoughing out, ‘Stap my vitals, Bill’ (this was to Shakespeare), ‘there’s a great wave coming and you’re on the top of it,’ by which he meant, Greene explained, that they were trembling on the verge of a great age in English literature, and that Shakespeare was to be a poet of some importance. Happily for himself, he was killed two nights later in a drunken brawl, and so did not live to see how this prediction turned out. ‘Poor foolish fellow,’ said Greene, ‘to go and say a thing like that. A great age, forsooth—the Elizabethan a great age!’ (63)

[vii] The Insatiate Countess. This should only take me another afternoon, so another review may be forthcoming soon.

20 May 2008 ~ St. Catharines

Glossary of Terms:

Johnson, Samuel. An inferior Johnson. He wrote a few odds and ends in the 18th century. I mean, he’s not very well known, but I’ve heard rumours about a “dictionary” to which he made a few contributions.