Personal Response to "A Sketch of the Past"

Memory is an illusive, ephemeral thing and something all writers struggle with in trying to recount anything from personal experience. At some point all your memories fade to the point of being impressions, remnants of the strongest sense memories and cognitive memories attached to an event or period of time. Woolf muses that our memories of childhood are strongest because as a child we are the “container of the feeling of ecstasy, of the feeling of rapture…Later we add to feelings much that makes them more complex; and therefore less strong; or if not less strong, less isolated, less complete” (A Sketch 2158). I feel that this is true of my experiences with childhood memories, that there are certain experiences where my emotions were so pure and so raw and my confusion over them left an indelible impression on me lasting throughout the years.

First memories however do not provide the complete picture of ones life, for as Woolf put it, “the things one does not remember are as important; perhaps they are more important. If I could remember one whole day I should be able to describe, superficially at least, what life was like as a child. Unfortunately, one only remembers what is exceptional. And there seems to be no reason why one thing is exceptional and another not” (2159). For every moment, every event, every impression that I can recall there are innumerable ones touching and surrounding it that shaped and influenced those impressions yet remain unknown to me. They reside in the confines of the unconscious, moving me in ways I cannot comprehend or feel directly, but their influence stretches out over time to make the hair stand up on the back of my neck or to coerce a smile onto my face.

Personal Response to "Professions for Women"

The struggles of the women of the early twentieth century are not so far removed from us today that we cannot empathize. Women of the twenty-first century, you have your own cultural stereotypes looming over your shoulder while you work, and when you dress to go out at night. You have the expectation of being lesser than you can be, that a man can do your job better still, and that if you attempt to have a career it is irresponsible for you to have a family and children as well. You have widespread idealized versions of womanhood that are at polar extremes that you are compared to daily. We have the corporate bitch, the soccer mom, and the slut, the highly sexually objectified woman that’s sole purpose is to please men through print media, billboards, television, the film industry, and the internet.

Virginia was right, that even with the opportunities for advancement there would be other obstacles, some old, some new. With sexual freedom has come sexual expectation, where a woman is expected to be sexual and if she is, she’s a slut. We walk a fine line every day between what we think is acceptable and comfortable for us, and what men want from us based on our age bracket and position in society. Aged eighteen to twenty-nine, you are to be highly sexual and ought to please men with your dress, social demeanor and private practices. Aged thirty to forty-five, you are to be a mother baptized by marriage and reborn pure as the driven snow, the only sexual thoughts you have are about your husband and for his pleasure. Aged forty-five to eighty you are a divorcee no longer sexual and therefore no longer needed. We are still taught from a very early age that we are here on this earth to serve men. These generalizations may seem extreme, and they are. These are the notions we combat everyday in our professional and personal lives. Even if the men in our lives don’t view us this way, others do and that is something we will be battling into the unforeseen future.

A Personal Response to "Modern Fiction"

Are we now working in a time of great literary prosperity, where all doors to truth and the human experience have opened and we achieve what generations before us could not? I do not know, but I feel it is safe to say we are not. What is apparent however is that truth no longer sells, sensationalism reins supreme and the best selling novels, the ones that garner the most public attention, have little or no value. We are in a culture of fluff entertainment, filler with no connection to the human spirit other than the gross imitation that “reality television” has become, a caricature of life.

Literary criticism focuses on the past, so where has the progress seen by Woolf and her contemporaries gone? Have we plateaued in our advancement of our literary efforts, have we regressed? There was a steady progress we can chart, a climb in exploration and self awareness for the sake of discovering the real “truth” behind everything, and that seems to have capped out amidst the hustle and turmoil of modernity. There is no longer a reaction against anything, but imitations of prior rebellions and complacency with the state of things as they are. We live in a world of compartmentalization where the successes find themselves in specific categories where convention, plot, comedy, tragedy and love interests rule.

That is not to say that there are not those out there who stand up and challenge the established status quo, but they are not the ones gracing the cover of magazines, and their names are known only by their followers who are marginalized. We are in need of a bomb to go off in every home in America, for something true and radical and progressive to take hold of our minds and captivate them for longer than the one hundred and twenty minutes of a movie, or the five minutes of a commercial. We are in need of another literary renaissance to captivate the minds of the common man, and make him challenge himself and his ideas of art and life. We are in need of the common man to consider himself, and have ideas of art and life that extend farther than the gnawing feeling in the back of his head at night that quickly fades with sleep and white noise.

Critical Analysis and further Discussion of "Modern Fiction"

Excerpt from Professional Criticism on Woolf:

“Joyce was aware unlike Bennett, Glasworthy, Wells, that life is composed of something more than externals; he was striving to capture the whole of experience, not just a part. To do so, for Virginia Woolf, meant to succeed in illuminating the data supplied by the intellect with the light of intuition, to attain to the andrygynous mind” (Marder 120).

Woolf felt that there was something missing from the works of Bennett, Glasworthy and Wells; that there was something deficient in their approach. Woolf wrote, “these three writers are materialists. It is because they are concerned not with the spirit but with the body that they have disappointed us, and left us with the feeling that the sooner English fiction turns its back upon them, as politely as may be, and marches, if only into the desert, the better for its soul” (Modern 2088).

The major fault lies in the materialist approach is lacking the truth of life. The picture painted may be beautiful, but does it have a place in real life?

Quotes from Woolf about Materialism:

“His (Bennett) characters life abundantly, even unexpectedly, but it remains to ask how do they life, and what do they live for?” (2088).

“He (Wells) is a materialist in the sense that he takes too much delight in the solidity of his fabric. His mind is too generous in its sympathies to allow him to spend much time in making things shipshape and substantial. He is a materialist from sheer goodness of heart, taking upon his shoulder the work that ought to have been discharged by Government officials, an din the plethora of his ideas and facts scarcely having leisure to realize, or forgetting to think important, the crudity and coarseness of his human beings” (2088).

“It we fasten then, one label on all these books, on which is one word, materialist, we mean by it that they write of unimportant things; that they spend immense skill and immense industry making the trivial and the transitory appear the true and the enduring” (2088).

It is not just the “materialists” Woolf finds fault with, but that their problem is the ongoing struggle of all authors seeking to capture the reality of life.

“Admitting the vagueness which afflicts all criticism of novels, let us hazard the opinion that for us at this moment the form of fiction most in vogue more often misses than secures the thing we seek. Whether we call it life or spirit, truth or reality, this, the essential thing, has moved off, or on, and refuses to be contained any longer in such ill-fitting vestments as we provide” (2089).

The solution that Woolf offers in this, “Look within and life, it seems, is very far from being “like this”. Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad of impressions—trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms…so that, if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what the chose, not what he must, if he could base his work upon his own feeling and not convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style” (2089).

This begs the questions, what is the writer to do? Woolf answers this by saying, “Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display, with as little mixture of the alien and external as possible? We are not pleading merely for courage and sincerity; we are suggesting that the proper stuff of fiction is a little other than custom would have us believe it” (2089).

Critical Analysis and further Discussion of "A Sketch of the Past"

Excerpts from Professional Criticism on Woolf:

“In addition, during the period April to November, when the first section of "A Sketch" was written, she and Leonard moved house and his mother died. In what seems to me an amazing feat of creative energy, she brought to bear all of these deep personal anxieties on a literary question that had always troubled her, namely the preoccupation of memoir writers with events, so that "they leave out the person to whom things happened" ("Sketch" 65)” (Dalgarno).

“"A Sketch" lies on the border between public and private writing, neither a draft of a work intended for publication, nor a diary. Woolf herself referred to the work as a "memoir" (64,98) and as "notes" (75,95,100,117). John Mepham discusses the status of "A Sketch" at length, observing that it is both memoir and diary,"and gives the life-writing activity itself a context."” (Dalgarno).

While “A Sketch of the Past” does seem to be an exercise in writing personally about ones life, I tend to be of the mind that it meant to be published because of the honesty and sincerity with which she set about her task. Unfinished as it may have been, Woolf has a direct purpose with writing this work and it is such:

“Here I come to one of the memoir writer’s difficulties—one of the reasons why, though I read so many, so many are failures. They leave out the person to whom things happened. The reason is that it is so difficult to describe any human being. So they say: “This is what happened”; but they do not say what the person was like to whom it happened. And the events mean very little unless we know first to whom they happened. Who was I then?” (A Sketch 2156).

Her issues lie with describing herself accurately, because like most people she does not have a clear sense of herself.

“I do not know how far I differ from other people. That is another memoir writer’s difficulty. Yet to describe oneself truly one must have some standard of comparison; was I clever, stupid, good looking, ugly, passionate, cold--?... I have never been able to compare my gifts and defects with other people’s” (2156).

Woolf turns to sense memory and impressions to rectify this problem, probing deeper into the self as she does yet only speculating about the past. She reveals more about herself at her present state and her ways of viewing the world, “all seemed to press voluptuously against some membrane; not to burst it; but to hum round one such a complete rapture of pleasure that I stopped, smelt; looked. But again I cannot describe that rapture. It was rapture rather than ecstasy” (2157).

She felt that her sense memories were able to transport her and could almost effect time itself bringing her to a liminal space where she could observe the surroundings of her youth.

“At times I can go back to St. Ives more completely than I can this morning. Can reach a state where I seem to be watching things happen as if I were there. That is, I suppose, that my memory supplies what I had forgotten, so that it seems as if it were happening independently, though I am really making it happen…Now if this is so, is it not possible—I often wonder—that things we have felt with great intensity have an existence independent of our minds; are in fact still in existence? And if so, will it not be possible, in time, that some device will be invented by which we can tap them? I see it—the past—as an avenue lying behind; a long ribbon of scenes, emotions” (2157).

This work, “Sketches of the Past” is an exercise in experiences, capturing them, recording them and reinterpreting them each time they are remembered as much as one can truly remember anything. These issues of time, sense memory and experience are recurrent themes in her work, and are further explored in the context of the conscious and unconscious mind (i.e. “A Mark on the Wall”, “Orlando”, “Mrs. Dalloway”).

Critical Analysis and further Discussion of "Professions for Women"

Excerpts from Professional Criticism on Woolf:

“Woolf’s “Professions for Women” was originally a speech given on 21 January 1931 to the London/ National Society for Women’s Service and later included in a shortened version in her posthumously published The Death of the Moth (1942). “Professions” has made the Victorian “angel in the house” a familiar figure, yet many readers seem to have missed the sly humor with which Woolf utilizes Coventry Patmore’s honorific image for womanhood. A mistake made early and repeated thereafter has been the assumption that Woolf succeeds in killing the angel in the house, as she claims to have done, where as her actual point is that she is indelibly stamped with the image and cannot destroy it.” (Blodgett).

So what is the Angel? What ideal is it asking women to live up to? Who is it asking them to be?

“The Angel, in short, is fully angelic: both unegotistically without pride and sexlessly without bodily desires or awareness. The Angel inhibits by reminding a writer to maintain the approved feminine image” (Blodgett).

The role of women in society was dramatically being altered during Virginia Woolf’s life time, but there were still many cultural stereotypes and limitations left over from the Victorian era and even before that inhibited women from being who they really were. These expectations are expertly explained with the use of the “Angel,” a figure from Coventry Patmore’s poem. In Woolf’s words the Angel was, “intensely sympathetic. She was immensely charming. She was utterly unselfish. She excelled in the difficult arts of family life. She sacrificed herself daily. If there was a chicken, she took the leg; if there was a draught she sat in it—in short she was so constituted that she never had a mind or a wish of her own, but preferred to sympathize always with the minds and wishes of others. Above all—I need to say it—she was pure” (Professions 2153).

What harm was the Angel? What effect would she have on Woolf that was so dramatic as to make her need to “kill” its influence?

“She would have plucked the heart out of my writing. For, as I found, directly I put pen to paper, you cannot review even a novel without having a mind of your own, without expressing what you think to be the truth about human relations, morality, sex. And all these questions, according to the Angel of the House, cannot be dealt with freely and openly by women; they must charm, they must conciliate, they must—to put it bluntly—tell lies if they are to succeed” (2153).

The solution does not lie in the detection of the problem however. It is an ongoing process that can still be felt today, “Even when the path is nominally open—when there is nothing to prevent a woman from being a doctor, a lawyer, a civil servant—there are many phantoms and obstacles, as I believe, looming in her way. To discuss and define them is I think of great value and importance; for thus only can the labour be shared, the difficulties be solved” (2155).

So What? Who's Interested In Virginia Woolf?

So who's interested in Virginia Woolf? Loads of people, and not just myself. Virginia Woolf's influence far exceeds her lifetime, stretching to every corner of 21st century pop culture. As recently as a few years ago Nicole Kidman donned a fake nose for the sake of Virginia Woolf in "The Hours", and not just for her own personal gratification but because she'd made millions doing it. There's an audience out there waiting to spend their hard earned money to experience her legacy and her life. Virginia Woolf has surpassed her fame among literary buffs and critics and has become a cult figure for the masses. As Judith Allen put it in the Virginia Woolf Miscellany,

"For at least the last twenty years, Virginia Woolf’s works have been finding their way to theaters, movie screens, musicals, television (from “Masterpiece Theatre” to “MTV”), recordings, and of, course, to performance pieces at Virginia Woolf conferences. Woolf’s play, "Freshwater", first performed for her Bloomsbury friends in 1935, has enjoyed a steady stream of new productions, including the memorable 1983 New York production…Joining productions of "Freshwater", Woolf’s novels, letters, essays, and diaries have been transformed—sometimes in combination—into performance pieces or various media: "Mrs. Dalloway", an opera; "The Waves", a musical; "Orlando" and "A Room of One’s Own", staged drama and film; and "To the Lighthouse", a film for television. Along with these productions, there have been readings, recordings of readings, and the rock lyrics of several groups such as the Indigo Girls’ song, “Virginia Woolf”".

So aside from her formidable literary legacy in print, her works and life's story live on in the media from the silver screen to your mother's made for TV movies, and even here on the internet.