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).