The Naked Victorian
by F.R.R. Mallory
December 10, 2006

Virginia Woolf, in "Professions for Women," states that a woman writer must kill the Angel of the House, that part of herself which charms, conciliates and lies. Woolf spins this idea into a phantom she can stab with her pen. This image suggests that Woolf desired to kill her Victorian conditioning as a means to reach her inner self; an idea that structure inhibits truth. She carries this determination forward in her work, Mrs. Dalloway, where her pen stabs at not only the Angel of the House, but also at the established structure of the Edwardian novel. Through this union of ideas it becomes possible to ask if Woolf considered typical novel structure to be reliant on charm, conciliation and deceit. By removing conventional novel structure, is the author more successful at exploring or discovering truth? If you remove novel structure, what's left? Is it a novel?

This is the same question often asked about modern art where the artist shifts the burden of comprehension onto the viewer by refusing to tell a story. Make something up, both forms seem to say. What you, the observer, creates is the objective. In this scenario, not only does the writer refuse to establish the orchestration of novel, they choose to step outside the silent contract between author and reader, acting upon the reader, as if handing them a pen, making the reader complicit to completing the narrative line in order to summon the work into the range of the reader's comprehension. Inevitably, this failure of the contract becomes a new acting upon of the reader as a form of manipulation. The reader, so burdened, feels an obligation to complete the work. It must have meaning because it is simply unreasonable for a good writer to place so many excellent words on the page without meaning. So the reader is pressed into unwilling service to search out meaning, intention, cause, depth and at the end of Woolf's promise to self, personal truth. Since the novel is the author's exercise in exposing their meaning it becomes clear that Woolf is saying that there isn't a meaningful truth to be discovered. Yet, it is human nature to believe that life is meaningful and for readers to believe that a book must have something important to say. People are in the constant business of interpreting, of seeking out patterns while they look for answers. It is this fact of human nature that is put into play during the execution of this work. When the reader acts to create structure to explain Woolf's meaning they are forced to resurrect of the Angel of the House, to re-clothe in Victorian conditioning, and take the flight back into self deceit.

Within the unspoken contract between writer and reader, the writer takes on the role of original creation and the establishment of narrative direction, summoning into language a sequence of words designed to inform the reader of the nature of the work. The reader, within the framework of this contract, agrees to some degree of compliance to the direction of the writer. When a writer exits traditional narrative structure such as Woolf does with Mrs. Dalloway with her removal of linear plot, the unspoken roles of direction and compliance are compromised. Since traditional narrative form can be viewed through the framework of Victorian culture, as the giving of direction by the writer to the reader, this places the writer in the position of the masculine and the reader in the position of the feminine. With the removal of plot structure, Woolf abandons authorial responsibility for offering direction and establishing meaning, creating a dilemma for the reader. In order to bring the work into a whole piece or create meaning, the reader is forced into the untenable position of adopting the author's abandoned role. The reader is no longer merely receiving direction but must now act to conciliate the author's words and meaning. Absent of direction the reader may also feel required to adopt false meanings or self deceive. These become acts of violence against the reader when the reader must re-feminize or become the Angel of the House in order to complete their part of the silent contract and bring the work to a cohesive and satisfying end.

By abandoning her authorial responsibility Woolf can be said to have moved into the role of perpetrator against her own readers. Using a standard victimizing ploy, she makes the reader responsible for acceptance of a nonconsensual submissive role, trafficking on the reader's belief and investment in the parameters of the original, now violated, silent contract between them.
Absent narrative line or direction (plot) from and by the writer, the objects and scenes she describes have no intrinsic meaning, they are merely words, sentences, ideas and scenes associated by proximity. In this way Woolf has assembled a, sometimes beautiful, collection of disconnected fragments. Her works' scope is kept intentionally banal as if to remind the reader of its absence of story. In this way the work mocks, showing awareness of the author's acts, urging us to remember that Woolf was famous for saying, "Nothing induces me to read a novel except when I have to make money by writing about it. I detest them." The Angels she was trying to kill were exactly those things she considered were trying to act upon her from the outside. She knew, of course, that readers would work hard to resurrect the Angel, she counted on it.

Works Cited and Referenced

Aichele, George. The Limits Of Story. Chico: The Society of Biblical Literature Semeia Studies Scholars Press, Co-published with Fortress Press, 1985

Lewis, Thomas, ed. Virginia Woolf, A Collection Of Criticism. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1975

Prose, Francine, ed. The Mrs. Dalloway Reader. Orlando: Harcourt Books, 2003

Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. Orlando: Harcourt Books, 2005

Virginia Woolf
1882-1941

I read Mrs. Dalloway after reading a progression of novels in a class purported to be about learning about the novel, as a writing form.

We proceeded from Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, to Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, then to Charles Dickens' Great Expectations to conclusion with Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway.

Quite honestly, at that point, I was horrified. Not only was the teacher orchestrating a perception that the novel began with Jane Austen, her focus centered entirely on a specific type of novel. One that favored English upper class characters, with disempowered women and extraordinarily narrow viewpoints.

At this point in the class (you can check my blog archives for more direct daily reports at that time) the class had dwindled to a few students (less than 10) and on our class message board questions about what a novel was were being ignored by the teacher. I chose to answer the other students by providing links and factual data to novels pre-dating Jane Austen and novels not centered on English aristocracy and/or early romance novels.

My decision placed me in direct confrontation with the teacher and eventually led to me filing a report regarding the class to the department chair (the first time I have ever felt such a thing was necessary)

I'm speaking about this because I felt Woolf was, at least temporarily, ruined by how the class was organized and taught.

I haven't returned to Woolf but feel at some point that I will. What I can in fairness say, is that her choice to write stream of consciousness is quite remarkable and in its own right quite interesting. I do currently find her writing somewhat poetic and might at this point in my consideration of her to consider her style that of a poet rather than that of a fiction writer. In this way her language choices and topic choices feel more appropriate for me. One day, I will return to Woolf absent the charge of this essay.

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