ceptional objectivity, there are times when a prophetic undercurrent seems to under-

mine the self-imposed detachment of the writer to make a case for the Jewishness
of Joyce. The last sentence in the book is revealing: "For some, Joyce as a 'Jew'

may only be an alluring myth, but for others, it is a key to understanding his life." Ira Nadel hands over this key. It opens many doors.
CORINNA DEL GRECO LOBNER

The University of Tulsa

frtr
Jane Wheare. Virginia Woolf: Dramatic Novelist. New York: St. Martin's, 1989.
238 pp. $35.00.

Virginia R. Hyman. '1To The Lighthouse" and Beyond: Transformations in the Narratives of Virginia Woolf New York: Lang, 1988. 288 pp. $39.10. Ruth C. Miller. Virginia Woolf: The Frames of Art and Life. New York: St. Martin's,
1989. 135 pp. $35.00.

Diane Filby Gillespie. The Sisters ' Arts: The Writing and Painting of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1988. 392 pp. $32.50. Virginia Woolf. The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Volume II. Ed. Andrew McNeillie.
New York: Harcourt, 1988. 448 pp. $22.95.

The most constructive result of reading several books about Virginia Woolf followed by reading one of her volumes of essays is the sense that her essays represent more than a novelist searching for her own system of fiction; they represent a way of reading that still seems fresh and exciting. We are ever so much more careful and ideological, but we often submerge the joy of reading underneath our academic concerns for various theoretical schools of thought. Jane Wheare points out that Virginia Woolfs modernist, experimental books
were only part of her text; Woolf also wrote three dramatic, realistic novels: The Voyage Out, Night and Day, and The Years. The modernist novels are about novels;

the realistic novels are about society. But even Wheare does not fully believe in this division: "This is not to deny, however, that in questioning the fictional narratives which we impose upon experience, The Waves makes a point not only about
the novel but also about society." In the realistic novels, however, Woolf "puts into practice her belief that theoretical ideas make the deepest impression when

they are dramatised through fictional scenes or episodes," creating "the illusion of absence from, her own text" so as to appear dramatic rather than didactic. Wheare is a good reader; she is adept at finding repetitions and ideas embodied in characters, and although for the most part I accept her particular analyses of the novels, her discussions seem constricted, dry, unattached to the vital Virginia Woolf I read. Of course a writer makes her themes clear through the actions and dialogue, but I want Wheare to elucidate Woolfs technique and make me
want to read the novels again.
802 MODERN FICTION STUDIES

Wheare also makes the naive argument about Night and Day that "Woolfs good-tempered and essentially sympathetic portrayal of the anti-feminists [in the novel] is considerably more persuasive than a bitter attack upon them would be." To paraphrase Jane Marcus and others, what is wrong with anger against the patriarchy; why assume A Room of One's Own is a better book than Three Guineas because the latter's militancy alienates some readers? And finally Wheare does not fully explore the issues that her own thesis raises,
Just how does Woolf avoid sounding didactic? Wheare often claims that Woolf

avoids didacticism in some particular scene but never clearly explains her techniques. Wheare too often leaves quotations to do her work, and this is tricky,

especially if she wants us to read a passage differently from how we used to read it. Wheare's book seems lifeless and overloaded with example; her conclusions often seem unjustified. Perhaps there is not enough of Jane Wheare in this book. Virginia Hyman attempts to show that most of Woolfs writings were influenced by her competitive and contradictory and ambivalent feelings about her family. Mostly she is convincing, although occasionally she stretches for a point: that Woolf and Leslie Stephen both wrote critical marginalia does not prove that she was trying to outdo her father as a reader. Hyman's view of the autobiographical writings as narratives is correct, although in these hypertheoretical days she probably should define what she means by narrative. She argues convincingly that rather than reading the narrator of A Sketch of the Past as a "passive transcriber of events over which she has no control . . . Woolf was [instead] an active creator of this narrative . . . [who] shaped it according to her own
psychological needs."

Hyman claims throughout the book that Woolfs narratives are distinguished by "the indeterminancy of characterization and the multiplicity and variability of points of view," although she fails to develop this point fully in the Diary, memoirs, or letters. A Woolfian "ambivalence," a swinging back and forth between extremes, which Hyman persuasively follows, is indeed a major characteristic of Woolf as a writer and evidently as a person. But Woolf fused these opposites into new wholes; if she felt ambivalence about her mother (and she certainly did), in Mrs. Ramsay she fused the extremes into an artistic creation, the creator and destructor in one. Hyman argues that Lily Briscoe may solve the painting by drawing her line, but she does so by splitting the canvas so that the two sides
are joined as well as separated. Hyman offers some legitimate correctives when she argues that Woolfs rela-

tionship with Leslie Stephen was more positive and that with Julia Stephen less positive than many critics have believed. Hyman's assertion that Woolf slayed her mother's influence more than her father's in killing the Angel of the House deserves particular consideration. She is right to remind us that it was Woolfs father who told her to read her way through the librarythe opposite of what
the Angel told her.

Hyman tells us little that is new about the novels, although she is quite good on the middle section of To the Lighthouse and on "The Absence of the 'Other'

in The Waves." The book is most helpful in its treatment of the Diary. Hyman
reads these volumes as a narrative like any other, as part of the Woolf text. What she does not do, however, is to define clearly the connections between the genres. Also, analyzing a person through a diary is tricky at best. Intelligent, informed
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biographical speculation of the sort in the chapters on Stephen do not always convince us to reach the same conclusions about Woolfs actions that Hyman reaches. Nevertheless, Hyman's book is a clear, straightforward, carefully constructed analysis only slightly infected by the theoretical jargon so fashionable today. In her dense, sometimes puzzling book, Ruth C. Miller argues that the frames ("arbitrary conventions required to identify and circumscribe works of art") in Woolfs writings "reveal the extent to which she anticipated the contemporary interest in the threat that the marginal poses to the integrity of the centre." Even though Miller's book is carefully divided into subheadings, I had some difficulty following the argument; but her work rewards a careful reading. Miller has three chapters. In the first, "Art and Life," she explains the background of Woolf s aesthetics and discusses the opposition between art and life that Miller sees as central to Woolfs work. In Roger Fry and Woolf, "the frame is perceived as a representative of the ordering powers of art, whether it is the order that art imposes upon life or design upon vision." The image of
the circle in The Waves "reveals the need for boundaries in life and the dangers that exist both within and outside of these boundaries." In her second chapter, "Towards a Defence of the Novel," Miller shows that Woolf was attracted to

the distance from reality novels offer and to the potential for closely exploring reality in novels. So, Miller concludes, "In Between the Acts, Virginia Woolf blurs the boundaries between embedded and framing forms until the reader wonders whether it is fruitful to distinguish between them at all." In her final chapter, Miller describes how frames "draw attention to the artifice of the works in which they appear' ' and expose the limitations created by
boundaries in life. Framing creates an outside and an inside, and in calling attention to this, Woolf calls attention to her self as an outsider and "encourage[s] the reader to become an outsider as well." Miller discusses rooms, windows, thresholds, and mirrors as the frames in Woolfs novels. These frames "retain

the advantages of the frame of a painting without its limitations." Miller writes especially well about thresholds. A threshold does not arrange life but intensifies it as "the spatial metaphor for the present moment." So Mrs. Ramsay pauses at the threshold before leaving the dinner scene, extending the present moment and ending it by preserving it. This is a good chapter, full of revelations about various novels, stories, and essays. Miller's thoughtful book is worth re-reading. We have long needed an informed, serious study of the connections between Virginia Woolfs and Vanessa Bell's works. Although we might still wish a writer with more formal understanding of painting would consider the subject, Diane Gillespie puts us well on our way with a readable, interesting book. Gillespie states her goals in her introduction: "to shift the emphasis in the ongoing discussion of Virginia Woolf and the visual arts from Roger Fry to Vanessa Bell; to shift the emphasis in the discussions of the sisters from the psychological to the professional and aesthetic; and, in these contexts, to define and reveal more fully the pervasive role of the visual arts in Woolfs writing." All the while, Gillespie traces collaboration and inspiration between the sisters. First, Gillespie follows the sisters' growing interests in visual arts and in writing, including an astute analysis of Bell's writing and Woolfs drawing. In "The Common Viewer" Gillespie considers Woolfs published writings on painting, arguing that, as she does in her literary criticism, Woolf "suggests" but does not dic804 MODERN FICTION STUDIES

tte "the proper response" to art and "emphasizes its ability to evoke incident
and character."

Then, Gillespie shows how "the sisters' awareness of each other as professional artists" manifested itself in their collaborative works and in their individual

theories. One of the revelations of this discussion is the close understanding Bell

had of Woolfs writingsboth thematically and formally. Bell's frontispiece for Woolfs "Kew Gardens" suggests the visual dimension of conversation in the story, and her endpiece suggests the same relationship between humankind and the natural world as does Woolfs story. The illustrations published in Gillespie's book now become more and more helpful, although the importance of Bell's choices of color seem slighted by the black and white reproductions. In the second half of her book, Gillespie shifts the focus to the specific kinds of paintings Vanessa Bell produced and their "many uses in Virginia Woolfs thinking and writing." As did many of her contemporaries, in portraits Bell often subordinated the human figure "to her interests in light, color, and overall composition." Bell's faceless people suggest "a transcendence of the individual to the communal and possibly to some eternal principles of order." Gillespie tries to change the usual reading of Lily Briscoe as a portrayal of Woolf to a revealing analysis of Bell. Covering some of the same ground as Miller, Gillespie discusses the framing imagery and use of portraits in Woolfs books; juxtaposed with her discussion of Bell's paintings, Gillespie's analysis is clearer and more convincing
and more relevant.

Gillespie's study produces some important connections. "Both sisters looked for formal structures that gave coherence to seemingly chaotic and continual change, whether in the natural world or in the mind." Many of Bell's landscapes are viewed through a window; many of Woolf s characters withdraw to rooms in which they can "scrutinize themselves more closely" and study other people from its windows or doorways.
Gillespie's book is an important contribution to Woolf studies as well as an

interesting discussion of the relationship between arts and between collaborative artists. One is not completely satisfied, however. What, for instance, is the connection between Woolfs narrative and descriptive techniques and the modernist painter's cropping that radically alters the viewer's perspective and that is often seen in the paintings represented in the book? Between Woolfs descriptive passages and Bell's decorative patterns? And to say, as Gillespie does, that Lily Briscoe's post-Impressionist painting cannot portray the artist's "struggle that went into its own creation" is to misunderstand the formal traits of the paintings Woolf saw in Fry's exhibits or in Bell's studio. Any number of the paintings in The Sisters' Arts fully preservein visible paint strokes at leastthe artist's struggle and personality. But these are minor quibbles about an intriguing study. Quibbles are even less often necessary about the second volume of Woolfs essays. Most of the works here, admirably edited by Andrew McNeillie, are short reviews for TLS. Woolf comments in her Diary that she learned to write with a pen in her hand while working on the many essays she wrote for this journal; she also later criticized her own essay voice for being too gratuitous, too eager to please, too much like tea-table chitchat. The essays in this volume (1912-1918) illustrate the truth of both comments. She reads closely, following specifics from a book by her own reactions, but her voice is constrictedperhaps by TLS
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restraintswithout the freshness and individuality of the Common Reader essays. Woolf has not yet hit her stride as an essayist, not yet found the voice of "Modern
Fiction" or "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown" or A Room of One's Own. Nevertheless, McNeillie's footnotes are reminders of the erudition and of the diligence of a major woman of letters.

One quality of the essays that struck me after reading the four books about
her is how little of what we look for in Woolf she looked for in the books she

read. Much of this difference is methodological, our academic backgrounds leading

us to search for images of thresholds and so on. Woolf, on the other hand, wanted a sense of the human being when she read his or her words. We should not dismiss this as impressionistic and quaintly archaic, therefore unworthy of our analysis. Woolf began a book as a reader, searching for uniqueness in the bock. The publication of this last part of Woolfs prodigious life's work clearly shows that the critical work on Woolf as an essayist has not yet really begun. Woolfs technique is "to open the mind as widely as possible to see what each writer is trying to do, and in interpreting him only to frame rules which spring directly from our impression of the work itself." When she reviews literary critical books she does not analyze the critic's methodology; she speaks familiarly about the original works under consideration and compares the critic's experience of reading with her own. (Ironically, she expresses surprise that three books about Jane Austen have appeared in one year. What would she think of the bibliography of critical analyses of her own work?) When she reviews a biography, she speaks about the subjects as if she had visited or known them. And when she reviews novels, she does not have a rigid agenda, a concise theoretical approach. She reads a novel as a separate entity and asks the questions that it raises rather than the questions a theory would demand. So she reads

H. G. Wells' Joan and Peter as a dogmatic book successfully peopled with flesh and blood characters; his is the "power of visualising a world for his latest idea to grow in." All of Charlotte Bronte's books are gestures of "defiance, bidding her torturers depart and leave her queen of a splendid island of imagination." While reading Woolfs kindly, honest, informed, and, above all, intelligent comments upon so many different writers and topics, one cannot help wondering what a contemporary editor would think of her graceful, careful, subtle prose.
We continue to find in Virginia Woolfs text such depth and quality of human

expression that we can only regret that soon, with the completion of the publication of her essays, little that is unknown from her pen will appear. But obviously
we will continue listening to her voices.
STEVE FEREBEE

North Carolina Wesleyan College

nrfr
806 MODERN FICTION STUDIES