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Are we afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Susannah Luthi
Until last year,
I knew nothing about Virginia Woolf other than the fact that
there was something suspicious about her.
And I knew that because I had
heard of Edward Albee's play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
and had taken the implications of its title to heart.
Then, last fall, I met a student
who encouraged me to give Woolf a try.
She suggested I read Orlando,
a novel relating the 300-year transformation of an Elizabethan
nobleman into a 1920s woman.
Surprisingly enough, I did not
follow up on this suggestion. If anything, I became a little
more suspicious.
Then-probably because I kept asking
this student what was so interesting about Woolf-I finally began
to be interested myself, and decided to study some of her work
in an independent study this semester. So, at a professor's
prompting, I bought The Waves to read over the summer.
My first impression of Virginia
Woolf was her skill with language and the poetic fluidity of
her prose, which is not only absorbing, but also sweeps you
rapidly along with it until you have to remind yourself to stop
and go back to grapple with the ideas she has been pouring over
you.
And once you have begun this grappling,
you can peel away layers and layers of insight and go deeper
into her language. Sometimes, in one moment, tiny glimpses merge
into a comprehensible picture; and in the next they scatter,
the picture disappears, and you find yourself turned in all
different directions.
Moreover, whatever you think of
the directions of the ideas that "stream" out of her
novels, the ideas themselves are complex, perceptive and provocative.
Flowing together, they form remarkable works of art.
And studying these works of art
has prompted some observations on their applicability to Hillsdale
College.
Our school is small and fairly
homogeneous. This is a good thing in many ways, but at the same
time it is also, by its nature, limiting. Indeed, the size of
our community here often restricts our points of view and dulls
our perceptions of the unconventional.
And so, consciously or not, we
can easily slip into comfortable apathy, perhaps actually preferring
apathy to learning how to adapt ourselves to others and examine
and criticize the opinions and convictions that define us.
Woolf herself wrote that perhaps
"friends are chosen partly in order to live lives that
we cannot live in our own persons."
Whether this is true or not, it
is important for us to try to avoid the apathy that allows us
to shut other souls out of the pretty pictures we make of our
world; to be ready to open our hearts to people who might want
to mar the pretty pictures by adding new or different dimensions.
Consider what the 19th century
art critic John Ruskin wrote:
"…[B]ut it would be
a more lamentable thing still, were it possible, to see a number
of men so oppressed into assimilation as to have no more any
individual hope or character, no difference in aim, no dissimilarity
of passion, no irregularities of judgment; a society in which
no man could help another, since none would be feebler than
himself; no man admire another, since none would be stronger
than himself . . . a society in which every soul would be as
the syllable of a stammerer instead of the word of a speaker,
in which every man would walk as in a frightful dream, seeing
specters of himself, in everlasting multiplication, gliding
helplessly around him in a speechless darkness."
Ruskin perfectly captures what
I wanted to say about Virginia Woolf: She spins out many different
strand in opposing directions so that at first it seems impossible
for them to cohere. Nevertheless they do have a habit of coming
together suddenly to reveal a comprehensible picture.
This coming together of opposites
does not just give the picture its texture; it also makes it
true.
And I think we should make every
effort to understand this. After all, we won't always be "in
the bubble."
Luthi is the assistant news editor of the
Collegian.
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