Finding
(3) And alongside it, one sees colonialism's negative legacy among women at home in their conception of the New World embodied by the same putatively Tasmanian born Mrs. Manresa and her nouveau riche Jewish husband Ralph, Mrs. Dalloway's Peter Walsh's Anglo-Indian bride ("silly, pretty, flimsy nincompoops," for Clarissa [8]) and The Years' American Mrs. Fripp.
Paper
"Mixed Virginia": Reconciling the "Stigma of Nationality" and the Sting of Nostalgia in Virginia Woolf's Later Fiction
Citations: 1
Full textAbstract
"For, " the outsider will say, "in fact, as a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world." And if, when reason has said its say, still some obstinate emotion remains, some love of England dropped into a child s ears by the cawing of rooks in an elm tree, by the splash of waves on a beach, or by English voices murmuring nursery rhymes, this drop of pure, if irrational, emotion she will make serve her to give to England first what she desires of peace and freedom for the whole world. Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas An analysis of foreignness in the work of Virginia Woolf is complicated by the ambivalent feelings about home that one finds there. As my epigraph suggests, Woolf was torn between a desire to escape the restrictions of home, which she saw become increasingly repressive in the years spanning the two world wars, and a deep-seated, visceral attachment to it. While she celebrates the denial to women in Three Guineas of what she provocatively terms "the full stigma of nationality," the sting of nostalgia haunts her resolve (82). (1) Soft pastoral images of England flutter about the hard edges of her fierce, condemnatory statements about the barbarism of war and the repression of women at home, in so doing forming a "knot in the smooth skein of her argument" (O 155). (2) Further complicating Woolf's ambivalence about England were contradictory ideas about the alternatives, ideas which manifest themselves in the mixed treatment of foreignness in her work. Thus, one finds twisted together in Woolf's work remnants of a stereotypical nineteenth century romanticization of a certain foreignness in figures like Mrs. Dalloway's young Sally Seton and The Years' Eugenie Pargiter, and an early twentieth century hostility, directed by what Linden Peach calls "a postwar 'conservative nationalism'" (116), to an alien presence in England informing figures such as Mrs. Dalloway's Doris Kilman, Elizabeth Dalloway's governess of German descent, and Rezia Warren Smith, Italian wife of Septimus, of the same novel. One notes in Woolf's work the nostalgia for the colonies of the repatriated colonial patriarchs Old Parry of Mrs. Dalloway, Abel Pargiter of The Years and Bart Oliver of Between the Acts, in their responses to characters such as Mrs. Dalloway's Sally, The Years' Eugenie and Between the Acts' Mrs. Manresa. (3) And alongside it, one sees colonialism's negative legacy among women at home in their conception of the New World embodied by the same putatively Tasmanian born Mrs. Manresa and her nouveau riche Jewish husband Ralph, Mrs. Dalloway's Peter Walsh's Anglo-Indian bride ("silly, pretty, flimsy nincompoops," for Clarissa [8]) and The Years' American Mrs. Fripp. Up against these imperialistic views of the colonies, one finds also the intrigue and fascination for these same places--now places where one might escape the strictures of England, rather than reproduce them--among the younger generations. This is represented by a defrocked Ambassador Extraordinary Orlando who finds, at least initially, respite from the restrictions of home among the Turkish gypsies, and by many of The Years' women, among them, the young Kitty Malone, who longs to visit America, and Eleanor Pargiter, who rejects the insularity of England and Englishness in favor of Italy and India. (4) This paper sets out to better understand this tangle of ideas centered around the concepts of nostalgia and nationality via a closer look at representations of foreignness in Woolf's later works. How does the contradiction between love and hate for England, a love of country and a love of universal freedoms, "a troubled half-love for England," as Jed Esty has recently termed it (93), inform and complicate the representation of foreign characters and foreign landscapes in Woolf's later fiction? What might an analysis of the relationship between Englishness and foreignness, home and away, tell us about Woolf's evolving ideas concerning nationality and nostalgia and the strains to which these concepts were subject as a second world war loomed? …
Authors
Helen Southworth
Journal
Woolf Studies Annual