Copyright is owned by the Author of the thesis. Permission is given for a copy to be downloaded by an individual for the purpose of research and private study only. The thesis may not be reproduced elsewhere without the permission of the Author. ''In My Own Voice'): Massey University Library Palmerston North Turltea Virginia Woolf's Use of Language A thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master Of Arts in English at Massey University Angela Lee Stratford 1996 I will go on adventuring, changing, opening my mind and my eyes. refusing to be stamped and stereotyped. The thing is to free one's self: to let it find its own dimensions. not be impeded. - Virginia Woolf, A Writer's Diary 11 ill ABSTRACT The collective work of Virginia Woolf is usually seen as an exemplar of literary modernism and a forerunner of later twentieth-century feminist thought. Instead of looking at Woolf's work solely for the literary and political innovations it displays, however. this thesis traces Woolf's use of language, and considers Woolf's novels, essays and diaries as her expression of a revolution in the paradigm of reality. Woolf's focus on a subjective rather than objective reality engenders her literary and political innovations and provokes her linguistic and epistemological investigations into the nature of language and the identity of the speaking subject. Observing that conventional representational language-use reflects an authoritarian belief in the stability and objectivity of an absolute world and enacts patriarchal tendencies to objectify people, Woolf displays a use of language which recognises and respects other people as subjects. Woolf's awareness of the arbitrary and relative nature of the relation between language and reality parallels Ferdinand de Saussure's linguistic theory of structuralism and marks a significant disjunction between Woolf and the majority of her predecessors and even her contemporaries. Anticipating Jacques Derrida in recognising that language can never, in itself, sanction any single or final reference to the world, Woolf goes on to explore language's potential as a medium of communication beyond direct representation. Woolf uses language to induce a process of consciousness in the reader which will allow her or him to apprehend the writer's subjective vision of the world. Thus Woolf conveys her thoughts, feelings and experiences as a subject in her own voice. Acknowledgements I would like to thank my supervisor, Dr Victoria Carchidi, for encouraging me to produce this thesis 'in my own words' , and Massey University for the award of a Massey Masterate Scholarship which made me feel accepted by the establishment and also assisted me to pay for my education. IV Thanks to my parents: to Mum for having faith in my ability to achieve, and to Dad for being so proud of me when I do. To Angela, Simon and Blair: thanktgoing through the thesis-writing process with me, guys: for constantly reassuring me, Angela, that even the best of us have hassles ; for nor erasi ng my disk. Simon (and teaching me a thing (or two) about philosophy along the way); and for being interrupted, Blair, when I read out great lines from Woolf, and not interrupting me quite so much by reading out great lines from Rushdie. Above all, thanks for encouraging me with your brilliance and supporting me with your friendship. I wish you all the best of luck for your future well-deserved achievements. Warmest affection to my wider circle of friends - Steve, Lennie, Jane, Andrea, Hannah and Haydn - for halving my misery by allowing me to share it and making sure I didn't work too hard by taking me out into the real world (as well as Dannevirke and Levin) every so often. To Phillip: for being a constant distraction; for saving my sanity by the frequent application of icecream; for listening to constant comparisons between Virginia Woolf and practically everything; for putting me onto Woolf in the first place, albeit indirectly; and finally, for inspiring me way beyond the bounds of this thesis. Thanks for five years of understanding me in my own voice. Table of Contents Introduction. In My Own Voice ................ ...... ... ... . ... ... . .. . Chapter One. "Subject and Object and the Nature of Reality": The Tyrant of Convention . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 Chapter Two. "Some Little Language Such As Lovers Use": Escaping the Tyrant of Convention . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 Chapter Three. Taking 'That Dangerous Leap" Between Words and Meaning ........ 44 Chapter Four. "Pigeon-holes Are Not Then Very Useful": Using Language to Liberate the Subject ........................................... 53 Chapter Five. "To See Life Whole": Woolf' s Vision and Textual Design ........... 66 Chapter Six . "I Sing Myself': Creating and Relating Self and Other .............. 78 Chapter Seven. " 'I' Rejected: 'We' Substituted'': Woolf's Vision of the Linguistic Community . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96 Works Cited . ................................... .... .. . ...... . . 110 Works Consulted . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114 INTRODUCTION: IN MY OWN VOICE I was originally inspired to study Virginia Woolf after reading about Einstein's work in quantum physics, and I also thought of Darwin on evolution and Freud on the uncon­ scious. I believed that it was only after these scientists had laid the factual basis for a new view of the world that writers could come along and embody such philosophies in their books. I saw the literary movement of modernism as engendered by the results thrown up by recent scientific experiments and theories. Writers. being, in the main, progressive thinkers, could then use the concepts that had arisen from science, and so flesh out the new paradigm, the new world view, in literature. I saw Woolf herself as one of these progres­ sive writers. embodying in her works new concepts - such as relativity, evolution and the unconscious - from the models that science provided, and hence shunned by a conservative canon and misread by uninformed critics who did not understand or accept the Einsteinian paradigm but preferred the Cartesian world view. And Woolf's position, I felt. was com­ mon to other modernist writers - D.H. Lawrence, E.M. Forster - who similarly saw that life was not what the Victorians believed it to be. I felt my search for links between the sci­ ence and literature of the modernist period to be a further exploration of the dramatic break between the thought and literature of the nineteenth century and of the twentieth century, and so a further definition of 'modernist' literature. And yet it seems that the more I search, the difference between 'Victorian ' and 'modernist' literature, conceived of in the terms of one literary movement following an­ other, is slightly superficial and spurious. Definitions of modernism become tautological: a work is 'modernist' if it contains features common to other 'modernist' works - features which can be found in works from any number of literary periods. Is Hardy a modernist? Is Sterne? Is Aeschylus? While there was certainly a literary phenomenon that took place sometime in the first half of the twentieth century, focusing on similarities between the writers of the period is often at the cost of suppressing the individual innovation and vision of each writer. No doubt in an overall view these individual perceptions are linked some­ how, and create a picture of a social movement across the arts. But to begin with such a 2 definition limits how we approach these writers, or indeed any writer. Virginia Woolf de­ serves far more than this; her work asks for a far more open and responsive approach. One wants, as Lily Briscoe says of Mrs Ramsay in To the Lighthouse, "fifty pairs of eyes to see with ... Fifty pairs of eyes were not enough to get round that one woman with" (:124). Simply to view Woolf through modernist eyes, and to seek those elements we expect to find,is to limit the relevance of Woolf's work. Similarly, simply to view her through feminist eyes also radically limits our understanding of the work of such a multifaceted writer, cutting off our sympathies for other positions that Woolf occupies. Admitting that I have but one pair of eyes, I seek to look at Woolf from a linguistic point of view: not to identify each linguistic technique she uses and analyse its value, but instead to investigate the relationship between language and reality that Woolf describes throughout her reuvre. Agreeing with Pamela Caughie that critics "need to keep in mind that what we are describing is not Virginia Woolf's process or form itself but our own readings or metaphors that enable us to see that process or form" (22), I find that the best way to view Woolf's particular use of language is to see it in terms of a revolution in the paradigm of reality, along the lines of Thomas Kuhn's description of conceptual revolu­ tions in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. To view Woolf in this way looks beyond a shared literary movement and interprets her within a wide and interdependent linguistic, philosophical and cultural movement: a movement, I believe, more dependent on personal realisation than any common or dominating influences. Woolf s linguistic innovation, her refo1mation of literary standards, her view of the relationship between the sexes (that much-vaunted androgyny), her view of sexual politics, and her view of international poli­ tics are all engendered by her perception of reality, her implicit metaphysical world view. Woolf holds a perception of reality that is radically different from her social, political and literary predecessors, and even, it appears, different from her intellectual cohort. Woolf sees the world not in a positivistic way, where things have a self-evident identity and hence meaning in themselves, but relatively, where the categories into which we divide reality, and the identity and hence meaning we confer, are arbitrary and pragmatic rather than actual and absolute. From this approach, boundaries can be fluid, and a change of 3 identity or meaning depends only on a change of perspective or a change of context. Lan­ guage becomes the tool and the medium for dividing up reality . This is where my interest finally arrived, for I feel that tracing Woolf s use of language - 'use' in a wide sense, meaning how she explores and enacts to their full potential the communicative functions and effects she finds in language - throughout her works, linking it in to her subject-matter and back out to her metaphysical paradigm, provides a helpful perspective from which to approach many other literary and political aspects of her work. I remain suspicious, how­ ever. that to uphold a view of Woolf as a relativist rather than a positivist is little more helpful and less superficial than to see her as a modernist rather than an Edwardian. I hope rather, as Woolf herself does, not to assert definitions and identities, but instead to provide a reading as a conceptual framework for understanding Virginia Woolf's use of language. Several themes run through this thesis as frameworks thr~~gh which to interpret Woolf's work. Firstly, the term 'subject' recurs, along with two associated terms, ·subjectivity ' and 'subject-position'. I use these terms to distinguish the person under di s­ cuss ion as a thinking, feeling entity with a personal experience of the world , and thus, an individual point of view. Throughout Woolf's work, the character's status as a subject be­ comes of paramount importance; all too often in society or in a personal relationship, Woolf suggests, people are treated as human objects, as if they had no thoughts, feelings , experiences or points of view unique to themselves - as if, being superficially in the same social group as those around them, they automatically accept the views of those around them. Recognising other people's subjectivity is not so much knowing the exact nature of their feelings as recognising simply that they have the capacity to feel - and recognising that this is a realm to which others do not have automatic access . To respect another's subject-position, similarly, is to recognise that another's experience and point of view may be different from one's own, and to respect that difference. For Woolf, language becomes a medium through which to express this difference and so assert one's status as a subject. The second set of terms used in my discussion, then, centre on speech: such words as ·voice', 'expression' and 'communication'. In her diary Woolf records the satisfaction of expressing herself "in my own voice" (A Writer's 4 Diary [A WD] 47) by finally throwing off the constraints of a conventional literary dis­ course that hindered her from expressing her own particular thoughts and feelings in her own way. Throughout her writing, public and personal, Woolf acknowledges the horrify­ ing experience of being silent, or worse, silenced. For Woolf herself, the ability to write was vital to her well-being, and she dreaded the times when doctors prevented her from working, as part of a rest 'cure' after periods of mental breakdown. She also recognised a debt of gratitude to the Hogarth Press, for the establishment of the Press gave her control over the formal expression of her own work: 'Tm the only woman in England free to write what I like. The others must be thinking of series and editors" (AWD 83). No longer would she, as a writer, be silenced by the barrier of publication. But the need to convey one's experience and point of view to others, the need to establish access between essen­ tiall y separate subjective minds, still remained. "Communication is health; communica­ tion is happiness" says Septimus Warren Smith in Mrs Dal/oway (101 ), and Woolf shares this sentiment. The third set of terms that runs throughout my discussion centres on writing. With the meaning of the root-word ' scribe' in mind, such words as 'described ' , with its conno­ tations of a sketching out in language, 'prescribed' , implying both being given a linguistic · course to follow and being already written on, and 'circumscribed', connoting being lim­ ited and bounded by language, become significant. With a person unable to be known conclusively because of the lack of complete and automatic access to her or hi s mind, a writer can at best sketch out a subject, giving an impression rather than a definition. Woolf tackles the issue of knowing others and describing them in language in Jacob's Room, while Rachel Vinrace in The VoyageOut faces society's prescription of her position in society; Katharine Hilbery initially faces life circumscribed by her family and social convention in Night and Day. Finally, my thesis hinges on the tension between two different interpretations of the word 'authority'. Conventional language-use prescribes the subject with an authoritative discourse in two complementary senses: the right way to use language is the only way to use language, and the right and only way is according to the prescribed social codes - so- 5 cial codes that require, in many cases, the renunciation of one's status as a subject. Woolf identifies and criticises social tendencies to objectify other people by asserting an authority over them which overrides individual difference and appropriates personal experience. In response, she promotes language's potential to provide a means to reassert oneself as a subjective agent , an agent capable of exercising an authority over one ' s own life by ar­ ticulating one's life-experience in one's own voice. The chapters of this thesis alternate between, on the one hand, theoretical discussions which articulate Woolf's point of view by drawing together comments predominantly from her essays and diaries, and, on the other, textual analyses, which show how Woolf demon­ strates these observations, criticisms and ideas in practice. Chapter One gives an overview of the constraints of conventional language-use, and describes Woolf's attempts to express herself in her own voice, challenging as she does so assumptions about language and real­ ity, and bringing upon herself scorn and ridicule from those who did not understand or felt threatened by her non-conformity. Consequently, Chapter Two addresses Woolf s first novel , The Voyage Out, which describes a young woman's experience of being effectively silenced because her expressions do not conform to her society's expectations of language­ use. Furthermore, Rachel Vinrace loses her 'voice', her status as a subject and ultimately her life, when her patriarchal community objectifies her in terms of her sexuality and her fiance rejects her music which has been her medium of expressing herself and her view of the world. I have also paired up Woolf's novels in these alternate chapters where they comple­ ment each other in certain aspects. To a great extent, I find that the first novel of each pair I identify investigates particular issues of constraint on a narrative level, while the second novel puts into practice, on a linguistic level, Woolf's solution of liberation. Hence, where Rachel Vinrace dies, unable to express herself and convince others of her status as a sub­ ject, Katharine Hilbery and Ralph Denham from Night and Day create a personal discourse which overcomes the fixed social code of language-use to form a relationship based on re­ specting each other as a subject. The chapters also trace a linear progression through Woolf s reuvre. I deal with the 6 novels in a predominantly chronological order because I perceive a progression in Woolf's works as she moves from identifying aspects of linguistic, literary and socio-political con­ straint to describing and embodying in her works the means for liberation. This structure, then, gives the reader a framework for the questions about language and communication that Woolf's works implicitly ask and answer. Hence, where Chapter Two leaves off with Katharine and Ralph seeking to communicate outside of linguistic and social codes of convention , Chapter Three picks up the underlying question 'how can language function outside of these accepted codes?' and investigates Woolf's ideas about the signifying rela­ tion between language and reality. Woolf explores the communicative potential of figura­ tive language, such as metaphor, which doesn't presume to define an objective reality , but instead evokes subjective impressions of reality. In turn , Chapter Four picks up the ' metaphor' metaphor and applies it to a di scussion of Jacob Flanders' signifying role in society, where the initial question of 'what does Jacob mean? ' becomes 'how does Jacob mean? ': Jacob's Room seeks to protect Jacob 's status as a complex and private subject by evading a conclusive definition of him in language - since definition would limit and so objectify him - while making the reader uneasy about the assumption that any person could be defined conclusively. Jacob 's Room is paired with Orlando, for the latter work advances Orlando as a complex and unlimited subject by the very assertion and proliferation of definition. The multiplication and contradiction in the identity of such a substantial and larger-than-life character make a farce of any expec­ tations we hold of discovering a single, final meaning in either language or life. But with­ out such a single, transcendent meaning, how can we interpret, and communicate, our im­ pressions of language and life? Chapter Four leaves the reader rhetorically poised on the brink of meaninglessness. Chapter Five, however, describes Woolf's solution to the search for meaning and communication. The single, final meaning is indeed a wild goose after which we may chase, for attaining meaning, Woolf suggests, is a matter of holding suspended in our minds multiple and often contradictory impressions in order to 'see life whole', to com­ prehend any element of life as a complex and multifaceted globe composed of our myriad 7 impressions. This too, she suggests, is the way to make sense of a linguistic object, a text, and thus the way to communicate through language. She promotes the reader's ability to have an authority over a text; Woolf respects the readers' role in arranging the various e lements in order to realise a text as whole in their minds, just as she makes real her own experiences by arranging the various elements to make sense of her life. Chapter Six looks at the ability of four of Woolf's characters - Septimus Warren Smith and Clarissa Dalloway from Mrs Dalloway, and Rhoda and Bernard from The Wm 1es - to author themselves and their lives: to shape their identities and assert themselves as subjective agents in the world. Septimus and Clarissa negotiate conventional defini­ tions of what counts as a valid self and a valid expression of that self. Rhoda and Bernard shape themselves through language; each has a subjectivity, a consciousness, that must answer the question 'who am I?' by creating an identity and establishing relations with the world. Frn1hermore, as Woolf shows the boundaries between characters to be arbitrary - since Bernard can use language to overcome the barrier between subject and object by forging an intersubjective communication - outside of the narrative, Woolf uses the rhythm of language to dissolve the boundaries between reader and writer. In doing so, she distrib­ utes the agency of the speaking subject between character, author and reader, and confuses the notion of the true author of the text. Widening the focus to international society and politics, Chapter Seven explores Woolf's vision of a 'linguistic community' . Against Ferdinand de Saussure's use of this term to describe the speaker's social group which accepts, and so fixes, only certain uses of language, excluding other expressions and invalidating those speakers who don't con­ form, Woolf envisions "a system that did not shut out" (A WD 189). The essay Three Guineas records Woolf's concern with the parallels between European fascism and Eng­ land's patriarchal society, where the proponents of each set out to homogenise society by means of an authoritative structured discourse. In contrast, The Years and Between the Acts present communities of speaking subjects, in which each subject contributes to a het­ erogeneous communal expression. Thus Woolf describes a discourse in which all subjects have an authority over life and an ability to express themselves in their own voice: CHAPTER ONE- "SUBJECT AND OBJECT AND THE NATURE OF REALITY"': VIRGINIA WOOLF AND THE TYRANT OF CONVENTION .. . as the current answers don't do, one has to grope for a new one - Virginia Woolf, A Writer 's Diary 8 In her 1922 diary Virginia Woolf writes, "I have found out how to begin (at40) to say something in my own voice; and that interests me so that l feel I can go ahead without praise" ( A WD 47). Woolf wrote this after finishing Jacob's Room, the first full-length fic­ tional work in which she practises the innovative literary style which distinguishes her as a modernist writer. Yet being able to express oneself in one's "own voice", without need for the praise of others, without fear of the censure of others, is a vital issue for Woolf within and without her fiction: it is an issue that runs throughout her novels, engages her attention in many of her essays, and concerns her, as we can see, in her private diary. Much of Woolf s genius as a writer and thinker, her literary and linguistic innovation and her value for succeeding readers, Ii~ not simply in the subjects she deals with and the specific tech­ niques she uses in her works, but in the entire relationship she understands between lan­ guage and reality, and the linguistic, literary and political implications of this relationship for speakers and writers. Many readers understand Woolf as a writer rejecting Edwardian literary conventions to create works that have become exemplars of modernist literature. Certainly we can trace Woolf's progress from her first novels The Voyage Out and Night and Day, which sustain the traditional chapter and plot structures of Victorian fiction, in which the "two and thirty < Mcde,,n Rcl-ression that deviates from social norms. Throughout her work, Woolf demonstrates her awareness of the fact that where lan­ ~uage constructs and embodies a social paradigm of reality, it also prescribes individual peakers ~ith this interpretative framework. Similarly, linguist Henry Lee Smith, Jr. recog- 1ises that language is a system, " in fact the most impo11ant system", through which a society etlects and transmits its culture (90). Defining culture as "the sum total of the learned, ,hared and transmitted, patterned and systematized ways man goes about meeting the prob­ ems raised by his environment ... all of his attitudes, assumptions, beliefs, and values" 89), Smith sees language as society's primary means of enculturating and socialising the 16 ndividual speaker into the pre-existing social group. Language becomes a process of initia­ ion by which the speaker's inclusion in the social group depends not simply on learning the anguage itself; the speaker's inclusion is contingent upon assuming the attitudes, beliefs and 1alues of the group that language embodies. Moreover, this prescribing process is inevitable, for language cannot avoid embodying :o llective assumptions about the nature of the world. Thomas Kuhn poses and rejects the )Ossibility of a neutral language, a language of "pure percepts" uninfluenced by any para­ ligmatic assumptions. Attempts to eliminate all non-logical and non-perceptual terms from a mrticular discourse all met with the same failure, he says, for the "result is a language that - ike those employed in the sciences - embodies a host of expectations about nature and fails o function the moment these expectations are violated" (127). Kuhn explains that as a para­ ligm of reality is established by the community to make sense of its world, the community ·orms a judgement about the nature of reality . Any use of language, then, that does not sub­ ;cribe to social beliefs and assumptions about reality "fails to function" as communication )ecause it does not conform to the expectations engendered by the prevailing paradigm . .:-urthermore, if the prevailing paradigm is strongly established or particularly dominating ;uch an anomalous expression won't just seem meaningless - meaningless because it can't Je interpreted by conventional means - but it will be marginalised or rejected as invalid. i\nd, as Woolf goes on to show, a so-judged invalid expression casts doubt on the authority of the speaker. According to Saussure, Smith and Kuhn, then, using language necessarily involves accepting the prevailing assumptions about the nature of the world that society has encoded into the linguistic system. For an individual speaker's expression to function as meaningful : ommunication, it must conform to the common discourse of the community. Yet the very fact of a social, shared discourse prevents the individual speaker from using language in a way different from conventional language-use and hinders the speaker from expressing ideas and views that dissent from the prevailing paradigm of reality. In that language has a dual function in communication, a linguistic system thus sets up two constraints: the constraint of expression, that is, the obstacles to what the speaker can conceive and articulate; and the 17 constraint of reception, that is the positive or negative response of the speaker's community which indicates how, or whether, the speaker's message has been received. Woolf confronts the constraint of expression in many instances, finding often that the only terms available are inadequate to express particular points of view, or that they carry unwelcome connotations . Throughout A Room o.l One 's Own ( I 929) and Three Guineas ( 1938), Woolf calls for new words, or makes up her own terms in order to discuss women from their own viewpoint rather than from a patriarchal point of view. If "Chloe Iike[s] Olivia" in a novel (A Room o.l One's Own [AROO] 108), the novelist must struggle to con­ vey the relation of woman to woman, to capture "those unrecorded gestures, those unsaid or half-said words, which form themselves ... when women are alone, unlit by the capricious or coloured light of the other sex" ( 110). Woolf contends that "the resources of the English language would be much put to the stretch, and whole flights of words would need to wing their way illegitimately into existence" before a woman could adequately describe her experi­ ence of life ( 113). Woolf argues in this essay that female writers face extreme difficulty in expressing themselves in their own voices because all they have at their disposal is a literary (and linguistic) system "made by men out of their own needs for their own uses", and " since freedom and fullness of expression are of the essence of the a11, such a lack of tradition, such a scarcity and inadequacy of tools, must have told enormously upon the writing of women" ( I 00). To remedy this situation, Woolf calls for female writers to cease attempting to use the "man's sentence" (99-100) and to develop a form of literature and a use of lan­ guage with which they can express themselves freely, without the constraint of needing to define themselves, and assert the validity of their expression, in opposition to patriarchal so­ ciety. In the author's notes to Three Guinea~. Woolf explains her political motives behind her use of the term "educated men's daughters" (157): Our ideology is still so inveterately anthropocentric that it has been necessary to coin this clumsy term ... to describe the class whose fathers have been educated at public schools and universities. Obviously, if the term 'bourgeois' fits her brother, it is grossly incorrect to use it of one who differs so profoundly in the two prime characteristics of the bourgeoisie - capital and environment. (369) 18 Woolf argues that such women need to assert their own points of view by defining them­ selves in terms that articulate and so make real their status of political inequality. Here Woolf uses language to identify individual subjects and their concerns, resisting the univer­ salising implications of a common label. In other cases, however, Woolf advocates getting rid of words that unnecessarily define and divide people. The word "feminist", Woolf be­ lieves , "has done much harm in its day" because it sets men and women in opposition to each other instead of emphasising their similar goals and so encouraging them to work to­ gether for a common political cause (302). In both situations Woolf feels constrained by the limits of the available te1ms, and has to reconstruct elements of the linguistic system in order to get her own point across. Woolf's major literary and linguistic innovation, however, lies in her re-evaluation of the use of prose language. She overcomes "this appalling narrative business of the realist: getting on from lunch to dinner" by giving up the "false, unreal, merely conventional" (A WD 139) representational narrative techniques of the realists which assume an objective reality , and developing ways - not primarily representative - of using prose language as a medium for communication, which reflect her own perception of a reality of subjective expe­ nences. Edward Bishop explains Woolf s perception of the relation between language and reality: The quality she called 'life' or the 'essential thing' refused to be fixed by a phrase, but it could be arrested, briefly, by a net of words: words that evoke as well as indicate, that conspire to produce their own luminous halo, rendering (by inducing) a process of consciousness rather than a concrete picture. (38) In order to communicate more closely with the reader, Woolf uses language to induce the reader to identify with the subjective impressions and experiences described in the work, and thus she "lead[s] the reader to the point where he or she can apprehend the writer's vision" (Bishop 16). In particular, four techniques serve to facilitate communication, whether between writer and reader, character and reader, or between characters themselves. The first is phatic communication. Phatic expressions are usually defined as meaningless social exchanges - 19 small-talk, in other words - but I want to extend this definition to cover any sort of language that derives its import not from the denotative meanings of the words but instead from the communicative function that the words provide. In this way, phatic communication be­ comes any use of language that serves primarily not to convey information but to affirm the personal relation between the speakers. In Orlando, for example, the narrator describes a phatic exchange between Orlando and Shelmardine: .. . it would really profit little to write down what they said, for they knew each other so well that they could say anything, which is tantamount to saying noth­ ing, or saying such stupid, prosy things as how to cook an omelette, or where to buy the best boots in London, things which have no lustre taken from their set­ ting, yet are positively of amazing beauty within it. For it has come about, by the wise economy of nature, that our modern spirit can almost dispense with language; the commonest expressions do, since no expressions do ... (165) Because the speakers invest their discourse with personal significance, rather than relying on the mundane , public meanings of the words - since no social terms can ever contain the per­ sonal feelings motivating the expression - phatic communication achieves a close relation between speakers. Indeed, Woolf often depicts phatic exchanges between couples - such as Katharine Hilbery and Ralph Denham, Clarissa and Richard Dalloway, and Mrs and Mr Ramsay - for whom this private and intimate use of language can express and confirm feel­ ings that remain otherwise unexpressed. Metaphor, and figurative language in general, is Woolf s second technique. Since all linguistic strnctures are paradigmatic, being a framework of interpretation for reality, even literal language is metaphoric to an extent in that it uses (albeit collective) subjective concepts to stand for the reality being communicated. 'Love', for example, is a word and a concept we apply to an actual mental experience. Language is always at a remove from the reality described. Metaphor, however, does away with the pretence of direct and objective refer­ ence and heightens the communicative potential of language by its full use of evocation, asking the reader to respond to the language, rather than simply decode the meaning, and thus be more fully involved in the communication process. Furthermore, metaphor func- 20 tions by conveying a subjective impression without presuming to define any objective refer­ ent. Thus it helps to orientate the reader towards the writer's vision of reality without pre­ suming to define an objective reality. Woolf uses metaphor to enable the reader to see what she sees when she cannot describe her intentions in a more direct and conventional fashion. The metaphors and anecdotes she uses in discussing language and literature - the luminous halo. and Mrs Brown, for instance - help the reader to grasp her point on subjects where conventional models of conception are unavailable or inappropriate. A semiotic use of language, the third technique Woolf displays, can be thought of as the poetic side of phatic expression. Described by Elizabeth Deeds Ermath, after Julia Kris­ teva 's use of the term\ as belonging to "the musical, rhythmic, non-sense effects of lan­ guage. the ones evident in poetry or in the echolalias of children" (331), the semiotic dispo­ sition of language recurs again and again in Woolf's works as inarticulate or broken phrases, nursery rhymes, singing, flights of poetic language or incomprehensible nonsense. The old woman on the street in Mrs Dallmmy, for example, sings "ee um fah um so, foo swee too cem oo .. (88), for the moment not meaning anything except that she is taking pa11 in life. Speaking for the sake of listening to the sound of their own voice, characters confirm their very existence by this ability to 'give voice' to some sound. Language used in this way can also let others know that one is there, as when Mrs Ramsay soothes her daughter Cam to sleep in To the Lighthouse. Having wound her shawl around the pig's skull that her son James insists on having in the room, Mrs Ramsay comforts her daughter by saying how lovely it looked now; how the fairies would love it; it was like a bird's nest; it was like a beautiful mountain such as she had seen abroad, with valleys and flowers and bells ringing and birds singing and little goats and antelopes .... Mrs Ramsay went on saying still more monotonously, and more rhythmically -' I am aware that Julia Kristeva presents a comprehensive and complex body of work, the implications of which - her psychoanalytic focus. for example - go far beyond the bounds of this thesis. While in no way do I claim to incorporate or apply the full import of her work, I wish to use her term 'semiotic' for two reasons: primarily because it names particular incidences of Woolfs language more appropriately than any other term; and secondarily because it gestures toward a perception of self and language - a sense of fluid ego boundaries, in psychoanalytic terms - that I think Woolf and Kristeva share. In Chapter Six I use the term to name one of Bernard· s uses of language, and though I don't apply the term with its full psychoanalytic implications, the potential to fully apply Kristeva's linguistic and psychoanalytic theories is there. Indeed, many critics have discovered the similarities between Woolf and Kristeva. Jean Wyatt discusses Mrs Da!loway with refer­ ence to Kristeva; other critics have explicated The Waves using Kristeva's work. "' ·' , . '-" 21 and more nonsensically, how she must shut her eyes and go to sleep and dream of mountains and valleys and stars falling and parrots and antelopes and gardens and everything lovely ... until she sat upright and saw that Cam was asleep. ( 132) Semiot ic language communicates on a level of sound and rhythm below conventional sym­ bolic representation. Not entirely distinct from language's semiotic disposi tion, rhythm is the fourth tech­ nique of Woolf s that I identify. Referring to The Waves, Richter describes Woolf's lan­ guage as ··articulated feeling" (134), and Woolf' s own words confirm this description. In a letter to Vita Sackville-West, Woolf discusses the effect of rhythm she hoped to achieve in To 1he Lighthouse, revealing her perception of how language functions in aiticulating thought: Now this is very profound, what rhythm is, and goes far deeper than words. A sight. an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to get it; and in writing (such is my belief) one has to recapture this, and set it working (which has nothing apparently to do with words) and then, as it breaks and tumbles in the mind, it makes words to fit it. (quoted in Richter 216) Where a sight or an emotion creates a wave in the mind of the writer before the application of language that would - in line with Saussure's description - structure it into conventional terms, Wool f embodies this initial rhythm in her own words as she writes. As the reader reads, then, the rhythm of the words, rather than the meanings, creates the same wave in her or his mind, and so conveys the same emotion that Woolf originally felt. Thus rhythm be­ comes a means of using language to achieve the same 'wave-length' between reader and writer. engendering communication beyond the constraint of conventional terms and con­ cepts. Where Woolf did manage to express herself 'in her own voice' by using language in the ways outlined above, she faced the consequences of offering an anomalous linguistic product within the conventional system. In 'A Mark on the Wall ' , Woolf writes of the hold that convention has over the members of a community, and the impossibility of advancing 22 anything that deviates from conventional expectations: she recalls a whole class of things indeed which, as a child, one thought the thing itself, the standard thing, the real thing, from which one could not depart save at the risk of nameless damnation .... There was a rule for everything. The rule for table­ cloths at that particular period was that they should be made of tapestry with little yellow compartments marked upon them .... Tablecloths of a different kind were not real tablecloths. ( 44) Just as "[t]ablecloths of a different kind were not real tablecloths", Woolf finds that any use of language that deviates from conventional language-use - a conventional language-use that embodies the prevailing paradigm of reality - does not constitute a real expression. Even within her own community of friends, the intellectual and seemingly innovative thinkers of the Bloomsbury Group, Woolf found that an expression had to conform to cer­ tain conventions. Though they challenged traditional ideas about religion, morality, social behaviour, politics, art and literature, the group still maintained its own paradigm of what l11ey considered real and true and rejected any expression that did not conform by invalidat­ ing the authority of the speaker. Gerald Brenan reminisces of the Bloomsbury Group: though they thought of themselves as new brooms and innovators, they quickly found that they were playing the part of a literary establishment. What I chiefly got from them was their respect for the truth. Yet this - they gave the word a capital letter - was defined in a narrow and exclusive way so that anyone who held views that could not be justified rationally was regarded as a wilful cultiva­ tor of illusions and therefore as a person who could not be taken seriously. (quoted in Poole 61, my italics) Specifically, debate within the group, though ostensibly calling for the expression of a per­ sonal opinion, still required this expression to conform to prescribed rules of logic and ra­ tionality, and to conform to the group's assumptions about the relation between language and reality, and the function of an expression: Words, in the world of G.E. Moore especially, were logical counters in a world of public logical discourse, and must have a clear and precise, not merely a per- sonal, meaning. 'What exactly do you ,nean by that?' [a Bloomsbury inter­ rogative initiated by Moore] is a demand for a publicly available and checkable meaning'' (Poole 66, original italics) 23 Words in the world of Virginia Woolf, however, are not logical counters with singular and -;elf-evident meanings, but are a means to give voice to personal experiences and subjective vi-;ions of life. Poole notes that the interrogative was not used by the group to assist com­ munication by encouraging further explanation. but "as a warning not to speak in tern1s that the group will not accept .... 'What exactly do you mean by that?' meant: conform to our verbal conventions, or prepare to be ridiculed" (66-7. original italics). As Poole describes it, Woolf faced a linguistic community that not only did not understand her use of language, but .1ctively discouraged her attempts at expressing herself in her own voice. Furthermore, Woolf was articulating an epistemological paradigm that differed from that of her contemporaries in its relativistic, rather than empiric, ideas about perception, knowledge and identity. Poole states, It was the essence of Virginia's genius that what she had to say, to show, was not capable of being fmther verbally reduced from the expression she had already given it .... It might take fifteen pages to describe a mark on the wall. The Moorean attitude had no patience with such descriptions. Its question was, so to speak, 'Is it a stain or is it a nail? ' Virginia was trying to draw attention, however, not to what the mark in fact empirically was, so much as to the process of human vision which allows such enormous and radical imprecisions. (67, Poole's italics) Poole recognises Woolf s concern with the process of forming subjective impressions and points of view in contrast to empirical assumptions about an unproblematic and self-evident reality. Just as Woolf herself suffered because of her unconventional use of language, Woolf s work also suffered for not conforming to conventional expectations. Some critics were confused by her attempt to alter the paradigm of reality. In 1950, D.S. Savage wrote, "Truth, the absolute, forms in every integrated work of art the invisible centre around which 24 everything in it coheres and in relation to which it becomes a communicator of value" (13 ); the passage suggests that he recognised the function and importance of a paradigm of reality in the creation of a work of art. However, Savage went on to contend that "in Virginia Woolf we see the elementary bewilderment of a mind incapable of formulating a clear view or her world of experience consequent upon inability to establish foundations in belief of whatever order'' ( 19). Though he demonstrates an awareness of the concept of a paradigm in art within which everything coheres and becomes meaningful, Savage neve1theless also believes that there is only one such valid paradigm - for him it is Christianity - and he cannot make sense of, let alone confer value on, a work that embodies an alternative paradigm. Writing in 1976, James Naremore provides a slightly more recent example of the same vein of literary criticism, in this case highlighting Woolf's use of language, which he finds objectionable. Focusing his discussion on Woolf's use of lyrical language, Naremore sug­ gests that "lyrical" and "rhythmic" equal "poetic" ( 14 ), and in turn, "poetic" equals (in addi­ tion to "feminine") "mannered" and "ornamental'' ( 17). "Mannered" and "ornamental'· are representative of "literary convention" ( 19), and "literary convention", used in this way, contrives a picture "based wholly on fancy" ( 19). For Naremore, to be "based wholly on fancy" in this way means that Woolf s language is "detached from experience", and so he concludes that the "charm" of Woolf s work "seems false, its authority invalid, and its beauty sterile" ( 19). Naremore fails to recognise his own implicit assumptions about lan­ guage and literature. Where he expects that language should be "put to the scrupulous serv­ ice of presenting life", he makes two assumptions of the writer: he assumes that 'life' is a universally similar experience, and he assumes that any use of language which does not ·present life' cannot function as literary expression. Woolf herself is quite explicit about the need to interpret and evaluate literary works from within the paradigms they create. She anticipates Kuhn's observations about anoma­ lies being seen as meaningless or marginalised: novelists are already so far apart, she writes in · Phases of Fiction', "that they scarcely communicate, and to one novelist the work of an­ other is quite genuinely unintelligible or quite genuinely negligible" (144). In the essay 'How Should One Read a Book?', she stresses the need for the reader to appreciate the dif- 25 ferences between works, saying "it is necessary to approach every writer differently in order to get from him all he can give us" (392-3). Woolf suggests the reader become an .. accomplice'' to the writer, following the inclinations of the work and renouncing any initial prejudices in order to maximise his or her chance of understanding: if we remember, as we turn to the bookcase. that each of these books was writ­ ten by a pen which, consciously or unconsciously, tried to trace out a design, avoiding this, accepting that, adventuring the other; if we try to follow the writer in his experiment from the first word to the last, without imposing our design upon him, then we shall have a good chance of getting hold of the right end of the string. (390) Woolf argued that this approach to reading was especially relevant when reading the works of the modernists themselves - works which required a greater effort of comprehension from readers of traditional literature. Of her contemporaries, she says: "wherever there is life in them they will be casting their net out over some unknown abyss to snare new shapes, and \\·e must throw our imaginations after them if we are to accept with understanding the strange gifts they bring back to us'' ('Hours in a Library ' 29-30). Woolf reconceptualises reality, creating in her works "new shapes" after which we, as readers, must "throw our imaginations" in order to fully understand her voice. With the ad­ vent of deconstruction as a literary and linguistic tool of inquiry, we can now begin to appre­ ciate the impon of Woolf s use of language. Such an approach parallels Woolf's own in­ vestigations into the production and reception of literary and linguistic expression, for she seeks no definitive literary fonn or incontrovertible meaning in language, emphasising only the goal of communication: "Any method is right, every method is right, that expresses what we wish to express, if we are writers: that brings us closer to the novelist's intention if we are readers" (MF l 92). As one critic notes with regard to A Room of One's Own, for ex­ ample, Woolf prescribes no 'woman's sentence', but only asserts the desire for women to be able to express themselves in their own voices. With regard to Woolf s work, Pamela Caughie describes literature as a dynamic process which offers "possibilities, not fixed posi­ tions" and "functions, not appropriate forms" (6). Caughie, like Woolf, focuses on the 26 speaker's motivation behind an expression and the reader's response to that expression, for each remains open to the potential for communication beyond fixed social codes of denota­ tive meaning. Certainly some readers have responded to Woolf in terms of the rhetoric of her work. Tori! Moi contends that "remaining detached from the narrative strategies of Room is equ ivalent to not reading it at all" (5), arguing that what the work does for the reader goes ove r and above what it simply states. Clare Hanson concurs, explaining that the "very method or A Room o_{One's Own, with its shifting viewpoints and sudden juxtapositions, encourages us to see ·truth' as varying and unstable, and value as dependent on point of view .. ( 116). Woolf enacts her vision of reality in her texts, deconstructing the certainty of any one fixed point of view by her use of language. Thus Woolf provokes the reader's awareness of the implications behind different constructions of reality and different uses of language. Victoria Middleton writes of Woolf' s "re-cognition" which entails " becoming conscious of how we know, what we know, and where we know: where we stand in rela­ tion to the dominant culture" (415, original italics). Middleton describes how Woolf' s ob­ ser\'ations on language and her use of language, in "exposing the relativity of supposed ab­ solutes and endorsing pluralism of meaning" ( 406), enact a political position of resisting the " imperial appropriation of knowledge, the assumption of mastery over and total certitude about the world'' ( 412) that conventional language-use assumes. Woolf deconstructs any one speaker or group of speakers' claim to an authority over language and reality by pro­ moting the authority of every speaker to use language to express themselves and their expe­ rience of life in their own voice. In the chapter that follows we see Woolf exploring and enacting different uses of lan­ guage and the implications of these uses for speakers. She begins, in The Voyage Out and Night and Day, to depict the effects of the tyrant of convention on speakers who want to es­ cape the social codes by which society defines them, speakers who seek, like Woolf, to ex­ press themselves in their own voices.