Who lived at Alfoxton?

CHOICE

Tremper (Brooklyn College, CUNY) begins and ends her comprehensive, readable, well-researched, but poorly titled work by speculating on the sources of Woolf's interest in the English Romantic poets, particularly Wordsworth. She locates Woolf's interest in the merging of the world and the imagination — their "marriage" or coexistence — in the complex intellectual relationship between Woolf and her father, Leslie Stephen. Drawing on the full range of Woolf's work — short stories, essays, novels, diaries, and letters — Tremper eschews narrow feminist and postmodern readings in favor of a solid source-based study of literary influence, providing insightful analysis of Night and Day, Monday or Tuesday, The Common Reader, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and The Waves. A useful addition to Jane Marcus's Virginia Woolf and the Languages of Patriarchy, Maria DiBattista's Virginia Woolf's Major Novels, and Hermione Lee's Virginia Woolf.
Recommended for all upper-division undergraduates and above.
— L. Winters, College of Saint-Elizabeth

Nathan Rose

One must be grateful for what this book is not. Most criticism of Virginia Woolf falls into two categories: Woolf as feminist, Woolf as modernist. Under the former interpretation, she is "the mother of us all," a mantle never worn very comfortably by Woolf, whose view of the imagination was androgynous and (what is truly "declasse") humanist. Criticism of Woolf as modernist has the virtue of referring to literary standards of judgment; but those whose expectations of the modern novel are conditioned (as they must be) by the multiple stylistic exfoliations of, say, Joyce or Faulkner, tend to find Woolf wanting. Dr. Tremper does not run down either of these blind alleys.

But apophatic praise is not all that is due. Tremper's book points us down the high road by suggesting the primacy of Woolf's Romantic inheritance. The book is composed episodically, with various of Woolf's works considered as filiations of Romanticism. There is a strangeness in some of the proportions. Immediately following the introduction, there is a "Prologue" comparing an early work (unpublished until 1979), "The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn," to Wordsworth's (published, but unread) "Guide to the Lakes." This is followed by an "Epilogue" devoted to two late, incomplete essays also not published until 1979. "To the Lighthouse" and "Mrs. Dalloway" are combined in one chapter, while "The Waves" and the early novel "Night and Day" get a full chapter each. However, Tremper's purpose is not to give a full reading of Woolf, but to identify and illuminate phases of a characteristic problem. The arrangement serves her well in this regard, even if one could wish for a shift in emphasis.

Tremper's prose, which is mostly limpid and substantive, is occasionally vitiated by intrusions of the vocabularies of other, lesser modes of criticism than her own. Thus "deconstruction" and "signified" here, "dialectical" and "preoedipal" there, loiter sheepishly in sentences inhospitable to them. But Tremper's major mode is a well-informed literary history, over which presides M. H. Abrams, whose figure of the mirror and the lamp pervades Tremper's reading of the Romantic imagination. And this gives some notion of the strengths and weaknesses of the book; it is of the species of criticism which regards literature as a series of episodes in the history of ideas. The danger of this kind of criticism is that, improperly handled, it can turn literary works into expressions, more or less eloquent, of the "zeitgeist." Sensing an affinity between works distant in time, it must broaden its terms. The dissection of the delicate linguistic fibers that compose literary influence, with so blunt an instrument as, for instance, "the democratic spirit," is unlikely to end happily. Fortunately, though such experiments are frequently threatened, they are not persevered in.

Tremper's thesis comes at the end of chapter two: "The sense that consciousness works through time and that the schemata of consciousness are not linear, that memory is central to one's definition of self, that creativity is a self-conscious and self-reflexive act, are Woolf's ideas, founded on the Romantic aesthetic." This is just, and well supported in the course of the book. But we may pause to note a certain tension between "ideas" and "aesthetic." The history of ideas which Tremper sketches would seem to demand the appearance of Coleridge's "Biographia Literaria"; indeed, a full account of Woolf's meditations on the history of consciousness and its relation to the perceived world (her "atoms of perception") would require Coleridge to be flanked by Hume on the one side and Pater on the other. This is, of course, beyond the scope of Tremper's book; Wordsworth is the term of comparison because he is the exemplary Romantic artist. That is fair enough; but Tremper evinces no inclination to suppose that as aesthetic modes prose and poetry may be in any substantial way incommensurable. (Perhaps this is why Tremper leans heavily on the "Guide to the Lakes" and the Preface to "Lyrical Ballads.") The problem, aesthetic and intellectual, of representing consciousness, could benefit from a consideration of its handling in the novel from Sterne to Henry James. Tremper's reading of "The Waves," for instance, posits "collective personality" to explain the invariant style of the six mental interiors; but the personality is clearly that of Virginia Woolf. This is disorienting because consciousness is represented in the first person; we expect Joycean voices, but we get what amounts to formal, syntactical variation of Jamesian translations. Tremper, in orbit around Wordsworth, hardly mentions novelists.

But, what Tremper does, she does well. Because she is most interestesd in a theory of consciousness, she deals best with Woolf's discursive prose; it is in the chapter on The Common Reader that Tremper hits her stride. There are, even here, moments of unnecessary strain: noting that the essay on the Greeks follows that on Chaucer, Tremper argues, "its very placement serves as a metaphor for this 'unplaceable' classical literature...." But the placement is not random: it represents the period at which Greek literature was discovered by the West. In the history of English literature, Ovid and Boccaccio precede Chaucer, but Sophocles follows him. However, the chapter is an engaging and well-reasoned defense of Woolf's "impressionistic" style of criticism. "The central issue for Woolf," she argues, "is...aesthetic self-consciousness of one's medium, with tropic language functioning as the barometer."

Tremper's argument for Woof's Romantic "traditionalism belied by many contemporary readings of her work" is convincing; the central posiion of Wordsworth is not. No matter, if we are not persuaded by all she says: this is criticism of the kind Woolf needs.

Nathan Rose, PhD candiate, English and American literature and language, Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Science.
— Harvard Graduate School Alumni Association Newsletter