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Archive for the ‘Three Guineas’ Category

Virginia Woolf appears at Occupy Berkeley

Posted in Three Guineas, Woolf sightings, tagged on Wednesday 16 November 2011| Leave a Comment »

Virginia Woolf participated in the Occupy movement at the University of California at Berkeley last week.

It’s true that her involvement appeared to be limited to a sign carried by Celeste Langan, associate professor of English at UC Berkeley. But I think her presence was more substantial than that.

The sign held by Langan, a teacher and a student of Thoreau, read:

We’re Afraid for Virginia Woolf

We should be afraid. Langan was yanked out of a crowd of protesters by her hair and arrested.

In his piece in Huff Post College, Michael Roth quoted Langan as saying she “was defending liberal education in Sproul Plaza.” She was “defending an idea of the university that is being dismantled by political and education leaders who support only the most narrow forms of instrumental training.” Her “idea of the university emphasizes the links between the practice of free thinking and the cultivation of freedom in the years after graduation.”

I can easily link this to Woolf’s ideas expressed in Three Guineas. She talks about the “adventurous college,” one that combines learning and learners instead of separating them, one in which “teachers should be drawn from the good livers as well as from the good thinkers” (49-50).

Was Woolf on UC Berkeley’s Sproul Plaza last Wednesday? Was she there on Nov. 15 for the Mario Savio Memorial Lecture? And will she participate in tomorrow’s all-out occupation of NYU and Hunter and Queen’s? I think so.

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Thoughts of Woolf on D-Day in Ohio

Posted in Three Guineas, Virginia Woolf, war, tagged , , , on Saturday 20 August 2011| 2 Comments »

It’s D-Day in Conneaut, Ohio. And as I sit here at my kitchen table under a sun-drenched window, I can hear — and feel — the loud drone of airplanes overhead and the gunfire nearby.

The invasion, complete with a beach landing, explosions in the sand, shots fired by opposing forces and airplanes flying low overhead, started promptly at 3 p.m., right on schedule.

The D-Day reenactment has been staged in Conneaut since 1999. The location was chosen because the township park’s 250-yard-long public beach and adjacent sloping terrain are said to closely resemble Omaha Beach in Normandy, France.

As I sit just four blocks away from the battle site and listen to the sounds of make-believe war, I wonder: What was it like for those who actually lived through World War II and experienced the sounds of a real war overhead?

Virginia Woolf described it this way in “Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid” (1940):  “It is a queer experience, lying in the dark and listening to the zoom of a hornet, which may at any moment sting you to death. . .The drone of the planes is now like the sawing of a branch overhead. Round and round it goes, sawing and sawing at a branch directly above the house…A bomb drops. All the windows rattle.”

I could walk down to the park bluff to get closer, to see the “invasion” myself. But it’s easier to imagine the reality here in my kitchen than at the actual site.

From past experience, I know that the crowd of spectators sipping cold drinks and licking ice cream cones makes it difficult to imagine a real battle, where people kill and are killed. And the uniformed volunteers who portray the German and Allied soldiers of June 6, 1944, take so much obvious enjoyment in the weekend’s events that they prevent me from suspending my disbelief in the proceedings.

Last night, for example, we saw a man in full uniform riding through town in an open military Jeep. His posture, his heavy wool uniform on a hot summer afternoon, the jaunty tilt of his cap and the expression on his face as he suavely steered the vintage vehicle, said it all. He was so puffed up with the importance of his imaginary role in the upcoming “battle” that my companion and I turned to each other and laughed. Out loud.

Under the laughter, though, I recalled Virginia Woolf’s statement in Three Guineas (1938) that “wearing pieces of metal, or ribbon, coloured hoods or gowns, is a barbarity which deserves the ridicule which we bestow upon the rites of savages.”

My fear that some of those watching the events today may think that war is exciting, glorious, even fun, also prevents me from attending. I remember that in Three Guineas Woolf recognizes that “war is a profession; a source of happiness and excitement.”

And I read with dismay that as part of the event, children will build their own miniature Omaha Beach in the sand. I am not sure what to make of that.

It is true that veterans are recognized and honored at the events of this weekend in our small city. And a few remaining WW II vets in town have been interviewed for a commemorative DVD.

But I remember Woolf’s response to war, and I am forced to stop and think again. I recall the fear she shared in her diaries as she heard — and sometimes watched at close proximity — German planes fly over the Sussex countryside during the second World War. And I recall her plea for peace in “Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid.”

Those thoughts sound more loudly in my head than the airplanes. Or the gunfire. Or the explosions on the beach. And Woolf says such thoughts are more powerful than all three.

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Woolf on the list of intermoderns

Posted in Three Guineas, Woolf and war, tagged , , , , on Friday 13 August 2010| 1 Comment »

A year or so after the war…it cannot be said that it is war…it cannot be said that it is war, it cannot be said that it is peace, it can be said it is postwar.

 Stevie Smith
The Holiday

While I was working on my master’s degree at Monmouth University, my favorite course was Dr. Kristin Bluemel’s seminar on intermodernism. Not surprisingly, intermodernism is a term coined by Dr. Bluemel for the, arguably, pretty neglected years between between the two world wars (although Intermodernism cannot only be defined by time).

During this time, novels, memoirs, and essays are being written by writers as varied as George Orwell, Storm Jameson, Dorothy Richardson, Stevie Smith, and Stella Gibbons. Virginia Woolf certainly could, and I would argue, be claimed as an intermodernist writer (we read Three Guineas, and I used it to write my seminar paper, working towards defining an intermodern sex-gender system using Woolf alongside Phyllis Bottome’s anti-fascist, feminist, novel The Mortal Storm).

Bluemel began writing about and attempting to define what Intermodernism is in her 2004 book George Orwell & the Radical Eccentrics: Intermodernism in Literary London. She also edits The Space Between, an academic journal dedicated to the literature and culture of the years between the wars.

In her book, and during our seminars, she argued the writers of this time period fashioned their work and reflected on the emotions of a nation in the aftermath of World War I. Readers of Woolf certainly see this influence in Three Guineas and, especially, Mrs. Dalloway.

Intermodernist writing was often focused on the working and middle classes, socialist and/or “radical” political leanings, and a more “middlebrow” writing style. Often, these writers are somehow “othered” based on their sexuality, ethnicity, or lack of class privilege.

In George Orwell & The Radical Eccentrics, Bluemel argues that these writers are “grounded in the experiences of England’s working-class and ‘working middle-class’ cultures” which do not fit into the same categories that popularized, privileged writers like W.H. Auden, T.S. Eliot, and James Joyce do (Bluemel 2). Their writing attends to politics, whether the domestic life in Woolf or Bottome’s novels, the working class of Orwell’s The Road To Wigan Pier, or the caste system of Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable.

Critics have struggled to place many of these writers within the canon. Many, like Woolf, share some aspects of the modernist aesthetic, but cannot truly be prescribed to that label. Intermodernism isn’t quite just a time period that begins and ends between the wars, but more a style of socially conscious writing and discourse shared amongst writers of varying ethnicities, genders, levels of privilege, and politics. Many of these writers, Woolf included, have drifted in and out of the canon, fates after their death attached to those outside of academia.

Bluemel continues the discussion of this fascinating literary period in the new anthology she edited Intermodernism: Literary Culture in Mid-Twentieth-Century Britain, which brings together leading scholars on the period to further discuss the merits of the period. If the Blogging Woolf community is interested, I have plenty more to say about Intermodernism.

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Iris Origo and Woolf both convey civilian view of war

Posted in Three Guineas, Woolf and war, tagged , , , on Thursday 15 July 2010| Leave a Comment »

It’s summertime, and the reading should be easy. At least once in a while.

In the past few days, while sitting lakeside, I read three books, a luxury for me.

The first was a heavy-hitter. I stumbled across War in Val D’Orcia: An Italian War Diary 1943-1944, while browsing in The Lion Bookshop on Rome’s Via dei Greci. It was written by Iris Origo, an Anglo-American who came from privilege to marry an Italian landowner in the 1920s and settle into a new agrarian life on the family’s Tuscan estate.

After years spent cultivating the land and setting up a health center and school for the local farmers and their families, Iris and her husband Antonio found themselves caught up in deadly conflict. Her diary, meticulously kept during two of the worst years of World War II, tells the story of how everyday Italians helped protect refugees from their own country — and soldiers from the countries of their “enemies” — from both the Germans and the fascists. 

Duomo Baptistry in Firenze

Having just returned from Italy, where we spent a week in Tuscany, I found Origo’s war diary particularly compelling. I could picture the settings she described and recognized some places she mentioned. When she writes of the massive bronze doors of the Duomo’s Baptistry being removed and hidden far from Florence to save them from wartime damage, I remembered their golden beauty. When she speaks of the battles at Monte Cassino, I recalled my husband pointing out the ancient Italian monastery as we zipped along the autostrade on our way to Sorrento.

The best thing about Origo’s wartime diary is that it gives us a woman’s view of war, which is a rare thing. We often hear the accounts of generals and commanders and even foot soldiers. But the voice of average civilians, especially women, is usually silent. In Origo’s diary, we get her first-hand account “in real time,” as we say nowadays. She wrote her story as it happened, finding enough stolen moments to convey the facts and the feelings of her own wartime experience as a mother, a humanitarian and a citizen of the world.  

The message her story conveyed to me is that civilians are the most damaged by war. It is civilians who are the oft-ignored victims.

That is a fact that Virginia Woolf certainly recognized. As I type this post, I recall her words from Three Guineas, words that haunt because they, too, convey images of war.

Woolf describes a photograph of the Spanish Civil War sent by the government that shows “dead bodies for the most part … a man’s body, or a woman’s; it is so mutilitated that it might, on the other hand, be the body of a pig. But those certainly are dead children, and that undoubtedly is the section of a house” (14).

A sobering subject for a summer read, which wasn’t my intention today. But Woolf’s influence will prevail. And my brief, airy reviews of the other  books I read this week will have to wait for another day.

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War and peace at Tavistock Square

Posted in a blog of her own, Blogging Woolf, Bloomsbury, Julian Bell, London, Tavistock Square, The Years, Three Guineas, Virginia Woolf, war, Woolf blog on Friday 10 August 2007| 7 Comments »

From reading Woolf, I knew that Tavistock Square in London had been touched by war. But until today, I didn’t realize how closely it was aligned with peace.

Tavistock Hotel, the site of where 52 Tavistock Square once stood.

First, the war connections. It was in Woolf’s Bloomsbury flat on the third floor of 52 Tavistock Square during the winter of 1936-1937 that she is said to have received a packet of photographs from the Spanish government. These were “not pleasant photographs to look upon,” she wrote in Three Guineas, for they depicted “dead bodies for the most part,” and devastated buildings, all victims of the Spanish civil war.

In July of 1937, she was once again at her Tavistock Square address when the violence of that war touched her in a more personal way. She learned that her twenty-nine-year-old nephew, Julian Bell, a volunteer ambulance driver in Spain, had been killed. It was a devastating personal loss, one she described in her diary as “a complete break; almost a blank; like a blow on the head: a shriveling up” (D5 104).

Four years later, in October of 1940, Woolf was visited by war again, this time in a more direct physical way. Her Tavistock Square building took a direct hit from a German bomb. When she viewed the devastation, she found “a heap of ruins…where I wrote so many books” (331).

War’s violence in real time
Fast forward to July 7, 2005. Woolf has been dead for sixty-four years, but Tavistock Square still exists. War strikes the location once more, when four terrorists detonate bombs in the London transport system, just as the morning rush hour comes to an end.The last of the four goes off on the Number 30 bus as it arrives in front of the British Medical Association, located on the east side of Tavistock Square, around the corner from the site of Woolf’s former flat. The blast, another incident in the 21st century “war on terror,” kills 52 persons and injures more than 770.

It is ironic that the gritty violence and destruction of war came again and again to the London location where Woolf spent 15 of her most productive years as a writer – and the place where she wrote two of her volumes most intimately connected to war and peace –Three Guineas and The Years. Three Guineas gives a creative and cogent argument that women must establish their own “Outsiders Society” in order to achieve peace. And The Years establishes unmarried matriarch Eleanor Pargiter as the character that holds the novel together and holds out hope for peace.

Peace comes to Tavistock Square
Virginia Woolf is not Tavistock Square’s only female connection to war and peace. Today I read about Rose Hacker, 101, who joined more than 100 other peace activists in Tavistock Square this week to remember the victims of the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima in 1945. The Bloomsbury square is the site of an annual commemoration of the Hiroshima victims.

At 101, Hacker has seen war come and go — and come again. She recalled sitting on the Tavistock Square gate and waving the Union Jack as residents flooded the square to celebrate the end of the First World War. And though she had been told by her teacher that there would be no more wars, she remembers hearing the same prediction when World War II ended.

Despite all that — and her feelings of shame that we still have nuclear weapons — she holds out hope for peace. “We must not lose hope,” she told the Camden New Journal. “If I have not lost hope in 100 years, then you young people can still have hope.”

The hope and wisdom of this longtime spokeswoman for peace inspires me. I feel the same way about a statue that I wandered across in Tavistock Square. It depicts Mahatma Gandhi, the martyred leader of the Indian independence movement who is known the world over for promoting active nonviolence.

This statue sits in the garden area of Tavistock Square on a central site donated by St. Pancras Borough Council. Since its unveiling in 1966, other peace memorials have been established in the square, and it has become a popular place for peace events.

On any given day, visitors to the quiet green space in the heart of bustling Bloomsbury can find individual candles around the statue’s base. The candles, glowing softly in the shadow of Ghandi’s statue, are lit by those who hope for peace.

Rose Harker can be counted among them. And Virginia Woolf is there in spirit.

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