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Article Excerpt
ABSTRACT
The small but meaningful presence of animals in writings by major Bloomsbury figures Virginia and Leonard Woolf and E. M. Forster signals a number of covert presences in these authors' texts and lives. They embody partially repressed individual emotions or desires, unresolved social issues, and a sense of mystical and cosmic sacredness and interspecies relationality that secular Bloomsbury overtly rejected. The presence of these animals can thus be aligned with Julia Kristeva's idea of the abject and Helene Cixous's concept of the 'abominable'--unstable elements of the self that are cast out in order to achieve a stable identity, keeping such elements present but at bay as the members of Bloomsbury explore aesthetic and intellectual realms.
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Animals do not play a major role in Virginia Woolf's experimental masterpieces, articulated under the sign of the androgynous mind rather than of the heterosexual beast, but they are present in minor if significant ways. They signal a number of covert presences, figuring the emotional, the mystical, and perhaps even the social underside of Bloomsbury's dominant intellectual and aesthetic pursuits. Thus Bloomsbury's beasts may remind us of the 'instinctual drive and continuous relation to the mother' that Julia Kristeva maintains is the cost when 'language as symbolic function' constitutes itself, revealing an often concealed side of Bloomsbury that looked towards the traditional English past, spirituality, and Romanticism, rather than forwards to the innovations of international secular modernism. (1) According to Samuel Rosenbaum,
Bloomsbury's writing combines two broadly different clusters of value, one of which is usually sacrificed to the other in much modern literature. [...] One [...] rational[:] [...] a profound belief in truth, analysis, pluralism, toleration, criticism, individualism, egalitarianism, and secularism. The other cluster [...] is harder to label, but it has to do with the visionary[:] [...] an equally profound faith in intuition, imagination, synthesis, ideality, love, art, beauty, Mysticism, and reverence. (2)
Bloomsbury's beasts belong largely to the second register.
As I have been suggesting, then, animals in the texts and lives of Bloomsbury serve three main functions. First, they embody repressed individual emotions or unresolved social issues; secondly, they represent reverent feelings of connection with the cosmos. Given Bloomsbury's bias, the presence of animals often implies a criticism of social rules, but unlike earlier treatments of animal communities as utopias or dystopias, such as Swift's herd of houyhnhms, for example, in keeping with the value Bloomsbury invested in individuals, Bloomsbury's beasts are often seen alone. This solitude also contributes to their efficacy as cosmic connectors. Furthermore, that animals serve both as outlets for repressed emotions and vehicles to express cosmic relatedness means that they also serve a third function: they help construct the delicate web of communal feelings and mysterious connections that comprises Virginia Woolf 's 'luminous envelope' of life itself.
In fulfilling these general functions, the presence of animals in Bloomsbury's texts fits into several related categories. As I have suggested, animals often serve to express partially repressed or problematic emotions or desires. This is not to deny that, as Reginald Abbott points out, Woolf absorbed the Victorian ideology of 'an ordered animal world governed by man' as articulated in Thomas Berwick's widely read A General History of Quadrupeds. (3) But the presence of animals in her work, while not greatly deviating from this view, nevertheless moves slightly beyond this ordered norm in the direction of the unruly; she implicitly approves, for example, of her family dog's habit of running wildly through the streets of the town. (4) Similarly, Woolf's acknowledgment that her article on 'The Plumage Bill' was 'an outburst of sex antagonism', contrasting with her own denigration of such verbal outbursts in A Room of One's Own, suggests that the subject of animals often freed her from habitual restraints. (5) Thus this presence of animals in Bloomsbury seems to be a small and unruly current running in the opposite direction from the mainstream Victorian vision of animals in the zoo, described by Harriet Ritvo as emblematic of the British imperial system. (6) Such a current flows to and from the unconscious, contributing a non-human element to Virginia Woolf's streams of consciousness.
In a characteristically meticulous footnote to an uncharacteristically proud moment in Beginning Again, the third part of his autobiography, Leonard Woolf carefully registers his early impressions of Freud: he claims to be 'rather proud of having in 1914 recognized and understood the greatness of Freud [...] when this was by no means common'. (7) His judgement of the importance and perspicacity of Freud's ideas underlies Bloomsbury's awareness of the unconscious.
And his observations in Growing (the second part of his autobiography) exhibit a distinctly analytical turn of mind, a consciousness of Freudian principles in which the jungle and its animals represent the unconscious and its libidinal impulses:
Our life runs between metal lines like the trains and the old-fashioned trains. It has normally nothing to do with the jungle where wild beasts like the leopard and the elephant roam or even the human jungle where the human beast roams [...] the ego and the superego are far too strong for the id. (8)
However, it would seem that for the most part the presence of Bloomsbury's animals signals the workings of that unconscious id, of the underside of the consciously thoughtful life they habitually led, rather than a conscious element in the analysis of it. In that capacity Bloomsbury's beasts, like many other literary animals, often serve as symbols of the unconscious as Freud conceived of it, as containing the libidinal desires of the id, but they can also represent the more language-centred problems of that unconscious, which Freud also posits in his investigation of the dreamwork. As if he were exploiting that more linguistically oriented side of the unconscious, Leonard Woolf uses Rilke's poem 'The Panther' as the epigraph for Beginning Again, which chronicles the years of the First World War, and then extends its vision of imprisonment to serve as an emblem of psychic life generally. Woolf claims that all throughout the war 'one felt that one was behind bars'. Furthermore, 'a terrible doubt' had come to him: 'there are other bars, permanent bars of the cage of one's life, through which one has always and will always gaze at the world. The bars of one's birth and family and ancestors, [...] of one's own secret and sinuous psychology'. (9) Woolf reflects on this image, and, as often in this autobiography, it is difficult to disentangle writing subject from portrayed self:
Has not my mind, my soul, if I have a soul, for the last 82 years been pacing up and down like the panther, backwards and forwards, behind these bars and gazing though them until, so weary, I have seen, not the world or life, but only the bars--a thousand bars and behind the thousand bars no world? (Foreword)
The animal becomes emblematic not only of the desires of the unconscious mind, but of an instinctual awareness of the ways in which those desires are contained by the discourses that enclose them. And finally, with the (uncharacteristic) mention of the soul, they trigger a specific metaphysical query.
The (reportedly) rather savage act of the Ramsays' dog who bites Mr Tansley in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse represents emotions temporarily breaking out of the discursive cage that Leonard Woolf describes: 'Even old badger without a tooth in his head had bit him, for being [...] the hundred and tenth young man to chase them all the way up to the Hebrides when it was ever so much nicer to be alone.' (10) The children, who dislike Tansley and whom we glimpse later on 'disappearing as stealthily as stags from the dinnertable', report the bite with delight (p. 11). Thus the dog suggests the unruly emotional underside of the socially acceptable, accepting, and civilized upper middle-class family that ostensibly welcomes outsiders. In biting guests rather than welcoming them, the dog embodies the rebellious, self-defensive, half-civilized, and emotional pack, rather like the sea that swirls around the house, held in check by the dual lighthouses of Mrs and Mr Ramsay. Mrs Ramsay sees her husband's 'anger fly like a pack of hounds' when old Mr Carmichael, who reminds her of 'a cat watching birds' in his brooding solitude, asks for more soup (pp. 144-45). Again, the misbehaving animals suggest hidden, unsocial selves. So, in Mrs Dalloway, does Elizabeth Dalloway's dog: just as her mother's chic party is beginning, the narrator fusses that jenny must remember the dog, Miss Elizabeth's fox-terrier, which, since it bit, had to be shut up', just as its mistress must behave correctly for this party, even though a part of her might rather bite than talk with the guests. (11)
In Kristeva's terms, then, inasmuch as they are psychopomps, preceding us into the realms of unconscious desires (and horrors), perhaps animals embody her idea of the abject as the underside of the symbolic, as the unclean, antisocial, and unstable elements of the self that are cast out in order to gain a stable identity, but hover ever after at the peripheries of that identity. Inasmuch as...
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