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Article Excerpt
ABSTRACT
This article contrasts Virginia Woolfs resistance to Fabian socialists such as George Bernard Shaw and Beatrice Webb with her response to the earlier, aesthetic socialism of William Morris. Woolf's Bloomsbury was connected to such 1880s radicalism through the translator Constance Garnett and the circle of 'Neo-Pagans' whose parents had followed the 'religion of socialism' at the turn of the century. Woolf's Preface to Life as We Have Known It offers a studied negation of the democratic aesthetics and communalist sympathies of the 1880s, and marks Woolf's separation of the world of labour from a perfectly autonomous aesthetic--the only realm in which Woolf's modern individual can find freedom and value.
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We've been sitting in the Park and listening to the Band and having a terrific argument about Shaw. Leonard says that we owe a great deal to Shaw. I say that he only influenced the outer fringe of morality. Leonard says that the shop girls wouldn't be listening to the Band with their young men if it weren't for Shaw. I say the human heart is touched only by the poets. Leonard says rot, I say damn. Then we go home. Leonard says I'm narrow. I say he's stunted. But don't you agree with me that the Edwardians, from 1895 to 1914, made a pretty poor show. By the Edwardians I mean Shaw, Wells, Galsworthy, the Webbs, Arnold Bennett. We Georgians have our work cut out for us, you see. There's not a single living writer (English) I respect: so you see, I have to read Russian: but here I must stop. I just throw this out for you to think about, under the trees. How does one come by one's morality? Surely by reading the poets. And we've got no poets. Does
that throw light upon anything? Consider the Webbs--That woman has the impertinence to say that I'm a-moral: the truth being that if Mrs Webb had been a good woman, Mrs Woolf would have been a better. Orphans is what I say we are--we Georgians--but I must stop. (1)
In 1922 Virginia Woolf playfully killed off her Edwardian elders and thus, in a familiar manoeuvre in her works, left herself a Georgian orphan, self-tutored in her art. For Woolf, George Bernard Shaw and Beatrice Webb had come to stand as types of a generation lacking aesthetic content, whose members sought to change the world and its citizens through pragmatic material reforms and a high-realist practice of representation. This supposedly Edwardian habit of conceiving the world and the self through material externalities alone was subjected to a more detailed and rather more famous attack on the grounds of aesthetics in Woolf's essay 'Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown' a year or so after she wrote the letter quoted above. In this instance, however, the Fabian researcher and campaigner Leonard Woolf was present to defend Shaw and his early mentors, the Webbs, against the political content of the onslaught. (2) For Leonard (according to Virginia, at least), the social reforms propagandized by Shaw and the Webbs over the past twenty-five years made it possible for working-class girls to approach a full and rich social subjectivity in 1922. Young women not only have time off, he responds, but can also choose to listen to the band in the municipal park during that period of leisure. For Virginia Woolf this is merely 'stunted' work at the fringes. Morality--and here it seems Woolf is talking about her own, rather than that of the shopgirls in the park--can come only from the purely aesthetic realm of the poets, and hence the unaesthetic Edwardians have left her generation of Georgians orphaned. If Woolf is amoral (or apolitical), as Beatrice Webb judged, then that is because Webb herself was not 'good'. Webb's virtue is not judged by ethics but rather by aesthetics: she lacked the aesthetic value that could have made Woolf moral.
In Woolf's experimental novella Jacob's Room, published in the same year that she wrote the letter to Janet Case, young Jacob Flanders escapes from lunch in Cambridge with his tutor, Mr Plumer, some time in the first decade of the twentieth century. Mr Plumer receives his students in a room lined with books 'by Wells and Shaw; on the table serious sixpenny weeklies written by pale men in muddy boots--the weekly creak and screech of brains rinsed in cold water and wrung dry--melancholy papers'. (3) Mrs Plumer taps the weeklies with 'her bare red hand' and tells Jacob she feels she can only know the truth about anything after she has read these papers. Jacob can take no more and rushes into the street to find his own truth: '"Bloody beastly!" he said, scanning the street for lilac or bicycle--anything to restore his sense of freedom' (p. 33). Freedom and truth for Jacob Flanders, that young Edwardian who never makes it past Woolf's end point of 1914 to become a Georgian, lies in individual aesthetic responsiveness, in flashes of being, not these 'scrubbing and demolishing [...] elderly people' (p. 33).
For the chief culprit of this Edwardian scrubbing and demolishing, George Bernard Shaw, the separation of political and rationalist truth from aesthetic value and responsiveness--the need to leave the subject alone with his or her own desires--was a means of the socialist movement embracing modernity. Such modernity required a break from the generation of Victorians who had devoted themselves to the distinctively aesthetic politics of socialism in the 1880s--a generation noticeably absent from Woolf's account. The rise of socialist activism in Britain from the early 1880s onwards had, as Stephen Yeo suggests, 'its own special dynamism' in which a concern with the ethical transformation of the individual through a desire for the beauty of life without capitalism was seemingly indivisible from the necessity of material revolution. (4) The prominence of artists and writers such as William Morris, Edward Carpenter, and Walter Crane within the movement, in addition to the clear debt owed to American romanticist thought by early ethical socialist groups such as the Fellowship of the New Life, ensured that the relationship between aesthetics and ethics--or, in Woolf's terms, poetry and morality--was a feature of socialist lectures during the 1880s and early 1890s. (5) Advocates of the 'simple life', such as Carpenter, argued that individuals could advance the great change by dispensing with the polite concealments of bourgeois society; hence, loose woollen clothing, sandals, vegetarianism, growing your own vegetables, doing without servants, discussing sexual desire in all its forms with frankness became intercalated with socialism by many middle-class followers. By the early twentieth century, however, the millenarian hope for imminent revolution had largely given way to a gradualist and pragmatic approach towards social democracy, led by the propaganda of the Fabian Society and the electoral efforts of the Independent Labour Party.
Shaw, in his preface to Major Barbara of 1905, teased out the distinctions between the 'modern' material politics of the twentieth-century Fabians and these affective aesthetics of earlier socialist hopes. William Morris and other socialist agitators of 1880s failed, he argued, because the poor 'do not share their tastes nor understand their art criticisms':
They do not want the simple life, nor the aesthetic life [...] What they do dislike and despise and are ashamed of is poverty [...] To ask them to fight for the difference between the Christmas number of the Illustrated London News and the Kelmscott Chaucer is silly: they prefer the News. (6)
Shaw's preface confirms the death by the early twentieth century of an ideal of aesthetic democracy that had been prevalent during the 1880s. As Linda Dowling has demonstrated, a wide variety of nineteenth-century writers were concerned with the concept of aesthetic democracy, yet the resurgence of socialism in Britain lent a particular urgency to this ideal. (7) For both William Morris and Edward Carpenter, albeit with significant differences in their analyses, the aesthetic retained a relative autonomy from material determinism. People of all classes and races had the capacity for a sensuous response to beauty, and thus the aesthetic provided a site of communal feeling; each person also had the potential to produce new art through the pleasurable labour of handicraft after the revolution. By the turn of the century, however, specialization played an increasingly important part in Fabian political thought, and that thought was itself increasingly influential. (8) In the Fabian socialist future the needs of the social organism would determine an increasing differentiation of labour. (9) Talents and tastes for 'hand' and 'brain' labour, including art itself, were simply not distributed democratically by nature. An affective response to the lack of beauty under capitalism would therefore never inspire a revolution among the masses; but the expert municipal provision of basic cultural goods in the form of libraries, free concerts, theatres, galleries, and gymnasiums could educate the people....
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