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encourages a literal reading of the novels that completely misses their
symbolism and obscures the dichotomy Woolf sensed between
freedom and communion. But she does succeed to a degree previously
unreaiized in giving texture to Virginia Woolf's early years. Bell is
rarely analytical. Though he tells in detail about the crude sexual
advances made on the child Virginia by her half-brother, Gerald, and
of her "seduction" in adolescence by her cousin, George Duckworth, he
barely suggests the traces of these experiences on the adult Virginia.
Nor does his view of the Stephen household as essentially harmonious,
with parents who combined brains and beauty between them, invite
speculations about adolescent rebellion and feelings of alienation. By
evoking those years through Woolf's record of them in "A Sketch of the
Past," Rose captures a subjective dimension missing in Bell's biogra–
phy.
The brains, of course, belonged to Leslie Stephen, agnostic man of
letters and dour patriarch whom Rose perceives as "an eminent
Victorian remnant against whom the more up-to-date daughters
longed to rebel." The beauty belonged
to
the mother and was both
physical and spmtual.
It
was she who "supported the fabric of their
lives," Rose shows, and her early death contributed to another kind of
frustration in Virginia. Though she was physically her mother's equal,
Virginia could not "rest easy" with her own beauty. Rose reports at
some length the novelist's recollection of catching herself in a mirror in
full view at age seven and feeling a sense of guilt, a reaction she would
later attribute to "a streak of puritanism." But Rose dredges further
meaning from the incident by attaching Woolf's comment on the
sexual assault made by George, that she would thereafter have recur–
ring dreams in which she saw an animal's face standing next to her in
the mirror. This is "the very face of sex," concludes Rose, and an image
pivotal to an understanding of the novels: "When Woolf writes about
sex in the novels, elements present in this childhood episode are
usually repeated-male advances as aggression and exploitation, the
woman's chief response a fear of violation and a desire not to be
touched, the shame and disgust represented by an animal."
It
is interesting to compare these remarks with Virginia Woolf's
own cautionary comments about these first memories. "As an account
of my life," she writes, "they are misleading because the things one
does not remember are as important, perhaps they are more impor–
tant."
When it comes to the Bloomsbury years,
Woman of Letters
makes too much of the "deprivations" Woolf experienced as a woman
