138
PARTISAN REVIEW
"in an inner circle of male culture and cultivation." Rose is convinced
that her exclusion from Cambridge because of her sex affected Virginia
Woolf's self-esteem throughout her life. Moreover, as a young intell ec–
tual woman, she was bound to suffer deep fru stration in being requ ired
to meet social demands in a motherless household. But did " the
Victorian game of manners," as Virginia Woolf somewhere face tiously
described her social duties, rea lly get in her way? Unease in the a bsence
of a university education may have been behind her endl ess self–
goading to learn Greek, read Plato, Shakespeare, the Russ ians, etc., but
the kind of "resentment" Rose is looking for is absent in Virginia
Woolf's own recollections of meetings with men fri ends. On the whole,
the "deprivations" she was so eloquently to expound in "A Room o f
One's Own" and "Three Guineas" are hard to trace back to her own
relationships with Bloomsbury males which, as the letters a nd diaries
reveal, were, if complex, spontaneous and close.
What Rose regrettably leaves out, as Bell before her, is some
suggestion of Bloomsbury'S importance to Virginia Woolf intell ec tu–
ally, the impact of its philosophy and aesthetics on her art.
It
is ironic
in a book purporting to honor Woolf as a woman of letters, tha t there
is no trace of intellectual "background." It is in part Rose's limitation
as a feminist critic, suspicious of Woolf as "a technician ," that she can
see no link between belief and literary a rt other than femini sm .
In a way that is rigid and limiting, every Woolf hero ine in her
hands from Rachel Vinrace in
The Voyage Out
to Miss La Trobe in
Between the Acts
becomes an incipient feminist in search of " the
primacy of the self." But one at leas t, Mrs. Dalloway, wiggles o ut of her
grasp; unable to fix that tremulous , ambivalent sensibility into a
feminist mold, Rose improvises her true qua lity : " . .. the comedy is
loving. This is the creativity of everyday feminine life. The goa l is
connection, establishing relationships rather than monuments." One
has doubts about Katherine Hilbery 's " feminism," too: how much
sense of self can the heroine of
Night and Day
have when she is unsure
at the novel's end which of her many "selves" the man she is marrying
will see? Most difficult of a ll to accept is Rose's sugges tion that the
most poetic of Woolf's novels,
To the Lighthouse,
actua ll y conta ins a
feminist text. Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay exemplify the writer's "continued
ambivalence toward her parents and her sense of the threa t they posed
to her identity." Furthermore, in pitting Mrs. Ramsay, " tha t gracious
and beautiful exampl e of self-sacrificing femininity, " aga inst the a loof
and self-centered artist, Lily Briscoe, Woo lf o ffers "a revealing exp lora–
tion of autonomy ... the giving necessary to ma rri age and the non–
g iving necessary to art." Such a read ing viol a tes our awareness of (he
