Abstract
In Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf depicts people and places as mysteriously connected, the boundaries between them so thoroughly blurred that her characters are “completed” by one another and by the spaces they inhabit. In this chapter, Kristina Groover reads Woolf’s novel through the lens of feminist enactment theologies, which situate the sacred neither in a transcendent God nor in individual consciousness, but in the relationship between self and other. Building on phenomenological studies of Woolf’s work, this chapter argues that Woolf’s religious thought emerges from situated and embodied experiences, challenging traditional theistic views that regard the spiritual self as immaterial, separated from the body and the world.
In her diary of December 1929, Woolf reflects on her adolescent writings: “I was then writing a long picturesque essay upon the Christian religion, I think; called Religio Laici, I believe, proving that man has need of a God; but the God described was in process of change…” (1977–1984, 3: 271). While this youthful essay is lost to history, I am intrigued by Woolf’s provocative reference to a God “in process of change”—an idea I explore in this essay.
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Notes
- 1.
Several critics have discussed this blurring of aesthetic and spiritual concerns in Woolf’s work. In “Notes Toward Thinking the Sacred in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse ,” Gabrielle McIntire writes that Woolf’s “protest against the existence” of God, Beethoven, and Shakespeare “betrays an uncertainty about the relations between aesthetics, meaning, human beingness, truth, identity, and the divine”; in probing the nature of her aesthetic vision, she also considers “both the undecided possibility and the impossibility of the divine” (2013, 8). James Wood writes that Woolf’s writing consistently seeks “‘something more’” that “lay beyond or outside art.…At times she seems to have been looking not so much for the aesthetic pattern behind reality as for a further metaphysical pattern behind the aesthetic pattern” (2010, 116).
- 2.
Woolf repeatedly and mockingly represents this “egotistical self” as the letter “I.” In To the Lighthouse, for example, Mrs. Ramsay recognizes Charles Tansley’s need “to assert himself, and so it would always be with him till he got his Professorship or married his wife, and so need not be always saying ‘I--I--I’” ([1927] 1981, 106). In A Room of One’s Own, the narrator describes “taking down a new novel by Mr. A, who is in the prime of life and very well thought of, apparently, by the reviewers…. But after reading a chapter or two, a shadow seemed to lie across the page. It was a straight dark bar, a shadow shaped something like the letter ‘I’.…One began to be tired of ‘I’” ([1929] 1981, 99–100).
- 3.
See, for example, Lorraine Sim, “Ailing Dualisms: Woolf’s Revolt Against Rationalism in the ‘Real World’ of Influenza” (2005); Justine Dymond, “‘The Outside of Its Inside and the Inside of Its outside’: Phenomenology in To the Lighthouse” (2001); Laura Doyle, “‘These Emotions of the Body’: Intercorporeal Narrative in To the Lighthouse” (1994).
- 4.
As theologian Naomi Goldenberg writes: “Theologians are ignorant of what every anthropologist knows – i.e., that the forms of our thought derive from the forms of our culture” (1979, 115). Similarly, Rosemary Ruether writes that feminist theology “makes the sociology of theological knowledge visible, no longer hidden behind mystifications of objectified divine and universal authority” (1993, 13).
- 5.
This view is so pervasive in literary studies that David Herman has termed it a “critical commonplace”: that modernist texts reflect an “inward turn, innovating on previous narratives by developing new means to probe psychological depths” (2011, 249).
- 6.
Clarissa’s experience reads as a dramatization of the “ordinary mind on an ordinary day” that Woolf describes in “Modern Fiction”: “The mind receives a myriad impressions – trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall…they shape themselves into the lives of Monday or Tuesday…” (1986–2011, 4: 160). “Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall,” she continues; “let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness” (161).
- 7.
In my introduction to this volume, I discuss religion scholar Ann Taves’ (2009) call for a study of “experiences deemed religious” by people or groups in contrast to “religious experiences” as defined by scholars, religious leaders, or other authorities.
- 8.
See, for example, Deborah Guth’s “Rituals of Self-Deception: Clarissa Dalloway’s Final Moment of Vision.” Guth argues that, while Clarissa does indeed evoke mythic motifs, she does so for purposes of “imaginative self-invention” rather than “self-discovery”; her interpretation of Septimus’s suicide as “a glorious act of defiance” allows her to evade the grim details of his death and the superficial hollowness of her party (1990, 36, 37).
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Groover, K.K. (2019). A God “in process of change”: Woolfian Theology and Mrs. Dalloway. In: Groover, K. (eds) Religion, Secularism, and the Spiritual Paths of Virginia Woolf. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32568-8_3
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