Virginia Woolf and the Empire Exhibition of 1924: Modernism, Excess, and the Verandahs of Realism

Abstract

Unlike her husband Leonard, her friend E. M. Forster, or the protagonist of her first novel Rachel Vinrace, Virginia Woolf never made the voyage out to distant quarters of the British Empire. On 29 May 1924, however, she travelled to the British Empire Exhibition, which promised to bring home and into view of the daytripper a realistic picture of imperial lands, fetching up out of the margins of empire a simultaneously fabricated and faithful representation of British holdings across the globe. Within the walled bounds of Wembley, the British Empire Exhibition sought to round out a view of the world as a whole, laying before the British people the spectacle of an entire empire in miniature. In Woolf’s novel The Waves, published seven years later, Rhoda performs a similar feat of imagination, illuminating and drawing into almost cinematic perspective the dim margins of empire:

[L]ook — the outermost parts of the earth — pale shadows on the utmost horizon, India for instance, rise into our purview. The world that had been shrivelled, rounds itself; remote provinces are fetched up out of darkness; we see muddy roads, twisted jungle, swarms of men, and the vulture that feeds on some bloated carcass as within our scope, part of our proud and splendid province … (112)