Woolf’s Political Aesthetic in “To Spain”, Three Guineas, and Between the Acts

Abstract

When Virginia Woolf read these words from her essay “The Leaning Tower” to the Worker’s Educational Association in Brighton in May 1940, she was not only marking a change that had taken place in modern writing and in how it depicted its subject — ‘human life’ — she was also identifying herself with a certain kind of political aesthetic. Although she warns against writing in an aesthetic tower that leans to the left or to the right, which would have the effect of distorting the artist’s angle of vision, she nevertheless declares in her essay “The Artist and Politics” (posthumously published along with “The Leaning Tower” in The Moment) that the artist is by no means independent of society; indeed, she writes, ‘intellectually [ … ] he depends upon society’ (TM, p. 227).

[The writer] sits upon a tower raised above the rest of us. [ … ] It is a tower of the utmost importance; it decides his angle of vision; it affects his power of communication. All through the nineteenth century, down to August 1914, that tower was a steady tower. The writer was scarcely conscious either of his high station or of his limited vision. Many of them had sympathy, great sympathy, with other classes; they wished to help the working class to enjoy the advantages of the tower class; but they did not wish to destroy the tower, or to descend from it — rather to make it accessible to all. Nor had the model, human life, changed essentially since Trollope looked at it, since Hardy looked at it: and Henry James, in 1914, was still looking at it. [ … ] From that group let us pass to the next — to a group which began to write about 1925 and, it may be, came to an end as a group in 1939. [ … ] They are tower dwellers like their predecessors [ … ] But what a difference in the tower itself, in what they saw from the tower! When they looked at human life what did they see? Everywhere change; everywhere revolution.

(TM, pp. 137–8)

Portions of this paper were delivered at the University of Pittsburgh (2004), at The Space Between conference at Bucknell University (2006), and at the Virginia Woolf in Bloomsbury conference in 2004. Thanks especially for those occasions to Jessica Rae Butto, Roger Rothman and Julie Vandivere.