ban BODY L WORD2! MOUTH ANGUAGE IN Katherine Mansfield & Virginia Woolf PN PATRICIA MORANAcknowledgments for previously published material appear on page x. ‘The University Press of Virginia © 1996 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia First published 1996 @ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Moran, Patricia (Patricia L.) Word of mouth : body language in Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf / Patricia Moran. p. cm, —(Feminist issues) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8r39-1675-5 (alk. paper) 1. Mansfield, Katherine, 1888-1923 —Knowledge—Psychol- ogy. 2. Literature and psychology—England—History—zoth cen- tury. 3. Feminism and literature—England—History—2oth cen- tury. 4. English fiction—Women authors—History and criticism, 5. English fiction—2oth century—History and criti- cism. 6, Women and literature—England—History—zothcen- tury. 7. Nonverbal communication (Psychology) in litera- ture. 8. Woolf, Virginia, 1882—1941—Knowledge— Psychology. 9. Body,Human, in literature, I, Title. I. Series: Feminist issues (Charlottesville, Va.) PR9639.3M258Z844 1996 823'.912—dczo 96-19760 CIP 0-8139-1675-5 Printed in the United States of AmericaDyads, Triads, and Discords in Katherine Mansfield’s “Bliss” sire? what does the pear tree represent? what is “bliss?” —replay the very issues Bertha confronts and repudiates. Her hysteria becomes the hysteria of the text, which in turn becomes the hysteria of the reader.** If the writer’s goal is to put the question rather than solve it, the questions “Bliss” raises continue to reverberate today: what is a woman's story? who can tell it? if it can be told, who can hear it? 66“The queerest sense of echo”: “Bliss” and Mrs, Dalloway f Mansfield had hoped to find a sympathetic reader for “Bliss” in her friend Virginia Woolf, she was doomed to disappointment. “I threw it down with the exclamation ‘She’s done for!’” Woolf's diary entry about the story begins. Declaring that her faith in Mansfield “as woman or writer” could not “survive that sort of story,” Woolf found in “Bliss” evidence of Mansfield’s “callousness & hardness as a human being”: “I shall have to accept the fact, I’m afraid, that her mind is a very thin soil, laid an inch or two deep upon very barren rock. For Bliss is long enough to give her a chance of going deeper. Instead she is content with superficial smartness; & the whole con- ception is poor, cheap, not the vision, however imperfect, of an inter- esting mind, She writes badly too” (DVW2 179). Woolf turns “Bliss” and Mansfield into reflections of one another: both lack depth; both are “hard” beneath the icing of “superficial smartness.” Yet Woolf’s obvious anger renders her judgment suspect, as she herself admits. For she closes her tirade by calling its motivation into question: “Or is it absurd to read all this criticism of her personally into a story?” (DVW2 179). Curiously, despite Woolf’s repudiation of Mansfield’s story, “Bliss” echoes throughout Mrs. Dalloway. Even a cursory reading of the two works turns up an astonishing number of resemblances. Both works portray women preparing for a dinner party; both women wander through London in a heightened, slightly hysterical mood; both dress in silver and green for their parties. Both women take an extraordinary sensual delight in preparing for their parties: Bertha arranges fruit, Clarissa flowers. These preparations, moreover, func- 67“Bliss” and Mrs. Dalloway tion as displaced desire in both texts, for Pearl evokes the colors of the pear tree, while Clarissa compares her feelings for women (and by extension, for Sally Seton) to a match burning in a crocus. Both women muse at length about the limitations of their marriages; in- deed, each believes that she is frigid. Bertha finds that “i]t had wor- ried her dreadfully at first to find that she was so cold, but after a time it had not seemed to matter. They were so frank with each other— such good pals” (SS 348). Similarly, Clarissa believes that she has failed her husband “through some contraction of this cold spirit” (MD 46). Like Bertha, Clarissa prefers a companionate marriage to a passionate one: she prefers the emotional distance in her marriage to the stifling intimacy she once had had with Peter Walsh: “in mar- riage a little licence, a little independence there must be between people living together day in day out in the same house; which Rich- ard gave her and she hin" (MD ro), Finally, both women long for intimacy with their daughters, but each has been thwarted in that longing by another woman whom she perceives as a usurper: Bertha has been replaced in the nursery by the nanny, while Clarissa feels she has lost her daughter to Miss Kilman. Paradoxically, the strongest resemblance between “Bliss” and. Mrs. Dalloway is also the site of the clearest differences. That site lies in the “moments” that occur between women, in “Bliss” between Bertha and Pearl, in Mrs. Dallotvay between Clarissa and Sally Seton. Both Bertha and Clarissa self-consciously acknowledge their attrac- tion to women, their awareness that these “moments” only occur in relation to women. Bertha admits that “she always did fall in love with beautiful women” and finds that the intuitive understanding she believes she shares with Pearl “happened very, very rarely between. women. Never between men” (MD 340-41, 346). Similarly, Clarissa “could not resist sometimes yielding to the charm of a woman, not a girl, of a woman confessing, as to her they often did, some scrape, some folly” (MD 46). Pondering “this falling in love with women,” Clarissa decides “[i}t was not like one’s feeling fora man. It was com- pletely disinterested, and besides, it had a quality which could only exist between women” (MD 50). Both Bertha and Clarissa insist on. the immateriality of these relationships, and yet both describe them. in strikingly physical and sexual terms. In “Bliss,” as we have seen, Bertha’s vision of the pear tree stretching up to the moon “like the 68“Bliss” and Mrs. Dalloway flame of a candle” encapsulates her complex emotion for Pearl: Bertha must invest herself with phallic qualities in order to imagine herself desirable to Pearl, and only the collapse of gendered polari- ties signals the preoedipal dimension of her desire, Clarissa’s medita- tion on her attraction to women contains no such dichotomization. Rather, she fuses male and female imagery in a charged passage that simultaneously dissociates her from her sensations: It was a sudden revelation, a tinge like a blush, which one tried to check and then, as it spread, one yielded to its expansion, and rushed to the farthest verge and there quivered and felt the world come closer, swollen with some astonishing significance, some pressure of rapture, which split its thin skin and poured with an extraordinary alleviation over the cracks and sores! Then, for that moment, she had seen an illumination; a match burning in a crocus; an inner meaning almost expressed. But the close withdrew; the hard softened. It was over—the moment. (MD 47) In contrast to the dissolution of boundaries that Bertha envisions, Clarissa locates this perception of orgasmic fusion within a single sensibility and neither subject nor object is clearly delineated. Indeed, Clarissa twice distances herself from this fusion: first by her use of the formal pronoun “one,” then by her emphasis on vision, an em- phasis that implies she stands outside the experience. This distanc- ing becomes apparent when set beside the passage that conveys her memory of Sally Seton’s kiss: “she felt that she had been given a present, wrapped up, and told just to keep it, not to look at it—a diamond, something infinitely precious, wrapped up, which, as they walked... she uncovered, or the radiance burst through, the revela- tion, the religious feeling!” (MD 53). The emphasis here is on tactility rather than vision. Clarissa feels she has been given a present, some- thing she must hold, not look at. And if “uncovered” suggests her desire to distance herself by crystallizing the experience into a dia- mond, an object she can aestheticize and gaze at, the phrases that immediately follow localize emotion in her body. Radiance, warmth, the total immersion of revelation—all flood the body and tie Sally’s kiss inextricably to the realm of sensual experience. Such experiences evade signification: “swollen with some astonishing significance,” 69“Bliss” and Mrs. Dalloway the body relinquishes nothing; its “inner meaning” remains “almost expressed.”! As in “Bliss,” then, the visionary moment precludes articula- tion. But whereas for Bertha it does so because it rehearses the alien- ation of her desire—an alienation that for Mansfield is coterminous with an exile from language—for Clarissa the visionary moment be- comes a sustaining memory, and it sustains in part precisely because it remains unspeakable. Language is suspect in Mrs. Dalloway; the novel’s privileged moments of communication occur in spite of, not because of, its mediating presence. “Communication is health; com- munication is happiness,” Septimus mutters in his madness (MD 141). But it is his suicide—his silencing—which Clarissa understands as “an attempt to communicate; people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre, which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded, one was alone. There was an embrace in death” (MD 280-81). Through suicide, Septimus preserves what Clarissa terms “[a] thing... that mattered; a thing, wreathed about with chat- ter, defaced, obscured in her own life, let drop every day in corrup- tion, lies, chatter” (MD 280). “Chatter” is equivalent to “lies” and “corruption”; silence, on the other hand, preserves the integrity of “the thing that matters.” It is understandable that Mrs. Dalloway has been read as a text that celebrates the subversive properties of the semiotic, the eruption into the symbolic of maternally connoted infantile sensations and vocalisations.? In clear contrast to Mansfield, Woolf privileges what people, and especially women, do not say to each other; she traces instead the ways in which communication is possible without words, But such a reading of Mrs. Dalloway overlooks the troubling mate- riality of the “thing that matters.” Muted, almost fetal in outline, this inarticulated figure puts into question the novel’s overt privileging of “the liquid rapture of preverbal emotion.”? Instead, it suggests that the female body somehow interferes with the process of communica- tion. The body that swells with a significance it does not relinquish, for example, explicitly contrasts with an image of linguistic birth: as Bonnie Kime Scott points out, Woolf underlines the resistance to lan- guage in the earlier passage by juxtaposing it with a later meditation by Septimus Smith: “The word ‘time’ split its husk; poured its riches over him; and from his lips fell like shells, like shavings from a plane, 70“Bliss” and Mrs. Dalloway without his making them, hard, white, imperishable words, and flew to attach themselves to their places in an ode to Time, an immortal ‘Ode to Time.” * Language is born and then shaped into an endur- ing poem. But the Word in Clarissa’s case refuses to become flesh, although she, like the Virgin Mary, “could nor dispel a virginity preserved through childbirth” (MD 46). Conventionally, of course, virginity connotes sexual inexperience; Woolf's usage foregrounds parturition at the same time that it erases coitus. This “preserved” virginity, moreover, scems akin to “the thing that matters”—the thing Septimus “preserved” by suicide (MD 280), but which for ‘Clarissa becomes “‘a thing, weeathed about with chatter, defaced, ob- scured” (MD 280). Through suicide, Septimus preserves the invio- lability of his relationship with Evans; he eschews the false marriage he contracted in bad faith, espousing instead an ideal of bodily and mental chastity that can only be fully realized in death, Clarissa, on ‘the other hand, “schemes” and “pilfers”; she chooses conventional marriage over conventual death. Significantly, Woolf represents this compromise in language that conflates inarticulation with bodily de- composition: it is as if the moment of unspeakable rapture metamor- phoses into a stillbirth.* Curiously, the “thing that matters” resembles a flaw Woolf claims to discover often in women’s fiction. The nineteenth-century woman writer in A Room of One’s Own possessed a mind that “altered its clear vision in deference to external authority”; readers can thus sense that the woman writer is “thinking of something other than the thing itself”: “Down comes her book upon our heads. There was a flaw in the centre of it. And 1 thought of all the women’s novels that lie scattered, like small pock-marked apples in an orchard. . . . It was the flaw in the centre that had rotted them. She had altered her values in deference to the opinion of others” (Room 77). Is “the thing that matters” related to “the thing itself?” That is, is it a figure of some- thing incompletely articulated because of the woman writer’s defer- ence to external authority? Yes. For, like the incomplete textual births Woolf images in Room, the degraded “thing” in Clarissa’s possession is a figure of compromise. It takes shape within the same dynamic governing Room, whereby an education in bodily “chastity” stunts the growth of the female imagination and impairs the ability of the woman writer to imagine plots and possibilities. Indeed, Woolf con- 71“Bliss” and Mrs. Dalloway flates the writing woman’s work with Eden apples; the image con- notes trespass, as if the woman who writes poaches on forbidden ground. But it connotes trespass in a bodily sense as well: the woman who cannot listen to her mind, who listens to her body, who suc- cumbs to her appetites, her sensuality, is a woman who has fallen. The desire to write is illicit for women. Thus Woolf’s paradigmatic woman writer Judith Shakespeare is a figure in whom the desire to write almost inevitably results in a shameful bodily fall; her illegiti- mate pregnancy translates into bodily terms the trespass Roorn insists writing represents for women: “whole flights of words would need to wing their way illegitimately into existence before a woman could say what happens when she goes into a room” (Room 91, emphasis added). “The thing that matters,” in fact, constitutes the site of the woman writer’s signature in Mrs. Dalloway, the site where it is possible “‘to discover the embodiment in writing of a gendered sub- jectivity; to recover from within representation the emblems of its construction.” The process of recovering these emblems entails in particular a close examination of the discourse of chastity that shapes the novel. Clarissa’s frigidity in the eyes of some readers represents a revisionary chastity, a refusal of marriage that permits her to retain her passionate memories of Sally. Jane Marcus, for example, suggests that Clarissa’s name derives from the Clarissan nuns, “an order of women who were married but signed vows of celibacy with their hus- bands, lived at home, and were secret nuns”; she is “the lesbian who marries for safety and appearances, produces a child, cannot relate sexually to her husband, and chooses celibacy within marriage.”7 Numerous passages support this reading: Clarissa is like “a nun with- drawing” to her attic cell; her narrow bed resembles an anchorite’s, its clean sheets “tight stretched in a broad white band from side to side” (MD 45); she hides her dress from Peter “like a virgin pro- tecting chastity, respecting privacy” (MD 59). Marcus considers Clarissa’s withdrawal into her attic cell evidence of Woolf's “clois- tered imagination”: “the powerful and moving images for {Woolf's} own creative processes are of the chaste imagination retreating to a nunnery.”’® The cloistered imagination, Marcus argues, is “a strategy of power for the woman mystic or artist... . Chastity then becomes erotic in these mystical terms because in union with the light and the word the soul experiences enormous power.”” ye“Bliss” and Mrs. Dalloway Bur chastity is a contradictory and confusing term in Woolf, and it sometimes damages the woman writer’s work. For the “religious importance of chastity in a woman's life” (Room 51) involves not only the patriarchal belief “that the woman’s mind and body shall be reserved for the use of one man and one man only” (TG 167). As Woolf explains in Three Guineas, it derives from Saint Paul’s convic- tion that the woman who speaks in public is doing something shame- ful: “‘Let the woman keep silence in the churches; for it is not per- mitted unto them to speak; but let them be in subjection. ... And if they would learn anything, let them ask their own husbands at home: for it is shameful to speak in the church’” (TG 167). It is this con- sciousness of impropriety that most often thwarts women writers in Woolf’s texts; women internalize paternal proscriptions and then become censors of their own speech. In “Professions for Women,” for example, the would-be woman writer’s imagination dashes itself upon the rocks of what cannot be said: “To speak without figure she had thought of something, something about the body, about the pas- sions which it was unfitting for her as a woman to say. Men, her reason told her, would be shocked. The consciousness of what men will say of a woman who speaks the truth about her passions had roused her from her artist's state of unconsciousness, She could write no more” (WoW 61-62). Indeed, Woolf claims this difficulty as her own: “telling the truth about my own experiences as a body,” she goes on, is a problem “I do not think I solved” (WcW 62). But something odd happens in this otherwise sensible and per- suasive explanation. “To speak without figure” promises a specific- ity that the disconcertingly vague “something about the body” does not deliver. Apparently, the (female) body possesses a transparent lit- erality that obviates figural speech. The problem for the speaker, then, derives just as much from the location of her speech as it does from her consciousness of disapproving auditors. And if we turn to ‘Woolf's discussion of chastity in Room, we find a similar problem- atic: the mention of chastity inevitably conjures up the female body, and that body forecloses the possibility of figural speech. The goal of “overreading,” “of reading for the woman writer’s signature,” Nancy K, Miller argues, “is to put one’s finger—figuratively—on the place of production that marks the spinner’s attachment to her web.” ° As Miller points out, Woolf relies on the same figure to open her discus- sion of the way in which material circumstances shape women writ- 73“Bliss” and Mrs. Dalloway ers’ work. When the fictional web is “pulled askew, hooked up at the edge, torn in the middle,” Woolf tells us, readers are reminded “that these webs are not spun in mid ait by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to grossly ma- terial things” (Roort 43-44). The recently published typescripts of Room make clear that the “grossly material thing” that mars the ‘woman writer’s fictional web is the female body she necessarily in- habits. For the draft version of Room explicitly connects the imper- fections of the web to women writers: “when the web is pulled askew, hooked up here, or with a great hole in it there, [the centre] then one remembers that these webs are not spun in mid air by incorporeal creatures, but {are the work of] {do depend on} are attached to grossly material things . .. in short the spider is a human being: I was {no doubt] thinking as ] [made] this simile of the spiders web, of cer- tain strains & holes that to my mind still slightly disfigure the webs made by women” (WeF 65).!! Woolf's definition of the “grossly ma- terial things” as “health and money and the houses we live in” cannot deflect the drift of her language: the phrase—which glosses the earlier sentence that “fiction is like a spider’s web . . . attached to life at all four corners” —now seems to correct the erroneous notion of authors as incorporeal (Wc*F 65). The literal attachment of the spider to its thread overwhelms the figurative materiality of Woolf's trope, a figuration further blurred by the phrases which collapse connection and creation (are the work of, do depend on). And the substitu- tion of “making” for writing—Woolf makes a simile, women writer make webs—similarly emphasizes the corporeality of writing. Most strikingly, the “great hole” in the center of the spider web returns specifically as a hole that disfigures the woman writer's web, a discon- certing gap that spoils the product at the same time that it paradoxi- cally closes the disjunction between the figurative and literal: the ‘woman writer’s body seems implicated, somehow inextricable from if not responsible for her (necessarily flawed?) productions. In short, ‘Woolf's spider is no neutral-gender “human being”; Woolf’s spider is a woman. Only the trope of the spider, with its tacit linkage of textiles and femininity, survives Woolf's revision. What also survives in the final draft, however, is a preoccupation with the material obstacle repre- sented to the woman writer by her female body, a preoccupation 74“Bliss” and Mrs. Dalloway that emerges in language resonant with the metaphorics of the web. For example, the story of Judith Shakespeare ends with the famous rhetorical question, “who shall measure the heat and violence of the poet’s heart when caught and tangled in a woman’s body?” (Room 50, emphasis added). The story of Judith Shakespeare launches Woolf's meditation on the importance of chastity in a woman's life; Woolf's image for chastity recalls the sullied thing in Clarissa’s possessiot “Chastity had then, it has even now, a religious importance in a wom- an’s life, and has so wrapped itself round with nerves and instincts that to cut it free and bring it to the light of day demands courage of the rarest” (Root 51).!? I will discuss in chapter 5 the logic of birth that partially governs this figure. What is relevant at this point is that the “coming to writing” for a woman violates an internal pro- hibition, a prohibition Woolf characterizes as “nervous stress and di- lemma” and figures as stillbirth; that stillbirth is the woman writer’s language, which is strangled by the materiality of her own body. Again, the relation between the metaphorics of the web and the me- taphorics of embryology is clear in the draft versions of A Room of One's Own. The sixteenth-century woman in Room is “tortured and pulled asunder by her own contrary instincts” (Room 51); her need to write conjoined with her need to preserve her chastity causes such psychological stress that the narrator imagines she “lost her health and sanity to a certainty” (Room 51).'3 The original wording of this passage depicts a more violent internal assault: the sixteenth-century woman metamorphoses into Judith Shakespeare, whose defiance of her father’s ban on writing results in the violation of something “deep in herself,” the “rending and tearing of instincts” (We+F 83, 82, em- phasis added). Writing in defiance of the father is imaged as the self- inflicted rupture of an hymenal daughterly silence, an image akin to the central hole disfiguring the woman writer’s web. In the final draft of Room, of course, Judith Shakespeare's literal pregnancy displaces this illegitimate textuality. Chastity also motivates Woolf's confusing use of the veil. This concept, tog, derives from Saint Paul: in Three Guineas Woolf cites a somewhat contradictory pronouncement by Saint Paul that a woman may not preach or prophesy unless she be veiled (TG 122); that is, while it is shameful for a woman to speak in public, that shame is somewhat mitigated by the concealment of her female body. Veils in 75“Bliss” and Mrs. Dalloway Woolf range from the maid or little sister who chaperones a woman in the public streets to strategies of indirect narration (e.g., the female narrator's recourse in Three Guineas to a male authority to mediate between her female body and a male auditor). But as in Saint Paul, the function these diverse veils have in common is concealment of the female body. Woolf thus connects chastity to the abolition of fe- male signature, that is, to anonymity as camouflage. As Woolf puts it in Room, And undoubtedly . . . [the sixteenth-century woman’s} work would have gone unsigned. That refuge she would have sought certainly. It was the relic of the sense of chastity that dictated anonymity to women even so late as the nineteenth century. Currer Bell, George Eliot, George Sand, all victims of inner strife as their writings prove, sought effectively to veil themselves by using the name of a man. Thus they did homage to the convention . . . that publicity in women is de- testable. Anonymity runs in their blood. The desire to be veiled still possesses them. (Room 52) But the draft demonstrates more clearly the need of the woman writer to veil the ruptured instinct of her chastity: “Currer Bell, George Eliot, Georges Sand . . . sought to veil themselves by using a man’s name; & thus did homage to the profound instinct which lay at the root of womens being” (WGF 83, 84, emphasis added). Anonymity veils the rupture, but it still exists. For the structure of women’s fic- tion, which in the draft still figures as the structure of the web, suf- fers from a destabilizing defect: “She was thinking of something besides the thing itself, & Thus failed in integrity; down come her books from this radical fault in their structure” (W&F 108, emphasis added). As we have seen, the revision of this passage retains the sense of trespass by conflating the sense of rot with the image of forbid- den fruit: “she was thinking of something other than the thing itself. Down comes her book upon our heads. There was a flaw in the centre of it, And I thought of all the women’s novels that lie scattered, like small pock-marked apples in an orchard. . . . It was the flaw in the centre that had rotted them” (Room 77). This passage demonstrates unmistakably that the central hole disfiguring the woman writer’s web, the “flaw in the centre” of her book, is nothing other than the 76“Bliss” and Mrs. Dalloway ruptured hymen of the woman writer’s chastity: the woman writer is a fallen woman. This detour through the problem of chastity in Woolf's texts pre- pares us to reconsider the relationship of “Bliss” to Mrs. Dalloway. For Woolf repudiated “Bliss” because it was “cheap,” a cheapness that reflected the “callousness and hardness” (DVW2 179) of its au- thor. “I dont see how much faith in her as woman or writer could survive that sort of story” (DVW2 179), Woolf concluded (empha- sis added), only to question the appropriateness of reading personal criticism of Mansfield into her text. What is at stake here isan anxiety about something we might call the “womanliness” of the woman who writes about sexual desire, an unanswered, indeed, an unasked question about whether she thus “unsexes” herself. Woolf's catty remarks about Mansfield bear some examination in this context. Her initial reaction to Mansfield is infamous: “We could both wish that ones first impression of K.M. was not that she stinks like a— well civet cat that had taken to street walking. In truth, ’m a little shocked by her commonness at first sight; lines so hard & cheap” (DVWr 58)."* A letter to Vita Sackville-West many years after Mans- field’s death recalls this initial impression: We did not ever coalesce; but I was fascinated, and she respectful, only I thought her cheap, and she thought me priggish; and yet we were both compelled to meet simply in order to talk about writing. This we did by the hour, Only then she came out with her little swarm of stories, and I was jealous, no doubt; because they were so praised; but gave up reading them not on that account, but because of their cheap sharp sentimentality, which was all the worse, I thought, because she had, as you say, the zest and the resonance—I mean she could permeate one with her quality; and if one felt this cheap scent in it, it reeked in ones nostrils. (LVW4 366) The word “cheap” recurs (three times in this description), as Woolf reveals a strange preoccupation with Mansfield’s personal smell. Un- like, say, Jane Austen, whose mind “pervades” her writing (Room 71), Mansfield’s “cheap scent’”’ “permeates” her prose and makes it stink. It is significant that Woolf is similarly preoccupied with the rela- tionship between words and female odor in Three Guineas. There, 77“Bliss” and Mrs. Dalloway she claims that “*Miss’ transmits sex; and sex may carry with it an aroma. ‘Miss’ may carry with it the . . . savour of scent or other odour perceptible to the nose on the further side of the partition and obnox- ious to it” (TG 50). Moreover, Woolf continues, if the men in public life object to the odor of the word “Miss,” they are unable to tolerate the stench of the word “Mrs.”: “As for ‘Mrs.,’ it is a contaminated word; an obscene word, The less said about that word the better. Such is the smell of it, so rank does it stink in the nostrils of White- hall, that Whitehall excludes it entirely” (TG 52).'' That Woolf de- scribes the effect of uttering “Mrs.” in Whitehall in the same terms she uses to describe the effect of reading Mansfield’s prose suggests that words that conjure up the sexual woman provoke revulsion. And the woman who writes openly about female desire—as Mansfield, for example, does in “Bliss”—makes herself and her work “cheap”; that is, she turns herself into a whore. Significantly, Woolf referred to her rivalry with Mansfield the same day she recorded her completion of Mrs. Dalloway in her diary: “{Ijf she’d lived, she’d have written on, & people would have seen that I was the more gifted—that wd. only have become more & more apparent” (DVW2 317). Given the many similarities between the two texts—and Woolf's denunciation of “Bliss” —it is fair to assume that Woolf had “Bliss” in mind when she decided Mrs. Dalloway demonstrated her superiority. The curious way in which Woolf pro- jects that judgment onto other people is most interesting. If the “thing that matters” testifies to an anxiety that the woman writer is im- proper and her writing necessarily flawed—a judgment always in- formed by an imagined paternal prohibition, a kind of literary super- ego—then does Mrs. Dalloway veil its female origins in ways that distinguish it from Mansfeld’s “Bliss?” Indeed it does. For although the novel, like “Bliss,” celebrates an homoerotic moment between. women, that moment is displaced into the past; in the present of the novel, it exists as a sustaining memory and not as a physical possibil- ity. On the other hand, the novel works to dissociate itself from the body—especially the female body—in every possible way. It seeks to establish the outlines of what Kristeva calls “the clean and proper body” by eliminating the damning traces of (female) corporeality. The fear of embodied existence emerges most distinctly in Clar- issa’s doubles, Septimus Smith and Doris Kilman. Both have troubled. 78“Bliss” and Mrs. Dallotvay relationships to food; for both, food functions as a symbolic expres- sion of distress about living within the confines of the body. Septi- mus, the shell-shocked veteran, “could not taste, could not feel”; eventually he reads into Shakespeare his own disgust for bodily func- tions: “That boy’s business of the intoxication of language—Antorry and Cleopatra—had shrivelled utterly. How Shakespeare loathed hu- manity—the putting on of clothes, the getting of children, the sordid- ity of the mouth and belly! This was now revealed to Septimus; the message hidden in the beauty of words. The secret signal which one generation passes, under disguise, to the next is loathing, hatred, despair. .. . Love between man and woman was repulsive to Shake- speare. The business of copulation was filth to him before the end” (MD 134). Septimus expresses a sickening sense of drowning in cor- poreality; by rejecting eating and (hetero)sexuality, he seeks to estab- lish a body with an impermeable surface. So profound is his rejection of the body that he commits suicide rather than entertain its needs. And the novel codes his suicide as heroic. By contrast, Doris Kilman wallows in her abject embodiment.'* Consumed with self-loathing, she considers “her unlovable body” an “‘infliction .. . which people could not bear to see. Do her hair as she might, her forehead re- mained like an egg, bald, white. No clothes suited her. She might buy anything. And for a woman, of course, that meant never meeting the opposite sex. Never would she come first with any one” (MD 195). Whereas Septimus wants to diminish the contact between his body and the world, Miss Kilman wants to increase it. But since she cannot fulfill her social and sexual needs, she becomes obsessed with food, the only bodily need she can sate herself. Thus, admitting that, “ex- cept for Elizabeth, her food was all that she lived for” (MD 195), Miss Kilman sublimates her desire for Elizabeth by eating eclairs:“‘It was her way of eating, eating with intensity, then looking, again and again, at a plate of sugared cakes on the table next them; then, when a lady and child sat down and the child took the cake, could Miss Kilman really mind it? Yes, Miss Kilman did mind it. She had wanted that cake—the pink one. The pleasure of cating was almost the only pure pleasure left her, and then to be baffled even in that!” (MD 197)."7 In fact, Miss Kilman’s fanatical religious practices seem to proceed from her conviction that “‘it is the flesh” she must control. The more she tries to control her appetites, however, the more she 79“Bliss” and Mrs. Dalloway ‘obsesses about them. As a woman, she cannot escape objectification; as an unattractive, poor, and intellectual woman, she cannot expect more than cultural indifference: the conventional social success of a ‘Clarissa Dalloway is not within her reach. This apprehension forms the basis of their competitive dynamic, for when Miss Kilman com- pares herself to Clarissa, she feels the revival of “the fleshly desires, for she minded looking as she did beside Clarissa” (MD 194). A woman cannot escape the reductive definition of the female body, Miss Kilman seems to say. Knowledgeable she may be, but she never- theless translates—and is compelled to translate—her unhappiness into the terms of the body. When Miss Kilman’s pastor tells her that “knowledge comes through suffering,” for example, she remembers him saying “knowledge com[es] through suffering and the flesh” (MD 196). Miss Kilman’s substitution, if a lapse of memory, is bibli- cally correct. Given Woolf’s familiarity with the teachings of Saint Paul, then, Miss Kilman’s last appearance in the novel should be ironic; on her knees (but not veiled) in the “bodiless light” of West- minster Cathedral, she prays for redemption from the flesh, as a male observer sympathetically remarks her “a soul cut out of immaterial substance; not a woman, a soul” (MD 202, 203). The scene should be ironic, but in fact it is not. The reader interested in Miss Kilman’s plight, who has welcomed her disruptive challenges to the main char- acter and the hegemonic surface of the text, may be surprised to learn that Miss Kilman “impressed” the sympathetic observer, as indeed she had “impressed Mrs. Dalloway (she could not get the thought of her out of her mind that afternoon), the Rev. Edward Whittaker, and Elizabeth too,” with her “largeness, robustness, and power as she sat there shifting her knees from time to time (it was so rough the ap- proach to her God—so tough her desires)” (MD 203), The word “impressed” both relates Miss Kilman to and distinguishes her from the goddess of Conversion, a female abstraction endowed with Miss Kilman’s insatiable appetite: Conversion “loves blood better than bricks, and feasts most subtly on the human will,” “loving to impress, to impose, adoring her own features stamped on the face of the popu- lace” (MD 152, 151). A religious fanatic, a supposed devotee of Con- version, Miss Kilman does not try to impress her own features on the world; she simply refuses permission for her unlovable features to be erased. Indeed, she becomes herself a “thing that matters’: in her 80“Bliss” and Mrs. Dalloway green mackintosh, Clarissa thinks, Miss Kilman “inflicted private torture, so insensitive was she” (MD 16). The word “inflicted” has also come up before: Miss Kilman herself rues “the infliction” of her “unlovable body.” The body is the torture, the insensitivity, the inflic- tion; Miss Kilman’s body will not go away, unlike, say, Rezia’s, which obediently grows thin when she becomes unhappy. And Miss Kil- man’s body certainly differs from Clarissa’s, whose properly aristo- cratic “narrow pea-stick” “body . . . seemed nothing—nothing at all. She had the oddest sense of being herself invisible; unseen; un- known” (MD 14). The woman without a body is invisible, unseen, unknown—like the woman writer?—whereas the woman with a large body gives away her unseemly desires, her unruly appetites, her bodily needs—in short, the unchasteness of her sex. Still, the attributes of “largeness, robustness, and power” imply a grudging respect for this woman who refuses to efface herself despite her marginalized status. Miss Kilman resembles Lady Bruton, who acquires from “that armoured goddess” Empire “her robustness of demeanour” (MD 275), and whose “pent egotism” similarly ex- presses itself in bulk (MD 164). In contrast to Lady Bruton, however, Miss Kilman has no access to the inherited wealth of male forebears. Her commanding presence belongs to her alone; no one has helped her acquire it; no one helps her retain it. Indeed, much has conspired to rob her of it: the man who remarks her a soul of “immaterial sub- stance” does so in Westminster Abbey, an imposing paternalistic set- ting of “white marbles, grey window panes, and accumulated treas- ures” (MD 203). Miss Kilman’s large body gives her substance and physical presence in a world where material substance, by and large, belongs to men. For this reason, perhaps, she constitutes another site of signature: for the novel repeatedly thematizes its own uncertainty about the powerful emotions she provokes. Mrs. Dalloway cannot dismiss the “thought” of Miss Kilman; she rationalizes her preoccu- pation by twice commenting that “it was not [Miss Kilman] one hated but the idea of her, which undoubtedly had gathered in to itself a great deal that was not Miss Kilman” (MD 16, 190-91). But what is the “idea” of Miss Kilman? Why is it so extraordinarily vivid? And what has it gathered in to itself? As we might expect, the idea of Miss Kilman gathers in to itself all of the novel’s free floating anxieties about the female body and the unwomanliness of sexual desire. If“Bliss” and Mrs. Dalloway Septimus is a spiritual double, a male sacrifice who redeems Clarissa, Miss Kilman is Clarissa’s body double, and for that reason, she is also the novel’s scapegoat. It is thus significant that Miss Kilman’s possessive desire for Elizabeth—“If she could grasp her, if she could clasp her, if she could make her hers absolutely and forever and then die; that was all she wanted” (MD 199-200)—monstrously echoes the line from Othello that Clarissa cites as capturing the intensity of her feelings for Sally: “If ‘twere now to die, ’twere now to be most happy.” '® In a scene reminiscent of the “thing that matters,” Miss Kilman experiences her overeating and unsated sexual longings as a form of unproductive childbirth: “She was about to split asunder. . .. The agony was so terrific. If she could grasp her, if she could clasp her, if she could make her hers absolutely and forever and then die; that was all she wanted. ... Elizabeth . . . went off, drawing out, so Miss Kilman felt, the very entrails in her body, stretching them as she crossed the room, and then, with a final twist, bowing her head very politely, she went” (MD 199-200, 201). Miss Kilman’s agony forges a link between Septimus, for whom “the word ‘time’ split its husk,” and Clarissa, whose memory of “some pressure of rapture, which split its thin skin” results in a “‘swol- fen significance . . . an inner meaning almost expressed” (MD 47). Eating helps Miss Kilman swallow her words; her embittered and angry emotions speak instead through her body. She “‘stands,” as Clarissa notes, for the “power and taciturnity of some prehistoric monster armoured for primeval warfare” (MD 190), the modernist woman coming to writing.'? The contrast with Lady Bruton is in- structive in this respect: “[a]fter a morning’s battle beginning, tearing up, beginning again,” bemoaning “the futility of her own woman- hood as she felt it on no other occasion,” Lady Bruton accepts her inability to write and instead feeds lunch to Hugh Whitbread to in- duce him to write for her. This luncheon, too, results in the stretch- ing of a woman’s entrails: “And they went further and further from her, being attached to her by a thin thread (since they had lunched with her) which would stretch, get thinner and thinner as they walked . . . as if one’s friends were attached to one’s body, after lunch- ing with them, by a thin thread, which . . . became hazy with the sound of bells... as a single spider’s thread is blotted with rain-drops 82“Bliss” and Mrs. Dalloway and, burdened, sank down” (MD 170). The figure of the (would-be) woman writer as spider secures the connection between Lady Bruton and Miss Kilman. It is clear, however, that the idea of Miss Kilman incorporates other troubled aspects of female embodiment. As a surrogate mother for Elizabeth and—simultaneously—as the hungry child greedily snatching eclairs from another child, Miss Kilman manifests the dual dangers of female appetite: her possessive need to retain her daughter threatens the daughter’s autonomy; her need to devour her object threatens to annihilate the mother. She reminds us that Othello even- tually suffocates the object of his desire because of his jealousy, be- cause he believes that Desdemona has been unchaste. Significantly, it is Clarissa who best understands Miss Kilman and who invests her with the appropriate imagery: for Clarissa, Miss Kilman has “be- come one of those spectres who stand astride us and suck up half our life-blood, dominators and tyrants” (MD 16-17). And in acknowl- edging their commonality—‘‘no doubt with another throw of the dice, had the black been uppermost and not the white, she would have loved Miss Kilman!” (MD 17)—Clarissa also reveals that the threat to female intimacy is not, as her memory of Peter Walsh’s in- terruption suggests, heterosexual imperatives, but rather the need to engulf another absolutely, which is represented in an oral register and recalls the infantile dynamics of the mother-daughter relationship. Clarissa chooses the relationship that will allow her to retain her own autonomy. She chooses an object she will never feel compelled to engulf. Mrs. Dalloway as a whole, in fact, dwells upon the dangers of female engulfment. Actual or abstract, female bodies threaten to dis- solve boundaries, to subsume others into their dangerously capacious confines. For that reason, the most powerful representations of yo- racity in Mrs. Dalloway, Miss Kilman and the goddesses Proportion and Conversion, are female, representations that underline the enor- mity and monstrosity of female hunger, the need for its containment. At one level, embodied in images like that of the elderly mother wait- ing for her son’s return from battle in Peter Walsh’s dream, Mrs. Dal- loway bespeaks the guilt of the female survivor, what Gilbert has de- scribed as “‘a half conscious fear that the woman survivor might be in an inexplicable way a perpetrator of some unspeakable crime,” a 83“Bliss” and Mrs. Dalloway fear that fosters in turn a sense that the “classical Roman’s noble pa- tria must have . .. become a sinister, death-dealing matria.”?° Lady Bruton, who feeds men in order to extract power from them, cer- tainly suggests the aptness of this observation; she has “the thought of Empire always at hand, and has acquired from her association with that armoured goddess her ramrod bearing, her robustness” (MD 275). The Harley Street doctor Sir William Bradshaw's craving for dominion is similarly attributed by Woolf to his servitude to the two goddesses, Proportion and Conversion. This pair supplants the goddess Ceres, who has disappeared in postwar England: “some- thing happened which . . . eventually, so prying and insidious were the fingers of the European War, smashed a plaster cast of Ceres” (MD 129).?! Ceres, the Roman designation of the great mother god- dess Demeter, is the goddess of harvests—and until almost the pres- ent day, British farmers celebrated the cerealia in mid-June (the fic- tional time of Mrs. Dalloway) by marching around their corn fields with burning torches.” Ceres figures the mother as food, nurture, regeneration. Her usurpers, however, forbid regeneration: serving Proportion, Sir William “forbade childbirth . . . made it impossible for the unfit to propagate their views” (MD 150). And if Proportion requires men to regress to an infantile state of sleeping and drink- ing milk, Conversion, like a monstrous mother, “‘feasts on the will of the weakly” (MD r51). Conversion, “fastidious goddess, loves blood better than bricks, and feasts most subtly on the human will” (MD 152). Clarissa’s image of Miss Kilman as a blood-sucking spec- ter that stands astride one at night similarly images the surrogate mother as devouring, annihilating, deadly. Engulfment is dangerous at the most basic level because it makes language impossible, When Peter “sucks up” a maternal figure that “shower[s] down from her magnificent hands compassion, compre- hension, absolution” (MD 86), he dreams of a “great figure, who will, with a toss of her head, mount me on her streamers and let me blow to nothingness” (MD 87). Despite the novel’s insistence upon the shortcomings of language, despite its privileging of a semiotic dis- course anterior to language, at its most inchoate level Mrs. Dalloway suggests thar female bodies prevent articulation. The body in Mrs. Dalloway is the site of abjection, the place where the speaking subject 84“Bliss” and Mrs. Dalloway drowns in materiality, the place where it is impossible to transcend embodiment, Abjection, Kristeva writes, “confronts us . . . with our earliest attempts to release the hold of maternal entity even before ex- isting outside of her, thanks to the autonomy of language. It is a vio- lent, clumsy breaking away, with the constant risk of falling back under the sway of a power as securing as it is stifling.”*) With the help of “a symbolic light,” a (phallic) term of differentiation, the sub- ject can demarcate itself from the maternal surround, “pursuing a reluctant struggle against what, having been the mother, will turn into an abject.” 24 Abjection occurs when such boundaries fail, when what has been expelled threatens encroachment. Thus, the abject is above all ambiguous, neither-outside nor inside, neither living nor dead. But it is always, indelibly, marked with its primal, maternal origins: the experience of abjection is visceral, pre-linguistic, female. Mrs. Dalloway is Woolf's last fictional demonstration of anxiety about female embodiment and its interference with female artistry. In To the Lighthouse, Lily’s body is small, insignificant, “skimpy,” whereas in Orlando the body is like a dress, something donned, as- sumed, put off when necessary. And when the mind/body split re- turns in Woolf’s later fiction in the thirties, it returns as evidence of the deformation wrought upon women by the appropriation of their bodies for the uses of patriarchy, But “the thing that matters” in Mrs. Dalloway reveals the woman writer’s signature as a signature of ab- jection; significantly, it forms that signature through its intertextual dialogue with Woolf’s most important female contemporary. In both “Bliss” and Mrs, Dalloway, hunger becomes code for a maternal symbolic; for that reason, it is necessary to turn to the role that hun- ger plays throughout the work, the way in which hunger encodes problematic relations both to maternal power and to female crea- tivity. Tragically, Woolf’s distorted impression that Mansfield was “cheap” prevented her from recognizing the commonality in their work. Reading “Bliss” as a confident manifesto that identified female sexuality as the source of a powerful female language, Woolf failed to observe the signs of distress: the focus on orality that records hun- ger for a maternal symbolic and rage at its unavailability. “I said how my own character seems to cut out a shape like a shadow in front of me. This she understood . .. and proved it by telling me she thought 85‘ord of Mouth speaks to an increasingly important issue in feminist criticism—the body— and does so with sophistication and percep- tiveness. Such an analysis in Woolf criticism is long overdue. The great virtues of the book are its theoretical sophistication, its clarity in dealing with complex and abstract issues, and its refusal to idealize the authors it treats as having somehow escaped con- flict and ambivalence. Because of the depth of its analysis, Word of Mouth should be of interest to anyone interested in the subject of women, writing, and the body (particu- larly the maternal body), as well as Woolf and Mansfield scholars.” —ELLen Bayux ROSENMAN, University of Kentucky A VOLUME IN THE SERIES F eary ll | i '80815'916751 | | UNIVERSITY PRESS OF VIRGINIA Charlottesville and London