Motherhood in the Writing of Virginia Woolf

Motherhood is one of the most important recurrent themes in Virginia Woolf's writing. The sheer number of texts that engage with maternal discourses, across a range of forms and genres, attest to the significance of the topic. References to motherhood can be found in every one of Woolf's novels, from Melymbrosia, where characters discuss the changing ‘conditions’ of maternity (M 137), to Between the Acts, where an empty cot in an empty nursery – ‘The cradle of our race’ (BA 45) – takes on a shadowy symbolism. Maternal themes and characters can frequently be seen in Woolf's shorter fiction and her essays, and maternal discourses are prominent in the message of A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas, and the lectures and manuscripts connected with these works. Mentions of motherhood also regularly occur in Woolf's letters and diary, and her unpublished memoirs contain valuable studies of her mother, Julia Stephen, and mothering. This book explores Woolf's literary interest in motherhood, adding a fresh perspective to current scholarship on Woolf's feminist politics, and offering a deeper understanding of how personal and public events worked together to inform her creative processes.

For a number of reasons Woolf's engagement with the ideologies and discourses of motherhood has received relatively little scholarly attention. Jane Marcus notes that in the 1970s and 1980s critics ‘fetishized’ Woolf, framing her as ‘the sign of feminist literary and political culture […] as well as the icon of Women's Studies and Feminist Theory’.

Introduction

In 1924 Maine governor Percival Baxter went against the political grain and commissioned a woman sculptor, Bashka Paeff, to create a pacifist memorial for sailors and soldiers lost in WW1. The sculpture depicts a woman protectively shielding a child. Around them lie the bodies of young men, naked and non-partisan, victims of the conflict. Baxter was probably aware of what he was commissioning. Three years earlier Paeff had given an interview in which she had said of the war:

As Paeff worked on her monument, Virginia Woolf was writing and editing the manuscript that would become Mrs Dalloway. This novel was to be her second to damn war, after the elegiac Jacob's Room published at the end of 1922. Like Paeff's bronze, Woolf's novels stood in contrast to the cultural norm. They exist as memorials that condemn war and its patriarchal origins – portraying tragic, empty loss, and creating a lasting reminder of the horror of such conflicts. All three works manifest prominent images of mothers to investigate their subject, reflecting a wartime trend that saw motherhood used as fuel for a variety of propaganda campaigns, both to promote war and to protest against it.

It has occasionally been pointed out that Deleuze was the only one of his generation to consider himself strictly a philosopher. When he was asked in which genre A Thousand Plateaus should be categorised (among archivists, deconstructionists and anthropologists), Deleuze answered: ‘Philosophy, nothing but philosophy, in the traditional sense of the word.’ It is in the same sense that he also understands Foucault's famous prediction perhaps one day this century will be known as Deleuzian: ‘Maybe that's what Foucault meant: I wasn't the best, but the most naive […] the most innocent (the one who felt the least guilt about “doing philosophy”).’ It's all the more surpris¬ing that some of the major sources of Deleuze's thought themselves express a certain distance with respect to philosophy – Nietzsche, who proclaimed himself a physician or psychologist of humanity; Spinoza, who so frequently attributed a pejorative meaning to the notion and who ultimately titled his magnum opus Ethics instead of Philosophy. But, on the one hand, we shouldn't forget the return of Deleuze's contemporaries to philosophy. In this sense, Foucault explains that insofar as his concern is with truth, he must consider himself a philosopher. Similarly, Derrida argues that the limit of the philosophical never comes without a certain unconditional reaf¬firmation.On the other hand, we should not ignore that Deleuze borrows the appellations of physician or psychologist, for example, whether this be on his own behalf or for the commentary of a self-proclaimed philosopher, like in the case of Hume. It's true that he's the only one to dedicate an entire book explicitly to the definition of philosophy. But perhaps this book shouldn't be examined as what distinguishes Deleuze from his contemporaries or from his sources, but as a possible explanation for a gesture that is shared by them, a gesture perhaps shared by many others, one that consists in denying the name ‘philosopher’ while at the same time maintaining it.

Today, Gilles Deleuze's thought seems to be exiled in two ways: first from philosophy and then from the university. In the best case, we find him in literature departments or departments of political science and in sociology or film studies faculties, if not in writing workshops or psychoanalytic institutions.

Of course, this involves a voluntary exile: no one encouraged the opening of philosophy to its outside and provided a philosophy for nonphilosophers more than Deleuze. Yet, in our opinion, this opening has always been conceived and practised from within by way of an unconditional reaffirmation of philosophy and a firm com¬mitment to the transformation of the academy.

This is why we have undertaken a thesis on his conception of philosophy. Why the conception of philosophy? Because Deleuze is a philosopher before all else. Why a thesis? Because it concerns philos¬ophy in the most traditional sense of the word. It is our responsibility to show the innovations he introduced into both of these fields.

But how do we appreciate them without starting there? How do we understand what becoming, the virtual, the rhizome is without beginning with being, spirit, system? One does not learn to speak another language with monolingual dictionaries. And if, according to Deleuze's phrase, a philosophy constructs ‘a language within language’, then we in fact need a dictionary that relates Deleuzian language to the language of the tradition.

Introduction

In his posthumous profile of Woolf, the writer E. M. Forster particularly highlights her accomplishment with regard to those

passages which describe eating. They are invariably good. They are a sharp reminder that here is a woman who is alert sensuously. She had an enlightened greediness which gentlemen themselves might envy, and which few masculine writers have expressed […] when Virginia Woolf mentions nice things they go right into our mouth, so far as the edibility of print permits. We taste their deliciousness: the great dish of Boeuf en Daube which forms the centre of the dinner of union in To the Lighthouse, the dinner which exhales affection and poetry and loveliness, so that all the characters see the best in one another at last and for a moment […] Such a dinner cannot be built on a statement beneath a dish-cover which the novelist is too indifferent or incompetent to remove […] The Boeuf en Daube, which had taken the cook three days to make and had worried Mrs Ramsay as she did her hair, stands before us.

The dinner that Forster describes is an expression of Mrs Ramsay's maternal power, her ability to nourish and to combine guests in an almost mystical moment of bringing together. However, this maternal act holds within it layers of class commentary and concern. Systems of unequal effort and reward are reflected by a dinner that has taken Mildred the cook ‘three days to make’, but has ‘worried Mrs Ramsay as she did her hair’. Forster's sensory identification with the scene draws attention to an important difference between Woolf and her male contemporaries (a difference which he notices but does not attempt to explain).

1. Its Function

The description of the concept in What Is Philosophy? begins in a manner that is as simple as it is intuitive: the concept is a way to order ideas. ‘[F]rom Plato to Bergson, we find the idea of the concept being a matter of articulation, of cutting-out and intercutting. […] Only on this condition can it escape the mental chaos constantly threatening it […].’ We do not yet know what chaos is, what order is, and how to reach it, but it isn't necessary to know this to accept the sufficiently obvious starting point according to which the concept is a sort of ordering.

And yet if we remain on this level of simplicity and intuitiveness, philosophy's element, the concept, cannot be distinguished from the element of science, the function, nor from the element of art, the affect or percept. Indeed, ‘[w]hat defines thought in its three great forms – art, science, and philosophy – is always confronting chaos.’ The difference between the elements appears when we ask how the concept confronts chaos. But, at the same time, the defini¬tion becomes extremely technical: the concept ‘refers back to a chaos rendered consistent’; it ‘gives a consistency to the virtual’. How is the concept distinguished from the function? If the first gives a consistency to the virtual, the second gives ‘a reference to the virtual, which actualizes it’. On its side, the element of art realises sensation in the material and makes the material pass into sensation.

We would like nothing more than to forgo this foreword to the reader and disappear behind the transparency of this text, portraying a fantasy best left to a bygone era in which translators might still claim to be objective and disinterested in what they attempt to carry across. An ideal translator would hide her choices, her compromises, her flaws and faults, and herself, seamlessly becoming-imperceptible and vanishing without a trace into that heavenly abode and tower of Babel in which all languages are black. However, perhaps the translator most of all is libidinally interested and invested in the production of texts, fated to echo the repetitions of a difference, self-sufficient in the serenity of its solitude, that is indifferent to her. But if the words are originally not her ‘own’ and if the efflorescence of the logic motivating them is in a reciprocal differential relationship with what has come before, then it's quite fortunate that she never has the last word and merely contributes to reverberating her reflective voice in the continual chorus of scholarly voices.

A book on the paradoxically systematic and methodical crea¬tion of concepts, cutting across and interweaving the history of philosophy while splicing together the old with the new, requires a concatenated rehandling of language. A book on Deleuze all the more so, insofar as it bears witness to incursions into the arena of philosophy's history with the goal of achieving the maximum of difference in the most rigorous of repetitions.

1. The Agent of Philosophical Enunciation

‘Concepts are not deduced from the plane. The conceptual persona is needed to create concepts on the plane, just as the plane itself needs to be laid out. But these two operations do not merge in the persona, which itself appears as a distinct operator.’ Between the plane and the concepts, a distinct operator completes the theory of elements. This is the conceptual persona. How is it defined? It is ‘the true agent of enunciation’. Like the narrator in a novel, the conceptual persona in philosophy is the one who says I. In this sense, it will be the object of the theory of creation and, more precisely, of the theory of philosophical discourse. However, the philosophical enunciation certainly differs from the literary enunciation. This is why we should distinguish the conceptual persona from the literary character. But first and foremost, what is the meaning of the one who says I in philosophy, what does it mean that the agent of enunciation is a persona and not, against our expectations, the philosopher?

In a novel, a story, a play, even if they concern different genres, we would never say that it is the writer or author who speaks. We observe without difficulty that speech is related to characters and that they often do not necessarily express the author's ideas or opinions. Yet even when they do, how can we confuse them with the author? The character will always be a character, with their own psychol¬ogy, their own memories or without memories, the finite number of words that constitutes them. What happens, for example, in the essay, a genre that brings us closer to philosophical enunciation? We could suppose that it's the author who speaks directly to the reader. But why do we lay out this difference with the other genres? Why do we short-circuit the persona? Due to the simple absence of the name, due to the fact that the text doesn't mention it? In the case of the essay, we may indeed consider that there is a single persona that speaks to the reader: the narrator.

1. Postulate of Commencement: The Principle of Cogitatio Natura Universalis

When do we start to think? The answer of the first postulate is that we begin to think when we decide to and due to the fact that our faculties are good by nature, i.e. because their structure coincides with the structure of the real. Thought would naturally be in a condition to know the real. This is why it suffices for the thinker to make the decision, to have the will to do it. Deleuze will support this thesis by citing the tradition, thereby proving the philosophical nature of the postulate: ‘“Everybody has by nature the desire to know”’; ‘“Good sense is of all things in the world the most equally distributed.”’

Yet we cannot, Deleuze reasons, think these phrases in fact, because ‘“Everybody”’, he repeats, ‘knows very well that in fact men think rarely, and more often under the impact of a shock than in the impulse of a taste’. This is why he argues that we should understand this determination of thought, of the commencement of thought, in principle, as a determination of pure thought.

It feels fitting to begin this conclusion with a section of Three Guineas in which Woolf reviews both the demise of Victorian maternity (as explored in the chapters of this book) and also the enduring influence of mothers (as discussed in the previous chapter). Her deliberations begin with the following passage:

No guinea of earned money should go to rebuilding the college on the old plan; just as certainly none could be spent upon building a college upon a new plan; therefore the guinea should be earmarked ‘Rags. Petrol. Matches.’ And this note should be attached to it. ‘Take this guinea and with it burn the college to the ground. Set fire to the old hypocrisies. Let the light of the burning building scare the nightingales and incarnadine the willows. And let the daughters of educated men dance round the fire and heap armful upon armful of dead leaves upon the flames. And let their mothers lean from the upper windows and cry ‘Let it blaze! Let it blaze! For we have done with this “education”!’ (TG 157)

This scene with its ‘Rags. Petrol. Matches.’ brings to mind the arson practiced by militant suffragettes, who often used such paraphernalia. Perhaps this is why criticism of this text has focused on what Naomi Black calls ‘the bonfire of feminism’ – the burning of words and buildings – rather than on the fiery deaths being visited upon the mothers leaning ‘from the upper windows’ of the burning college (Christine Haskill, for example, writes of the scene, that Woolf draws ‘on generational imagery as the daughters and mothers rejoice in the “blaze” of the fire’).

Introduction

By the time Virginia Woolf started becoming interested in psychoanalytic theory its pioneers had split into two rather distinct factions. Sigmund (and later Anna) Freud advanced theories in which the individual is motivated by two opposing life and death drives known as ‘Eros’ and ‘destruction’. Melanie Klein, on the other hand, was interested in the way infants formed relationships from birth and proposed models which, as Jay Lefer explains, ‘saw the mother-child dyad as a building block of psychic structure’. Lefer notes that although these differing philosophies caused quite serious rifts in American psychoanalysis, in Britain there was more tolerance. British psychoanalysts worked together, predominantly focusing on Kleinian object-relations theories in which ‘the child's relationship with the mother is internalized and becomes part of his self through time’. This preference for Kleinian psychoanalysis may have been a consequence of the markedly high number of female psychoanalysts working, researching and publishing within Britain. As the preeminent British psychoanalyst Ernest Jones noted in a 1927 letter to Freud, ‘for many years there has been a rather special interest taken in the problems of childhood in London, perhaps more than elsewhere. I suppose the reason is that we have a number of women analysts’. Sanja Bahun notes that ‘almost half of the practicing members of the British Psycho-Analytical Society in the interwar years were women’. These women and their colleagues focused on a list of gynocentric topics that included ‘female sexuality, gender’ and ‘motherhood’ – all topics that are also prominent within Woolf's work.

1. Philosophy's Inauguration

1.a. Image of Thought and Matter of Being

In the second chapter of What Is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari assert that if philosophy commences with the creation of concepts, then the laying out of a plane constitutes its inauguration, that if the creation of concepts is the commencement of philosophy, then there is a prephilosophical plane. What is this plane, and what is its relation with concepts? Why is it a plane of immanence? What is the difference between the commencement and the inauguration of philosophy?

According to Deleuze and Guattari, the plane of immanence is the ‘image of thought’ and the ‘matter of being’, Nature and Thought, Physis and Noûs. What does this mean? We in fact have to recall this distinction that the authors themselves make when they define the plane as the ‘unlimited One-All’. The plane of immanence is what the philosopher is given from the start as totality. From the start – and it will be necessary to understand what the order of this anteriority is – the philosopher is given a conception of the whole, an ontology. This is the conception of being, the configuration of the world. If each philosophy constitutes an experience that corresponds to it, if the concept is a way to order chaos, then in Deleuzian metaphilosophy the plane of immanence is the notion which signifies the constitution of the whole, the delimitation of the margins of this experience. With this in mind, we have to note that when the notion unfolds, we do not say being and thought, but matter of being and image of thought. How should we understand these expressions to preserve their precision?