Introduction

Cicero could read in his well thumbed text of Plato’s Republic that political constitutions did not endure forever. Experience reinforced the message of philosophy that the Roman Republic was unlikely to withstand the recurrent civil wars that marked the years of his adult life. Cicero, along with his contemporaries, preferred to analyse historical change in moral terms. Thus, he argued that the traditional constitution of the Republic was intrinsically the most stable available, and the only reason for its weakness was the corruption of the ruling classes. To the modern historian, his conservatism may seem nostalgic or impractical; yet his de Re Publica was received with immediate enthusiasm, while de Officiis proved one of the most influential of all Classical works. Cicero’s strength as a political philosopher lay in the creative and enduring expression that he gave to a remarkably fertile set of aristocratic ideals.

I have described Cicero’s political philosophy as creative. However, much scholarship since the late nineteenth century has been devoted to discovering the precise ways in which his thought is derivative. Cicero the philosopher has been supposed habitually to have imitated a lost Greek ‘source’; and his texts have been mentally translated back into Greek in order to learn more about their alleged author. Unsurprisingly, Cicero’s arguments have seemed both unoriginal and anachronistic. However, the presuppositions, the methods and the results of the source-hunters have not stood up to close scrutiny. In particular, we can no longer ignore the wealth of evidence for Cicero’s wide reading in Greek philosophy and history, and his easy familiarity with philosophical concepts (shown, for example, by jokes in his letters) as well as his outstanding ability to organize ideas and arguments.

Panegyrics hailing the arrival of Charles II in England in 1660 celebrated the return of an old order - a restoration of former ways and prior certainties. The previous two decades of political experiment and religious innovation were to be firmly canceled by the restoration of the monarchy and the Church of England, bringing with them political stability and settled order. In his Defense of the Epilogue appended to the second part of The Conquest of Granada (1669), John Dryden refers to the king and court's exile “in the most polish'd Courts of Europe” and argues that this experience “waken'd the dull and heavy spirits of the English” so that “insensibly our way of living became more free.” Another way of putting this brilliant apologia for changes in cultural habit is that the Restoration could not, in fact, restore the previous structures of authority. Politically and culturally, despite efforts to turn back the clock, the Restoration was a period of change, dynastic uncertainty, and intellectual inquiry. Although tied by both law and patronage to the fortunes and policies of the court élite, the Restoration theatres performed plays which reflected national unease and social alteration.

Beethoven lived at a time when Christianity and its institutions were losing much of their power, yet the influence of religion is felt not only in his explicitly sacred and liturgical works but also in works such as the Ninth Symphony, Fidelio, and the “Heiliger Dankgesang” from the A minor String Quartet. Since Beethoven, who was baptized as a Catholic, never really subscribed to any one of the many distinct theological currents of his time, it is difficult to obtain a coherent picture of his religious views from the multiplicity of ideas that, as documentary evidence proves, occupied Beethoven's interest. Still, a pattern emerges in his independent pursuit of religious questions that is reflected in his choice of texts to set: for him, religion was something not just dogmatically given and represented through the Catholic Church, but rather to be understood from a human perspective and experienced in its relevance to one's own life – a position that differs as essentially from the Baroque orientation toward the hereafter as from the mysticism and otherworldliness of Romanticism.

The “Gellert” Lieder op. 48 and other songs with sacred texts

With the first unmistakable signs of hearing loss and the deep personal, musical, and ideological crisis that followed, Beethoven began to grapple increasingly with religious ideas. At this time he came to know the Geistliche Oden und Lieder of Christian Fürchtegott Gellert (1st edn., Leipzig, 1757). From these fifty-four texts he chose six with revealing content: “Die Ehre Gottes aus der Natur,” for example, recalls ideas in poems by Christoph Christian Sturm from Betrachtungen über die Werke Gottes im Reiche der Natur . . ., a book which he may have encountered while still in Bonn and later definitely read, and “Vom Tode,”to which the ideas of the last section of the Heiligenstadt Testament (October 1802) closely correspond, seems to reflect his preoccupation with thoughts of death.

Politics, the legislator, and the structure of the Politics

Aristotle’s Politics does not itself articulate any consolidated account of how the nature and scope of inquiry into politics are to be conceived. For that we need to turn to statements elsewhere in his writings, and particularly at the beginning and end of the Nicomachean Ethics. Adoption of this expository strategy is just one index of the fact that for Aristotle ethics and politics are not two distinct even if connected disciplines, but one and the same subject. The name for this subject is ‘polities’; and the systematic, drily analytical treatises which have come down to us under the titles of Ethics and Politics deal with different aspects of it. Politics so understood is a pursuit or a form of knowledge which has as its aim the achievement of the good for human beings – both individually and collectively, in their cities or peoples.

According to Aristotle that good consists in happiness or human fulfilment, which is analysed as ‘activity of soul in accordance with excellence’, i.e. a life exemplifying the moral and intellectual virtues. Roughly speaking, ethics – as its name indicates – is the subdivision of politics concerned with understanding the habits of character which constitute the moral virtues necessary for human fulfilment. The other subdivision studies politeiai or constitutions, construed as different ways of organizing government in a city or nation; it is presumably viewed as the more obviously or directly political part of politics. Under these rather bare and brute descriptions ethics and politics (in this narrower sense) might seem to have little to do with each other.

Feminism, both as a theoretical analysis of gender inequality and oppression and as a political movement, has used literary texts extensively in making and disseminating its meanings. Literary and literary-critical texts were central to 'second-wave' feminist politics and the movement for 'women's liberation' in the late 1960s and 1970s, laying many of the foundations for the developments in feminist and gender criticism and theory that have changed literary studies so radically. The significance of literature for feminism also gives a particular place to those writers whose work spans both feminist polemic and fiction or poetry, including Mary Wollstonecraft, Simone de Beauvoir, Adrienne Rich and, preeminently, Virginia Woolf.

The relationship between Virginia Woolf and feminism, feminism and Virginia Woolf is, as the title of my chapter suggests, a symbiotic one. On the one hand, Woolf's feminism - which includes not just her explicit feminist politics but her concern and fascination with gender identities and with women's lives, histories and fictions - shaped her writing profoundly. On the other, feminist criticism and theory of the second half of this century have fundamentally altered the perception and reception of a writer who, in Anglo-American contexts at least, had largely fallen out of favour by the 1950s and 1960s. The immediate post-war generation tended to perceive Woolf's as an essentially pre-war sensibility. In the decades that followed, women critics and academics creating new feminist approaches found Woolf speaking very directly to their concerns, in the first-person address (albeit one in which the 'I' is diffuse and multiple) of A Room of One's Own or in the voice or voices that seemed to speak out from Woolf's newly available essays, letters, diaries and memoirs.

Psychoanalysis is the science and clinical practice that was born from Freud's discovery of the unconscious and that began to spread with the publication of his Interpretation of Dreams in 1900. Freud's invention of the 'talking cure' placed language firmly at the centre of its theory and practice. Throughout the twentieth century, in the West, psychoanalysis has had a huge impact on how human beings think of their own mental and psychic life. It has led to new ways of looking at art, new ways of reading texts, literature in particular.

Woolf's relation to psychoanalysis was manifold. Critics have interpreted it essentially in three ways: in terms of her own mental illness; of her involvement in, knowledge of and attitude to Freud and his followers; of the impact of psychoanalytic concepts upon her own writing and of the occurrence, in her writing and relation to language, of concepts and practices similar or alternative to psychoanalytic ones. In addition, psychoanalytic interpretations of her life and work have been offered. This triple - or quadruple - relation is fraught with paradoxes and questions which this essay will attempt to place before the reader.

Virginia Woolf 's fiction explores the nature of the human condition: what makes up our consciousness when we are alone and when we are with others, how we live in time, and to what extent our natures are determined by the accidents of gender, class and historical moment. In her novels, the Great War (as it was always referred to, until the Second World War) was the defining moment, the line that separated the past from the present, always seen as an abyss or a watershed. Jacob's Room (1922) portrays middle-class English society before the war; Mrs Dalloway (1925) portrays it after the war. To the Lighthouse (1927) contrasts the two, separating them from one another with the 'Time Passes' section. Woolf began To the Lighthouse with the intention of exploring who her parents had been, but in the process of recording them she relocated them in a post-war perspective, seeing them through the affectionate yet critical gaze of a modern young woman, Lily Briscoe, who is painting a portrait of Mrs Ramsay. The effect of Lily's viewpoint in the novel was to begin to isolate and set in perspective the elements that made up the Ramsays' (and the Stephens') cultural consciousness, so that Woolf could see in what ways their particular historical moment had determined who her parents were, as well as what they believed and how they behaved.

Virginia Woolf kept an almost daily diary throughout her life and wrote many thousands of letters. The first extant journal dates from 1897 when Woolf was fourteen and the diaries continue, with interruptions, until her suicide in 1941. Her earliest surviving letter was written in 1888, and she maintained a regular correspondence right up to her death, sometimes writing six letters a day. The diaries and letters are now published in twelve volumes and form a substantial part of her œuvre. They have been hailed as works of genius. Quentin Bell, in his introduction to the mature diaries, describes them as a 'masterpiece', and reviewers of both the diaries and the letters have been equally laudatory. Yet, despite the accolades, the tendency has been to scour the diaries and letters for the insights they afford into Woolf's writing, or - in the wake of the seemingly endless fascination with Bloomsbury - into Woolf herself. They are rarely read in their own right.

Considering the diaries and letters as distinct and intrinsically worthwhile works of art raises interesting questions. What is their relationship to Woolf's other writing - her fiction and criticism? How does one read a personal diary, or a letter intended for its addressee? What reading strategies might be appropriate for such material? Can Woolf's views expressed in her diaries be taken in evidence when reading her fiction? Does the fact that she signs her letters mean that they are true? In this chapter, I explore these and other questions, and suggest that postmodern theory offers a rewarding frame from which to review the genres. In particular, I argue that recent French feminist accounts of human subjectivity and writing provide dynamic routes into the diaries and letters, and intimate their accomplishment of the new form for which Woolf was searching throughout her career.

The aeroplane scene in Mrs Dalloway combines many of the perspectives relevant to Virginia Woolf's modernism: intellectual, technological, social, and literary. As 'Einstein' suggests, modernist literature responded to radical intellectual developments in philosophy and science. In 1911, as Leonard Woolf recalled, 'Freud and Rutherford and Einstein' had begun 'to revolutionise our knowledge of our own minds and of the universe'. The late nineteenth-century philosophical work of Friedrich Nietzsche and Henri Bergson was equally significant. As the aeroplane suggests, modernism was also a response to technological innovation, particularly in the urban environment. As the setting in Greenwich suggests, it explored the nature of time. The distinction between psychological time and clock time, the durée and temps of Bergson's philosophy, underlies the modernist experiments with time and narrative form. Psychology and anthropology encouraged explorations of prehistorical time, and of primitive and mythic ideas of time. The aeroplane's evanescent sky-writing raises other issues: of reading and interpretation; of the transitory nature of modernist beauty; and, in the way that the spectacle unites a disparate group of characters, the nature of the crowd in the urban environment.

'The greatest benefit we owe to the artist,' George Eliot once claimed, 'whether painter, poet, or novelist, is the extension of our sympathies.' As richly enlarging as they are tightly controlled, Woolf's novels 'benefit' the reader in just this fashion. But while it has long been agreed that they are geared towards broadening our aesthetic responsiveness - as we read Woolf's novels, we are prompted to question how and why we read fiction and to acknowledge the limitations of our answers - it is only relatively recently that the degree to which her novels seem conceived to extend our ethical and political 'sympathies' has begun to be recognised. An ideological bias, unobtrusive but palpable, is at work, for instance, in The Voyage Out, Jacob's Room, To the Lighthouse and The Years, and readers of these novels are challenged to think just as hard about the wider moral, social and political issues which the novels encompass as they are required to come to terms with the writerly goad of the texts. As early as 1908, Woolf noted in her journal that she had grown to 'distrust description' and that she wished to 'write not only with the eye, but with the mind; & discover real things beneath the show', and this was to become her principal aspiration as a novelist. In the same year, Woolf congratulated E. M. Forster for having won her over to what she presumed to be his own position in A Room With a View.

On 26 July 1922, shortly after she finished writing her third novel, Jacob's Room, Virginia Woolf noted in her diary her feeling that in writing this novel, she had 'found out how to begin (at 40) to say something in [her] own voice' (Dz, p. 186). Critics have often followed Woolf's lead in regarding Jacob's Room as a starting-point of some kind. Many monographs on Woolf discuss the novels that preceded Jacob's Room (The Voyage Out (1915) and Night and Day (1919)) only in passing, or not at all, and where they are given more sustained attention they are often dismissed as 'apprentice efforts'. Woolf's comments appear to authorise developmental readings of her œuvre, readings which assume that her early novels were attempts to work out who she was as a novelist before, in early middle age, she found her characteristic fictional voice.

But Woolf made something of a habit of announcing new beginnings. About ten years after she made the diary entry on Jacob's Room, shortly after the publication of The Waves, she wrote excitedly in her diary:

Ethics and art

When the young Virginia Stephen first began to join in discussions with her brother Thoby Stephen's friends who were just down from Cambridge and making new lives in London - people such as Clive Bell, Lytton Strachey, Maynard Keynes - she had already begun to write. She was trying out descriptions of landscape and anecdotal stories designed to show up elements of colour, light, transpositions in language and human character. She described railway journeys and disasters in duckponds; she made up stories about two young ladies going into the society of university educated people and being shocked by the frankness of the discussion: they discovered that one could discuss politics and philosophy in a charged, energetic way; and that talk was designed to discover things and share ideas, rather than being employed simply to perform the acrobatics of polite society (to amuse, while keeping one's own and the listener's actual views and emotions at bay).

There must have been a significant disparity between the materials she was working with to ply the tools of her trade, and the content of the intellectual discussions to which Thoby Stephen introduced her and her sister Vanessa. The feelings of exclusion called up in her by observing the ease with which educated men communicated with one another never left her. Her writing is split, throughout her œuvre, into the kind of writing which makes discoveries through styles of aesthetic charge, and the writings in which she plied her social conscience. In the latter, she usually wrote under strain.

Words

In 1915, under the terms of the National Registration Act, Virginia Woolf was registered by her husband Leonard as an 'author'. This official classification seems straightforward enough. The literary vocation of Virginia Woolf seems a public fact, now as then, to which we might hardly give a second thought, especially given the avalanche of work on her literary ideas, politics, psychology, autobiographical and critical writings that began with Quentin Bell's 1972 biography of his aunt and gathered force and momentum with the publication of her complete diaries, letters and collected essays. In truth, everything about Virginia Woolf, author, is in danger of becoming benignly familiar to common readers as well as professional critics - her life, her critical precepts, her feminist politics, the distinctive rhythms of her prose.

Yet, just when we believe Woolf is securely enshrined in the niche ('modern author, female') assigned to her, we encounter, as we do in a radio address entitled 'Craftsmanship', a writer whose relationship to words strikes us as either so advanced or so primitive as to confound any settled view we might have of her. Woolf begins this talk, part of a series devoted to the theme 'Why Words Fail Us', by confessing to a limited knowledge of her subject: 'Now we know little that is certain about words,' she disingenuously remarks, 'but this we do know - words never make anything that is useful; and words are the only things that tell the truth and nothing but the truth.' This is an extraordinary claim and we hardly know how to credit it. First, there is the questionable assertion, which Woolf treats as incontrovertible fact, that words never make anything useful. But of course they do - they are used to make inventories, manuals and guides, contracts, treaties, to name only a few of the useful forms words may take, as Woolf elsewhere openly acknowledges.

The conversation Virginia Woolf has been having with her readers for nearly a hundred years now (her first publication was in 1904) has gone on changing, as conversations do. As a pioneer of reader-response theory, Virginia Woolf was extremely interested in the two-way dialogue between readers and writers. Books change their readers; they teach you how to read them. But readers also change books: 'Undoubtedly all writers are immensely influenced by the people who read them.' Writers must adapt to changing conditions. Books alter as they are re-read: 'Even things in a book-case change if they are alive; we find ourselves wanting to meet them again; we find them altered' ('The Modern Essay', 1922, 1925, E4, p. 220). They are read differently by different generations: 'In 1930 we shall miss a great deal that was obvious to 1655; we shall see some things that the eighteenth century ignored.' Readers, therefore, need always to be aware of themselves not as isolated individuals, but as part of 'a long succession of readers', joining in the conversation.

The entry on Virginia Woolf in the old Dictionary of National Biography, a piece by David Cecil (who married a daughter of the Bloomsbury Group), speaks of 'the shimmering felicities of her style' and concludes that in her work 'the English aesthetic movement brought forth its most exquisite flower'. In such light, where the language of biography trespasses upon eulogy and teeters floridly towards obituarese, we might recall how Woolf's father, Leslie Stephen, the DNB's founding editor, pursued a policy of 'No flowers by request' when briefing his contributors. Stephen died in 1904. The incumbents at the dictionary in Cecil's day were obviously more relaxed about floral arrangements. They let him get away with not just a flower (a Wildean lily?) but a whole bouquet. For what after all is or was the English aesthetic movement? To put the question is not to suggest that there are no lines of relation between the diverse stock of, say, John Ruskin, Walter Pater, and Oscar Wilde, and that of a no less diverse Bloomsbury Group. Rather it is to ask what is the nature of that relation? If it is at all important, how important is it in the cultural formation of Bloomsbury?

On Monday 26 January 1920, Virginia Woolf recorded in her diary that she had 'arrived at some idea of a new form for a new novel'. The 'theme' was 'a blank' to her, but the form had immense potential: 'Suppose one thing should open out of another - as in An Unwritten Novel - only not for 10 pages but 200 or so - doesn't that give the looseness & lightness I want' (D2, pp. 13-14). In Woolf's short story 'An Unwritten Novel', the narrator, imagining the life story of a stranger sitting across from her in a train, strains against both the conventions of realist fiction and, behind these, the demands of life itself. 'Life imposes her laws; life blocks the way', she writes after conceding that she must include a commercial traveller named Moggridge in her story. Life also finally proves her wrong, for the woman does not fit the story created for her. Nonetheless, the narrator concludes on a high note: she has celebrated a vision of life, which is much more than a narration of mere facts.

'An Unwritten Novel' reflects two of Woolf's firmest assumptions about how the realist novel needed to be reformed. First, novelists must be selective. The mid-Victorian novelists, she wrote in a 1910 review, 'left out nothing that they knew how to say. Our ambition,' she added provocatively, 'is to put in nothing that need not be there.' Second, the choices novelists make should evolve from a shift of focus so that 'life' is conveyed not only in its external aspect, but as it is experienced. Taking on the 'materialists' Arnold Bennett, John Galsworthy and H. G. Wells in her essay 'Modern Novels' (1919), she asserted that 'the proper stuff for fiction' was the myriad impressions received by the mind 'exposed to the ordinary course of life' (E3, p. 33).

Prelude

World War II was the crucible from which most of the trends of the twenty years following the war developed. The post-Depression economic boom, and the fact that New York was a major point of both embarkation and recreational leave for American servicemen, pumped much-needed dollars into the theatre and gave rise to long runs that surpassed all earlier eras, as well as a rebirth of that most topical of music-theatre forms, the revue. Indeed, the seeds of virtually all of the major trends in the musical theatre after the war can be seen in the attractions offered during 1943 and 1944. Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!, often heralded as the beginning of the modern “musical play,” opened in 1943 (see Volume 2’s coverage of pre-1945 Rodgers and Hammerstein). At the same time, such unabashedly old-fashioned musicals as Cole Porter’s Mexican Hayride and the vaudeville-burlesque-flavored Follow the Girls, both major hits of 1944, showed that there was plenty of life in the old forms. 1944 also saw the first of the major choreographer-conceived dance musicals, On the Town, and the dawning of a new social consciousness in Bloomer Girl. Nostalgia for an earlier, more simple era also led to revivals of older operettas (The Student Prince, The Merry Widow), as well as the rise of such “new” old-fashioned operettas as 1944’s Song of Norway. This was the picture as the musical theatre entered the postwar period in 1945.