Impressionism in the Early Novels of Virginia WoolfAuthor(s): Jack F. StewartReviewed work(s):Source: Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 9, No. 2 (May, 1982), pp. 237-266Published by: Indiana University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3831259 .Accessed: 27/06/2012 17:50

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JACK F. STEWART

UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA

Impressionism in the Early

Novels of Virginia

Woolf

In "A Sketch of the Past,"1 Virginia Woolf traces the origins of her

sensibility in childhood. "If I were a painter," she observes, "I should

paint these first impressions in pale yellow, silver, and green. There was

the pale yellow blind; the green sea; and the silver of the passion

flowers. I should make a picture that was globular; semi-transparent. . .

I should make curved shapes, showing the light through, but not giving a clear outline. Everything would be large and dim; and what was seen

would at the same time be heard . . . sounds indistinguishable from

sights." This verbal painting has the glowing indistinctness of an Im?

pressionist canvas: colors, shapes, sounds, and rhythms merge in a

synthesis of sense and emotion. Whereas a pure Impressionist like

Monet works "directly from nature, striving to render [his] impressions

in the face of the most fugitive effects,"2 a writer like Proust (or Woolf)

works from visual memory; both aim, however, at instantaneity, "that

very jar on the nerves, the thing itself before it has been made

anything."3

The quality of light suffusing objects with color awakens Woolf's

aesthetic consciousness. "Light," says Maria Kronegger, "is the soul of

impressionist paintings, and the soul of impressionist literature. . . .

Reality, for the impressionist, has become a vision of space, conceived

1 Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being, ed. Jeanne Schulkind (London: Hogarth Press, 1978), p. 66. (Title sub? sequently abbreviated as MB.) All references in my text are based on editions previously given in footnotes.

2 Quoted in William C. Seitz, Claude Monet (Abrams, n.d.), p. 44. 3 Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927; rpt. London: Hogarth Press, 1967), p. 297. (Title subsequently

abbreviated as TL.) Other Hogarth editions of Woolf cited in my text are: The Voyage Out (1915) (VO); Night and Day (1919) (ND); Jacob's Room (1922) ()R); Mrs. Dalloway (1925) (D); Orlando (1928) (O); The Waves (1931) (W); Between the Acts (1941) (BA); Collected Essays (1966) (CE); A Haunted House and Other Stories (1944) (HH); A Room of One's Own (1929) (AROO); A Writer's Diary, ed. Leonard Woolf (1953) (AWD); The Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. Anne Olivier Bell (1977) (Diary).

237

238 JACK F. STEWART

as sensations of light and color."4 In her Diary, Woolf shows an Im?

pressionist sensitivity to movements of light over landscape: "the look

of clouded emerald which the downs wear, the semi-transparent look,

as the sun & shadows change, & the green becomes now vivid now

opaque" (Diary, I, 185). Light is certainly the soul of her work?or,

rather, a synthesis of light, time, and space sensuously apprehended in a

moment of being. In "The Narrow Bridge of Art," Woolf sees fiction

extending its range to convey "the power of music, the stimulus of sight,

the effect on us of the shape of trees or the play of colour, the emotions

bred in us by crowds . . . obscure terrors and hatreds ... the delight of

movement, the intoxication of wine. Every moment is the centre and

meeting-place of an extraordinary number of perceptions which have

not yet been expressed" (CE, II, 229). This commitment to sensation and

perception links Woolfs art with that of the Impressionists.5 In To the

Lighthouse (1927), she gives the flux of sensations associated with

childhood their fullest ordering. But before she could encompass that

luminous vision, she had written two apprentice and two experimental

novels. I shall consider Impressionist motifs in The Voyage Out (1915),

Night and Day (1919), and Jacob's Room (1923),6 leaving aside Mrs.

Dalloway (1925), where impressions are psychologized in interior

monologues.

Woolf, who conceived her fiction in visual scenes, stresses the close

analogy between her art and that ofthe painter.7 As a writer, she aims to

render the feel of life in a given consciousness at a given moment,

through a language of sense perception that parallels that of paint. Ralph

Freedman says she saw the design of her novels of the twenties "chiefly

4 Maria Elisabeth Kronegger, Literary Impressionism (Yale University Press, 1973), pp. 42, 48. 5 See Octave Mirbeau, in Figaro, 1889, quoted in Jacques Lassaigne, Impressionism, trans. Paul Eve (Funk &

Wagnalls, 1966), pp. 110-11. 6 Herbert Howarth, "Symposium of Literary Impressionism," Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature,

XVII (1968), 41, says that "Woolf develops from latent to overt Impressionism." I see this development complet- ing itself within the first three novels.

7 See MB, 66, 70-73; also "Walter Sickert," CE, II, 233-44. Commenting on Arnold Bennetfs essay, "Neo- Impressionism and Literature," Woolf in Contemporary Writers (ed. Jean Guiguet [London: Hogarth, 1965], p. 62) echoes the question: "is it not possible that some writer will come along and do in words what these men have done in paint?" (Bennett's essay actually deals with Post-lmpressionist painting.) Several critics have related Woolfs art to painting and/or Impressionism. See Ralph Freedman, The Lyrical Novel (Princeton University Press, 1970); Hermione Lee, The Novels of Virginia Woolf (London: Methuen, 1977); Allen McLaurin, Virginia Woolf: The Echoes Enslaved (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973); James Naremore, The World Without a Self (Yale University Press, 1973); Jane Novak, The Razor Edge of Balance (University of Miami Press, 1975); Wanda Mae Brewer, "Virginia Woolf and the Painter's Vision," DAI, XXX (1969), 716A-17A; Hershey Julien, "Virginia Woolf: Post-lmpressionist Novelist," DAI, XXIX (1968), 4490A: Jacqueline Gaillet Thayer, "Virginia Woolf: From Impressionism to Abstract Art," DAI, XXXVIII (1977), 1419A. [Richard Morphet] Catalogue Intro? duction to Vanessa Bell: Paintings and Drawings (London: Anthony d'Offay, 1973), pp. 10-11, compares the visual styles and motifs of Virginia's writing with those of Vanessa's painting.

WOOLF AND IMPRESSIONISM 239

in terms of an analogy with painting, precisely with impressionist and

post-impressionist art. Her 'paintings' were visual illuminations . . .

artistic equivalents ofthe recognition ofthe moment. . . [in which] the

image becomes that form of awareness which corresponds to the figure

on the painter's canvas" (203). In this paper, I am concerned with

interrelations between Woolf's early style and Impressionist painting,8

rather than with "literary impressionism," as the term is applied to

Conrad's and Ford's narrative devices. To this end, I adopt Todorov's

tactic of "superimposing the various works . . . by reading them as if in

transparency, one on top of the other."9

The Voyage Out gives glimpses of the style that was to permeate

Woolf's fiction. Here she wishes to convey the sense of "life itself

going on" (AWD, 143), just as "the Impressionists all painted the

passing scene . . . the fleeting moment in nature . . . action unfolding in

space . . . the breath of life . .." (Courthion, 28). The outward bustle that

catches the painter's eye parallels that inward movement where "the

mind receives a myriad impressions," and where "life is a luminous

halo, a semitransparent envelope. . . ."10 The early plein-air Im?

pressionists, Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, and Sisley, were variously at?

tracted by movements of sunlight over leaves or flesh, river scenes,

lights on dark water, cities by night, seascapes, clouds, mist, smoke,

snow, floods, and crowds strolling, sitting, eating, drinking, dancing.

The visual scenes in Woolf's early novels exploit similar motifs and

8 The following works on Impressionist painting are cited in my text or notes: Maria and Godfrey Blunden, Impressionists and Impressionism (Rizzoli, 1976); Kermit Swiler Champa, Studies in Early Impressionism (Yale University Press, 1973); Pierre Courthion, Impressionism, trans. John Shepley (Abrams, n.d.); William Gaunt, The Impressionists (London: Thames & Hudson, 1970); Arnold Hauser, "Impressionism," The Social History of Art (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1951), II, 896-926; Jacques Lassaigne (see above); Linda Nochlin, Im? pressionism and Post-lmpressionism, 1874-1904: Sources and Documents (Prentice-Hall, 1966); John Rewald, The History of Impressionism, rev. ed. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1961); Lionello Venturi, Im? pressionists and Symbolists, trans. Francis Steegmuller (New York: Cooper Square, 1973). See also Roger Fry, "Impressionism," Characteristics of French Art (London: Chatto & Windus, 1932), pp. 125-49, as well as studies by Germain Bazin, Alan Bowness, ed., Bernard Dunstan, Diane Kelder, and Phoebe Pool. Reproductions of paintings mentioned in my text will be found most readily in Donald Holden, Whistler Landscapes and Seascapes (New York: Watson-Guptill, 1976); Walter Pach, Pierre Auguste Renoir (Abrams, n.d.); William C. Seitz, see above, and Claude Monet: Seasons and Moments (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1960); John Rewald, Camille Pissarro (London: Thames & Hudson, 1963); and Pierre du Colombier, Alfred Sisley in the Musee du Louvre (London: Collins, 1947).

9 Tzvetan Todorov, The Poetics of Prose, trans. Richard Howard (Cornell University Press, 1977), pp. 144-45. 10 "Modern Fiction," CE, II, 106. (Subsequently abbreviated as "MF.") Woolf's metaphors might derive from

Monet's concept of "envelopment": Kronegger returns the complimentby applying them to Impressionist painting (28). See also Courthion, "a halo of light" (36); Fry, "atmospheric halo of lighted surfaces" (141); Gaunt, "an envelope of surrounding light" (240); Seitz, Monet, "the gaseous luminosity in which [objects] are immersed" (35); Seitz, CM: Seasons, "the luminous medium encircling [objects]" (23); Venturi, "a light which becomes a veil of gleaming particles" (64).

240

show an Impressionist sensitivity to color, atmosphere, and shifting rela?

tions of subject and object.

Just as Whistler composed melodic sequences of tones in figure

studies like Symphony in White (1864), so Woolf gives us a glowing

portrait of her heroine, Katharine, in Night and Day, "in the blue dress

which filled almost the whole ofthe long looking-glass with blue light

and made it the frame of a picture, holding . . . shapes and colours of

objects reflected from the background . . ." (ND, 365). The mirror that

frames and reflects is a microcosmic image of art,11 and the real subject

of this harmony in blue is Virginia's sister, Vanessa, with her artistic

ethos. Florinda, one of Jacob's girlfriends, rates only surface im?

pressions: "Gold and white with bright beads on her she emerged, her

face flowering from her body, innocent, scarcely tinted, the eyes gazing

frankly about her, or slowly settling on Jacob and resting there" (JR, 79).

Shallowness is stressed in Jacob's Room, where the narrator suppresses

depth and detail, to sketch in the anonymity that envelopes Jacob and to

subordinate his hazy yearnings to a self-conscious display of her own

style12 (see also JR, 114-15). Here Woolf uses the metaphor of an artist

drawing faces with brush or crayon: "The women in the streets have the

faces of playing-cards; the outlines accurately drawn in with pink or

yellow, and the line drawn tightly around them" (JR, 115). Manet first

suppressed the illusion of depth in his Olympia (1863), which Courbet

called a "playing-card"; Maurice Denis later defined painting as "a flat

surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order." Woolf's

technique vies with that of her sister's portraits, such as Virginia Woolf at

Asheham (1912), or Lytton Strachey (1913),13 in which the painter leans

toward Fauvism, leaving the faces blank patches of color and suggesting

personalities by posture. Woolf's art combines rapid sketches with lyri?

cal abstraction to ignite momentary "illuminations" (see D, 36).

The selective focus that produces a luminous highlight against a

blurred background is an optical phenomenon verified in photography

and exploited in paintings such as Renoir's Woman Reading (1876)

(Figure 1), Her First Evening Out (1880), or Place Clichy (1880), as well

as in Jacob's Room: "Of the faces which came out fresh and vivid as

though painted in yellow and red, the most prominent was a girl's face.

11 See "The Lady in the Looking-Glass," HH, 89, where objects "dripping with light and colour at first crude and unabsorbed" are "drawn in and arranged and composed and made part of the picture and granted that stillness and immortality which the looking-glass conferred."

12 See Barry F. Morgenstern, "The Self-Conscious Narrator in Jacob's Room," Modern Fiction Studies, XVIII (Autumn 1972), 351-61.

13 See Richard Shone, Bloomsbury Portraits: Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, and Their Circle (Oxford: Phaidon, 1976), Fig. 59, p. 93; Fig. 77, p. 127.

Figure 1: Renoir, Woman Reading, 1875-76. Illustration from Germain Bazin, Impressionist Paintings in the Louvre (London: Thames and Hudson, 1969), p. 170.

By a trick of the firelight she seemed to have no body. The oval of the

face and hair hung beside the fire with a dark vacuum for background.

As if dazed by the glare, her green-blue eyes stared at the flames" (JR,

72-73). The effect of lighting here is to make the ordinary seem mys?

terious. Similarly, Renoir, in Portrait of a Girl (1878) (Figure 2), sought

"effects of reverie and mystery" that had nothing to do with the mind.

His model's eyes glow with life against a soft background, but "that girl

never thought," he said, "she lived like a bird and nothing more" (Pach,

60).

In Renoir's early Impressionist paintings, such as The Swing (Figure 3)

or Woman's Torso in Sunlight (both 1876), the rippling play of sunshine

and shadow, pouring over still or moving bodies, tends to depersonalize

them as part of the natural scene. Thus the tenuousness of Jacob's

contact with life is reflected in his view of Clara: "She looked semi-

transparent, pale, wonderfully beautiful up there among the vine leaves

and the yellow and purple bunches, the lights swimming over her in

coloured islands" (/R, 61). The whole scene is bathed in the summer

light of the Impressionists, and the harmonic interplay of complemen?

tary colors might be drawn from Renoir's palette. The mingling of iden?

tities in a mood of festivity is a related Impressionist theme, seen in

Renoir's Le Moulin de la Galette (1876) (Figure 4) and La Grenouillere

(1879), which appears more sketchily in Jacob's Room (see )R, 73).

Woolf crystallized her Impressionist style in "Kew Gardens" (1919).

There people are etherealized or dehumanized by the play of light

Figure 2: Renoir, Portrait of a Cirl, 1878. Illustration from Walter Pach, Pierre Auguste Renoir (New York: Abrams, n.d.), p. 61.

through a shifting lens, alternately microscopic or blurred, that synthe-

sizes human and natural objects. A disembodied eye dramatizes the

sensuous life of plants and reduces moving figures to splashes of color:14

"They walked on past the flower-bed . . . and soon diminished in size

among the trees and looked half-transparent as the sunlight and shade

swam over their backs in large trembling irregular patches" (HH, 34).

The microcosmic world ofthe gardens is made and unmade in a series

of "prismatic decompositions."15 Human outlines dissolve in a lumin?

ous flux: "Yellow and black, pink and snow-white, shapes of all these

colours, men, women, and children were spotted for a second upon the

horizon, and then, seeing the breadth of yellow that lay upon the grass,

they wavered and sought shade beneath the trees, dissolving like drops

of water in the yellow and green atmosphere, staining it faintly with red

and blue" (HH, 39).16 Light is life, and objects, liberated from the cramp

of mind, vibrate upon the retina. In language equivalent to Monet's use

of paint, Woolf seeks to render "the [instantaneous] envelopment, the

same light spread over everywhere" (Monet, quoted in Nochlin, 34). In

14 Venturi, p. 103, shows how the Impressionist brushstroke "extended to everything in the universe the principle of reflections of light in water. . . ."

15 Jules Laforgue said that "the Impressionist sees everything not with a dead whiteness, but rather with a thousand vibrant struggling colors of rich prismatic decomposition" (1883; quoted in Nochlin, 16).

16 Rewald, pp- 386-87, observes that Monef s models, "sprinkled with spots of light falling through the foliage . . . became merely media for the representation of curious and momentary effects of light and shadow which partly dissolved forms . . . ." Moreover, the mixing of complementaries (blue/orange, red/ green) into areas of shade is characteristic of Neo-lmpressionist painting.

243

setting up her "easel" at Kew, she might have been responding to

Monet's advice: "When you go out to paint, try to forget what objects

you have before you?a tree, a house, a field, or whatever. Merely

think, here is a little square of blue, here an oblong of pink, here a streak

of yellow, and paint it just as it looks to you, the exact color and shape,

until it gives your own naTve impression of the scene before you"

(Nochlin, 35). Words that name cannot be as naYve as paint, yet Woolf

sometimes uses abstract spots of color in a defamiliarizing way that

approximates the taches ofthe Impressionists, or the "leopard-spotting"

technique of Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell. Thus, in Night and Day,

Figure 3: Renoir, The Swing, 1876. Illustration from Maria and Godfrey Blunden, Impressionists and Im? pressionism (New York: Skira/Rizzoli, 1980), p. 134.

"a tall figure . . . [emerges] from a fluttering circle of soft feathery

bodies, upon whom the light fell in wavering discs calling out now a

bright spot of yellow, now one of greenish-black and scarlet" (ND,

196). In "Kew," Woolf focuses primarily on transforming effects of light and distance, but she also zeroes in on objects with hallucinating vivid-

ness of detail. Thus to the innocent eye of the painter she adds the

moving eye of the camera, with its panning, close-up, soft focus, and

dissolve.17

17 Novak compares Woolf's technique in/R with "dynamic montage" and cites Eisenstein (93); however, she points out that "Woolf was imitating not the cinema but her own hypersensitive visual processes . . . ."

Figure 4: Renoir, Le Moulin de la Galette, 1876. Illustration from Blunden, Impressionists and Impressionism, p. 134.

The Impressionist forerunners, Boudin and Jongkind, were marine

painters with an eye for wind, clouds, and water. Monet followed their

lead, and his beach-front scenes, such as Seaside Terrace near Le Havre

(1866) (Figure 5), Beach at Saint-Adresse (1867), and Hotel des Roches

Noires at Trouville (1870) (Figure 6), are remarkable for their brightness

and bustle. When Mrs. Flanders visits Scarborough, in Jacob's Room, the

narrator playfully remarks that "the entire gamut of the view's changes

should have been known to her" and proceeds to list more than could be

crammed into a single canvas: seasons, storms, shadows of clouds, a

"red spot," a "criss-cross of lines," a "diamond flash," a "gold tint,"

and little boats out at sea (/R, 15). Panorama and syntax are equally

impressionistic: "The whole city was pink and gold; domed; mist-

wreathed; resonant; strident. Banjoes strummed; the parade smelt of

tar.... Tulips burnt in the sun.... Purple bonnets fringed soft, pink,

querulous faces . . ." (JR, 15-16). The description ends, as a spoof, with

"red, blue, and yellow letters" (the primary colors of the chromatic

scale)18 on a triangular billboard, "each line end[ing] with three differ-

ently coloured notes of exclamation" (/R, 16).

The sea was a favorite motif for painters of light and atmosphere, as it

was for Woolf. The motifs of Corot, Courbet, Boudin, and Jongkind are

reflected in Wallace Stevens' poem, "Sea Surface Full of Clouds,"19 and

18 The motif of "red, blue, and yellow" recurs four times in the opening paragraph of "Kew Gardens." 19 Michael Benamou, "Wallace Stevens: Some Relations Between Poetry and Painting," Comparative Litera?

ture, XI (Winter 1959), 49, compares "Sea Surface" with Monet's Water-Lilies as mirror-images "[fusing] con? sciousness with the external world."

245

in Stephen Dedalus' treasured phrase, "A day of dappled seabome

clouds." Monet, who started painting outdoors with Boudin at Le Havre,

did many studies of coastal waters, including the famous Impression: Sunrise (1872) (Figure 7), which gave its title to the movement. The

Voyage Out is naturally and symbolically concerned with the sea, and at

one point Rachel gazes into its green depths (VO, 23-24), as if fore-

seeing her ultimate voyage "'under the glassy, cool, translucent

wave'" (VO, 399).

The early Impressionists sought to catch the play of sunlight on sur-

faces, and in this mode Woolf describes her imaginary South America:

"The sea filled in all the angles of the coast smoothly, breaking in a

white frill, and here and there ships were set firmly in the blue. The sea

was stained with purple and green blots, and there was a glittering line

upon the rim where it met the sky" (VO, 150). Height and distance play a part in this impression?from her mountain vantage-point Rachel has

just "obscur[ed] the whole of Santa Marina . . . with one hand" (VO,

150)?and the emphasis is on color, line, and simplified form. Such

heightening and simplification ofthe exotic produce several passages of

naive art (VO, 30, 98, 127-28, 331) reminiscent of the paintings of

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Figure 5: Monet, Terrace Near Le Havre, 1866. Illustration from Jean Leymarie, Impressionism (New York: Skira/Crown, 1972), I, p. 51.

Figure 6: Monet, Hotel des Roches Noires, Trouville, 1870. Illustration from Denis Rouart, Claude Monet (New York: Skira/Crown, 1972), p. 48.

Henri Rousseau, whose voyages were also probably imaginary.20 Woolf's

flexible manipulations of distance combine the physical with the fantas?

tic. "Seen at a distance," Kronegger observes, "no object has any clear

and detailed outlines, and thus ... the subject itself is subordinated to

the melodious effect of colours and sounds, which then can be used to

evoke a particular mood" (47). As the Euphrosyne stearns out to sea, the

narrator's inner eye reduces England to a colored patchwork: "Great

tracts of the earth lay now beneath the autumn sun, and the whole of

England, from the bald moors to the Cornish rocks, was lit up from dawn

to sunset, and showed in stretches of yellow, green, and purple" (VO,

28). In her Lilliputian fantasy, Rachel imagines the antlike, clamorous

20 See Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years, rev. ed. (Vintage, 1968), p. 46.

247

life of England fading out, and the continents shrinking to "wrinkled

little rocks" (VO, 29). By a reversal ofthe lens, she imagines ships seen

from shore "dissolved, like snow in water" (VO, 28-29). Her mind is an

impressionist medium irr which objects thaw, transmute, and vanish.21

As the painters record evanescence in nature (melting snow, breaking

ice, floods), Woolf records the shifting tides of consciousness and

reverie.

This immersion in a fluidly changing viewpoint reappears in the open?

ing lines of Jacob's Room, in which solid objects lose their outlines and

collapse into glimmering mist: "The entire bay quivered; the lighthouse

wobbled .... Tears made all the dahlias in her garden undulate in red

Figure 7: Monet, Impression: Sunrise, 1872. Illustration from William C. Seitz, Claude Monet (New York: Abrams, n.d.), p. 93.

waves and flashed the glass house in her eyes, and spangled the kitchen

with bright knives . . ." (JR, 5-6). McLaurin sees this scene as "a kind of

rudimentary impressionist painting" (179) and its visual effects do pre-

figure the more abstract impressions of The Waves. The world trembling in a teardrop symbolizes the tenuous nature of seeing and knowing that

affects the whole narrative process.

21 Naremore, in an extensive analysis of this passage {VO, 27-29), characterizes Woolf's style as "a prose in which things are slightly blurred, as in a fine mist.... a language which is always in fluid motion ..." (20). He stresses the "watery element" in her work, which makes hers "the preeminent example in English literature of what. . . Gaston Bachelard calls 'the material imagination of water'" (2).

Figure 8: Monet, La Crenouillhre, 1869. Illustration from Leymarie, Impressionism, I, p. 81.

ln 1868, Zola said of Monet: "With him, water is alive, deep, above

all real. It laps against the boats with little greenish ripples cut across by

white flashes; it spreads out in glaucous pools suddenly ruffled by a

breeze . . . it has dull and lambent tints lit up by broken gleams" (quoted in Blunden, 126). With Woolf the kaleidoscopic play of light on water

becomes a paradigm of consciousness itself. In Jacob's Room, she be?

gins to elaborate this motif: "The Scilly Isles were turning bluish; and

suddenly blue, purple, and green flushed the sea; left it grey; struck a

stripe which vanished; but when Jacob had got his shirt over his head the

whole floor of the waves was blue and white, rippling and crisp, though

now and again a broad purple mark appeared, like a bruise; or there

floated an entire emerald tinged with yellow" (JR, 46). Such moments of

being are expressed largely through verbal equivalents of color, shape,

and texture. Yet here the mirror of the sea conflates time with color

changes, and the visual impression expands toward limitless space:

By six o'clock a breeze blew in off an icefield; and by seven the water was more purple than blue; and by half-past seven there was a patch of rough gold-beater's skin round the Scilly Isles, and Durrant's face, as he sat steer- ing, was ofthe colour ofa red lacquer box polished for generations. By nine all the fire and confusion had gone out of the sky, leaving wedges of apple-green and plates of pale yellow; and by ten the lanterns on the boat were making twisted colours upon the waves, elongated or squat, as the

249

waves stretched or humped themselves. The beam from the lighthouse strode rapidly across the water. Infinite millions of miles away powdered stars twinkled; but the waves slapped the boat, and crashed, with regular and appalling solemnity, against the rocks. (/R, 50-51)

Woolf's imagery matches the luminous reflections and vigorous

brushwork of Monet's La Grenouillere. Reflections in the sea's surface

pass through a four-hour cycle of daylight, sunset, twilight, and darkness

that prefigures the cosmic cycle of The Waves, Complementary colors

are closely allied with shapes and textures, and there is an emphasis on

geometric planes that shows an advance towards the Post-

Impressionism ofthe major novels.

The Impressionists loved to study the play of reflections on moving

water. Similarly, Woolf's keen delight in fluid color led her to articulate

sensations as if she were dipping a brush in paint: "we just had time

after printing off a page to reach the river & see everything reflected

perfectly straightly in the water. The red roof of a house had its own little

cloud of red in the river?lights lit on the bridge made long streaks of

yellow? . . ." (Diary, I, 80-81). Monet, like Woolf, was fascinated by

the "impalpable and fleeting; the transparency and vibration of air and

water" (Blunden, 133). He painted from a studio-boat on the Seine (as

Daubigny had done), and he and Renoir set up adjacent easels to paint

Figure 9: Renoir, La Grenouillere, 1869. Illustration from Leymarie, Impressionism, I, p. 80.

250

the same motifs (see La Grenouillere [1869] [Figures 8 and 9] and Sail-

boats at Argenteuil [1873-74]). Slow-flowing rivers?like Monet's

Branch ofthe Seine near Civerny (1897) (Figure 10)?give a dual sense

of continuity and time suspended. Woolf catches this idyllic atmosphere

in an impression of Cambridge: "the trees bowing, the grey spires soft in

the blue, voices blowing and seeming suspended in the air, the springy

air of May, the elastic air with its particles ... its potency, blurring the

trees, gumming the buds, daubing the green. And the river too runs past,

not at flood, nor swiftly, but cloying the oar that dips in it and drops

white drops from the blade, swimming green and deep over the bowed

rushes . . ." (JR, 34). Like Emily Dickinson, Woolf is an "inebriate of air"

and "debauchee of dew," or at least of microcosmic drops. She creates

an aura of ephemeral bliss and potency (sap rising, river flowing), and

the elegiac tone ("dips," "drops," "bowed") of an anthem for doomed

youth. This suspended moment, which unites Jacob with his surround?

ings and draws a shimmering veil across reality, recurs for every passing

generation. The mood is one of inertia, "cloying" the will. The har-

monic tones lack the vibrating intensity of Monet's complementaries;

their affinity is rather with Renoir's "gentler, more sensitive, and more

poetic [vision]" (Blunden, 85).22 Like Renoir, Woolf "softens . . . down

[contrasts] in an all-pervading harmony of subdued and silvery colors"

(Blunden, 85). There is a soft, feathery, yellow-greenery in Renoir's

foliage (see The English Pear-Tree [1885]) that is itself a sensuous im?

pression of summer. Similarly, the form of Jacob's Room reflects its

subject, but here the emphasis is on elusiveness, rather than fulfillment

of being.

The Impressionist motif of rivers?which Rene Huyghe calls an "ob?

session"23 dating from Corot and Daubigny?reveals a complex of val?

ues brilliantly expounded by Arnold Hauser:

The dominion of the moment over permanence and continuity, the feeling that every phenomenon is a fleeting and never-to-be-repeated constella? tion, a wave gliding away on the river of time, the river into which "one cannot step twice," is the simplest formula to which impressionism can be reduced. The whole method of impressionism . . . is bent . . . on giving expression to this Heraclitean outlook and on stressing that reality is not a being but a becoming, not a condition but a process. Every impressionist picture is the deposit of a moment in the perpetuum mobile of existence,

22 Champa shows how the creative temperaments of Monet and Renoir transform the same scene (La Grenouil? lere), producing "visual 'correspondances' in Baudelaire's sense, for the motif.. ." (65). Woolf's sea surface (JR, 52) tends more toward Monet's manner; her river scene (JR, 36) toward Renoir's (as described by Champa, 66).

23 Huyghe writes, "Earth, trees and sky were to become nothing more than fragile reflections, swamped by water, absorbed by it, liquefied into its undulating and vibrant form" (quoted in Lassaigne, pp. 102-03).

Figure 10: Monet, Branch ofthe Seine Near Giverny, 1897. Illustration from Seitz, Monet, p. 145.

the representation of a precarious, unstable balance in the play of contend- ing forces . . . Everything stable and coherent is dissolved into metamor? phoses and assumes the character of the unfinished and fragmentary. The reproduction of the subjective act. . . here achieves its culmination. The representation of light, air, and atmosphere, the dissolution of the evenly coloured surface into spots and dabs of colour... the play of reflected light and illuminated shadows, the quivering, trembling dots and the hasty, loose and abrupt strokes of the brush, the whole improvised technique with its rapid and rough sketching, the fleeting, seemingly careless perception of the object and the brilliant casualness of execution merely express, in the final analysis, that feeling of a stirring, dynamic, constantly changing reality _(872-73)

Thus the Impressionist style can be seen as a direct signifier of life-

values. Indeed, every period style is a historical or metaphysical sig?

nifier, and Hauser (despite the realist bias of his social philosophy)

clearly sheds light on the basic premises of Impressionism.

Floods and thaws are characteristic motifs ofthe Impressionists. (See

Sisley, The Flood at Port-Marly [1876] [Figure 11 ]; Monet, The Break-up ofthe Ice [1880] [Figure 12].) Their predilection for fluid and dissolving forms may be connected with scenes of shared energy (sunlight, wine,

dancing) that break up social rigidity or, as Hauser and Kronegger main?

tain, with loss of self and dissolution of identity. Huyghe goes further

and links the Impressionist love of "debacles" with the break-up of

nineteenth-century society and the substitution of mobility for stability in science and culture. In Night and Day, Woolf uses the flood

metaphor to express life going on, in a momentum abstracted from

individual wills. Katharine detaches herself for a moment from the un?

conscious stream of life to meditate upon it:

Figure 11: Sisley, The Flood at Port-Marly, 1876. Illustration from Bazin, Impressionist Paintings in the Louvre, p. 161.

The great torrent of vans and carts was sweeping down Kingsway; pedes- trians were streaming in two currents along the pavements. She stood fasci- nated at the corner. The deep roar filled her ears; the changing tumult had the inexpressible fascination of varied life pouring ceaselessly ... its com? plete indifference to the individuals, whom it swallowed up and rolled onwards, filled her with at least a temporary exaltation. The blend of day- light and of lamplight made her an invisible spectator, just as it gave the people who passed her a semi-transparent quality, and left the faces pale ivory ovals in which the eyes alone were dark. They tended the enormous rush of the current-the great flow, the deep stream, the unquenchable tide. (ND, 465-66)

Incessant movement, blurred outlines, mixed lighting, and detached

viewpoint make these faces as apparitional, if not as empty, as Pound's

"petals on a wet, black bough." The spiritual impression transcending

individuals is underlined by Conradian cadence and Olympian view?

point in the last sentence, with its quadruple metaphor of the flood.24

Here Woolf creates an impersonal image of the soul of a great city.

The narrator of Jacob's Room often seems more interested in the

passing scene than in her ostensible subject: like the narrator of Tristram

Shandy, she lets the stream meander rather than following a straight

line. (Are not digressions "the sunshine of the work?") And like Tris?

tram, orthe biographer of Orlando, she "clumsily" yet comically points

24 The city/river image recurs in AROO, 144-45, where "a river. . . flowed past, invisibly, round the corner, down the street, and took people and eddied them along, as the stream at Oxbridge had taken the undergraduate in his boat and the dead leaves."

253

to her own artifice?as Impressionist painters kept the naTve quality of a

sketch25 by drawing attention to their choppy brushwork and refusing to

give their work an illusory "finish":

Under the arch of the Opera House large faces and lean ones, the pow- dered and the hairy, all alike were red in the sunset; and, quickened by the

great hanging lamps with their repressed primrose lights, by the tramp, and the scarlet, and the pompous ceremony, some ladies looked for a moment into steaming bedrooms near by, where women with loose hair leaned out of windows, where girls?where children?(the long mirrors held the ladies suspended) but one must follow; one must not block the way. UR, 174)

tt-4m* ?**? ?

Figure 12: Monet, Break-up ofthe Ice, Lavacourt, 1880. Illustration from Phoebe Pool, Impressionism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 222.

The visual images here?lights playing over a throng of faces, domestic

glimpses, gestures caught unawares, reflections?recall the motifs of

Manet and Degas, those curious observers of "modern life."26

The life of great cities fascinated Baudelaire, Whistler, Manet, Monet,

Renoir, and Pissarro, as well as Woolf.27 Edmond Duranty said of the

Impressionists, in 1876, "They have tried to render the walk, motion,

25 Kronegger cites Ortega y Gasset on the Impressionist "attempt to retain the spontaneous energy of a sketch in a finished painting or piece of writing" (52). See Woolf, AWD, 66: "Suppose one can keep the quality of a sketch in a finished and composed work?"

26 See Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. & ed. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon, 1964), pp. 1 -40. (Baudelaire's essay is devoted to Constantin Guys, but Manet and Degas were about to invent the kind of modern art he called for.)

27 "London is enchanting," Woolf exclaims (AWD, 62), while Pissarro wrote: "Monet and I were very en- thusiastic about the London landscapes" (quoted in Blunden, 92). Impressionist cityscapes include: Whistler,

254 JACK F. STEWART

hurry and intermingling of passers-by, just as they have tried to render

the trembling of leaves, the shimmer of water and the vibration of air

drenched with light, just as they have managed to catch both the irides-

cent play of sunshine and the soft envelope of cloudy skies" (quoted in

Blunden, 142). In Night and Day, Woolf compares the atmospheric

envelope of London with that of the country: "The afternoon light was

almost over, and already streams of greenish and yellowish artificial

light were being poured into an atmosphere which, in country lanes,

would have been soft with the smoke of wood fires . . ." (ND, 119).

While writing the novel, she jotted down an impression of twilight

luminosity heightened by electric light: "A Spring night; blue sky with a

smoke mist over the houses. The shops were still lit; but not the lamps,

so that there were bars of light all down the streets .... Then . . . the

search light rays out, across the blue . . ." (Diary, I, 111). Here nuances

create a lyric mood, as in Whistler's Nocturnes, Blue and Silver or Grey

and Gold. In Woolf's impression of the victory fireworks, a luminous

halo actually forms and disperses: "Red & green & yellow & blue balls

rose slowly into the air, burst, flowered into an oval of light, which

dropped in minute grains & expired. There were hazes of light at differ?

ent points. . . . the light on the faces of the crowd was strange; yet of

course there was grey mist muffling everything & taking the blazeoff the

fire" (Diary, I, 294; see also D, 27). The motif bears a striking re?

semblance to Whistler's The Falling Rocket (c. 1874) (Figure 13),

which Ruskin called "a pot of paint [flung] in the public's face." (In

addition, the symbolic interplay of light and dark, fire and damp,

foreshadows a central motif in The Years.)

Hauser further explores the relation between city living and the rise of

Impressionism: "The feeling of being alone and unobserved, on the one

hand, and the impression of roaring traffic, incessant movement and

constant variety, on the other, breed the impressionistic outlook on life

in which the most subtle moods are combined with the most rapid alternation of sensations" (876-79). Restless animation and fragmented

perspectives mark the London scenes of Night and Day and Jacob's

Room. In a sketch set off from the main action, Woolf attempts to

synthesize floral and urban motifs in a single bouquet: "London, in the

first days of spring, has buds that open and flowers that suddenly shake

their petals?white, purple, or crimson?in competition with the dis-

Nocturne: Westminster Palace (1870s), Trafalgar Square, Chelsea (1870s), Nocturne in Grey and Gold, Chelsea Snow (1878); Monet, Boulevard des Capucines (1873); Renoir, Le Pont Neuf (1872), The Great Boulevards (1875); Pissarro, The Outer Boulevards, Snow Effect (1879), Boulevard des Italiens in Morning Sun (1897), Boulevard Montmartre, Night (1897), Place du Theatre Franqais (1898), Avenue de I'Opera (1898).

WOOLF AND IMPRESSIONISM 255

play in the garden beds, although these city flowers are merely so many

doors flung wide in Bond Street. . . inviting you to look at a picture, or

hear a symphony, or merely crowd and crush yourself among all sorts of

vocal, excitable, brightly coloured human beings" (ND, 386). As in

"Kew Gardens," people are reduced to patches of color, while a sense

of careless animation (only loosely linked with Cassandra) pervades the

scene.

In order to paint crowds drifting through the streets, Monet, Renoir,

and Pissarro set up their easels at balconies or windows from which they

could look down at an angle on the passing scene. Kronegger argues that

Impressionist perspectives in literature can contribute to a sense of alien?

ation. Thus in Night and Day, Ralph sees "the people in the street . . .

[as] only a dissolving and combining pattern of black particles" (ND,

242)?although he recognizes that this view is a projection of his own

disordered feelings. In Jacob's Room, self is all but lost amid the

haphazard patterns ofthe traffic: "The omnibuses were locked together

at Mudie's corner. Engines throbbed, and carters, jamming the brakes

down, pulled their horses sharp up. A harsh and unhappy voice cried

Figure 13: Whistler, Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket, c. 1874. Illustration from Donald Holden, Whistler Landscapes and Seascapes (New York: Watson- Guptill, 1976), p. 39.

256

something unintelligible. And then suddenly all the leaves seemed to

raise themselves. 'Jacob! Jacob!' cried Bonamy, standing by the win?

dow" (JR, 176). The narrator hovers over Jacob, seeing him alternately

as a figure in the crowd, or a solitary, opaque young man (a possible

archetype of his generation).28 In her Diary, Woolf admits "I insubstan-

tise, wilfully to some extent, distrusting reality . . ." (AWD, 57). Leonard

Woolf, while praising the strange "genius" of the novel, told Virginia

that she had "no philosophy of life" and that "the people are

ghosts . . ." (AWD, 47). Indeed, the narrator herself says that "life is but

a procession of shadows" (JR, 70).

In her cityscapes, Woolf shows an impressionistic sensitivity to

changing light, the subject that obsessed Monet as he painted the

Thames bridges in 1870-71, and the Houses of Parliament from his

balcony in the Savoy in 1903. Light is nowhere more active than in

Monet's great series (Haystacks, Poplars, Rouen Cathedral, Venice),

transforming and dematerializing objects. Helmut A. Hatzfeld writes,

"[One] method of seizing the climate of a modern city is to view its

silhouette or some of its representative buildings in rain or mist, sun?

shine or darkness, and thus to evoke, so to speak, its ghost and soul

instead of its body . . . ,"29 Monet increasingly came to render the

luminous envelope of light that intervenes between the eye and objects,

so that his painting records not just the thing seen, but the subjective act

of seeing.30 He "saw landscape as an ever-changing chimera" (Blun-

den, 161), as does Woolf in The Voyage Out: "Sometimes the flats and

churches and hotels of Westminster are like the outlines of Constan?

tinople in a mist; sometimes the river is an opulent purple, sometimes

mud-coloured, sometimes sparkling blue like the sea" (VO, 3). Helen

Ambrose's movement through the city creates a shifting perspective: her

mental impression of "the West End, with its electric lamps, its vast

plate-glass windows all shining yellow . . . and tiny live figures trotting on the pavement" is self-consciously juxtaposed with the reality of a

working-class district, so that the former seems "a small golden tassel on

the edge of a vast black cloak" (VO, 5). Such a montage of subjective

28 See Carol Ohmann, "Culture and Anarchy in Jacob's Room," Contemporary Literature, XVIII (Spring 1977), 160-72.

29 "Impressionism and Surrealism," Literature Through Art: A New Approach to French Literature (Oxford University Press, 1952), p. 176.

30 Zola defined Impressionist art as "a corner of nature seen through a temperament"; Conrad, in his famous statement, says that "Fiction?if it at all aspires to be art?appeals to temperament.... It must strenuously aspire to the plasticity of sculpture, to the colour of painting, and to the magic suggestiveness of music ... to make you hear, to make you feel . . . to make you see."

Figure 14: Plssarro, Boulevard Montmartre, Night, 1897. Illustration from Leymarie, Impressionism, II, p. 109.

and objective images reveals the temporal and psychological dimen?

sions that literature or film can add to the fixed moments of Im?

pressionist painting.

Woolfs large-scale city impressions might be modeled on master?

pieces such as Pissarro's Boulevard Montmartre, Night (Figure 14):

"They were now moving steadily down the river... and London was a

swarm of lights with a pale yellow canopy drooping above it. There

were the lights of the great theatres, the lights of the long streets, lights

that indicated huge squares of domestic comfort, lights that hung high in

air. No darkness would ever settle upon those lamps, as no darkness had

settled upon them for hundreds of years. It seemed dreadful that the

town should blaze for ever in the same spot.. ." (VO, 11 -12). Conrad's

Heart of Darkness, which seems to have influenced The Voyage Out,31

also opens with impressions of the Thames at night: "Flames glided in

the river, small green flames, red flames, white flames, pursuing, over-

taking, joining, crossing each other?then separating slowly or has-

tily."32 Conrad's verbs are kinetic, while his phrasing and punctuation

31 See Avrom Fleishman, Virginia Woolf: A Critical Reading (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), p. 1; James Hafley, The Glass Roof (Russell & Russell, 1954), p. 17, n. 15; Lee, p. 34; Naremore, p. 45.

32 Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, ed. Robert Kimbrough, rev. ed. (Norton, 1971), p. 7.

Figure 15: Monet, The Houses of Parliament, Sunset, 1903. Illustration from Seitz, Monet, p. 149.

recall the comma brushstroke. Complementary colors vie with each

other in a rhythmic dance, like the reflections in Monet's La Grenouil?

lere or Houses of Parliament, Sunset (Figure 15). Both Woolf and Con?

rad employ parallelism ("lights"/"flames"), but Conrad's rhythm is

terser, with participles doing the work of adjective clauses to create an

expressionist atmosphere. Woolf's focus is vaguer, emphasizing a gen?

eral dazzle of light rather than an active play of colors, and this kind of

blurred impression slips more easily into authorial reflection. While

both symbolize the "City of Dreadful Night" as a monster of Capital, Conrad's symbolic undertones seem more powerfully fused with the

surface impression.33 In Night and Day, images of river lights and misty shapes combine

nuances of Whistler with chords of Conrad: "They stood silent for a few

moments while the river shifted in its bed, and the silver and red lights

which were laid upon it were torn by the current and joined together

again. Very far off up the river a steamer hooted with its hollow voice of

unspeakable melancholy, as if from the heart of lonely mist-shrouded

voyagings" (ND, 62). With the same gesture as Mrs. Dalloway, exclaim-

ing of the grey Portuguese shore, "'It's so like Whistler!'" (VO, 40),

William Rodney (another "tinselly" character) "waved his hand toward

the Citv of London, which wore, at this moment, the aooearance of a

33 See lan Watt, "Impressionism and Symbolism in Heart of Darkness," in Norman Sherry, ed., Joseph Conrad: A Commemoration (London: Macmillan, 1976), pp. 37-53, for interesting comparisons between Woolf, Conrad, and Monet (39-40). Benamou (55, 56) uses the terms "plastic" or "chromatic symbolism" for Stevens' dual vision of colorful surface and inner significance.

259

town cut out of grey-blue cardboard, and pasted flat against the sky,

which was of a deeper blue" (ND, 69). The carefully graded tones are

those of Whistler's Nocturnes (for example, Blue and Silver: Battersea

Reach) (Figure 16), while the imagery suggests collage, which Picasso

and Braque had pioneered, and with which Vanessa Bell and Duncan

Grant experimented (1912-15) at Roger Fry's Omega workshops. This

city-by-night motif is expanded in Jacob's Room:

The lamps of London uphold the dark as upon the points of burning bayonets. The yellow canopy sinks and swells over the great four-poster.

Figure 16: Whistler, Nocturne in Blue and Silver: Battersea Reach, 1870s. Illustration from Holden, Whistler Landscapes and Seascapes, p. 51.

Passengers in the mail-coaches running into London in the eighteenth cen?

tury looked through leafless branches and saw it flaring beneath them. The

light burns behind yellow blinds, and above fanlights, and down in base? ment windows. The street market in Soho is fierce with light. Raw meat, china mugs, and silk stockings blaze in it. Raw voices wrap themselves round the flaring gas-jets. Arms akimbo, they stand on the pavement bawling -(JR, 96)

Here the style modulates from decorative Whistlerian Impressionism,

through Surrealism, historical Impressionism,34 and Synaesthesia,35 to

34 See my "Historical Impressionism in Orlando," Studies in the Novel, V (Spring 1973), 71-85. 35 Synaesthesia of sound and light waves occurs in "Kew Gardens" (HH, 39), where "[wordless] voices went

wavering from them as if they were flames lolling from the thick waxen bodies of candles." In Jacob's Room there is amusing self-parody in the figure of Miss Marchmont ransacking the British Museum "to confirm her philosophy that colour is sound?or, perhaps, it has something to do with music. . . . The rhythm of the soul depends on it..." (104). Kandinsky, whose Concerning the Spirtual in Art appeared in 1912, would have agreed with her.

260

the disfiguring Expressionism of Soutine. The visual impression sub-

sumes an apocalyptic metaphor of light as the all-consuming, self-

sustaining energy of the City.

Monet was fascinated by the way refracted light transforms objects, and he painted the fafade of Rouen Cathedral (Figure 17) from dawn to

dusk, seeing it "as an object battered by light rays, not an identity of

Gothic form but some strangely encrusted cliff giving back with an extra

measure of vibration the light it had received at hours that produced a

mottled rugousness of blue, buff, pink or grey . .." (Gaunt, 40). Woolf's

impression of King's College Chapel, Cambridge, seems modeled on

Monet: "An inclined plane of light comes accurately through each win?

dow, purple and yellow even in its most diffused dust, while, where it

breaks upon stone, that stone is softly chalked red, yellow, and purple"

(JR, 30). The vibrations of the spectrum have a life of their own in

Woolf's work, and she often describes the action of light through

metaphors of an unseen artist. Indeed, rhythmic pulsations of light read?

ily take on mystical overtones, as in Shelley, where "Life, like a dome of

many-coloured glass, / Stains the bright radiance of eternity." In Orlando

the "watery element" combines with a fluid play of colors and con-

Figure 17: Monet, Rouen Cathedral, the Facade at Sunset, 1894. Illustration from Rouart, Claude Monet, p. 92.

Figure 18: Monet, The Water-Garden at Giverny, n.d. Illustration from Rouart, Monet, p. 107.

sciousness to convey a moment of being36 in which the spirit, identified

with universal waves of energy (or light rays), seems to transcend time

and self (285). Monet denied any such metaphysical intention in his

art?"I am simply expending my efforts upon a maximum of appear-

ances in close correlation with unknown realities" (quoted in Seitz,

Monet, 44)?but the fact that he spent his life recording the subtlest

nuances of changing light has given rise to speculation, particularly about the Water-Lily series (see Figure 18).37 The following text, by Louis

Gillet, is inscribed over the stairs leading down to the "Salle Monet" in

the Musee Marmottan, Paris: "Etonnante peinture, sans dessin et sans

36 See "Kew Gardens" (HH, 32), where sun-rays refracted through water create momentary microcosms. 37 Jean-Dominique Rey, in Denis Rouart and J.-D. Rey, Monet: Water-Lilies, or The Mirror ofTime, trans. Wade

Stevenson (New York: Amiel, 1974), p. 91, quotes Nietzsche?" In the heart of the physical world, one finds the metaphysical"?and notes Monet's "movement from form to energy" (100). He claims that Monet "created a sort of space-time in painting" (96)?which Camille Bryen compares to Einstein's concept in physics (144). Rey calls the Nympheas "a celebration of cosmic light" (112).

Figure 19: Seurat, Courbevoie Bridge, 1886-87. Illustration from Leymarie, Impressionism, II, p. 91.

bord. . . cantique sans paroles . . . ou I'art. . . sar\s le secours de

formes, sans vignette . . . sans anecdote . . . sans fable . . . sans al-

legories . . . sans corps et sans visage . . . par le seule vertu des

tons . . . n'est plus qu'effusion . . . lyrisme, ou le coeur se raconte . . .

se livre . . . chante ses emotions." In the Orlando passage, as in Monet's

Nympheas, the artist creates a luminous fusion of space and time that

transcends the normal order of reality.

E. M. Forster's description of Woolf's narrative method in Jacob's

Room suggests an analogy with Divisionist or Pointillist techniques: "In

the stream of glittering similes, unfinished sentences, hectic catalogues,

unanchored proper names, we seem to be going nowhere. Yet the goal

comes ... and looking back from the pathos ofthe closing scene we see

for a moment the airy drifting atoms piled into a colonnade."38 Just so,

geometrical forms and monumental designs emerge from Seurat's can?

vases (see Figure 19), as the eye mixes and recombines the myriad atoms

38 "The Early Novels of Virginia Woolf," Abinger Harvest (1936; rpt. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1967), p. 123.

263

of contrasting color. Woolf would have been exposed to Seurat through

Roger Fry's admiration for the artist.39 It would be unwise to push the

analogy too far, as narrative, however discontinous, cannot very well be

compared with an arrangement of colored dots on canvas. Yet the effect

of atomization and resynthesis does demonstrate how Woolf breaks up

linearity in favor of a loosely constellated mosaic of scenes. "Dispersed

are we . . ." chants the gramophone in Between the Acts (230), and

fragmentation within and between selves constitutes the raw data of

Woolfs art. She sought techniques of "Unity-Dispersity" (BA, 235)?

roughly equivalent to those of Neo-lmpressionism?that would enable

her to depict consciousness not as an object, but as "an incessant

shower of innumerable atoms" (fragmentation)40 or as "a luminous

halo" (synthesis). An apparently random series of disjunct scenes, with

occasional highlighting of aposiopesis, are among the signs of this de-

materializing style. "Spaces of complete immobility" appear in the text

(see JR, 98). Woolf depicts the space-time capsule surrounding Jacob,

and the refracted light playing over him, rather than the self as a know-

able object. Thus her airy form is the ontological expression of her theme.

As a "spiritual" writer concerned with the "innermost flame" of con?

sciousness ("MF"), Woolf, like Impressionist painters, stresses the activ?

ity of light. Her sensitivity to color and movement appears not only in

imagery, but in parallel verb structures and syntactic rhythms:

... the stir in the air is the indescribable agitation of life. But colour returns; runs up the stalks oi the grass; blows out into tulips and crocuses; solidly stripes the tree trunks; and f/7/s the gauze of the air and the grasses and pools. . . . And the light mounts over the faces of all the tall blind houses, slides through a chink and paints the lustrous bellying crimson curtains; the green wine-glasses; the coffee-cups; and the chairs .... (JR, 162-63; my italics)

The crucial verb here is "paints": this painterly impression prefigures

the activity of light in the interludes of The Waves and in Bernard's

summing-up (see especially W, 203). The famous passage on color and

rhythm of words in A Portrait ofthe Artist affords a comparison between

aural and visual stimuli in language. Stephen's predilection for sound

39 See Fry, "Seurat," in Transformations (London: Chatto & Windus, 1926), pp. 188-96. 40 Rene Huyghe links Impressionism with the "vision of a new universe," in which "science divides matter into

billions of atoms-These, by haphazard and logical association, form bodies, shapes and objects, like so many provisional illusions. The Impressionist practises a similar divisionism: no more contours, no more shapes, no more distinct objects, but a dusting of coloured blotches whose proximity and grouping gives rise to an illusion of things" (in Lassaigne, 104).

264

and rhythm is clear, although visual, musical, and psychological ele?

ments are inseparable in a rich Impressionist style, such as Proust's or

Joyce's. Yet the prismatic quality of language is relatively more

important to Woolf than to Joyce (many of whose scenes are bathed in

grey light). Indeed, impressions of color as living energy abound in

Woolfs work.

Kronegger has shown that "impressionist passivity" can turn to "ex?

pressionist activity" within a single paragraph (28). In the quotation

above (JR, 162-63), however, the emphasis is not on projection or

distortion, but on the movement of light as a free energy not subject to

self, and thus a paradigm of being. The narrator, abandoning Jacob,

proceeds to a literary peroration, in which sunlight becomes the Apol-

lonian symbol of civilization triumphing over the Dark Ages. In the

hands of a self-conscious narrator who reflects upon the scene instead

of merely reflecting it, Impressionism always tends to take on symbolic

overtones. All the more striking, therefore, is the clarity of Woolfs im?

pressions as impressions, their degree of equivalence to painting.

Given her emphasis on activity of light, it is not surprising that

Woolfs Impressionism verges at times on lyrical Expressionism. The

same tendency has been observed in Monet, particularly in his

Sunflowers, Haystacks (see Figure 20), and Water-Lilies.41 This inten-

sified style begins to emerge in Jacob's Room:

The waves showed that uneasiness, like something alive, restive, expecting the whip, of waves before a storm. . . . A pale yellow light shot across the purple sea; and shut. The lighthouse was lit. . . . The sun blazed in their faces and gilded the great blackberries trembling out from the hedge. . . .

Betty [pulled] them along . . . looking with uneasy emotion at the earth

displayed so luridly, with sudden sparks of light from greenhouses . . . with a sort of yellow and black mutability, against this blazing sunset, this as-

tonishing agitation and vitality of colour .... (JR, 9)

Emotional agitation, lurid tones, and staccato movement show affinities

with Expressionism. The Expressionist style is evident in the increased

verbal emphasis on activity of light ("shot," "shut," "lit," "blazed,"

"gilded"), and the diminished adjectival insistence on its colorific

properties. Random focus and swift movement are implied by parallel

phrasing. Light penetrates space, its rhythms fusing with those of the

storm:

41 See Seitz, Monet, pp. 144, 138, and CM: Seasons, p. 50. Kandinsky conceived the lyrical power of color liberated from form when he saw one of Monet's Haystacks in Moscow in 1895. Thus Monet is associated with the subsequent birth of Abstract Expressionism (c. 1910-11).

Figure 20: Monet, Haystack at Sunset Near Civerny, 1891. Illustration from Seitz, Monet, p. 139.

The light blazed out across the patch of grass; fell on the child's green bucket with the gold line round it, and upon the aster which trembled violently beside it. For the wind was tearing across the coast.... How the lights seemed to wink and quiver in its fury, lights in the harbour, lights in bedroom windows high up! And roll ing dark waves before it, it raced over the Atlantic, jerking the stars above the ships this way and that. (JR, 11-12)

The violent restlessness that gives visual embodiment to imagined space

shows the spiritual turbulence of Expressionist art.

Some critics claim that Expressionism is a major element in Woolf's

style.42 I think one could point to isolated examples, such as Septimus'

mad visions in Mrs. Dalloway (see D, 25-26), but the general tendency of Woolf's art is to impose order on the flux of impressions (CE, II, 228),

rather than to dramatize their disruptive quality by stylistic dissonance.

(A comparison with Finnegans Wake will make the point clearer.) In To

the Lighthouse and The Waves, surface impressions give way to a more

42 See Irma Rantavaara, Virginia Woolf's "The Waves" (Helsinki: Societas Scientiarum Fennica, 1969), pp. 37, 74-77. (Rantavaara cites Eva Weidner, Impressionismus und Expressionismus in den Romanen Virginia Woolfs [Berlin, 1934].) Novak finds "expressionistic imagery" in Jacob's Room (96).

266

solid structuring of color in relation to "psychological volumes":43 there

Woolfs art is informed by the Post-lmpressionist aesthetic of Cezanne

and Roger Fry. Atmospheric Impressionism, however, impingingon the

imagery of The Voyage Out and Night and Day, and saturating the

experimental method of Jacob's Room, first encouraged Woolf to break

the "materialist" mold and spiritualize the language of fiction.

43 See Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry: A Biography (1940; rpt. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1979), p. 225.