Seduction and Betrayal (18 page)

The devotion and gratitude are part of a larger, more courteous and loyal time. That is the appeal of Bloomsbury, yes, that and the economy of scholarship. What a relief it is to have a period that has passed into cultural history, but only yesterday, within our lifetime. It is all contemporary and at the same moment also
historical
. Seize the day. It will not last long. No sooner have we taken in Lytton Strachey's homosexuality than
Eminent Victorians
has gathered too much dust.

Virginia Woolf was a feminist. She thought and wrote seriously not only about being a woman but about the defaults and defects of the world made by men. Some of her friends found her insistencies about all this a little sharp and tedious; Forster called her feminism “old-fashioned” and felt, writing in the forties, that it was also unnecessary, since “By the 1930s she had much less to complain of, and seems to keep on grumbling from habit.” He goes on from there to the pondering of the ways in which Virginia Woolf was not only a woman but also “a lady.” It is with this aspect of her life, the social one, that the English memorialists are, to use a strange American locution picked up from psychiatry, “most comfortable.” With us, since our country is not rich in persons even fleetingly acquainted with Virginia Woolf or Bloomsbury, the new phrase is “androgynous vision.”*

“Androgyny” is a way of bringing into line the excessive, almost smothering “femininity” of the fiction of a feminist like Virginia Woolf. In her novels there is no work truly understood except that of painting and writing. Men are in politics or law but we see them at a luncheon party and later at an evening party, and both the settings and the feminine domination of the scene are remarkable for the way in which the men and their work are absorbed, contained, almost erased by the powers of the domestic and the social. There is no novelist whose surfaces are as beautiful as Virginia Woolf's. A mist of loveliness covers everything, even sorrow and regret. The birds sing (“‘how those birds sing!' said Mrs. Swithin, at a venture”), Big Ben tolls, life is a sort of tragic pageant, the Bœuf en Daube browns in the kitchen. The inner life of feeling, the shifting, never recovered, never completely to be known flow of existence — this was the aim toward which she had directed her genius:

The “masculine” knowledge a writer like George Eliot acquired from her youth in Warwickshire is way beyond anything Virginia Woolf could have imagined, and thus she could not have created Lydgate and Rosamond, in whom the destructive power of sex and marriage are perfectly and realistically embodied. The aestheticism of Bloomsbury, the “androgyny” if you will, lies at the root of Virginia Woolf's narrowness. It imprisons her in femininity, as a writer at least, instead of acting as a way of bringing the masculine and feminine into a whole. But, of course, the “prison” of words and feelings, the drift and color of things, the losses, the flow of time — these were seized by her as a goal, a pattern, a belief. She is a theorist of fiction, like Nathalie Sarraute, even if they come out at the far ends of Idea. (Perhaps there is something feminist in this, a way of testing and confronting the very structure of the novel itself.)

There was a great mind working in Virginia Woolf's novels. Words, images, scenes, are always perfectly there in her works, but only a great conception could have made history out of the pageant on the lawn in
Between the Acts
. This novel and
The Waste Land
are the most powerful literary images we have of the movement of life and cultures, the dying of the past in the dying of a day, the shift from one order to another in an overheard conversation.

*Three recent works using this idea and all of special interest on Virginia Woolf:
Toward a Recognition of Androgyny
, by Carolyn G. Heilbrun;
Feminism and Art: A Study of Virginia Woolf
, by Herbert Marder;
Virginia Woolf and the Androgynous Vision
, by Nancy Bazin.

D
OROTHY WORDSWORTH
and Jane Carlyle do not present clear possibilities for comparison, but it is not out of order to think of them as products of their place in life — side by side with two of the greatest men of nineteenth-century England. The two women seem to have their being and to have their “work” — if that is the proper word for the journals and letters by which they are known — from the dramatic propinquity of William Wordsworth and Thomas Carlyle. Were they happy or unhappy? Was it enough: the letters, the gatherings at Cheyne Row, the visitors to Grasmere, the household anecdotes, and the walking tours recorded? A sort of insatiability seems to infect our feelings when we look back on women, particularly on those who are highly interesting and yet whose effort at self-definition through works is fitful, casual, that of an amateur. We are inclined to think they could have done more, that we can make retroactive demands upon them for a greater degree of independence and authenticity.

Dorothy Wordsworth is awkward and almost foolishly grand in her love and respect for and utter concentration upon her brother; she lived his life to the full. A dedication like that is an extraordinary circumstance for the one who feels it and for the one who is the object of it; it is especially touching and moving about the possibilities of human relationships when the two have large regions of equality. It is rare and we can only be relieved that Wordsworth understood and valued the intensity of it, did not take his responsibility to it lightly or try to hurt his sister so that his own vanity might be freed of all obligation. (George Lewes, one of the most lovable and brilliant men of his day, gave the same kind of love to George Eliot and to the creation and sustaining of her genius. A genuine dedication has a proper object and grows out of a deep sense of shared values. It is not usual because the arts, more than any other activity, create around them — at home, with those closest, in the world, everywhere — a sense of envy.)

We are no longer allowed such surrenders and absorptions as the Wordsworth brother and sister lived out. The possibilities for this kind of chaste, intense, ambitious, intellectual passion are completely exhausted. Wordsworth would hardly be allowed, or wish, to dream of setting up with Dorothy in a cottage, managing their frugal life, starting out with her help on his great career. Leslie Stephen has him in youth mooning about uselessly on free will, right and wrong, revolution, conscience, and “the mysteries of being.” Godwinism, with its carefree notions about family ties, was a temptation until Dorothy persuaded him of what he wished above all to be persuaded of: that he was a poet, nothing else. “It meant, in brief, that Wordsworth had by his side a woman of high enthusiasm and cognate genius, thoroughly devoted to him and capable of sharing his inspiration.... His sister led him back to nature....”

Wordsworth was not attractive in appearance. Dorothy, walking behind him, said, “Is it possible — can that be William? How very mean he looks!” No doubt she was not thinking of her own vision, but painfully imagining the skeptical, loveless eye of a stranger upon the precious person. De Quincey, discoursing upon the valuable, much-tested Wordsworth legs, says, “But useful as they proved themselves, the Wordsworthian legs were certainly not ornamental; and it was really a pity, as I agreed with a lady in thinking, that he had not another pair for evening dress parties....”

Still, dispiriting as his manner and appearance could be at times, Wordsworth had a surprising, if somewhat dour, gift with women. He established difficult, enduring relationships and kept them going with a pedestrian sort of confidence and trust. When he was young his affair in France with Annette Vallon was ended by prudence and a little heartlessness. His money ran out and he was propelled homeward by the firmest sense of destiny. He clearly could not, as a young man, live on in France and he could not support a wife, and he did not need a foreign one. But he kept in touch with Annette, he visited her on his tours, he met his illegitimate daughter. No hard feelings — respect, instead.

He married a tranquil, retiring, maternal woman who had once to him been “a phantom of delight” — or so we are told. They had five children. Two died very young. A much-loved daughter died before the poet. William, his wife Mary, and Dorothy lived on and on. William was eighty when he died, Dorothy was eighty-four, Mary Wordsworth lived to be ninety. It was a thorough achievement: love, years, and poems. He never lacked the absolute devotion of women. His daughter, Dora, entered the list. There was no reason, even for the abandoned Annette, to fall entirely out of love with the nice, preoccupied genius who meant her no harm, whose pride did not need to inflict pain, plan humiliations. But what did Dorothy signify to him, what do his words really mean? And what did Carlyle actually think about his wife? Did he indeed think about her seriously?

Dorothy and William Wordsworth were almost the same age. They lived all their long lives together except for a few journeys she made with a friend. They were in their twenties when they visited the Lake Country and decided to settle there. This was one of those decisions, those plot turns of destiny that we cannot question as if they were ahead of us rather than behind us. True, it was forevermore narrowing, confining, and defining, but the country seemed to represent Dorothy's undeviating inclination even more than William's. Other possibilities had already offered themselves to his mind — the city, the university, living abroad, radical groups. Dorothy's life is overwhelmingly affected by the residence in the country:
he
becomes her occupation, her destiny, and what is left over goes to his family, to the hard work of living in the early 1800s.

Hiking trips, observations, the local people, Coleridge, poems read over and over each night by the fireside — this was the natural landscape of Dorothy Wordsworth's interests and talents. Her mother had died before she was eight, her father when she was twelve. She was sent to her maternal grandmother who didn't much like her, then taken to an aunt, finally adopted by an uncle. From her earliest years her situation was close to the dreaded one we find in novels: she was a female orphan. The dearest things mysteriously vanished from her life. She had only her intelligence, her exacerbated sensibilities, and her brother.

There was always something peculiar about Dorothy Wordsworth; she is spoken of as having “wild lights in her eyes,” and is remembered as excitable and intense. There is something about her of a Brontë heroine: a romantic loneliness, a sense of having special powers of little use to the world and from which one tries to extract virtue if not self-esteem. She is said to have received several marriage offers, perhaps even from Hazlitt in one of his manic moods. It is hard to imagine any true sympathy between the austere, trembling Dorothy and the Hazlitt who complained that there were no courtesans in Wordsworth's “Excursion.”

The enthusiasm for a quiet country life with her brother and his family perhaps cannot be wholly endorsed by contemporary women critics or by female readers given to skeptical wonderings about arrangements and destinies. Still, for Dorothy Wordsworth it was a kind of conquest; lucky, safe, and interesting. It kept her from the horror of “independence” as this condition presented itself to respectable, sensitive young women without sufficient means. The simple, earnest seclusion she had at the beginning with her brother was threatened by Wordsworth's marriage to Dorothy's friend, Mary Hutchinson. But again this worked and she found with them a ground of support, duty, reverence, she could stand on. What alternatives were there — being a governess? Suitable marriages were almost impossible without money, beauty, or some of the scheming acquisitive nature of the lucky young women in the novels of the period. Perhaps writing could have saved her. She wrote, but it was her brother's writing that truly became her lifelong work.

Her journals were begun early, spurred on by William. It appears that he realized the need of an “occupation” for Dorothy, an anchor for her free-flying emotions and impressions. The first notes made at Alfoxden in 1798 set the pattern for all of her writing. It is a peculiar one, trapped in the very weather of the days, concentrating upon the bare scenic surface, upon the ineffable and more or less impersonal:

What rivets the attention in this early journal is not the moon or the mild morning air, but a sudden name. “Walked with Coleridge over the hills,” or “walked to Stowey with Coleridge.” Even in her youth in the lake region, nature is not a sufficient subject for the whole mind. To name it, to paint it with words is indeed a rare gift. But it is a gift almost dangling in the air. It is the final narrowness of the pictorial, the frustration of the quick microscopic brilliance, unroped by generalization.

In “The Grasmere Journal” a few years later, the brief, jagged portraits of country people begin, but there are also desperate hints of vulnerability. When William goes away, loneliness and panic creep in; the time is ruined by the longing for letters, the need for exhausting walks so that one could sleep. William was utterly necessary to give this isolated life meaning; without him the tranquillity was a burden; alone it was nothing but waiting, filling time. Still, he returned and the three months or so at Grasmere with Coleridge, while William was writing the Preface to the
Lyrical Ballads
, were probably the best of Dorothy Wordsworth's life.