The Mighty Political Pen

After learning a great deal about the radical leaders in England’s suffrage movement, Emmeline, Christabel, and Sylvia Pankhurst (as my main focal point), I was taken aback by the occurrences, such as arson and window breaking versus brute force and force feeding, respectively, committed by both sides—suffragettes versus government officials. I realized that the Pankhursts and several other women were impatient in getting their vote and, moreover, being treated as equals to their male counterparts, so suffrage tactics needed to change in order to gain attention. I further realize if the suffragettes did not take such action that lead to a chain of events, such as Black Friday, they may have waited longer than they had to obtain the vote (somewhat) in 1918. What would have happened if the suffragists continued to solely distribute pamphlets to support the suffrage cause?

I guess what I’m getting at is the differing literary approach that was taken by the Bloomsbury group (with a focus on the Woolves and Forster) as they take a much less physical approach to fighting for women’s rights and, above all, human rights. I only ponder the difference because of questions that I left with last week. As I learned where Virginia Woolf fit into the suffrage movement—“doing office chores” (Gilbert and Gubar, Norton Anthology: Literature by Women 1316) and host[ing] meetings “in her home” (Chapman and Manson 60)—I wondered why she wasn’t a more radical participant. This week’s readings served as a reminder and also shed a little more light to aid in my better understanding.

I believe, for the same reason Virginia Woolf appreciated Jane Austen as a writer over Charlotte Bronte, she preferred a less radical (less emotional) suffrage group, the Women’s Cooperative Guild. We discussed in class regarding Woolf’s interpretation of Austen as she wrote as an observer. Austen did not allow irrational emotion to interfere with the meaning she intended whereas Bronte did. This weakened her literary conveyances and art as a whole. Austen was a Classicist, and Bronte was a Romantic in terms of aesthetic rules. In making this parallel, I suggest that if the suffragettes were literary artists, they would be deemed Romantics. Further if suffragists were also literary artists, they would be Classicists. This being said, I do realize that I have taken suffragettes and suffragists out of context because they are not literary artists and, therefore, cannot be analyzed in accordance with aesthetic rules. Yet, I can’t help trying to make sense out of it in this way based on one of the initial questions in Sara Blair’s essay: “How does aesthetic activity categorized as modernist stand in relation to forms of power” (157). I refer to Wayne K. Chapman and Janet M. Manson’s article to come up with a more definitive answer.

[Virginia Woolf] may have seemed to her husband, on late reflection and relative to his career as an advisor to statesman, ‘the least political animal…since Aristotle invented the definition,’ but she was not, as he added, ‘a frail invalidish lady living in an ivory tower…and worshipped by a little clique of aethetes’ (Downhill 27). The roots of A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas, went back to a tradition of pamphleteering and to Labour party and Co-operative Movement activities in which both were engaged during and after World War I (Chapman and Manson 59-60).

Woolf was influential in her husband’s work in addition to taking on her own. It was her writing and Leonard’s writing that spoke out to people on all levels. They crafted their political convictions through their literary art. Through their use of allusion and metaphor, they deliver a political message. We see this in Leonard Woolf’s “Fear and Politics” as he uses alludes to certain leaders as zoo animals. They maintained a (peaceful, yet poignant) political platform through written conveyance—something more than a simple article that appealed directly to the people and asked them to join their cause. I think we see this poignant appeal in Woolf’s “Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid” as she goes from German’s flying over her house at night “with a gas-mask handy” to “send[ing] fragmentary notes to huntsmen.”

E.M. Forster also seemed to take a similar stance to Woolf in his essay “What I Believe” when he professes that he “do[es] not believe in Belief” (165). Instead, he abides by Montaigne and Erasmus and seems to follow similar threads in his essay when compared with Montaigne’s “Of the Useful and the Honourable.” I won’t go into the comparison, but what I do find useful is Montaigne’s introductory quote by Terrence, “No one is exempt from saying silly things. The misfortune is to say them with earnest effort” (Frame 599). I believe Forster addresses this on page 169: “…the evidence of history shows us that men have always insisted on behaving creatively under the shadow of the sword; that they have done their artistic and scientific and domestic stuff for the sake of doing it, and that we had better follow their example under the shadow of aeroplanes.” Forster doesn’t see much change from those who have come before him. He’s read it from Montaigne’s perspective and adapts it to fit his own, which doesn’t seem much different. Unfortunately, I don’t think Forster had an optimistic view, but he certainly seemed to maintain that violence wasn’t resolving anything for humankind.

I want to conclude with this final thought: it is not my intent to portray Virginia Woolf as lacking an emotional attachment to political actions taking place during her lifetime. I realize that the thought of war taking her life in addition to those around her has been stated/implied several times throughout the course of the semester. She simply seems to convey her position with such strength that one would think she would display some sort of irrational emotion as she wrote about women's rights and the war. On a slightly different note, perhaps her androgynous shift at the end of A Room of One’s Own is simply meant for her reader to pause and consider not only the women’s cause but humankind’s cause?