Boredom and Individualism in the Lady in the Looking-Glass: A Reflection

Boredom and Individualism in The Lady in the Looking-Glass: A Reflection

Abstract

Bored women populate many of the most celebrated works of British modernist literature. According to Allison Pease’s study about boredom, this essay analyzes Virginia Woolf’s short story The Lady in the Looking-glass: A Reflection in the perspective of boredom and individualism.

Keywords: Allison Pease, boredom, individualism, Virginia Woolf

Introduction

The Lady in the Looking-Glass: A Reflection, a short story by Virginia Woolf published in Harper’s in December 1929, describes the images reflected in a mirror situated in a woman’s dressing room, providing a glimpse of the furnishings of her life, but, pointedly, not allowing readers a glimpse into the more private aspects of her character. According to Professor Allison Pease at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, “In modern use, boredom is understood as a loss of personal meaning, occasioned either by the withdrawal or absence of the meaningful or by the imposition of the meaningless”(Pease, 2012: 2). Boredom, can be seen as one of the features of the stream of consciousness in         Woolf’s literary works. Through the understanding of boredom and individualism, this essay is going to analyze Woolf’s short story The Lady in the Looking-Glass: A Reflection in order to better understand the women’s inner thoughts and situation including the narrator and people being narrated in the early twentieth century.

1. Notions about boredom and individualism

As Norwegian philosopher Lars Svendsen argues, “To be able to be bored, the subject must be able to perceive himself as an individual that can enter into various meaning contexts, and this subject demands meaning of the world and himself” (Svendsen, 2008: 32). Bored women populate many of the most celebrated works of British modernist literature. Whether in popular offerings, women’s boredom frequently serves as narrative impetus, antagonist, and climax. Pease characterizes boredom as an important category of critique surfaces in modernist fiction in an undeniably gendered way. Boredom’s constitutive role in modernism is a manifestation of broader social and cultural forces in which British women agitated for recognition as men’s legal and social equals. At that time, female modernists such as Woolf searched for ways to narrate women’s experiences of themselves as alternately agentic and bored. Feminist modernist texts, whether written by men or women, confront boredom as a problem originating out of the question of what it means to be a self in a culture shaped by masculine-defined individualism. By Pease, “boredom functioned not only as chronological descriptor of women’s lived experience in time, but also as the dilemma of accessing a subjectivity that was without previous definition”(Pease, 2012: 12). Their boredom manifests as an irritating awareness of what they lack and an inability to envision a successful resolution to this sense drama of self-consciousness.

More than a confined set of experiences on the pages of literary novels, boredom in the early twentieth century is a cultural phenomenon: a structure of feeling that includes affective, emergent but not wholly realized or defined personal and social relationships, relationships in process. Representations of boredom as a structure of feeling for British women during this time are acknowledgements of the profound dissatisfaction of a group of people who found themselves on the wrong side of agency, interest, and meaning as the twentieth century began. Women’s boredom cannot be simply viewed as a failure of meaning making, but a failure to become themselves as individuals. Although women should have human rights for they are humans, mostly they are viewed as men’s dependents. By depicting individual women enduring, struggling against, and made subject to boredom, the constellation of modernist novels that do so together actually manifest the personal, subjective emotion of boredom as a public feeling. To explore and give shape to the experiences of boredom was to forge a public form of inquiry into women’s lives that simultaneously created affective identities for woman as oppressed, or would – be, agents.

1. Boredom in the narrator

Ⅰ. Woolf’s experiences of boredom

Woolf was no stranger to boredom. Her own earliest diaries, recorded at age fifteen after a breakdown following her mother’s death, observe over and over again the “dull,” “uninteresting,” and “melancholy” existence she led as she endured a partial version of the rest cure so often prescribed to “neurasthenic” women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Woolf defined boredom and its more prolonged form, depression, as symptomatic of the suppressed young women of her time. The image of a woman on the coach is very common in Woolf’s works. It is a symbol of the passive protest that is boredom. Maybe the woman is thinking, maybe she just find nothing to trigger her to stand up from the couch. Boredom is the psychic equivalent of sofa that is confined but safe. The reason why women choose to confine themselves to that small place may be a retreat that allows them to avoid threatening such as the prevailing order. Boredom exists between individual and collective experience; the discreet entity of one’s self is pierced (bored), and there is no longer an impregnable barrier between what is outside and what is inside. Woolf exploits this construction of boredom to develop her narrative style. This narrative style can also be embodied in her short story The Lady in the Looking-Glass: A Reflection.

Ⅱ. Boredom in the narrator and Isabella

At the beginning and end of the story, the narrator both narrates that “People should not leave looking-glass hanging in their rooms” (Woolf, 1992: 75, 80), which becomes a trigger of the narrator’s curiosity to the outside world: “one could not help looking, that summer afternoon, in the long glass that hung outside in the hall” (Woolf, 1992: 75). From the angle of “the sofa in the drawing-room”, the narrator chooses to confine herself to this small and safe space, where boredom becomes the psychic equivalent of the sofa. The narrator on the sofa begins to observe the mirror in the drawing room to dispel her boredom. “The house was empty, and one felt, since one was the only person in the drawing-room, like one of those naturalists…themselves unseen” (Woolf, 1992: 75). This emptiness is aimed to mimic the alienated, diffuse internal state of the narrator’s consciousness flowing. With nothing special in the room, the narrator’s attraction was easily drawn by the outside views through the reflection of “a strange contrast – all changing here, all stillness there” (Woolf, 1992: 76) of the looking-glass but still confined in the sofa.