The Subconscious, Death and Feminism

Beining Gong

Professor Joshua Ewing Weber

International Writing Workshop II

May 12th, 2016

Essay II Rewrite

The Subconscious, Death and Feminism

The complexity of Virginia Woolf’s writing has perplexed readers for over a century with her ideas that are often laced into her variable writing style. As a feminist pioneer, Woolf calls our attention to the need for both mental and financial freedom of women by her famous claim that "A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction” (“A Room of One’s Own” 4). Virginia Woolf tends to employ numerous metaphors, dark imagery, implicit comparisons, and juxtaposed writing styles in her pieces to discuss both death and feminism. These two key fascinations of Virginia Woolf, feminism and death, seem somehow peculiar for me at first. As feminism is normally considered radical and progressive, why would Woolf also contemplate constantly the gloomy topic of death alongside her feminist ideology?

Woolf appears to be obsessed with death and her writing betrays this obsession. She often includes her reflections on death and often the death of a character within the story. In “Old Mrs. Grey,” Woolf creates a portrait of a ninety-two year old women whose only wish is to “let [her] pass,” because the woman has already witnessed the passing of the rest of her family (“Old Mrs. Grey” 4). She seems to hold an admiration for death and a belief that peace can be heralded by death. Woolf graphically depicts the difficulty of life when one’s family has left them alone in her implementation of metaphors such as Mrs. Grey’s, which she compares to “a damp sheet is folded over a wire” (“Old Mrs. Grey” 4). This comparison convinces the reader to empathize with the woman for her suffering. Her portrayal of the old woman creates empathy, not because of her advanced age but because she is showing the reader her fear of living a life beyond its use. Woolf admires the absolute power of death, and worries about unhappiness and suffering in life should death not come. Her obsession with death casts a dark shadow over her writing style, particularly her use of dark imagery.

Woolf also shows her obsession with death by creating a dark comparison between a moth and a women. While Woolf does not allude to women particularly in the scene of “The Death of the Moth”, we cannot help but think of such a comparison, because the “frail and diminutive” little moth is comparative to the reigning idea that women are also “tender” and “pure” and meant to be pitied (“The Death of the Moth” 1, “Professions for Women” 27). The moth is frail, alone, and in need of assistance. So to was the belief of the nature of women during the time of Virginia Woolf, and perhaps she is noting that, like the moth, women either need to right themselves and learn to fly without the help of the pencil or perish (“The Death of the Moth” 1, “Professions for Women” 27). Help from others is temporary and demeaning to Woolf, she would rather perish like the moth than have somebody take pity on her because of her frailty as a woman.

Woolf employs many literary tools to display her mood as a writer and to discuss death. Her use of imagery to depict the darkness of death is obvious, but what is less obvious is the tone in which the imagery is portrayed. Woolf often writes in a calm and almost indifferent tone when discussing death. Death in her essays isn’t necessarily designed to be dark and gloomy all the time. Sometimes her casual mentions of killing communicates to the reader her calmness towards death. In her unsent letter to the editor of the “New Statesman,” Woolf unhesitatingly uses death as a deterrent: Woolf threats anyone who dares to call her a money-and-power-driven “middlebrow” that she would “take [her] pen and stab him, dead.” She show her disdain for the title “middlebrow,” since Woolf believes she should be considered a “highbrow” according to her skills and intellect like men of similar qualities (“Middlebrow” 22). Her unshaken and steadfast resolution against this derogatory title shows that she is not afraid to voice her disdain. Death is something she wages easily in her writing, but perhaps death may not be as serious as we imagine for Virginia Woolf. It may constitute part of her philosophy, but death does not entirely encompass her philosophy. The reader is confronted by these casual mentions of death juxtaposed with her more confrontation writing style in some of her stories. Therefore, death could be one of her writing tools that she employs without hesitation against anti-feminist ideas. Woolf’s resolution contributes to her passion of writing as a complex, real person, which lends to her confrontational writing style versus her calm tone regarding death.

Among the overwhelming gloominess of her writing, one can see that Woolf intentionally elaborates certain characters or actions to pull the reader to what she herself wished to concentrate on. In “The Death of the Moth,” Woolf writes in great details of the struggle of a moth before its demise. Although the moth tries to right itself, he was “so stiff or so awkward that he could only flutter to the bottom of the window-pane; and when he tried to fly across it he failed…He could no longer raise himself; his legs struggled vainly” (“The Death of the Moth” 1). Instead of directly pointing out that the moth is dying, her elaboration on the moth’s movement strongly implies impending death. It occurred to her that “the failure and awkwardness” were the approach of death, she denied her first instinct of “stretching out a pencil…to help [the moth] to right himself” and “la[id] the pencil down” (“The Death of the Moth” 1). Woolf intentionally mentions her fleeting empathy for the moth as she contemplates artificially interfering with its death, however, she stops herself and maintains her classical position that life brings with it inevitable death. We certainly feel an intangible pang of guilt that the moth will certainly perish without her assistance, but we also understand the composed tone of Woolf’s writing about the idea of death.

Her reluctance to assist because of a fear of dependence is a portrayal of one of the deeper issues presented in her writing: the subconscious. As Tessa Hadley introduces, Woolf writes so “exquisitely well,” so “heavily” “in such labored sentences” (Virginia Woolf by Alexandra Harris: Review, 2). Woolf likes to compose long, descriptive and metaphorical sentences to elaborate her own subconscious feelings so that the reader hopefully picks up the same emotions as they read. In her “Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid,” she contemplates why women cannot “make ideas that will help the young Englishman who is fighting up in the sky to defeat the enemy” (28). Woolf explains through an implicit comparison between men and Hitler that men hold tyrannical power over women, the man is in the skies fighting other men while women are told to hide in shelters. She questions whether this misguided affair is the best solution in a situation such as war, holding down half of the population that could help in order to retain the dignity of the man while he is about to be shot out of the sky. Since Hitler stands for “aggressiveness,” “tyranny” and “the insane love of power,” the “subconscious Hitlerism in the hearts of men” holds women back (Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid, 28). This hurdle is something that Woolf struggles against herself. Her conscious wants to write freely but her subconscious tries to hold her imagination back. In this case Woolf doesn’t seem to be a fan of clarifying what exactly the subconscious is or what her subconscious tells her personally, but she honestly presents her feelings, her observations and her imagination for the reader to interpret. This inclination can also been seen in her depiction of a post-war raider. In this idealistic imagery, everyone turns out to be safe and sound after the war. The raider even speaks “fairly good English” and gets along well with his English “captors.” The sarcastic description of “an Englishman g[iving] him a cigarette, and an Englishwoman m[aking] him a cup of tea” unsettles us and makes us feel deliberately uncomfortable because it immediately seems unrealistic. In this way, Woolf forces us to wonder whether such phenomenon is right, and to consider where the discomfort comes from, as Woolf writes that the sound of bombing “compel[s] us to think about peace” (“Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid” 28).