Hearts of Darkness: White Women Write Race (review)

At the very least, any new work by Jane Marcus is guaranteed to change the way we think about feminism and modernism, not to mention their co-dependancy with racism and imperialism. In Hearts of Darkness, Marcus challenges us to read her new essays as arguments with those reprinted ones we thought were seminal. Interwoven with questions about her earlier navigations, the book's six essays and coda chart an intellectual and political autobiography that startles us with its dazzling juxtapositions and insights. But this should not surprise us. This volume continues the odyssey of Jane Marcus's unrelenting self-questioning as it channels us through often uncharted but always bracing waters. Autobiographical criticism may now be considered canonical, but as Marcus reshapes it, she questions what we mean by canonical. Even now, as we debate the canonical effects of liberating Virginia Woolf from her miniaturist frame, Marcus restretches the canvas. An invitation to speak at Harvard releases a stream of critical consciousness that intricately connects memories of her undergraduate experience with the recognition of empire in an affirmative action jewel in Harvard's crown.

But what is most stunning about the reach of this autobiographical web is that it purposefully ensnares Marcus's own ongoing analysis of another outsider—Virginia Woolf at imperial Oxbridge. As Marcus interrogates her own critical subject position, she insists that we also imagine the cultural and political consequences of our analyses of outsiders and insiders. I, for one, have always wondered about Woolf's "self-proclaimed outsider" status and how it served her to suffer the well manicured lawns of Oxbridge while living a short walk away from the intellectually, if not socially venerable concrete jungle of the University of London (61). Unlike her intellectual and political if not social or economic equal, Storm Jameson (who welcomed a King's College fellowship), Woolf appears never to have considered partaking of its outsiders' classes.

Despite the temporal gaps between the composition of the essays, Marcus's method is coherent and compellingly purposeful. The essays introduce two figures who as outsiders to the modernist canon are positioned to revolutionize it. Interwoven throughout the book but resisting easy incorporation into its arguments or into extant versions of the modernist canon are the figures of Virginia Woolf's "A Very Fine Negress" in A Room of One's Own and that of Nancy Cunard. Cunard's Negro anthology is the key, for "the things that strike us now as racist and embarrassing in the volume are precisely the points where we may enter the tangled depths of the white heart of darkness in the two decades between the European wars" (3). Marcus changes the face of modernism with that of Nancy Cunard, now established once and for all as "an important radical intellectual and cultural historian" who teaches us how to read the political aesthetics of modernism (147). Marcus relocates the heart of darkness to deepest London and Paris and within the end of empire and rise of fascism, and scans that heart through the lenses of Cunard, Mulk Raj Anand, and Michael Arlen. Consequently we gain new perspectives on race, feminism, and imperialism in Virginia Woolf's The Waves and Djuna Barnes's Nightwood. The political and sexual phantasmagoria of Nightwood exposes but casts critical shadows over Woolf's "own racial and sexual fantasies." These have encouraged all too many to read The Waves as ivory-tower modernist aesthetics overwhelming what little content could be fathomed from its formal experimentation (13).

Perhaps nowhere is Marcus's self-questioning more innovative and enlightening than in the scenarios she imagines for that "very fine Negress" in Woolf's cultural and political imagination. Tracing the origins of this racial imaginary back through Woolf's great-grandfather James Stephen, "the (reluctant but dutiful) writ[er] and shepherd . . . of the Anti-Slavery Bill," Marcus establishes a family resemblance to Woolf's nervousness "about sisterhood under the skin" (29). But rather than offering a...