Virginia Woolf Icon (review)

Virginia Woolf Icon. Brenda R. Silver. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Pp. 353. $54.00 (cloth) $19.00 (paper).

In the 9 June 2000 issue of the London Guardian, Bel Littlejohn extols Madonna's status as cultural icon by comparing her to another modern celebrity, Virginia Woolf: "Virginia Woolf . . . never starred in an even halfway decent rock video. But if she had, you can be pretty sure that she'd have donned a T-shirt and jeans, let her hair hang loose, sharpened up her dance routines and told her deadweight husband Leonard to pick up his tweed jacket and get the hell out of it. She would . . . have looked and behaved exactly like Madonna in the landmark American Pie video." ¹ Readers who are startled by this jarring comparison have obviously not read Brenda Silver's dazzling new book, Virginia Woolf Icon, a volume which provides an intricate, historicized context for understanding the seemingly incongruous association of Madonna and Woolf. Although Madonna herself does not figure prominently in Silver's meticulous analysis of the author's iconization and commodification, Woolf's Madonna-like popularity--as well as her chameleon-like ability to evoke contradictory feelings regarding feminism, sexuality, and gender--are central to an understanding of how, and why, today's preeminent British female modernist has evolved into a "border-defying monster" (27). Silver demonstrates the extent to which the multifaceted iconic status of "Virginia Woolf" has given rise to a proliferation of cultural meanings that far exceed the stereotype of the hyperintellectual, unerotic English highbrow that have primarily to do with the governing trope of fear. Focusing primarily upon both visual and verbal depictions that have circulated in Anglo-American culture since the mid-1960s, Silver uncovers a range of radically conflicting representations that point to Woolf's function as a transgressive cultural signifier, symptomatic of embedded layers of cultural anxiety regarding female embodiment and intellect.

Making innovative use of material from such diverse sources as the New York Review of Books, Hanif Kureishi's Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and the recent Bloomsbury fashion revival, Silver's brisk and densely researched book moves engagingly around its central premise: that Virginia Woolf (the personality and icon, as opposed to the historical figure) straddles the border between high and low culture, and that her ubiquitous appearance in films, plays, photographs, fashion layouts, advertising, and magazine articles does not depend on her academic reputation and perceived literary value. It is precisely the mobility and multiplicity of Woolf's image--Silver uses the term "versioning" to describe this complex intertextuality--that gives rise to the book's recurring motif of a widespread fear of "the monstrous feminine" (13, 151). While skeptical readers may at times question her presumption that Woolf's destabilizing role is necessarily scary (as opposed to liberatory or merely characteristic of the ambivalent position typically occupied by women writers), one need not accept this thesis unequivocally in order to appreciate her trenchant analysis of Woolf's celebrity. Indeed, while the focus on fear is the conceptual glue that holds this diverse study together, the centrality of this theme at times recedes--arguably a sign of Silver's wariness of imposing too narrow an interpretation on Woolf's "borderline existence" as an image (11). Overall, Virginia Woolf Icon challenges received ideas regarding the author's Queen of Bloomsbury persona by examining hitherto unexplored affinities between representations of Woolf and the pervasive fear of women's "monstrous sexuality," that is, the fear of the dominant, intellectual, angry, feminist, beautiful, childless, deadly, castrating, independent, bisexual woman (107).

Despite Silver's claim that Woolf's border-crossing induces a kind of cultural panic, she is simultaneously interested in how this fear has been "rearticulated and reinscripted for new possibilities and pleasures" (27). A typical example of this dynamic arises within the context of a discussion of British photographer Cecil Beaton's visual and verbal depictions of Woolf in his Book of Beauty (1930...