Woolf & Feminism

ELT 42 : 1 1999 Woolf & Feminism John R. Maze. Virginia Woolf: Feminism, Creativity, and the Unconscious . Westport: Greenwood Press 1997. 220 pp $55.00 JOHN MAZE'S BOOK differs from other psychoanalytical criticism of Woolf in that it is an interdisciplinary work that bridges literary criticism and psychoanalysis, with mutual benefits. For Maze, psychoanalysis is not just a mere tool of literary analysis, sometimes useful, sometimes negligible, but a consistent base of reference which illuminates his interpretation. From the other direction, the reading that emerges provides a detailed psychoanalytical case study of a creative mind and its attempt at finding peace and resolution through literary expression. This interdisciplinary approach is especially helpful for passages of text that evade cohesive critical explanation consistent with the rest of the work. Maze claims that data independent of the text, such as evidence from the author's life, including the unconscious, often succeed in offering the missing meaning. That "independent evidence" is often a source of discomfort for a textual critic, because it is so remote from the text the analysis appears forced. Once we realize that we are reading a work of psychoanalysis, and not literary criticism per se, that "independent evidence" becomes more admissible. The main premise of Maze's analysis is that Woolf s successive books are a quest for "self-understanding," and a record of her process of resolving her relationship with her diseased mother and her prematurely dead brother Thoby. He also presents Woolf s novels as products of selfcensorship , which sought covert representation for her subconscious desires and fears. Following Woolf's self-discovery process, Maze considers each of Woolf's novels chronologically. The starting point is The Voyage Out. Maze identifies Woolf s conscious intentions to show Rachel's "voyage towards independence" that ends in disaster, and Woolf s own unconscious fear of the forces that bring that disaster. The connection between the two can only be achieved through interpretation, sometimes very far-reaching, and that is what constitutes the brunt of Maze's analysis. Maze postulates that Rachel's relationship with Helen represents Woolf's relationship with her sister Vanessa, Vinrace representing "the patronizing, suffocating male domination from which Woolf knew she herself must escape." Rachel's fear of her sexuality and marriage is a 96 BOOK REVIEWS projection of similar fears and trauma connected with Woolf s incestuous childhood. Maze then investigates Night and Day as an inquiry into the nature of love as an exalted, God-sent feeling that demands submission. This definition seems, ever so subtly, to include love between women, i. e. Mary and Katharine. However, Maze notes that, despite Woolf s bad experiences with male sexuality, "Woolf s self-image was so fragile and her need for protection so great that she could not represent or embrace lesbian love as a better solution than conventional matrimony." The classically romantic ending of the novel is an act of denial of what Maze claims Woolf knew by that point in her life: "that the conventional, sentimental image of love is simply false, that it is merely a consolatory fantasy of a state of perfect harmony that we lost when we were disjoined from our mother and found ourselves helpless and alone." Jacob's Room and later The Waves are presented as expressions of Woolf's complex sisterly love and suppressed sexual attraction for her younger brother Thoby. Maze lists notable similarities between Jacob and Thoby (education, death at twenty-five), conceding that Woolf never confirmed the identification. He also interprets the female narrator's lighthearted attitude to Jacob's sexual exploits as Woolf s own unconscious , sexual feelings towards the real life Jacob. Mrs. Dalloway is analyzed as a study of sanity versus insanity, both relative. Maze traces the genesis of the novel to Woolf s original short story, "Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street," this time denying the identification of Woolf with the character, since her "social and political attitudes [deference to establishment, social snobism]... are opposed to Woolf s own." Maze points out that "if Clarissa represents sanity and Septimus insanity, then her 'sanity' is the death of the soul; she remains sane by giving herself over to the morality of power...