Woolf & Dr. Johnson

ELT 39:3 1996 but the teacher, her development proceeding in tandem with that of Higgins and Pickering, both of whom learn from her. Though Higgins learns from Eliza, he also remains in large part unreconstructed, serving as a Prometheus analogue in his rebelliousness as well as a Satan analogue. So at every turn, Berst acknowledges the complexities of Shaw's characters as well as his theatrical craft. Most suggestive is Berst's discussion of Act V of the play as he aligns Eliza's development of soul to "the mystic way" as Everlyn Underhill elaborated it in Mysticism (1911). I have been able only to cite a few of the stimulating observations as Berst reads Shaw's play. A full chronology of Shaw's life and works and a topical index to Berst's book increase its value for the reader. For the novice and advanced Shavian alike, Berst's analysis of Shaw's perennially fresh Pygmalion is indispensable. Frederick P. W. McDowell University of Iowa Woolf & Dr. Johnson Beth Carole Rosenberg. Virginia Woolf and Samuel Johnson: Common Readers. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995. xiii + 144 pp. $39.95 BETH ROSENBERG argues in Virginia Woolf and Samuel Johnson: Common Readers that Samuel Johnson and Virginia Woolf are in dialogue, and that this relation has been ignored in Woolf criticism. Applying a paradigm of dialogic relations as developed by the Russian formalist, Mikhail Bakhtin, she isolates Johnson's influence in this densely-argued book. Rosenberg is best when she discusses Woolf's essays and corrects the misconceptions that have materialized around Woolf's notion of the Common Reader, the title of two series of essays published in 1925 and 1932. The concept of the common reader, Rosenberg explains, most certainly derives from Samuel Johnson, and the adjective "common" to describe the reader does not mean "average or ordinary." Rather, the address to the common reader in both Johnson and Woolf is an attempt to address an audience that "not only wants direct language, but has come to distrust the authority who claims to espouse truth" (10). Rosenberg perceptively summarizes this stance stating that the common reader is not a persona but "a rhetorical function... a metaphor for how texts operate and how knowledge is constructed" (56). 380 BOOK REVIEWS Rosenberg is not as convincing, however, in applying Johnson's theories to Woolf's later novels. In discussing his influence, Rosenberg opens up myriad definitions of the terms "dialogue" or "conversation"—the metaphor of voice—as used by Johnson and Woolf in eighteenth- and twentieth-century England, Mikhail Bakhtin in early twentieth-century Russia, and contemporary literary theorists. Though carefully distinguishing between "dialogue" and "dialectic" (dialogue representing the simultaneity of viewpoints rather than the dialectical synthesis), Rosenberg , nevertheless, conflates several meanings of dialogue, dialogical, and conversation from different contexts. In this discussion, she offers less rather than more clarity on Woolf's experimental methods. For example, one of the main arguments of the book is that Woolf in her early essays articulates theories that are essential to the "use of dialogue" in her later "dialogical" novels, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse , The Waves and Between the Acts. But we are never quite sure what "dialogical" means except something broadly "interactive." Sometimes , it means that Woolf's narrative style contains many points of view or "voices" which are in "dialogue" with one another—Bakhtin's "polyphony "; at other times, it means that Johnson and Woolf are "in dialogue." At still others, "dialogic" refers to a relation between the writer and audience or a "relation between the inner and the outer world" (93) or Virginia Woolf's conversing with herself (57). Crucial, however, to Rosenberg 's discussion of Woolf's narrative techniques is her understanding that "dialogic" refers to the fact that Johnson writes as he talks—has "the ability to incorporate his conversational techniques into his written discourse" (xx)—and that this has directly influenced Woolf. If we recall, however, Woolf's use of the term "conversation" in her essay on Jane Austen, we find that she is more concerned as a writer with extending the representation of the inner life in the genre of the novel. Woolf writes: Had Jane...