Two on Woolf

Book Reviews Volume 32:3, 1989 approach to Woolfs writing from an important but previously unexplored spatial angle. Panthea Reid Broughton Louisiana State University TWO ON WOOLF Lucio P. Ruotolo. The Interrupted Moment: A View of Virginia Woolfs Novels. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986. $29.50 Ellen Bayuk Rosenman. The Invisible Presence: Virginia Woolf and the Mother-Daughter Relationship. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986. $22.50 LUCIO RUOTOLO'S THE INTERRUPTED MOMENT is a carefully thought-out study of Virginia Woolfs novels which claims that Woolfs aesthetics obey both anarchist and existentialist principles. As Ruotolo postulates in his introduction, Woolfs novels reveal her own struggle against the appeal of perfection and wholeness and her characters' consistent attempts to decline the "security of prescribed actions." In general, the author marshals powerful evidence to demonstrate how, central to Woolfs vision in these works, is the notion that interruptions and disorienting moments arouse creative impulses and serve to affirm art's struggle against the comfort of closure. The introduction points to a basic strength of the study, its organization. The entire section is begun by a direct reference to the moment when Woolf finished her first draft of Between the Acts and how she worked a domestic interruption (her cook, Louie, brought her a glass of milk) into previous musings about her new novel: "I am a little triumphant about the book. I think it is an interesting attempt in a new method. I think it's more quintessential than the others, more milk skimmed off. A richer pat." This beginning sets the pattern for Ruotolo's book. Material is usually structured to show how each of Woolfs novels specifically reveals her artistic impulse to create new materials from disruption and discontinuity. Ruotolo notes, however, that his is a thematic approach which inevitably risks appearing simplistic and reductive and he invokes what he feels should be the ideal end of all criticism, human intercourse, as his basic motivation in this critical work. In the chapters that follow, the author chronologically examines each of Woolfs novels (except Orlando, which he considers a biog367 Book Reviews Volume 32:3, 1989 raphy) to trace the thematic development and expansion of her anarchist and existentialist views. The chapter on The Voyage Out, for example, offers an interpretation of Rachel Vinrace as a character who resists definition and "would preserve space outside a society at best unreceptive to her own intuition of life and movement." Her death is seen here as an interruption of our optimistic as well as our artistic expectations. Ruotolo claims that Woolfs first novel resembles her final one in its disruption of an expected pattern. However, although his discussion is never less than impressive, it does not illuminate the novel beyond what many other critics have found, namely, that The Voyage Out is a strange and difficult first novel which provides us with glimpses of the themes and stylistic traits which Woolf was to use repeatedly in her later novels. Within this context, the diffusive Rachel Vinrace fits in as a heroine whose very being, in collusion with her ultimate ülness and death, embodies a total rejection of wholeness and closure. However, one need not label the artistic impulse that guided The Voyage Out anarchic to understand how Woolf creates and develops human relationships in this novel. Part of the problem here is that the reader never fully grasps the thrust of Ruotolo's argument in this section. In my opinion, it is not enough to have focused his discussion on principles such as wholeness and closure which anarchists are well known to abhor without a fuller exploration of his epistemological stance. This seems to reduce Woolfs first novel to a series of phUosophical principles before careful consideration has been given to the human beings and relationships in this work. Ruotolo's analysis of Night and Day and Jacob's Room follows the same pattern as his discussion of The Voyage Out. In Night and Day he says that life offers its characters "ample opportunity to withdraw from life's conclusiveness." Although Woolf allows Ralph and Katharine to commit themselves to each other (a definite departure from her impulse in The Voyage...