Woolf and War

ELT 36:3 1993 the circulating libraries of the day, in his Pall Mall articles "Literature at Nurse" and "A New Censorship of Literature," which as Pyket indicates moved the discourse into issues of class and gender because GM's attacks were principally aimed at the control exercised by librarians and women on the "form, production, and distribution of fiction." Another focus rests on Arthur Waugh's "Reticence in Literature" (published in The Yellow Book in 1894), a reactionary criticism of Zolaism which deplored the manner in which naturalism invaded the domestic space—i.e., the bedroom—and exposed all areas of experience, especially female experience, to the public's (which is to say, men's) gaze. The third section of this volume, Texts, includes critical essays on individual works by Alas, Galdos, and Thomas Mann. I pause here only on the last item, by Valerie Minoque, "James's Lady and Zola's Whore . . . ," a comparison of the heroines of The Portrait of a Lady and Nana. Evidently part of a larger project, this study begins by noting that though the publication dates of these works are a scant year apart (1880 and 1881) and their "internal dates" are close, the novels could hardly be further apart in their treatment of the female protagonists. Where the naturalistic bias was "scientific" and "all-inclusive," James stressed the need for "selectivity" and saw Zola's methods as having no regard for the dichotomies of "decency and indecency, morality and immorality, beauty and ugliness." Although quite detaüed and objective in her individual analyses of the progress of the two "heroines," Minoque does seem to conclude that the mimetic effect of Nana is the more "realistic" and therefore to her more aestheticaUy satisfying. What ultimate value this volume may have for individual scholars and students of English literature of the Transition period is not easy to judge. I suspect not much. Its hefty price alone, as well as its segmented subject matter, stamps it as a library book," rather than one which would normaUy find its way to the scholar's personal shelf. But if it does no more than keep active the debate about what constituted "naturalism" and what effect its set of principles had on the mainstream of modern literature, it wül have served a highly useful purpose. Thomas C. Ware University of Tennessee at Chattanooga Woolf and War Mark Hussey, ed. Virginia Woolf and War: Fiction, Reality, and Myth. Syracuse Studies on Peace and Conflict Resolution. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. 1991. xiv + 272pp. $29.95 402 BOOK REVIEWS FROM ITS DUST JACKET with Kristin Reed's La Muerte Se Confundir á Con Tus Sueños (Death wül confuse itself with your dreams), depicting five women dancing on a pile of guns whüe a pair of fighter planes fly upward, through Hussey^ introduction with its epigraph from Antigone, "I cannot share in hatred, but in love," and the remaining twelve essays, this collection maintains a high pitch of emotional intensity and thought. That the collection grew out of a MLA panel from 1989 and was published in a timely fashion underscores the urgency of its subject. The relevance of Virginia Woolf and war to peace and the resolution of conflict is, however, natural if not inevitable. Virginia Woolf, whose life spanned two major wars (1882-1941), far from ignoring war was obsessed by it. The collection presents a range of essays, beginning with a reintroduction to James Haule's significant discovery of earlier versions of the Time Passes" portion from To the Lighthouse. Haule's insightful reading of these texts contributes to the sense one has of sharing fragments or indeed relics against the ruins as we encounter these meditations on what Woolf constructed out of her awareness of the general breakdown affecting "all breathing kind" (The Years) as well as her own pain and loss. "The holograph," Haule writes, "is quite clearly a feminist's view of the violence of the war, which she associates with male sexual brutality." In the typescript Mrs. McNab is "an ancient female symbol of life and regeneration." Nancy Topping Bazin and Jane Hamovit Lauter discuss Woolf s "Keen Sensitivity to War," tracing...