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  • In the Hollow of the Wave: Virginia Woolf and Modernist Uses of Nature by Bonnie Kime Scott
  • Kelly Sultzbach (bio)
In the Hollow of the Wave: Virginia Woolf and Modernist Uses of Nature, by Bonnie Kime Scott. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012. 268 pp. $39.50.

Bonnie Kime Scott's panoramic view of Virginia Woolf 's organic imagery offers scholars and common readers alike a tantalizing array of research. Drawing on her years of expertise in the fields of feminism and modernism, Scott opens up to the reader a wealth of rare archival document collections, including photographs from her own travels to Woolf 's places, [End Page 233] allowing those who might not otherwise have access to such resources a prolific assortment of biographical, historical, and place information. As a result, Scott creates a newly vibrant representation of how nature informs Woolf 's representations of hierarchy and gender, making a major contribution to both Woolf studies and ecofeminism. Indeed, seemingly in debt to her descriptions of Woolf 's own style, Scott enacts the kind of collage motif she ascribes to Woolf, and in alliance with feminist narrative strategies, she avoids making clear analytical claims in favor of disrupting binary assumptions about predominate interpretations of nature within Woolf 's oeuvre. Consequently, some readers might be disappointed by a strategy that frequently relies on lists of different critical positions and extensive sets of quoted examples but refrains from providing, on the one hand, a lot of connective analysis regarding the underlying assumptions of the quotes or, on the other hand, assertions about how positions interact with one another to reveal a particular claim or insight. However, most readers of Woolf will delight in the strategy of marginalizing the authoritative voice of the critic in favor of presenting highly provocative assemblages of information organized thematically by plentiful subtitles, encouraging the reader to draw her own conclusions from the information. In this way, Scott's text not only brings together important strands of research in Woolf scholarship and ecofeminism but also suggests a model for a more eclectic and inviting approach to scholarship that can sustain a readership beyond the academy.

The introduction positions the author's resistance to overly dogmatic binaries related to the antirural impulse in modernism or the celebration of a harmonizing feminine-coded nature by embracing Raymond Williams's acknowledgement of the inherent slippages between nature and culture, as well as Donna Haraway's formulation of "naturecultures."1 Scott admits the generous scope of her approach, warning,

Although I cannot guarantee an ecofeminist Woolf, or a green world of pre-Oedipal delight in those of her novels most idealized by feminists over the years, I do find that nature plays a significant part in both the external and the internal dimensions of her life and work, and that it is inextricable from her language and ethics.

(p. 10)

In this way, Scott's mode of inquiry leaves the particular meaning of nature's "significant part" in Woolf 's "language and ethics" up to the reader, thereby directing what the reader sees while still admitting spaces for reflection—pauses during which the reader is invited to make deductions from the rich array of "orts and fragments" of researched material.2

Thus, the first chapter, "Towards a Greening of Modernism," does not clearly situate Woolf within the other writers it references but rather serves to remind the reader that Woolf was one figure alongside several modernists who were shaping a modernist depiction of environmental ethics by [End Page 234] their representational choices. Nature's "persistent, even adaptive presence in modernism" is exemplified by Ezra Pound, T. E. Hulme, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, H. D., D. H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, and Djuna Barnes (p. 13). The section on Eliot brings overlooked aspects of his own childhood experience, winter-homes, and the churning industry of the Mississippi River to light, and the close readings of H. D.'s garden metaphors reveal a keen awareness of how the brute realism of natural forces constructs an image that paradoxically blends trauma and tranquility into an unexpected image of grace.

Chapters two through four—treating "Diversions of Darwin and Natural History...

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