In the Hollow of the Wave: Virginia Woolf and Modernist Uses of Nature

1. Toward a Greening of Modernism

13 Despite the challenges of modernity, nature has a persistent, even adaptive, presence in modernism. Furthermore, the reinsertion of nature into modernist studies contributes to ongoing debates concerning sources of aesthetic form, the development of personal identity, survival of trauma, and the rebalancing of power and resources in the light of post-colonial and antiracist consciousness. Modernists regularly make reference to nature, or its control, in their writing. Natural interests of specific writers vary, as affected by factors such as geographical location, gender, race, class privilege, spirituality, and awareness and acceptance of scientific theory. This chapter investigates ways that a small set of Woolf’s companion modernists developed discourses involving or excluding nature. While it is hoped that this We want something that has been shaped and clarified, cut to catch the light, hard as gem or rock with the seal of human experience in it, and yet sheltering as in a clear gem the flame which burns now so high and now sinks so low in our own hearts. We want what is timeless and contemporary. •Woolf, “Reading” Yet the poetry often seems to come in precisely at the moment when the scientist and the science, the method and the newness go out. •Woolf, “What Is Poetry?” 1 Toward a Greening of Modernism 14 In the Hollow of the Wave work will contribute to a greening of modernism, this chapter will also provide context and direction for the more intensive study of Woolf’s uses of nature that follows. Modernist rejection of nature came in part from the preference of classicism over Romanticism, as well as attraction to new technologyandscience .Butmodernistsalsodiscoveredtheimpossibilityofrejecting the natural world, given powerful early memories of place and sensation, and the experimental satisfaction that comes with imaginative merger of human and nonhuman other—one of the basic tropes of ecofeminism. The Classical Version: Making It New through Technology Modernist opposition to nature came largely from those who identified with a classicist approach, including the group labeled the “men of 1914,”1 whose gender-biased version long enjoyed academic prowess. In manifestos and reviews , Wyndham Lewis, T. E. Hulme, and Ezra Pound conjure up formless, dark, decayed manifestations of nature to condemn what they consider inferior forms of writing; these they associate with decadence and the feminine.2 Following the lead of Baudelaire, they turn toward urban settings. Science and mechanics, including the engines of war, furnish preferred masculine metaphors. Their gendering and diminishment of nature, and their goal to “make it new,” are in keeping with the broad patterns of culture reported by Sherry Ortner in her provocatively titled 1974 essay, “Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?” Ortner observes, “Every culture, or, generally ‘culture’ is engaged in the process of generating and sustaining systems of meaningful forms (symbols, artifacts, etc.) by means of which humanity transcends the givens of natural existence, bends them to its purposes, controls them in its interest” (72).3 T. E. Hulme, in his advocacy of classicism, provides a difficult scenario for incorporating nature into modernism. Classicism, as he defines it, is all about culture and its capacity to control expression. In his essay “Romanticism and Classicism,” he sides with those who are suspicious of human nature: “Man is an extraordinarily fixed and limited animal whose nature is absolutely constant . It is only by tradition and organization that anything decent can be got out of him” (179). This contrasts to Romanticism, which is generally seen as the most nature-friendly of literary groupings. Hulme focuses his attack on Rousseau, citing the belief “that man was by nature good, that it was only Toward a Greening of Modernism 15 bad laws and customs that had suppressed him.” Hulme faults the Romantics for their recourse to the infinite and mysterious, and for finding god in man. In reaching for a metaphor suitable to his goal of “accurate, precise and definitedescription,”hethinksfirstofanarchitect’svariouslycurvedwooden templates, but settles finally upon a springy piece of steel that can be bent precisely, using the pressure of the artist’s own fingers. The goal with this implement is “to bend the steel out of its own curve and into the exact curve which you want. Something different to what it would assume naturally” (183–84). Hulme’s favorite texture of “dry hardness” suggests that for him the best organism is a dead, or at least a desiccated, one. Hulme does have some use for natural...