Hellenism and Loss in the Work of Virginia Woolf (review)

Theodore Koulouris’s Hellenism and Loss in the Work of Virginia Woolf is the first comprehensive work on Virginia Woolf’s engagement with Greek culture and literature. Drawing on Woolf’s unpublished Greek Notebook, Koulouris argues that Woolf’s familiarity with Greek literature helped to develop a textual strategy that embodied the many forms of “loss” she experienced. We now have a book that places Woolf firmly within the context of nineteenth-century British Hellenism through careful readings of her notes and commentaries on canonical Greek works, as well as convincing close readings of Jacob’s Room (1922), Mrs. Dalloway (1925), and Orlando (1928).

The first section of Hellenism and Loss, “Loss in the Making,” focuses on Woolf’s early life—the loss of her mother and father, Julia and Leslie Stephen, and the death of her half-sister, Stella Duckworth—and it concentrates on “the socio-political factors that led her to produce early, private writings, letters, journals and reading notebooks” (pp. 8–9). The context of nineteenth-century British Hellenism as a cultural force is laid out for us, and within this context Koulouris discusses and refers to Woolf’s Greek Notebook, wherein she attempts to translate, comment on, and analyze a diverse array of classical Greek texts, including Plato’s Symposium, Homer’s Odyssey, and Euripides’s Ion.

Woolf’s “poetics of loss” is defined in relation to her involvement with Greek literature, and Koulouris argues that it is an “indispensable component of her identity as a woman of letters and as a (modernist) female intellectual” (pp. 10, 11). The concept of “loss” is crucial to this study, and it assumes for Woolf a “position of a constant, ‘interminable’ intellectual preoccupation that does not seek to transcend loss but to find ways in which to render it textually” (p. 12). Woolf’s aesthetics are paradoxically found in her attempt to make present her sense of personal loss.

Not only did Woolf suffer loss in her personal life, she also suffered the loss of a formal education in Greek, an education her male contemporaries of Bloomsbury received at Cambridge. Therefore, she could not experience Greek “love” as a Platonic and homosocial act, and Koulouris contends, perhaps a bit too patly, that “in relation to the concept of ‘love,’ Woolf’s informal study of Greek was a constitutive factor in the crystallization of a poetics of ‘loss,’ a poetics in which Greek is both, and the same time, an agent of (socio-cultural) exclusion and an instrument of textual and intellectual fulfillment” (p. 99). Woolf distanced herself from Greek texts, and this “enabled her to define her identity outside the significatory values of Hellenism, to create a referential poetics which would nevertheless renegotiate, and textually re-structure, British socio-cultural and political appropriations of concepts borrowed from classical Greek literature” (p. 118). This poetics—of silence, absence, death and “loss”—allows her to make Hellenism her own.

Woolf’s “Greekness,” a term Koulouris distinguishes from “Hellenism,” is Woolf’s “private, post-Victorian Hellenic aesthetic, and as a synergy of reworked textual influences derived from her, by and large, private, informal readings of Greek mythology, Greek literature and Greek religion” (p. 8). Another interesting contextual argument that Koulouris makes is in regard to the “female” line of Greek scholarship, particularly the work of Jane Harrison and the Cambridge Ritualists. Ultimately, however, Woolf vacillates between the masculine, British Hellenism and female codifications of Hellenism in Harrison and refuses to align herself with either. Here, as many critics of Woolf’s work have done, Koulouris focuses on Woolf’s ambivalence, or even ambiguity, in regard to this binary split. He is not quite successful in trying to explain this vacillation, but it is clear that Woolf was working within the two modes of Hellenism he sketches out.

Woolf “absorbed and solidified and subsequently transformed the heritage of ‘female’ classicism into her own Greek ethos, which reflexively established her narratives, be it...