Virginia Woolf Tracing Patterns through Plato's Forms

In her recent article, "Virginia Woolf's 'cotton wool of daily life,'" Liesl M. Olson argues that while Woolf's "novels experiment stylistically with how to represent [. . .] 'evanescent' incidents, it is possible to understand her entire oeuvre as committed to the representation of the ordinary" (65). Drawing upon Woolf's metaphor in her memoir "A Sketch of the Past" of the "cotton wool of daily life," which represents habitual and unconscious states of being, Olson shows how Woolf's modernism is "deeply invested, stylistically and ideologically, in representing the ordinary" (43). Olson's research intersects with my interests in Woolf's rendering of ordinary and common experience. A part of my concern has been with how Woolf reconciles what Lily Briscoe in To the Lighthouse (1927) describes as a mutual sense of the "ordinary" and "extraordinary" nature of life (272), and their relationship to Woolf's conception of common experience.¹ In addition to the experiential and epistemological dialectic in Woolf's modernism between ordinary and what Olson calls "heightened" (43) modes of experience is an ontological dialectic between Woolf's commitment to empirical reality and her repeated allusion to a metaphysical reality that subsists behind everyday appearances. Olson's article focuses upon the "cotton wool of daily life" and its central role in Woolf's modernism. This essay considers the "pattern" that Woolf finds behind that "cotton wool" and its relationship to empirical reality. While this might seem like a radical departure from discussions about the ordinary, the particular, and the social, I suggest that it is possible to understand Woolf's philosophy of a "pattern" as integral to her concept of being, and one that does not imply a devaluation of the ordinary world.

I understand Woolf's use of the term "pattern" to operate on several levels. As I will show, her "pattern" suggests an archetype or model deserving imitation; however, the expressions of that "pattern" which she finds in the empirical world assume aesthetic and social forms.² A philosophical conception of a "pattern" occurs throughout Woolf's writing—for example, in her first novel The Voyage Out (1915):

According to [Terence Hewet], too, there was an order, a pattern which made life reasonable, or, if that word was foolish, made it of deep interest anyhow, for sometimes it seemed possible to understand why things happened as they did. Nor were people so solitary and uncommunicative as [Rachel Vinrace] believed.

(318–19)

Terence Hewet alludes to his belief that there is a "pattern" to life. This pattern is likened to an "order" which affords him an understanding of why things happen as they do. It makes life "reasonable" and interesting. His "pattern" is also associated with ideas of community; it is proof that people are neither "solitary" nor "uncommunicative." Hewet's allusion to a rational "order" to life suggests that his "pattern" resembles the classical conception of the logos. Logos is a Greek term that refers to a rational, intelligible principle, structure, or order that pervades something. In Western philosophy the term refers to a rational order in the universe revealing the right relation between the universal and the particular (Dent, "Logos").³

In Woolf's second novel, Night and Day (1919), Mary Datchet, a young woman dedicated to the Women's Rights movement, reflects upon the "scheme" of "life" in general and her place within it as an "individual". She wants to translate this "conception" into a visible form on paper. Conceiving her life as a pattern of "lines," this "vision" provides her, like Terence Hewet, with a feeling of satisfaction and a sense of life's inherent "harmony" and order:

From an acute consciousness of herself as an individual, Mary passed to a conception of the scheme of things in which, as a human being, she must have her share. She half held a vision; the vision shaped and dwindled. She wished she had a pencil and a piece of paper to help her to give a form to this conception which composed itself as she walked down the Charing Cross Road. But if she talked to any one, the conception...