The Artist as Outsider in the Novels of Toni Morrison and Virginia Woolf (review)

In cross-cultural and transhistorical comparisons, the trick is often to justify and elaborate the grounds for such comparisons. The Artist as Outsider in the Novels of Toni Morrison and Virginia Woolf implicitly suggests one way of comparing these two writers' work. At times, though, Williams's study cannot sustain a coherent and focused argument for why we should read these two very different writers together, a lack of focus that is reflected sometimes in awkward prose and confusing transitions. What does emerge from Williams's interpretations are the numerous thematic preoccupations and plot strategies Morrison and Woolf share. Williams is particularly successful in her use of Morrison's overtly political consciousness to analyze Woolf's choices of plot and theme. These readings are often quite insightful and illuminate a refreshingly political understanding of Woolf's oeuvre. However, it is less clear what Woolf offers to Morrison readers. Though well-researched and convincing in parts, the book attempts to be too many things: a close reading of various works by Woolf, a summary of Morrison criticism and of Morrison's political and aesthetic strategies, and a consideration of historical and contextual issues in Woolf.

What emerges most powerfully in The Artist as Outsider is how reading Woolf through Morrison enables a more deeply nuanced understanding of the racial dimensions inherent in Woolf's critique of the cult of white womanhood, specifically "the angel in the house." Unfortunately, Woolf herself only intermittently embraces the race and class implications of her critique of the material conditions for the female artist. While Williams's readings successfully locate Woolf in a more racialized version of the modern literary tradition, she is less successful in her claim that Woolf, like Morrison, is writing about the "destructive consequences of internalizing whiteness" (3). Woolf does indeed call for "kill[ing] off the angel in the house," but she does not necessarily understand that desire as a "cry to destroy this very racist construct of Victorian femininity" (3). So in spite of an astute reading of Woolf's anticolonial subtext in works such as The Voyage Out, Williams is unable to demonstrate an analogous awareness of how women's oppression in the role of domestic goddess, á la Mrs. Ramsey and Clarissa Dalloway, "maintains and justifies racial domination and violence" (132). Hence, while Williams's book illuminates the racial aspects of domesticity and the gender inequities that so absorbed Woolf, her argument falters in its effort to see these concerns as organic elements of Woolf's writing practice and not as products of historical and critical hindsight.

The term "artist" drops in and out of Williams's analyses in a way that leaves her title overly ambiguous. For example, Woolf's character Clarissa is first identified as an "artist" of her own life and later invoked as an example of the stunting and deadening effects of heterosexual marriage and upper-class allegiances. Williams identifies an artist variously as a woman who finds a language that represents her subjective experiences of oppression and isolation, who uses everyday life as a medium, or who dedicates herself to the practice of an art such as music, painting, or writing. In concluding her chapter on Mrs. Dalloway, Williams reads Clarissa as an artist because of her elaborate dinner party, contrasting her with the shell-shocked war veteran Septimus. She then links Septimus to Pecola Breedlove in Morrison's The Bluest Eye because both have psychotic breakdowns precipitated by an inability to find an artistic means of representing trauma. Later, however, Williams compares Clarissa to Rachel Vinrace in The Voyage Out, Mrs. Ramsey in To the Lighthouse, and Nel in Sula, identifying all four as suppressed or failed artists because they capitulate to the trap of heterosexual domesticity.

Williams concludes that her comparison of the two authors' artistic techniques "serves to redefine modernity in terms...