Bloomsbury, Modernism, and the Reinvention of Intimacy (review)

Bloomsbury, Modernism, and the Reinvention of Intimacy is a conspicuously intelligent, ambitious, and capacious new book that will help set the terms with which Bloomsbury is—or “the two Bloomsburies” are (192)—discussed in the twenty-first century. Reading Bloomsbury in the form of the writings of six “Bloomsburians” (25), three of them acolytes (G. E. Moore, E. M. Forster, and Virginia Woolf), three associates (Sigmund Freud, D. H. Lawrence, and Vita Sackville-West), Jesse Wolfe offers a hard-nosed account of the Bloomsbury politics of representation. Wolfe regards characterization as inescapably if often unwittingly allegorical, the better to reveal a deep Bloomsburian ambivalence running between contrary impulses to accommodate personal relations to Victorian marital, courtship, gender, psychological, and aesthetic norms and to reimagine them so as to challenge those norms. Hence the “two Bloomsburies”: a Bloomsbury (Forster, Sackville-West) of sexual and gender “retrenchment,” despite also being one likely to offer such forward-looking, happily “prescient” (192) critiques as Sackville’s West’s “feminist assault on Victorian spousal roles” (190), on the one hand; on the other, a more radical, avant-garde Bloomsbury (Freud, Woolf, Lawrence, and—a surprise—G. E. Moore) of “anti-foundational ideas” and forms (28; Birkin “critique[s] . . . the notion of a self-knowing subject telling a knowable object, ‘I love you,’” [27]), despite also being one likely to offer backward-looking (Victorian) and quite “substantial concessions to convention” (27). E. M. Forster’s Howards End is “perhaps simply reactionary” (80; this Forsterian swallowed hard), in the end angelicizing its New Woman Margaret Schlegel and suggestively failing to endow sexually “intermediate” male characters such as Leonard Bast and Tibby Schlegel with revolutionary dynamism (105). Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, on the other hand, “combines a radical skepticism about sexuality and selfhood with a hard-won pragmatism, particularly where marriage is concerned” (161); even its accommodations are innovative.

Bloomsbury innovation is an important topic, and an important aim is to give Bloomsbury a properly “central role in the story of literary modernism” (1), a role that has been overlooked by those who equate modernism (improperly, in the judgment of Wolfe and many others) with “formal bravado” (5). Wolfe thus contributes to the “New Modernisms” project that gave rise to this journal and one premise of which has been that modernism may be found in “newness of various kinds” rather than just that one, very familiar kind, that of a strenuous and daring aesthetic formalism (3). The particular kind of newness that we call “Bloomsbury” being thus positioned at the center (or one center) of modernism, modernism itself may be studied by way of it, the consequence being a new sense not just of Bloomsbury but also of modernism—of its manners and morals, its methods and motives.

Amongst these often overlooked motives, Wolfe argues, is a newly sharp and sustained interest in “intimate relations” (3). “[L]iterary Bloomsbury made intimacy central to its work, . . . interrogating its meaning and imagining models—both positive and negative” (3). Central to modernism itself, it follows, was a new creative and critical interest in what it meant and what it might mean to be intimate, what it meant and might mean to be not (like Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, we may have thought) entirely “inward” and standoffish, on the one hand, and on the other not entirely social and superficial (like Virginia Woolf’s steady, un-heroic Mr. Dalloway). On this view, modernism emerges as both what we always thought it was, an introspectivist, inward journey, as well as what we may have tended to overlook—a distinctly social journey, an exploration of new interpersonal space undertaken together by an intimate few. “Intimacy” is the perfect, perhaps the only word for what Wolfe is discussing, suggesting as it does a space removed from broader social pressures, and yet not an asocial, solitary, or even lonely space. As Wolfe argues, “Modernism is frequently associated with . . . a turn toward subjectivity, away from Victorian realism. For Bloomsbury and its...