Virginia Woolf's "cotton wool of daily life"

[Poetry] has never been used for the common purpose of life. Prose has taken all the dirty work on to her own shoulders; has answered letters, paid bills, written articles, made speeches, served the needs of businessmen, shopkeepers, lawyers, soldiers, peasants.

—Virginia Woolf, "The Narrow Bridge of Art"¹

[T]he everyday is what we are first of all, and most often: at work, at leisure, awake, asleep, in the street, in private existence. The everyday, then, is ourselves, ordinarily.

—Maurice Blanchot, "Everyday Speech"²

Virginia Woolf's prose has frequently been called poetic, a description that alludes to the rhythm and sound of her sentences, the lyric plotlessness of her novels, and the self-conscious interiority of her characters. Woolf's friend, E.M. Forster, once claimed that Woolf's "problem" was that she should have been a poet, not a novelist.³ But poetic is a term that invites question, largely because it suggests that Woolf does not tackle the pedestrian world of ordinary life, or that her novels disdain prosaic subjects. While Woolf sought to remove the heavy furniture of the realist and naturalist novel in order to render the inner workings of the mind—the "atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall"—she knew that the modern novel could not flee from the external world of everyday things, from "the common objects of daily prose, the bicycle and the omnibus," as she writes in "A Letter to a Young Poet" (1932).⁴ Her characters will not dwell solely in their heads; they will dwell, for instance, in a physical world of London streets and public parks, where vagrants sing for money and airplanes advertise overhead.

Woolf's finest writing calls attention to ordinary experiences in a world full of ordinary things. Celebrators and critics of modernism have typically focused on Woolf's interest in the mind, or the "moment of being," but have left the ordinary largely overlooked, a tendency evident in our critical fascination with modernism's fantastic revelations: Joyce's "epiphany," Pound's "magic moment," Eliot's "still point of the turning world," or Proust's explosion of memory, triggered by such events as the taste of the madeleine.⁵ The modernist preoccupation with self-consciousness, located most strikingly in such moments as these, has been both praised and criticized, but it has rarely been questioned.⁶ Yet, as I will show, Woolf's modernism is not purely concerned with recording the subjective mind or heightened experience, but is deeply invested, stylistically and ideologically, in representing the ordinary.⁷

Certainly, those who argue that Woolf shares with other modernists an emphasis on subjective interiority, above all else, find much support in Woolf's writing. In "Modern Fiction," Woolf herself states that "For the moderns 'that,' the point of interest, lies very likely in the dark places of psychology," and many critics have taken this statement (among similar ones) as a point of departure.⁸ Elizabeth Abel, in Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis (1989), examines the way Woolf's works "echo and rewrite the developmental fictions of psychoanalysis."⁹ Most of the introductions to Woolf's major works also pick up on what Abel describes as Woolf's interest in internal states, "the points of origin marked by mother and father," or other "[p]rivate powerful sources."¹⁰ Beginning readers of Woolf's work will learn that "the external event is significant primarily for the way it triggers and releases the inner life" and that "there is a roominess about so many of Virginia Woolf's characters, a sense of mystery and of the inexplicable; they are rarely enclosed in precise outlines."¹¹ Woolf also has been called "a novelist usually considered the most inward of all British writers," an appraisal that is misleading, and which she would certainly dislike.¹² A general sense, in both popular...