Equal Outsiders: Woolf and Coleridge Thinking Community, Romance, and Education in the Face of War

In a passage from Three Guineas (1938), which rhetorically foreshadows Churchill's famous June 1940 "we shall fight on the beaches" speech, Virginia Woolf prompts women to preserve and expand their ancestresses' habit of thinking critically even while lacking some comforts. Joining the newly-available public sphere, women who had thought "while they stirred the pot" (2001a: 160) are now called to become more articulate:

Let us think in offices; in omnibuses; while we are standing in the crowd watching Coronations . . . let us think as we pass the Cenotaph; and in Whitehall; in the gallery of the House of Commons; in the Law Courts; let us think at baptisms and marriages and funerals. Let us never cease from thinking—what is this "civilization" in which we find ourselves? . . . Where . . . is it leading us, the procession of the sons of educated men?

(161)

These lines echo Blake's "I will not cease from mental fight," which Woolf explicitly cites later in "Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid" (1942: 155). Woolf often interweaves Romantic tropes in her plea against war. Near the end of Three Guineas, for example, she alludes to Coleridge's line from "Kubla Khan," "ancestral voices prophesying war"¹ (Coleridge 1954: 298), when she speaks of "some ancestral memory prophesying war" (Woolf 2001a: 218). Such resonances of Romantic affects in Modernism are both frequent and meaningful, as the work of Mary Favret (2010) and Alexandra Harris (2010) shows. While Favret emphasizes the skewed remoteness of war imagery, especially for the British imagination, and Harris sees the Modernists' return to the Romantics as a tradition-embracing homecoming, an "imaginative claiming of England" (10), they both give less attention to the implications of the Romantic connection for a conception of community that truly goes beyond nationalism.

Building on an understudied textual reference, this paper traces some threads that tie Woolf's attitudes towards war to her critical response to Romantic political thought, particularly Coleridge's, as she works to dissociate the representation of women from "romance" (a trivialized inheritance of Romanticism) and recover the societal ideals of Romanticism for the feminist cause. Significantly, Woolf refers to Romantic writers at a crucial point in her argument. After delving into historical and socio-economic issues, after invoking both "the white light of facts" and "the coloured light of biography" (2001a: 143), after imagining the Society of Outsiders, Woolf sounds weary, almost unsure at the end of Three Guineas. Having unveiled the connection between war, capitalist greed, and the oppression of women, having proposed indifference to honors and the refusal of excess as chief solutions, Woolf points to something not yet fully thought out: "we can best help you to prevent war not by repeating your words and following your methods but by finding new words and creating new methods" (241). To indicate the purpose of these new, outsider-specific methods, Woolf falls back on "the great principles of Justice and Equality and Liberty" (241) and, in her very last endnote, cites three sources that might reveal "the views and aims of the outsiders" (293): Romantic writers from different nations—S. T. Coleridge, Walt Whitman, and George Sand. Woolf's use of three examples from the 19^th century suggests a renewed reliance on the Romantic paradigm. Although Favret, drawing on Woolf's notes in "The Leaning Tower" about the relatively limited effects of war on novelists such as Austen and Scott, thinks that Woolf underestimated her own remoteness from war and unfairly considered the 19^th century "immune" to mass conflict in a way the 20^th century was not (Favret 46), Woolf's return to the Romantics and their social models at the end of her pacifist essay suggests that her very conception of the nature of mass conflict has its roots in the 19^th century.

There is more at stake in Woolf's pointing towards Coleridge as a precursor of the Society of Outsiders than first meets the eye. This neglected reference reveals a deep-seated affinity between the two writers' worldviews, which functions in spite of (or perhaps...