In the Hollow of the Wave: Virginia Woolf and Modernist Uses of Nature

6. Virginia Woolf and Ideas of Environmental Holism

193 This book began by placing Woolf in the company of her contemporaries , finding that nature has a vigorous if largely unheralded presence in modernist literature and in modernity itself. We have seen Woolf writing about nature in numerous registers—in childhood explorations of natural history, the creative and political challenges of landscapes, cultivation of character in contexts of the garden, and imaginative crossings of the species barrier. This final chapter considers whether an ordering approach to nature is decipherable in Woolf’s work, and what her construction of such order might mean in facing trauma and environmental crisis. How do Woolf’s uses Somehow in the streets of London, on the ebb and flow of things, here, there, she survived, Peter survived, lived in each other, she being part, she was positive, of the trees at home; of the house there . . . part of people she had never met; being laid out like a mist between the people she knew best, who lifted her on their branches as she had seen the trees lift the mist, but it spread ever so far, her life, her self. •Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway Behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we— I mean human beings—are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art. •Woolf, “A Sketch of the Past” 6 Virginia Woolf and Ideas of Environmental Holism of nature contribute to or complicate feminist, modernist, and environmentalist understandings and agendas? This chapter, like the previous ones, selectively engages the diverse field of ecofeminist theory, which has struggled with women’s passive, essentialist assignment to nature. Early ecofeminists invoked holism, in the form of the Gaia principle, as a model for environmental order. Though interest in the goddess can be dismissed as an early phase of cultural ecofeminism, it is worth noting that Woolf was frequently cited by these ecofeminist forerunners, and that Woolf’s rewriting of myths resonates both with natural processes and modernist feminist experimentalism . Our knowledge and appreciation of this aspect of modernism is far from complete, as shown, for example, in a recent burgeoning of interest in modernist dance, which often evokes mythic situations and affects classical garb. In Modernism’s Mythic Pose, Carrie Preston analyzes various forms of solo performance, including recitation, dance, and film, implicating Amy Lowell, Isadora Duncan, and H.D. in the pattern. Woolf’s interest in science, present in childhood naturalist pursuits, was renewed in the last two decades of her life, as she pondered the new physics of her day and applied it to her perceptions and representations of natural phenomena. The preceding chapters of this book have explored the politics of Woolf’s responses to various ways that science, culture, and the arts have arranged andcontainednature,especially inaworld dominatedby patriarchy.Wehave repeatedly dealt with nature as discourse, figured in symbols, similes, and metaphors. For this chapter, such figurations take on greater complexity, as related to the marginal identity of selected perceivers, and to tentative, temporary , but hopeful visions of holistic order. Both chaotic and holistic scenarios have explanatory and even complementaryvalueintwenty -first-centuryecologicalscience—aviewanticipated by the eighteenth-century naturalist Gilbert White (Heidi Scott 18–23) and Romantic narratives of nature, both familiar to Woolf. Natural balance or equilibrium is regularly punctuated with disturbances on a local and minute scale (the tree that falls in the forest in Jacob’s Room [32]) or a catastrophic one (the meteor that led to the extinction of dinosaurs). The little ice age represented in Woolf’s Orlando falls somewhere in between. Environmentalists of various persuasions concur, however, that human cultures have disturbed natural equilibrium through the power of technology, employed in the service of modernity and for purposes of political domination. For concepts of the contingent and transitory nature of environmental 194 In the Hollow of the Wave Virginia Woolf and Ideas of Environmental Holism 195 order, Woolf could turn to new understandings of science in her own day. Contemporary physics, inclusive of Einstein’s theories of relativity, wave theory, and quantum mechanics, is now widely accepted as an influence on Woolf. Gillian Beer suggests that by the time she was writing The Waves, Woolf had access to the popularized accounts of physics and astronomy offered by Arthur Eddington and James Jeans, as well as new evidence and interpretation of evolution by H. G. Wells and Gerald Heard (Wave, Atom, Dinosaur). Beer suggests that wave-particle theory helped Woolf...