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

Notes

221 Notes Introduction 1. Haraway began blurring the borders between nature and culture with “Cyborg Manifesto” in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, 149–81. When Species Meet, concerning dogs and humans, develops the concept most deliberately. 2. Notable exceptions are Tremper, Goldman, and Alt, whose Virginia Woolf and the Study of Nature was published after this study was complete. Alt argues that Woolf resisted the taxonomical methodology of the natural history tradition in favor of other contemporary scientific approaches, attending both to these paradigms and to Woolf’s uses of scientific analogy. Recent papers from International Virginia Woolf Conferences also turn toward Woolf in a natural frame. See, for example, Alt; Blyth; Gerrard; Goldman, “’Ce chien est á moi’”; my “Woolf, Ecofeminism, and Breaking Boundaries”; and Sultzbach. Work on the modernist primitive by Torgovnick, especially in Gone Primitive, is also applicable. 3. Important works relating modernism to modernity include the journal Modernism /Modernity, which began appearing in 1994; Felski, Anderson, Dettmar and Watt’s edited collection; and Walkowitz. Important resistance to and reshaping of ideas of modernity has emerged in postcolonial studies. 4. See Earthcare 75–90. Merchant first detects this formation in the sixteenth century, particularly in Francis Bacon’s scientific discourse. This turned from an organic imagination that revered the earth as a living mother to a mechanical approach that subdued the earth to serve mankind’s own inquisitiveness. Another mechanical model in Western thought, “the anthropological machine of humanism,” has created, according to Giorgio Agamben, the idea of human superiority over animals by ceaselessly creating distinctions and divisions. His crafters of distinction include Aristotle, St. Thomas Aquinas, Linnaeus, and Haeckel. 5. Leading French feminists include Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, Catherine Clément, Julia Kristeva, and Monique Wittig, all of whom challenged logocentric 222 Notes to Pages 3–14 partriarchal discourse. Ecofeminist evocations of the mother goddess are a concern in chapter 6. 6. See especially Sturgeon and Gaard, “Toward a Queer Ecofeminism.” 7. For a fine summary of “Feminist Theory’s Flight from Nature,” see Alaimo 3–9. 8. Extended studies include Friedman’s Mappings, Jane Marcus’s Hearts of Darkness , and Phillips. 9. “Even oneself has felt it, driving any new idea into the great passive vulva of London, a sensation analogous to the male feeling in copulation.” This is from his postscript to Remy de Gourmont’s The Natural Philosophy of Love. 10. See for example The Waves, where Bernard is aware of “shells and bones” beneath London’s pavements (82), or “London Revisited,” where bones of extinct monsters lie in cellars (E 2:50). 11. Leonard Woolf felt that St. Ives had a permanent hold on the Stephen family (Beginning Again 163). Woolf’s nephew, Quentin Bell, proclaimed Cornwall “the Eden of her youth, an unforgettable paradise” (Virginia Woolf: A Biography 32). 12. Like the symbols Freud assigned to dream work, the images associated with abuse are, in my opinion, best studied for multiplicity of connotation and presentation , rather than as one-to-one clinical correspondences. 13. I am grateful to Michelle Garvey for bringing the posthuman into focus as a useful category for this study. James Joyce used “posthuman” in correspondence with his patron, Harriet Shaw Weaver. She had used “prehuman” to describe the “Penelope ” episode of Ulysses. He responded, “Your description of it . . . coincides with my intention—if the epithet ‘post human’ were added. . . . In conception and technique I tried to depict the earth which is prehuman and presumably posthuman” (Selected Letters289).Thismakesthehumanabriefepisode—aformofdecenteringalsofound in the cosmic view occasionally afforded by Woolf. 14. Examples of recent ecofeminist interest are Cantrell, Kostkowska, Waller, Walker, and Westling. As we proceed, I will be discussing ways that nature enters the mythic and figurative formulations of Abel; Madeline Moore, “Female Versions of Pastoral”; DeKoven, Rich and Strange; and DiBattista. 15. The first panel focused on creatures: Ian Blyth on rooks; Richard Espley on “others at the zoo,” and Jane Goldman on “the signifying dog.” In the second, Diana Swanson sought an ecofeminist in Jacob’s Room, Astrid Bracke crossed the “humannonhuman boundary,” and I proposed ecofeminist boundary breaking. 1. Toward a Greening of Modernism 1. The term originated in Wyndham Lewis’s Blasting and Bombardiering (1937) and has been much used in discussions of modernist history, particularly where gender is concerned. His journal, Blast, lasted only two numbers (1914–15). The second was a war number, introducing the event that would provide pervasive modernist images of lost illusions and shattered order. 2. I began this discussion...