The Continuing Battle Against the Philistines: Virginia Woolf's Cultural Criticism.

Abstract

This thesis argues that Virginia Woolf drew heavily upon the Victorian idea of culture in criticizing her own society. Her early rebellion against the Victorians was more limited than is generally assumed, for in denouncing Victorian qualities like narrowmindedness and hypocrisy, she reiterated in substance what the major Victorian critics had already said. In addition, she faced problems similar to those of the Victorians: industrialization, mechanization, bureaucracy, intellectual doubt, and the position of the arts in society. Because of her upbringing in a rather traditional Victorian household, Woolf's life and works as a major "modern" writer lend themselves well to this placement of her within the context of the English critical tradition. The approach is chronological. Woolf's published works, her diaries and letters, and some unreprinted articles are employed to elucidate her awareness of and involvement in the literary, political, and social events of her age. Various aspects of her age influenced her outlook on life and , consequently, her writing. This was partly a case of purely personal growth; however Woolf also changed and developed in reaction to her society. Old family ties, the Hogarth Press, her husb and 's political work, and Woolf's own career as a journalist and novelist illustrate her broad knowledge of the world and the varied pattern of her life. Testaments of contemporaries and disagreements with writers such as Arnold Bennett and the thirties poets are employed to evaluate her central position in London literary life. The effects of two world wars, the various economic and social changes, and the political confusion of the thirties clearly influenced her writing. It is this perspective of Woolf as a writer working and changing within the atmosphere of her age and as an artist criticizing her society that is conveyed in this study. Matthew Arnold and John Ruskin are the primary representatives of Victorian cultural criticism here. In employing their theories for comparison with Woolf's views, I have considered the broad outlines of their thought to define the Victorian writers' general critical and cultural assumptions and their attempts to solve their society's problems. Like the Victorians, Woolf attempted to reconcile continuity with change, and she employed the values of art in her cultural criticism of society. From this cultural base, she opposed fragmentation with wholeness, commercialization with spiritual values, and mechanization with intellect and all the resources of the human mind. She gradually developed from an amateur journalist who wrote little about art and society to a full-fledged cultural critic who envisioned the artist as a leader and a prophet in society. Woolf always firmly believed in the search for truth and the disinterested perspective necessary to that search. Her belief in culture became stronger as she matured, while her hopes for a community of "common readers" dwindled. By the later 1920's Woolf began to don the mantle of the prophet, and she became more distinctly a critic of her society both in her self-image and in her work. Thinking and writing represented for her a mental fight against the evils of her society, and ironically, given her criticism of Victorian writers for being too moral in their roles as sages and prophets, the final image of Virginia Woolf reflects a writer with a high sense of moral duty to society, a writer, who, in criticizing that society, became a prophetic and rather alienated figure.