But to condemn
To be a member of the Hilbery household is to be steeped in the past: The talk brims with allusions to literature and history; the Cheyne Walk house is crowded with books, portraits, and the ever-present ghost of Alardyce; and the street itself is one on which a Who’s Who of nineteenth-century writers and artists—Thomas Carlyle, George Eliot, Henry James, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, James McNeill Whistler—had lived. Amid these hallowed surroundings, an ongoing battle between the centuries plays itself out. Conversation among the Hilberys is predictably boisterous, but nevertheless their domestic rituals suggest a world where relations between the sexes have changed little since the last century:
Daily life in a house where there are young and old is full of curious little ceremonies and pieties, which are discharged quite punctually, though the meaning of them is obscure, and a mystery has come to brood over them which lends even a superstitious charm to their performance. Such was the nightly ceremony of the cigar and the glass of port, which were placed on the right hand and on the left hand of Mr Hilbery, and simultaneously Mrs Hilbery and Katharine left the room. All the years they had lived together they had never seen Mr Hilbery smoke his cigar or drink his port, and they would have felt it unseemly if, by chance, they had surprised him as he sat there. These short, but clearly marked, periods of separation between the sexes were always used for an intimate postscript to what had been said at dinner, the sense of being women together coming out most strongly when the male sex was, as if by some religious rite, secluded from the female (p. 88).
Several of the novel’s characters come down firmly on the side of such a “clearly marked” world. Although Mrs. Hilbery muses in a letter to her sister-in-law that “one doesn’t know any more, does one? One hasn’t any advice to give one’s children” (p. 126), she is still eager to see Katharine married, and admits, “I don’t believe in sending girls to college” (p. 86). She also bemoans the previous generation’s “vitality” that “we haven’t got! We’re virtuous, we’re earnest, we go to meetings, we pay the poor their wages, but we don’t live as they lived. As often as not, my father wasn’t in bed three nights out of the seven, but always fresh as paint in the morning” (p. 103).
Even more staunchly conservative is William Rodney. “A man naturally alive to the conventions of society,” Woolf mockingly writes, “he was strictly conventional where women were concerned, and especially if the women happened to be in any way connected with him” (p. 215). Marriage, to him, is the sum and glory of a woman’s existence, and while Katharine, in a revealing scene, stares distractedly at the skies, Rodney rhapsodizes on the joys of wedlock:
“But for me I suppose you would recommend marriage?” said Katharine, with her eyes fixed on the moon.
“Certainly I should. Not for you only, but for all women. Why, you’re nothing at all without it; you’re only half alive; using only half your faculties; you must feel that for yourself” (p. 56).
Rodney admires Katharine’s beauty and intelligence, but he is also deeply threatened by her unwillingness to admire
“She lives... one of those odious, self-centred lives—at least, I think them odious for a woman—feeding her wits upon everything, having control of everything, getting far too much her own way at home—spoilt, in a sense, feeling that every one is at her feet.... She has taste. She has sense. She can understand you when you talk to her. But she’s a woman, and there’s an end of it” (pp. 60-61).
As his feeble attempts at poetry make hilariously clear, Rodney’s blind allegiance to the past has a cost: an inflexibility that makes him sadly unfit for the complex demands of modern life and love.
But Katharine, as is only proper for a heroine, does not yield to propriety’s pull so easily. Whether working on her grandfather’s biography or simply wandering around her house, she feels both drawn to and overwhelmed by the past:
Sometimes Katharine brooded, half crushed, among her papers; sometimes she felt that it was necessary for her very existence that she should free herself from the past; at others, that the past had completely displaced the present, which, when one resumed life after a morning among the dead, proved to be of an utterly thin and inferior composition (p. 35).
Yet even though “a great part of her time was spent in imagination with the dead” (p. 32), Katharine also has a fine and searching mind of her own. Alone among the Hilberys, she has a passion for mathematics, rather than for more traditional accomplishments like music or poetry. This passion gives rise to guilt as well as rapture:
Perhaps the unwomanly nature of the science made her instinctively wish to conceal her love of it. But the more profound reason was that in her mind mathematics were directly opposed to literature. She would not have cared to confess how infinitely she preferred the exactitude, the star-like impersonality, of figures to the confusion, agitation, and vagueness of the finest prose. There was something a little unseemly in thus opposing the tradition of her family; something that made her feel wrong-headed, and thus more than ever disposed to shut her desires away from view and cherish them with extraordinary fondness. Again and again she was thinking of some problem when she should have been thinking of her grandfather (pp. 37-38).
But torn though she may be, Katharine never abandons her dearly held preferences. She dreams frequently—in language that anticipates Woolf ’s pioneering
Flattered by William’s attentions but unable to return his love, Katharine considers marrying him anyway because she thinks that it might, paradoxically, allow her to preserve her identity and independence. In lyrical flights of fancy that would make her grandfather proud, she dreams of an all-consuming love, a “superb catastrophe in which everything was surrendered, and nothing might be reclaimed” (p. 93). But she also worries about the dissolution of her self that such a cataclysm might cause, and is therefore “able to contemplate a perfectly loveless marriage, as the thing one did actually in real life, for possibly the people who dream thus are those who do the most prosaic things” (p. 93). Perhaps, she cynically reflects, “to be engaged to marry some one with whom you are not in love is an inevitable step in a world where the existence of passion is only a traveller’s story brought from the heart of deep forests and told so rarely that wise people doubt whether the story can be true” (p. 189).
