career, and alternated irregularly between them. In literary circles, she is most famous for the experimental, lyrical style of the novels she produced in midcareer-Jacob's Room (1922), Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and The Waves (1931). The focus on external events in these works is tightly controlled; instead of chronicling action and achievement, Woolf trains her narrative attention on more evanescent shapes of thought and feeling as they are distributed among a seemingly random group of people. The second kind of novel Woolf produced seems, at the outset, more conventional. In these novels- The Voyage Out (1915), Night and Day (1917), Orlando (1928), and The Years (1937), for example-she tells a story; she draws her characters with sharp definition, inviting us to see them from the outside, from the familiar novelistic perspective of impossibly privileged observer. Interestingly, though, the two kinds of novels are designed to address similar issues, if from opposite angles: Woolf's characteristic chord is her often-subtle insistence on the falseness of «normalcy»; the unnatural restrictiveness of habit, both social and verbal; and the slow asphyxiation of imaginative freedom in the closed room of a dominant, prescriptive tradition, whether that tradition be propagated through family, school, or nation.
The presence of clear-cut plot and character, then, almost always signals the reader to look critically at the social script that has limited the characters being presented (or, in the case of Orlando, to appreciate Orlando's Houdini-like ability to escape-through magicomical trans -789- formations of time and gender-the stories in which he/she finds herself defined). Woolf's more traditional novels, although too imaginatively sympathetic to be satire, nevertheless work to expose the invisible «plot» of the past against the present, of convention against the free exercise of imagination and sensation. For example, what makes a novel like The Voyage Out quietly subversive is the unraveling of the usual marriage plot; Rachel and Terence are sharply suspicious of the institution of marriage that they have agreed to enter, to the point that they are described as most united when Rachel proposes that they break it off. When they receive congratulations on their engagement, Rachel dismisses the language of social correctness as 'sheer nonsense' in contrast with that of 'novels and plays and histories.' And in place of the consummation of marriage that we expect to find at the end of the novel, we are presented instead with Rachel's sickness and death. Although the methods are those of realism, the novel's displacement of expectation-a «happy» marriage-by what actually happens-fatal illness-suggests a reading of marriage as a kind of death for intelligent but sheltered women.
Woolf is famous for her eloquently argued protests against the different and unequal ways that men and women were (and are) educated and socialized. Her essays are more unsettling for being powerfully reasoned, yet remarkably unscarred by bitterness (see especially A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas). These feminist essays are the natural counterpart to her more realistic, storied novels, as is nowhere more apparent than in an early draft of the 1880 section of The Years (edited and published by Mitchell A. Leaska as The Pargiters). Woolf originally envisioned The Years as an essay-novel, in which each chapter is introduced and followed by a sympathetic but uncompromising analysis of social impositions on the characters. The Years therefore began as a hybrid of literature and criticism, and as such it serves to illustrate the elsewhere implicit interdependence of Woolf's more plotted novels and her feminist writing: the plot that circumscribes and defines character, Woolf suggests, is never written by the author, but by the combined determinants of class, gender, and the historical moment. It is only the pressure of society on individuals that creates representative «types» such as the Pargiter family, but even when such types have been cast, their suppressed uniqueness throws a shadow.
Society deforms the individual by forming her, by dictating a shape and a narrative for her life and her thoughts, as is shown through the -790- character of Kitty Malone in The Pargiters and The Years. Kitty, as the daughter of the master of St. Katharine's of Oxford, is someone whose yearnings after female companionship and the life of a farmer are never realized, subordinated to her hostess duties of pouring out tea for undergraduates, and later to her duties as the wife of a lord. Woolf's most revolutionary stroke in her portrayal of Kitty is neither to criticize nor to endorse Kitty's silent, occasionally fretful acquiescence to her 'education.' Woolf argues that women are taught to give 'restful sympathy' to men, told that the 'art of pleasing… consists in entire selfeffacement,' and denied free expression of their doubts or questions. The restrictions that «educate» women in the art of pleasing others also direct them to repress their own sexual and emotional passions as shameful. It is because women are socially controlled through shame that scorn or criticism of them is not a useful response, or conducive to social change.
If Woolf declines to shame women for assuming the roles designed for them, she is equally resistant to idealizing their sacrifice; for, as she stresses in A Room of One's Own, idealization and contempt are analogous ways of denying-and thereby stifling-the complexity of the real. In a speech she gave before the London Society for Women's Service in 1931, Woolf famously describes her determination to kill domestic ideals of womanhood-such as 'the angel in the house'-in simple self-defense: 'I turned upon that Angel and caught her by the throat. I did my best to kill her… [for] she would have killed me… That woman-but she was not a woman she was an Angel-has more blood on her hands than all the murderers who have ever been hanged.'
Woolf never loses her acute awareness that Angel and Bitch are caricatures, and she is determined to resist such reductiveness in her own writing. When she turns to her attention to men, therefore, she tries to imagine them as they see themselves, without surrendering her independence of judgment. Her alert but sympathetic identification leads her to argue that men, like women, are defended against passion, but their defense works differently, bringing them compensations for combating their desire that are not available to women.
The scene that best illustrates Woolf's theory that men produce culture as a defense against passion is one in which Edward Pargiter, in his rooms at Oxford, turns from a fitful reading of Antigone to a brief feeling of passion for Kitty. The sequence of events is carefully recorded: he drinks a glass of excellent port; reads the scene between Antigone and -791- Ismene; begins to feel sexual desire. Edward experiences his desire as degrading and resolves almost immediately to fight it, which he does by turning to a chorus in Antigone in which the two sisters have no part. His mind triumphs, and he transforms his vision of Antigone and Ismene into 'an ideal of womanhood [italics mine] which moved Edward not to desire them, but to desire to produce something, to be something which their spirit, the spirit of all that was holy, & pure, & lovely and at the same time. Just & magnificent & serene & high… would bless & sanction & reward.' He puts Antigone away and begins a highly derivative poem to Kitty as «Persephone» (he has recently discovered that Persephone is her middle name). He writes until he is overcome with disgust at his own imitativeness, then he shreds the paper and throws it away. (The version of this scene in The Years is much abbreviated.)
In her analysis of this scene, Woolf contends that young men are much more familiar with their feelings than young women; and that young men have learned from other males that love is dangerous, along with the best method of exorcising it. She points out that Edward is successful in producing 'a different and less disturbing emotion-a generalized idealisation of sex,' which also generates self-approval for having «conquered» his original feelings. She argues that 'when the writer idealises his subject he almost always sentimentalises himself'; his love for her, born of ignorance, is inevitably narcissistic. Finally, Woolf highlights the peculiarity of Edward's feeling for Kitty, its difference from his feeling for his male friends, by pointing out that it is imaginary (he hardly knew Kitty). As telling as Woolf's arguments are, even more powerful are the things she does not say: that although Edward would become an expert on Antigone (in The Years, he gives a copy of his translation of it to his cousin Sara Pargiter), he seems completely unaware of the ironic appropriateness of such 'expertise.' Antigone, whom he admires as 'fierce and daring,' is punished for these qualities by being buried alive at the end of the play, and it is precisely the practice of burying women alive that Woolf herself seeks to expose. The subtle evocation of women's buried lives is reinforced by Edward's allusion to Kitty as Persephone, whose marriage to Pluto, god of Hades, condemns her to spend half of every year in hell. What Edward cannot see is that he, too, wants to kill the girl he professes to admire, first by idealizing her, and then by marrying-and effectively burying-her. -792-
Woolf's essays in The Pargiters invite us to contrast two pictures: a picture of young men joining the 'great fellowship… of men together,' a fellowship promoted by five hundred years of male boarding schools; and an image of girls, isolated from the company of both sexes and kept in ignorance of culture. Both are programmed to repress their sexual feelings, but men learn to do so in a way that produces culture and self-approval, whereas women do so in silence, isolation, and shame. The heroes of the book are not the Edward Pargiters, men who understand the intricacies of ancient Greek grammar with little comprehension of the contemporary resonance of Antigone's tragedy, but men like Sam Brook and Dr. Joseph Wright, who, out of a profound respect for their mothers, formulate a «revolutionary» conception of marriage that demands no burial. Woolf quotes from Joseph Wright's proposal to Elizabeth Mary Lea:
There will never be a 'lord and master' in our home… I should lead a most unhappy, and I will say, a most miserable life… if you could, under any possible circumstances, ever become a mere Hausfrau… It is my greatest
