ambition that you shall live, not merely exist; and live too in a way that not many women have lived before, if unlimited devotion and self-sacrifice on my part can do anything towards attaining that end…
Women who must repress their own feelings in service to the feelings of others, whose sexual and intellectual responses are curbed by shame and ignorance, are circumscribed yet again by the code of silence. Shrouded in secrecy, sexual fear mutates into furtive guilt, as Woolf demonstrates through an abortive adventure of Rose Pargiter's when she is ten years old. Rose wants to go to Lamley's toy store one evening to buy a fleet of ducks and swans for her bath. She gets permission to go, on condition that she not go alone; however, neither Bobby (Martin in The Years) nor Nurse will go with her, so she decides to go alone. She pretends to be making an adventurous night ride through hostile territory, when a man suddenly emerges from under the gas lamp near the pillar box. She pretends to shoot him, but his face is so horrible it shatters her illusion. On the way back, the man is still there, illuminated, leaning against the pillar box as if he were ill, and no one else is in sight. 'As she ran past him, he gibbered some nonsense at her, sucking his lips in and out; & began to undo his clothes… ' Later that night she is awakened by nightmares that he is in her room, but she cannot relieve her terror by telling anyone, partly out of guilt (she had dis-793- obeyed) and partly out of shame: 'It was horrid, nasty, what she had seen… He had undressed.'
In the third essay of The Pargiters Woolf severely indicts society for its secretiveness about what she calls 'street love, common love.' Denial of the realities of abuse is ineffective as a protection against it; as Woolf points out, 'children of Rose's age are frequently assaulted, and sometimes far more brutally than she was.' Woolf suggests that Rose feels guilty when she sees the man because his face, working with outlawed desire, reflects similarly outlawed feelings in herself that she fears; her fear of herself coalesces with her fear of the man, and her inability to distinguish clearly between the two creates a clandestine and distorted bond between herself and the abuser. Woolf traces the root of the problem to 'the instinct to turn away and hide the true nature of the experience, either because it is too complex to explain or because of the sense of guilt that seems to adhere to it,' criticizing novelists, biographers, and autobiographers for having refused to treat the subject more openly. Woolf goes on to show how Rose's hidden shame and fear poison her subsequent relationships with men.
In the final version of The Years (1937), Woolf is much less explicit about the implications of what happens to members of the Pargiter family. As the years wheel by, Woolf brings the reader into the family at intervals, ending when most of the children are in their seventies. Major historical events take place in the distant background: the deaths of Charles Stuart Parnell and Edward VII, the rise of Nazi Germany. The First World War is the only event to erupt briefly into the foreground, during a bombing raid on London. Parents, husbands die in the intervals between chapters, without seriously disabling the established structure of family life.
What then is The Years about? This family novel, meandering unevenly over fifty-odd years, seems radically discontinuous with The Waves (1931), which preceded it. And in one sense, the discontinuity is real: in The Waves, we know only the voices of the characters, their innermost thoughts and desires, whereas in The Years we see the characters primarily from the outside. Our lengthy immersion in the characters' lives is designed to enlist our tolerance, even sympathy. It isn't until we reach the 'present day' that the novel unmasks its more radical purpose: to criticize not individuals but what Martin earlier called the 'abominable system' of family life, in which a group of different people are made to live, 'boxed up together, telling lies.' Indicted along -794- with family life are the more superficial conventions of social intercourse, the construction of identity as fixed and knowable rather than mysterious and fluid, and the novelistic habit of categorizing people. At the family party that concludes the book, North Pargiter wonders, 'What do [politicians] mean by Justice and Liberty?… Something's wrong, he thought; there's a gap, a dislocation, between the word and the reality. If they want to reform the world, he thought, why not begin there, at the centre, with themselves?'
The Years suggests throughout that if political and social reform is to be more than mere rhetoric, it must include a restructuring of the family, the self, and artistic representations of the self. As North wanders through the party, over which the magnified self-interest and grotesque homogenization of the Third Reich distantly broods, North contemplates 'the contamination of family life':
This [family life] is the conspiracy, he said to himself; this is the steam roller that smooths, obliterates; rounds into identity; rolls into balls. He listened… my boy-my girl… they were saying. But they're not interested in other people's children, he observed. Only in their own; their own property; their own flesh and blood, which they would protect with the unsheathed claws of the primeval swamp… How then can we be civilised, he asked himself?
The characters in The Years continue to look for traces of life beneath the tangle of roles dictated by habit and tradition. North Pargiter, straight from a farm in Africa, sees society as a jungle in which he is 'provided only with broken sentences, single words, with which to break through the briarbush of human bodies, human wills and voices, that bent over him, blinding him.' Still, he believes that underneath the forms imposed on humanity, there is the 'sweet nut,' 'the fruit, the fountain that's in all of us.' That fountain, bubbling up beneath overgrown institutions of family, society, and language, evokes the Dionysian energy and alienated potential of the unconscious. In a conversation with Nicholas after an air raid, Eleanor asks, 'How can we improve ourselves… live more… live more naturally… better?' and Nicholas answers,
'It is only a question… of learning. The soul… It wishes to expand; to adventure; to form-new combinations?… Whereas now,'-he drew himself together; put his feet together; he looked like an old lady who is afraid of mice-'this is how we live, screwed up into one hard little, tight little-knot?… Each is his own little cubicle; each with his own cross or holy books; each with his fire, his wife… '
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Peggy, too, wants a less predictable, imaginable way of life; in a bitter moment she lashes out at her brother in the fear that his life will be yet another compromise softened by token compensations: ''You'll write one little book, and then another little book, she said viciously, 'instead of living… living differently, differently. '
The problem, of course, is how to support the desire of those accustomed to the security of social roles to 'live differently,' to expand and form new and more vital combinations. That the old system of decorum is moribund, enervating, powerless to promote real knowledge or intimacy, is beyond question. North thinks with disgust of the discomfort caused by 'this half knowing people, this half being known, this feeling of the eye on the flesh, like a fly crawling.' A little later the same evening he extends his critique of social intercourse to narrative convention when he watches Sara leave the room without looking in the mirror.
From which we deduce the fact, he said to himself, as if he were writing a novel, that Miss Sara Pargiter has never attracted the love of men. Or had she? He did not know. These little snapshot pictures of people left much to be desired, these little surface pictures that one made, like a fly crawling over a face, and feeling, here's the nose, here's the brow.
After years of writing experimental novels in which she had avoided using 'little snapshot pictures' that promote the illusion of knowledge, Woolf returned to this technique in The Years to underscore its falseness, its inadequacy. The Years ends on what might seem to be an impossibly hopeful note, with the dawn sky wearing 'an air of extraordinary beauty, simplicity and peace,' in tribute to people like Eleanor, who even after seventy years of service to others, has somehow preserved the 'keen sensation' of life. The dawn is full of optimism that the human race, still in its infancy, might grow to maturity. This optimism, never very robust, would not last long after 1937; it was shortly to be displaced by the despair of Between the Acts, the outbreak of World War II, and Woolf's own suicide in 1941.
If Woolf's last two novels were shadowed by the imminence of World War II, the possibility of a Nazi occupation of Britain, and the extermination of difference, the experimental novels published from 1922 to 1932 were haunted by the memory of World War I, which fueled an early and accelerating determination to live and record -796- experience 'differently.' Woolf had sustained devastating private losses-of parents and siblings-before the war, but the war so amplified the sense of random loss that in 1925 Woolf suggested her work be categorized as something other than novels-'elegy?' she proposed. Intellectually, Woolf expressed contempt for war as the violent extension of the homosocial bond formed in all-male schools (see Three Guineas). In her manuscript notes for a 1931 speech (reprinted as the appendix to The Pargiters), Woolf calls war 'a stupid and violent and hateful and idiotic and trifling and ignoble and mean display.' In her novels, Jacob Flanders, Septimus Warren Smith, and
