Molly Hite
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781501714450
- eISBN:
- 9781501714474
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9781501714450.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
This chapter considers Woolf’s lifelong association with Robins, a charismatic novelist, actress, and suffrage activist. Despite Woolf’s famous claim that the most important Edwardian writers were ...
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This chapter considers Woolf’s lifelong association with Robins, a charismatic novelist, actress, and suffrage activist. Despite Woolf’s famous claim that the most important Edwardian writers were men, Robins and other feminist fiction writers were popular and critically esteemed as well as being formidable models of the public woman, engaged in the aesthetic and political movements of the turn of the century. Woolf notoriously rejected their precedent as both writers and public figures, but many of her interactions with Robins, especially her revisions of Robins' own work, testify that her personal as well as professional competition with her foremother was intellectually stimulating and productive.Less
This chapter considers Woolf’s lifelong association with Robins, a charismatic novelist, actress, and suffrage activist. Despite Woolf’s famous claim that the most important Edwardian writers were men, Robins and other feminist fiction writers were popular and critically esteemed as well as being formidable models of the public woman, engaged in the aesthetic and political movements of the turn of the century. Woolf notoriously rejected their precedent as both writers and public figures, but many of her interactions with Robins, especially her revisions of Robins' own work, testify that her personal as well as professional competition with her foremother was intellectually stimulating and productive.
Molly Hite
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781501714450
- eISBN:
- 9781501714474
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9781501714450.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
This study argues that the greatest formal innovation in Virginia Woolf’s fiction is the muting, complicating or effacing of tonal cues: textual pointers guiding how readers feel and make ethical ...
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This study argues that the greatest formal innovation in Virginia Woolf’s fiction is the muting, complicating or effacing of tonal cues: textual pointers guiding how readers feel and make ethical judgments about characters and events. Much of Woolf’s narrative prose thus refrains from endorsing a single position, not only adding value ambiguity to the cognitive ambiguity associated with modernist fiction generally, but explicitly rejecting the polemical intent of feminist novelists in the generation preceding her own. This book contends that these novelists, especially the writer, actress and feminist activist Elizabeth Robins, influenced some of Woolf’s most important writings. In A Room of One’s Own Woolf borrowed arguments and examples from Robins’ prior polemical essay Ancilla’s Share. In Mrs. Dalloway and The Voyage Out she implicitly criticized Robins by revising her precursor’s major themes, using tonal ambiguity to introduce new perspectives. But Woolf reconsidered her rejection of polemical fiction later in her career. In the unfinished draft of her “essay-novel” The Pargiters, she created a brilliant new narrative form allowing her to make unequivocal value judgments.Less
This study argues that the greatest formal innovation in Virginia Woolf’s fiction is the muting, complicating or effacing of tonal cues: textual pointers guiding how readers feel and make ethical judgments about characters and events. Much of Woolf’s narrative prose thus refrains from endorsing a single position, not only adding value ambiguity to the cognitive ambiguity associated with modernist fiction generally, but explicitly rejecting the polemical intent of feminist novelists in the generation preceding her own. This book contends that these novelists, especially the writer, actress and feminist activist Elizabeth Robins, influenced some of Woolf’s most important writings. In A Room of One’s Own Woolf borrowed arguments and examples from Robins’ prior polemical essay Ancilla’s Share. In Mrs. Dalloway and The Voyage Out she implicitly criticized Robins by revising her precursor’s major themes, using tonal ambiguity to introduce new perspectives. But Woolf reconsidered her rejection of polemical fiction later in her career. In the unfinished draft of her “essay-novel” The Pargiters, she created a brilliant new narrative form allowing her to make unequivocal value judgments.
Kirsten E. Shepherd-Barr
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- December 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780190467876
- eISBN:
- 9780190467913
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190467876.003.0009
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Aesthetics
This chapter reads Hedda Gabler as self-conscious actor and director of her own drama. It builds on the groundbreaking work of Gay Gibson Cima on Elizabeth Robins’s depiction of Hedda in 1891. Cima ...
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This chapter reads Hedda Gabler as self-conscious actor and director of her own drama. It builds on the groundbreaking work of Gay Gibson Cima on Elizabeth Robins’s depiction of Hedda in 1891. Cima traced Robins’s development of an “autistic gesture” in acting the role of Hedda, whereby she would pause and gaze directly out at the audience. This created a tension between private mental state and public action, which in turn was part of a wider movement by actresses like Eleonora Duse and Janet Achurch to carve out a specific interior female space on stage through their gestures, expressions, and readings of roles. At the same time as Ibsen’s plays were premiering, suffrage theatre was beginning to highlight the related theme of how women were always performing a role and following a script someone else had written. Hedda is perhaps Ibsen’s strongest representation of women’s self-suppression and adoption of another’s identity.Less
This chapter reads Hedda Gabler as self-conscious actor and director of her own drama. It builds on the groundbreaking work of Gay Gibson Cima on Elizabeth Robins’s depiction of Hedda in 1891. Cima traced Robins’s development of an “autistic gesture” in acting the role of Hedda, whereby she would pause and gaze directly out at the audience. This created a tension between private mental state and public action, which in turn was part of a wider movement by actresses like Eleonora Duse and Janet Achurch to carve out a specific interior female space on stage through their gestures, expressions, and readings of roles. At the same time as Ibsen’s plays were premiering, suffrage theatre was beginning to highlight the related theme of how women were always performing a role and following a script someone else had written. Hedda is perhaps Ibsen’s strongest representation of women’s self-suppression and adoption of another’s identity.
Molly Hite
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781501714450
- eISBN:
- 9781501714474
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9781501714450.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
This chapter introduces the idea of tonal cues and considers how they work to guide readers’ affective responses—or are muted, contradictory or simply absent--in what is perhaps Woolf’s best-known ...
More
This chapter introduces the idea of tonal cues and considers how they work to guide readers’ affective responses—or are muted, contradictory or simply absent--in what is perhaps Woolf’s best-known novel, Mrs. Dalloway. Contrasting examples come from other canonical modernist literary works and from the fiction of Elizabeth Robins, the feminist precursor on whom this study focuses. The discussion emphasizes how tonal ambiguity in Mrs. Dalloway complicates readers’ understanding of and value judgments about the climax as well as individual characters.Less
This chapter introduces the idea of tonal cues and considers how they work to guide readers’ affective responses—or are muted, contradictory or simply absent--in what is perhaps Woolf’s best-known novel, Mrs. Dalloway. Contrasting examples come from other canonical modernist literary works and from the fiction of Elizabeth Robins, the feminist precursor on whom this study focuses. The discussion emphasizes how tonal ambiguity in Mrs. Dalloway complicates readers’ understanding of and value judgments about the climax as well as individual characters.
