Virginia Woolf on Fiction, and “Bleak House” in Particular

Man is a list-making animal.  Nothing, it seems, can be properly apprehended, digested, comprehended and then absorbed or rejected until it is first categorized in relation to its peers. 

Thus in her 1929 essay “Phases of Fiction,” Virginia Woolf divides the subject matter up into a list of six categories.  There are The Truth Tellers, The Romantics, The Character-Mongers and Comedians, The Psychologists, The Satirists and The Poets. 

By prevailing standards, this is a modest registry. “Writer’s Digest,” for instance, currently lists 21 genres of fiction. But let’s give Virginia the benefit of the doubt and say she was considering only what might be termed literature as opposed to, say, the broader realm of commercial fiction, the chief purpose of which is profitable entertainment. 

Significantly, in view of the three main books Bill has chosen for our seminar, Woolf focuses on “Bleak House” in the category of Character-Mongers and Comedians, eventually comparing and contrasting it with Jane Austin’s “Pride and Prejudice.” At the end of that section, George Eliot gets some consideration as well. 

The term “comedians” here does not mean authors whose aim is humor. Rather, it refers to authors who write books, in the English tradition, that have happy, or comedic (as opposed to tragic), endings. Such books generally conclude with successful marriages that often served to reinforce prevailing social norms after many trials and tribulations along the way. Woolf’s own second novel, “Night and Day” (her least highly regarded) easily fits within that category. 

But when one is in the mood for characters of extravagant force, one need look no further than “Bleak House,” Woolf maintains. “In Dickens, the character-making power is so prodigious that the very houses and streets and fields are strongly featured in sympathy with the people.” Thus, in “Bleak House,” one perceives a certain location as looking like or characterized by one thing or another because of the attributes of the character that inhabits it as opposed to the reverse. 

Thus, for instance, readers clearly see the chaotic conditions of the house in which poor Caddy Jellyby is brought up not because the place itself is much described, but because of the manner in which Dickens depicts Mrs. Jellyby’s preoccupation with the Borrioboola-Gha peoples of Africa at the expense of her family. 

Dickens works by way of exaggeration, Woolf says. “Who has met anyone who, whatever the day or the occasion, can be trusted to say the same phrase, to repeat the same action? This perpetual repetition has, of course, an enormous power to drive these characters home, to stabilize them.” 

Such characters, Woolf says, naming a few, serve as stationary points in the flow and confusion of the narrative and thereby firm up what she termed the extraordinary intricacy of the plot.

For me personally, the catatonic seizure-prone Mr. Smallweed, episodically shaken back into his senses by his granddaughter Judy, was one such character, albeit more significant to the plot than, say, the king of deportment, Mr. Turveydrop, who Woolf points to as one of the “gargoyles” of Dickens’ composition. 

There are times, Woolf says, when Dickens’ powers of character development pull readers away from his story because of the sentiments they generate.  She points in particular to Mademoiselle Hortense, dismissed from her presence by Lady Deadlock, walking shoeless through the wet grass. “She goes and leaves a strange wake of emotion behind her,” Woolf says. 

Similarly, in “Howards End,” Helen describes Ruth Wilcox walking off into the meadow. “Trail, trail, went her long dress over the sopping grass, and she came back with her hands full of the hay that was cut yesterday.” Another powerfully emotive image. 

But back to “Bleak House” where Woolf cites in the same context Mr. Tukinghorn’s friend (unnamed as I recall). “A man of the same mold and a lawyer, too, who lived the same kind of life until he was seventy-five years old, and then, suddenly conceiving (as it is supposed) an impression that it was too monotonous, gave his gold watch to his hairdresser one summer evening, and walked leisurely home to the Temple [an area between Fleet St. and the River Thames where lawyers lived and had their chambers], and hanged himself.” One can easily imagine Virginia pausing and dwelling on that depiction. 

The most interesting character in “Bleak House” for Woolf is Inspector Bucket. Rather than being static and extreme, he “is made up of contrasts and discrepancies,” she says. 

While at times bombastic, but very able in his official capacity, Bucket is also conscientious and even compassionate, Woolf says. “All these qualities are displayed by turns in the astonishingly vivid account of the drive through the night and the storm, in pursuit of Esther’s mother.” 

Dickens “uses this clear-cut, many-faced figure to sharpen his final scenes and then, letting Inspector Bucket of the detective force disappear, gathers the loose folds of the story into one prodigious armful and makes an end,” Woolf says. 

But while she clearly admires Dickens’ abilities (and, I suspect, greatly enjoyed “Bleak House”) Woolf also finds her literary predecessor lacking in an important respect.  His characters are unconvincing when it comes to intimacy with each other, she says, and thus fail to “interlock.” This, she argues, may be because Dickens’ own heart burned far more with indignation for public wrongs than for private relationships. 

“So it is that we begin to want something smaller, more intense, more intricate,” Woolf says, pointing to Jane Austin and in particular, to “Pride and Prejudice.” 

But back to lists and categories. 

In a previous post, I wrote about Virginia Woolf’s take on “Howards End,” material extracted from an essay in which she discusses all of Forster’s novels except for “Maurice,” which, dealing with homosexuality, was only published after first Woolf and then Forster had died. 

“We look, then as time goes by, for signs that Mr. Forster is committing himself; that he is allying himself to one of the two great camps into which most novelists belong,” Woolf said. 

She identified the two camps as “the preachers and teachers” headed by Tolstoy and Dickens on one hand, and “the pure artists” headed by Austin and Turgenev on the other.

Two categories this time, rather than six. 

Forster, Woolf says, has a strong impulse to belong to both camps at once and that may be one reason he is an author about whom “there is considerably disagreement” and whose gifts are “evasive.” 

He falls into the “pure artist” camp when it comes to “an exquisite prose style, an acute sense of comedy, (and) a power of creating characters in a few strokes which live in an atmosphere of their own.”  But at the same time, Woolf continues, “he is highly conscious of a message” and that tends to put him in with “the preachers and teachers.” 

Her own message: if a writer can’t be properly categorized, he or she can be hard to understand and digest. 

Well, how about Woolf herself?  That’s potentially a big topic since she experimented with different styles, but let’s keep it simple and stick with what Forster had to say about her. 

In his view, there are two categories as well – “The Temple of Art,” a rarified atmosphere within which beauty is pursued for the sake of itself, on one hand, and the real world on the other. 

Woolf’s writing, in Forster’s view, comes perilously close to the former, but in the end thankfully escapes, and in so doing, remains relevant. 

“She has all of the aesthete’s characteristics: selects and manipulates her impressions; is not a great creator of character; enforces patterns on her books; has no great cause at heart. So how did she avoid her appropriate pitfall and remain up in the fresh air where we can hear the sound of the stable boy’s boots, or boats bumping, or Big Ben; where we can taste really new bread, and touch real dahlias?”  

Because, Forster maintains, Woolf liked writing for fun and “in the midst of writing seriously, this other delight would spurt through.” 

“For you cannot enter the Palace of Art, therein to dwell, if you are tempted from time to time to play the fool,” he says.  It is by mixing and managing these two impulses – the serious and mischievousness – in masterly fashion that Woolf succeeds as few other writers can, Forster says. 

This aspect of her gifts is clearly evident, I believe, in “Mrs. Dalloway,” when, for instance she slyly pokes fun at the classes of society represented by Hugh Whitbread and Lady Bruton (that name alone says it all) on one hand, and Doris Kilman on the other. 

If, however, we return to Woolf’s six categories and ask Forster to place her in one of those, it would clearly be the last: The Poets. 

“She was a poet who wanted to write novels,” he says, pointing in particular to “The Waves” a novel often said to be her greatest work if not her most satisfying. “To the Lighthouse” is generally awarded that prize and I would certainly argue that “Mrs. Dalloway” is a very close second.