Mansfield and Woolf: Catfight in Modernist Literature

The fluctuating rivalry-respect and backbiting-friendship between Mansfield and Woolf disturbs me. It is something that I notice now between women. In college, especially at HBCU’s, the competitive nature among women is obvious in the attire. It seems that there is this ongoing struggle for male attention and slight antagonism towards other competitors/females. Tyra Banks has been campaigning against this Naomi Campbell type mentality—which views other females in her field strictly as a threat and aims to destroy their careers—for years. There is something about this society that makes it easy for women to view other women as competitors and for two women who are successful in the same profession and rare in some way to duke it out with each other.

The same is true during the Feminist and Civil Rights Movement. According to some accounts I’ve read of women who were involved in both simultaneously, there was always a prompting to prove one’s value. In organizations like SNCC, SCLC, etc., there was a necessity for women to ban together against sexist men who held front seats in the Civil Rights Movement for other men. Then when these women would attend meetings regarding the Feminist Movement, the men there would prod them for theoretical arguments about the state of women and the female attendees would be drawn into competition with each other. Even if only at times, Mansfield and Woolf bought into this verbal mud wrestling match. In the same way that many men enjoy seeing a “catfight,” I suggest that certain men enjoyed seeing Mansfield and Woolf in a word-fight, simply because as Mansfield and Woolf continued to devalue each other, it decreases both of their chances for lasting success.

Both were, as successful women writers, rarities in their field. They were kindred spirits when they were together. Their work contains very similar ideas. However, for some reason they never really gained each others loyalty. They never tried to help each other develop new Modernist writing techniques: they just kept a constant fluctuation between colleagues and enemies. Why does this fluctuation persist, even after the intimate conversations they have?

The men in their lives could very well be a prime factor in the discordance between Mansfield and Woolf. Near the beginning of their relationship, Clive and Maynard instigate derision between Mansfield and Woolf: “Virginia was accused by Clive of ‘having come inimitable up to sample’ by repeating some spiteful Garsington gossip of his and Maynard’s to Katherine” (384). There is also “Kot—who told Virginia that Katherine’s ‘lies & poses’ had proved too much for him” (384). Needless to say, this led to Virginia calling Garsington the “underworld” and Katherine renaming Virginia and her friends “the Bloomsbury tangi” (385).

There is a constant evolution and de-evolution in their friendship, especially on the part of Mansfield. Sometimes Woolf is “immensely important” (388) in Mansfield’s life and other times Katherine pretends she loves one of Virginia’s fiction pieces when speaking with her but berates it to others (385). Virginia seems to have been able to control her jealousy by allowing it to manifest only with Vanessa (388), but Katherine took to public critical disparaging of Virginia’s work, despite the similarities in intention and themes between the two writers. So I guess my question is why is competition necessary among women, especially when there aren’t many women succeeding in a given field in the early twentieth century?

Longwinded Circumlocution, Verbosity, and Tedium in Monday or Tuesday

I’m glad to know that Woolf was just “experiment[ing]” (Kemp 66) when she wrote this nonsense. Reading Monday or Tuesday splashed cold water on any excitement I had to read Virginia Woolf’s novels. I keep trying to come up with ways to explain why I dislike these short stories so much, but the characteristics that I dislike about them are the same characteristics that Sandra Kemp praises.

I’m starting to feel like Margaret in Howard’s End. If Woolf wanted rhythm, she should have composed a song. If she wanted fragmentation, she should have stuck to painting. Even The Times Literary Supplement said that the stories “‘aspire to the condition of music’: it cannot reach it” (66). The stories seem like a fun experiment and that it is a great writing exercise, but Woolf was correct when she described them as “wild outbursts of freedom, inarticulate, ridiculous, unprintable mere outcries” (63). She said that they are “inarticulate, ridiculous” and “unprintable.” I’ll just say I believe her and leave it at that.

Another issue I have with Monday or Tuesday is that the stories aren’t about anything. I even have trouble watching “Seinfeld” because it drags on and on about nothing until I feel like I’ve aged three years in a thirty minute time span. The same applies for Woolf’s short stories. Kemp intimates, “They are rarely about anything in the conversational sense” (63). Literature that isn’t conversational is like Monopoly money—it does have some value, but one still can’t take it to a real bank. At the end of the day, what about Woolf’s short stories can one take to the bank? What can one value, practice, or appreciate about it? Maybe some of my classmates can help me find the literary value in Monday or Tuesday. As of now, however, I would tweak the The Dial’s review to say that “she has mastered starting anywhere and arriving” nowhere (66).

Woolf also experiments with fragmentation in Monday or Tuesday, which adds another annoyance and “inarticulate[ness]” to the text. Monday or Tuesday is filled with incomplete thoughts, phrases, and perspectives and sudden deceptive shifts in perspective. Her fragmentations are meandering boxcars of thought that reject the tradition of the full train of thought: thus, they try to function as isolated boxcars but lack locomotion. Ergo, they lose function and become a hindrance. Kemp says that “Woolf used the stories to introduce perceptions that didn’t obviously lead anywhere, or become part of a larger unit” (62). This makes me think that Woolf is selling ideas rather than plots, drama, comedy, etc. Kemp also compares Woolf to Eliot saying that they both “present the boredom, the horror and the reality of the everyday world rather than to construct a fictional one” (63). The problem with this comparison is that these grand ideas are not put into boring, everyday circumstances like Eliot, who gracefully and dexterously twines verbose into gold; they are instead buried under boring, pointless, dribble in Monday or Tuesday. Who wants to find a cupcake in a garbage dump? Even if the cupcake is found, no one would want to eat it. Presentation is everything and Woolf wraps her ideas in garbage. I don’t think this is what Woolf meant when she spoke of “‘rubbish reading’” (64) but this is definitely what I think of.

However, in Monday or Tuesday there is the idea of crossing genre lines. This is clear but is still unappealing. The only thing reading Monday or Tuesday has done for me is illustrate how writers tried to incorporate the dominant themes of different genres into their work. Because Woolf admitted these stories were inexperienced trials and diversion, I can’t allow myself to put much stock into it. Despite this rant, I do like “A Society” and “Kew Gardens.” They are the lone soldiers in this collection.

The Synthesis of Expression and Form in Modern Art

At the start of Glen Macleod’s chapter, he establishes the essentialness of the interdisciplinary nature of Modern Art. This reminds me of Helen and Margaret’s eternal argument in Howard’s End. In terms of art forms influencing each other, Margaret must represent the standpoint of classical representational art, which asserts an impossibility of the form of one art being adopted by another. On the other hand, Helen speaks on behalf of Modern Art when she illustrates Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 in C Minor as a drama of goblins and elephants. She views music as literature and drama, rather than as just music. Her deduction embodies the soul of the Modernist Movement.

It is a little known fact that the vast majority of early twentieth century literature originated as pictorial art. It is even lesser known that there are oppositional rifts in abstract arts such as veristic surrealism and absolute surrealism or geometrical and non-geometrical abstract art. It is very interesting to see how two artistic movements can be influenced by the same art but are theoretically and practically discordant with each other. A good example is Fauvism and Cubism, as depicted in Alfred H. Barr’s, Jr. sketch of the interrelatedness of Modern Art.

Another potential rift is exposed in “Desmond MacCarthy: The Post-Impressionists” and “Clive Bell: The Artistic problem.” MacCarthy asserts the importance of emotional expression in art over its literal representation of objects. He uses childhood art to support his claim for primitive art. Even though a painter, author, or sculptor can realistically depict something or someone, there must be a “significant” amount of expression in the work. He believes that “there comes a point when the accumulations of an increasing skill in mere representation begin to destroy the expressiveness of the design” (101). Thus, to MacCarthy, an artist may or may not acquire the skill for realism. This is of no consequence. The artist must instead be wholly devoted to expressing emotion.

However, in “Clive Bell: The Artistic problem,” Bell gives his attention to form more so than expression. Although he indicates that expression—creative impulse—is an essential part of the artistic process, he does not value expression in and of itself but values expression contained in a form. To Bell the form is the last step to prove mastery of an art.

Although MacCarthy and Bell esteem different aspects of art, the nature of Modern Art allow these differences to unify. It seems that, according to Macleod’s overview of Modern Art, form becomes a means of expression to Modern artists. Because of the rifts and derision sparked by the fight for artistic revolution or tradition or evolution, re-revolution, and de-evolution, it stands to reason that MacCarthy and Bell could use a synthesizing. As MacCarthy mentions, synthesis or “Synthesists” does not adequately represent the individual; however, in this case, synthesis can benefit the overall analysis of Modern Art. In combining the two theories, one can discern that Modern artists’ emotions were expressed through form. All of the denominations in the spiritual quest for Modernist forms attest to that. Therefore, In Modern Art, MacCarthy’s cry for emotional expression and Bell’s plea for form are one and the same. The different forms are the result of artistic emotional expression.

Eliot's Standing on top of Dead People!: "Tradition and the Individual Talent" in Eliot's Early Poems

Of the poems we were assigned, “Preludes” seems to be incongruent with the others. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” “Portrait of a Lady”and“La Figlia che Piange” deal with different types of love. There is the middle aged lust of “…Prufrock,” the budding friendship of “Portrait…,” and the broken heartedness of “La Figlia…” “Preludes,” on the other hand, deals with an undefined sin, evidenced by the “sordid images” and “soiled hands.” The poem explores the morning after a night of decadence and debauchery as the subject recovers from a night of drinking and begins to remember what transpired and possibly recognize the condemnation of his soul.

Some of the common features of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” “Portrait of a Lady,” and “La Figlia che Piange” are that they bear epigraphs of great writers. Eliot leans on “the dead poets, his ancestors,” Virgil, Marlowe, and Dante, to add more depth to his poems. This refers back to “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” the first section of which focuses on the involvement that dead poets have in influencing living poets. With these poems, he emphasizes his assertion that no work is completely individual. He says, “…we shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of [a writer’s] work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously.” Thus, Eliot avows his deftness by incorporating some of his great forerunners.

Prufrock and Other Observations begins with a dedication to Jean Verdenal, who died two years before the first edition was published. The epigraph is of Virgil speaking to Status in Dante’s Purgatorio saying, “Now canst thou the sum of love which warms me to thee comprehend, when this our vanity I disremember, treating a shadow as substantial thing” (Canto XXI, 133-136).

“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” begins with Dante’s The Inferno. “If I believed that my answer were to a person who should ever return to the world, this flame would stand without further movement; but since never one returns alive from this deep, if I hear true, I answer you without fear of infamy” (Canto XXVII, 60-66). Eliot’s poems actually deals with a middle aged man’s insecurity, which calls for such absolute secrecy as found in Dante. According to Eliot’s essay “Hamlet” and James Torrens’s “Eliot’s Essays: A Bridge to the Poems,” Eliot not only stands on the shoulders of Dante but gets a boost from Shakespeare’s, as well. He forms the Prufrock character as a combination of Hamlet, who is older and “overmature in thoughts” and Polonius, who is also an older man but is immature. This creates an internal conflict in the poem between Prufrock’s mature age and his youthful, lusty ambitions.

“Portrait of a Lady” pulls its title from James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and bares an epigraph extracted from Christopher Marlowe’s play The Jew of Malta. It reads, “Thou hast committed—/ Fornication; but that was in another country, / And besides, the wench is dead.” Similar to the dexterity Eliot shows in “…Prufrock,” “Portrait…” incorporates Jamesian elements and Marlowian conflict into this poem.

“La Figlia che Piange,” which means “The Weeping Girl” looks back to Virgil’s The Aeneid for its epigraph, “O, how am I to speak of you, maiden?” Eliot chooses to speak of this maiden in the same manner that a play director or playwright would. He describes and defines her through a series of commands or directions.