Jenkins, A.

‘Getting the past to shadow this broken surface’: Time, Materiality, and

Aesthetics. In: Virginia Woolf, Literary Materiality, and Feminist Aesthetics. Material

Modernisms. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. 2023: 177-197.

Amber Jenkins (2023) explores Woolf’s representational use of object-forms in her

writing to undermine narrative linearity by embedding the past within the present

moment, and also examines several of her works including The Journal of Mistress

Joan Martyn. Each of these texts centre around the materiality of books and objects,

which offer the potential for lost stories to be re-established within dominant cultural

narratives. It concludes that Woolf’s interconnected theory of aesthetics draws upon

common and shared experiences to disrupt conventional or prescribed modes of

being.

Woolf conceptualises the past events of her life as a ‘pattern of detail’ that she can

weave into textual form.

The process of writing her life, of materialising her experiences ‘by putting [them]

into words’ (p. 85), is essential to understanding both the self and the past.

Doing so will highlight Woolf’s life-long understanding that materiality, in

literary and visual form, offers the potential for the past and present to intersect,

and for lost stories to be re-established within dominant cultural narratives.

Virginia Stephen’s early short fiction ‘The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn’ brings

together her criticism of the patriarchal history of print culture, the significance of

materiality in the process of reading and writing, as well as her exploration of the

visual nature of the literary arts. The story remained unpublished during Woolf’s
lifetime. It first appeared in print in a thirty-two page version edited by Louise

DeSalvo and Susan Squier in Twentieth-Century Literature in 1979.

The result is ‘The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn’, which opens with the first of two

narrative voices, that of historian Rosamond Merridew, who has ‘won considerable

fame among my profession for the researches I have made into the system of land

tenure in mediaeval England’ (CSF, p. 33). She has ‘exchanged a husband and a

family and a house in which I may grow old for certain fragments of yellow

parchment’, making reference to her own writings which, she suggests, only a few

people ‘would care to read if they could’ (p. 33)

Despite her commitment to historical fact, Rosamond has ‘not scrupled to devote

several pages of large print to an attempt to show, vividly as a picture, some scene

from the life of the time’ (p. 34). Here Woolf highlights a tension between history and

literature, between the ‘granite-like solidity’ of truth and the ‘rainbow-like

intangibility’ of literary art, which she would later explore in essays such as ‘The New

Biography’ (1927) and ‘The Art of Biography’(1939). In this early story, Woolf places

the same emphasis upon the tangible, material certainty of truth and the imagined

digressions found in Rosamond’s writing, which are often criticised by her peers who

claim that she has ‘no materials at my side to stiffen these words into any semblance

of truth. […] I am told, [that story-telling] is a useful art in its place; but it should be

allowed to claim no relationship with the sterner art of the Historian’ (CSF, p. 35).

Although the story provides no conclusion to this ‘quarrel’ between the arts of history

and fiction, at the opening of the text we can observe Woolf beginning to explore how

her writing might undermine the distinction between literary forms. She also invokes
the visual arts as an analogue for Rosamond’s writing, which ‘attempt[s] to show,

vividly as a picture […] Dame Elinor, at work with her needle; and by her on a lower

stool sits her daughter stitching too, but less assiduously’ (p. 34). Entering into the

interior spaces of the house, Rosamond’s writing makes visible aspects of history that

are often excised from dominant patriarchal narratives. The story, therefore, is a

nascent example of Woolf’s feminist interest in thresholds and border-crossing, her

instinct towards ‘the transitional aspect of boundaries, and to their fluctuation, their

permeability, their transgression’ (Burrells et al. 2007, p. ix). It also demonstrates how

materiality, and the visual or pictorial nature of narrative writing, is directly connected

to her feminist aesthetics.

Woolf’s attention to the materiality of the manuscript also works to undermine the

distinction between the past and the present, and the status of women in both; unlike

the other books in the collection, Joan’s journal is not ‘kept together in any way’, but

bundled together like ‘butcher’s bills, and the year’s receipts’ (CSF, p. 40). With its

‘greasy’ pages, its contents threaten to transgress its boundaries and imprint upon

those who interact with it: ‘Mr Martyn indeed offered to fetch a duster before

desecrating my white skin; but I assured him it was of no consequence’ (p. 41). In this

story, one of her very first literary experiments, Woolf explores textual and temporal

transgressions which have the potential to bring to light a forgotten history of

women’s lives and female experiences.

[T] they contribute to the experimental narrative structure, which creates a temporal

intersection between the distant past (that of Joan’s life in the fifteenth century), the

near past (two years before Rosamond’s visit to Martyn Hall), and the present moment
of the narrative (in which Rosamond recalls her visit).

Joan’s awareness of this forms the basis of self-expression in her writing, but her

vision soon becomes compromised by the prospect of marriage: ‘Marriage […] would

confuse the clear vision which is still mine. And at the thought of losing that, I cried

in my heart […] and straightaway I started chasing rabbits across the heath with

Jeremy and the dogs’ (CSF, p. 52). Woolf also revisits this idea in The Waves in the

figure of Susan who mourns her loss of vision later in her life: ‘I never rise at dawn

and see the purple drops in the cabbage leaves; the red drops in the roses. I do not

watch the setter nose in a circle, or lie at night watching the leaves hide the stars and

the stars move and the leaves hang still. The butcher calls; the milk has to be stood

under a shade lest it should sour’ (W, pp. 137–38).5 In both instances, Woolf positions

sight and vision as analogous to freedom; Joan fears that her own ‘clear vision’ would

be compromised by the institution of marriage, with her own subjective perceptions

submitted to that of her husband: ‘when I imagine such a picture, painted before me, I

cannot think it pleasant to look upon; and I fancy that I should find it hard to draw my

breath’ (CSF, p. 60).

Woolf enacts the historian’s attempt to establish historical narratives through a

material engagement with women’s writing. In the second section, Joan’s narrative is

pre-determined, written for her by men: ‘My mother called me from my book this

morning to talk with her in her room. […] She had a sheet spread before her, covered

in close writing’ (p. 49). This written marriage proposal from Sir Amyas of Norfolk

will determine whether Joan will become an ‘honourable and authoritative’ woman or

‘it will show that she is of no weight or worth. Either in this world or in the next’
(p. 51). As a material guarantee of her worth, Woolf highlights the socio-political

narratives that fix a woman’s position in history as wife and mother.

Woolf turns to the fragmentary literary materiality of women’s writing to explore the

exclusion of women from literary history and print culture. As Joshua Phillips

highlights, when writing these essays ‘Woolf recycles older paper to write her literary-

historical project where she writes back to her substrate’ (Phillips 2021, p. 198)

yet the manuscript fragment, which defies textual boundaries, offers new ways of

thinking about textuality. From her early short story ‘The Journal of Mistress Joan

Martyn’ (1906) to her final essays, she uses the image of the literary draft or fragment

to signal a lost female literary tradition that lies outside the public spaces of print.

Woolf’s unravelling of textual authority in her emphasis on literary processes is a

feminist act that works both to destabilise patriarchal narratives of succession while

developing new forms for writing.

Woolf’s literal and representational interest in matter and materiality, therefore,

coheres her theories of aesthetic form and textuality, as well as her feminist politics.

Her writing is founded upon shared experiences and an interconnected understanding

of life, art, and aesthetics.

Woolf’s modernist and feminist aesthetics are founded upon the very process of

writing, and it is through literary production that she is able to challenge and re-write

homogenous cultural narratives.

Woolf’s interactions with and representational use of literary materiality work to

highlight a shared theory of textuality founded upon equality and dialogue.

[R]eading the contexts of her creative processes reveal how Woolf’s impulses for

writing are generated from her interactions with the palpable matter of everyday life.

Woolf’s textual practices, therefore, offer new ways of thinking about the interplay

between materiality and aesthetics in her writing. An engagement with the materiality

of her literary processes foregrounds several key aspects of Woolf’s literary works:

firstly, that Woolf’s embodied experience of creating her texts, from writing, revising,

and editing, to printing and binding them (initially by hand during the early years of

the Hogarth Press) shaped her ideas about literature as a material form of art within

the broader context of twentieth-century material and visual culture; secondly, that her

material conceptualisation of text and textuality informs her modernist aesthetics,

particularly in her exploration of the temporal and visual nature of narrative writing;

and thirdly, that material objects in their various manifestations (such as colours,

fabrics, and forms) work covertly in her texts to signify both the presence and absence

of female stories that counteract dominant political discourses.