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GEOCRITICISM AND SPATIAL LITERARY STUDIES

Modernist Waterscapes
Water, Imagination and Materiality
in the Works of Virginia Woolf
Marlene Dirschauer
Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies

Series Editor
Robert T. Tally Jr.
Texas State University
San Marcos, TX, USA
Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies is a new book series focusing on
the dynamic relations among space, place, and literature. The spatial turn
in the humanities and social sciences has occasioned an explosion of
innovative, multidisciplinary scholarship in recent years, and geocriticism,
broadly conceived, has been among the more promising developments in
spatially oriented literary studies. Whether focused on literary geography,
cartography, geopoetics, or the spatial humanities more generally,
geocritical approaches enable readers to reflect upon the representation of
space and place, both in imaginary universes and in those zones where
fiction meets reality. Titles in the series include both monographs and
collections of essays devoted to literary criticism, theory, and history, often
in association with other arts and sciences. Drawing on diverse critical and
theoretical traditions, books in the Geocriticism and Spatial Literary
Studies series disclose, analyze, and explore the significance of space, place,
and mapping in literature and in the world.
 Marlene Dirschauer

Modernist
Waterscapes
Water, Imagination and Materiality in the Works
of Virginia Woolf
Marlene Dirschauer
University of Hamburg
Hamburg, Germany

ISSN 2578-9694     ISSN 2634-5188 (electronic)

Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies
ISBN 978-3-031-13420-3    ISBN 978-3-031-13421-0 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13421-0

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature
Switzerland AG 2023
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
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The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
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This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
To Leonie
 Series Editor’s Preface

The spatial turn in the humanities and social sciences has occasioned an
explosion of innovative, multidisciplinary scholarship. Spatially oriented
literary studies, whether operating under the banner of literary geogra-
phy, literary cartography, geophilosophy, geopoetics, geocriticism or
the spatial humanities more generally, have helped to reframe or trans-
form contemporary criticism by focusing attention, in various ways, on
the dynamic relations among space, place and literature. Reflecting
upon the representation of space and place, whether in the real world,
in imaginary universes or in those hybrid zones where fiction meets
reality, scholars and critics working in spatial literary studies are helping
to reorient literary criticism, history and theory. Geocriticism and
Spatial Literary Studies is a book series presenting new research in this
burgeoning field of inquiry.
In exploring such matters as the representation of place in literary
works, the relations between literature and geography, the historical
transformation of literary and cartographic practices and the role of
space in critical theory, among many others, geocriticism and spatial
literary studies have also developed interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary
methods and practices, frequently making productive connections to
architecture, art history, geography, history, philosophy, politics, social
theory and urban studies, to name but a few. Spatial criticism is not
limited to the spaces of the so-called real world, and it sometimes calls
into question any too facile distinction between real and imaginary

vii
viii SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE

places, as it frequently investigates what Edward Soja has referred to as

the ‘real-and-imagined’ places we experience in literature as in life.
Indeed, although a great deal of important research has been devoted
to the literary representation of certain identifiable and well-known
places (e.g., Dickens’s London, Baudelaire’s Paris or Joyce’s Dublin),
spatial critics have also explored the otherworldly spaces of literature,
such as those to be found in myth, fantasy, science fiction, video games
and cyberspace. Similarly, such criticism is interested in the relationship
between spatiality and such different media or genres as film or televi-
sion, music, comics, computer programs and other forms that may sup-
plement, compete with and potentially problematise literary
representation. Titles in the Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies
series include both monographs and collections of essays devoted to
literary criticism, theory and history, often in association with other arts
and sciences. Drawing on diverse critical and theoretical traditions,
books in the series reveal, analyse and explore the significance of space,
place and mapping in literature and in the world.
The concepts, practices or theories implied by the title of this series are
to be understood expansively. Although geocriticism and spatial literary
studies represent a relatively new area of critical and scholarly investigation,
the historical roots of spatial criticism extend well beyond the recent past,
informing present and future work. Thanks to a growing critical awareness
of spatiality, innovative research into the literary geography of real and
imaginary places has helped to shape historical and cultural studies in
ancient, medieval, early modern and modernist literature, while a discourse
of spatiality undergirds much of what is still understood as the postmodern
condition. The suppression of distance by modern technology,
transportation and telecommunications has only enhanced the sense of
place, and of displacement, in the age of globalisation. Spatial criticism
examines literary representations not only of places themselves but of the
experience of place and of displacement, while exploring the interrelations
between lived experience and a more abstract or unrepresentable spatial
network that subtly or directly shapes it. In sum, the work being done in
geocriticism and spatial literary studies, broadly conceived, is diverse and
far-reaching. Each volume in this series takes seriously the mutually
 SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE ix

impressive effects of space or place and artistic representation, particularly

as these effects manifest themselves in works of literature. By bringing the
spatial and geographical concerns to bear on their scholarship, books in
the Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies series seek to make possible
different ways of seeing literary and cultural texts, to pose novel questions
for criticism and theory, and to offer alternative approaches to literary and
cultural studies. In short, the series aims to open up new spaces for critical
inquiry.

San Marcos, TX Robert T. Tally Jr.

 Acknowledgements

Many people have helped me bring this project to fruition, and it is a plea-
sure to acknowledge their support and generosity. First of all, I would like
to extend my warm gratitude to Claudia Olk for seeing the potential of my
project ‘on the far side of a gulf’ many years ago and for guiding me
through the process of writing this book with her expertise and her deep
grasp of Woolf’s works. I would also like to thank Cordula Lemke for her
lucid comments on earlier drafts of this book and for her encouragement
and support.
The Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School of Literary Studies, Berlin,
funded the doctoral research on which this monograph is based, for which
I am incredibly grateful. Special thanks to Rebecca Mak, who taught me
to be bolder. During my time at the graduate school, I greatly benefited
from the continuous dialogue with my fellow Schlegelians: Louisa
Künstler, Jan Lietz, Lisa Müller, Caroline Schubert, Christoph Witt and
Niovi Zampouka.
My research stay at the University of Cambridge was particularly
productive for my writing, and I thank Andrew Webber for his judicious
comments. Over the past few years, I have had the privilege of sharing my
ideas for this book with a number of colleagues and friends: Jennifer Bode,
Elizabeth Bonapfel, Justus Gronau, Alan MacKenzie, Ferdinand von
Mengden, Anat Messing Marcus, Björn Quiring and Julia Weber. I am
especially grateful to Ansgar Dirschauer, Anne Enderwitz, Henrike
Höllein-Krause, Lukas Lammers and Marlies Zwickl for generously giving
their time to read different chapters of the manuscript and for providing
invaluable criticism.

xi
xii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

During the COVID-19 pandemic, I had the great pleasure of joining a

remote study group with three fellow Woolfians: Angela Harris, Imola
Nagy-Seres and Erin Penner. This book profited as greatly from their
expertise as I did from their kindness and companionship.
Jaclyn Arndt gracefully navigated me through the revision process, and
I cannot thank her enough for her diligent copyediting, which was kindly
funded by the English department at Humboldt University, Berlin. All
remaining errors and idiosyncrasies are entirely my own. Thank you to
Molly Beck, Paul Smith T. J. and Allie Troyanos for helping me bring this
book to publication.
I am grateful for the love and support of my family, who somehow
made it feel natural for me to plunge into these unfathomable waters, and
to my dear friends Christiane Alberts and Laura Bergmann, who always
waited for me, at the shore. I thank Helga and Jürgen Gembus for the safe
haven they have provided over the years. Modernist Waterscapes would not
have been written were it not for Yannick Bauer’s sharp wit and tender
patience—I need ‘a little language’ to properly thank him. The book grew
in time with our daughters, whose presence and humour (‘Mummy, why
do you only write books no one is going to read?’) never fail to get me
through my lowest ebbs. And, finally, I would like to thank Leonie
Achtnich for being such an astute reader and such a wonderful friend. This
book is dedicated to her.
 Contents

1 Introduction:
 Virginia Woolf’s Modernist Waterscapes  1
1.1 Modernism and Water: ‘Blueing’ Virginia Woolf  5
1.2 The Materiality of Metaphor  8
1.3 Mapping Modernist Waterscapes  12
References 15

2 Aqueous
 Affinities: Woolf, Bachelard and the English
Romantic Poets 21
2.1 Bachelard’s Water and Dreams and Woolf’s Poetics of Water 24
2.2 Woolf’s Waterscapes: ‘More Congenial to Me Than Any
Human Being’ 26
2.3 ‘And Myself So Eliminated of Human Features’: Water and
the Appeal of the Impersonal 32
2.4 From the ‘Incessant Shower’ to the ‘Bottom of the Sea’:
Woolf’s Dialectics of Surface and Depth 42
2.5 Writing in Water: Woolf, Keats and the Possibilities of
Ambiguity 47
References 53

3 ‘How
 It Floats Me Afresh’: Water in Woolf’s Early
Experimental Fiction 57
3.1 ‘And We, Submerged, Widen Our Eyes Again’: Exploring
New Territories in the Early Stories 59

xiii
xiv Contents

3.2 The Blue Air-Ball Beneath the Fountain: Elusive (Subject)

Matter in Jacob’s Room  69
References 78

4 The
 Fluid Texture of Time: To the Lighthouse, Mrs.
Dalloway, Orlando, The Waves 81
4.1 The Rhythm Between Depth and Surface: Competing
Temporalities in Mrs. Dalloway  88
4.2 ‘In the Face of the Flowing’: Movement and Ecstasis in To
the Lighthouse  95
4.3 The Aggregate States of Time: (Re)Writing Literary
History in Orlando109
4.4 ‘And Time Lets Fall Its Drop’: Saturating the Moment in
The Waves 119
References127

5 ‘The
 Obscure Body of the Sea’: Female Bodies, Water and
Artistic Creation from The Voyage Out to The Waves133
5.1 The Voyage Out: The Young Woman and the Sea139
5.2 ‘To Move and Float and Sink’: Artistic Immersion in To
the Lighthouse 149
5.3 Attached to the Sea: Fluid Bodies in The Waves 157
References169

6 ‘Floating
 Down a River into Silence’: Water in Woolf’s
Later Works173
6.1 ‘And Then We Sank into Silences’: The Metapoetics of The
Waves175
6.2 The Silence of the Fish: Opaque Water and the Constraints
of Language in Between the Acts 185
6.3 ‘The Watering Place’: The Deterioration of Words into
Wastewater202
References205

7 Conclusion209
References216

Index217
 Abbreviations1

BA Between the Acts

CRI The Common Reader Vol. I
CRII The Common Reader Vol. II
CSF The Complete Shorter Fiction by Virginia Woolf
DI–V The Diary of Virginia Woolf
EI–VI The Essays of Virginia Woolf
JR Jacob’s Room
LI–VI The Letters of Virginia Woolf
MB Moments of Being
MD Mrs. Dalloway
ND Night and Day
O Orlando
RF Roger Fry. A Biography
RO A Room of One’s Own
TL To the Lighthouse
VO The Voyage Out
W The Waves
Y The Years

1
Works by Virginia Woolf.

xv
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Virginia Woolf’s Modernist

Waterscapes

‘The sea is a miracle—more congenial to me than any human being.’

—Virginia Woolf, letter to Clive Bell, 20 April 1908 (LI, 326)
‘[T]he depths of the sea […] are only water after all.’
—To the Lighthouse (223)

In juxtaposing the epiphanic and the matter-of-fact, these two epigraphs—

the first taken from a letter Virginia Woolf wrote in 1908, the second a
fragment from her novel To the Lighthouse—create an intriguing incongru-
ence. But rather than merely describing two antithetical realities, these
short passages also work together: they point us to the multivalence of
water in Woolf’s writings. Water emerges as a rich source of literary cre-
ation, and Woolf’s modernist poetics draws heavily on the materiality of
this element. Its various rhythms, forms, movements and properties
informed much of her experimental writing and inspired her recasting of
the novel. In this sense, one of the aims of this book is to show that the sea
(and water, more generally) was indeed congenial to Woolf. At the same
time, Woolf was acutely aware that water could also be ‘only’ itself: part of
an external nature that exists prior to and beyond the symbolic, and that
precedes and outlasts the individual human being. Time and again, her
writing draws attention to nature’s indifference to ‘humanist assumptions’
(Westling 1999, 860). The present book sets out to explore the richness

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2023
M. Dirschauer, Modernist Waterscapes, Geocriticism and Spatial
Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13421-0_1
2 M. DIRSCHAUER

of an element that, in Woolf’s works, oscillates so productively between

the metaphorical and the real, between imagination and materiality. It
argues that Woolf’s writing allows these different levels of meaning to
coexist and it examines the many ways in which water figures in her texts.
A book-length study of Woolf’s oeuvre has the privilege of exploring in
due detail how her writing engages with one of nature’s most powerful
forces and one of culture’s most powerful metaphors. I combine these dif-
ferent perspectives not only because I think they are equally important to
Woolf’s poetics, but also because they, in fact, evince a similar objective:
namely, the writer’s aim to destabilise the anthropocentric and, more spe-
cifically, the androcentric viewpoint (Scott 2016, 326) by letting in ‘other’
voices. Recent ecocritical readings of Woolf’s works have identified these as
the voices of a natural environment to which the writer was drawn as a relief
from the human world. This book shows that Woolf’s waterscapes and
water metaphors also make manifest the echoes of those who wrote before
her. That is, her water writing reveals the link between Woolf’s attraction
to the indifference of nature and her appreciation of an impersonal writing
that acknowledges its indebtedness to the larger literary tradition.
In its boundlessness and resistance to being fully translated into (patri-
archal) culture, water provides the modernist writer with an alluring anal-
ogy. Seeking out new territories of narrative representation and form by
closely engaging with the male-dominated canon whose restraints she
overcomes in the process, Woolf, especially in her early experimental fic-
tion, finds in metaphorical waterscapes an apt means of escaping the
restrictions of what she condemns as the solidly constructed fiction writing
of the Edwardians. Moreover, Woolf’s feminist desire to liberate the
female artist from the ‘persistent voice’ of patriarchy—‘now grumbling,
now patronizing, now domineering, […] admonishing them […] to keep
within certain limits which the gentleman in question thinks suitable’
(RO, 68)—is akin to her ‘proto-ecofeminist desire to liberate the “thing”,
the literal, the natural, the absent referent […] from domination by falsify-
ing, destructive signifiers’ (Josephine Donovan, quoted in Waller 2000,
137). Her waterscapes bear a distinctly feminist signature.
Unpacking the above quotation from To the Lighthouse offers an illumi-
nating example of how Woolf’s ecological and intertextual awareness
advanced her feminist poetics. In the last part of the novel, the Ramsay
children are finally sailing to the lighthouse with their father. When their
sailing companions point the family to a spot where someone had drowned
the previous winter, the children half-expect their father to burst out
 1 INTRODUCTION: VIRGINIA WOOLF’S MODERNIST WATERSCAPES 3

fragments from William Cowper’s poem ‘The Castaway’ (1799)—‘we

perished each alone’ and ‘but I beneath a rougher sea / Was whelmed in
deeper gulfs than he’ (TL, 180–181), which he had already repeatedly
recited during their voyage. But, instead—and to his children’s surprise
and relief—‘all he said was “Ah” as if he thought to himself, But why make
a fuss about that? Naturally men are drowned in a storm, but it is a per-
fectly straightforward affair, and the depths of the sea (he sprinkled the
crumbs from his sandwich paper over them) are only water after all’ (TL,
223). Like the Ramsay children, who are spared another outburst of their
father’s pathos as he faces the material presence of the sea, Woolf found in
nature, and in waterscapes in particular, a welcome escape from the patri-
archal symbolic order. Rejecting a ‘tradition of inflating the sense of
human entitlement over either human or nonhuman territories’ (Ryan
2016, 151, emphasis in the original), Woolf, here and elsewhere, turns to
physical reality to counterbalance a subjective, anthropocentric
perspective.
Yet, her incorporation of Cowper’s poem simultaneously reveals how
closely her waterscapes are bound up with the human imagination and
with poetry, and how keenly aware she was of her predecessors’ and con-
temporaries’ figurative appropriations of the element. As a lifelong reader
and a deeply intertextual writer, she internalised the extent to which water
has shaped poetry—from Homer’s seas and Ovid’s fountains to
Shakespeare’s seas and brooks and the Romantic poets’ rivers and lakes.
This intertextual consciousness substantiates the impersonal character of
Woolf’s water writing. As I show in the second chapter of this book, Woolf
shared T. S. Eliot’s ([1920] 1960) aim to divert ‘interest from the poet to
the poetry’ (59), and, like him, she considered the writer’s awareness of
the literary past as vital to this process of depersonalisation. Yet her posi-
tion also ‘contrasts with Eliot’s ambition to demonstrate mastery of a tra-
dition that he at once continues and preserves’ (Fernald 2012, 55). Anne
E. Fernald’s use of ‘mastery’ is key here: in Woolf’s writing, neither the
literary past nor nature need to be ‘mastered’. Rather, her embrace of
impersonality allows for a multitude of voices to enrich her own.
Woolf’s water writing thus also entails a reassessment of her relation-
ship with the literary past. If, as Elizabeth Waller (2000) has argued from
an ecocritical perspective, Woolf ‘is the ephemeral visitor to a landscape
that will always precede her, and but one being in an infinitely evolving
story’ (142), then she is just as much the reader of a textual landscape that
will always precede her, and but one writer in an infinitely evolving story.
4 M. DIRSCHAUER

And if, as Bonnie Kime Scott (2016) suggests, nature allows Woolf to see
humankind ‘as part of a much larger rhythm’ (325), then literature does
the same for the individual text, which to Woolf is never a ‘single and soli-
tary bir[th]’ (RO, 59) but rather the product and producer of a larger
genealogy. Indeed, as in the above-quoted scene, the waterscapes in her
writing often carry within them the water writings of the past. I propose
to expand Kelly Elizabeth Sultzbach’s (2016) appraisal of Woolf as a
‘green reader’ (89) (although I am ‘blueing’ it), and I further aim to
explore how Woolf’s reading of nature writing affected her own writing.
While Sultzbach largely focuses on the nature writing Woolf discusses in
her essays, it is worth taking into consideration how her fictional and non-­
fictional water writing builds on, lays bare, transforms and challenges the
literary past which helped produce it. In November 1940, she commented
on the works of her male contemporaries such as T. S. Eliot and H. G
Wells: ‘[t]hese queer little sand castles, I was thinking […]. Little boys
making sand castles. […] Each is weathertight, & gives shelter to the
occupant. […] But I am the sea which demolishes these castles’ (DV,
340). The intertextual dimension of Woolf’s poetics of water is therefore
an important focal point of this book. I agree with Fernald (2012) that
Woolf’s intertextual practice is part of her feminist agenda, since ‘Woolf’s
references to prior texts almost always contain within them elements of
resistance to patriarchy’ (56).
This book explores the multiple and interrelated elements that consti-
tute Woolf’s poetics of water: water’s metaphorical ubiquity, its structural
and metapoetic relevance, its ecological sovereignty, its intertextual char-
acter and its feminist implications. Her writing manages to hold a balance
by which water can figure as the other and the self, as the outer and the
inner, as the real and the metaphorical. Sometimes, like in the above-­
quoted scene from To the Lighthouse, the non-human and the human,
nature and culture, reality and metaphor coexist as different layers of
meaning that complement each other; at other times, Woolf depicts them
as essentially antagonistic and almost brutally confronts us with the rift
between them. My analysis mediates carefully between these different lay-
ers of meaning to uncover the ways Woolf uses water to newly approach
topics that hinge on the relationship between human consciousness and
experience on the one hand, and a simultaneously emblematic and indif-
ferent nature on the other. It shows that rain can senselessly beat the aster
down to the earth in Jacob’s Room (JR, 9) and that it can be the highly
symbolic rain in Orlando, which signals the advent of a new era. It shows
 1 INTRODUCTION: VIRGINIA WOOLF’S MODERNIST WATERSCAPES 5

that fish can be the ‘semi-transparent boneless fish [being] dabbed […]
down on the kitchen table’ in Between the Acts (BA, 29) and Bernard’s ‘fin
in the waste of water’ in The Waves (W, 145), evoking the fleeting matter
of poetic vision. It shows that the sea, for Woolf, was both ‘congenial’ and
‘a broken mirror’ (TL, 146).

1.1   Modernism and Water: ‘Blueing’

Virginia Woolf
This book intertwines different strands of criticism and thereby draws on
a rich variety of Woolf studies. It examines in significant detail the close
parallels between water and Woolf’s modernist writing as well as the devel-
opment of her use of water imagery throughout her career in the wider
context of modernism’s affinity for the element. At the same time, it
chimes in with more recent attempts to erode ‘received notions of Virginia
Woolf as a writer primarily if not exclusively concerned with mapping the
contours of the internal world’ (Levy 2004, 139). It does so by turning
the focus to Woolf’s ‘attunement to the natural world and her creative
experiments with the formal and narrative displacement of the human fig-
ure’ (Brush 2021, 71). This juncture is where the ecocritical angle proves
particularly fruitful to my argument.
The current study is much indebted to many of the groundbreaking
books that have shaped Woolf criticism. Seminal studies such as Richter
(1970), Naremore (1973), DiBattista ([1977] 1980), Hussey (1986),
Minow-Pinkney ([1987] 2011), McNichol ([1990] 2018); Laurence
(1991) and Beer (1996) have, in very different ways, provided valuable
insights into the relation between the subject and the world, and between
language and reality, in Woolf’s writings. Most of the well-known books
that closely engage with Woolf’s works have, variably, and more or less
consciously, touched upon the importance of water to her writing. But, up
until now, no study has recognised the continuity and persistence of
Woolf’s formal and aesthetic indebtedness to water. Modernist Waterscapes
aims to fill this gap.
As for the scholarship more explicitly focused on the relationship
between Woolf and water, several, often interrelated, trends are detect-
able. Scholars such as Klein (2002), Hanson (2006), Feigel and Harris
(2009) and Baker (2010) have evidenced British writers’ fascination with
water—a fascination closely bound up with the country’s geographical
6 M. DIRSCHAUER

position. The more politically driven studies by Muscogiuri (2011, 2014),

Rizzuto (2016) and Uphaus (2015) shed light on Woolf’s subversions of
ideological appropriations of the sea. By putting in close dialogue Woolf’s
fictional and non-fictional texts, the present book also follows in the foot-
steps of Bradshaw (2009), Simpson (2004) and McNeer (2011), whose
articles discuss the intimate links between water and Woolf’s creative
imagination.
Moreover, as this book traces the material referents of Woolf’s imagi-
nary waterscapes, it engages with some of the key questions that have
spurred ecocriticism and environmental humanism: ‘How and to what
effect are concepts of the natural and the human related to each other?
What is the relationship between nature, language, art, and literature?’
(Gersdorf and Mayer 2006, 12), as well as the more theoretical but equally
pertinent question, ‘What is the materiality of metaphor?’ (Cohen and
Foote 2021, 2). Ecocriticism has emerged as a particularly exciting branch
of Woolf scholarship in the past two decades, in that it has brought about
a shift from examining the ‘[p]rimacy of culture to its entanglement with
nature’ (Ryan 2013, 3) and has inspired scholars to discover, in Woolf’s
works ‘a new, post-humanist pattern that escapes androcentrism and the
nature/culture binary’ (Scott 2012, 2). In this context, recent ecocritical
enquiries have taken up as their subject her shorts stories (Levy 2004;
Swanson 2012; Ryan 2015; Kostkowska 2013), To the Lighthouse
(Sultzbach 2016; Brush 2021), The Waves (Waller 2000; Kostkowska
2013; Ryan 2016; Winkiel 2019) and Between the Acts (Westling 1999,
2006; Tazudeen 2015). While these studies acknowledge seascapes as an
important part of Woolf’s representations of the physical world, only a few
of them have given the inanimate geological forces of water their full
attention. To that end, Annie M. Cranstoun (2016) and Laura Winkiel
(2019)—who make an ecocritical focus on water productive to their
respective readings of Woolf’s experimental aesthetics—are recurring ref-
erences for this book. Cranstoun’s ecofeminist study postulates the ‘emer-
gence of text from [an aquatic] environment’ via the ‘faculty of the
imagination’ and claims Woolf’s writing as a primary example of a
‘thinking-­through-water’ (iv). Covering a considerable amount of mate-
rial in the relatively short space of her chapter on Woolf, Cranstoun
encourages further research when she concedes in her concluding remark
that ‘water is so abundant in Woolf’s writing, I have barely plumbed the
depth’ (53).
 1 INTRODUCTION: VIRGINIA WOOLF’S MODERNIST WATERSCAPES 7

While Modernist Waterscapes welcomes the need to explore in more

depth Woolf’s representation of ‘the living world outside human struc-
tures and cultural constructions’ (Westling 1999, 859), it does not aim to
make ecocriticism the only lens through which to look at her oeuvre. Even
though it sheds new light on the extent to which Woolf engages with non-­
human nature, it is also very much concerned with the cultural connota-
tions of her waterscapes and with the rich imagery of water and its effects
on Woolf’s texts, and, not least due to its interest in intertextuality, this
study does read many of Woolf’s sea- and waterscapes as deeply inscribed
with human meaning. Further, while I pursue a different aim than does
Emma Brush (2021), who regards Woolf’s formal experiments as an aes-
thetic and proto-Anthropocene response to the looming existential threat
of ‘total war’ at the beginning of the twentieth century, I echo her scepti-
cism about an ‘uncritical embrace of holistic nature’ (71) and about too
readily collapsing human consciousness and the natural world. For
instance, Justyna Kostkowska’s (2013) claim that Woolf ‘reunit[es] lan-
guage and the world, nature and civilisation’ and that she is among those
writers who attempted to ‘reestablish the unity of humanity and the land,
and to heal the split between culture and nature’ (8) ignores the many
instances in Woolf’s works which, on the contrary, expose the discord
between language and the world, the split between culture and nature,
even if this very split fosters some of the most beautiful and lyrical passages
in her writing. Rather, I agree with Michelle Levy (2004) when she states
that, ‘for Woolf, the human and nonhuman worlds were […] at once
“closely united” and “immensely divided”’ (140). In my view, losing sight
of this intrinsic ambivalence potentially even risks the renewal of a picture
of Woolf as the very ethereal writer that postmodernist and poststructural-
ist studies of the 1980s and 1990s were eager to oppose, and with good
reason. As Christina Alt (2010) and Bonnie Kime Scott (2012) as well as
Derek Ryan (2013) and Louise Westling (1999, 2006) have persuasively
demonstrated, this risk can be averted by grounding Woolf’s ecological
writings in contemporary scientific discourse or in philosophical theory,
respectively. My book proposes a different path, but it similarly insists on
contextualising Woolf’s nature writing. What I hope an intertextual and
metapoetic sensibility adds to an ecocritically orientated reading is an
emphasis on the intellectual anchorage of Woolf’s waterscapes. For
instance, in her ecopoetic analysis of The Waves, Kostkowska (2013), look-
ing at the novel’s last soliloquy and the character Bernard’s death as a kind
of fusion with the natural world, argues that ‘the wave, part of the sea, is
8 M. DIRSCHAUER

now part of Bernard, and at the same time it is an animal, arching its back.
The wave inside Bernard soon joins the one breaking on the shore’, and
she concludes that ‘[t]his last image is the culmination of Woolf’s use of
metaphors to portray a world where the artificial boundary between the
human and the nonhuman is deconstructed’ (53). Waller (2000) com-
ments on this same episode: ‘It is all in vain. The waters usher his body
forward and home despite his intellectual attempt to disown the flux of life
into death, into life’ (152). Certainly, the human character here com-
mends himself to the greater force of nature. But Bernard’s fusion also
takes place on an intertextual level, as his imagery appropriates Lord
Byron’s Shakespearean battle cry from his poem ‘Childe Harold’s
Pilgrimage’. At the very moment the character merges with something
bigger than and outside himself, the novel, through this allusion, draws
attention to its interwovenness with other texts.
In light of this complex layering of Woolf’s poetics of water, I claim that
the nature which is the source and inspiration of much of her writing is a
nature already written and yet resistant to being written; a nature already
invented and yet endlessly inventive; a nature already shaped by human
language and yet producing its own kind of language. It is my contention
that, always, Woolf was as at home in nature as she was at home in lan-
guage; she was both an observer and a reader of nature. In its ‘blue read-
ing’ of Woolf’s oeuvre, the current book does not weigh one against the
other; instead, it takes into consideration the two most important sources
of Woolf’s poetics of water: the material reality and the human imagination.

1.2  The Materiality of Metaphor

Woolf’s fascination with water was not an isolated phenomenon within
her time. Rather, it is a primary example of a more widespread affinity for
the element in the modernist era. Strikingly, this affinity also has had a
considerable impact on the rhetoric of modernist studies and Woolf stud-
ies in particular. Woolf readers and critics have long shared a propensity to
resort to the very imagery that so abundantly features in her writing.
Comparing the role of water in previous criticism on Woolf and in Woolf’s
own literary criticism, this section asks what it means to apply a metaphor
as a tool of critical analysis. Examining the ‘materiality of metaphor’
(Cohen and Foote 2021, 2) as part of a poetological and ecocritical proj-
ect ultimately challenges the critic to call into question their own use of
metaphors when dealing with literary texts. Throughout, my book
 1 INTRODUCTION: VIRGINIA WOOLF’S MODERNIST WATERSCAPES 9

attempts to make the distinction between metaphor and materiality a

methodological premise of its textual analysis. This attempt may not
always be successful, as no study can escape figurative language altogether;
however, I nonetheless consider it a necessary attempt in order to arrive at
a more nuanced understanding of what we mean when we talk about
Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness narratives, her fluid style and the flow of
her words.
Various aspects of modernism have been characterised as ‘fluid’ (Marcus
1997, 61), and the idea of fluidity often serves as a prominent vehicle to
articulate the simultaneous sense of crisis and liberation that came with the
collapse of traditional values and ideas at the beginning of the twentieth
century. According to Pamela Caughie (2006), for modernist thinkers,
‘existence is flux’ (489). Critics have made use of the concept of fluidity to
describe the experimental and innovative writing and narrative techniques
that emerged in the first half of the twentieth century, with ‘stream of
consciousness’ as its most successful offshoot. Borrowed from William
James’s term as it appears in his Principles of Psychology from 1890, by now
the metaphor has advanced almost to the status of a synonym for modern-
ist poetic strategies and has become a watchword in introductions and
companions to modernist literature.
From the very beginning of Woolf criticism up until today, both general
readers and professional critics of her fiction have frequently drawn on
water imagery to describe their reading experiences and to capture the
effect of her writing. When reading The Waves for the first time, Vanessa
Bell told her sister that she was ‘completely submerged [and] left rather
gasping, out of breath, choking, half drowned, as you might expect. I
must read it again when I may hope to float more quietly’ (quoted in DIV,
49, n. 7). Rachel A. Taylor, in her 1927 review for the Spectator, describes
Woolf’s ‘genius’ as ‘flowing into the secret recesses of consciousness, float-
ing out its rose-pale shells, its wavering shapes’ and calls Mrs. Dalloway ‘a
complete crystal eddy of the River of Life’ (quoted in Majumdar and
McLaurin 1975, 198). In 1934, William Butler Yeats ([1934] 1966)
argued that ‘[c]ertain typical books—Ulysses, Virginia Woolf’s The Waves,
Mr Ezra Pound’s Draft of XXX Cantos’ suggest ‘a deluge of experience
breaking over us and within us, melting limits whether of line or tint; man
no hard bright mirror dawdling by the dry sticks of a hedge, but a swim-
mer, or rather the waves themselves’ (210). Voices of a more critical bent
saw Woolf’s novels as ‘degenerat[ing] into undifferentiated flux’ or, like
M. C. Bradbrook, argued that The Waves had ‘no solid characters’ (quoted
10 M. DIRSCHAUER

in Snaith 2007, 4). When, from the 1970s onwards, academic research on
Woolf gathered momentum, the general recourse to water metaphors
continued.
Scholars have emphasised Woolf’s ‘fluid style’ (Laurence 1991, 184)
and the ‘natural flow’ of her works (Ellison 2001, 186); they have noticed
the ‘currents in her thoughts’ (Baldwin 1989, 3), the ‘flux and flow of
certain emotional patterns’ (Richter 1970, ix), ‘the ebb and flow of her
prose rhythm’ (Marcus 2012, 379), her ‘ultimately fluid syntax’ (DiBattista
2009, 364) and her ‘streams of words’ (Tratner 2015, 155). They have
depicted Woolf as ‘riding the tide, so to speak, her perception infused with
currents of meaning’ (Waller 2000, 152) and even described her as ‘exotic
undersea flora’ (Naremore, 2). Gillian Beer (1996), echoing Vanessa Bell’s
reading experience, writes:

Certainly, the reader of The Waves needs to swim, to trust the buoyancy of
the eye and the suppleness of the understanding. It is no good panicking
when sequence seems lost or persons are hard to pick out. The rhythms of
the work will sustain us comfortably as long as we do not flounder about
trying to catch hold of events. The events are there, sure enough, but they
are not sundered from the flow. This is to say that the form of the waves is
acted out in the actual reading experience, and the reader must trust the
medium. (89)

Yet, how fruitful are these metaphors for the critic? What do we gain from
writing metaphorically about an often deeply metaphorical text? What is
productive to the creative writer and essayist can become vague in literary
scholarship. When James Holt McGavran Jr. (1983) remarks about Percy
Bysshe Shelley and Woolf that ‘both of these explorers of the seas of con-
sciousness died by drowning’, this is a conflation of different layers of
metaphors, and, even more importantly, a conflation between the real (the
sea in which Shelley drowned and the river in which Woolf drowned) and
the metaphorical (the depth and abundance of these writers’ imagination)
that this book tries to resist.
The tendency of her contemporaries to associate her writing with water
did not escape Woolf, nor did she in fact seem happy about it. In a letter
to an acquaintance of hers, the political scientist and philosopher
G. L. Dickinson, she complains about the reception of The Waves:
 1 INTRODUCTION: VIRGINIA WOOLF’S MODERNIST WATERSCAPES 11

I wanted to give the sense of continuity, instead of which most people say,
no you’ve given the sense of flowing and passing away and that nothing
matters. Yet I feel things matter quite immensely. What the significance is,
heaven knows I cant [sic] guess; but there is significance … I’m annoyed to
be told that I am nothing but a stringer together of words and words and
words. (LIV, 397)

Elsewhere, she notes that ‘one reviewer days [sic] that I have come to a
crisis in the matter of style: it is now so fluent and fluid that it runs through
the mind like water. That disease began in The Lighthouse’ (DIII, 203).
In 1926, she reports how she ‘said to Lord B. All you must do in writing
is to float off the contents of your mind’, at which Clive Bell and Raymond
Mortimer, apparently having overheard her remark, ‘laughed & said Thats
exactly what you do anyhow’. Revealingly, this incident made her ‘want
[…] to found [her] impressions on something firmer’ (DIII, 63), which
attests to Woolf’s unease with the notion of ‘mere fluency’ (DIII, 219).
In the essays, letters and diary entries in which she discusses literature,
she similarly uses water as a tool of literary analysis. Not unlike Samuel
Taylor Coleridge’s (1987) notion of ‘ideal poetry’ as the ‘balance or rec-
onciliation of opposite or discordant qualities’ (16), Woolf elevates the
reconciliation of opposites as indicative of good writing. She rejects a flu-
ency of style that lacks substance of matter. Thus, she calls Vita Sackville-­
West’s prose ‘too fluent’ (DIII, 126), and admits finding Katherine
Mansfield’s ‘Prelude’ ‘a little vapourish […] & freely watered with some
of her cheap realities’ (DI, 191). Elsewhere, she criticises the ‘ladling out
of sentences which have the dripping brilliance of words that live upon real
lips’ because she conceives of such an approach as ‘admirable for one pur-
pose; disastrous for another. All is fluent and graphic; but no character or
situation emerges clearly’ (EIV, 403). It was her conviction that ‘fluid
gifts’ must be complemented by ‘boney ones’ (DII, 166). On the writing
of Arnold Bennett, a contemporary of hers, Woolf expresses the following
opinion in a letter to a friend: ‘I’m drowned in despair already. Such dish-
water! pale thin fluid in which (perhaps, but I doubt it) once a leg of mut-
ton swam’ (LIII, 100–101). By contrast, she applauds Laurence Sterne’s
prose, in which, according to her, ‘the utmost fluidity exists with the
utmost permanence. It is as if the tide raced over the beach hither and
thither and left every ripple and eddy cut on sand in marble’ (CRII,
79–80). Envisioning the book that would become Mrs. Dalloway, she
12 M. DIRSCHAUER

consequently aims for something ‘rich, & deep, & fluent & hard as nails,
while bright as diamonds’ (DII, 199).
Woolf’s use of metaphors that evoke contrasting but complementary
materiality expresses an aesthetic attitude which encourages a careful anal-
ysis of what Winkiel (2019) has called ‘the intra-action of matter and
form’ in Woolf’s writing (148). Uncovering the materiality of metaphor is
part of such a project. Therefore, this book explores Woolf’s waterscapes,
both the imaginary ones and those with material referents in the text, as
well as their interrelations. It looks at how water metaphors operate in the
texts, at the continuities and fissures they create, at how they affect the
writtenness of her texts and at how they become sites of poetic
self-reflection.

1.3   Mapping Modernist Waterscapes

Across six chapters, this book explores Woolf’s modernist waterscapes to
offer a new perspective on topics as widely discussed and diverse as the
relationship between language and reality, the representation of time, the
representation of bodies and the relationship between words and silence.
The ambivalence of water as an element that it is both life-giving and life-­
threatening, both creative and destructive, both ‘pleasurable and terrify-
ing’ (Ellison 2001, 190), has produced persistent cultural dichotomies
between land and water, life and death, closeness and distance, the familiar
and the other, the male and the female, reason and madness, the known
and the unknown. Throughout the chapters, I show that Woolf’s writings
continuously undermine these dichotomies by drawing on the erratic
materiality of water and its innate resistance to being translated into fixed
cultural signifiers.
While the book roughly follows a chronological order, it is primarily
meant to allow for a close dialogue between Woolf’s fiction and non-­
fiction, between her aesthetic contemplation and her poetic practice and
between her confidence in and doubts about language. Moreover,
Modernist Waterscapes brings together a more traditional and philological
approach that examines the metaphorical potency of water; an ecocritical
approach that pays close attention to the material voices of water in the
texts; and an intertextual approach that grounds Woolf’s poetics of water
in the literary waterscapes of her predecessors. My readings shift the bal-
ance between these perspectives to fit the subject matter at hand.
 1 INTRODUCTION: VIRGINIA WOOLF’S MODERNIST WATERSCAPES 13

While the second chapter contours what I mean by Woolf’s ‘poetics of

water’ and discusses the relevance of the actual waterscapes in Woolf’s life,
Chaps. 3 and 6 offer new insights into the role water plays in conveying
Woolf’s deep ambivalence about language. Chapter 3 shows how water
inspired her early experimental fiction and encouraged her to embrace a
more flexible narrative form, whereas Chap. 6 addresses Woolf’s increas-
ing doubts about the adequacy of human language, most powerfully
shown in the figurative deterioration into wastewater in her final story,
‘The Watering Place’. These decisively metapoetic chapters frame the cen-
tral plank of this book, which is dedicated to an investigation of Woolf’s
representation of time (Chap. 4) as well as her representation of the female
body and sexuality (Chap. 5) to provide a fresh perspective on two much-­
debated topics in which the cultural inscriptions of water are particularly
tangible. The middle chapters hold a balance between examining water as
a metaphor and water as a referent of the text’s material reality, as, even
more pointedly, does Chap. 6, which has to cater to the marked contrast
between The Waves as the apex of Woolf’s aqueous imagination and
Between the Acts, which places emphasis on the scarcity and stagnancy of
water in the narrated world.
The second chapter, drawing chiefly on Woolf’s non-fiction—her
essays, diaries, letters and autobiographical writings—embeds the writer’s
poetics of water in the wider context of a philosophical and literary tradi-
tion of linking water and writing. It takes up a particularly revealing exam-
ple of humans’ propensity to ‘internalise’ nature by looking at the French
philosopher Gaston Bachelard’s text L’Eau et les Rêves. Essai sur
l’imagination de la matière (Water and Dreams: An Essay on the
Imagination of Matter), which, published in 1942, is the first systematic
attempt to define a poetics of water. For my argument it serves as a para-
digmatic foil to decouple Woolf’s poetics from a psychoanalytic and
anthropocentric perspective of water, and to stress water’s impersonal
dimension. By closely juxtaposing Woolf’s aesthetics and selected writings
of the English Romantic poets, to which both Woolf and Bachelard are
highly indebted, the aim of the second chapter is to display the singular
position of Woolf’s writing: while she is deeply entrenched in a literary
tradition of thinking and writing of, about and even in water, she at the
same time makes water productive to her modernist poetics.
Through a close reading of selected short stories, essays and the novel
Jacob’s Room, the third chapter discusses the extent to which Woolf’s early
fiction is fuelled by water. It posits a connection between the waterscapes
14 M. DIRSCHAUER

in her fiction and the experiments in form that marked the beginning of
Woolf’s modernism. It accomplishes this by examining the possibilities
water held for a young author who was weary of what she conceived as the
solidly constructed fiction that predominated in Edwardian literature. I
argue that Woolf’s early experimental fiction—her short stories and Jacob’s
Room (1922)—uses water as the most important metaphor to create a
narrative style that destabilises the supposed certainties of mimetic repre-
sentation and to productively translate the limitations of knowledge into
the possibilities of fiction.
Based on the conceptual proximity between time and water, the fourth
chapter examines Woolf’s representation of time in the most productive
phase of her writing career. It claims that she makes abundant use of the
materiality of water to convey the immateriality of time. Through a discus-
sion of the variety of watery forms in Woolf’s writings—ranging from the
sea to the drop in The Waves and Mrs. Dalloway, from the cascades, rivulets
and lakes in To the Lighthouse to the frozen river, rain, dampness and pools
in Orlando—the element is identified as the driving force in Woolf’s writ-
ing of and about time. Drawing attention to the many manifestations of
non-human time in the novels under scrutiny, an ecocritical perspective
complements the chapter’s investigation of the imagining of time as a fluid
substance.
Woolf ’s rewriting of the female body in close conjunction with the
sea—representing for Woolf the ‘insensitive nature’ of the narrated
world—(DIII, 218) is the subject of the fifth chapter, which has an
ecofeminist impetus. Woolf ’s narrative strategies challenge the phallo-
centric tradition that conceives of the female body as the material
counterpart to the masculine spirit and as both the metaphorical and
actual womb-­container of masculine creation. Woolf, by contrast, puts
focus on the female body as a site of artistic creation, which she,
throughout her fiction and non-fiction, interweaves with the novels’
geographical waterscapes. The chapter examines the trajectory from
Rachel Vinrace’s solid but fatally passive body in Woolf ’s debut novel,
The Voyage Out (1915), to the woman artist’s liberation from the body
as object in To the Lighthouse (1927), to Woolf ’s representation of elu-
sive, hardly graspable bodies in The Waves (1931), which draws from
the materiality of water.
Focusing on The Waves, The Years, Between the Acts and her last story,
‘The Watering Place’, the sixth chapter explores Woolf’s scepticism
towards language and the relation between water and silence in her later
 1 INTRODUCTION: VIRGINIA WOOLF’S MODERNIST WATERSCAPES 15

works. It argues that the considerable change that her poetics of water
underwent in the last decade of her career allows us to trace the author’s
acute awareness of the limitations of language, her productive exploration
of human silence and non-human language and the growing appeal for
her of a post-human world. As we will see, Woolf’s reliance on water is
most productive where mimetic narrative fails. It is in the impossible
spaces of language—moments in which the text gravitates towards the
ineffable, the indescribable, towards silence—where Woolf’s attraction to
water and her attention to the voices of a non-human environment become
most discernible.
Water pervades the imaginary and actual landscapes of most of Woolf’s
writing, but, of course, its presence differs in the individual works. The key
text, certainly, is The Waves, which as such features prominently in three of
the six chapters. Other novels, among them Night and Day and The Years,
are of lesser importance to the topic under discussion; Woolf’s biography
of Roger Fry is only very marginally mentioned, and her imaginative biog-
raphy of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s spaniel, Flush, and her essay Three
Guineas are not included at all. Substantiating close philological analyses
with an ecocritical and intertextual attention to Woolf’s modernist water-
scapes, this book is the first to explore the overall significance of water in
Woolf’s works, to expand the hitherto dominating focus on the sea to a
more encompassing exploration of the various manifestations of water and
to trace their importance across her whole oeuvre, from her early fiction,
through her letters and essays, to her very last story and covering almost
all of her novels.

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 1 INTRODUCTION: VIRGINIA WOOLF’S MODERNIST WATERSCAPES 19

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 CHAPTER 2

Aqueous Affinities: Woolf, Bachelard

and the English Romantic Poets

‘Water is a complete poetic reality.’

—Gaston Bachelard ([1942] 1983, 15)
‘One ought to sink to the bottom of the sea, probably, and live alone with
ones [sic] words.’
—Virginia Woolf (LIII, 189)

Gaston Bachelard’s L’eau et les rêves, essai sur l’imagination de la matière,

here quoted in the English translation of 1983, Water and Dreams: An
Essay on the Imagination of Matter, is the first in-depth philosophical med-
itation on the relation between water and poetry. In the author’s own
words, Water and Dreams shifts the focus from ‘a poetry of water to a
metapoetics of water’ (Bachelard ([1942] 1983, 11); it thus examines
water beyond its metaphorical and symbolic function by proposing an
ontological link between water and poetry. Written in the year of Woolf’s
death and published in 1942, it forms part of Bachelard’s investigation
into the workings of the imagination, which started with his La psychanal-
yse du feu in 1938. Bachelard’s claim that water provides ‘its particular
rules and poetics’ to a literary work ([1942] 1983, 3) holds perhaps unsur-
prising appeal for a project that sets out to explore water as the key poetic
principle of Woolf’s writing. Indeed, both Bachelard and Woolf emphasise

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 21

Switzerland AG 2023
M. Dirschauer, Modernist Waterscapes, Geocriticism and Spatial
Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13421-0_2
22 M. DIRSCHAUER

the poetic and metapoetic potential of water. Yet despite this shared under-
standing, there are essential differences between their respective vantage
points, which complicate any attempts to read Woolf’s writing, with James
Naremore (1973), as a ‘preeminent example’ of what ‘Bachelard calls the
“material imagination”’ (2). I nonetheless start this chapter with a short
discussion of Bachelard’s essay because it provides a useful juxtaposition
with which to delineate the scope and tenets of this book, not least by
making clear what it does not aim to do. The present study rejects a psy-
choanalytic reading of and questions a merely anthropocentric view on
Woolf’s engagement with nature, by placing new emphasis on water as an
impersonal force. It introduces water as part of an indifferent nature that
precedes and exceeds the individual human subject and on water as part of
literature’s genealogy that precedes and exceeds the individual author.
Moreover, the juxtaposition of Bachelard’s philosophical essay and
Woolf’s fictional and non-fictional writing reveals an unexpected overlap
that serves as a productive starting point for this study. Both Bachelard’s
Water and Dreams and Woolf’s poetics of water emerge in close interac-
tion with the writings of the English Romantic poets. Bachelard continu-
ously refers to Romantic poetry to undergird his argument about the
pre-eminence of water within the poetic imagination, and the field of
Woolf studies is rife with the investigation of the extensive influence of the
Romantic poets on Woolf’s writing—most of all William Wordsworth,
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats and Lord
Byron (de Gay 2006; Harris 2010; Vine 2013; Sandy 2016; Pinho 2017).
I aim to shed new light on Woolf’s indebtedness to the Romantics, by
arguing that her affinity for them becomes particularly tangible in this
shared fascination for water; and indeed, critics have assessed the Romantic
era as a time when poetic creation was intimately linked with the element
(Isham 2004; Baker 2010). Woolf’s waterscapes, thus, also reveal her as an
avid reader of the Romantics’ nature writings. This chapter therefore pos-
its the unusual triangulation between Woolf poetics of water, Bachelard’s
metapoetic reflections on water and the English Romantic affinity for the
element.
However, this study does not intend to offer a systematic discussion of
the Romantic poets’ relation to water to then examine its transformations
in Woolf’s writings. Rather, it builds upon Alexandra Harris’s (2010)
shrewd observation that literature, to Woolf, is ‘not a series of authorita-
tive texts, but […] a remembered store of phrases and ideas, altered by
each owner and still evolving. Mere orts and fragments they may be, but
 2 AQUEOUS AFFINITIES: WOOLF, BACHELARD AND THE ENGLISH… 23

they are personal possessions’ (113). In paying close attention to the

microscopic workings of intertextual dialogue, I suggest reading these
‘orts and fragments’, this ‘buzz of words’ of the Romantic poets, as one of
the undercurrents that shape and enrich Woolf’s modernist narratives; as
such, they figure throughout this book, coalescing productively with other
currents from Woolf’s literary past and present. The site of this dialogue
will be the material waterscapes of Woolf’s texts.
This chapter first introduces Bachelard’s main line of argument and
draws attention to the points at which it proves fruitful in undertaking an
analysis of Woolf’s poetics of water (Sect. 2.1). I then examine some of the
key moments in her diaries, letters and autobiographical writings that shed
light on the imprint that her surrounding waterscapes had on Woolf’s
writing (Sect. 2.2). While I return to the impact of the writer’s natural
environment throughout this book, the aim at this point is to emphasise
that, even in her most intimate writings, Woolf did not fail to respect
nature’s otherness. At the same time as she dreamt about becoming one
with the non-human world, she was keenly aware that nature could never
fully merge with the human symbolic order. Section 2.3 argues that
Woolf’s writing, in championing the indifference of nature and the imper-
sonal dimension of water, defies the psychoanalytic thrust of Bachelard’s
essay. The focus in the remaining sections shifts to Woolf’s consciousness of
form—a term I use in distinction to Bachelard’s ‘unconsciousness of
form’—which becomes apparent in the writer’s indebtedness to the variety
of aqueous forms and rhythms. To carve out the essential differences
between Bachelard’s philosophical and Woolf’s poetic approaches to
water, this chapter accentuates the fact that Woolf’s appropriations of the
element draw both upon nature itself and upon nature as a kind of literary
heritage, in which water has always appeared in close affiliation with poetic
creation and innovation. Because Bachelard, Woolf and the Romantic
poets under scrutiny elevate water to an element of great poetic relevance,
a juxtaposition of these approaches helps to outline the concept of a poet-
ics of water as it is here understood. Yet, I do not intend to use Bachelard’s
essay as a theory with which to pin down Woolf’s poetics, nor do I imply
that Woolf simply incorporates the English Romantics’ affinities for the
element. Rather, I suggest that these other aqueous voices—Bachelard’s
philosophical meditation on and the Romantics’ poetry about water—
form a vivid tableau against which the distinctness of Woolf’s voice can be
more succinctly illustrated.
24 M. DIRSCHAUER

2.1   Bachelard’s Water and Dreams and Woolf’s

Poetics of Water
More emphatically than his previous writings, Water and Dreams pursues
the philosopher’s interest in poetry and poetic creation. Bachelard himself
calls it an ‘essay in literary aesthetics’ ([1942] 1983, 10) and states his
ambition to ‘contribute some means, some tools for renewing literary
criticism’ (17). Against the backdrop of an increase in scientific and posi-
tivist thinking in the first half of the twentieth century, his essay gives
renewed value to the imagination. It suggests that there is a material ele-
ment at the root of the imagination, which ‘provide[s] its own substance,
its particular rules and poetics’ (3) to a literary reverie. According to
Bachelard, a work of poetic depth—a work that is more than formal play
on the surface—always ‘derives its strength from a substantial cause’ (2).
He links these ‘material’ or ‘substantial’ causes to the four fundamental
elements (fire, water, earth, air), which affect a poet’s ‘material reality’ to
different degrees. Water as an ‘element of materializing imagination’ (11)
appears as the poetic element par excellence.
Yet his notion of ‘material reality’ is strikingly anthropocentric.
Bachelard does not mean the physical reality, but rather refers to the
dynamics between the poet’s physical reality and what he calls the poet’s
‘oneiric reality’: ‘[D]reams come before contemplation. Before becoming
a conscious sight, every landscape is an oneiric experience’ (4). His empha-
sis on the role of dreams, by which he maintains the psychoanalytic per-
spective that informed some of his earlier works, culminates in Water and
Dreams. According to him, a poetic work, if it has matter and weight, is
intricately linked with the ‘oneiric matter’ of the poet: it is the reverie of
the imagination materialised as literary reverie, keeping its ‘poetic fidelity’
(5) to the material substance of the poet’s dreams (18).
Bachelard’s main argument relies heavily on the writings of the
Romantics. Before him, Coleridge had underscored the importance of the
inherent laws of the poet’s imagination through his concept of the ‘organic
form’: ‘The organic form […] is innate; it shapes as it develops itself from
within, and the fullness of its development is one and the same with the
perfection of its outward Form’ (1987, 495). Bachelard begins his essay
on a similar note when he analogises the material imagination with a flow-
er’s seeds ‘whose form is embedded in a substance, whose form is internal’
(1). The Romantic poets famously championed a close association of the
imagination with nature. If, as Andrew Bennett (2018) suggests, the
 2 AQUEOUS AFFINITIES: WOOLF, BACHELARD AND THE ENGLISH… 25

Romantics’ view on nature is ‘both productive of and produced by the

mind’ (588), and if, as Kathleen M. Wheeler (1995) asserts, ‘what is
“given” and “external” seems so because its production originates at
unconscious levels’ (137), then this idea reverberates through Bachelard’s
concept of ‘material reality’. It assumes that the landscape of poetic con-
templation is already inherent in the poet’s dreams—an assumption that
blurs the boundaries between the subject and the object of perception,
between the human and the non-human world. To substantiate his idea,
Bachelard quotes one of the founding fathers of German Romanticism,
Ludwig Tieck, who observed that the unity of the landscape appears ‘as
the fulfilment of an often-dreamt dream’ (quoted in Bachelard [1942]
1983, 4).
As a major part of this pre-mediated landscape, both Bachelard’s essay
and the Romantics’ works ascribe a prominent position to water. In the
Romantic era, the sea famously represented an elemental manifestation of
the sublime in nature. ‘[T]he mystical interpenetration of the sea and the
human soul’ was, as Howard Isham (2004) contends, a characteristic trait
of Romantic thought; it generates the poet’s ‘sense of oneness with the
sea’ (364). Bachelard similarly emphasises the intricate relation between
water and the poet when he argues that the element emerges as the primal
matter of their imagination.
Both Bachelard’s anthropocentric perspective on nature and the psy-
choanalytic premise of his argument—his strong emphasis on the poet’s
unconsciousness (what he calls the poet’s ‘oneiric reality’)—conflict with
Woolf ’s perspective. Her views on nature, matter and the imagination
indeed fundamentally differ from Bachelard’s. For one, her writing, time
and again, directs the reader’s attention to nature as existing outside
human parameters. Secondly, while water, to Bachelard ([1942] 1983),
is essentially the ‘unconsciousness of form’ (50), and while he highlights
the intrinsic link between the poet’s unconscious and their material real-
ity, Woolf gives much weight to the writer’s consciousness of form: a con-
sciousness characteristic of a subject who also acknowledges the distance
between the human and non-human world. My readings position the
artist (both Woolf herself and her various fictional proxies) as an impor-
tant intermediary between the two spheres, who is alert to the possibili-
ties that water holds for the artist while also understanding the limits of
humankind’s appropriations of nature. By discussing the various water-
scapes in Woolf ’s life as they appear in her diaries, letters and autobio-
graphical writings, I suggest that Woolf (like Bachelard) elevates water as
26 M. DIRSCHAUER

poetic matter, yet I propose to approach the relation between water and
poetic creation via a different path. To productively make Woolf ’s reflec-
tions of her natural environment part of my analysis, the attention must
shift from the author to the text, from psychoanalysis to poetics, and one
way of doing this is to allow more space for water to ‘speak’ for itself.
This chapter aims to shed new light on the waterscapes of Woolf ’s life by
putting her autobiographical texts in relation to nature, in relation with
each other and in relation with other literary texts in which water fea-
tures prominently. This perspective allows me to stress the significance of
the ‘impersonality’ of water even in Woolf ’s most personal texts and to
introduce her aesthetic contemplations of water as one of the driving
forces behind her poetics.

2.2   Woolf’s Waterscapes: ‘More Congenial to Me

Than Any Human Being’
Woolf’s lifelong attachment to many different littoral sites and bodies of
water can be traced through her diaries, letters and autobiographical writ-
ings. The sea forms the background to her earliest memories, and her
diaries and letters reveal the lasting effect of waterscapes on her creative
mind. From 1882 to 1894, her family spent the summer months at Talland
House in St Ives, Cornwall. Many critics have ascribed Woolf’s fondness
for water metaphors to these early memories of the sea. Bonnie Kime Scott
(2016) notes that ‘Woolf’s immersion in the natural world began with her
first memories, which incorporated the movement of wind, the sound of
waves, and the structure of flowers’ (319). According to Rebecca McNeer
(2011), the time spent in Cornwall forms ‘the heart, the foundation of
[her] watery references’ and is ‘the underwater spring of creativity that
hydrated Woolf’ (95). Lyndall Gordon (1984) states that ‘Woolf’s imagi-
nation was shaped first by a natural scene’ (16), and that Cornwall ‘gave
Virginia, as the Lakes Wordsworth, a sense of emotional reality in nature
that no experience in later life could surpass’ (12). In 1908, Woolf wrote:
‘The sea is a miracle—more congenial to me than any human being’ (LI,
326). This observation is Romantic in spirit. The German Romantic poet
Heinrich Heine put the Romantics’ affinity for the ocean in a nutshell
when he wrote: ‘I often feel as if the sea were my own soul itself’ (quoted
in Isham 2004, 34). Indeed, to the Romantic poet, the ocean often fig-
ured as ‘a supplement for or “emblem” of the poet’s own consciousness’
 2 AQUEOUS AFFINITIES: WOOLF, BACHELARD AND THE ENGLISH… 27

(Bennett 2018, 588), and ‘19th-century representations of the sea fre-

quently turn the ocean into a reflector of subjective consciousness’ (Klein
2002, 4). Yet, if Dorothy Wordsworth, as Woolf sharply put it, ‘never
confused her own soul with the sky’ (CRII, 164), then Woolf never con-
fused hers with the sea. In 1909, in the process of becoming a writer,
Woolf likens the sea to the creative imagination, when she reports to her
sister: ‘I end upon the beach generally,—find a corner where I can sit and
invent images from the shapes of the waves’ (LI, 363). For the first time
in her oeuvre, the ‘shape of waves’ is tied to the artist’s ‘invention’.
Similarly connected with the creative process is a passage in which Woolf
links water with ‘scene-making’, a technique she would later identify as
one of her crucial narrative devices. ‘How can I pick out the scene?’, she
asks herself, and muses: ‘You look down onto the semi-transparent water—
the waves all scrambled into white round the rocks—gulls swaying on bits
of seaweed—rocks now dry now drenched with white waterfalls pouring
down crevices’ (DII, 105). Words like ‘shape’, ‘invent’ and ‘scene’ indi-
cate that, from early on, Woolf conceived of water in close relation to her
art, as a material to be ‘used’. In 1923, for instance, she recorded in her
diary: ‘And then I caught a view or two which I’ve no doubt will keep for
some years & then be used. […] The clear water was very moving to me,
with the pale stones showing under lit like jelly fish’ (DII, 267). In yet
another allusion to the Romantic poets, she later painted the intriguing
image of literally merging with what she sees: ‘Otherwise I am only an
eye—yes, I observe the sea incessantly very rough, blue and white’ (LIII,
309). Where the speaker in Shelley’s ‘Song of Apollo’ conceives of himself
as a medium through which a bigger force acts—‘I am the eye with which
the Universe / Beholds itself’ (Shelley 2003, lines 31–32)—Woolf claims
this agency for herself, when she equates the sea with her seeing.
In Woolf’s meditations on the processes of her art, she shows herself as
highly aware of the role water plays in the literary works of her predeces-
sors, as well as of the element’s many contiguities with artistic creation, as
suggested by water’s varying forms, movements and depths. In the follow-
ing letter, sent to her friend Violet Dickinson after leaving London ‘on the
spur of a moment’ on Christmas Eve 1909 to take to the sea for a holiday
on her own, Woolf wrote: ‘How any one, with an immortal soul can live
inland I cant [sic] imagine; only clods and animals should be able to endure
it’ (LI, 418). Her choice of the phrase ‘immortal soul’ is intriguing: in
Woolf’s secularised aesthetics, the ‘immortal soul’ is of course a (here
slightly ironic) allusion to the poet’s soul that thrives in proximity to the
28 M. DIRSCHAUER

boundless ocean. In this respect, she is in unison with Wordsworth’s lyric

subject in his ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’, who conceives of the
immortality of the soul in analogy to the ‘mighty waters rolling evermore’:
‘Our souls have sight of the immortal sea / Which brought us hither’
(1983, 371, lines 170, 166–167). Woolf’s playful allusion to Wordsworth
already suggests her self-stylisation as an aspiring writer. The sea undoubt-
edly played a major role throughout Woolf’s life and writing, and it is thus
of much importance to my readings of Woolf’s poetics of water; but this
book also draws overdue attention to the smaller, less eminent bodies of
water in Woolf’s works, which in their variety exceed the kind of symboli-
cally charged waterscapes Bachelard evokes ([1942] 1983, 14). Every
form and manifestation of water could potentially trigger and ‘materialise’
(in Bachelard’s words) Woolf’s imagination.
Woolf ’s fascination with less eminent bodies of water also becomes
apparent in her autobiographical writings. The Stephen children were
taken for an airing to Kensington Gardens twice a day, and so ‘[c]ultured
nature was very much a part of Woolf ’s early life in London’ (Scott
2016, 323). As Woolf later records, it was natural for her and her siblings
‘always to compare Kensington Gardens with St Ives, always of course to
the disadvantage of London’ (MB, 88). The children called the ground
behind the Flower Walk ‘the swamp’, imagining it to have once been
‘covered with reeds and full of pools’, thus stamping ‘the glamour of the
past on it’ (MB, 88). They broke the ‘monotony’ and ‘dullness’ of these
walks (MB, 89) by imaginatively turning the muddy grounds of the park
into a primeval waterscape. Thereby, they transferred some of the charm
of their beloved seascape in Cornwall onto this quotidian urban space.
Elisa Kay Sparks’s (2012) article ‘Woolf on the Downs’, which relies on
several illuminating passages from Woolf ’s diaries and letters, detects a
similar conflation between the rural and coastal imagination in Woolf ’s
biography:

Virginia Stephen herself expressed a personal connection between Cornwall

and the landscape of East Sussex through the name she gave her new domi-
cile, ‘Little Talland House’, and perhaps also through her interior decora-
tion scheme; she told Violet Dickinson that she was excitedly ‘furnishing my
cottage, and staining the floors the colour of the Atlantic in a storm’ ([LI,]
451). In April of 1911, she wrote Clive Bell, expressing her pleasure in
being self-sufficient and exploring her new territory in terms that make the
sentimental equation clear: ‘There are plains, rivers, downs and the sea to
 2 AQUEOUS AFFINITIES: WOOLF, BACHELARD AND THE ENGLISH… 29

choose from. You will wag your head, and say “Poor creature! Cornwall
again!”’ ([LI,] 461). In 1929 she again described the downs as being ‘like
long waves, gently extending themselves, to break very quickly; smooth &
sloping like the waves’ ([DIII,] 231). A late diary entry of December 1940
returns to this aquatic theme, the ‘downs breaking their wave’ being part of
the ‘incredible loveliness’ of the country ([DV,] 346). (21)

Moreover, there are numerous references to the Round Pond in

Kensington Gardens and the Serpentine in Hyde Park in Woolf’s autobio-
graphical writings and letters. Occasionally, these bodies of water take on
a more prominent position and have been identified as biographical
sources of her fictional writings (Lee 1997, 39). At the same time, the
ways they are reflected in her writing also offer insights into Woolf’s atti-
tude towards language. In the summer of 1899, when the family spent
their holidays in a Fenland village, Virginia wrote a little story parodying
the style of provincial newspaper reports as a birthday gift to her cousin
Emma Vaughan, ironically calling it ‘A Terrible Tragedy in a Duck Pond’.
This little piece dramatises the actual incident of how one night, Emma,
Virginia’s brother Adrian and Virginia herself capsized a punt. In Woolf’s
fictionalised version, this capsizing results in the drowning of three
young people:

Suddenly but noiselessly the boat leant to one side, & failed to right itself;
the waters rose & rose, irresistible, calm. One moment dry & vigorous, then
thrown from the warmth & animation of life to the cold jaws of a sudden &
unthought of death—what change could be more absolute or more dread-
ful? Alone, untended, unwept, with no hand to soothe their last agonies,
they were whelmed in the waters of the duck pond, shrouded in the green
weed (we believe it to be a species of Anseria Slimatica) which we have men-
tioned above. (Quoted in Lee 1992, 179)

This scene echoes Shelley’s famous midnight dunking, which happened

when he and two friends were sailing from Livorno to Pisa on a canal,
where, halfway, their small boat was capsized. Shelley nearly drowned in
the event but was as stimulated by it as the young Virginia and reported to
have been ‘in ecstasies of delight after his ducking’ (quoted in Isham 2004,
66). But even more important than this playful evocation of all the (nearly)
drowned figures of literary history (a lifelong fascination of Woolf’s, which
shall resurface in my later chapters) is what follows on the description of
30 M. DIRSCHAUER

the actual incident. In her ‘A Note of Correction & Addition to the above
by one of the Drowned’, Woolf articulates an idea that is germane to her
poetics: ‘Methinks the human method of expression by sound of tongue
is very elementary & ought to be substituted for some ingenious inven-
tion which should be able to give vent to at least six coherent sentences at
once’. Referring to her cousin’s skills on the piano, she evokes music as a
more potent method of expression but concludes by saying that even
music ‘fails to completely carry forth the flood’ (quoted in Lee 1992, 185).
As early as 1899, Woolf hints at the insufficiency of language, a theme that
would remain on her mind throughout her writing career. Though in the
guise of mock-journalism, her doubts about language here arise out of the
humorous fictionalisation of a real-life incident and literally issue from the
‘waters of the duck pond’. Woolf’s scepticism towards language and her
interest in the question of how, as a writer, to ‘carry forth the flood’, of
how to ‘convey the stream’ (MB, 92), repeatedly find expression in water
metaphors, as is discussed at length in Chaps. 3 and 6 of this study.
Woolf’s letters and diaries attest to a consolidation of her affinity for
water. When she and Leonard moved to Richmond, she would go for daily
walks along the Thames, lovingly calling it ‘my river’. In a letter to her
friend Margaret Llewelyn Davis, written in 1916, which gives a good
impression of her attachment to the river, she teasingly asks: ‘Do you ever
get out onto your Heath? I often think of you as I pace beside my river,
which surely surpasses anything you have’ (LII, 76). The Woolfs divided
their life between London and their country house in Sussex. Together
with the sea, the river Ouse and its downs and marshes emerged as the
landscape most reflected and commented upon in her letters and diaries
(Sparks 2012; Laing 2017). In 1919, after purchasing Monks House, they
moved from Asheham to the other side of the river. They took to the gar-
den at Monks House with growing enthusiasm, and its three little ponds
added to the bodies of water that Woolf would contemplate in her writing.
A passage from a letter, in which Woolf describes her vantage point from
her little garden cabin, is evocative of the significance of what lay before
her eyes while she was writing: ‘I am sitting in my garden room which has
a fine view of the downs and marshes and an oblique view of Leonard’s
fish pond’ (LIV, 83). Though here appearing at the margins, ponds occa-
sionally received the full focus of the writer’s attention, as my readings of
Woolf’s ‘The Fascination of the Pool’ and Between the Acts will show. This
particular pond appears in a diary entry from 1934, where she records the
 2 AQUEOUS AFFINITIES: WOOLF, BACHELARD AND THE ENGLISH… 31

spectacle of a ‘violent rain storm on the pond’ and offers a beautiful exam-
ple of a poetics of the surface. Woolf writes:

The pond is covered with little white thorns; springing up & down: the
pond is bristling with leaping white thorns: like the thorns of a small porcu-
pine; bristles; then black waves: cross it: black shudders; & little water thorns
are white: a helter skelter rain, & the elms tossing it up & down: the pond
overflowing on one side. Lily leaves tugging: the red flower swimming
about; one leaf flapping. Then completely smooth for a moment. Then
prickled: thorns like glass; but leaping up & down incessantly. A rapid smirch
of shadow. Now light from the sun: green & red: shining: the pond a sage
green: the grass brilliant green: red berries on the hedges: the cows very
white: purple over Asheham. (DIV, 248)

The aesthetic detail with which Woolf captures this scene—the effect of
light, the dynamic between the different colours, movements and tex-
tures—reveals her appreciation for the beauty of nature in itself. Moreover,
it attests to her fascination with those bodies of water that were later
neglected by a writer like Bachelard, to whom the important waters are
those that flow ([1942] 1983, 8).
Finally, anybody who discusses the significance of water in Woolf’s life
and writing is inevitably confronted with Woolf’s death by drowning.
Vivienne Forrester (2015), for instance, reads ‘the water that runs
through-out Virginia’s work’ as ‘pointing the way to the River Ouse’ (53).
David Ellison (2001) interprets a scene from a letter as ‘foreshadow[ing]
her imminent death by drowning’ (209). David Bradshaw’s (2009) paper
on ‘Virginia Woolf and the Sea’ ends on the speculation that the fact
‘Woolf chose to drown herself […] rather than take her life in any other
way’ has to do with ‘her life-long tendency to fly southwards in her mind
to the landscape of her lost content’ (115). These readings resonate with
Bachelard’s concept of water as a ‘type of destiny’ ([1942] 1983, 8). Yet, I
share Elaine Showalter’s ([1977] 2009) concern that to read Woolf’s sui-
cide ‘as a beautiful act of faith, or a philosophical gesture towards androg-
yny, is to betray the human pain and rage that she felt’ (278) and can only
echo Olivia Laing’s (2017) hesitance to ‘weigh every word with what
would take place, years later, in the Ouse’ (195). Rather than exerting this
kind of teleological reading, in which references to water presumably
anticipate Woolf’s death, this book aims to uncover the impersonal char-
acter of Woolf’s modernist affinity for water. Woolf’s autobiographical
32 M. DIRSCHAUER

meditations on the waterscapes in her life reveal her as highly conscious of

the presence of an indifferent nature and as alert to the possibilities this
nature holds for a writer—possibilities that, as she was keenly aware, writ-
ers and poets before her had made productive use of. Even in her most
intimate encounters with nature, she acknowledged its non-human and
impersonal ‘otherness’.

2.3   ‘And Myself So Eliminated of Human

Features’: Water and the Appeal of the Impersonal
A central plank of Bachelard’s essay is that it upholds the psychoanalytic
perspective that triggered his attempts to rehabilitate the value of imagina-
tion in the first place. Bachelard aims to complement ‘literary criticism’
with ‘psychological criticism’ by proposing a continuity between the psy-
chology of ordinary reverie and the psychology of literary reverie ([1942]
1983, 18). The oneiric state of the poet is thus given a prominent position
in Bachelard’s essay. According to him, the poet materialises their dreams
in the act of poetic creation: ‘poetic experience […] must remain depen-
dent on oneiric experience’ (22). These dreams are intricately linked with
what he calls ‘material reality’, which was discussed above as the interrela-
tion of physical reality and the realm of dreams. Bachelard’s emphasis on
the unconscious explains why his discussion of the material imagination of
water touches upon psychoanalytic topics such as narcissism, different
‘complexes’ (the Ophelia complex, Charon complex, swan complex and
others) and the significance of ‘maternal waters’.
The crucial difference between the two positions is that Woolf’s poetics
attempts to escape the self—‘the letter I’ (RO, 90)—whereas Bachelard’s
meditation, through its correlation of literary criticism and psychology,
consolidates it. Unlike Gillian Mary Hanson (2006), whose monograph
on literary waterscapes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries revolves
around the tenet that ‘through the rural settings of riverbank and sea-
shore, the idea is demonstrated that it is possible, eventually, for one to
discover an affirmation of selfhood’ (3), I argue that the waterscapes in
Woolf’s works do not necessarily entail an affirmation of selfhood; rather,
they can radically challenge it: her writing steers towards impersonality,
and bears witness to her continuous fascination for the non-human. As
Diana L. Swanson (2012) contends, Woolf’s uses of nature ‘open up pos-
sibilities for human recognition of non-human existence and subjectivity
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 NOTES TO THE LAOCOON.

Note 1, p. 8.
Antiochus (Anthol. lib. ii. cap. 4). Hardouin, in his commentary on
Pliny (lib. xxxv. sect. 36), attributes this epigram to a certain Piso.
But among all the Greek epigrammatists there is none of this name.
 Note 2, p. 9.
For this reason Aristotle commanded that his pictures should not
be shown to young persons, in order that their imagination might be
kept as free as possible from all disagreeable images. (Polit. lib. viii.
cap. 5, p. 526, edit. Conring.) Boden, indeed, would read Pausanias
in this passage instead of Pauson, because that artist is known to
have painted lewd figures (de Umbra poetica comment. 1, p. xiii). As
if we needed a philosophic law-giver to teach us the necessity of
keeping from youth such incentives to wantonness! A comparison of
this with the well-known passage in the “Art of Poesy” would have
led him to withhold his conjecture. There are commentators, as
Kühn on Ælian (Var. Hist. lib. iv. cap. 3), who suppose the difference
mentioned by Aristotle as existing between Polygnotus, Dionysius,
and Pauson to consist in this: that Polygnotus painted gods and
heroes; Dionysius, men; and Pauson, animals. They all painted
human figures; and the fact that Pauson once painted a horse, does
not prove him to have been a painter of animals as Boden supposes
him to have been. Their rank was determined by the degree of beauty
they gave their human figures; and the reason that Dionysius could
paint nothing but men, and was therefore called pre-eminently the
anthropographist, was that he copied too slavishly, and could not rise
into the domain of the ideal beneath which it would have been
blasphemy to represent gods and heroes.
 Note 3, p. 11.
The serpent has been erroneously regarded as the peculiar symbol
of a god of medicine. But Justin Martyr expressly says (Apolog. ii. p.
55, edit. Sylburgh), παρά παντὶ τῶν νομιζομένων παρ’ ὑμῖν θεῶν,
ὄφις σύμβολον μέγα καὶ μυστήριον ἀναγράφεται; and a number of
monuments might be mentioned where the serpent accompanies
deities having no connection with health.
 Note 4, p. 12.
Look through all the works of art mentioned by Pliny, Pausanias,
and the rest, examine all the remaining statues, bas-reliefs, and
pictures of the ancients, and nowhere will you find a fury. I except
figures that are rather symbolical than belonging to art, such as those
generally represented on coins. Yet Spence, since he insisted on
having furies, would have done better to borrow them from coins
than introduce them by an ingenious conceit into a work where they
certainly do not exist. (Seguini Numis. p. 178. Spanheim, de Præst.
Numism. Dissert. xiii. p. 639. Les Césars de Julien, par Spanheim, p.
48.) In his Polymetis he says (dial. xvi.): “Though furies are very
uncommon in the works of the ancient artists, yet there is one
subject in which they are generally introduced by them. I mean the
death of Meleager, in the relievos of which they are often represented
as encouraging or urging Althæa to burn the fatal brand on which the
life of her only son depended. Even a woman’s resentment, you see,
could not go so far without a little help from the devil. In a copy of
one of these relievos, published in the ‘Admiranda,’ there are two
women standing by the altar with Althæa, who are probably meant
for furies in the original, (for who but furies would assist at such a
sacrifice?) though the copy scarce represents them horrid enough for
that character. But what is most to be observed in that piece is the
round disc beneath the centre of it, with the evident head of a fury
upon it. This might be what Althæa addressed her prayers to
whenever she wished ill to her neighbors, or whenever she was going
to do any very evil action. Ovid introduces her as invoking the furies
on this occasion in particular, and makes her give more than one
reason for her doing so.” (Metamorph. viii. 479.)
In this way we might make every thing out of any thing. “Who but
furies,” asks Spence, “would have assisted at such a sacrifice?” I
answer, the maid-servants of Althæa, who had to kindle and feed the
fire. Ovid says (Metamorph. viii.):—
Protulit hunc (stipitem) genetrix, tædasque in fragmina poni
Imperat, et positis inimicos admovet ignes.
“The mother brought the brand and commands torches to be placed
upon the pieces, and applies hostile flame to the pile.”
Both figures have actually in their hands these “tædas,” long pieces
of pine, such as the ancients used for torches, and one, as her
attitude shows, has just broken such a piece. As little do I recognize a
fury upon the disc towards the middle of the work. It is a face
expressive of violent pain,—doubtless the head of Meleager himself
(Metamorph. viii. 515).
Inscius atque absens flamma Meleagros in illa
Uritur; et cæcis torreri viscera sentit
Ignibus; et magnos superat virtute dolores.

“Meleager, absent and unconscious, is consumed in that fire, and

feels his bowels parched with the unseen flames; yet with courage he
subdues the dreadful pains.”
The artist used this as an introduction to the next incident of the
same story,—the death of Meleager. What Spence makes furies,
Montfaucon took to be fates, with the exception of the head upon the
disc, which he also calls a fury. Bellori leaves it undecided whether
they are fates or furies. An “or” which sufficiently proves that they
are neither the one nor the other. Montfaucon’s further
interpretation should have been clearer. The female figure resting on
her elbows by the bed, he should have called Cassandra, not
Atalanta. Atalanta is the one sitting in a grieving attitude with her
back towards the bed. The artist has very wisely turned her away
from the family, as being only the beloved, not the wife, of Meleager,
and because her distress at a calamity of which she had been the
innocent cause must have exasperated his family.
 Note 5, p. 14.
He thus describes the degrees of sadness actually expressed by
Timanthes: “Calchantem tristem, mæstum Ulyssem, clamantem
Ajacem, lamentantem Menelaum.” Ajax screaming would have been
extremely ugly, and since neither Cicero nor Quintilian, when
speaking of this picture, so describe him, I shall venture with the less
hesitation to consider this an addition with which Valerius has
enriched the canvas from his own invention.
 Note 6, p. 15.
We read in Pliny (lib. 34, sect. 19): “Eundem [Myro] vicit et
Pythagoras Leontinus, qui fecit statiodromon Astylon, qui Olympiæ
ostenditur: et Libyn puerum tenentem tabulam, eodem loco, et mala
ferentem nudum. Syracusis autem claudicantem: cujus hulceris
dolorem sentire etiam spectantes videntur.” “Pythagoras Leontinus
surpassed him (Myro). He made the statue of the runner, Astylon,
which is exhibited at Olympia, and in the same place a Libyan boy
holding a tablet, and a rude statue bearing apples; but at Syracuse a
limping figure, the pain of whose sore the beholders themselves seem
to feel.” Let us examine these last words more closely. Is there not
evident reference here to some person well known as having a
painful ulcer? “Cujus hulceris,” &c. And shall that “cujus” be made to
refer simply to the “claudicantem,” and the “claudicantem,” perhaps,
to the still more remote “puerum?” No one had more reason to be
known by such a malady than Philoctetes. I read, therefore, for
“claudicantem,” “Philoctetem,” or, at least, both together,
“Philoctetem claudicantem,” supposing that, as the words were so
similar in sound, one had crowded out the other. Sophocles
represents him as στίβον κατ’ ἀνάγκην ἕρπειν, compelled to drag his
limping gait, and his not being able to tread as firmly on his
wounded foot would have occasioned a limp.
 Note 7, p. 24.
When the chorus perceives Philoctetes under this accumulation of
miseries, his helpless solitude seems the circumstance that chiefly
touches them. We hear in every word the social Greek. With regard
to one passage, however, I have my doubts. It is this:—
Ἵν’ αὐτὸς ἦν πρόσουρος οὐκ ἔχων βάσιν,
οὐδέ τιν’ ἐγχώρων,
κακογείτονα παρ’ ᾧ στόνον ἀντίτυπον
βαρυβρῶτ’ ἀποκλαύ—
σειεν αἱματηρόν.

Lit.: I myself, my only neighbor, having no power to walk, nor any

companion, a neighbor in ill, to whom I might wail forth my echoing,
gnawing groans, bloodstained.
The common translation of Winshem renders the lines thus:—
Ventis expositus et pedibus captus
Nullum cohabitatorem
Nec vicinum ullum saltem malum habens, apud quem gemitum mutuum.
Gravemque ac cruentum
Ederet.

The translation of Thomas Johnson differs from this only in the

choice of words:—
Ubi ipse ventis erat expositus, firmum gradum non habens,
Nec quenquam indigenarum,
Nec malum vicinum, apud quem ploraret
Vehementur edacem
Sanguineum morbum, mutuo gemitu.

One might think he had borrowed these words from the translation
of Thomas Naogeorgus, who expresses himself thus (his work is very
rare, and Fabricius himself knew it only through Operin’s
Catalogue):—
... ubi expositus fuit
 Ventis ipse, gradum firmum haud habens,
Nec quenquam indigenam, nec vel malum
Vicinum, ploraret apud quem
Vehementer edacem atque cruentum
Morbum mutuo.

If these translations are correct, the chorus pronounces the strongest

possible eulogy on human society. The wretch has no human being
near him; he knows of no friendly neighbor; even a bad one would
have been happiness. Thomson, then, might have had this passage in
mind when he puts these words into the mouth of his Melisander,
who was likewise abandoned by ruffians on a desert island:—
Cast on the wildest of the Cyclad isles
Where never human foot had marked the shore,
These ruffians left me; yet believe me, Arcas,
Such is the rooted love we bear mankind,
All ruffians as they were, I never heard
A sound so dismal as their parting oars.

To him, also, the society of ruffians was better than none. A great and
admirable idea! If we could but be sure that Sophocles, too, had
meant to express it! But I must reluctantly confess to finding nothing
of the sort in him, unless, indeed, I were to use, instead of my own
eyes, those of the old scholiast, who thus transposes the words:—Οὐ
μόνον ὅπου καλὸν οὐκ εἶχέ τινα τῶν ἐγχωρίων γείτονα, ἀλλὰ οὐδὲ
κακόν, παρ’ οὗ ἀμοιβαῖον λόγον στενάζων ἀκούσειε. Brumoy, as well
as our modern German translator, has held to this reading, like the
translators quoted above. Brumoy says, “Sans société, même
importune;” and the German, “jeder Gesellschaft, auch der
beschwerlichsten, beraubt.” My reasons for differing from all of these
are the following. First, it is evident that if κακογείτονα was meant to
be separated from τιν’ ἐγχώρων and constitute a distinct clause, the
particle οὐδέ would necessarily have been repeated before it. Since
this is not the case, it is equally evident that κακογείτονα belongs to
τίνα, and there should be no comma after ἐγχώρων. This comma
crept in from the translation. Accordingly, I find that some Greek
editions (as that published at Wittenberg of 1585 in 8vo, which was
wholly unknown to Fabricius) are without it, but put a comma only
after κακογείτονα, as is proper. Secondly, is that a bad neighbor from
whom we may expect, as the scholiast has it, στόνον ἀντίτυπον,
ἀμοιβαῖον? To mingle his sighs with ours is the office of a friend, not
an enemy. In short, the word κακογείτονα has not been rightly
understood. It has been thought to be derived from the adjective
κακός, when it is really derived from the substantive τὸ κακόν. It
has been translated an evil neighbor, instead of a neighbor in ill. Just
as κακόμαντις means not an evil, in the sense of a false, untrue
prophet, but a prophet of evil, and κακότεχνος means not a bad,
unskilful painter, but a painter of bad things. In this passage the poet
means by a neighbor in ill, one who is overtaken by a similar
misfortune with ourselves, or from friendship shares our sufferings;
so that the whole expression, οὐδ’ ἔχων τιν’ ἐγχώρων κακογείτονα, is
to be translated simply by “neque quenquam indigenarum mali
socium habens.” The new English translator of Sophocles, Thomas
Franklin, must have been of my opinion. Neither does he find an evil
neighbor in κακογείτων, but translates it simply “fellow-mourner.”
Exposed to the inclement skies,
Deserted and forlorn he lies,
No friend nor fellow-mourner there,
To soothe his sorrow and divide his care.
 Note 8, p. 34.
Saturnal. lib. v. cap. 2. “Non parva sunt alia quæ Virgilius traxit a
Græcis, dicturumne me putatis quæ vulgo nota sunt? quod
Theocritum sibi fecerit pastoralis operis autorem, ruralis Hesiodum?
et quod in ipsis Georgicis, tempestatis serenitatisque signa de Arati
Phænomenis traxerit? vel quod eversionem Trojæ, cum Sinone suo,
et equo ligneo cæterisque omnibus, quæ librum secundum faciunt, a
Pisandro pene ad verbum transcripserit? qui inter Græcos poetas
eminet opere, quod a nuptiis Jovis et Junonis incipiens universas
historias, quæ mediis omnibus sæculis usque ad ætatem ipsius
Pisandri contigerunt, in unam seriem coactas redegerit, et unum ex
diversis hiatibus temporum corpus effecerit? in quo opere inter
historias cæteras interitus quoque Trojæ in hunc modum relatus est.
Quæ fideliter Maro interpretando, fabricatus est sibi Iliacæ urbis
ruinam. Sed et hæc et talia ut pueris decantata prætereo.”
Not a few other things were brought by Virgil from the Greeks, and
inserted in his poem as original. Do you think I would speak of what
is known to all the world? how he took his pastoral poem from
Theocritus, his rural from Hesiod? and how, in his Georgics, he took
from the Phenomena of Aratus the signs of winter and summer? or
that he translated almost word for word from Pisander the
destruction of Troy, with his Sinon and wooden horse and the rest?
For he is famous among Greek poets for a work in which, beginning
his universal history with the nuptials of Jupiter and Juno, he
collected into one series whatever had happened in all ages, to the
time of himself, Pisander. In which work the destruction of Troy,
among other things, is related in the same way. By faithfully
interpreting these things, Maro made his ruin of Ilium. But these,
and others like them, I pass over as familiar to every schoolboy.
 Note 9, p. 35.
I do not forget that a picture mentioned by Eumolpus in Petronius
may be cited in contradiction of this. It represented the destruction
of Troy, and particularly the history of Laocoon exactly as narrated
by Virgil. And since, in the same gallery at Naples were other old
pictures by Zeuxis, Protogenes, and Apelles, it was inferred that this
was also an old Greek picture. But permit me to say that a novelist is
no historian. This gallery and picture, and Eumolpus himself,
apparently existed only in the imagination of Petronius. That the
whole was fiction appears from the evident traces of an almost
schoolboyish imitation of Virgil. Thus Virgil (Æneid lib. ii. 199–224):
—
Hic aliud majus miseris multoque tremendum
Objicitur magis, atque improvida pectora turbat.
Laocoon, ductus Neptuno sorte sacerdos,
Solemnis taurum ingentem mactabat ad aras.
Ecce autem gemini a Tenedo tranquilla per alta
(Horresco referens) immensis orbibus angues
Incumbunt pelago, pariterque ad litora tendunt:
Pectora quorum inter fluctus arrecta, jubæque
Sanguineæ exsuperant undas: pars cetera pontum
Pone legit, sinuatque immensa volumine terga.
Fit sonitus, spumante salo: jamque arva tenebant,
Ardentesque oculos suffecti sanguine et igni
Sibila lambebant linguis vibrantibus ora.
Diffugimus visu exsangues. Illi agmine certo
Laocoonta petunt, et primum parva duorum
Corpora natorum serpens amplexus uterque
Implicat, et miseros morsu depascitur artus.
Post ipsum, auxilio subeuntem ac tela ferentem,
Corripiunt, spirisque ligant ingentibus; et jam
Bis medium amplexi, bis collo squamea circum
Terga dati, superant capite et cervicibus altis.
Ille simul manibus tendit divellere nodos,
Perfusus sanie vittas atroque veneno:
Clamores simul horrendos ad sidera tollit.
Quales mugitus, fugit cum saucius aram
Taurus et incertam excussit cervice securim.
 And thus Eumolpus, in whose lines, as is usually the case with
improvisators, memory has had as large a share as imagination:—
Ecce alia monstra. Celsa qua Tenedos mare
Dorso repellit, tumida consurgunt freta,
Undaque resultat scissa tranquillo minor.
Qualis silenti nocte remorum sonus
Longe refertur, cum premunt classes mare,
Pulsumque marmor abiete imposita gemit.
Respicimus, angues orbibus geminis ferunt
Ad saxa fluctus: tumida quorum pectora
Rates ut altæ, lateribus spumas agunt:
Dat cauda sonitum; liberæ ponto jubæ
Coruscant luminibus, fulmineum jubar
Incendit æquor, sibilisque undæ tremunt;
Stupuere mentes. Infulis stabant sacri
Phrygioque cultu gemina nati pignora
Laocoonte, quos repente tergoribus ligant
Angues corusci: parvulas illi manus
Ad ora referunt: neuter auxilio sibi
Uterque fratri transtulit pias vices,
Morsque ipsa miseros mutuo perdit metu.
Accumulat ecce liberûm funus parens
Infirmus auxiliator; invadunt virum
Jam morte pasti, membraque ad terram trahunt.
Jacet sacerdos inter aras victima.

The main points are the same in both, and in many places the
same words are used. But those are trifles, and too evident to require
mention. There are other signs of imitation, more subtle, but not less
sure. If the imitator be a man with confidence in his own powers, he
seldom imitates without trying to improve upon the original; and, if
he fancy himself to have succeeded, he is enough of a fox to brush
over with his tail the footprints which might betray his course. But he
betrays himself by this very vanity of wishing to introduce
embellishments, and his desire to appear original. For his
embellishments are nothing but exaggerations and excessive
refinements. Virgil says, “Sanguineæ jubæ”; Petronius, “liberæ jubæ
luminibus coruscant”; Virgil, “ardentes oculos suffecti sanguine et
igni”; Petronius, “fulmineum jubar incendit æquor.” Virgil, “fit
sonitus spumante salo”; Petronius, “sibilis undæ tremunt.” So the
imitator goes on exaggerating greatness into monstrosity, wonders
into impossibilities. The boys are secondary in Virgil. He passes them
over with a few insignificant words, indicative simply of their
helplessness and distress. Petronius makes a great point of them,
converting the two children into a couple of heroes.
Neuter auxilio sibi
Uterque fratri transtulit pias vices
Morsque ipsa miseros mutuo perdit metu.

Who expects from human beings, and children especially, such self-
sacrifice? The Greek understood nature better (Quintus Calaber, lib.
xii.), when he made even mothers forget their children at the
appearance of the terrible serpents, so intent was every one on
securing his own safety.
... ἔνθα γυναῖκες
Οἴμωζον, καὶ πού τις ἑῶν ἐπελήσατο τέκνων
Aὐτὴ ἀλευομένη στυγερὸν μόρον....

The usual method of trying to conceal an imitation is to alter the

shading, bringing forward what was in shadow, and obscuring what
was in relief. Virgil lays great stress upon the size of the serpents,
because the probability of the whole subsequent scene depends upon
it. The noise occasioned by their coming is a secondary idea,
intended to make more vivid the impression of their size. Petronius
raises this secondary idea into chief prominence, describing the noise
with all possible wealth of diction, and so far forgetting to describe
the size of the monsters that we are almost left to infer it from the
noise they make. He hardly would have fallen into this error, had he
been drawing solely from his imagination, with no model before him
which he wished to imitate without the appearance of imitation. We
can always recognize a poetic picture as an unsuccessful imitation
when we find minor details exaggerated and important ones
neglected, however many incidental beauties the poem may possess,
and however difficult, or even impossible, it may be to discover the
original.
 Note 10, p. 36.
Suppl. aux Antiq. Expl. T. i. p. 243. Il y a quelque petite différence
entre ce que dit Virgile, et ce que le marbre représente. Il semble,
selon ce que dit le poëte, que les serpens quittèrent les deux enfans
pour venir entortiller le père, au lieu que dans ce marbre ils lient en
même temps les enfans et leur père.
 Note 11, p. 37.
Donatus ad v. 227, lib. ii. Æneid. Mirandum non est, clypeo et
simulacri vestigiis tegi potuisse, quos supra et longos et validos dixit,
et multiplici ambitu circumdedisse Laocoontis corpus ac liberorum,
et fuisse superfluam partem. The “non” in the clause “mirandum non
est,” should, it seems to me, be omitted, unless we suppose the
concluding part of the sentence to be missing. For, since the serpents
were of such extraordinary length, it would certainly be surprising
that they could be concealed beneath the goddess’s shield, unless this
also were of great length, and belonged to a colossal figure. The
assurance that this was actually the case must have been meant to
follow, or the “non” has no meaning.
 Note 12, p. 39.
In the handsome edition of Dryden’s Virgil (London, 1697). Yet
here the serpents are wound but once about the body, and hardly at
all about the neck. So indifferent an artist scarcely deserves an
excuse, but the only one that could be made for him would be that
prints are merely illustrations, and by no means to be regarded as
independent works of art.
 Note 13, p. 40.
This is the judgment of De Piles in his remarks upon Du Fresnoy:
“Remarquez, s’il vous plaît, que les draperies tendres et légères,
n’étant données qu’au sexe féminin, les anciens sculpteurs ont évité
autant qu’ils out pu, d’habiller les figures d’hommes; parce qu’ils ont
pensé, comme nous l’avons déjà dit qu’en sculpture on ne pouvait
imiter les étoffes, et que les gros plis faisaient un mauvais effet. Il y a
presque autant d’exemples de cette vérité, qu’il y a parmi les
antiques, de figures d’hommes nuds. Je rapporterai seulement celui
du Laocoon, lequel, selon la vraisemblance, devrait être vêtu. En
effet, quelle apparence y a-t-il qu’un fils de roi, qu’un prêtre
d’Apollon, se trouvât tout nud dans la cérémonie actuelle d’un
sacrifice? car les serpens passèrent de l’île de Tenedos au rivage de
Troye, et surprirent Laocoon et ses fils dans le temps même qu’il
sacrifiait à Neptune sur le bord de la mer, comme le marque Virgile
dans le second livre de son Enéide. Cependant les artistes qui sont
les auteurs de ce bel ouvrage, ont bien vu qu’ils ne pouvaient pas leur
donner de vêtements convenables à leur qualité, sans faire comme
un amas de pierres, dont la masse ressemblerait à un rocher, au lieu
des trois admirables figures, qui ont été, et qui sont toujours,
l’admiration des siècles. C’est pour cela que de deux inconveniens, ils
out jugé celui des draperies beaucoup plus fâcheux, que celui d’aller
contre la vérité même.”
 Note 14, p. 42.
Maffei, Richardson, and, more recently, Herr Von Hagedorn.
(Betrachtungen über die Malerei, p. 37. Richardson, Traité de la
Peinture, vol. iii.) De Fontaines does not merit being reckoned in the
same class with these scholars. In the notes to his translation of
Virgil, he maintains, indeed, that the poet had the group in mind, but
he is so ignorant as to ascribe it to Phidias.
 Note 15, p. 44.
I can adduce no better argument in support of my view than this
poem of Sadolet. It is worthy of one of the old poets, and, since it
may well take the place of an engraving, I venture to introduce it here
entire.

DE LAOCOONTIS STATUA JACOBI SADOLETI CARMEN.

Ecce alto terræ e cumulo, ingentisque ruinæ

Visceribus, iterum reducem longinqua reduxit
Laocoonta dies; aulis regalibus olim
Qui stetit, atque tuos ornabat, Tite, Penates.
Divinæ simulacrum artis, nec docta vetustas
Nobilius spectabat opus, nunc celsa revisit
Exemptum tenebris redivivæ mœnia Romæ.
Quid primum summumque loquar? miserumne parentem
Et prolem geminam? an sinuatos flexibus angues
Terribili aspectu? caudasque irasque draconum
Vulneraque et veros, saxo moriente, dolores?
Horret ad hæc animus, mutaque ab imagine pulsat
Pectora, non parvo pietas commixta tremori.
Prolixum bini spiris glomerantur in orbem
Ardentes colubri, et sinuosis orbibus errant,
Ternaque multiplici constringunt corpora nexu.
Vix oculi sufferre valent, crudele tuendo
Exitium, casusque feros: micat alter, et ipsum
Laocoonta petit, totumque infraque supraque
Implicat et rabido tandem ferit ilia morsu.
Connexum refugit corpus, torquentia sese
Membra, latusque retro sinuatum a vulnere cernas.
Ille dolore acri, et laniatu impulsus acerbo,
Dat gemitum ingentem, crudosque evellere dentes
Connixus, lævam impatiens ad terga Chelydri
Objicit: intendunt nervi, collectaque ab omni
Corpore vis frustra summis conatibus instat.
Ferre nequit rabiem, et de vulnere murmur anhelum est.
At serpens lapsu crebro redeunte subintrat
Lubricus, intortoque ligat genua infima nodo.