These figures from To the Lighthouse meet their ends both at the center of a tripartite structure and in a parenthetical space. Their deaths are at once vital and trivial. The same is true of Jacob Flanders in Jacob's Room and of Percival in The Waves: cogs in the wheel of overweening political forces, they die offstage, yet their loss irrevocably affects the characters who remain.
In the past several years, many if not most of the MLA convention panels dealing expressly with modernism have focused on such questions. Anthologies such as Bonnie Kime Scott's The Gender of Modernism and her more recent, two- volume study Refiguring Modernism have initiated a reconsideration of the move- ment and period as a network of intersections among artists and writers of varied class, national, racial, and ethnic background, as well as infused with ideologies of gender. Continuing studies of T. S. Eliot's ideological and especially antisemitic leanings have broadened into recent considerations of the figure of “the Jew,” espe- cially in conjunction with ideas about sex and character, in modern British litera- ture. See, for example, Andrea Freud Loewenstein, Loathsome Jews and Engulfing Women: Metaphors of Projection in the Works of Wyndham Lewis, Charles Williams, and Graham Greene, and Bryan Cheyette, Constructions of “the Jew” in Modern English Literature and Society: Racial Representations, 1875-1945.
A fascinating study elucidating the way the definers of literary high modernism— in particular, Hugh Kenner—have privileged exile over national rootedness as the condition for membership in the canon (and thus excluded Virginia Woolf) is Mi- chael Gluzman's “Modernism and Exile: A View from the Margins” in Biale, Gal- chinsky, and Heschel, Insider/Outsider: American Jews and Multiculturalism.
Michael Tratner's book Modernism and Mass Politics: Joyce, Woolf, Eliot, Yeats is the first to extensively discuss her politics in conjunction with these other figures'; it also argues convincingly for modernism as a movement composed of splinters and antithetical currents.
Thomas C. Caramagno, The Flight of the Mind: Virginia Woolf's Art and Manic- Depressive Illness. My conviction derives from Caramagno's detailed research into Leonard's care of Virginia and attitude toward her illness, but also from notations in Virginia Woolf's own diaries and Leonard Woolf's descriptions in his autobiog- raphy of his painful efforts to help Virginia understand her “phases” as somatic episodes rather than symptoms of moral weakness—the latter being an all-too- common explanation of mental illness, especially in women, in those early post- Victorian times.
See the second chapter in Tratner's Modernism and Mass Politics for an in- depth analysis of the relation between sections of the novel and sectors of society within the novel. The work of postcolonial theorists, such as Edward Said in Culture and Imperialism, discusses the simultaneously buttressing and unsettling presence of the colonies even in texts whose main locus is the metropole.
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Publication Information: Book Title: Outsiders Together: Virginia and Leonard Woolf. Contributors: Natania Rosenfeld - author. Publisher: Princeton University Press. Place of Publication: Princeton, NJ. Publication Year: 2000. Page Number: 183.
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