a force (by parties, by people) to whom he is both marginal and essential.
The Smiths of the world are throwaways, but without the Smiths, govern-
ment cannot operate.

This introduction takes its title from Septimus's designation; but I dilate
the word “case,” with its suggestions of enclosure and categorical dis-
creteness, to focus on its other implication of the exemplary individual
instance. Like Woolf, I am concerned with the energies contained within
a border figure and with imagining an internal dynamic that works against
encasement and toward the connection of disparate objects. Septimus's
credo is “Communication is health; communication is happiness”—finally
bursting through the window (the “casement”) that represents his psychic
internment, only to be impaled on the fences he rails against, Septimus
nonetheless embodies a hope for communicating territories, plots, and
neighbors. Like Judith Shakespeare, he is a Messiah figure, who will rise
again when humans embrace the border as a place of possibility, a fecund
ground where opposing energies, intersecting, need not stiffen into ancient,
deathly postures. It is this resurrection that Woolf's prose continually
works for, in an evolving effort not so much to reconcile opposites as to
imagine the varied configurations formed by difference.

The rejection of simplistic notions of “centrality” that underlies Woolf's
concern with borders also informs recent discussions of literary modern-
ism, which question the idea of a “central” current even while continuing
to interrogate the work of those figures traditionally denoted as the defin-
ers of high modernism. ² James Joyce, W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, and Ezra
Pound have been increasingly examined from the point of view of ideology,
and the intersection of their own politics with larger political movements
such as fascism and socialism has received particular attention. Virginia
Woolf dealt consciously, and often explicitly, with ideological and political
questions; ³ through her husband, but also through inclinations developed
early on, she was involved in Labour issues and actively engaged with an
offshoot of the Labour movement, the Women's Co-operative Guild. Not
only was she alert and sensitive to the class divisions of her world; she was
also, as the descendant of imperialists and judges and a liberal-humanist
child of privilege, both prone to and aware of her class, racial, and ethnic
prejudices.

Woolf's marriage played a vital role in the engagement with injustice that
informs, I believe, every one of her works; her husband, a Jew of financially
straitened circumstances, a skeptic and lifelong socialist, was overtly the
friend and secretly often the butt of Woolf's family and social circle—both
central and marginalized, a “border case” himself. Certainly, as a man, a
Cambridge graduate, and an imperial administrator, he was more centrally
located than Virginia Stephen. Yet one might call Leonard the Septimus
Warren Smith to Virginia's Clarissa Dalloway—the scapegoat who pointed

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