The First "Orlando": The Laugh of the Comic Spirit in Virginia Woolf's "Friendships Gallery"

Author(s): Karin E. Westman

Source: Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 47, No. 1 (Spring, 2001), pp. 39-71
Published by: Hofstra University
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/827856
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!l4
The First Orlando:
The Laugh of the Comic Spirit
in Virginia Woolf's
"FriendshipsGallery"

KarinE. Westman

The Comic Spirit laughed meanwhile.

-"Friendships Gallery" (284)

If Orlando(1928) has typically been read as the literary consequence of

Woolf's call for a new "art" of biography that could negotiate the ten-
sion between fact and fiction-between the "granite"and the "rainbow"
of life, as Woolf's metaphor figures it in her review essay "The New Bi-
ography" (1927)-the early biographical sketch "Friendships Gallery"
questions Orlando'spride of place in that critical narrative.1The laughter
of the Comic Spirit in "Friendships Gallery" is a harbinger of the revi-
sionary spirit that runs through Virginia Woolf's early essays and prose
fiction and into her later work. Its text bound in violet leather and typed
with purple ink,Woolf's gift to her childhood friendViolet Dickinson is
the direct antecedent to the later "mock" biography Orlando,and in that
capacity "Friendships Gallery" illustratesWoolf's growing control over
her literary inheritance as she satirically mocks the failures of biography
and novels to capture the "granite"and the "rainbow"of individuals'lives.
For Woolf, the ideological connection between these traditional narra-
tives of experience must necessarily come under investigation, particu-
larly if a woman's life is to be told. Her narrative'sself-conscious, satiric

* 47.1 * 39
Literature
Twentieth-Century
Karin E.Westman

use of established forms illustrates how these forms in turn could be re-
constructed for different ideological ends.
The comic tropes ofWoolf's "Friendships Gallery" (her emphasis on
Violet's physical height and persistent laugh, the disruptions of narrative
time) as well as the biographer's self-conscious rejection of sentimental
and realisticnarrativeforms suggest the sketch'spivotal position in Woolf's
feminist revisions of literary traditions. In this more "proper writing of
lives" (15 April 1908, Letters1: 325), "Friendships Gallery" tells Violet
Dickinson's history by way of a dialogic emphasis on voice, in order to
convey the energy and strength ofViolet's character from birth through
middle age-a range of female experience not traditionally recorded
within the conventions of either the nineteenth-century biography or
novel. By explicitly calling on both the historiographic and novelistic
conventions for writing a woman's life, Woolf's biographical sketch of
Dickinson reveals how these narrative forms can limit a woman's mate-
rial existence within a capitalistsociety's histories and stories.Woolf there-
fore explicitly writes into her narrative what patriarchalideologies and,
consequently,history often elide: a woman's individual character,expressed
through body and voice.
Since the tension between biographical truth and literary fiction is
explicitly worked out in the pages of this early biographical sketch,
"Friendships Gallery" offers early evidence for Woolf's goal of a new
"art" of biography that strives to capture "the truth of real life and the
truth of fiction," however "antagonistic"and "incompatible" those truths
may be ("The New Biography" [1927], 154-55).John Stape's assertion
that we find the roots. of Orlandoin "The Journal of MistressJoan Mar-
tyn"(1906), "Memoirs of a Novelist" (1909), and "The Jessamy Brides"
(1927) is therefore appropriate but incomplete (xi). While these three
texts certainly contribute to the development of Woolf's art, I believe
that "Friendships Gallery" best represents the complex root system from
which Orlandogrows. In the pages of"Friendships Gallery,"we see nearly
all of the qualities Stape identifies in his description of Orlando:a "hy-
brid genre of mock forms,""simultaneously a novel, a treatise on biog-
raphy,a study of the art of fiction, a work of feminist social criticism, a
revisionist literary history and the fantastically reinvented life history of
Woolf's friend" (xi).
The sketch's three chapters each offer a view of Violet's character
that balance, in varying combinations, the "truths"of life and fiction: the

40
Woolf's "FriendshipsGallery"

first, untitled, chapter comically tells ofViolet's birth, childhood, and first
season; "Chapter Two: The Magic Garden" offers not only a comic but
also a fantastic narrative of Violet's early years in society; and, finally,
"Chapter Three: A Story to Make You Sleep" shifts almost completely
into the realm of the fantastic by relating Violet's trip to Japan as a tale
of a giant princess who saves a village from monsters by laughing and
brandishing her umbrella. After briefly placing "Friendships Gallery" in
the context ofWoolf's other early biographical writings and noting its
critical reception since its publication in 1979, I will identify three ways
in which this early comic sketch anticipates Orlando and the feminist
concerns ofWoolf's later work: first, through her questioning of a third-
person, omniscient narrative style typical of historiography and biogra-
phy; second, through her revisions to Meredith's definition of the Comic
Spirit, embodied byViolet's character in "Friendships Gallery";and third,
through her choice of romance and fantasy as alternative narrativeforms
for the telling of a woman's life. My goal is not only to recover an early
sketch for further critical study but also to identify the importance of
"Friendships Gallery" to our critical narrative of Woolf's development
as a feminist writer.

"Friendships Gallery" is only one of several biographical sketches that

Woolf, as an aspiring chronicler of the past,2 composed for family and
friends or for general publication in advance of her more famous and
irreverent Orlando.When we hear that Woolf had been asked by F.W
Maitland to contribute to his biography of her father Sir Leslie Stephen,
a man whose name had become synonymous with the compendious
Dictionaryof National Biography,we might expect Woolf to have felt as
burdened by her literary past as her character Katharine Hilbery in Night
and Day (1920), who labors at her grandfather'sbiography,"half-crushed"
by the weight of"the great poet, Richard Alardyce" (15), and his many
letters and manuscripts.Yet far from suffering under the weight of this
legacy, Woolf repeatedly adapts her inheritance to her own literary and
feminist goals.3 Like her traveljournals and earliest fiction, Woolf's bio-
graphical sketches4 put into practice a more "proper writing of lives"
than she had found in the many histories, biographies, and memoirs she
reviewed during these same years, a method that questioned patriarchal

41
Karin E.Westman

ideology by questioning the established methods of biographical writ-

ing. In her biographies,Woolf chose to emphasize individual voices from
the past, to advocate storytelling as a way to recover those voices and
bodies of the past for the contemporary reader, and, perhaps most im-
portantly, to avoid historians' and biographers' replication of a patriar-
chal ideology of separatespheres,in which men's lives turn on their active
engagement with the social world, and women's lives turn on their pas-
sive appearance and the "invisible" work they accomplish within the
home.5 Acknowledging her independent, subjectiveperspective by writing
herself into the biographical text,Woolf continually pursues the individ-
ual character of her subjects by re-presenting their speech and thoughts
as well as their actions, so that the historical past lives again in the read-
er's present experience. Her biographical sketches anticipate the need to
balance the "truth of real life and the truth of fiction," the hallmark of
what Woolf will identify as the new art of biography ("The New Biog-
raphy" [1927], 154); their narrative forms illustrate a dialogic writing of
lives commensurate with her feminist goals. In "FriendshipsGallery,"how-
ever, we can see Woolf altering the balance from historical narrative (the
"truth of real life") to the possibilities of fiction (the "truth of fiction"),
as her writing notebooks confirm.6 "Friendships Gallery" therefore pro-
vides a crucial link in our understanding of Woolf's development as a
feminist materialist artist, one concerned with economic relations and
with the life of the body and the mind within a patriarchalculture.
When "Friendships Gallery"was first discovered, however, the sketch
was quickly linked with Woolf's better-known mock biography of an-
other female friend,Vita Sackville-West, and it has since shared a critical
fate similar to Orlando'swithin the Woolf canon of literary works.7 The
prevailing critical evaluation of Orlandoread Woolf's novel through the
lens of Nigel Nicholson's oft-quoted line "the longest and most charm-
ing love letter in literature."8Woolf's biographical sketch ofViolet Dick-
inson is introduced in similar terms by Ellen Hawkes, who edited the
previously unpublished sketch for TwentiethCenturyLiteraturein 1979. In
Hawkes's introduction, "Friendships Gallery" becomes "an early exam-
ple of Virginia Woolf's way of expressing her affection and admiration
for a woman friend"-a "spoof biography ofViolet Dickinson [that] be-
gins and ends in love" (270).9 While both "Friendships Gallery" and Or-
lando are certainly motivated, as Woolf's letters and diary entries bear
out, by the "affection and admiration"Woolf felt "for a woman friend,"

42
Woolf's "FriendshipsGallery"

this perspective limits the critical import of the particular stories each
"biography" tells, and, in the case of Orlando,inappropriately limits the
intended audience for the book. Both texts become only "love letters,"
to be read more for the affection conveyed rather than for the form and
content of the narrativestold.
While the prevailing critical view of Orlando has shifted over the
years, that for "Friendships Gallery" has not. In her biography Virginia
Woolf(1996), Hermione Lee replicates Ellen Hawkes's approach, identi-
fying "Friendships Gallery" as "a spoof love-letter-cum-biography" and
therefore "an early Orlando" (13). Although Hawkes concludes her in-
troductory comments by acknowledging the "reverberations here of
[Woolf's] serious themes," her list of themes is not fleshed out within
the necessarily brief editorial space.10Nevertheless, Hawkes's decision to
frame "Friendships Gallery" foremost as a "panegyric" subordinates the
narrative'srole in cultural,feminist criticism, since Hawkes's choice elides
Woolf's explicit play with the genres of biography, the novel, and the
romance-a sign ofWoolf's search early in her literary career for narra-
tive forms by which to accomplish her explicitly feminist goals. A criti-
cal approach that reads "Friendships Gallery" alongside Orlandofor the
narrative forms by which Woolf conveys her "affection and admiration"
reveals how these two biographical sketches underscore Woolf's continu-
ing concerns with re-presenting individual experience, particularlywom-
en's experience.Together,"FriendshipsGallery"and Orlandomark an early
and later revision of available narrative forms into a new, and particular-
ly comic, art.

Like Orlando,"Friendships Gallery" offers a satiric commentary both on

the necessarily imaginative role a biographer plays in re-presenting ex-
perience and on the historiographic methods that traditionally mask this
subjective view.Woolf's narrativeplaces the biographer's construction of
characterin the foreground of the sketch, thereby encouraging her reader
to see historical texts as subjective, interested readings of past experience
rather than as the objective, disinterested truth historiography often pur-
ports to be. As she will in Orlando,Woolf's narrator adopts a masculine
biographical persona when writing the sketch of Violet Dickinson-a
rhetorical move that emphasizes not only how "biographer"is a role one

43
Karin E.Westman

assumes within the biographical narrative but also how this role is usu-
ally "played"from a masculine point of view. Though the sketch is writ-
ten in the first and second person, the biographer's professed lack of
knowledge of women and the solitary life the biographer leads indicates
this masculine persona:
I will not say how they [the ladies] do these things; for that
would require a surgical knowledge of anatomy, neither polite
[n]or possible; for living as I do, in a garret with one dirty char
woman who brings me Lloyds Weekly and a bunch of kippered
herrings tied by the tails like candles, on Friday nights,... (283)
Given this character sketch in "Friendships Gallery" and the use of the
masculine pronoun in Orlando-"Happy the mother who bears, happy
still the biographer who records the life of such a one! Never need she
vex herself, nor he invoke the help of novelist of poet" (15)-Woolf ap-
pears to be drawing attention in both mock biographies to the presumed
sex and gender of the biographer, making the reader aware of the gen-
dered, subjective position of the supposedly "objective" historical voice.
The constraints of propriety, coupled with class position, emerge in
this same narrative aside, emphasizing further the degree to which the
biographer's own material circumstances must necessarily influence his
representation of Violet's life. In describing the food consumed by la-
dies having tea inViolet's garden, the biographer cannot pretend to have
an objective view of the scene:
how can I imagine the taste of the cutlets which Lady B th
eats off silver, beneath the eyes of six flunkeys in livery? Cutlets
may change their shape beneath such a radiance;and Heaven
knows what exquisite nerves are stimulated and begotten by
mutton eaten off silver.And as it is with mutton, so it must be
with other things; with books, with pictures;with love with life;
this is a very good reason why I should not attempt to describe
what I do not know-why I should continue to adore it. (283)

Anticipating the narrator in A Room of One's Own (1929),Violet's biog-

rapher insists on the influence that good food in pleasant surroundings
will have on the creative and intellectual faculties.l1 And, like the narra-
tor of A Room of One's Own who "take[s] the liberty to defy that con-
vention of novels" (10) and describes the quality and quantity of food

44
Woolf's "FriendshipsGallery"

eaten at the men's college, Violet's biographer defies a related conven-

tion of biography by insisting on how the material experience of eating
limits a biographer's sympathetic imagination. Woolf's biographical per-
sona thus abandons all claims to objectivity: the subjective emphasis falls,
as it does in A Room of One's Own, on the material conditions that allow
or prevent a greater understanding for another's point of view.
The difficulty of composing with propriety while still craftinga "true"
history marks another aspect of biography that Woolf questions in her
comic sketch, as she will in her later work. In "Friendships Gallery,"such
self-censorship limits Violet's "sincere historian" right from the opening
of the sketch:

Forty years ago, our sincerity does her credit, a child was born in
a Somersetshire manor house.Whether she was born laughing or
crying or both at once or whether she merely accepted the situ-
ation and made the best of it, a sincere historian anxious to use
only those words that cannot be avoided has no means of telling.
(275)
Restricted by the biographical conventions emerging from nineteenth-
century social mores,Violet's biographer can only recount the dificulty
of maintaining his goal of sincerity and cannot provide sincere speech
itself. A paragraph later, the biographer's narrative is thwarted again by
these prescribed bounds of speech:
Now the history of Christian names is so interesting that if I had
the freedom of my mother tongue, as I have not for a reason to
be told in the appendix,' I would here expound it;12 I will only
say that forty years ago a Christian name was a Christian name;
and that if you wished your daughter to answer with credit in
this world and the next you branded her with the virtues of the
faith from the very beginning. (275)
Lacking the "freedom of [his] mother tongue," the biographer claims not
to be able to convey an important context forViolet's name; in place of
the unspeakable,Violet's biographer includes the scene of Violet's bap-
tism, but does so in order to turn the serious occasion of Christian naming
through baptism into a merely arbitrary event, concluding how "nearly
Violet was Mary, how easily Dickinson might have been Jones" (275).
Violet's biographer thus both criticizes the social censure of his "mother

45
Karin E.Westman

tongue" and renders such censure ineffective, even detrimental to those

social mores that required "a Christian name."The biographer of Orlan-
do will encounter and then surmount similarnarrativedifficultiesby com-
ically drawing the reader'sattention to the censorship while offering a
pointed commentary on the hypocrisy of the restrictions. When faced
with the "truth" of Orlando's change from man to woman, Orlando's
biographer is caught between "spar[ing] the reader what is to come" and
adhering to "Truth, Candor, and Honesty, the austere gods who keep
watch and ward by the inkpot of the biographer" (134).Woolf's satire
on the hypocrisy of such claims to "Truth, Candor, and Honesty" soon
becomes clear in the masque the biographer describes, a spectacle that
in turn foreshadows the Victorian interval of Miss La Trobe's play in Be-
tween the Acts (1941). As "our Lady of Purity,""our Lady of Chastity,"
and "our Lady of Modesty" all dance attendance on the scene of Orlan-
do's transformation,they try to "cover Orlando with their draperies"and
"to cast their veils over the mouths of the trumpets";"Truth" however,
"blare[s] out" and thrusts their offices from the room (136). Their de-
parting speech invokes the qualities their names suggest, but only to re-
veal how ignorance and greed masquerade behind their seemingly pure
draperies of faith and social respectability:
For there, not here [...] dwell still in nest and boudoir, office
and lawcourt those who love us; those who honour us, virgins
and city men; lawyers and doctors; those who prohibit; those
who deny; those who reverence without knowing why; those
who praise without understanding; the still very numerous
(Heaven be praised) tribe of the respectable;who prefer to see
not; desire to know not; love the darkness;those still worship us,
and with reason;for we have given them Wealth, Prosperity,
Comfort, Ease. (137)
As in "Friendships Gallery,"the biographer of Orlando acknowledges
the limitations that censor his narrative,but does so in a way that such
limitations appear ill-conceived and hypocritical-indeed, worthy of our
laughter. Not being able to speak the truth ultimately works against the
censor's goals: the reader learns that Violet's naming was a completely
arbitrary event, rather than one with some meaning, and that the sup-
posed protectors of society's modesty,purity,and chastity are,in fact, blind-
ly faithful and self-serving citizens.

46
Woolf's "FriendshipsGallery"

Woolf's strongest indictment in "Friendships Gallery" of biography's

claims to omniscience and objectivity occurs with the laugh of the Comic
Spirit, a laugh that neatly captures the tone and historiographic method
Woolf advocates for the more "proper writing of lives" in both "Friend-
ships Gallery" and Orlando.The occasion of the laugh is the biographer's
hyperbolic claim that Violet's decision to purchase "a cottage of one[']s
own" (288) will be seen by future historians as "the beginning of the
great revolution which is making England a very different place from
what it was" (288).The biographer supports the hyperbole of his mock-
heroic claim by citing a parody of the Cambridge historian George Treve-
lyan, anticipating what Trevelyan will write about this "momentous
change":
That act of hers typifies a really momentous change which will
be described one of these days by Mr George Trevelyan in his
work of "The Social Life of the Nineteenth Century". "A new
spirit" he will write, "breathed,like the wind of a rosy dawn,
from the works of George Meredith, and stirring the dusty and
arid leaves now beginning to shrivel on the stunted bushes of
modern life, caused them to drop those perfectly inefficient
shields, relics of a purblind aristocratic age, and to put forth
whatever of youth or Spirit yet remained in them. Not much in
most cases!"There he laughed; and then went on sprinkling his
page with notes to tell us how gently born ladies took to eating
porridge off earthen ware, without stays,and how they dug in
their gardens, and how muscles grew on their arms, and their
husbands called them "Comrade" and how children in vast
quantities mostly of the male sex were born to them, and how
they toiled for human brotherhood, and the sap of life sang in
their veins. The Comic Spirit laughed meanwhile. (284-85)
Woolf's parody ofTrevelyan's choice of historical subject and style is both
prescient and topical: although Trevelyan did not compose his BritishHis-
tory in the Nineteenth Century until 1922 and his English Social History
until 20 years later,Woolf captures the cadence and spirit of Trevelyan's
historiographic methods for social history,13perhaps in part because of
her familiarity with Trevelyan's ideas by 1907, the year she composed
"Friendships Gallery."Not only were George Trevelyan and his brother
Robert well known to the young men of Bloomsbury during their Cam-

47
Karin E.Westman

bridge years,14but also Trevelyan lectured on the French Revolution at

Morley College in 1905, the same year Woolf lectured on history and
composition for her Morley College students (Rosenbaum 167). It is
likely that Woolf also read Trevelyan'sessays for the IndependentReview,
since work by Lytton Strachey,E. M. Forster, Desmond McCarthy, and
Leonard Woolf appeared in the Review during its first year (1903-04)
and until its demise in 1908 (Rosenbaum 9).Trevelyan'sessay titled "Clio,
A Muse," published first in the IndependentReview in 1903, might well
have caughtWoolf's historiographic eye. Arguing for a literary,rather than
the increasingly favored scientific, approach toward the writing of histo-
ry,Trevelyan believes that history should be told as a "narrative,"a "tale,"
that could recapture the past in almost Wordsworthian terms (148, 150).
Trevelyan particularly values a historical method that includes humor:
"The 'dignity of history' whether literary or scientific, is too often afraid
of contact with the Comic Spirit" (146), he claims. His laugh in "Friend-
ships Gallery" ("There he laughed"), followed by his carefree gesture of
"sprinkling his page with notes," suggests that Woolf parodies Trevelyan
with knowledge of his desire to include humor in historiography,as well
as with knowledge of his highly metaphorical style.
Yet what of the Comic Spirit who laughs afterthe parody of Treve-
lyan's historiographic style? It may well be the one Trevelyan calls for in
"Clio, A Muse," but it might also be George Meredith's Comic Spirit,
which Trevelyan describes in some detail in his study of The Poetryand
Philosophyof GeorgeMeredith,published in 1906 and reviewed by Woolf's
brother-in-law, Clive Bell, for the CambridgeReview that same year
(Rosenbaum 278). In one of the few critical commentaries on "Friend-
ships Gallery,"critic S. P. Rosenbaum hears echoes of Trevelyan'sstudy
of Meredith in Woolf's parody, identifying the connection as the result
of "G. M. Trevelyan, fresh from his championing of Meredith" (374).
Rosenbaum does not go on to explain Meredith's influence on the Treve-
lyan parody,but presumably the connection rests with the Comic Spirit
as introduced in Meredith's Essay on Comedy(1897) and the Meredithean
democracy and pastoral landscape of Violet's cottage, where, as Violet's
biographer explains,
fashionable London "mak[es] believe" with a pruning hook and
knife that it loves the country; as you have seen little town bred
children dig holes in a corner of the Square Garden and pretend

48
Woolf's "FriendshipsGallery"

that they are really camping out with tinned food, in the Indian
jungle, and that the cats are roaring lions. (289)
As Trevelyan describes Meredith's philosophy on society, Meredith
detects one of the chief causes of the slack, good-humoured, and
unthinking spirit, in the inheritance by individuals of immense
quantities of unearned wealth. In consonance with the general
tenor of his philosophy, he thinks that in most cases irresponsible
wealth, especially when inherited in youth, dwarfs the growth of
character and intellect by sheltering men unnaturally from the
education of strife.... (200)
Physical labor, then, in combination with the benefits of nature, should
transformViolet's "unthinking" aristocratic guests into "Comrade[s]" of
a new, more advanced and democratic age-a moment that Trevelyan,
"fresh from his championing of Meredith," would find worthy of re-
cording in the history books.
The tone of the biographer's description of Violet's aristocratic
friends, however, indicates there is more "play"than substantive transfor-
mation atViolet's pastoral cottage. Woolf's allusion to the Comic Spir-
it-and Rosenbaum's decision not to explain this allusion-in turn begs
the following questions: At what or whom does the Comic Spirit laugh
in the parodic passage quoted above? At Violet's decision to build her
cottage? At Violet's aristocratic friends who visit her to "labor" on the
pastoral land?At the parody composed in Trevelyan'svoice, which antic-
ipates the intonations and phrasing he will use in his later histories? And
what is the intended effect of the laugh on the reader'sunderstanding of
the scene: critical, sympathetic, or both?
To answer these questions and arrive at a reading of Woolf's ex-
tended parody of historiographic practice, we must pause here and un-
tangle Woolf's view of the Comic Spirit in 1907 from Meredith's Comic
Spirit and Trevelyan'sreading of Meredith's Comic Spirit-distinctions
Rosenbaum does not pursue in his reading ofWoolf's parody.For Woolf,
the Comic Spirit shares qualities with Meredith's, but differs significant-
ly in terms of motive, as Woolf's essay "The Value of Laughter" on 15
August 1905 for the Guardianmakes clear.While Rosenbaum feels "the
essay as a whole is more Meredithean and Aristotelian" (159), Rosen-
baum's assessmentelides severalimportant differences between Meredith's

49
Karin E.Westman

and Woolf's views.15Woolf's observation in her essay that "[d]irectly we

forget to laugh we see things out of proportion and lose our sense of
reality" (Essays 1: 59) does correspond to Meredith's view that the laugh
of the Comic Spirit "cures [society's] sickness [ . .] whenever men wax
out of proportion," since "the spirit overhead will look humanely ma-
lign and cast an oblique light over them, followed by volleys of silvery
laughter" (qtd. in Poetry 192-93). Woolf's claim that "the comic spirit
concerns itself with oddities and eccentricities and deviations from the
recognised pattern"(59) might not seem incommensurate with Meredith's
claims.YetWoolf locates the curativelaughter withinindividuals,not "over-
head," and places the term "comic spirit" in lowercase rather than up-
percase letters,further marking its earthly origins. Most importantly,Woolf
genders and sexes Comedy as feminine and female, and here departs from
Meredith's view of the Comic Spirit as a reconciling force between the
sexes. Meredith aligns women with the Comic Spirit, but only to grant
them equal opportunity in their "battle with men, and that of men with
them":
as the two, however divergent, both look on one object, namely
Life, the gradual similarity of their impressions must bring them
to some resemblance.The Comic poet dares to show us men and
women coming to this mutual likeness; he is for saying that
when they draw together in social life their minds grow liker....
(qtd. in Poetry188-89).
Woolf, by contrast, assigns women and children the shaping powers of
the comic spirit, a power to reveal patriarchal ideologies that may be
detrimental to men's and women's lives:
Women and children, then, are the chief ministers of the comic
spirit, because their eyes are not clouded with learning nor are
their brains choked with the theories of books, so that men and
things still preserve their original sharp outlines. All the hideous
excrescences that have overgrown our modern life, the pomps
and conventions and dreary solemnities, dread nothing so much
as the flash of laughter which, like lightning, shrivels them up
and leaves the bones bare. It is because their laughter possesses
this quality that children are feared by people who are conscious
of affectations and unrealities;and it is probably for this reason

50
Woolf's "FriendshipsGallery"

that women are looked upon with such disfavor in the learned
professions.The danger is that they may laugh, like the child in
Hans Anderson who said that the king went naked when his
elders worshiped the splendid raiment that did not exist. [...]
There is nothing, indeed, so difficult as laughter, but no quality is
more valuable. It is a knife that both prunes and trains and gives
symmetry and sincerity to our acts and to the spoken and the
written word. (60)
The laugh of the Comic Spirit in "Friendships Gallery"may indeed pro-
vide "symmetry and sincerity" to the biographer's act of composition
and to the historiographic enterprise more generally,given that the laugh-
ter occurs directly following the parody of Trevelyan's history of the
century.Yet this laughter also "prunes and trains,"giving outline to the
founding patriarchal and class ideologies hidden by the draperies of so-
cial custom. Far from echoing Meredith's Comic Spirit of reconcilia-
tion,Woolf's comic spirit cuts through ideological "excrescences"to divest
them of their power.
In "Friendships Gallery,"the character of Violet Dickinson embod-
ies the Comic Spirit Woolf describes the previous year in "The Value of
Laughter."Physically disruptive as she navigates her large body through
the social world,Violet's comically exaggerated size signifies not only dif-
ference but also productive difference in the terms established byWoolf's
essay:it "prunes and trains"the layers of patriarchalcustom she encoun-
ters. The biographer emphasizes Violet's physical attributes-her great
height-to locate the disruptionViolet causes to establishedsocial norms,
and how such disruption often revealsthe economic basis of those norms.
Playing upon Violet's unusual height-as she does not do in her brief
biographical sketch from 190216-Woolf hasViolet's biographer present
Violet's early years according to her rapid growth:
But there never was such a child for growing.
"Nurse, bring the weighing machine" said the doctor.
"It's the foot rule you want, Sir,"said Nurse; "if I may make
so bold." (275)
The biographer's exaggeration of Violet's size reflects an approach to
the body that echoes a long tradition of comic novelists such as Sterne,
Cervantes, and Rabelais. However, such exaggeration is also at odds with

51
Karin E.Westman

the conventional focus of biography. In Woolf's biographical sketch, the

development of the subject's mind and character is neatly acknowledged
only to be undercut by an insistence onViolet's unruly body:
MissViolet Dickinson grew to be as tall as the tallest hollyhock
in the garden before she was eight; but after all our concern is
with her spiritual progress.True, her size alarmed her family; her
position in the ball room they thought might be seriously preju-
diced.... (276)

By suggesting that Violet's "spiritual progress" is related to her success

"in the ball room,"Violet's biographer ironically reveals how, far from
being discrete, any "spiritual progress"is closely tied to the very material
fact of Violet's height-a connection symbolized by the heavy weight
of a gold cross bestowed on Violet before her first ball. The gift of the
cross from Violet's godmother to Violet, intended to make Violet attrac-
tive as a "Beacon of Godliness" rather than be seen as a "Maypole of
Derision" (276), echoes the import of the biographer's claims but with-
out the biographer's irony: both the biographer's narrative and the gift
of the cross attempt to distinguish between the spiritual and the materi-
al, only to confirm the necessary link between them in a society that
values physical beauty and material wealth as the signs of"spiritual" suc-
cess. In the case of a woman, the connection is even more pointed: phys-
ical beauty and material wealth are the established criteria for a woman's
success "in the ball room" with her potential suitors.As she grows older,
Violet's height continues to challenge established views of women and
class:"[S]triding along a country road" and "need[ing] only a couple of
terriers at her heels and a whip in her hand to look the part which in
effect she did not play; the Squires sporting daughter" (288),Violet is an
avatarof the sporting Orlando who strides, dogs at heel, across her lands
(97,320) and of Miss La Trobe who appeared"swarthy,sturdy and thick-
set; strode about the fields in a smock frock [ ...] often with a whip in
her hand" (58). Importantly,Violet's great stature is resignified at the end
of the sketch in the fantastical "Chapter Three: A Story to Make You
Sleep."There,Violet becomes a "Giantess,"one of two beneficent Giant
Princesses, whose size represents the bounty of her good deeds. Rather
than existing only as a disruptive force to society,Violet's great height is
located back within the realm of the social, yet in support of a different
social role for women and different feminine ideals: independence,

52
Woolf's "FriendshipsGallery"

strength, generosity, and, significantly,a principle of exchange rather than

accrued material gain.
Violet's voice matches the physical height and ideologically disrup-
tive force of her body. Through its strength,Violet challenges social pro-
prieties with her loud and frequent laugh, and she voices revolutionary
ideas. Woolf's decision not only to value but also to record Violet's voice
stands in marked contrast to the palpable silence of women's voices in
much history and biography.While Woolf regrets the loss of her moth-
er's voice from records of Julia Stephen's life,17 in the role of Violet's
biographer Woolf has the advantage of the "truth,"factual or fictional, of
Violet's speeches:
Here again I would digress. But this is one of Violets earliest
sayings.
Her mother;"I wish you would learn to write Violet."
Violet[:] "I wont write; I'd rather talk." (275-76)
The biographer's "digression" reveals, in fact, an extremely important
quality of Violet's character,one that first opens the sketch-her nurses
"agreed that she was the cleverest child,""the noisiest child,""the child
with the finest lungs in the Parish" (275)-and recurs throughout. Like
the comic portrayal of her height,Violet's insistent voice disrupts the es-
tablished order of her class-based society to reveal the ideology that per-
petuates it, thereby offering further evidence that Violet embodies the
revolutionary force of the Comic Spirit asWoolf conceives it in her 1905
essay. While visiting the grounds of an aristocratic, Elizabethan home
and noticing the gardener at work,Violet takes the unusual approach of
rising to greet him:
"Good day" she began, with a heartiness that made the bent old
creature straighten himself and look at her.Yes,she was a real
lady; and-what was that odd feeling she gave him? [His usual]
<The>18 crust of his demeanor which sheltered all [the] <his>
natural passion [of the untaughtman] and protected him from
ladies and gentlemen and gave him a body wherewith to appear
decently in their eyes, the crust that they both agreed to accept
for the real man since the real man was not presentable, [a] <was
pierced> by this ladies voice and her friendly gaze. He felt as
though something long suppressed were now rising into day-

53
Karin E.Westman

light. Freedom gleamed in his eyes as he spoke; and he waved his

shears towards the house as men waved bloody bayonnettes once
before the Bastille. (286)
Violet's address liberates the gardener's character from the constraining
"crust of his demeanor" that he and his employers "had agreed to accept
for the real man," revealing revolutionary, democratic sentiments within.
The contradiction between their quotidian conversation about roses and
his wife's illness and his violent gesture with his shears ushers the narra-
tive into the register of the mock heroic and would seem to make him a
comic figure. However, the tone of the narrative shifts at the end of the
scene to a less hyperbolic and more reflective acknowledgment of his
class difference: "He forgot for the first time for twenty years that half
hours are the property of the C[eci]l family, and have been so 'for centu-
ries and centuries I dessay"' (286).19Violet's address and her genuine in-
terest in his concerns may invoke mock-heroic revolutionary fervor, but
the shift in tone suggests that she has, like the comic spirit of Woolf's
description, "give[n] symmetry and sincerity" (Essays 1: 60) to their ex-
change, "piercing" through generations of class-based difference with her
"voice and friendly gaze."
Violet's meeting with the gardener precipitates another scene in
which Violet's voice challenges the ideology of class in order to reveal
two material bases of her society: inherited wealth and drains.Once back
within the aristocratic house,Violet finds in her Bible
a phrase for her discontent among so much that was old and
beautiful which ended with "moth and rust" and suggested a
figure to her mind of bodies encrusted with precious stones as
some beetles are crusted with dry excrescences, trying painfully
to scrape themselves smooth against gleaming walls of steel. It
was not you perceive that she had no love of beauty but that-
how can I explain it?-there was some illicit connection in her
mind between beauty and riches, beauty and luxury, beauty and
selfishness tyranny and vice. (286-87)
The "illicit connection"Violet intuits between "beauty and selfishness
tyranny and vice" will be explained in great detail by Woolf in Three
Guineas (1938) as a connection forged by a capitalist and patriarchalso-
ciety that signifies beauty as "riches,""luxury,""selfishness tyranny and

54
Woolf's "FriendshipsGallery"

vice" in order to further its own ideological ends. Orlando senses a sim-
ilar illicit quality to material possessions, especially when they are di-
vorced from the human life that animates them with purpose and pleasure
(111-12, 147-48). But in 1907, Woolf had already expressed these
thoughts, in quite similar terms, in her essay on laughter:just asViolet's
biographer notes how "so much that was old and beautiful which ended
with 'moth and rust' and suggested a figure to her mind of bodies en-
crusted with precious stones as some beetles are crusted with dry ex-
crescences,"we hear in Woolf's essay how "[a]ll the hideous excrescences
that have overgrown our modern life, the pomps and conventions and
dreary solemnities, dread nothing so much as the flash of laugher" (Es-
says 1: 60).Violet, like the comic "knife that prunes and trains,"can cut
through the crust of ideology to see-and encourage others to see-the
"original sharp outlines" within the illusions of everyday experience (60).
At dinner,Violet's voice is granted the power to reveal the cultural
ideologies that mask the physical evidence of bodies and of lived expe-
rience in and around the decaying Elizabethan house.Violet quickly dis-
rupts the complacent complicity of her hosts by revealing this materiality:
[A]nd the question which she put with tremendous animation,
to her host at lunch "Do tell me on what system is your drainage
managed?"was the first shot of an attack which threatened the
whole of the Elizabethan pile. They were sitting in the long gal-
lery watching with calm benignant eyes the daily performance
of sun and earth which had so often been repeated in front of
them that they could almost prompt the actors.You had the
impression, untilViolet spoke, of an audience such as the audi-
ence of the hills beholding an evening sky; or the long gallery
was a tranquil creek where ships that had done their voyages
came to anchor. And then Violet spoke. (287)
The audience toViolet's question-her act of speech-prefigures the au-
dience that Woolf will assemble for Miss La Trobe's play in Betweenthe
Acts. Like the voice that exclaims "All that fuss about nothing" (138)
during the Restoration act of the play, Violet's question breaks the com-
placent illusion of security under which her hosts exist, to reveal the
material condition of their lives. The fact that "[n]o one could tell her
how the drains were managed, for no one remembered that there were
drains" (297), indicates the degree to which these members of the aris-

55
Karin E.Westman

tocracy have become unconscious of their own bodily existence and their
necessary connection with the materiality of their surroundings-includ-
ing the presence of their own gardener,whom Violet names when they
cannot. It is Violet, then, who, in her role as the Comic Spirit, "laughed
meanwhile" (284) when her aristocratic friends follow her to "a cottage
of [her] own" where there are "real drains, and real roses" (288). Their
growing awareness of their material condition marks "the beginning of
the great revolution," a beginning mock-heroically elevated by Violet's
biographer, who in turn seems to join in the laughter and encourages
the reader to do so as well.

While Woolf's biographical sketch of Violet Dickinson illustratesWoolf's

frustrationswith the methods and discipline of historiography conveyed
contemporaneously through her reviews, her traveljournal, and her other
biographical sketches, "Friendships Gallery" is particularly important for
its bearing on Woolf's evolving theories of fiction. The biographer's self-
conscious rejection of"sentimental" and realistic narrative forms illus-
trates the pivotal position the sketch holds in an evaluation of Woolf's
revisions of her literary inheritance. In this final section, I would like to
explore Woolf's early revisions to received novelistic forms, particularly
her allusions to romance and her use of fantasy.Both genres offer ways
to capture the "truths" of a woman's life, truths that otherwise escape
from the ideologically complicit narrativesof experience valued by a pa-
triarchalsociety.
Through Violet's biographer, Woolf criticizes the fictional methods
available for recounting a woman's life, drawing attention to the ideo-
logical implications of nineteenth-century novelistic forms. Calling upon
but redeploying the narrative conventions of the sentimental novel20and
the realist novel, Woolf's biographical sketch of her friendViolet Dick-
inson frequently questions and then rejects the "realistic"representation
typical of biographies and novels, narrative modes that can limit a wom-
an'sbody and voice.21 Instead,Woolf privileges a more "realistic"-more
truthful-presentation of Violet's life through a dialogic narrative form
that borrows from fantasy and the romance while still emphasizing the
material conditions shaping her subject'sbody and voice.
In revising the narrative forms available for telling a woman's life,

56
Woolf's "FriendshipsGallery"

Woolf encourages her readers to recognize how existing narratives of

experience, particularly the sentimental novel, influence a woman's ma-
terial existence, since they record a woman's life according to her im-
portance within a patriarchal society. 22 In the conventional biography
and bourgeois novel, women's lives only become worthy of note when
women become valuable as a commodity through marriage, at the sea-
son when they "c[o]me out" ("Memoirs of a Novelist" 70). In recogni-
tion of this narrative convention, Violet's biographer pauses five pages
into the sketch to reflect on the decisions he has made thus far for a
reader who presumablyknows the establishedmethods for telling a wom-
an's life in history and in fiction:
Now there should be here some more tremendous division
than a blank space of white paper; and I suspect that my artistic
skill would have been more consummate had I thrown these first
pages into the waste paper basket or enclosed them [between]
<within> the arms of a parenthesis. For when you are writing
the life of a woman you should surely begin
Her First Season
and leave such details as birth parentage education and the first
seventeen years of her life to be taken for granted. [...] But then
this Biography is no novel but a sober chronicle; and if Life will
begin seventeen years before it is needed it is our task to say so
valiantly and make the best of it. (279)
Taking a stand against the prevailing assumption that "the first seventeen
years of [a woman's] life [are] to be taken for granted,"Violet's biogra-
pher satirically decides that "if Life will begin seventeen years before it
is needed it is our task to say so valiantly and make the best of it."23
Violet's biographer thus lays claim to a higher authority than the estab-
lished biographical and novelistic methods for recounting a woman's life
and thereby revises the standards of woman's biography: "this Biogra-
phy" will consider all of the yearsViolet has lived, even if those experi-
ences are deemed by others to be a "mere waste of time" (279). Orlando's
biographer wrestles with similar difficultieswhen Orlando, now a woman,
provides none of the actions deemed appropriate for the writing of a
woman's life, such as falling in love with a gamekeeper (268). Orlando's
biographer chooses to defy convention by remarking on his difficulties
and by resolving to "look out the window" to discover "Life" in all its

57
Karin E.Westman

sensory and sensuous experience, including the "Laughter,Laughter!"

from the moths, until his human subject does or says something he can
legitimately record (269-71). Both biographers' responses question the
prevailing view that women's lives only become worthy of note when
women become valuable as a commodity through marriage at the sea-
son when they "c[o]me out" or through a relationship with a man. By
criticizing the ideologically tempered techniques of novels as well as
biographies, Woolf censures the patriarchal ideology replicated within
both narrative forms.To tellViolet's life, both must be revised.
While Violet's biographer insists that "Friendships Gallery" differs
from a novel, the biographer does not refrainfrom using novelistic forms
of representation if they can enhance the reader'sexperience of Vio-
let's life and character.An ironic frame, however, accompanies their in-
clusion:
The day after a ball is always used by sentimental novelists en-
dowed with words, for an effective contrast;not only does it
change the scene and relieve the strain of prolonged atten-
tion-I give away these secrets the best in my possession, but it
reveals quite naturally a different side of the heroes character.
And so it was with my heroine, if a living woman can be called
by such a title. The critics dispute it. (277)
The biographer'sneed to explainwhy the methods of"sentimental nov-
elists" could be used speaks to the presumed distinction between the
genres of biography and fiction. However, because "[t]he day after a
ball" provides "an effective contrast,"Violet's biographer is willing to
embrace this novelistic device for its ability to conveyViolet's charac-
ter.Woolf shows, through Violet's biographer, the compatibility of nov-
elistic and biographical methods, and how fictional devices that
foreground character could benefit a biographical narrative-an oft-
repeated point in her early essay reviews like "Their Passing Hour"
(1905) and "Maria Edgeworth and Her Circle" (1909), and one devel-
oped further in "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown" (1923) and "Character
in Fiction" (1924).Violet's biographer even contemplates the benefits
of shifting the usual emphasis of biography from intellectual develop-
ment to a broader psychological portrait of his subject, one that could
capture the "flight of her mind, rising like a cloud of bees" (282) and
would pursue the sort of "intricate labyrinths" that "modern novel-

58
Woolf's "FriendshipsGallery"

ists"(281) might enter, anticipating the narrativemethods Woolf will adopt

for her fiction.
The literary technique that best allowsViolet's biographer to present
Violet's character for the reader comes not from the novel per se but
from one of the novel's antecedents: the romance. If conventional biog-
raphies of women's lives and the sentimental novel both elide those years
that precede a woman's entrance into "the world"-those years consid-
ered a "mere waste of time" to describe, according to her biographer's
ironic comment-the romance narrative can, by contrast, accommodate
and value the early education Violet receives from her women teachers
as well as the ways in which Violet's lessons are given: through the ex-
change of personal stories rather than the reading of "official" history.
Woolf offers a pointed satire of the "formal" education many mid-
dle-class daughters receive through the persona of Violet's biographer,
who reveals the discrepancy between the professed goal of Violet's edu-
cation and the alternative"history"she acquires during those hours. Since
Violet is educated for her role as a commodity rather than the develop-
ment of her character,Violet's biographer moves directly from the scene
of her first ball to her morning lessons, since "it was the morning when
Friulein Miiller came to 'finish' her with a German polish" (277)-a
juxtaposition that highlights the ideological continuity between the two
scenes.Violet'sbiographer explains the prevailingview of a young woman's
education through the metaphor of science, marking her parents as doc-
tors:
A time comes however, when parents and guardians can tell the
precise second, when book learning has yielded exactly the
number of drops which taken internally benefit the system of a
maiden; a teaspoonful in excess has been known to ruin the
constitution for life; some maintain that a little external polish is
no bad thing. (278)
The extended metaphor of education as the "finish" or "polish" applied
to a young woman's body or administered "internally" illustratesthe im-
portance of social appearance over character.YetViolet seems to tarnish
under the "polish" of history she receives from Fraulein Miiller, andVi-
olet's education soon comes not from the "history"in textbooks but from
the personal stories of her female teachers.Though Violet's lesson on the
history of drama begins with the textbook, Friulein Miiller's candid ac-

59
Karin E.Westman

knowledgment thatViolet will not be successful "in the society of Bath"

(278) for her knowledge of Elizabethan drama leads to Fraulein Miiller's
narration of her own experiences in the social world: "when the lunch
bell rang Fraulein Miller was wiping her eyes saying'Ah my dear Miss
Violet, I have never told any one what I have told you"' (278). Provid-
ingViolet with first-hand experiences of the social world in place of the
more "conventional" (and, by comparison, less practical) education,
Fraulein Miiller andViolet's other governesses offer their pupil what the
heroine of Frances Burney's novel Evelina,orThe Historyof a YoungLady's
Entranceinto the World(1778) desires so much after her first experiences
in the "world": Evelina writes, "But, really, I think there ought to be a
book, of all the laws and customs d-la-mode,presented to all young peo-
ple upon their first introduction into public company" (89).Violet's fe-
male teachers provide her with scenes from just such a book.
The way in which Violet learns this knowledge of the world sug-
gests the earlier novel form of the romance, represented by even so late
an example as Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote (1752).24 Within
the feminine world of the romance, friendships between women are val-
ued; to tell one's own "story" or history in response to another's is a
compliment and an act that builds trust.Within the patriarchalsocial world
of the bourgeois novel, by contrast,women are often encouraged to com-
pete with one another for a man's affection, forging envy and jealousy
instead of friendship and confidence. Further,in the novel a young woman
is judged according to her innocence, not her experience-even her in-
nocence of the sort of experiential knowledge that could in fact help
her to preserve her innocent character. In Violet's biography, the reader
sees the plot of the romance played out in place of the novel's preferred
plot: rather than keeping Violet ignorant of previous women's experi-
ences and leaving her to rely on her innocence,25 Fraulein Miiller and
Violet's other instructors share their own stories and the stories of women
they know. These stories, paired with sanctioned instruction, become al-
ternative "history" lessons, creating a genealogy of women's experience
forViolet to learn by heart:
Keats sang of German life in <a> flat on the third story;Word-
sworth taught her how a plain Somersetshire girl the daughter of
an Attorney can earn her living, hem her underclothing, and
keep her father's drunkenness from the knowledge of the neigh-

60
Woolf's "FriendshipsGallery"

bours. [...] literature sent straight avenues branching out from all
sides of the lawn till it swam as a little island on an immense
ocean and she could scarcely sit on her chair for a desire to voy-
age there. (278-79)
Violet's association of Wordsworth with "a plain Somersetshire girl" and
her financial difficultiescould be compared to Arabella's"foible"of reading
romance as history, except that inViolet's case the two narrativesare held
in tension: one does not replace the other. Instead, the alternative edu-
cation that Violet's governesses provide for her forges connections be-
tween life and literature.Violet begins her time in the world with an
"island"of literary and personal stories that will serve her as she experi-
ences the "immense ocean" of life--a stability of self in relation to the
world that Rachel in The VoyageOut (1915) yearns for as she ponders
Ibsen and Gibbon, and which Orlando struggles to achieve and finds
only after many voyages across the centuries. According toViolet's biog-
rapher,her governesses' dramatic narrativesabout life-history, literature,
stories of any kind-thus exist in connection with present experience,
not separate from it. This connection between stories of the past and
stories of the present, between official and unofficial narratives,is made
possible by storytelling, the act of one person speaking to another. The
result offers extraordinary potential for broadening women's experienc-
es, as they acquire, like Violet, alternative histories of the past not pro-
vided by the high "polish" of the official books.
While the first chapter of"Friendships Gallery" illustrates the value
of female friendships and an education inspired by the romance narra-
tive, Violet's biographer tells two alternative "histories" of women's ex-
perience during the sketch for the reader to experience directly,both of
which partake of the fantastic:a scene in "ChapterTwo;The Magic Gar-
den" and the whole of "Chapter Three: A Story to Make You Sleep."
Interwoven into the everyday, the fantasy of"Friendships Gallery" an-
ticipates the balance of realism and fantasy in later works like Orlando.
Shown taking tea in "The Magic Garden" of an aristocratic home,Vio-
let and her friends have a mythic and fantastic beauty that still insists on
their three-dimensional material existence:
There were gigantic women lying like Greek marbles in easy
chairs;draped so that the wind [blew]<bared> little gleaming
spaces on their shoulders; who laughed as they helped them-

61
Karin E.Westman

selves to strawberries and cream as though they looked upon a

vision of a jocund world; [...] And there were other ladies like
flowers strayed from the beds, anemones and strange fritillaries
freaked with jet, and certain tulips, tawny as sunset clasped by
stiff green spikes, all kinds of flowers indeed, whose voices
chimed like petals floating and kissing the air; or creaked, as fresh
tulip leaves creak when rubbed together, so that you long to
crush the juice out of them.
This is a picture of noble English ladies at tea, as true as I
can make it, and if it is not spoiling the harmony, I would fur-
ther suggest that these ladies think, eat and breathe-live in
short, besides existing or whatever the polite word for it is, with-
in the pages of Burke. (282-83)
Violet's biographer decides not to forego a fantastical description that
communicates the aesthetic "harmony" of the scene, but instead to sup-
plement the ideological implications of that narrative with the equally
material presence of the ladies' eating and drinking bodies. Painting a
tableau of Greek goddesses who "looked upon a vision of a jocund world"
and of women as "flowers [that] strayed from the beds,"26the biogra-
pher conjures an idyllic, mythic, and extremely feminine scene of ladies
at tea while also suggesting a vision of women's autonomy and inde-
pendence from the demands of patriarchal social norms, not unlike the
world presented in The Conventof Pleasure(1668) by Margaret Cavend-
ish, Duchess of Newcastle. The stylized poses of the "flowers" and "stat-
ues" indicate the staged quality to their performance-a performance of
gender and class that Violet will soon indict, as we saw in the previous
section, however beautiful it appears.In anticipation perhaps of that mo-
ment whenViolet will reveal the material necessity of drains, the biog-
rapher's description insists on the ladies' three-dimensional existence.
Violet's biographer is conscious of and determined not to replicate the
biographical and historical methods of those like Burke, who negate
women's bodies through a "polite" propriety complicit with patriarchal
ideologies of the feminine. Instead,Violet's biographer asserts the intel-
lect, sexuality,and the corporeality of the ladies' existence.
If "The Magic Garden" both invokes and complements the avail-
able narrative methods for describing a woman's life, the third chapter
of Violet's biography,"A Story to Make You Sleep," abandons the con-

62
Woolf's "FriendshipsGallery"

ventions of biography and realism entirely to offer a fantastic "story" in

place of "history."The story begins at the conclusion of Chapter Two:
"In Japan they have a story, [whichis] fast becoming myth, which moth-
ers tell good children as a treat, or sick children who cannot sleep at
night. [...] <But this is how it goes>" (292). ChapterThree then begins
the narrative through another persona, a mother telling a child the "sto-
ry": "Once upon a time my child, before you born,.. ." (292). Staging
this story within a second narrative frame further complicates any easy
distinction between this "story" and the "history" the reader experienc-
es in the preceding chapters. Further, while the reader is frequently ad-
dressed by the biographer in the second-person singular throughout the
preceding two chapters,27 the effect of the direct address in this third
chapter is slightly different: here, the reader plays the more intimate role
of child to the narrating mother/biographer-a bond of intimacy quite
uncharacteristicof conventional historiography and biography,and in this
alternative mode, we hear an echo of the storytelling relationship be-
tweenViolet and her governesses.
The "story" told in Chapter Three is loosely based on Violet Dick-
inson's and Lady Robert (Nelly) Cecil's trip to Japan, an event known
to the sketch's intended reader,if not to others. Its characters share qual-
ities with the first and second chapters of the sketch, respectively: in this
final story, the two women become Two Princesses, a Giantess (Violet
Dickinson) and the Mistress of the Magic Garden (Nelly Cecil). Elevat-
ing to mock heroic status the help both women provide to those in need,
the storyteller describes how the two princesses assistthe people of "Tok-
io" by curing their ills, bringing good luck, encouraging laughter, and,
at the story's end, by slaying a sea monster with "certain magic wands
called'Umbrellas"' (300).While the Rabelaisian presence of the women
and the destruction caused certainly fulfill certain narrative tropes of the
comic novel, the "story" form of tale is significant for "Friendships Gal-
lery" as a whole. It is through the narrative tropes of myth and fantasy-
through storytelling-that Violet's biographer can convey "truths"about
Violet's character otherwise lost from conventional biographical meth-
ods: her independence, her generosity, and good spirits.
To shift an ostensibly biographical narrative into the register of the
fantastic defies the "factual" conventions of historiography and biogra-
phy.Yet, as Violet's biographer has made clear throughout "Friendships
Gallery"-and as Orlandomakes clear 20 years later-the methods of

63
Karin E.Westman

fiction are not incompatible with those of a "truthful"narrative.In con-

trast to literary realism and its affiliation with the didactic, mimetic, and
ideologically suspect goals of historiography and biography,the romance
and the fantastic explicitly acknowledge the implicit "fiction" of histori-
cal and novelistic claims to truth.While popular romances and fantasies
can affirm the patriarchal ideologies found in historical narratives and
realistic novels, these less-sanctioned forms hold out a narrative space in
which to figure an alternative view of experience, particularly of wom-
en's relationship to cultural expectations within a patriarchal and capi-
talist society. The romance and the fantastic thus allow the expression of
a different "economy" of power, a "fantasy of power," according to Nan-
cy Miller, "that would revise the social grammar in which women are
never defined as subjects" (41). And aligned as they are in "Friendships
Gallery" with Woolf's "comic spirit,"the resulting narrativesprovide not
only an alternative view on women's lives within a patriarchal society
but also one that indicts society through laughter.With the comic force
of Violet's address to the gardener and his longtime employers,Woolf's
"Friendships Gallery" breaks through the "crust" of the past to "prune
and train"the ideologies of literary and biographical conventions toward
a more feminist future.

Notes
1. Beth A. Boehm's"Fact,Fiction,and Metafiction:BlurredGen(d)resin Orlan-
doand A Roomof One'sOwn"(1992) exemplifiescriticaldiscussionsofWoolf's
interestin biographythatfail to acknowledgeWoolf's earlyinterestin the
relationshipbetween fact and fiction.Hermione Lee,by contrast,offersa rich
discussionof Woolf's earlyviews of biographyin the firstchapterof her biog-
raphy VirginiaWoolf(1996), especially pages 10-14.
2.Woolf's earlyjournalsand letters,as well as her fatherLeslieStephen'smem-
oirs,indicatethat the youngVirginiaStephenplannedto be a historian,not a
novelist.See Letters1:166 and 1: 190, and LeslieStephenxxviii.
3. For a discussionconcerningthe continuitybetweenWoolf'sand her father's
views of biography,see KatherineC. Hill.While JuliaBriggs'sessayon Virginia
Woolf providesa brief overview of Woolf'srelationshipto establishedbio-
graphicalmethodsand her responseto them in NightandDay,Briggsdoes not
extend her insightsto Woolf'squestioningof historiographyin generaland
only gesturesbrieflyin conclusiontowardthe roleWoolf'srevisionsto bio-

64
Woolf's"FriendshipsGallery"

graphicalmethodsplayin her developmentof a new narrativeform for prose

fiction.

4.These earlybiographicalsketchesfallinto two categories:seriousand comic.

Her serioussketchesinclude her contributionto F W.Maitland'sbiographyof
her fatherin 1906 and her biographicalsketchof her sisterVanessa,
written
upon the birth ofJulian Bell in 1908, publishedin Moments
of Beingas"Remi-
niscences."Thecomic sketchesaremore numerous:an earlybiographical
sketchof Violet Dickinson (composedin 1902 but not necessarilyshared[Bell
82-83]); the comic lives of herAunt CarolineEmeliaStephenand herAunt
Mary Fisher(writtenaround1904, but now lost [Letters1: 163-64]); the life of
her dog Shag (publishedunder the title "On a FaithfulFriend"in 1905 [Essays
1: 12-15]), which anticipatesher latermock biographyof the Brownings'dog
Flush(1933);the second,more elaboratebiographicalsketchofViolet Dickin-
son titled"FriendshipsGallery"in 1907;and notes for a biographicalsketchof
her friend and brother-in-lawClive Bell, made in 1908 duringtheir trip to
Italy(Passionate383-84).
5. See Nancy Armstrong,JohnBerger,and SandraGilbertand-SusanGubar.
6. As Mitchell Leaskaremarksin his introductoryheadnotesto Woolf's early
journals,Woolfbegins writing a few shortstoriesin June 1906:"Phyllisand
Rosamond"and"The MysteriousCase of MissV."During August 1906,Woolf
also wrote the untitledstory now publishedunderthe editorialtitle of"The
Journalof MistressMartyn."By fall 1907, soon aftershe writes"Friendships
Gallery"forViolet Dickinson,Woolfbegins her firstlong work of fiction,
which will be publishedin 1915 as TheVoyage Out.
7.John Stapeoffersan overview of Orlando's criticalreceptionin his introduc-
tion to the Blackwelledition of Orlando(1998),xii-xiii.
8. Until HarcourtBrace'scurrentedition of Orlandoappearedin 1993 in con-
junction with SallyPotter'sfilm Orlando(1992),the earlierHarcourtedition
had Nicholson'scomment runningprominentlyacrossthe top of the book's
frontcover.
9. Hawkesechoes this view in her essay"Woolf's'MagicalGardenof Wom-
en"'in JaneMarcus'sNew FeministEssayson VirginiaWoolf(1981),but with
greateremphasison the power of femalefriendshipto change the socialworld
(40-42, 56).
10. Hawkesnotes at the end of her introductionto "FriendshipsGallery,"
without furtherdiscussion,that:

65
Karin E.Westman

there are tracesof [Woolf's]ideasabout the limitationsplacedupon

young women by society;their meagereducation;their specialrela-
tionshipswith their women teachers;their desireto be themselves,to
havea life and a room or a cottageof their own; their need to experi-
ment, to rebel,to bring changein others'lives. (273)
11. In A Roomof One'sOwn,Woolf'snarratorexplainsmore fully the experi-
enceViolet'sbiographerlacksyet still"adore[s]":
And thus by degreeswas lit, halfwaydown the spine,which is the seat
of the soul, not that hardlittle electriclight which we call brilliance,as
it pops in and out upon our lips,but the more profoundglow,which is
the rich yellow flameof rationalintercourse. (11)
12.The manuscriptof "FriendshipsGallery"includedannotationsmade in
Woolf'shandfor (primarily)Violet'seyes.The biographer'spromiseof an "ap-
pendix,"signaledby a raisedromannumeral"I,"directsthe readerto an appen-
dix that does not exist;instead,the readerencountersin the marginof the
pageWoolf'shandwrittennotationthatdesignatesthe appendixas"missing."
Woolf's appendednote about the "missing"appendixwould thus seem to play
with scholarlypracticeand the formalitiesof scholarlyediting.Like the "Pref-
ace"and"Index"to Orlando, this"missing"appendixis a comic parodyof such
practice,much as Cervantes mocks the scholarlyconventionsof historiesand
storiesin "TheAuthor'sPreface"to Don Quixote(1605) and Sterne transpos-
es-or even omits-chapters of his narrativein Tristram Shandy(1759).
13. Compare,for instance,Trevelyan's
descriptionof the birthof the Renais-
sancein Englandas recountedin his BritishSocialHistory:

Shakespeare'sEnglandhad a charmand a lightnessof heart,a free as-

piring mind and spiritnot to be found elsewherein the harshJesuit-
CalvinistEuropeof that day.[...] The music of the Elizabethan
madrigaland the lyric poetry to which it was wedded,expressedthe
reasonablejoy in life of a people freedfrom mediaevaland not yet
oppressedby Puritancomplexesand fears;rejoicingin natureand the
countrysidein whose lap they had the felicity to live;moving forward
to a healthyagriculturaland mercantileprosperity,and not yet over-
whelmed by the weight of industrialmaterialism. (97-98)
And:
The ElizabethanEnglishwere in love with life, not with some theoret-
ic shadowof life. Largeclasses,freedas neverbeforefrompoverty,felt
the upspringof the spiritand expressedit in wit, music and song. [...]

66
Woolf's"FriendshipsGallery"

The Renaissance,that had known its springtimelong ago in its native

Italy,where biting frostsnow nippedit, came late to its glorioussum-
mer in this northernisle.... (139)
14. GeorgeTrevelyanwas familiarenough with the Stephenfamilyto visit
Gordon Squareon 2 December 1906 to walk with AdrianStephen,Woolf's
youngestbrother,soon afterthe deathofToby Stephen,her elderbrother,from
typhoid on 20 November (Letters1:255-56).
15. In her essay"FourStagesin Woolf's Idea of Comedy:A Sense ofJoviality
and Magnanimity," SallyA.Jacobsenalso elides key differencesbetweenWoolf
and Meredith,arguingthatWoolf"followsMeredith"in "TheValueof Laugh-
ter"(217).
16. In contrastto "FriendshipsGallery,"the tone of Woolf's earliersketchis
earnestand admiring,and lacksthe humor of the latercharacterstudy.In the
1902 sketch,Violet'sheight is remarkableonly for the waysin which it does
notdetractfrom her character: "She came down to dinnerin flowing & pictur-
esque garments-for all her height,& a certaincomicalityof face,she treats
her body with dignity"(Bell 82).Violet'sown comicacceptanceof her body
capturesWoolf'sattentionin the latersketchto an even greaterdegree.
17. In "Reminiscences"(1908),her biographicalsketchof her elder sisterVan-
essa,Woolfwrites of theirmother:
It has often occurredto me to regretthat no one everwrote down her
sayingsand vivid waysof speech since she had the gift of turning
wordsin a mannerpeculiarto her,rubbingher handsswiftly,or raising
them in gesticulationas she spoke. (36)
ForWoolf, JuliaStephen's"sayingsand vivid waysof speech"could begin to
capturethe life of her character,beside which Woolf's own and other written
biographicaleffortspale by comparison.ThedailysayingsofJulia Stephen
would not have been seen-and she most likely would not haveseen her own
sayings-as worthy of transcriptionand preservationlike the sayingsof
Johnson,recordedfor posterityby Boswell.Woolf impliesthat they are,if we
everwant to knowJuliaStephen.
18. In transcribingWoolf'smanuscriptsfor publicationin Twentieth Century
the
Literature, editorsused [word](thatis, squarebrackets)to designatea dele-
tion editoriallyrestoredand <word> (anglebrackets)to designatean insertion,
usuallyabovethe line, made byWoolf.
19.The biographer'sinclusionof the gardener'sown voice resemblesWoolf's
inclusionin herjournal narrativeof the voices of the people she meets in the

67
Karin E.Westman

scenic landscapearoundPlaydenin 1907;in both narratives,hearingthe voices

of individualpeople dramatizesthe scene and embodiesmore fully the indi-
vidualcharacterand subjectposition of speaker.
20. In Sentimental
Modernism (1991), SuzanneClarkidentifiesthe word senti-
mentalwith a narrativeform beginningin the eighteenthcenturythat is "con-
nected to the patheticappeal-the appealto emotion, especiallypity,as a
meansof moraldistinctionand moralpersuasion"(20). Further,the "sentimen-
tal locatesmoralvaluesin the (feminized)heartand denies the importanceof
externaldifferences"(22).Woolf,by contrast,questionsa narrativeform that
denies the determininginfluenceof "externaldifferences"and how they affect
the "heart."
21.The historiesof the biographyand the novel intersectat severalpoints.In
TheRiseof theNovel(1962),for example,IanWattnotes the connection be-
tween the novels of Defoe and the episodicrogue biographiesof the sixteenth
and seventeenthcenturies,known for factualdetailof events,most particularly
the trickeryand deceptionsof their subjects(106).The connection between
autobiographyand the novel,accordingto Watt,can be more definitively
linked to the novel'ssimilaritiesto the confessionalautobiographyor personal
memoir (75,292), as well as to the epistolarynovel of the eighteenthcentury.
In all cases,the novel'sand the biography/autobiography's narrativeswere
expected to tell the life of an individual
according to an outside standardof
experience. It is this "standard," necessarilyinvestedin a particularideology of
socialbehavior,againstwhichWoolf writes her narrativesof femaleexperience.

receptionby familyand friendsaftertheir mother's

22. DescribingVanessa's
deathfor her nephewJulianBell,Woolf commentson how debilitatingtextual
imagesof femininitycan shapesociety'sexpectationsfor women in everyday
life:

People who [...] love to invent a melodramaticfitnessin life, as though

it were a sensationalnovel,acclaimedher now the divinelyappointed
inheritorof all womanlyvirtues,and with a certainhazinessforgot
your grandmother'ssharpfeaturesand Stella'svague ones, and createda
model of them forVanessato follow,beautifulon the surface,but fatally
insipidwithin. ("Reminiscences"55)
Woolf's descriptionillustrateshow hegemony authorsand reproducesitself
throughvariousculturalpracticesalreadyin place,as friendsapplieda patriar-
chal ideology found in the melodramaand the sensationalnovel to the family's
experiencesandVanessa's future.

68
Woolf's"FriendshipsGallery"

23. See Woolf'smock review tited "Memoirsof a Novelist"(1909) for another

satireof conventionalbiographicaltechniquesthat elide the first 17 yearsof a
woman'slife.Woolf'scommentaryimpliesthe importanceof those earlyyears
to the developingcharacterof the fictionalMissWillatt,a period in which
certainqualitieswill become "characteristic."
24. Operatingconsciouslyand ironicallyunderthe traditionof the extremely
popularFrenchromancesof Madeleinede Scudery,the narrativeof Lennox's
novel follows the adventuresofArabella,who readsthe legacy of her mother's
romancesas historiesratherthan as the chivalricfictionsothersbelieve them to
be.AlthoughArabella'sproclivitytowardunderstandingher world throughthe
lens of the romanceis deemed a "foible"of which she must be cured,Lennox's
narratorclearlyasksthe readerto recognize,asArabellasaysin her own de-
fense,that"the Difference[betweenthe world of the romanceand the world
of Georgianupper-classlife] is not in Favorof the presentWorld"(380).
25. The theme of a young, uneducatedwoman left to learn about and survive
the waysof the world on the basisof her innocence alone extendsover several
centuries,to include such charactersas the titularcharactersof Richardson's
Pamelaand Clarissa,Burney'sEvelina,Gwendolen Harlethin George Eliot's
Daniel Deronda,and IsabelArcher in Henry James's Portraitof a Lady.

26. An earlyversionof this scene appearsin Woolf'sjournal for 1903 underthe

title "AnAfternoonwith the Pagans"(Passionate 184-85).Woolf reflectsthat,
farfrom being Barbariansas MatthewArnold claims,the "Englisharistocracy
[...] arevery strongbelieversin the Gods [...] of the very picturesquePagan
mythology"(184).Katie (Countessof Cromer)is describedas"thatdivine
Giantess,"a greatbenevolentgoddess"(185), two expressionsthatwill be used
in "ChapterThree:A Story to MakeYouSleep"forViolet,who was not in
attendanceat this partyin 1903, and for Nelly (LadyRobert Cecil),who was.
A letter to Violet Dickinson in June 1907, and thereforeclose to the gift of
"FriendshipsGallery"in August,describesNelly Cecil,Violet,and Kitty Maxse
"asbeings moving in a higherworld,with voices like the rippleof Arcadian
streams"(Letters1: 297), echoing the mythic and pastoralscene presentedhere.
27.The biographer'sdirectaddressto the readerin the earlierchaptersis more
comic:as in Orlando, the readeris askedto excuse the biographer'somissions,
trustthe biographer'snarrativeapproach,and make use of his or her imagina-
tion when the biographical"facts"are not enough. One extended addressto
the reader,when the readeris askedto play the role of a visitorto Violet's
cottage (290), constructsa scene of interpellationthat is closerin tone to that
of "ChapterThree,"if still humorousin spirit.

69
Karin E.Westman

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