Virginia Woolf's Mythic Method

by Amy C. Smith

Overview

In Virginia Woolf’s Mythic Method, Amy C. Smith reinvigorates scholarly analysis of myth in Virginia Woolf’s fiction by examining how Woolf engaged social and political issues in her work. Through close readings of Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and Between the Acts, Smith argues that Woolf develops a paratactic method of alluding to Greek myth that is shaped by the style of archaic oral literature and her intersectional feminist insights. By revising such famously paradoxical figures as the Great Goddess, the Eleusinian deities, Dionysus, Odysseus, and the Sirens, Woolf illustrates the links between epistemological and metaphysical assumptions and war, empire, patriarchy, capitalism, and fascism. At the same time, her use of parataxis to invoke ancient myth unsettles authorial control and empowers readers to participate in making meaning out of her juxtaposed fragments. In contrast to T. S. Eliot’s more prominent mythic method, which seeks to control the anarchy of modern life, Woolf’s paratactic method envisions more livable forms of sociality by destabilizing meaning in her novels, an agenda that aligns better with our contemporary understandings of modernism.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780814215135
Publisher:	Ohio State University Press
Publication date:	03/01/2022
Series:	Classical Memories/Modern Identities
Pages:	172
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Amy C. Smith is Associate Professor of English at Lamar University.

Read an Excerpt

In his 1923 review of James Joyce’s Ulysses, T. S. Eliot formulated his influential modernist “mythical method,” a theory that for a long time dominated modernist studies of myth. Eliot praises Joyce for shaping the jumble of modern life into a meaningful order through mythic parallels. In that essay Eliot may be inaccurately projecting his own idée fixe on to Ulysses, since his description of the method more accurately fits The Waste Land. While Eliot’s theory has often served as a paradigm for how modernist authors used myth, I argue that Virginia Woolf developed her own original method of incorporating myth into modernist literature. Her method’s divergence from Eliot’s shows in the absence of Woolf in many studies of myth in modernism, including Michael Bell’s classic Literature, Modernism, and Myth, which includes chapters on all the major male modernists as well as Latin American Boom authors and postmodern writers, but none on Woolf.

Inspired by the structure of archaic oral literature, Woolf’s mythic method reflects her feminist vision of the modern world. Eliot’s mythic method was, in his own words, “a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history,” an impulse that Jean Mills characterizes as the search for “a reaffirmation of masculine hierarchies in mythic structures” following the destruction of World War I. Despite her friendship with Eliot, the problems that concern Woolf stem not from a failure of control and order but from an excess of the masculine hierarchies that Eliot mourned. Woolf dreads not the anarchy of contemporary history but the oily craving for power and domination that the modern world evinces. In contrast to Eliot, who believes that classicism is the “goal toward which all good literature strives,” Woolf’s literary goals are not classical at all but rather archaic. Rather than seeing myth as a straightforward unifying force with the role “of controlling, of ordering” reality, her careful practice of translating Greek tragedies led her to view myth as a powerfully disordered and disordering influence and to prioritize the indeterminate style of oral literature.

In this study I combine the long, though recently neglected, scholarly conversation about myth in Woolf’s fiction with more recent conversations regarding Woolf’s treatment of social and political issues; the influence of Jane Harrison’s scholarship and Woolf’s reading in Greek on her intellectual and political views; and Woolf’s preference for indeterminacy in narrative structures. As early as 1956, with Joseph Blotner’s study of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter and the Oedipal conflict in To the Lighthouse, scholars began analyzing Woolf’s use of Greek myth. This topic gained prominence in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s with feminist analyses of Woolf’s allusions to Greek and Egyptian goddesses, but it has been relatively neglected as an area of critical inquiry in recent years. Over the last twenty years, attention has turned to Woolf’s treatment of social and political issues in her fiction and nonfiction, building on feminist scholarship to address issues of empire, race, the British class system, fascism, war, and many other topics. A third track of scholarship, which has lately seen a resurgence, examines how Harrison’s scholarship and Woolf’s own reading of Greek literature and philosophy influenced Woolf’s intellectual and political views, but it largely does not address the position and function of myth in the artistic expression of these views. Finally, a range of scholars examine Woolf’s refusal to settle meanings or resolve inconsistencies within her fiction. Woolf’s strategies for incorporating myth in her fiction have not generally been part of these important conversations, yet I will argue in this book that Woolf often explores these ideas through a particular type of allusion to Greek myth. I aim to bring together these areas of Woolf studies, reviving the study of myth in Woolf’s work by showing that Woolf’s mythic method is a primary aesthetic vehicle for expressing critical views about the role of modern epistemological and metaphysical assumptions in social structures.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction    A Paratactic Method Chapter 1        Clarissa’s Eleusinian Desires Chapter 2        Septimus’s Dionysian Sacrifice Chapter 3        Peter Walsh’s Primitivist Odyssey Chapter 4        The Goddess in the Lighthouse Chapter 5        Harmonious Discord in Between the Acts Bibliography Index