1 - Electricity: Technologies and Aesthetics

Summary

In the first movement of Orlando, Virginia Woolf’s 1928 gender- and genrebending novel set in Elizabethan England, night is marked by an absence of light. For Woolf, darkness was the predominant experience of night in the seventeenth century; instances of nocturnal illumination only demonstrate the inherent fallibility of light. The introduction of the electric light does not occur in the novel at the time of its advent in the late 1870s, but in 1928, the moment in which the novel’s final movement is set. Woolf employs electric lights to signal the close of a very long nineteenth century and herald the belated beginning of the twentieth century. Orlando is astonished by the convenience of the instantaneous illumination of ‘a whole room’, of ‘hundreds of rooms’ at ‘a touch’. Not only was ‘the sky […] bright all night long’ but so too were ‘the pavements’ (Woolf 2008: 283). This proliferation of artificial illumination across the city distinguishes ‘the present moment’ from that preceding it. Orlando’s new world appears more vibrant and vital; ‘[t]here was something definite and distinct about the age’, something modern (Woolf 2008: 284). Following Woolf’s example, we take for granted that the electric light was an accepted object and, indeed, symbol of modernity. But was this still the case, fifty years after the first commercially viable electric lights were introduced in London’s streets?

As one of electricity’s most prominent and prevalent technologies, the electric light is entangled with an elision of technology and modernity and of modernity with modernisation. But electricity, electric lights and modernity are not interchangeable. Graeme Gooday challenges the presumption that ‘electrification and modernization are integral features of the same phenomenon, and thus that electricity is synonymous with modernity’ (Gooday 2008: 14–15). The orthogonal processes of domestication and modernisation were neither assured nor easily accomplished; before the electric light could become an object of modernity and, in turn, a modernist object, it needed first to be romanticised ‘as both an upper-class luxury and a mysterious magical force’ and anthropomorphised ‘as benign fairy, goddess, wizard or imp’ (Gooday 2008: 19).