Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Table of Content
- Introduction to Woolf and the Natural World
- Acknowledgments
- List of Abbreviations
- Ecofeminism, Holism, and the Search for Natural Order in Woolf
- “We Make Life”: Vibration, Aesthetics, and the Inhuman in The Waves
- “The Real World”: Virginia Woolf and Ecofeminism
- Virginia and Leonard, as I Remember Them
- “Everything tended to set itself in a garden”: Virginia Woolf's Literary and Quotidian Flowers: A Bar-Graphical Approach
- Taking Her Fences: The Equestrian Virginia Woolf
- The Metaphysics of Flowers in The Waves: Virginia Woolf's “Seven-Sided Flower” and Henri Bergson's Intuition
- Crowding Clarissa's Garden
- The Flesh of Citizenship: Red Flowers Grew
- The Besieged Garden: Nature in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and Willa Cather's One of Ours
- Virginia Woolf: Natural Olympian: Swimming and Diving as Metaphors for Writing
- “This, I fancy, must be the sea”: Thalassic Aesthetics in Virginia Woolf's Writing
- Wild Swimming
- The Woolf, the Horse, and the Fox: Recurrent Motifs in Jacob's Room and Orlando
- The Dogs that Therefore Woolf Follows: Some Canine Sources for A Room of One's Own in Nature and Art
- “The Bird is the Word”: Virginia Woolf and W.H. Hudson, Visionary Ornithologist
- Evolution, History, and Flush; or, The Origin of Spaniels
- “Lappin and Lapinova”: A Woolf in Hare's Clothing?
- “A Certain Hold on Haddock and Sausage”: Dining Well in Virginia Woolf's Life and Work
- Moments of Aging: Revising Mother Nature in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway
- Homeless in Nature: Solitary Trampings and Shared Errantry in Cornwall, 1905
- “Walking over the bridge in a willow pattern plate”: Virginia Woolf and the Exotic Landscapes
- Mining with the Head: Virginia Woolf, Henry David Thoreau, and Exploring the Self Through Nature
- Virginia Woolf as Mountaineer
- “It was an uncertain spring”: Reading Weather in The Years
- Transforming Nature: Orlando as Elegy
- “Nature, who has played so many queer tricks upon us”: Digging Granite and Chasing Rainbows with Virginia Woolf
- Sundered Waters: Isolated Consciousness and Ostensible Communion in Woolf's Narration
- “To give the moment whole”: The Nature of Time and Cosmic (Comm)unity in Virginia Woolf's The Waves
- Spengler's The Decline of the West and Intellectual Quackery: Checking the Climate with Leonard Woolf and W.B Yeats
- Listening-in, Tuning Out: Leonard Woolf's Criticism of the BBC During the 1930s
- Notes on Contributors
- Conference Program
The Besieged Garden: Nature in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and Willa Cather's One of Ours
- Frontmatter
- Table of Content
- Introduction to Woolf and the Natural World
- Acknowledgments
- List of Abbreviations
- Ecofeminism, Holism, and the Search for Natural Order in Woolf
- “We Make Life”: Vibration, Aesthetics, and the Inhuman in The Waves
- “The Real World”: Virginia Woolf and Ecofeminism
- Virginia and Leonard, as I Remember Them
- “Everything tended to set itself in a garden”: Virginia Woolf's Literary and Quotidian Flowers: A Bar-Graphical Approach
- Taking Her Fences: The Equestrian Virginia Woolf
- The Metaphysics of Flowers in The Waves: Virginia Woolf's “Seven-Sided Flower” and Henri Bergson's Intuition
- Crowding Clarissa's Garden
- The Flesh of Citizenship: Red Flowers Grew
- The Besieged Garden: Nature in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and Willa Cather's One of Ours
- Virginia Woolf: Natural Olympian: Swimming and Diving as Metaphors for Writing
- “This, I fancy, must be the sea”: Thalassic Aesthetics in Virginia Woolf's Writing
- Wild Swimming
- The Woolf, the Horse, and the Fox: Recurrent Motifs in Jacob's Room and Orlando
- The Dogs that Therefore Woolf Follows: Some Canine Sources for A Room of One's Own in Nature and Art
- “The Bird is the Word”: Virginia Woolf and W.H. Hudson, Visionary Ornithologist
- Evolution, History, and Flush; or, The Origin of Spaniels
- “Lappin and Lapinova”: A Woolf in Hare's Clothing?
- “A Certain Hold on Haddock and Sausage”: Dining Well in Virginia Woolf's Life and Work
- Moments of Aging: Revising Mother Nature in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway
- Homeless in Nature: Solitary Trampings and Shared Errantry in Cornwall, 1905
- “Walking over the bridge in a willow pattern plate”: Virginia Woolf and the Exotic Landscapes
- Mining with the Head: Virginia Woolf, Henry David Thoreau, and Exploring the Self Through Nature
- Virginia Woolf as Mountaineer
- “It was an uncertain spring”: Reading Weather in The Years
- Transforming Nature: Orlando as Elegy
- “Nature, who has played so many queer tricks upon us”: Digging Granite and Chasing Rainbows with Virginia Woolf
- Sundered Waters: Isolated Consciousness and Ostensible Communion in Woolf's Narration
- “To give the moment whole”: The Nature of Time and Cosmic (Comm)unity in Virginia Woolf's The Waves
- Spengler's The Decline of the West and Intellectual Quackery: Checking the Climate with Leonard Woolf and W.B Yeats
- Listening-in, Tuning Out: Leonard Woolf's Criticism of the BBC During the 1930s
- Notes on Contributors
- Conference Program
Summary
Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway (1931) and Willa Cather's One of Ours critique the visual propaganda of World War 1 through metaphoric representations of nature. Although the writers were not personally acquainted, Virginia Woolf contextualized Cather's work in “American Fiction,” while Cather judged A Room of One's Own (1929) to be an accurate account of the challenges faced by some women writers (Woodress 423). Additionally, the argument of Cather's essay “The Novel Demeuble,” is clearly indebted to Woolf's insistence in “Modern Fiction” that novelists should only sparingly represent material reality (O'Brien 155). Further, each novelist had researched conditions at the French front, and each disapproved of the distortions on which visual and verbal government wartime propaganda depended.
Willa Cather has long been branded with the infamous image of the plow that broke the plains encircled by the huge red ball of the setting sun from My Antonia (254). Denounced as “scenic nationalis[m],” mocked as praise of American frontier expansionism (Cooperman, qtd. in Trout 4), Cather's work is currently undergoing reappraisal. Some critics now champion Cather as an eco–feminist (Ryder “A Cry” 75–6). Most current critics argue that Woolf did not reduce the land to the body of the female (Bagley, Zeiss), although Cather critics reluctantly acknowledge her reductive practices about “the feminine landscape” (Stout 82–3, O'Brien 409–11). However, both Cather and Woolf were fierce preservationists of both rural and natural landscapes (Hussey “I'd,” Ryder, “A Cry” 77–9).
Twice as long as Mrs. Dalloway (1925), One of Ours won the Pulitzer Prize in 1923. It earned gratitude from numerous war survivors and their families (Lewis 122–3, Harris 32–3), along with male denunciations such as Hemingway's that the novel desecrated their depictions of the manly art of war (North 172–4, 178–9). One of Ours remains controversial. Some read its narrative voice as praise of American war–fervor, while others champion the novel's undermining of American militarism (Trout, Memorial 191). In fact, argues Steven Trout, Cather's novel juxtaposes “clashing discourses,” narrated through several “inconsistent points of view,” (Memorial 7) in order to create “a many–faceted Modernist texture” (Memorial 146). Critical discourse about Woolf's narrative methods is equally contentious. Not surprisingly, the cacophony of interwoven voices and competing, embedded interpreters within Mrs. Dalloway resembles the layered, often “conflicted” (Memorial 83) narrative voices of One of Ours.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Virginia Woolf and the Natural World , pp. 90 - 94Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2011