“Can ‘I’ become ‘we’?”: Addressing Community in The Years and Three Guineas

Summary

In a note she wrote while working on To the Lighthouse (1927) in 1925 Woolf made an intriguing link between the forms of individual life and the state of international affairs: “How much more important divisions between people are than between countries. The source of all evil” (Dick Appendix A. 12). This amplifies, and perhaps reverses, a connection she had touched on in The Voyage Out (1915), where Rachel Vinrace finds Richard Dalloway's mechanistic conception of the state to be a failure because it does not touch “the mind…the affections” of the isolated individual (VO 63). The 1925 note makes a more direct, if still enigmatic, link between personal relationships and political and social issues, but the connection between the two becomes most important for Woolf in the 1930s when she is thinking through feminist and social ideas in The Years (1937) and Three Guineas (1938). My focus here is on what turns out to be an intriguing point of chiasm between Woolf's accounts of the personal and the social. The logical and linguistic aporias that surround the idea of meaningful interpersonal connection, and the rich set of metaphoric and syntactic moves through which Woolf engages with them, are reflected and transformed in her later attempts to imagine functional forms of community.

The importance of personal relationships is a recurrent idea in critical discussions of Bloomsbury, and G. E. Moore's Principia Ethica (1903) is of ten cited as a manifesto for its emphasis on love and friendship. The influence of Moore and Principia Ethica on Bloomsbury is well attested. For example, Leonard Woolf talks of being “permanently inoculated with Moore and Moorism” (Beginning Again 24) and Maynard Keynes lists himself, Lytton Strachey, Leonard Woolf, Clive Bell, and Saxon Sydney-Turner among others as early devotees of Moore's philosophy. Keynes characterises what Bloomsbury drew from Moore as a feeling that: “The appropriate subjects of passionate contemplation and communion were a beloved person, beauty and truth, and one's prime objects in life were love, the creation and enjoyment of aesthetic experience and the pursuit of knowledge. Of these love came a long way first” (Keynes 251).