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 Metaphysics of Flowers in The Waves: Virginia Woolf's “Seven-Sided Flower” and Henri Bergson's Intuition
- 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 The Waves (1931) questions epistemology and ontology and, in so doing, becomes a novel concerned with the “thing–in–itself.” Kant, in Critique of Judgment (1790), posits that we can never reach the “thing–in–itself” because the intuition which would give us a full understanding or experience of this “thing” is impossible. However, within the framework of modernist philosopher Henri Bergson's theory of metaphysics, we will recognize how we might intuit the “thing–in–itself.” Rhoda asks in The Waves : “‘Like’ and ‘like’ and ‘like’—but what is the thing that lies beneath the semblance of the thing?” Like Rhoda, we want to “see the thing” (163), and, while we have been told by Kant and others that we will never be able to approach the “thing” fully, Woolf's writing suggests otherwise.
In the first dissertation on Woolf, published in 1935, Ruth Gruber writes that Woolf “is too innately creative, too inherently Bergsonian to be called Bergson's imitator. It is conceivable that she would have found the way without him” (49). Gruber's comments on the thematic bridge between Woolf 's aesthetics and Bergson's philosophy come as no surprise, especially as Bergson experienced immense popularity during the time she wrote Virginia Woolf: A Study. Currently and in part because of the publication of Gilles Deleuze's Bergsonism, the English edition of which was published in 1988, a reinvigorated Bergson is once again popular. As with Gruber's perceptive comments, current scholars have not failed to identify the integral connection between Modernism—especially Woolf 's work—and Bergsonism. Mary Ann Gillies cites The Waves as a “Bergsonian work” (126) in Henri Bergson and British Modernism (1996); Merry Pawlowski utilizes Bergsonian time in her more recent analysis of “feminine space” in The Years (2008). And, Angela Hague, in Fiction, Intuition & Creativity (2003), defines intuition through Bergson, William James, and Jung (among others) as she traces intuition in Woolf 's creative process, concluding that “[i]n The Waves Woolf achieves the triumph of intuitive form that she sought throughout her career” (275). Extending these and similar arguments that propose a productive coupling of Woolf 's work with Bergson's, this paper affirms that, like Bergson's philosophy, Woolf 's fiction calls for a new metaphysics, a redefinition of the “thing” through duration, intuition, and assemblage.
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- Information
- Virginia Woolf and the Natural World , pp. 71 - 77Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2011