with names of the 'lost generation.

' " This book should well serve the student

of propaganda and the sociologist of literature. It is not well-indexed, but its thirtythree illustrations and concluding two-page bibliographical note on propaganda
sources add value. EWART SKINNER

Purdue University

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Lucio P. Ruotolo. The Interrupted Moment: A View of Virginia Woolfs Novels. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1986. 262 pp. $29.50. Jane Marcus. Virginia Woolf and the Languages of Patriarchy. Bloomington: Indiana
UP, 1987. 219 pp. $29.95 cloth; pb. $10.95.

Jane Marcus, ed. Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987,
307 pp. $24.95.

Virginia Woolf is ideally suited to contemporary critical discourse. A remarkable

number of key twentieth-century preoccupations, which remain the preoccupa-

tions of literary critics now, converge in her work. It is not just that her texts yield up riches, over and over again, to analysis informed by all current or recent
critical orientations. That formulation makes her work seem a passive feeding ground for the publication-hungry critical establishment. Rather, her writing

engages in a profound and multifarious way the issues out of which all those critical
orientations have arisen.

Lucio Ruotolo succinctly formulates in his Introduction the central premise

of his book: "The Interrupted Moment sets forth my claim that Woolfs evolving aesthetics encompass both existentialist and anarchist presumptions." The protagonist of this analysis, the "interrupted moment," "arousefs] inventive impulses"
in WoolFs life and fiction. Responding creatively rather than defensively to inter-

ruption is a measure for Ruotolo of WoolFs success in her writing and of her characters' success in their fictions. To embrace interruption, "the rhythm of the broken sequence" (WoolFs phrase in A Room of One's Own), is to be "open to
life . . . open to an aesthetic of disjunction situated at the heart of human in-

terplay." Ruotolo's premise leads to major revisions of relatively consensual views of some of WoolFs best-known characters. For example, he groups together as negative characterizationscharacters who respond defensively rather man creatively to
interruptionSeptimus Warren Smith of Mrs. Dalloway, whose suicide is seen by

Ruotolo as his failure to respond openly to interruption rather than either a pathetic victimization or a sacrificial gift; Mrs. Ramsay of To the Lighthouse, whose ability
to gather together disparate fragments, usually associated with a positive view in Woolf of art and the maternal function, is associated here with her love of

self-annihilating solitude as retreat from the enabling flux of life; and Bernard of The Waves, who, far from being the largely positive protagonist he's generally taken to be, a stand-in for or approximation of the authorial point of view, becomes
RECENT BOOKSBRITISH AND IRISH 275

here a narrow, limited, coercive character who serves to undermine the flux, in-

determinacy, openendedness of the text by gathering it together into a false, reductive unity in his final monologue, associating himself with patriarchal-imperialist
politics by taking up the sword of Percival.

Most notably, that artist's gift of merging and creating wholenessMrs. Ramsay's artist's medium is life, as Lily's is paintingof forging the perfect moment lifted out of time, which is usually regarded as a positive figure of art for Woolf,
a life-force in opposition to Mrs. Ramsay's coerciveness rather than a facet of it, becomes for Ruotolo the enemy of WoolFs healthier existentialist-anarchist aesthetic. Wholeness, continuity, and perfection are on the side of ordered

deathliness, hierarchy, and oppressive convention, associated for Ruotolo with coercive politics and with WoolFs defensive reaction against the threat of chaotic in-

coherence (the connection he makes between Mrs. Ramsay's love of order and her coerciveness is persuasive), The positive force in WoolFs art works against
wholeness and order, disrupting her own inclination toward closed forms, and

valorizes interruptedness, or creative openendedness and indeterminacy.

Ruotolo's arguments are responsible, persuasive, and carefully documented. Even if his reader does not want to assent finally to his radical revision of our sense of the function of "the vision of the whole," in Stephen Spender's phrase, in WoolFs fiction in particular, or modernist writing in general, preferring to see it eifiier as the modernists saw itan affirmative response to devastating modern dislocationsor, more neutrally, as in dialectic with modernist fragmentation,

this reader, at least, comes away impressed, engaged, and with a sense of comfortable assumptions about Woolf and modernism creatively interrupted.

Jane Marcus is a crucial, enabling figure not only for Woolf criticism but for feminist criticism in general. Her work has done more, perhaps, than anyone else's to establish Woolf as one of the few most important writers for contemporary feminist critics. Moreover, she fosters and supports die work of younger feminist critics with exemplary generosity, as dozens of citations attest. She has
edited three anthologies of Woolf criticism, but it is in Virginia Woolf and the Languages

of Patriarchy, a collection of her essays, that the full impact of her scholarship and feminist analysis becomes most apparent. I had read these essays as they appeared in print over the past decade, in the context of other feminist criticism and other
work on Woolf; reading mem here in Marcus' own editorial sequence makes clearer

to me how groundbreaking they were and how influential they have been. The motivating force behind Marcus' work on Woolf can be seen in this
sentence from "The Niece of a Nun: Virginia Woolf, Caroline Stephen and the

Cloistered Imagination," an essay on the influence of her aunt's Quaker mysticism on WoolFs vision of chastity in feminist creation: "The extraordinary revival of interest in the life and work of Virginia Woolf has, I believe, a single sourcethe political themes of her novels and the ethical and moral power of her writing, both essays and fiction." A great deal of Marcus' work is a detailed, extended elucidation of those political themesfeminism, socialism, pacifismand of their accompanying ethical and moral power. Marcus focuses particularly on WoolFs "novels of fact," the previously neglected Night and Day, WoolFs second novel,
and The Years, her next-to-the-last, novels that Marcus' work has done a great deal to rescue from critical oblivion. The first three essays of the collection are

devoted to those novels, and they reappear, particularly The Years, throughout
276 MODERN FICTION STUDIES

the book. A Room of One's Own, WoolFs masterpiece of feminist literary criticism,
and Three Guineas, her feminist-antiwar-antifascist book, also figure prominently throughout these essays. Profoundly polemical, Marcus' Woolf criticism is at least as profoundly scholar-

ly and literate. Marcus claims the classicist Jane Harrison as her heroine in these
essays, and a great deal of her work explores, with impressive erudition and a keen ear and eye for verbal and imagistic resonances, the Greek mythological

underpinnings of WoolFs work. Marcus' erudition is not limited to classical mythology, however, and her reader is treated to a breadth of knowledge of history
and the arts that seems as wide as WoolFs own. Her readings are informed by

detailed knowledge of WoolFs family and their works, particularly her Quaker mystic aunt, Caroline Stephen, and her patriarchal imperialist uncle, James Fitzjames Stephen. Characteristically, Marcus pursues a line of thought beyond its
most immediate manifestation. She does not rest with an analysis of Caroline

Stephen's life and writings, for example; she does further research into modes
of Quaker rhetoric. Furthermore, Marcus' extensive knowledge of music, par-

ticularly opera, in which Woolf herself was immersed, brings a dimension to Woolf
criticism unavailable, to my knowledge, anywhere else.

In Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury, edited by Marcus, a book of essays that

emerged from the Woolf centennial, we see enacted another major motif in Marcus'

criticism: the disjunction between the English Woolf establishment, headed by WoolFs nephew and biographer Quentin Bell, and the American feminist Woolf critics. The English and American Woolfs are barely recognizable to one another.
To the English critics, she was a social figure of imposing wit and beauty, doyenne

of Bloomsbury, lover of aristocracy, when she wasn't off being mad; as a writer, she was apolitical, artsy, convoluted, obsessed with private themes, perhaps a trifle
slight. Needless to say, Marcus' visionary lesbian feminist socialist pacifist, and other American feminists' avatar o- criture fminine or feminist modernism, must

be to the English Woolfians a laughable invention. To American feminists, their

Woolf is pure patriarchal ideology.

Both sides are polite, however, in this anthology. After the opening three essays by famous Englishmen, Nigel Nicolson, Noel Annan, and Michael Holroyd, which are elegant, impeccably well written, enjoyable, and innocuous, we get a series of twelve American essays (not quite one for each colony), that moves generally chronologically through WoolFs oeuvre. John W. Bicknell argues, in "Mr. Ramsay was Young Once," for Leslie Stephen's positive influence on his daughter. His argument, well supported by his scholarship, provides an interesting correction of the one-sided view of Stephen as tyrant and ogre that predominates in

feminist criticism. He did, at least when he was "young once," foster his daughter's
writing.

Carol Hanbery MacKay gives us "The Thackeray Connection: Virginia WoolFs Aunt Anny" in the Marcus tradition of uncovering positive female role models in WoolFs family (Anny Thackeray was an independent, strong-minded woman, model for Mrs. Hilbery in Night and Day). Louise A. DeSalvo continues

her groundbreaking archival scholarship in her article on WoolFs early, unpublished

journals (the Woolf Estate has refused to publish them or to allow DeSalvo to quote from them), "As 'Miss Jan Says': Virginia WoolFs Early Journals" ('Miss Jan' is an early Woolf persona who is allowed to say things Virginia is not).
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In " 'The Sacred Edifices': Virginia Woolf and Some of the Sons of Culture," Angela Ingram discusses the oppressive stature of Cambridge architecture in WoolFs imaginative universe. Jane Marcus' " 'Taking the Bull by the Udders': Sexual Difference in Virginia Woolfa Conspiracy Theory," also reprinted in Virginia

Woolf and the Languages of Patriarchy (the characteristic Marcusite title gives a good
sense of her provocative wit) is a wide-ranging essay on various facets of WoolFs feminist collaborative writing"trialogic" writing that depends equally on female

audience and readerin A Room of One's Own. Marcus ranges freely and informatively through twentieth-century history and Greek mythology to make her
complex argument.
Elizabeth Abel's " 'Cam the Wicked': WoolFs Portrait of the Artist as her

Father's Daughter," part of her forthcoming book Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis, is a brilliant close reading of Cam as alternative artist-daughter in To the Lighthouse (alternative, of course, to Lily Briscoe) that sees Cam as a representation of the cost to the woman (writer) of acceding to the symbolic order
of the Father. In "This is the Room that Class Built: the Structures of Sex and

Class m Jacob's Room," Kathleen Dobie argues that Woolf links unmarried women with working-class characters as powerless, exploited, and immobilized by the allpowerful upper-class men. Sandra M. Gilbert, in "Woman's Sentence, Man's Sentencing: Linguistic Fantasies in Woolf and Joyce," an earlier version of a chapter in Gilbert and Gubar's No Man's Land, argues that male modernist linguistic innovation functions to degrade newly threatening women, whereas modernist
women writers' "yearn" for a new language is a fantasy that masks their desire

for linguistic authority. In "Three Guineas: Virginia WoolFs Prophecy," Catherine F. Smith makes an interesting argument for a link between WoolFs polemic and a genre of prophetic writing by English women, particularly the seventeenth-century mystic Jane
Lead. Laura Moss Gottlieb, in "The War Between the Woolfs," argues that

Leonard's patriarchal biases prevented him from appreciating Virginia's antiwar writing. In "The Remediable Flaw: Revisioning Cultural History in Between the Acts," Judith L. Johnston gives a lucid and comprehensive account of that novel as WoolFs antifascist response to the late-thirties political situation. And in "The Stage of Scholarship: Crossing the Bridge from Harrison to Woolf," Sandra D. Shattuck continues Jane Marcus' work of tracing the influence of Harrison and
her feminist classical scholarship on WoolFs fiction.
MARIANNE DeKOVEN

Rutgers University

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MODERN FICTION STUDIES