NORAH VINCENT'S NOVEL
Norah Vincent notes that as a girl Virginia Woolf had studied ancient Greek, which was encouraged in the prestige culture in her day. Concerning her study of ancient Greek, see Theodore Koulouris' informative book HELLENISM AND LOSS IN THE WORK OF VIRGINA WOOLF (2011).
Virginia Woolf's younger brother Thoby Stephen had been lucky enough to study ancient Greek and other subjects at Cambridge University, where he was part of a select group of students who gloried in discussing Plato. The select group of students, known as disciples, also included a Jew named Leonard Woolf, who later became Virginia Stephen's husband, and assorted other white Anglo-Saxons such as John Maynard Keynes, E. M. Forster, Lytton Strachey and Clive Bell, who later married the artist Vanessa Stephen (Virginia's lovely older sister, who, according to Norah Vincent, had been a substitute mother-figure in young Virginia's life after their mother had died). Virginia and Vanessa were two well-bred, middle-class Victorian young women.
We can use the familiar idea of male bonding to understand the male bonding of the all-male group of young Disciples at Cambridge University. No doubt their male bonding continued after they graduated and later became members of the famous Bloomsbury group, which included of course Virginia and her sister Vanessa. Norah Vincent describes the persons in the Bloomsbury group as being as "close as kittens" (page 48).
Now, in D. H. Lawrence's famous novel WOMEN IN LOVE (1921), he portrays two lovely and articulate young women who are sisters from a working-class English background: Ursula and Gudrun, who is an emerging artist, as was Vanessa. In that novel, Lawrence also famously portrays Lady Ottoline Morrell, who was part of the English avant-garde scene that also included Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury crowd and the American poet T. S. Eliot, who had relocated in England.
Ottoline Morrell may also have served as the real-life model for Lady Chatterley in Lawrence's novel LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER (1928). Concerning Ottoline Morrell, see Miranda Seymour's biography OTTOLINE MORRELL: LIFE ON A GRAND SCALE (1993).
As noted above, Virginia Woolf and her husband Leonard Woolf established themselves as the publishing house Hogarth Press, which first published their friend T. S. Eliot's famous poem "The Waste Land" (1922) in book form in Britain (1923). For a recent biography of young Tom Eliot, see YOUNG ELIOT: FROM ST. LOUIS TO "THE WASTE LAND" (2015).
Now, Leonard Woolf arranged to have Hogarth Press publish the English translations of Sigmund Freud's works, which were the "in thing" with the avant-garde crowd in England at the time. Incidentally, James Strachey, Lytton Strachey's brother, translated Freud's works into English. However, even though Virginia Woolf heard certain men in the avant-garde crowd discuss Freud's ideas, Norah Vincent goes out of her way to make us aware of the fact that Virginia Woolf herself had not undertaken yet to read Freud for herself, even after Leonard Woolf had arranged to have Hogarth Press publish Freud's translated works (pages 59, 81).
Not surprisingly, Lawrence's novel SONS AND LOVERS (1913) had been subjected to a Freudian interpretation in England. But the Freudian interpretation prompted Lawrence to write his brilliant and perceptive books PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE UNCONSCIOUS (1921) and FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS (1922).
In a deep bow to Freud, Norah Vincent even mentions "transference" in one context in her own narrative commentary in her novel (page 86). Even though she is obviously indebted to Freud's conceptual construct of transference, the psychological account of Virginia Woolf's psyche that Norah Vincent advances in her novel strikes me as resembling Lawrence's account of the psyche far more than Freud's.
Now, Norah Vincent also portrays young Virginia Woolf as being deeply impressed by the words of the prologue of the Gospel According to John (quoted on page 28), which features the Logos of ancient Greek and Roman thought -- and also found in Gnostic thought.
Norah Vincent prominently uses the words communion and communing (see, for example, pages 10, 87, 91). Because of the prominence of communion in her fictional account of Virginia Woolf's subjective psychological temperament and artistic sensibility, I want to step back from her portrayal of Virginia Woolf in her novel and discuss the larger cultural context of Western culture regarding communion.
In the book THE DUALITY OF HUMAN EXISTENCE: AN ESSAY ON PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION (1966), David Bakan in psychology at the University of Chicago describes the duality of human existence as involving agency (stereotypically masculine) and communion (stereotypically feminine). In what certain feminist theorists characterize as male patriarchy in Western culture, agency is not only stereotypically masculine but also stereotypically assigned to men and boys. Conversely, in their view of patriarchy, communion is not only stereotypically feminine but also stereotypically assigned to women and girls.
But Bakan sees agency (stereotypically masculine) and communion (stereotypically feminine) as two aspects of human nature -- two dimensions of the human psyche.
Vicki S. Helgeson in psychology at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh has used Bakan's conceptual constructs of agency and communion in her own research projects, which she sums up in her 700-page textbook THE PSYCHOLOGY OF GENDER, now in its 4th edition.
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