“Do Not Touch”: The Masculine Artist as Homemaker in Virginia Woolf’s Roger Fry: A Biography
Jadavpur University
Abstract
This article demonstrates how Virginia Woolf presents her subject, the artist and art critic Roger Fry, as a masculine artist and homemaker and a progressive model for masculinity in Roger Fry: A Biography (1939). For Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry was a figure she could portray as an ideal feminist man whose presence signaled a radical break from Victorian bourgeois patriarchy as well as from the masculinist mores of inter-war High Modernism. Insofar as her choices as a biographer dovetail with her vision for a feminist modernity, they have important implications for understanding the limits of her feminism. Fry’s apparently pioneering masculinity and the communities it engenders remain dependent on, first, exclusions and appropriations of the aesthetic traditions and labor of subaltern figures, and, second, denying the position of modernist subject to working-class women. Hence, there are parallel implications for Woolf’s feminism, given that Woolf’s conception of creative space for the artist swings between a shared space for collaboration and an inviolable private space for creation. Thus, the paper examines why Woolf might have deemed it necessary to envision the artist’s room of their own as a bourgeois, imperial space in Roger Fry, in the context of other writings in her oeuvre.
Key Words: Roger Fry: A Biography / Virginia Woolf / domestic spaces / servants / masculinities
Introduction
In Roger Fry: A Biography, Virginia Woolf presents her subject, the artist and art critic Roger Fry, as a masculine artist/homemaker, a progressive model for masculinity. This has important implications for understanding her feminism. By contextualizing Fry as a man who chose to work with various artistic traditions, including the much derided domestic and decorative arts, this biography presents Bloomsbury as a site of conscientious dissent from the gendered aesthetic values that dominated interwar “High Modernism,” especially in the fields of visual art and architecture. For Virginia Woolf, then, Roger Fry was a figure she could portray as an ideal feminist man whose presence signaled a radical break from Victorian bourgeois patriarchy. Woolf was especially observant of Fry’s inventive methods for combining domestic responsibilities with his life as an artist and a man of letters, thus dismantling hierarchies of class, gender, and race, as well as the modes of cultural consumption inherent in these hierarchies.
However, this apparently pioneering masculinity and the communities it engenders remain dependent on exclusions and appropriations of the aesthetic tradition and labor of subaltern figures. Fry appears invested in the gender-bending praxis of masculine homemaking only because subaltern women workers are pushed to the margins of the text. Hence, there are parallel implications for Woolf’s feminism, given that Woolf’s conception of creative space for the artist swings between a shared space for collaboration and an inviolable private space for creation. As various scholars of Woolf studies and modernist feminisms have explored, subaltern figures, especially servants, become problematic presences in the creation of a modernist aesthetic. This situation is particularly fraught, as scholars like Alison Light, Mary Wilson, and Ann Mattis have demonstrated, in relation to the production of a gendered domestic modernism. On one hand, servants’ presence in modernist writing often represents the liberating, path-breaking novelty of modernist modes of expression; on the other, servants are also strategically rendered silent, or made to carry the burden of pre-modernist conventions. As Mary Wilson writes “[s]ervants are key figures of modernism because they simultaneously are and are not figures of modernism; they are and are not allowed to be modernist selves” (14).
This paradigm informs a crucial aspect of bourgeois feminism in the interwar years: the dream of creating a novel domestic arrangement via the new artistic and technological innovations which fascinated the Modernist imagination, thus freeing the bourgeois subject of all genders from direct dependence on subaltern figures. Gender equality and modernity are thus arrived at not by doing away with the exploitative hierarchy of domestic labor, but rather by rendering invisible figures who remain stubborn reminders of that appropriation. In Woolf’s admiring portrait of Fry, these tensions emerge through the depictions of household work and the elision of servants from the narrative.
Roger Fry’s Domestic Arts
Roger Fry (1866-1934) was senior to most of his peers in the Bloomsbury group. By championing Post-Impressionism and organizing the first Post-Impressionist Exhibition in London in 1910, Fry established himself as an avant-garde artist and intellectual, one who would come to be known as the father of British Post-Impressionism. In doing so, he broke away from his early career as an art critic specializing in Old Masters. At the time, he also became an outsider to the British artistic establishment and to the British public: both groups fiercely decried post-Impressionism as an assault upon the standards of art.
However, as Christopher Reed has illustrated, long before Fry remade himself as an outsider, and from his earliest days as an artist in the 1880s, a tradition of dissent from the artistic standards of the British bourgeoisie had characterized Fry’s career because he associated with the various guilds and workshops of the Arts and Crafts movement (Bloomsbury Rooms 36). These relationships brought him into contact with a socialist tradition of art committed to altering the domestic interior. For socialist thinkers of the time, such as William Morris, Robert Blatchford, and Edward Carpenter, authentic artistic expression required breaking away from mass-produced domestic furnishings sourced through imperial networks of trade and industrial production.
In his essay “The Beauty of Life” (1880), William Morris, for example, takes up the subject of furnishing a room as a site for socialist intervention. In this essay, Morris’s standards for furnishing are an integral part of his socialism. Morris argues that mass-production simultaneously compels individuals to participate in the alienating processes of industrial production and to purchase and consume these objects in their own domestic sphere, ensuring profit for the capitalist. Thus, Morris critiques the dominant aesthetic standards of mass-produced furniture as an ugly and useless bourgeois aesthetic, and he exhorts the working class to discover what might truly make their homes beautiful ("Beauty" 110). The so-called decorative or lesser arts, those characterized by producing items with both use value and aesthetic value, interested Morris because of their ubiquity in daily life. According to Morris, decoration was of prime importance to give people “pleasure in the things they must perforce use” and to give people “pleasure in the things they must perforce make” (4).
Morris’s critique of ugly household items is part of a larger socialist critique of bourgeois domestic decorum. Edward Carpenter and Robert Blatchford routinely critiqued genteel standards of living in Britain, pointing out the male householder’s refusal to perform any labor within the house, which, to use Blatchford’s terms, created a standard of living in which he would be a “victim to [his] furniture, and [his] wife […] a slave” to it (41). For Edward Carpenter, this state of affairs manifests the skewed social morals of a capitalist class structure
where to converse with a domestic at the dinner table would be an unpardonable breach of etiquette; where it is assumed as a matter of course that you do nothing for yourself—to lighten the burden which your presence in the world necessarily casts upon others; where to be discovered washing your own linen, or cooking your dinner, or up to the elbows in dough on baking day, or helping to get the coals in, or scrubbing your own floor, or cleaning out your privy, would pass a sentence of lifelong banishment on you; where all dirty work, at least such work as is considered dirty by the “educated” people in a household is thrust upon young and ignorant girls; where children are brought up to feel far more shame at any little breach of social decorum—at an “h” dropped, or a knife used in the wrong place at dinner, or a wrong appellative given to a visitor—than at glaring acts of selfishness and uncharitableness. (“England’s Ideal” 7-8)
As this quotation bears out, Carpenter attacks the hierarchies of class and gender, along which domestic labor is organized, and addresses the bourgeois man, asking him to recognize his complicity in perpetuating systematic oppression. It asks the bourgeois man to take into account his own chauvinism, in depending upon various forms of feminine working-class labor, to bolster his self-image as a respectable member of society.
Roger Fry’s ideas about housekeeping appear to have been the antithesis of the system excoriated by Carpenter. Setting up home after his marriage in 1896, Fry established a different kind of domesticity and, correspondingly, an unconventional domestic aesthetic, while rejecting the model of the Arts and Crafts cottage for his abode at Durbins, in the south of England. The house was built to run more efficiently, including modern technology such as central heating, electricity, a spin mop, a dumb waiter between the cook’s room and what Fry dubbed the “houseplace” where meals were eaten, a telephone, an electric bell for servants, and flushing water closets. The house contained minimal furniture and few staircases, making work easier for paid domestic workers. Most of the furniture was oak, which did not easily show marks. The maids’ rooms were also better than those standard for Victorian servants. (Reed, <em>Bloomsbury Rooms</em> 35-50). Fry thus set up a household which addressed some of the concerns raised by the English socialists of the late nineteenth century, molding himself into a householder who would not conform to the glaring inequalities of the normative British middle-class home.
The Omega Workshops
By the time Roger Fry founded the Omega Workshops—his bid to center the domestic in the aesthetics of visual art—in 1913, the legacy of the Arts and Crafts movement been co-opted by large-scale retail businesses. Moreover, there was also a range of so-called artistic workshops, from Arthur H. Mackmurdo’s Century Guild to the French couturier Paul Poiret’s École Martine, which employed working-class labor to produce artisanal home wares. These workshops were structured like capitalist enterprises. They functioned through an artistic hierarchy, with designs curated by middle-class stakeholders and executed by artisans, thus negating the progressive impulses of the Arts and Crafts movement. (Reed, Bloomsbury Rooms 35-50, 111-132)
Fry’s Omega Workshop was also inspired by William Morris’s experiments in producing furniture and household items, and it attempted to create a movement which once more “allowed the artist the possibility of utilizing his gifts in applied design” (Fry, qtd. in Reed, Bloomsbury Rooms 111). Omega was a collaborative effort, in which artists/employees earned a fixed wage for fixed hours to produce art marketed under the name of the Omega, the understanding being that they would seek employment as independent artists outside these hours
From the beginning, Omega produced items that belonged in the domestic interior: furniture, carpets, earthenware, fabric, wallpaper, cushions, screens, lampshades, boxes, and fans. Omega also executed commissions for interior decoration. The group participated in the Ideal Home Exhibition of 1913, exhibiting a number of model domestic interiors. According to Woolf’s biography, Fry, the middle-class son of a judge, regularly practiced artisanal skills as an amateur— as a potter, or a carpenter, for example, and often with comic results—as long as Omega functioned (Roger Fry 196- 97).
In addition to prioritizing the reform of the domestic interior, Fry brought an aesthetic of playfulness and novelty to domestic objects. This tendency appears in Woolf’s re-telling of an interviewer’s experience of being shown around the workshop. Fry shows the interviewer a series of furnishings/artworks: a cushion, a chair, a wall decoration (significantly, not a painting), a screen, designs for ceilings and nursery walls, chintz fabrics, lampshades, and a woman’s dress. The items exhibit Fry’s self-conscious effort to move away from conventions of proportion, colour, as well as the frequent presence of comic animals and human beings in ludic postures. Pieces feature, for example, a cat playing with a butterfly, a racoon “with very flexible joints,” or a circus troupe with “long waists, bulging necks and short legs” (194). According to the artist,
“It is time,” said Mr Fry, “that the spirit of fun was introduced into the furniture and into fabrics. We have suffered too long from the dull and the stupidly serious.” […] Then Mr Fry showed him a chair. He said it was “a conversational chair,” a witty chair; he could imagine Mr Max Beerbohm sitting on it. Its legs were bright-blue and yellow, and brilliant bands of intense blue and green were worked round a black seat. […] Then there was a design for a wall decoration […] “If people get tired of one landscape,” said Mr Fry, “they can easily have another. It can be done in a very short time.” (Roger Fry 194-195)
The Omega sought to bring whimsy, nonchalance, and originality to housewares by embracing the decorative domestic arts and by creating art which would be a deliberate choice for the possessor’s living quarters. Art from Omega drew attention with its amusing, or even frivolous, qualities, regardless of whether it had a utilitarian role in the domestic interior. Thus, the art produced by Omega, came to be associated not only with a new, outlandish aesthetic, but also with the values associated with feminine interior decoration; that is, with extraneous frivolity, and hence with a “degraded,” less-than-masculine set of artistic values, as the next section will explore.
High Masculine Modernism
One can see these same business men [sic], bankers and merchants, away from their business in their own homes, where everything seems to contradict their real existence- rooms too small, a conglomeration of useless and disparate objects, and a sickening spirit reigning over so many shams- Aubusson, Salon d’Automne, styles of all sorts and absurd bric-à-brac. Our industrial friends seem sheepish and shrivelled like tigers in a cage; it is very clear that they are happier at their factories or in their banks. We claim, in the name of the steamship, of the airplane, of the motor car, the right to health, logic, daring, harmony, perfection. (Le Corbusier, Toward a New Architecture 18-19)
As the above quotation suggests, Fry’s approach to home design was out of sync with its times on aesthetic as well as economic grounds. The Omega’s philosophy simultaneously rejected a notion of art as an item of intellectual conspicuous consumption, created through the vision of a single artist, and resisted mass produced housewares. If Fry had earned the ire of the British public from the very first Post- Impressionist Exhibition in 1910, his work in the domestic interior repeatedly inflamed critics. For instance, the Omega’s exhibit at the Ideal Home exhibition of 1913, garnered this headline in the Mirror: “A Post-Impressionist Flat: What Would the Landlord Think?” According to contemporary gossip, the British royal family considered the Post-Impressionist room “the perfect example of how not to decorate a sitting room” (Reed, Bloomsbury Rooms 128).
Wyndham Lewis dismissed the Omega’s standards of homemaking both for looking back to Victorian standards and for failing to perform the heroic masculinity demanded by the spirit of the age. Lewis claimed that since their “Idol [was] still prettiness with its mid-Victorian languish of the neck,” the main artists could not create anything that would “rise above the level of a pleasant tea party” (qtd. in Bell and Chaplin 337).
By the time Omega closed in 1919, the masculine, practical aesthetic already dominated, and this trend continued through the war. Le Corbusier’s 1923 Towards a New Architecture valorized mass production and standardization and hailed the masculine, highly qualified engineer as the hero of modernity. In this volume, Le Corbusier asserts the importance of a unified plan for a house, and its strict execution, as crucial for successful mass housing (227-65). For Le Corbusier, house-building had to be brought in line with the celebration of mass production, which he saw as the moving spirit of the twentieth century:
We must create the mass-production spirit.
The spirit of constructing mass-production houses.
The spirit of living in mass-production houses.
The spirit of conceiving mass-production houses. (6)
In Le Corbusier’s scheme the excellence of the house was measured by its adherence to an architectural plan drawn on modern, simplified lines, an idea which he applied to the interior of the house as well as its external framework. As a critic of the proliferation of objects in the domestic interior, Le Corbusier advised his readers to build furniture into the body of the house and to eliminate movable furniture such as wardrobes, cabinets, bookcases, washstands, mantelpieces, dressers, and sideboards, along with ornate light fittings, wallpapers, and curtains (115).
As the lines from Towards a New Architecture at the beginning of this section show, Le Corbusier sought to establish the values he associated with the haute bourgeoisie and the upper echelons of the white-collar workforce. His domestic spaces featured the masculine values of the public sphere of Western Europe and America. For Le Corbusier, masculinity was linked with the technological advances of the first half of the twentieth century, in methods of transportation such as “the airplane, the steam-ship, and the motor-car.” By comparing domestic spaces to these sites, Corbusier downplays the role of the home as the site of labor and dwelling, modes associated with the feminine and working-class praxes of domestic labor and home-making.
Le Corbusier’s strident call to impose architectural values he formulated as masculine have two chief aspects. First, his ideas devalue the domestic as a permanent site of people’s affective relations to a space and the relationships it might engender. As Christopher Reed’s scholarship has demonstrated, the dominant narrative of modernist architecture and the visual arts, from 1914 onwards, became decisively invested in an eschewal of domesticity (Not at Home). The alignment of the house with modern transit implies that the real business of the world was located in these sites rather than in the feminized domestic realm. Secondly, Le Corbusier masculinizes the domestic realm through the repeated emphasis on modern home construction being suited to the comforts of the modern man (comforts as determined by the engineer rather than the dweller in the house). These comforts would be provided efficiently, where efficiency is defined as maximally productive, in an industrial context.
Le Corbusier dismisses the idea of domesticity as an active process through which a space develops over time and may signify varied affective states, a form of aesthetic expression for an individual resident within the household. Clearly, then, Le Corbusier invests in a form of house-building reliant on a normative division of gender roles that privileges the male breadwinner, who works outside the home, and renders the domestic sphere primarily a support to his activities.
By contrast, as Susan Fraiman points out, feminine homemaking projects are usually formulated as slow, accretive processes: “[H]omemaking, which appears teleological compared to housekeeping, may also actually be work that is never done, a kind of ritual necessarily repeated many times throughout a lifetime” (42). The vision privileged by the Omega workshops saw the home as a ludic, dynamic space. In this vision, domestic spaces evolved or altered piece by piece, through modes of piecemeal artisanal production, consciously adapted as a means through which to resist mass production. It is, after all, an orientation that involves a sustained preoccupation with decoration, an activity that had been firmly demoted to a feminine, inferior praxis, by practitioners of High Modernist aesthetics.
A Room of One’s Own
It may thus be easy to see why Woolf may have been a sympathetic bystander to Fry’s and the Omega’s endeavors. The Omega Workshop valued domestic labor in parallel to her own outrage at the exploitation of women’s labor. Woolf’s feminism is crucially linked to a critique of the arrogation of paid and unpaid domestic labor that enables the patriarchs of the British bourgeois family to sustain the gender relations that in turn allow a murderous imperial military industrial complex to grow unchecked.
As a long tradition of feminist scholarship has pointed out, Woolf repeatedly addresses questions of class, even when she leaves these questions open, and she is consciously mindful of her position as a member of the rentier class (see Lee; Marcus; James). The question, “is the charwoman who has brought up eight children of less value to the world than the barrister who has made a hundred thousand pounds?” is located at the heart of A Room of One’s Own (60), and the question of who will write the autobiographies of the lady’s maids of famous nineteenth-century Englishwomen is a critical juncture in Three Guineas (251-252). Similarly, in a speech delivered around 1931, Woolf creates a utopian household in which the patriarch has been overthrown, and “the kitchen maid [is] curled up in the arm chair reading Plato […;] the cook [is] engaged in writing a Mass in B flat […;] the parlourmaid [is] knocking up a fine break at the [billiard] table […;] the housemaid [is] working out a mathematical problem” (“Speech” xxxxii).
Indeed, the behavior of servants anchors Woolf’s declaration that “[i]n or around December 1910, human character changed” (Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown 5). While the date is that of the first British Post-Impressionist Exhibition, organized by Fry, Woolf substantiates her claim by reflecting on a change in the spatial range of the paid female cook:
In life one can see the change, if I may use a homely illustration, in the character of one’s cook. The Victorian cook lived like a leviathan in the lower depths, formidable, silent, obscure, inscrutable; the Georgian cook is a creature of sunshine and fresh air; in and out of the drawing-room, now to borrow The Daily Herald, now to ask advice about a hat. (Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown 5)
Woolf thus establishes a covert, but strong, link between Roger Fry, the man who, as I shall discuss later, had facilitated the recognition of the paid domestic worker as an aesthetic critic, and the social and aesthetic upheaval that Woolf celebrates. For Woolf, subaltern women will emerge as participants in public life, whether the discourse is politics or fashion, in this new age.
Leslie Stephen, Roger Fry, and Virginia Woolf
Woolf’s appreciation for Fry may well have been a reaction to her upbringing under a controlling father who dominated the domestic realm. Woolf criticized her father for his systematic exploitation of domestic economy to torment his adolescent daughters, Vanessa and Virginia, “an extraordinary dramatization of self-pity, horror, anger” (Moments of Being 144). Writing forty years later, Woolf would testify, “Never have I felt such rage and such frustration. For not a word of what I felt—that unbounded contempt for him and of pity for [Van]essa—could be expressed” (144).
Significantly, Woolf mentions Fry, in the context of this recollection, writing that, “Roger Fry said that civilisation means awareness; [father] was uncivilised in his extreme unawareness” (146,). Perhaps it is no coincidence that Virginia remembers Fry’s strictures about civilization in the context of a personal experience of masculine tyranny in a domestic space.
Virginia and Vanessa’s move to Bloomsbury after their father’s death was a step towards cultivating a different kind of domestic order, one in which Leslie Stephen’s daughters would no longer be vulnerable to the patriarch’s emotional abuse and could adapt items from the their family home to a new standard of domesticity, breaking up the visual order and daily rituals of their childhood family, as she later recollected:
To make it all newer and fresher, the house had been completely done up. The Watts-Venetian tradition of red plush and black paint had been reversed; we had entered the Sargent-Furse era instead; white and green chintzes were everywhere; and instead of Morris wallpapers with their intricate patterns we decorated the walls with washes of plain distemper. We were going to do without table napkins, we were to have [large supplies of] Bromo instead; we were going to paint; to write; to have coffee after dinner instead of tea at nine o’clock. (Moments of Being 185, brackets original)
From 1910 onwards, when Vanessa and her husband Clive Bell first met him, Fry would have been counted among the male contemporaries who participated in the Stephen sisters’ housekeeping experiments. Perhaps more importantly, Virginia Stephen would learn that Fry could be trusted with care-work, which was usually coded feminine, when she and Fry travelled to Turkey to nurse Vanessa after a miscarriage. In the biography, she recounts the way he balanced his commitment to painting with attention to domestic concerns to ease the recovery of the invalid—apparently flourishing in an unfamiliar domestic space, arranging for the patient’s needs, (including going into the kitchen on occasion) while pursuing various other activities: “Soon therefore his room at the hotel was littered with stuffs and pots and silks, mixed with chessmen, medicine bottles and paint-boxes.” (Roger Fry 170-1)
For Woolf, then, this accretive domestic set-up modeled a revised domestic praxis that could nourish feminine subjects instead of burdening them. Fry, as Woolf pointed out in her biography, routinely performing domestic labor so his behavior in Turkey was no anomaly. Following his wife Helen’s institutionalization in 1910, Fry managed his own domestic affairs, combining domestic and artistic labor.
Roger’s Room
Rows of dusty medicine bottles stood on the mantelpiece; frying pans were mixed with palettes; some plates held salad, others scrapings of congealed paint. The floor was strewn with papers. There were the pots he was making, there were samples of stuffs and designs for the Omega. But on the table, protected by its placard, was the still life—those symbols of detachment, those tokens of a spiritual reality immune from destruction, the immortal apples, the eternal eggs. (Roger Fry 215)
In Woolf’s biography, Fry’s studio emerges as a unique space. It is no Jacob’s Room where the bachelor is well provided for with every comfort, by working-class women. Nor is it the Ramsay household in To the Lighthouse where the house which gets shabbier and shabbier through the carelessness of the Ramsay children, must produce the incandescent beauty of the Ramsay dinner party. Those nurturing, beautiful meals are produced through the labor of a group of women, driven to illness (like Mrs MacNabb) or an early grave (like Mrs Ramsay) by their labors.
Woolf’s recollections of Fry’s studio habits are in contrast to these domestic situations. The studio is a place where he cooks “odd meals for himself with the smell of paint hanging over the frying pan,” combining his art with his work (Roger Fry 246). In a contrast to the “genius” of Leslie Stephen, which could only flourish under conditions of domestic tyranny, Fry’s studio is a place where various kinds of gender-coded activities and labor jostle together, and the work of producing art shares space with cooking and cleaning. In Fry’s homemaking, domesticity and aesthetics inform each other: eggs and apples arranged as a still-life model can, after all, be cooked and eaten as well as painted.
Most strikingly, Fry cooks a bœuf en daube, a dish immortalized by Woolf in To the Lighthouse. In Woolf’s hands, Fry’s cooking provides sustenance and frees the cook to devote time to his artistic pursuits: “‘I’ve made a bœuf en daube which is a dream and will last us about five days so all I need is to boil peas or something,’ and he could read or write while he watched the pot” (206). Woolf’s addition to Fry’s words, imagining him as combining reading and writing with domestic labor, could be seen as a liberating model for the artist and thinker, including for Woolf herself, who struggled with finding an ethical balance between domestic labor and professional, creative labor. This is in contrast to Mrs Ramsay’s dinner party, where the fear that “the boeuf en daube would be entirely spoilt,” haunts the home-maker as she devotes all her energy into making sure her family and guests are pleased (To the Lighthouse 74).
Moreover, it would appear that Fry upsets class hierarchies in domestic and aesthetic context. For instance, Woolf provides an anecdote about deferring to his charwoman for methods of curing indigestion (Roger Fry 87). Fry’s own writing asserts the right of the paid domestic worker to participate in the revolution in British aesthetics heralded by Post-Impressionism. Fry argued that appreciating abstract form was an instinctive, untutored act and therefore, Post-Impressionism was not dependent on class hierarchies: “‘though it can be cultivated [it] is a grace—a grace that one’s sculley [scullery maid] may have it in greater degree than oneself.’” (qtd. in Reed, Bloomsbury Rooms 11). Indeed, Fry had earlier claimed, in Vision and Design (1920), that working-class subjects are better prepared to appreciate the innovations of Post-Impressionism than the privileged and affluent male British subject immersed in art as a system of rarefied intellectual conspicuous consumption.
In the biography, Woolf deliberately amplifies and highlights Fry’s inclusive aesthetics, writing “Anyone’s sensation—his cook’s, his housemaid’s—was worth having” (Roger Fry 153). As reported by Woolf, Fry’s housemaid “had seen the point of Cézanne instantly,” while the formally educated masculine British subject was unable to do so, since his “taste had been perverted by public schools and universities” (Roger Fry 164). These characteristics, Woolf implies, consistently associated Roger Fry with a progressive, self-reflexive, amusing modernity opposed to the masculinist modernity, represented in architecture by Le Corbusier, which emerged from the same military- industrial complex which had bolstered Victorian imperial patriarchy.
“Do Not Touch”
“It was an untidy room. He cooked there, slept there, painted there and wrote there. There was always a picture on the easel, and on the table an arrangement of flowers or of fruit, or eggs or of onions—some still life that the charwoman was admonished on a placard “Do not touch.” […]
[…][T]he room was if possible still more untidy. Mrs Filmer had obeyed the command on the placard, “Do not touch.” Mrs Filmer had not touched...” (Roger Fry 215)
Yet, we need to locate Woolf’s reading of Fry as a man ahead of his time, in the context of scholarship about Woolf’s treatment of subaltern subjects like working-class and non-European women, alongside the scholarly tradition of seeing the Bloomsbury artists as a subculture of independent and progressive thought.
Although she describes Fry as deferring to his charwoman for medical advice, sitting at the feet of “old charwomen with a hoard of nostrums under their black bonnets” (Roger Fry 87), Woolf also gives details about the failings of Fry’s servants in this period and the uncomplimentary things he had to say about them. Fry nicknames the people who come to work for him, “the old Scotch witch” who cannot cook, or a husband-and-wife couple, “the Shepherd and Shepherdess” (Roger Fry 205, 212). Woolf also quotes Fry’s disapproval of a “slavey” who comes to work for him, for being “bred in genteel houses and with only one conception of housework—that there must be a tray under everything” (Roger Fry 205).
Between themselves Fry and Woolf thus manage to push the burden of the mores of British middle-class domesticity onto the shoulders of the working-class woman in domestic service. As the scholarship of Alison Light, Monica Miller, and Ann Mattis demonstrate, on one hand, the modernist writer carries the baggage of seeing the working-class domestic servant as simultaneously abject, dangerous, and inscrutable. Even when they strive to fashion themselves into subjects who have left behind the pre-modernist—pre “December 1910”—moment, into a cultural moment in which class hierarchies are broken, it remains a project of aesthetic self-fashioning for masters and employers, rather than an aesthetic project in which servants are given opportunities to be stakeholders or participants.
Most strikingly, as explored by Sonita Sarker and Urmila Seshagiri, Woolf’s writing is a testimony to the fact that everyday life for the modern English subject was mediated by foreign commodities procured through imperial trade networks. Her essays “The Docks of London” and “Oxford Street Tide” in The London Scene, contain enormous catalogues of the goods. These catalogues enumerate a diverse range of goods, from mammoth’s tusks to cheeses, which found their way to Britain’s shores through networks of empire.
In her novels, Woolf shows an awareness of how the decorative arts were caught up in these networks of imperial exploitation. In her first novel The Voyage Out (1915), the novel’s pivotal episode, the journey to an indigenous ” settlement, is brought about by Mr Flushing, who buys textiles and ornaments from indigenous women whose lives appear to be embedded in the performance of household chores in a village. Woolf pointedly dwells on the fact that these indigenous artefacts are bought dirt-cheap and sold at high prices by Mr Flushing (286).
In this context, it is striking that in writing Roger Fry, Woolf points out, in a completely unironic vein, that Fry performs a somewhat similar role to Mr Flushing, hunting out pots used by local women to fetch water in “the native quarter” on holiday in Broussa, which he then transports back to England as artefacts (171). She also records his hunting out of the reverse flow of commodities made in the mills of Manchester into Africa: “He never seemed to come into the room that autumn without carrying some new trophy in his hands. There were cotton goods from Manchester, made to suit the taste of the negroes. […] And what magnificent taste the untutored negress had!” (206). It is Fry whose discoveries of patterns of demand by African women or of children’s art curated by Marian Richardson in the Black Country of England’s Midlands (92).
In this, Woolf faithfully follows Fry’s own attitude to the non-European art he was curating. For instance, writing about West African art, Fry wonders “for what might not such an acute and rarefied plastic sensibility accomplish if it could be utilized by the wide range of experience, the awareness and intellectual power of a great European artist?” (Fry, Last Lectures 83). Woolf is thus able to re-create the structures of Western aesthetic imperialism, in which the so-called primitive can only become the site of self-conscious artistic expression when it is mediated through an Occidental consciousness, aware of western standards of rationality and aesthetics (see Mitter 202-220; Torgovnick; Araeen 132-50).
Uncomfortably, Woolf’s uncritical representation of Fry’s aesthetic relationship to the non-Western world resonates with Woolf’s infamous statement about how women have not been given the opportunity to cultivate possessiveness as men have: “one can pass a very fine Negress [sic] without wishing to make an Englishwoman of her” (A Room of One’s Own 76). As Jane Marcus points out, this statement positions the Negress as the producer/product of an aesthetic effect (being “very fine”) destined for the appreciation of the “Englishwoman” (Marcus, Hearts of Darkness 41).
If Woolf’s and Fry’s maneuvers acknowledge the presence of racial subalterns as practitioners or suppliers of primitive versions of a modernist aesthetic, both artists also presume that only the Western artist can authentically curate these works and reposition them for the appreciation of a civilized, First World audience. Likewise, servants are offered similarly contradictory roles in Roger Fry. Mrs Filmer’s presence, as a charwoman who comes in to clean Fry’s studio, testifies to the continuing necessity of servants for managed domestic labor, even in the life of a forward-thinking single man.
Frys’s action of placing the “Do Not Touch” notice in front of his still life model reinforces her position as subordinate. It presumes that she lacks the discrimination to distinguish art in progress from routine foodstuffs. Her ignorant touch is what, the sign assumes, will render the apples and eggs, intended for immortalization in Fry’s painting and Woolf’s prose, into nothing if she cooks them for Fry to eat or throws them away to ensure that Fry lives in hygienic surroundings. Fry demotes the charwoman to a desensitized human subject, one who only recognizes eggs and apples for their use value, rather than trusting her to share the sensibilities of an artist.
These are clearly indicative of the class anxieties that arise when the artist is forced to share his creative space with someone he (or she) instinctively believes is their social inferior. As Alison Light writes, “For what is entrusted to the servant, be it only the crockery, is something of one’s self, and being taken care of by a person who is seen as subordinate, an outsider or an inferior, is never without its anxieties and fears.” (Light, Mrs Woolf). Even if the scullery maid or the charwoman has an innate sensibility to abstract form in greater degree than “oneself” (the middle-class art critic), she is not invited to participate in the processes of creating domestic decorative art in the terms on which Vanessa Bell, the middle-class woman artist, would be asked to collaborate (Fry, qtd. in Reed 11). Nor is the labor she spends in maintaining the artistically revolutionary home valued.
A Room Entirely of One’s Own
You have won rooms of your own in the house hitherto exclusively owned by men. You are able, though not without great labor and effort, to pay the rent. You are earning your five hundred pounds a year. But this freedom is only the beginning; the room is your own but it is still bare. It has to be furnished; it has to be decorated; it has to be shared. How are you going to furnish it, how are you going to decorate it? With whom are you going to share it, and upon what terms? (Woolf, “Professions for Women” 241)
So far, it would seem that while Fry begins by reinterpreting modernity to establish a non-heteropatriarchal, non-Eurocentric modernism, his position as a radical innovator is constituted through the hierarchies of the society he rebels against. But perhaps a more pressing question would be how Woolf came to provide an unironic vision of the middle-class masculine homemaker-as-pioneer when her novels seem to take a more critical stance. This distinction might allow us to trace out two separate strands in Woolf’s approach to domesticity and domestic labor. On one hand, Woolf repeatedly sought to analyze and attack systemic patriarchal oppression. These struggles run through her autobiographical writing, as well as taking shape as moments of narrative rupture in her novels which raise the question of what it might mean to empathize with Crosby in The Years, Mrs McNab in To the Lighthouse, or Mrs Giles of Durham in “Memories of a Working Women’s Guild.”
More importantly, as Light has shown, when Woolf studies her own life, through her copious journaling, she takes scrupulous note of her own relationship with Nellie Boxall, the cook-general of the Woolf household. Her diaries record her own vicious distaste for Nellie and her honest awareness of how their relationship was characterized by a systematic lack of power on Nellie’s side. She also notes that one of the aspects of her diary with the most literary potential, would be “the portrait of Nelly” (qtd. in Light, Mrs Woolf xiii ). Thus, in the privacy of her diary, writing as a woman, Woolf is able to admit that her life-story could indeed be overshadowed by a narrative in which Nellie Boxall would emerge as a protagonist, rather than a foil.
On the other hand, in Woolf’s memorial writings about Bloomsbury’s revolution in domestic living, such as Roger Fry, she prioritizes the new freedoms enjoyed by these masculine homemakers who dared to do women’s work while reducing the agency of subaltern subjects. Adrienne Rich claimed Woolf’s style in A Room of One’s Own arises from a need to write so that she would be taken seriously in “a roomful of men,” trying to sound “as cool as Jane Austen, as Olympian as Shakespeare, because that is the way men thought a writer of culture should sound” (20).
In “Professions for Women,” Woolf asks her audience of professional women, “with whom are you going to share [the room]” (242)? But writing in the late 1930s, hoping that her book would be appreciated by those who shared her admiration for Fry, Woolf sticks with a vision of the room of one’s own where art is produced in a space over which the British subject reigns with sovereign prerogative. In the context of Woolf’s admitted struggle with servant’s agency, it is striking that Woolf represents Nellie Boxall in such a prominent fashion in her diaries but manages to push paid domestic labor into the margins while describing Fry’s space of artistic production. Thus we find an intriguing split between Woolf the self-aware woman writer, and Woolf the biographer of Bloomsbury, writing Roger Fry, towards the end of her own life, almost as a eulogy for the Bloomsbury group and, thus, for her own youth.
Perhaps, when Woolf finds herself in the role of the biographer of one of the key figures of inter-war modernist art, she shapes her narratives according to the modes of High Modernism, crafting a narrative which fits into a bourgeois masculinist vision of progressive thought. Woolf follows the paradigm outlined by Mary Wilson in The Labors of Modernism, wherein the very act of representing the servant in an unconventional manner adequately signifies the refreshingly new sensibility of the modernist artist without asking the servant to participate in the project of European modernism (14). Wilson does not consider Roger Fry, but the example of the artist even allowing his servant to look at or drop a passing comment about Cezanne, becomes a signifier of Fry’s worthiness as Fry’s artistic space can thus be carefully guarded as his sovereign space, even if Mrs Filmer is hovering somewhere nearby.
However, given that, as this paper has established, Woolf’s relationship with Fry is also linked with her feminist quest for dismantling the patriarchal family, Woolf’s impetus to create a servant-free domestic interior also has implications for her feminism. As Ann Mattis points out, the feminist modernist subject, even in the very act of negotiating an overthrow of bourgeois domesticity, can be powerfully impelled to accomplish this by banishing the paid domestic servant, who lacks agency to fit into a more “modern” domesticity, from the text.
This phenomenon is significant when we return to another aspect of Woolf’s self-fashioning in her diary. Alison Light meditates on an entry from 8 March 1940, the penultimate year of her life, as it signifies a feminine middle-class modernity in terms that echo Woolf’s writing about Fry:
Approximately two years after finishing Roger Fry, Woolf figures as a forerunner of what Light argues might be “a utopian vision in which cooking and writing could enhance each other as human activities” (143). Light’s critical interpretation allows us for once, to see Woolf inhabiting the space of the kitchen, cooking out of necessity, Nonetheless, Woolf’s modern domestic arrangements demonstrate the imperial bourgeois subject’s need to control the space they call their own and to be free to determine when, where, and how to acknowledge the presence, labor, and intellect of Mrs Filmer and the “very fine negress,” in their house, or in their art.“When Virginia Woolf writes in her diary that ‘one gains a certain hold on sausage and haddock by writing them down,’ […w]e can also read a social history and a history of class into that sentence. Woolf cooking dinner in the half-darkness of Rodmell, without a resident servant, is a prototype of a new kind of middle-class woman who is not above knocking herself up an omelette or even—in years to come—cooking a Sunday lunch.” (Forever England 143)
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