Review | Virginia Woolf and Capitalism
Reviewed by John D. Attridge, Regent College London
Since the 1990s, Virginia Woolf’s insider/outsider status has subsisted on modernist scholars’ delicately balanced recognition of both her oppressions and her privileges. During the boom of 1970-80s feminist criticism, she was often celebrated as the leading figure championing women’s rights and artistic integrity during the interwar era, and her famous polemics A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas have frequently been cited as evidence of her robust commitment to feminism (including women’s financial independence), equal rights, and antifascism. Others have nevertheless pointed to Woolf’s snobbery, her disdain for working women, and her tendency to indulge in antisemitic and/or racist tropes, all of which undermine this saintly feminist image. More recent criticism astutely recognises that Woolf remains a celebrated and contentious figure in equal measure. Rarely do scholars now consider one of these popular angles in isolation from the other.
Virginia Woolf and Capitalism, edited by Clara Jones, proves no exception. Neatly bringing together a range of essays that examine Woolf’s relationship to different forms of capitalism and the power structures that reinforce them, this volume accounts for Woolf’s own prejudices and social advantages, as well as her lived experience of writing as a woman within western patriarchal constraints. Jones sets out her rationale for the book by confidently claiming in her introduction that “Woolf was deeply imbricated in the contradictions of the specific phase of capitalist development she lived and wrote through,” including through her affiliations with the upper-middle class Bloomsbury group (4), her status as a property owner, the income she earned as a writer, and her stake in the Hogarth Press. Consequently, “the collection reconsiders the central tenets of Woolf’s politics—her feminism, her anti-imperialism, and pacificism—in the context of her engagements with capitalism” through a variety of exacting critical lenses (6). These lenses include the more familiar Marxist and Bordieuan frameworks, but also more recent theoretical models such as cultural fandom (Silver), the problem-novel (Dikova), and post-work (Evelyn Tsz Yan Chan).
Following the 2008 global financial crisis, various modernist writers’ relationships with capital, capitalism, and social inequality have come under increasing scholarly scrutiny, and Virginia Woolf and Capitalism contributes to debates which have their origins in both Seth Moglen’s prescient Mourning Modernity: Literary Modernism and the Injuries of American Capitalism (2007) and Alison Light’s excellent Mrs Woolf and the Servants (2007). Moglen’s focus on artistic modernist projects as sites of social and political struggle (often between tentative hope for the future and existential despair) provides a particularly useful template for considering how Woolf and other British modernists also negotiated new understandings of capital in early twentieth-century society—which, in Jones’ volume, includes capital as related to colonial expansion (Snaith), the property market (Bowlby), domestic consumerism (Suppé) and cultural capital (Silver). Contributors to Virginia Woolf and Capitalism also engage with texts such as Elizabeth Outka’s Consuming Traditions: Modernity, Modernism, and the Commodified Authentic (2008), Alissa G. Karl’s Modernism and the Marketplace: Literary Culture and Consumer Capitalism in Rhys, Woolf, Stein, and Nella Larsen (2009), and Mark Steven’s recent edited collection Understanding Marx, Understanding Modernism (2021).
Virginia Woolf and Capitalism balances a variety of different perspectives from its contributors. Chapters by Natasha Periyan (“Biometric Feminism: A Room of One’s Own and the Politics of Intelligence") and Bryony Randall (“Woolf’s Working Women Writers"), for example, reposition Woolf’s perceptions of working women and the imprecise gradations in the English class system in more than favourable lights. In contrast, both Anna Snaith (“Empire, Slavery and Capitalism") and Charlotte Taylor Suppé (“Virginia Woolf on Consumption, Co-operation and Motherhood") cast a more critical, though not unforgiving, eye on the comparisons Woolf draws between gender inequality and racial and class-based oppressions. Snaith is deeply interested in unravelling Woolf’s focus “on the exploitative economics of imperial extraction” alongside seemingly conflicting “feminist arguments [that] are underpinned by racial violence” (48, 54). Snaith’s concluding point—that “moments of textual difficulty, even revulsion, can be generative, as Woolf’s texts continue to be remixed, reread and challenged”—serves as an equally pertinent mission statement for the volume itself (65).
Only two chapters are dedicated entirely to a novel by Woolf, which—along with Jones’ coda ("Critical/Creative Approaches")—help the volume to stand out from more conventional critical works. Charles Andrews’ chapter, “Capitalism and the Liturgies of Peace and War in Jacob’s Room," dissects the ways in which Woolf’s 1922 novel navigates a “complex network of associated ideologies” including Christianity, English nationalism, and the values of rural life (120). For Andrews, these ideologies’ “transferal of [their] sacredness and enchanted belief to the marketplace” foreshadow Woolf’s later preoccupations with war and violence, as she attempts to depict how the “cultural force” of such ideologies “shapes English nationalism and contributes to its politics of death”—a politics she attributes directly to unfettered modes of patriarchal capitalism (123). Bryony Randall’s reclamation of the working woman writer Miss Allan in The Voyage Out is similarly illuminating, enabling us to recontextualize this otherwise minor character as “a subset of the New Woman characterised by eccentricity, asexuality and masculinity”—a description that recalls the titular hero/ine of Orlando, and which undermines frequent claims that The Voyage Out represents Woolf at her most reticent and conservative (195).
Other chapters, including those by Rachel Bowlby (“Between the Houses: Woolf and the Property Market”) and Brenda R. Silver (“Virginia Woolf: A Sound Investment”), prove equally enlightening by looking beyond the novels to aspects of Woolf’s biography and critical reception, respectively. Bowlby, for instance, skilfully examines Woolf’s (and her husband’s) relationship to capital investment and explains how their engagement with the property market across the south of England provides a surprising “immorality tale of speculative risk and rescue, way out of the expected Woolfian character on either side” (154). Silver explores “the complex intersections [of] Virginia Woolf’s star status” in late-twentieth and early twenty-first-century publishing, primarily by reviewing Michael Cunningham’s The Hours (1998) and the subsequent 2002 film adaptation in relation to questions of gender, identity and sexuality (246). In particular, Silver expertly highlights how the “economic and cultural capital” available to admirers and re-workers of Woolf today sits somewhat uncomfortably alongside the complexities that the “gay male appropriation” of Woolf entails (247, 255).
It is in the coda subtitled “Creative/Critical Approaches,” however, that Jones’ volume offers something truly innovative for scholars and educators familiar with popular approaches to Woolf and her works. Both Helen Tyson's and Kabe Wilson’s concluding chapters, which make up this final section, not only provide novel research methods for rethinking “the intimate and insidious connections between capitalist greed, patriarchal power, and imperialist militant masculinity” that Woolf herself insisted upon, but they also demonstrate how such methods might simultaneously function as pioneering pedagogies for teaching Woolf and capitalism (272). Tyson’s student scrapbooks modelled on Woolf’s own research scrapbooks for Three Guineas permit students “to inhabit Woolf’. . . critical and creative methods” to critique fundamental structural inequalities in early-twentieth and twenty-first-century societies (281). Similarly, Wilson’s “found poem” project, in which Wilson cuts out words and phrases related to “commercially paid work” from Mrs Dalloway makes for a convincing “demographic map of how British interwar capitalist society was depicted” in the novel, and the technique might be applied to a range of other modernist—or even non-modernist—texts (295).
As part of Edinburgh University Press’s new “Virginia Woolf—Variations” series, edited by Derek Ryan, Virginia Woolf and Capitalism continues the work of looking beyond Woolf’s celebrated contributions to feminism and aestheticism, leaning instead towards critiquing her relationship with other, equally crucial, aspects of early twentieth-century and interwar life. Woolf continues to occupy an ambivalent space in discussions of class and capitalism. Contributors such as Randall, for instance, contend that Woolf “delighted in the economic capital that her own work as a writer brought her” (186), while others such as Stanislava Dikova emphasize how novels such as Night and Day show Woolf’s “marked refusal to inhabit the voices and bodies of those who belong to underprivileged classes” (215). Such conclusions demonstrate Woolf’s willingness to embrace capital, as well as her keen awareness of the nuances embedded in her own advantageous social and economic position. While Evelyn Tsz Yan Chan also sees throughout Woolf’s oeuvre attempts at “new ways of conceptualising work” (239), Tyson perhaps sums up the findings of the collection best when she observes that there is “something in [Woolf’s] method that opens up a space in which other ‘outsiders’ might do that critical and imaginative work” of rethinking the relationships between self, society and capitalism (288). Virginia Woolf and Capitalism consequently proves an important, timely, and original contribution not only to the fields of new modernist and working-class studies, but also to our understandings of Woolf’s place within (and perceptions of) various capitalist modes of production—both during her lifetime and in her afterlives.