In her study of Virginia Woolf's oeuvre, Christine Froula argues that Woolf's novels and essays contribute to “an unfinished and unfinishable struggle against barbarism” in Europe as begun by Enlightenment thinkers and continuingly necessary in the face of early twentieth-century threats to civilization, such as “belligerent nationalisms, racialized imperialisms, the class system, the sex/gender system, genocidal persecution, and war” (1). Through this vision of an Enlightenment civilization project, Froula disputes the contention, popularized by Raymond Williams and others, that the Bloomsbury movement focused only on solipsistic aestheticism and failed to engage in the “real world.” Froula's study proves conclusively that this was not the case with Woolf, as nearly every one of her works—including novels, essays, short stories, drafts, diaries, and letters—is shown to contribute to this civilization project (the only works to receive little or no attention are Night and Day, Flush, and Roger Fry). Even at her most autobiographical in works like To the Lighthouse, Orlando, and The Waves, Woolf serves this agenda by negotiating the often difficult divide between private and public. Bloomsbury in particular provided Woolf with a venue for the freedom of expression, and free speech becomes a frequent trope analyzed by Froula in each of Woolf's works. Froula's study is significant not only because it collects the author's important, previously published essays on Woolf, but also because it presents such a unified, comprehensive examination of almost all of Woolf's work, demonstrating how Woolf's narrative and intellectual experiments are involved in a fight for civilization's “possibility” (9).
Individual chapters are framed by a variety of theorists—Habermas, Bakhtin, Benjamin, Renè Girard, and, to lesser degrees, Barthes and Derrida, among others—and most of the chapters here focus on Woolf's feminism, which serves the civilization project as an appeal for universal freedom and a battle against all tyranny. Feminism promotes civilization, Froula asserts, by increasing equality, providing more citizens with access to freedom and the other benefits of civilization. Woolf's vision involves a civilization where gender distinctions no longer matter in terms of opposition, antagonism, or subjugation. As Froula writes, “In Bloomsbury's vanguard spirit, Woolf affirms the principle that to fight one form of tyranny is to fight them all” (266).
This study follows a roughly chronological approach to Woolf's works, beginning with The Voyage Out and concluding with Between the Acts. Though The Voyage Out may be Woolf's most conventional novel, Froula argues that the novel features avant-garde literary techniques and radical politics that align it with Woolf's more overtly experimental and political later works. Froula reads Rachel Vinrace's voyage as “originat[ing] in dialogue with Conrad's inaugural modernist voyage toward European imperialism's hidden ‘truth’” (35). This theme of “voyage” provides another unifying concept for this study, continuing in To the Lighthouse and running through Between the Acts.
As Woolf's work becomes more experimental, it involves the reader more in the active, Barthian sense of the “writerly,” and this increased reader involvement across the novels is essential to Woolf's political project. In the chapter on Jacob's Room, Froula demonstrates that reading the novel becomes a practice of witnessing modern lives and events, and this act of witnessing continues into Mrs. Dalloway. In this sense of the audience as witness, she reads both novels as modernist prose elegies. Later, Froula shows how the foregrounding of the diegetic audience's voice in the pageant of Between the Acts informs and empowers the reading audience on its own responsibilities in relation to history and the fascist threat to civilization in the immediate present.
In many chapters, Froula traces the path of this civilization project through the genitive texts to the final published version of the novels to demonstrate both how the civilization project remained at the forefront of each work and how it evolved within the evolution of the work itself. While for the most part she clearly distinguishes between the draft version of a character and the final version—as she does with “ur-Lily” and Lily Briscoe of To the Lighthouse—in several instances she does not, as is the case with Rachel Vinrace in Melymbrosia and The Voyage Out, where she problematically seems to present a consistent character from draft to final version and moves fluidly between examples from each without making necessary distinctions.
Most chapters also involve autobiographical readings: Orlando and The Waves, for example, are read as “self-portraits” (176). Froula also looks at how Woolf wrote about her own experience with sexual abuse first in diaries and public letters. However, Woolf later found it difficult to transform that experience into more public writing, when her planned project to write on the history of “the sexual life of women” failed to achieve her ambitions as she revised The Pargiters into The Years.
This is an important work for Woolf studies, necessary for its unifying vision of Woolf's life and work. Perhaps the greatest value in this study is the way in which Froula unifies biographical, political, textual, and aesthetic approaches to Woolf's writing, all under the aegis of Woolf's personal and public fight for civilization's “possibility,” a fight that continues and will continue to remain relevant.
