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The Conversation Behind the Conversation: Speaking the Unspeakable in Virginia Woolf

Julia Briggs

Résumé

This article explores the unspeakable or the unspoken behind conversations in Woolf’s fiction, focusing particularly on homoerotic love. To this end, it examines in detail a scene from Between the Acts and one from Orlando, concluding that, particularly in Orlando, Woolf actively enjoyed circumventing the censorship she deplored elsewhere.

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  • 1 The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vols. 2 (1920–24), 3 (1925–30), 4 (1931–35), ed. Anne Olivier Bell (Lo (...)

‘Shall I ever ‘write’ again? And what is writing? The perpetual converse I keep up’.
Virginia W
oolf1

  • 2 Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out (1915; London: Penguin, 1992) 204.

1Any discussion of what lies behind the conversation in Woolf’s novels must take into account the several modes of literary anteriority: there is the anteriority of earlier versions. If we picture writing as a chronological sequence, these will normally take the form of the various manuscripts or typescripts that precede the final text; there is also the quite different but equally significant anteriority of social or cultural context which exerts its own pressure on what and how a writer writes. And then, behind speech, in yet another sense are ‘the things people don’t say’. In Woolf’s first novel, The Voyage Out, Terence Hewet voiced an ambition to write ‘a novel about Silence [. . .] the things people don’t say. But the difficulty is immense’.2

2His or his author’s concern with the as-yet-unsaid, or even the not-to-be-said remained a feature of Woolf’s fiction from first to last–one might even see it as constituting her ‘project’, a project in which anteriority is intimately linked to interiority (construed as a prior, and to-be-privileged mode of being). Such interiority (or ‘stream of consciousness’, to use a term that Woolf did not much care for) constitutes Woolf’s first liberated writing for the Hogarth Press in 1917, her short story ‘The Mark on the Wall’. Here interiority is finally interrupted and disrupted by a voice that starts a conversation, and proceeds to collapse all that has gone before—an extended meditation around an absent centre—by reductively identifying the ‘mark’ (itself a figure for writing) as no more—or less—than a snail. Interiority of an essential yet perhaps indefinable kind stamps The Waves as the summit of Woolf’s achievement in this line,—perhaps the ultimate outcome of that ‘project’.

  • 3 Virginia Woolf, ‘Jane Austen’, Collected Essays, vol. 1, ed. Leonard Woolf (London: Chatto & Windus (...)
  • 4 Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore and London: The Johns (...)

3But other forms of the unsaid or the unspeakable, words and thoughts that cannot be spoken in polite society, also exert their pressure on what does get said: many of these are connected with the needs or urges of the body, and reflect public regulation or repression of bodily desires or actions. And there is a further, indeed an embracing or comprehensive aspect of the unsaid which constitutes the condition on which acts of communication seem to depend: that essential space or gap within which the reader’s imagination operates, what Woolf referred to when she wrote that Jane Austen ‘stimulates us to supply what is not there’3—precisely the quotation which Wolfgang Iser used to introduce his discussion of the ‘blank’ or ‘gap’ in the text that makes communication possible at all, according to his account of The Act of Reading,4 and that may serve to link these several other unspokens—or at the very least, to comprehend them.

  • 5 Virginia Woolf, The Pargiters: The Novel-Essay Portion of ‘The Years’, ed. Mitchell A. Leaska (Lond (...)
  • 6 Virginia Woolf, Orlando: A Biography (1928; London: Penguin, 1993).

4Later in her essay on Jane Austen, Woolf suggests that, had she lived longer, ‘She would have devised a method [. . .] for conveying not only what people say, but what they leave unsaid’ (‘Jane Austen’153). This essay focuses upon two particular examples of the unspoken within or behind conversations, with the intention of illustrating the continuous conflict or creative tension between Woolf’s impulse to say ‘the things people don’t say’ and her recognition of the limits on what could be said,—limits which at times she chafed against, and saw as one of the undesirable effects of patriarchy, not to be cured ‘until men have become so civilised that they are not shocked when a woman speaks the truth about her body’.5 But while Woolf experienced convention and censorship as constraining, she also found a certain exhilaration in walking the tightrope of the allowable, or (to change the metaphor), patrolling the border between the acceptable and the forbidden,—between on the one hand the recognised and acknowledged, and on the other the unspoken and unspeakable. To find a language at once precise and suggestive in which to meet, respond to and even expose cultural taboos is an extraordinary challenge, one that Woolf often rose to, and nowhere with greater energy or more positive delight than in Orlando.6

  • 7 Virginia Woolf, ‘Modern Fiction’, Collected Essays, vol. 2, ed. Leonard Woolf (London: Chatto & Win (...)
  • 8 The Pargiters, xxxix; Orlando, 187; A Room of One’s Own (1929; London: Penguin, 1993) 90.

5Woolf’s profound ambivalence over the whole question of the speakable, the ‘decent’, is of course much in evidence in her writings: she resented the limits placed on free expression, associating them with the physical constraints imposed on her as a young woman—constraints that prevented her from going out alone, walking through London’s West End unaccompanied, riding in a hansom cab without both the flaps down, etc. (The Pargiters 37) Yet at the same time she criticised Joyce’s ‘indecency’,7 and sneered at D. H. Lawrence’s single-minded harping on sexuality, as she saw it, though usually without identifying him by name.8 Part of her power lies in a Janus-like ability to look backwards disapprovingly at the hypocrisy of the Victorians (in the approved fashion of Bloomsbury—or Lytton Strachey), while at the same time understanding their values from deep within. Indeed, these two central and alternating views might be seen as the electro-magnet that drives the motor of To the Lighthouse. The great Victorians had themselves found how to turn contemporary limitations on what might ‘decently’ be said to their own uses (as Woolf herself would): it has often been observed that George Eliot does not need to take us into her heroines’ bedrooms for us to understand the nature of their marriages at an intimate level: Casaubon’s failure is apparent to us when we see Dorothea weeping in the Via Sistina; Grandcourt’s brutality when he kicks his little spaniel. And the Victorian tradition of using the signifying power of language to do what language does best—that is, to suggest, rather than to limitingly state, finds its ‘most rich inheritor’ (in Yeats’s phrase) in Henry James. Woolf was among the earliest critics to draw attention to this aspect of James’s style, in a review of an anthology of his ghost stories commissioned by Bruce Richmond for the Times Literary Supplement, late in 1921. Writing about the story, ‘The Friends of the Friends’, in which the hero’s secret encounters with a dead woman prevent him marrying, Woolf described the effect of the story as ‘tranquil, beautiful, like the closing of chords in harmony; and yet somehow [lewd]’ (‘Henry James’s Ghost Stories’ 289). Her editor, Richmond, was immediately on the telephone:

‘Mrs Woolf? I want to ask you one or two questions about your Henry James article . . . now you use the word ‘lewd’. Of course, I don’t wish you to change it, but surely that is rather a strong expression to apply to anything by Henry James. I haven’t read the story lately of course—but still my impression is . . .
But you know the usual meaning of the word? It is—ah—dirty—now poor dear old Henry James—At anyrate, think it over, & ring me up in 20 minutes’ (Diary II, 151).

6‘So’, Woolf’s diary entry continues ruefully, ‘I thought it over & came to the required conclusion in twelve minutes & a half—But,’ she wonders, in a characteristic afterthought, ‘what is one to do about it?’ (152). On that occasion, she submitted to the pressure to comply, yet her compliance itself annoyed her, fuelling a determination to speak out that is increasingly evident in the early 1920s (for example in her letter criticising Desmond Mac Carthy for his endorsement of Arnold Bennett’s and Orlo Williams’s contemptuous accounts of women’s achievements, usually reprinted under the title ‘The Intellectual Status of Women’).

7Woolf altered ‘lewd’ to ‘obscene’, in response to Richmond’s complaint (made, she suspected, not so much for the sake of ‘poor old Henry’ as to preserve the reputation of the TLS—Diary II, 152). But this line of investigation had not confined itself to a single word: the final paragraph of her review had addressed ‘The Turn of the Screw’, and in particular, James’s evocation of the moment when the governess first catches sight of Peter Quint, standing on the tower in the twilight,—the moment when ‘The rooks stopped cawing in the golden sky, and the friendly evening hour lost for the unspeakable minute all its voice’ (‘Henry James’s Ghost Stories’ 292). Woolf picks up James’s use of the adjective ‘unspeakable’ in order to expose the ‘unutterable obscenity [that] has come to the surface’. Her careful retrieval of that word ‘unspeakable’ brings together both the sexual horror evoked but never stated, and the notorious dependence of that particular story upon gaps and silences, on what cannot be spoken—or even written. James’s combination of great precision and silence, she recognises, is played off against what his society cannot speak about, is indeed most reluctant to contemplate—namely, sexual relations between children and adults. In writing thus, Woolf observes, James makes us ‘afraid of something, perhaps, in ourselves’ (292).

  • 9 Virginia Woolf, The Years (1937; London: Penguin, 1998) 246.

8‘The Turn of the Screw’ deliberately takes as its ground what, culturally speaking, cannot be said, exploring how far words can carry the reader across that forbidden territory. Woolf, too, from her first novel, had been concerned with what couldn’t be said—the life of outcast London, prostitution, the fearful vision of old women slaughtering chickens to feed the hotel guests, the ‘ruined’ women who die ‘with bugs crawling across their faces’ (The Voyage Out, 6; 72, 202; 238–9; 284). But it was actually the First World War that came to stand for the unspeakable, the unspoken, exerting its pressure on the texts of Jacob’s Room, Mrs Dalloway and, arguably, To the Lighthouse. As late as the ‘Present Day’ section of The Years, Peggy sneers at the statue of Edith Cavell, saying that it always reminds her of an advertisement for sanitary towels, while Eleanor recognises that the true source of her bitterness has been displaced: it is not sanitary towels but the First World War and her brother’s early death that constitute the real obscenity.9 Orlando could be seen as breaking this sequence since it ignores the War altogether, substituting for it a different discourse of the unspeakable,—that of homosexuality, ‘the love that dare not speak its name’, though arguably such love remains as much the unspoken of that novel, as the War had been in Woolf’s earlier novels.

9Into the novels of the 1930s, Woolf introduces the theme of male homosexuality (Neville in The Waves, Nicholas Pomjalowsky in The Years, William Dodge in Between the Acts). Her treatment of such figures typically involves pleas for tolerance, usually indirect, but sometimes direct (despite Sara’s announcement that Nicholas ‘ought to be in prison . . . Because he loves . . . the other sex’—by which, a little oddly, she means ‘the same sex’). William Dodge in Between the Acts becomes the focus of Giles Oliver’s silent anger, during the course of a lunch time conversation in which words ‘rose, became menacing and shook their fists at you’:

  • 10 Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts (1941; London: Penguin, 1992) 38.

[Dodge’s] expression [. . .] gave Giles another peg on which to hang his rage [. . .]. A toady; a lickspittle; not a downright plain man of his senses; but a teaser and twitcher; a fingerer of sensations; picking and choosing; dillying and dallying; not a man to have straightforward love for a woman—his head was close to Isa’s head—but simply a—At this word, which he could not speak in public, he pursed his lips; and the signet-ring on his little finger looked redder, for the flesh next it whitened as he gripped the arm of his chair.10

10Isa, his wife, just as silently responds:

Isabella guessed the word that Giles had not spoken. Well, was it wrong if he was that word? Why judge each other? Do we know each other? Not here, not now. But somewhere, this cloud, this crust, this doubt, this dust—she waited for a rhyme, it failed her; but somewhere surely one sun would shine and all, without a doubt, would be clear. (39)

11The couple never exchange a word in the whole book, but like many married couples, they are intensely engaged in a ceaseless, if hostile, dialogue which operates at some deeper level. The passage as a whole (intervening conversations have been omitted) makes a continuous and highly suggestive play with hands and gestures, from William catching the coffee cup that Isa has half purposely knocked over, through Mrs Manresa’s comic (and provocative?) demonstration that she does not know how to hold a pen, to William’s ‘very delicately’ setting the cup back on its saucer. The catching and replacing of the cup frame the whole passage, and the allusions to china may involve sexual suggestion (as, for example, in William Wycherley’s comedy, The Country Wife).

  • 11 Virginia Woolf, Pointz Hall: The Earlier and Later Typescripts of ‘Between the Acts’, ed. Mitchell (...)

12The word that Giles ‘could not speak in public’ (‘aloud’, in an earlier version, Pointz Hall),11 creates a highly explicit gap in the text whose pressure is nevertheless exposed by his pursed lips, and white knuckles, as he grips the arm of his chair. Isa recognises that Giles is looking for an object to justify his anger, and she identifies the word he hasn’t said, countering his silent accusation with an equally silent plea for tolerance. This is very deftly and concisely handled in the published text, but it is interesting to look back at how that version was reached. Three pages of manuscript of this section of Between the Acts (or more precisely, Pointz Hall) have survived—unusually, since the earlier versions exist almost entirely in the form of typescript. In this early formulation, written on 16 September 1938, as Woolf began drafting her novel, Isa guessed ‘the very word’ that Giles had not spoken, and wondered whether it was ‘true that William Dodge was that thing?’ (Pointz Hall 473). Almost immediately, Woolf changed ‘thing’ to ‘word’—perhaps that very afternoon, since the earlier of the two surviving typescripts where this first appears, may have been typed out by Woolf herself later the same day. With that change, it becomes a matter of what Dodge is ‘called’, rather than what he actually is. In the middle of any Woolf novel, let alone a novel as intensely word-conscious as Between the Acts, we can scarcely fail to respond to the power of language: but the status of Giles’s silent accusation is reduced to that of ‘a word’, and one that expresses contemporary prejudice rather than any objective truth. In comparison with the surviving manuscript, the published text sheers away from the argument much more rapidly, burying itself in that strange and private language mingling nonsense and poetry that Isa continually speaks to herself. This accords with a development also apparent in the writing of The Years, which reflects Bernard’s yearning (as stated in the final chapter of The Waves) for ‘some little language’, for stories that don’t ‘come down beautifully with all their feet on the ground’ (183)—for an acknowledgement that the chaos and flux of nature find their counterparts in the chaos and flux of human thought and conversation. Such a recognition constantly undermines, even dismantles the direct statements and developed arguments evident in the earlier drafts of The Years, and, to a lesser extent those of Pointz Hall/Between the Acts. Finally, in the manuscript and typescript, Isa asks ‘Why do we all hate each other?’, posing too early and too explicitly the question that ties the narrative of Giles and Isa (a narrative of significant silences) to that of the approach of war in Europe. Bernard’s acknowledgement that human experience, like the alien and contingent world of nature, is not story-shaped, and that the artist must confront the tenuous and precarious character not only of language but also of meaning itself, should encourage us to re-examine the ways in which we think about Woolf’s practice of revision; and in particular the way in which direct political statements are reworked, qualified, modified or even cut out altogether to the detriment—as it has sometimes seemed to her readers—of her forcefulness as a feminist reformer. Such changes, often regarded as a part of a process of self-censorship imposed on Woolf by contemporary attitudes, may have other and more complex causes. Woolf herself enjoyed that ‘indirection’ that ‘finds direction out’, as all her work attests; and her ambivalent, and sometimes contradictory feelings, often over issues of great importance to her (such as England and Englishness, for example) are a source of richness within her work. To illustrate this, let us return to Orlando, a case example of a novel whose central topic was unspeakable from the very beginning: it’s possible that this paradox itself gave rise to the novel’s proliferating fantasy,—what could not be said thus occasioning the invention of what could.

13Even before Woolf knew that the novel would be about Vita, she had designated it in a diary entry for March 1927 as ‘The Jessamy Brides’, redeploying the eighteenth-century slang term ‘Jessamy’ (or ‘Jemmy Jessamy’) for a gay man (‘jessamy’ being an old-fashioned name for jasmine). ‘Jessamy Brides’ was her invented term for their female equivalents, in other words, lesbians. The rest of this entry makes Woolf’s intention explicit: the projected book was to be about ‘two women, poor, solitary at the top of a house [. . .] [it was to be] on the ladies of Llangollen; [. . .] Sapphism is to be suggested [. . .] The Ladies are to have Constantinople in view [. . .] And it is to end with 3 dots . . . so’ (Diary III, 131). Orlando does indeed end thus, and the novel does offer a vision of Constantinople, but very little of the rest of this plan was—or even could have been—fulfilled. Thus Orlando became a novel full of feelings that cannot be mentioned, and events that cannot be described under existing conventions, such as love-making, pregnancy and birth, and even a sex-change—all of these occasion lavish displays of concealment. Indeed, Woolf goes so far as to invent a Jonsonian masque in which the negative figures of the antimasque—here, Purity, Chastity and Modesty—are dismissed by the trumpet of Truth (95–7). In the fourth chapter, Orlando encounters Nell in Leicester Square, and is introduced to her circle which forms a female and underworld counterpart to the clubs and coffee-houses that were such a feature of male social life in the eighteenth century, when supposedly ‘rational’ men identified women as their irrational ‘other’. In this passage, Woolf brought together two unspeakable discourses—that of women’s intimacy and homosexuality, and that of prostitution, which for Woolf always implied a critique of patriarchy; from these two discourses, she created a double subversion, though subtly and indirectly. Nell’s unidentified gentleman visitor refuses to believe that women can hold any interest for one another, or even that women have individual desires, as opposed to affectations. Tidied up a little, the passage runs thus in the manuscript draft:

  • 12 Virginia Woolf, Orlando: The Holograph Draft, ed. Stuart N. Clarke (London: S. N. Clarke, 1993) 176 (...)

So they would draw round the punch bowl in which Orlando made it her business to keep furnished; & many were the fine tales they told of the other sex, & how to practise on their weaknesses; For it cannot be denied that when women get together—but hist! They are always careful to see that the doors are shut, & that not a word of it gets into print. & the gentlemen have the field all to themselves; in the matter of deriding the other sex. All they desire is—but hist again!—is not that the voice of the manly—upon the stairs? Women have no desires he said, only affectations. Without desires, & only affectations to take their place, their conversation cannot be of the slightest interest to anyone.12

14In the published text, however, the last two sentences read ‘Women have no desires, says this gentleman, coming into Nell’s parlour; only affectations. Without desires (she has served him and he is gone) their conversation cannot be of the slightest interest to anyone’ (Orlando 152). It may be that in the earlier version, too, we were intended to understand that the gentleman heard on the stair was also Nell’s customer, but here the new parenthesis lies like an unexploded bomb in the text, a reminder of the (male) assumptions that make prostitution possible. By suggesting (without stating) the physical dimension of Nell’s self-effacing sexual ‘service’, the text now dramatises male indifference to female feeling in a peculiarly disturbing way. Not only can we not hear the tales that Nell and her friends tell among themselves (tales which Orlando found more amusing than the conversation of Pope and Dryden), because they are not considered interesting enough, but women’s desires (which may be very different from what men suppose) are also censored on the same grounds. Thus Woolf exploits male conventions and assumptions in order to avoid writing of female intimacy, whether as shared narrative or even relationship, while strongly suggesting both the existence and the strength of that intimacy. Women’s meetings, taking place behind closed doors may be even more sexually and politically subversive than those of the coffee houses, but such secrets must perforce remain secret.

15This added parenthesis is a good example of a process that is not often noticed, yet undoubtedly occurs in the course of Woolf’s revisions: while the transition from draft to published text sometimes toned down Woolf’s social critique or voiced it less directly, it could, on occasion, tune it up, announcing it more emphatically. In this passage, words are used both precisely and suggestively to convey an act that cannot decently be shown. The words chosen are at once clear yet indirect: in the context of a prostitute and a male visitor, we know exactly what ‘she has served him’ means, although in another context, it might become a wholly innocent remark.

16Orlando makes delighted and self-mocking play with the several forms of the unspoken defined at the beginning of this essay—the gap between writer and reader, the culturally unspeakable, and interiority itself. The novel simultaneously celebrates ‘High battlements of thought’ (124) while ironically castigating the thoughtlessness of Orlando in sitting down to write, and thus depriving her biographer of the action necessary for any report to be possible: ‘If only subjects . . . had more consideration for their biographers! What is more irritating’ [she continues] ‘than to see one’s subject, on whom one has lavished so much time and trouble, slipping out of one’s grasp . . . to see all this dumb show of emotion and excitement gone through before our very eyes when we know that what causes it—thought and imagination—are of no importance whatsoever?’ With these words Woolf’s text comically denies the very act that brought it into being.

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Notes

1 The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vols. 2 (1920–24), 3 (1925–30), 4 (1931–35), ed. Anne Olivier Bell (London: Hogarth, 1978, 1980, 1982) IV, 57.

2 Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out (1915; London: Penguin, 1992) 204.

3 Virginia Woolf, ‘Jane Austen’, Collected Essays, vol. 1, ed. Leonard Woolf (London: Chatto & Windus, 1966) 148.

4 Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978) 168.

5 Virginia Woolf, The Pargiters: The Novel-Essay Portion of ‘The Years’, ed. Mitchell A. Leaska (London: Hogarth, 1978) xl.

6 Virginia Woolf, Orlando: A Biography (1928; London: Penguin, 1993).

7 Virginia Woolf, ‘Modern Fiction’, Collected Essays, vol. 2, ed. Leonard Woolf (London: Chatto & Windus, 1966) 108; ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’, Collected Essays, vol. 1, 334.

8 The Pargiters, xxxix; Orlando, 187; A Room of One’s Own (1929; London: Penguin, 1993) 90.

9 Virginia Woolf, The Years (1937; London: Penguin, 1998) 246.

10 Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts (1941; London: Penguin, 1992) 38.

11 Virginia Woolf, Pointz Hall: The Earlier and Later Typescripts of ‘Between the Acts’, ed. Mitchell A. Leaska (New York: University Publications, 1983) 472.

12 Virginia Woolf, Orlando: The Holograph Draft, ed. Stuart N. Clarke (London: S. N. Clarke, 1993) 176–77.

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Julia Briggs, « The Conversation Behind the Conversation: Speaking the Unspeakable in Virginia Woolf »Études britanniques contemporaines [En ligne], Hors série | 2005, mis en ligne le 02 juillet 2024, consulté le 13 décembre 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/ebc/15014 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/12cwi

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Julia Briggs

Julia Briggs is Professor of English Literature at De Montfort University, Leicester, Emeritus Fellow of Hertford College, Oxford, and has recently been Visiting Professor at the Sorbonne, Paris III. She has written on the English ghost story, renaissance drama (particularly Shakespeare and Middleton), children’s books and their authors. She acted as general editor for the Penguin Classics reprint of Woolf’s work (in 13 volumes) and has just completed a major study of Woolf’s writing practice, Virginia Woolf. An Inner Life (London: Penguin 2005).

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