Journal of a Plague Year: Jane Harrison, Virginia Woolf, and community

My last blog on the intense feeling of oneness a child can experience with a painting--or any aspect of the world--is a good segue into Jane Harrison, a classical scholar who was a friend and influence on Virginia Woolf. She is one of five women writers featured in Francesca Wade's superb new book Square Hauntings.

 Margaret Jolliff 's1935 painting of Mecklenburgh Square, an image of the locale before it was bombed in the war. Even today, as an adult, I can imagine myself into this scene.  

The women Wade features--H.D., Dorothy Sayers, Jane Harrison, Eileen Power, and Virginia Woolf--all lived for some portion of the interwar period in Mecklenburgh Square on the edge of Bloomsbury. Wade calls the square "a hidden architectural gem in the heart of London" and describes it as the home of "students, struggling artists, and revolutionaries." I loved reading this book as it gave me a fuller sense of the like-minded community surrounding Woolf. Wade shows that Woolf's thoughts did not spring out of a vacuum but out of a milieu. Often, she can seem to shine as a lone genius, the one blazing star speaking for women in her period, rather than one of a multitude of far-seeing people working to solve what they perceived rightly as the interrelated problems of patriarchy, war, hierarchy, and inhumanity. Much of what Woolf says is influenced and amplified by the work of these other women--and Woolf's literature echoed and reinforced their scholarship.

In this post, I would like to concentrate on Jane Harrison, a classicist born in 1850, and a dynamic, intellectually engaged woman until her death in 1928. She was a friend of both Woolfs. They published her short autobiography Reminiscences of a Student's Life as a Hogarth Press title in 1925. Present day classical scholar Mary Beard  has published a biography of Harrison called The Invention of Jane Harrison.

Portrait of Harrison by Augustus John. She liked John, apparently unaware that his wife sacrificed her art career for his. 

Harrison, who lost her mother shortly after birth, was exactly the type of person Woolf had in mind when she wrote A Room of One's Own. As Wade points out, Harrison was a role model for her, though Woolf was not afforded the same coherent educational opportunities.

Mary Beard's biography. The photo is of a younger Harrison

Harrison had the  good fortune first, to be sent to Cheltenham Ladies School, then the premier boarding school for wealthy women in England of the "ladies" class (tradesmen's daughters, no matter how wealthy, could not attend). Her greatest good fortune, however, was to inherit 300 pounds a year from her mother when she turned 21, a sizable income at the time. This gave her  financial independence and liberated her from her father who did not believe in higher education for women. In 1874 she used her money to enroll in Newnham College at Cambridge, a woman's school begun just three years before.   Thus, with the money inherited from another woman, Harrison was able to forge her own destiny. Harrison used her economic freedom to become a classical scholar, a traditionally male field.

The young Woolf

Woolf first met Harrison in 1904 while convalescing at her aunt, Caroline Stephen's, home in Cambridge. Caroline Stephen, who like Harrison never married, was Woolf's savior, leaving her enough income to achieve financial independence when combined with other inheritances. Even after the war, when massive inflation had badly eroded interest income, Woolf, with Leonard, was able to pursue her vocation through careful budgeting, writing book reviews, and eking out what was at first a marginal living from Hogarth Press: Harrison referred to them as "poor as rats" but did not disparage that.  (Caroline used her inherited money to research women's communities, such as convents, to write, and to build a block of working class housing in downtown London.)

Harrison was a person of rare courage She left Newnham late in life because she was tired of the kowtowing and timidity of the woman's college. She stated:  

much of our ingenuity & energy goes into cringing  

In later life, having left Cambridge, she became a Russian scholar.

According to Wade, Hamilton, before leaving Newnham, shook "the foundations of classical scholarship” (154) by studying new archeological  discoveries (some from artifacts which she saw come out of the ground) and asserting that “powerful goddesses” once “reigned alone over cult shrines.” These goddesses were gradually “effaced” and replaced by Zeus.  At one time, women’s activities were at “the heart of [Greek] community life” and “‘matriarchal, husbandless goddesses’ were not mocked or feared but reverently worshipped.” (155) Wade states that Harrison's work gave Woolf a “new, subversive model of history which informed all her subsequent novels and essays." (158)

In her Themis, radical at the time in its assault on patriarchy, Harrison argues that Greek religion originated in a matrilineal (though not matriarchal) world. The cosmos was presided over by the goddess-like figure Themis  who stood “above the gods, supreme, eternally dominant … She is  … the collective conscience projected” (xvii). Themis was also “the very spirit of assembly incarnate” (485). She represents an early, pre-patriarchal worldview in which “man [sic] and nature form[ed] one, indivisible whole” (xviii).  

In this universe, plants and animals are equal to humans, and “if one member of that body suffer, or prosper, all the other members” do too. ( 533-34) Harrison asserts that ancient Greek religion enacted rituals to remind humans that they are merely a “specialized fragment” of a far larger whole of nature. (xix). These rituals, in which people, for example, would dress as animals, enacted getting into the skin of the non-human world in the same way a child might enter imaginatively into a painting.

Harrison considered the pantheon of patriarchal Zeus' family which replaced the earlier religion a sad diminution of the earlier Greek faith: in Zeus' world: “The family comes before us as the last forlorn hope of collectivism” (491). 

Harrison's words echo across time: in the twenty-first century it sometimes feels the only people we are allowed to fully care about beyond ourselves are immediate family members. This leads to a sad sense that community has diminished. Surely, too, if we are to save the planet we must come to understand once again that we are merely a “specialized fragment” of a far larger community. 

Harrison's thought  leads us to understand the importance of feeling a oneness or unity with the plant and animal world. It leads back as well to Woolf's Between the Acts. 

  

Woolf read Harrison's books, visited her in Mecklenburgh, and attended her funeral. In Between the Acts, her last work and one written under war's shadow, Woolf tried to transport the communality of ancient Greece that Harrison describes to England. With a Themis-like woman orchestrating the ritual, the entire community of an English village comes together for a pageant, including plants and animals. Miss La Trobe, the author, incorporates not only the village "idiot" but nature into her pageant to create an inclusive whole, the mooing of the cows and the start of rain incorporated into the rhythm of her performance. This accords, Wade notes, with what Harrison argued for in a book she gave Woolf: her Ancient Art and Ritual, which asserts that the beginnings of Greek drama lie in “ancient community rituals” (Wade 286)  and ends by pushing for a return to “a communal style of art and living,” (Wade 288) as a way to avoid war. 

Woolf illustrates in Between the Acts an entire community, as in ancient ritual, for a transitory moment becoming one:

'A-maying, a-maying," they bawled. "In and out and round about, a-maying, a-maying. . .’” It didn't matter what the words were; or who sang what. Round and round they whirled, intoxicated by the music.

A May Day dance at a great house. Traditional rituals, Harrison and Woolf thought, could build inclusive community and promote peace. 

History has to be reframed, Woolf believed, to create a world without wars, a history of life, not death. But not everyone in Between the Acts is happy about the omission of warfare from the pageant's survey of Britain's past: 

Colonel Mayhew  asks “Why leave out the British army?,” a sentiment echoed by his wife: “Also, why leave out the Army, as my husband was saying, if it's history?”

And that question will lead us to another friend and contemporary of Woolf's dedicated to peace through a reformulation of what matters historically: historian Eileen Power, who will be the subject of the next blog.

Virginia Woolf's "The Leaning Tower," To the Lighthouse and Viva the Income Tax

In a late essay, "The Leaning Tower," a talk given to the Workers' Educational Association in Brighton in May, 1940 less than a year before her death and in the midst of World War II, Woolf makes a stunning claim. She asserts it as she envisions a post-war world where the "hedges" of social classes have been abolished and "all classes will be merged in one class."

Key to this transformation is the income tax, utterly central and integral in her mind to the better society waiting to be born. The "towers" that protect elites, she states, "will disappear," as will "class" because of

the income tax. The income tax is already doing in its own way what the politicians are hoping to do in theirs. The income tax is saying to middle-class parents: You cannot afford to send your sons to public schools any longer; you must send them to the elementary schools

This is stunning because of the context in which we have lived in the United States for the last forty years, where taxes have long been posited as the great, existential evil, the Satan rising dangerously to consume us above all the other arch-demons in the pantheon in hell. 

Woolf's advocacy of taxes should not hit with force of a shock: it should be a sensible idea that has been dunned into us with equal or greater force than that of lowering taxes as a supposed social good. But it has not been.

As Woolf understood, taxes are our boon and our power, even if we have, ostensibly, less money in our pockets on an individual level. If we tax high, especially the rich--as we have done in the past, in this country and the UK--abundant money exists (assuming we don't throw it into wars or walls) for social good: better education, better libraries (a system Woolf strongly supports in this talk), better roads, better healthcare, jobs, and, as the quote above indicates, a wealthier class that might have to rely on the same infrastructure we do.

And yet Woolf's advocacy shocks in its openness. It is more than a subversive whisper or an apologetic murmur to be shouted down in incandescent indignation. Instead it is states plainly what is censored and verboten in our society: taxes are a social good.  Education, too, she asserts in this essay is a great good in and of itself, a social force that in our society has been eroded as much as the tax base--and yet is still vitally important. In today's New York Times, for example, an op-ed piece quotes a scholar named Linda J. Skitka:

Every study I’ve ever seen across the social sciences shows that education promotes less in-group favoritism and greater tolerance toward those unlike ourselves,” she continued. “In panel studies that track the same people over time, as people gain advanced levels of education, they become more tolerant and favorable toward liberal democratic norms.” (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/22/opinion/trump-voters.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage)

No wonder that Woolf pushed her listeners to educate themselves.

The audience for Woolf's essay was working people, perhaps those who came bemused to see the famous and much caricatured Bloomberry. Yet continuing her Society of Outsiders theme from Three Guineas, she speaks to them as "us," finding common ground:

the immense class to which almost all of us must belong, to pick up what we can in village schools; in factories; in workshops; behind counters; and at home.

She goes on:

We can help England very greatly to bridge the gulf between the two worlds if we borrow the books she lends us and if we read them critically. …are we not commoners, outsiders?

Clearly, Woolf 's audience is working people, not of her class, and yet she is appealing to them in terms of "we." It could seem stunning--or disingenuous or dishonest (though more easily done in a time of war)--for her, the snobbish emblem of the upper crust, to speak with working people as if they are a "we." Yet she is being honest--and honesty about one's life was a key value for her, as she says in this essay. Self-honesty, Woolf states in the essay, is the only possible way to an honest literature--and only an honest literature can help people. 

I am rereading To the Lighthouse, always a stunning book if we are to be endlessly stunned--and am struck anew about how openly the novel explores identity as fluid and ever-changing, as created by people who see us one way and then another: Mr. Bankes is in one instance, struck dumb with love for Mrs. Ramsey, and a few hours later he hates her, feeling:

rigid and barren, like a pair of boots that have been soaked and gone dry so that you can hardly force your feet into them. 

Then he loves her again. Much of Lighthouse is an exploration of this kind of knowing of the other, through variable emotion, through touch, through constructing fictions, through an always veiled intimacy--and an exposé about how often we construct false narratives about people we know. In the long section of Lily's stream-of-consciousness near the end of the novel, she muses on Paul and Minta, who Mrs. Ramsey pulled together years ago:

He was withered, drawn; she flamboyant, careless. For things had worked loose after the first year or so; the marriage had turned out rather badly.

Yet Lily immediately goes on to think:

this making up of scenes about them, is what we call "knowing" people, "thinking" of them, "being fond" of them! Not a word of it was true;
she had made it up; but it was what she knew them by all the same.

This sense that what we grasp of people is both a fragment we think we know and yet incomplete and provisional, ("made ...up") is core to Woolf's thought and project. And yet we pigeonhole her all the time: she is, we say definitively, as if we know, a classist snob. When we do so, we can write her off, hate her, place ourselves in a superior position to her. Yet to pigeonhole her this way ironically violates exactly her life project of trying to understand people, leaving intact their layers of complexity so as not to reduce them to merely this or that, good or bad, lovable or detestable.

Woolf was both an insider snob and  an outsider. When she lumps herself with the working people listening to her talk, she is careful to tell the truth. She had spent her life as part of that "immense class" that picked up what education they could, where they could, in her case, mostly, at "home." In the world of education, at a time when women were earning advanced degrees and teaching at prestigious universities, she was largely self taught, with only some university day classes--perhaps more than we earlier knew--behind her, but never a degree that could open doors.  So insider/outsider, elite and not--this makes sense in context, but that is for the next blog.