‘We Talked about Solitude’: Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf, and Affective Bonding

Abstract

Before they met in 1917, Virginia Woolf envisioned a peculiar setting for her first encounter with Katherine Mansfield, the promising young writer who had ‘dogged [her] steps for three years’. Intriguingly, Woolf imagined she might glimpse Mansfield, not in the drawing-room of a mutual friend or at a literary soirée, but ‘on a rock or in the sea’ – there, ‘I shall accost her’.1 Woolf pictures Mansfield in an attitude reminiscent of Frederic Leighton’s Solitude (1890), an allegorical painting of a ‘woman draped in white, sitting on a rock’ overlooking the sea, mentioned in Mansfield’s 1915 short story, ‘Autumns: II’.2 This allusion reveals acute attention to Mansfield’s early work, as well as a tendency to imagine the New Zealand outsider in a liminal position, tricked out in classical trappings but on a promontory of her own. It seems that, for Woolf, Mansfield’s allure was mixed up with her air of solitude. Indeed, solitude would draw these writers together as a magnet, a fertile ground for ‘accost’. Woolf’s image proved strangely prescient as if, already attuned to the sound of ‘waves breaking’, she had somehow anticipated Mansfield’s declaration in her diary, ‘All that I write – all that I am – is on the border of the sea’.3 If Woolf assumed she could identify Mansfield as a ‘sign’ of solitude (not merely the signature of her own work, but a citation of longstanding pictorial traditions), it is worth recognising that we, their readers, also approach these figures through the iconography of solitude developed by their contemporaries and cultural legatees. For instance, when Mansfield’s husband John Middleton Murry edited her journal for posthumous publication, he presented Mansfield as the female isolate par excellence, adding subheadings like ‘Femme Seule’, ‘Being Alone’, and ‘Living Alone’.4 Similarly, in 1930, Cecil Beaton described Woolf as a fragile ‘sea-anemone’ that ‘curls up at contact with the outer world’, a marine image that influenced her popular representation for decades (despite her indignation), perhaps because it anticipated her suicide by drowning in 1941.5 Such early depictions of the modernist isolate – embracing the deluge alone with tragic but heroic determination – seem like caricatures, especially in light of recent scholarship on modernists’ efforts to develop meaningful forms of intimacy and public engagement.6 Nevertheless, in addition to complicating these stock images, we might consider how their crude outlines invite questions about the legibility and evasiveness of that ubiquitous affect we call ‘solitude’. The assumptions that colour Woolf’s imagined Mansfield – simultaneously, a distinctive body that can be recognised by virtue of her solitary position, and a generic genius loci – should alert us to how solitude is implicated in ‘the tension between personal expression and general convention’. Solitude is at once a passionate feeling of (or claim to) singularity, an uncompromised only-ness, and a culturally encoded ‘repertoire of actions and statements […] postures and signs’ that can evoke the heat of genuine frisson or seem like tepid clichés.7 In singling out the one, solitude gestures towards the universal, connoting island and ‘continent’, one Mansfield standing out to sea and ‘mortal millions that live alone’ in ‘the shoreless watery wild’.8 Solitude seems like a landscape where we travel alone but it is characterised by discursive landmarks and pocked with others’ steps. Thus, this paper not only traces the connections between Mansfield and Woolf’s thoughts on solitude, but also tracks their course through a wider cultural and literary horizon. Solitude emerges as a fluid network of feeling, characterised by expressive norms and emotional protocols that are ‘repeatedly undone by the very wildness’ of its ebbs and flows.9 Solitude and literature have been deeply wedded in the Western cultural imaginary, as solitude is often considered an essential precondition for creativity, marking a writer’s commitment to their craft. We might, for instance, think of Henry James sententiously advising the aspiring writer to inscribe ‘one word’ ‘upon your banner … that word is Loneliness’.10 James’s self-advertising tone aside, Woolf often subscribes to this idea, remarking that ‘solitude will be good for a new book’ for ‘it is likely that the best [phrases] are made in solitude’.11 Moreover, her seminal essay, A Room of One’s Own, contends that, throughout history, too few women have had the privilege of uninterrupted solitude or an income of £500 with which to purchase an escape from the voice of that ‘eternal’ patriarchal ‘pedagogue’ ‘which cannot let women alone’.12 Although Mansfield did not explicitly frame the need for solitude in gendered terms (and, as a perpetual boarder, knew a room of one’s own could be rented for less), she also valued spatial privacy. ‘[T]o be alone’, she notes, was one of ‘2 essentials to my writing – endless time no fires to attend to, no-one to wait for … I’d better find a room in London quickly – and £5 with which to furnish it’.13 Woolf and Mansfield’s efforts to reclaim solitude as a space of independence, individuation, and personal growth have been a perennial touchstone for literary, sociological, and philosophical studies that highlight solitude’s positive functions as revitalising social critique and creative resource.14 I find the rapture at being alone hard to understand. Certainly when I am sitting out of sight under a tree I feel I would be content to never return … ‘oh Loneliness of my sad heart is Queen’. It isn’t in the least that. This entry vacillates between rapture and refusal as Katherine riffs on the French expression, ‘la solitude est la reine de mon cœur’, opting for the less exact translation, ‘loneliness’.16 In both authors’ writings about solitude, we find them slipping between cognates and casting about amongst clichés to express the turbulent valences of their own feelings. Indeed, some passages leave the reader with a profound sense of isolation without naming any feeling at all, relying instead on the simultaneously empty but pregnant cry – ‘oh, oh, oh’.17 This tendency to ‘move among’ and even relinquish ‘names’ in search of ‘some more appropriate predicate’ shows that expressions of feeling are, in Charles Altieri’s words, characterised by ‘a continual struggle between a sense of inchoateness and the forms of intelligibility provided by our social grammars’.18 We might venture to say that solitude reveals a unique dimension of this struggle. The difficulty of expressing solitude is not only to do with an inadequate or messy vernacular, but with the fact that a vernacular necessarily originates in a community and solitude seems like an intimation of distance or difference from others that craves its own idiolect. Isolates may find themselves in the same situation as theorists like Brian Massumi, who has sought to develop a language that directs attention to an experiential ‘excess or remainder’ that does not fit into ‘socially recognised lines of actions and reactions’ or confining emotional categories. Hence, Massumi famously distinguishes between ‘the socio-linguistic fixing of [a] quality of an experience’, a naming process whereby feelings become ‘owned and recognized’ as emotions, and ‘asignifying’ intensities he calls ‘affects’.19 Massumi’s distinction may be a little too tidy; as Sianne Ngai observes, ‘the difference between affect and emotion’ may well be ‘a modal difference of intensity or degree, rather than a formal difference of quality and kind’.20 However, it betokens a desire to distinguish between the unruliness of feeling and normative models of the emotions, which have emerged out of long historical struggles over diagnostic criteria that allow us to not only identify but invest ourselves in states of feeling that can be recognised and assessed by others. I wonder whether the speaking isolate is not uniquely situated to observe the gap between affect and emotion (in my opinion, more thought-provoking than secure) as well as how they bleed into each other. Isolates may feel that they are living in the ‘remainder’ that the concept of affect gestures towards, ‘the unexpected, the singular, or […] quirky’ aspects of experience rather than ‘the generally applicable’.21 Yet if they are to express and take ownership of solitude, they must engage with the emotional frameworks that qualify particular sorts of selves, solitary or otherwise. If they tend to squirm a little, no wonder, since discourses on solitude are often condensed into aphorisms and clichés that have lost much of their pith and energy in the course of public circulation. Faced with an overdetermined vernacular, the isolate is forced to navigate the ineffable only-ness of their feelings and the thorny places where these singular intensities brush up against the social. Thus, like affect, the isolate sits on the precarious boundary between the public and the private, the individual and the social (albeit with some vested interest in preserving it). If the isolate tends to test their feelings against social grammars and feel about for the parameters of the self, it is because solitude is deeply connected to ideas of authenticity. I do not mean to say that solitude is exempt from artifice, or to privilege it as more real and pure than other feelings, but it often feels like an exceptionally authentic part of the self, the self’s most sincere testament. Woolf broaches this issue in The Waves, where Bernard contrasts his shifting identity, dependent on ‘the illumination of other people’s eyes’, with ‘the authentics’ who ‘exist most completely in solitude’.22 Likewise, Mansfield relied on solitude ‘to puzzle out’ her ‘own particular self’ – ‘[w]hat I aim at is that state of mind when I feel my soul and my mind are one. … Only solitude will do it for me’.23 Solitude seems to bring the self to a peak of concentration so that we exist in emphatic totality, absorbed in ‘that sense of being which is so extreme in solitude’ and temporarily lost to all the distinctions whereby we gauge authenticity and parcel out the self into zones that are deemed more or less personal and inviolable (like the body, mind, or soul).24 Yet while solitude seems to consolidate the self, it is often experienced as self-displacement or surprise, seizing us unawares. Although my solitude seems specific to me, I do not seem to be its origin. Similarly, though some critics suggest that solitude ‘produces individuals’, an ‘I’ is not necessarily its result.25 In Woolf’s experience of ‘solitude’, identity seems to ebb away ‘into deep waters’ and ‘it is not oneself but something in the universe that one’s left with’.26 Thus, solitude places pressure on the authentic self it evokes, prompting us to ask whether solitude stakes out some indigenous territory we can legitimately define as personal or whether, like affect, it reveals our susceptibility to migratory intensities stemming from ‘impersonal, or […] “pre-personal” forces’?27 Just as solitude is linked to the authentic individual, modernism has been defined by an interest in individual experience. As Woolf writes in ‘Modern Fiction’, many modernists tried to discard ‘the conventions which are commonly observed’ and ‘record […] the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness’.28 They sought to distinguish unique feelings from emotional norms through experimental works that reflect the vibrant flow of one’s inner life. Thus, modernism seems rather partial to the idea that ‘art […] is the rediscovery of solitude, and the road back into the individual self’.29 However, Woolf and Mansfield were sceptical of any art that ‘remains centred in a self which, in spite of its tremor of susceptibility, never embraces or creates what is outside itself and beyond’.30 This famous caveat from ‘Modern Fiction’, which immediately qualifies Woolf’s call to record personal impressions, may have been inspired by one of Mansfield’s reviews. A year earlier, Mansfield had contended that writers must not be content to ‘register’ the individual’s ‘faint inward shock[s]’, those ‘experiences which are, as it were, peculiarly theirs’. Such an art would leave us enclosed within a ‘tiny circle’, like that envisioned in ‘Modern Fiction’.31 Both authors sought a style that would capture ‘the effect of things upon one’s mind’ and yet portray these effects as affects (in our contemporary parlance), resonances between the self and the outside world. Else, Woolf observes, the writer ‘“lives alone, / Housed in a dream, at distance from the / Kind”’.32 … no sound Which the heart does not make, or else so fit[s] To its own temper that in external things No longer seems internal difference … things that are without Live in our minds as in their native home.37 Glossing over whether this exquisite ‘fit’ between self and things is altogether seamless or a matter of nipping and tucking, these isolates suggest that nature is not simply a surrogate for society and its difficult compacts and compromises. The isolate’s experience in the natural world models a better, organic community that operates by the principle of complete integration, not only resolving any splits in the self but also the more fundamental split between self and world. The permeability of hands and peaches and souls and boughs admits no barrier of difference, raising the question of whether the isolate’s pleasures are finally autoerotic, a matter of voluptuous self-gratification rather than a real engagement with otherness. Although Marvell exclaims, ‘Fair trees! wheres’e’er your barks I wound, / No name shall but your own be found’, is he actually grafting the name and legend of the human on the non-human world?38 Mansfield and Woolf were heirs to this tradition, demonstrating a deep familiarity with both Marvell and Wordsworth throughout their careers. For Mansfield, ‘W.W’ was one of those ‘people with whom I want to live’ and, in many ways, she did ‘live with’ Wordsworth, incorporating his ode to solitude into her letters and diaries.39 Mansfield’s repeated use of Wordsworthian motifs might explain the Woolfs’ conspicuous mistakes when typesetting Mansfield’s Prelude at the Hogarth Press; they were frequently in error over the title, using the definite article ‘the’, as in Wordsworth’s The Prelude.40 Wordsworth was also a significant figure in Woolf’s intellectual development and her frequent allusions to his work show that she was ‘involved in “one continuous unexhausted reading” of the Romantics, particularly of Wordsworth, from childhood to the end of her life’.41 Similarly, as Marvell was restyled in the twentieth century as the poet laureate of rural solitude, echoes of his poetry can be heard throughout both authors’ work.42 They invoke his images of blissful union with nature as well as his desolate ‘deserts of vast eternity’ to contemplate the double-edged nature of solitude.43 Indeed, Mansfield claimed Marvell’s ‘deserts’ as her personal ‘secret’, translating them into an existential threat hovering over the most quotidian experiences.44 In Mansfield and Woolf’s conversations with the past (shaped, perhaps, through conversations with each other), we see that to ‘live with’ these eminent poets of solitude was also to revise, rewrite, and disagree with them. Woolf and Mansfield tease out the complications and tensions in earlier paeans to solitude for, like other twentieth-century writers, they often felt immune to solitude’s If they could to Wordsworth’s pleasures in a they could also with when he of and the as by The of solitude are often (not by the natural as it seems to the by Marvell and Thus, Mansfield and Woolf’s writing much to who see as of our in […] the and its as much as its Solitude a sense of the and as we shall this is a precondition for a more of than that by of The cultural landscape of solitude is characterised by questions about and the nature of feeling, and our to others and to the non-human world. questions are also at in work on and and and A between solitude and affect can how solitude of and may even Indeed, solitude a in Woolf and Mansfield’s we find them the same ground in and their in and letters they were to have The and between their writings on solitude suggest the they claim to have or conversations that have been lost in the of I have letters in which she of the of a upon my writing with I have letters for adding of … the is it is The question also If it were not that I her of to these […] I should be more As it is Woolf frequently Mansfield’s and the quality of her own Indeed, authenticity something of a in their Mansfield knew she had a for and tried to Woolf that she ‘to be … without any at even to Woolf her Nevertheless, Mansfield ‘a to [her] and whether the most between women were could be and but also about her she with In Mansfield a of Woolf’s and she considered the ‘a in the to the effects of to to to the most … I am to by it might also for the of Mansfield’s repeated was in that and her situation with wonder she can is in her writing a of expression as though she were at – her over her – her own her – and her within Mansfield ‘I to feel like Virginia but she had I had This into her of and and Woolf spite in A she up to The was by Mansfield’s to to her – no no It that she is of the solitary we about solitude, I her expressing my feelings, as I never heard them we into as as as though were – … once more as as I feel a between us – a sense of being – not only about literature did they say when they about We can only because this it has no in Mansfield’s Yet it some about how these women solitude. Woolf solitude as the for an experience where we into feeling both and we think about solitude as a of This solitude, not as an but as a or that its – and meaningful – but is not by both authors tend to write of solitude in this tone seems to from the intensity of the feeling rather than from a that solitude is For instance, in To the and his an feeling that in the back of both of their minds … […] was for both of them the about The that is a profound between the but does not out In an To the echoes a from an in where Mansfield writes of ‘that which to her to be her only the only Woolf was to have this – is this what Mansfield when she my feelings, as I never heard them the of To the back to Woolf’s of in as solitude of Woolf that solitude is a even itself to a The idea that solitude is the of an may have its as when a young Woolf Wordsworth – like many is well to be in good I find solitude strangely Yet as the speaking isolate a in this does she some of her and authenticity – in a her Although Mansfield that solitude was the to a self, she also how even the most inward feelings and In solitude is up with an of […] and In her opinion, solitary we are ‘to a than would be in to to to even to ourselves or others only to find are no longer we think about Woolf and Mansfield’s it is to wonder whether Mansfield about how solitude the lines between the and its longer she the need to our feelings on show for others and have them recognised as sincere – a that might be as a in the air […] for of the with a of over of the sea […] – and more – of a where my were like and … and this other self in the the of her some of Mansfield’s find a of but one self is while and the of a towards the end of her Mansfield was with the idea of what she her and of feeling when we are most ourselves and least If Mansfield this experience their it is likely that Woolf would have her more for she that we are of many than but with the desire ‘to be but one ‘a self, a real Mansfield and Woolf might have that of alert us to the and of selves, our to flow towards things and back into is – what and – how one the other to have the other – … it is how and we each of us are – at the and from their find their into like a short in in which Mansfield ‘the quality of […] between an and to Woolf, consider how it is to find some one […] who to be with is in the desire to ‘the most of this ‘to be the Mansfield a of each up into that invite the other to complete each is with that the and of a that no For a minds to each Mansfield’s that she could ‘the quality of Yet For no their into and they themselves as little away into This is a as if the were to human they were – over their but from the a of and a The the with the the seems to a – is intimacy and a short from Woolf’s this between and on the and of a between and the of this is simply on the and the lines of and in the landscape the feelings this and that, like the of a sea felt that […] the who sits in while his does all the and and the show his the In the of social a of authentic encounter with ‘the upon which the was and they each other so were in so that they had only to by this as as in feels ‘the of human … that of Both the same the of human the quality of and the of and intimacy and isolation seem to from outside the sense of so that they and in time to an that them and echoes between Mansfield’s and Woolf’s at a about solitude that the ebbs and of their an intimacy they but could not finally Mansfield and Woolf’s over solitude was only by Woolf was already a by Katherine to my on Nevertheless, their seems to have Woolf to her to a she considered and so and so that I had to to the for something to As observes, this may be to the of Woolf as of with her a little on one and as if were Mansfield’s of Woolf with your a little on one as though knew some we shall see In Mansfield Woolf’s about her on their – it is not but who is of the her as Woolf’s that she between and she qualifies her on Mansfield’s it to all this of her into a Yet has an personal even as it out into a on of solitude Woolf