Blindness and Insight: Considering Ethos in Virginia Woolf's Three Guineas

Abstract

This essay considers how Virginia Woolf's personal and social anti-Semitism disrupts creation of a stable ethos in her political tract, Three Guineas. The article uses De Man's concept of blindness and insight to interrogate Woolf's own ideological blindness and forwards liminality as a frame within which to understand ethos in this work.

Notes

¹I thank Marian Eide and Rhetoric Review referee Mark Gellis for their helpful suggestions.

²Otto Christian Von Bismarck was the grandson of the German Chancellor and secretary to the German Legation in London during the prewar years. Leonard was deeply engaged in a variety of political activities, and was an active member of the Labour Party. As such, he was anxious to understand the ideological and political bases for “the new and disturbing era that was coming in” to know how to respond to it most effectively in his own country and abroad (Glendinning 273).

³Two notable exceptions to this silence exist: Leonard jokingly offered T. S. Eliot an account of Nazi Germany through the eyes of a marmoset (Glendinning 283). Julia Briggs cites this experience as an impetus to Virginia's decision to write Three Guineas (318).

⁴By September 1935 the Nuremberg laws that effectively segregated Jews from full citizenship and German social life were all but complete. By November 1935 laws forbidding marriage between Jews and Aryans were adopted (Friedlander 48–49).

⁵I reference De Man here because I believe that a useful analogy can be made if we understand Three Guineas as criticism—not of literature per se—but of the climate of war-mongering and the texts that this time period produced: sexism, nationalism, fascism, and so on. Woolf's composing process with regard to Three Guineas was relentlessly textual: She subscribed to three dailies and three weeklies and amassed an incredible array of clippings that she used in drafting Three Guineas.

⁶See Shoshana Felman's “Paul De Man's Silence” and Jacques Derrida's “Like the Sound of the Deep Within a Shell: Paul de Man's War” in Critical Inquiry vols. 14 and 15, respectively.

⁷Aristotle divided persuasion into three categories—ethos, pathos, logos. Ethos is the author's credibility. Persuasiveness is predicated upon a strong ethos.

⁸“Arthur” is the name that Woolf gives to men who come from what she calls the “educated class.” As she points out bitterly, “Arthur” was provided with a rigorous education, which was paid for (in part) by denying Arthur's sister(s) the same privilege: “[T]he mysterious letters A.E.F [Arthur's Education Fund] figured in the household ledgers… . It is a voracious receptacle. Where there were many sons to educate it required a great effort on the part of the family to keep it full. For your education was not merely book-learning; games educated your body; friends taught you more than books or games. Talk with them broadened your outlook and enriched your mind. In the holidays you travelled; acquired a taste for art; a knowledge of foreign politics; and then, before you could earn your own living, you father made you an allowance upon which it was possible for you to live while you learnt the profession which now entitles you to add the letters K. C. [Queen's Counsel] to your name. All this came out of Arthur's Education Fund” (TG 4–5).

⁹I include anti-Semitism as a species of both racial/class superiority and nationalism here. In this designation I am indebted to Jean Paul Sartre and Hannah Arendt's work on anti-Semitism. See Sartre's AntiSemite and Jew and Arendt's Antisemitism: Part One of the Origins of Totalitarianism (chapter three).

¹⁰E. M. Forster defines “Jew-consciousness” in his 1939 article of the same name as an invidious kind of antipathy toward Jews: “Jew-consciousness is in the air. Today, the average man suspects the people he dislikes of being Jews, and is surprised when the people he likes are Jews… . People who would not ill-treat Jews themselves, enjoy tittering over their misfortunes; they giggle when pogroms are instituted by someone else and synagogues defiled vicariously: ‘Serves them right really, Jews!’” (25).

¹¹See Lara Trubowitz's “Concealing Leonard's Nose: Virginia Woolf, Modernism Anti-Semitism, and ‘The Duchess and the Jeweller.’” Natania Rosenfeld's Outsiders Together: Virginia and Leonard Woolf. Maren Tova Linett's Modernism, Feminism and Jewishness. Leena Kore Schroder's “Tales of Abjection and Miscegnation: Virginia Woolf and Leonard Woolf's ‘Jewish’ Stories.”

¹²Woolf's anti-Semitism is ignored in many biographies. Quentin Bell's biography Virginia Woolf: A Biography remains largely silent on the subject as does Hermione Lee's Virginia Woolf, and Naomi Black's Virginia Woolf as Feminist. Julia Briggs is a notable exception. In her work, Briggs notes “Woolf's anti-Semitism is characteristic of her class and her moment—casual, unsystematic, and apparently thoughtless. It was as invisible to her as sexism was to the rest of Bloomsbury” (320). While this is a rare acknowledgement of Woolf's anti-Semitism, it also paradoxically excuses her from responsibility for it. After all, who can be blamed for feeling something that was inevitable to feel? Such Woolf-coddling arises from the perception that to critique Woolf is to undermine her larger feminist project. Ironically, this kid-glove treatment undermines the revolution in thinking patterns that Woolf passionately sought to establish, especially in Three Guineas.

¹³Maren Linett effectively responds to those who argue that Woolf's marriage to Leonard “insulates” her from the accusation of anti-Semitism, writing, “Just as having Jewish ‘best friends’ does not absolve one from charges of anti-Semitism, Woolf's antipathies need not have been overcome in 1912 when she married Leonard” (51). I also believe that Leonard's profound ambivalence to his own Jewishness enabled Virginia to rest comfortably in her anti-Semitism. For a fuller discussion of Leonard's peculiar relationship to his Jewishness, see Victoria Glendinning's biography, especially chapters two and three.

¹⁴I am retaining the word dwarf because of Woolf's use of it in her story. The correct usage today is “little person.”

¹⁵Woolf's use of the word pullulate is particularly disturbing since it conjures an image of vermin feeding and reproducing, a very popular view of Jews propagated by the Nazis.

¹⁶The so-called deathless quality of Jews that Woolf remarks here is perhaps related to the myth of the Wandering Jew, popular in European literature from the middle-ages to the twentieth century. “The Wandering Jew” is a figure from Christian folklore. According to the legend, a Jewish shoemaker taunts Jesus during the latter's passion. Jesus tells him “to go on forever till I return.” The shoemaker's punishment is to wander the earth forever until the second coming. (References to the wandering Jew appear in Chaucer, Goethe, Anderson, and Joyce, among others). For a discussion of Woolf's representation of Jews, see Maren Linett's Modernism, Feminism and Jewishness.

¹⁷In a similar vein, Woolf complains in a 1933 letter to her nephew Quentin Bell that she “cant [sic] be bothered to rush out and buy gloves, hat, and shoes, all for a Jew” (5: 258). This Jew is again Victor Rothschild. Virginia was invited to a cocktail party to celebrate Barbara Hutchinson's engagement to Rothschild. One might read “gloves, hat and shoes” as the quintessentially English regalia that one wears to special occasions, but which Woolf balks at obtaining for one who isn't really English—“all for a Jew.”

¹⁸Trubowitz further argues that Woolf uses Rothschild as a prism within which to imagine the character of the jeweler in the “Duchess and the Jeweller.” Through Rothschild she “create[s] a narrative about Jewish-Gentile relations,” in which the Jew is associated with food, “depict[ing] Jewishness as vulgar and distinctly ‘un-English,’ relegated to the ghetto” (283).

¹⁹In a similar vein, Charles Booth designates an area as Jewish if the gardens seem untended in Life and Labour in England (1903).

²⁰Ironically, in Three Guineas Woolf expresses a similar destructive sentiment, advocating setting fire to the universities with “Rags. Petrol. Matches” (36). In fact, she will give aguinea only on the condition that it is used for this purpose. Woolf predicates this use of her guinea on her liminality: She is English, but she is a woman. Her exclusion from universities is both justifiable and unjustifiable. She therefore encapsulates both the problem and its solution.

²¹Just as the “Arthurs” of “Arthur's Education Fund” were the beneficiaries of a system that excluded women, Virginia, as a native Englishwoman, was a beneficiary of a system that marginalized those considered foreigners. This label was applied to Jews and other newcomers to England in the early twentieth century. As a beneficiary of this system of ethnocentric marginalization, it is fair to consider Virginia as a quasi-Arthur.