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ABSTRACT
The marginalized figure of the prostituted woman haunts Virginia Woolf's writings throughout her career. Lola Mendoza in The Voyage Out, Florinda and Laurette in Jacob's Room, Nell and her friends in Orlando, and the musings on prostitution in Three Guineas all indicate that, despite her status as the privileged daughter of an educated gentleman, Woolf empathized with women who were ostracized by society because they sold their bodies for money. That profound empathy stems from Woolf's childhood experiences of sexual abuse at the hands of her half-brothers. Like many survivors of childhood sexual abuse, Woolf was given presents by her abuser to reward her for her cooperation and to ensure her silence. That particular tactic frequently makes the abused child feel complicit in her own abuse. Consequently, Woolf identified with prostitutes, as Leonard's nickname for her, “Aspasia,” suggests. In Three Guineas, Woolf writes from her position as a prostituted woman (or girl, really) while resisting its abjection. Unlike her fellow modernists, Woolf directs our sympathy toward society's traditional scapegoat and documents that the prostitution of women is the inevitable result of the systematic oppression of women at every level of society.
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Notes
1 Woolf, The Pargiters holograph draft, V, 17–18, qtd. in Radin, Virginia Woolf’s The Years, 86. Maggie, another character in The Pargiters, makes the same assertion—“Every patriarch has his prostitute”—in a discussion with Elvira and Rose in the 1910 chapter . After describing Englishwomen who engage in politics as prostitutes, Maggie then adds afterward of such a woman, “She Comforts Him and then Asks for Favors.” Woolf, The Pargiters holograph draft, qtd. in Marcus 53.
2 Shelton, “Don’t Say,” 228.
3 Woolf, The Voyage Out, 307.
4 Woolf, Jacob’s Room, 105.
5 Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 175.
6 Woolf, Orlando, 216.
7 Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 88.
8 Woolf, The Years, 146.
9 Woolf, Between the Acts, 158.
10 Woolf, Flush, 80.
11 As Celia Marshik notes, “Reviews of The Voyage Out reveal that some readers were offended by any literary treatment of prostitution.” Marshik, “Publication and ‘Public Women,’” 858; emphasis added. For additional references to prostitution in Woolf’s books, see The Voyage Out (233, 248–49, 307–8), Orlando (81, 118, 162, 206), Three Guineas (82, 135), and The Years (404). See also Melymbrosia (96, 140, 222, 246, 317). There are doubtless many others throughout her published and unpublished writings. Celia Marshik brilliantly catalogs a series of indirect allusions to prostitution in The Voyage Out, from its South American setting (which hints at the terror of white slavery, or what would now be called sex trafficking) to cryptic unfinished sentences obliquely referring to the oldest profession. Marshik, British Modernism and Censorship, 96–99.
12 Woolf, Letters I: 343.
13 Woolf, Letters I: 353.
14 Woolf, The Voyage Out, 248–49.
15 Woolf, Orlando, 206.
16 DeSalvo, “A Wound,” xxii.
17 Marshik, British Modernism and Censorship, 102.
18 Woolf, Melymbrosia, 96. Woolf, Voyage Out, 81.
19 Woolf, Melymbrosia, 140.
20 Woolf, The Voyage Out, 248.
21 Woolf, Melymbrosia, 317.
22 Woolf, Voyage Out, 307.
23 Ibid., 308. This incident in The Voyage Out prefigures an oddly parallel incident from Woolf’s life. In January 1930, as she and Leonard returned home from an Alice in Wonderland costume party for their niece Angelica’s twelfth birthday, they stumbled across a confrontation in which a drunken prostitute cursed at three men who had jeered at her. When a policeman arrived at the scene, Leonard successfully defended the woman from an undeserved arrest: “‘Why don’t you go for the men who began it? My name’s Woolf, and I can take my oath the woman’s not to blame. She called them bugger; but they called her whore’—and so on,” Virginia (who was dressed as the March Hare) later recounted in a letter to Clive Bell (Letters 4: 129). Leonard was in costume as the Carpenter at the time, wearing a green baize apron and carrying chisels. He later included a more detailed version of the bizarre incident in his autobiography (Downhill 122–23).
24 Woolf, The Voyage Out, 224.
25 Woolf, Letters 4: 366.
26 Woolf, Diary, 5: 183.
27 Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf, 385.
28 Staveley, “Marketing Virginia Woolf,” 303–4.
29 Woolf, Three Guineas, 76.
30 Marshik, British Modernism, 94.
31 Corbett, “Generational Critique,” 220.
32 Ibid., 222.
33 Mills, “Violence into Speech.”
34 Scholes is hardly the only scholar to argue for the importance of prostitution to literary modernism. For example, see Christine Froula (“On French”), Susan Buck-Morss, Claude Caswell, Charmion Gustke, Melinda Harvey, and Laurie Teal.
35 Froula, “On French and British Freedoms,” 571.
36 Woolf, Diary 5, 198.
37 Qtd. in Glendinning, Leonard Woolf, 123.
38 Hines, Universal Man, 236.
39 Qtd. in Hines, Universal Man, 213.
40 Qtd. in Glendinning, Leonard Woolf, 78.
41 Ibid., 125.
42 Spalding, Vanessa Bell, 133–34.
43 Laurence, Lily Briscoe’s Chinese Eyes, 188.
44 Woolf, Diary 2, 75.
45 Woolf, Moments of Being, 172. “Emotional coercion” is a common tactic deployed by abusers. A 1983 study of prostitutes who were survivors of childhood sexual abuse indicated that “implying that sexual relations was her duty if she loved him” occurred in 44 percent of the cases (Silbert and Pines, “Early” 286).
46 Silbert and Pines, “Early,” 286.
47 Woolf, Moments of Being, 177.
48 Woolf, Letters 6, 460.
49 Ibid., 69.
50 DeSalvo, Virginia Woolf, 72.
51 Woolf, Moments of Being, 136.
52 DeSalvo, Virginia Woolf, 85.
53 Woolf, Moments of Being, 170–71.
54 U.S. Department of Justice, “Common Questions.”
55 Ibid.
56 Ibid.
57 Winters and Jeglic, “Stages of Sexual Grooming,” 726.
58 Woolf, Moments of Being, 152.
59 Ibid., 152n.
60 Woolf, Diary 4, 211.
61 Woolf, Moments of Being, 171.
62 DeSalvo, Virginia Woolf, 85.
63 Woolf, Moments of Being, 172.
64 Mills, “Violence into Speech.”
65 Ibid., 157.
66 Ibid., 177.
67 Farley, “Risks,” 100.
68 James and Meyerding, “Early Sexual Experience,” 41.
69 Farley, “Risks,” 98. See also Dworkin’s formulation: “Incest is boot camp. Incest is where you send the girl to learn how to do it. … And the training is specific and it is important not to have any real boundaries to her own body; to know that she’s valued only for sex; to learn about men what the offender, the sex offender, is teaching her.” Dworkin, “Prostitution and Male Supremacy,” 4.
70 Silbert and Pines, “Sexual,” 410.
71 Widom and Kuhns, “Childhood Victimization,” 1611.
72 Farley, “Prostitution.”
73 Qtd. in Glendinning, Leonard Woolf, 124. Lyndall Gordon quotes this passage slightly differently. Gordon, Virginia Woolf, 150.
74 See Shannon Bell (19–20 and 32–39), Cheryl Glenn’s essays, and Madeleine M. Henry for helpful introductions to the life and work of Aspasia of Miletus.
75 Glendinning, Leonard Woolf, 123.
76 Woolf, Letters 1, 223.
77 See Madeleine M. Henry (98–101) for a useful summary of Pericles and Aspasia by Walter Savage Landor, “whose work is little read today” (Henry 98).
78 Gordon, Virginia Woolf, 150.
79 Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 175.
80 Neverow, “Tak[ing] Our Stand,” 15.
81 Woolf, Three Guineas, 93.
82 Ibid., 100.
83 Ibid., 15.
84 Dworkin, “Prostitution and Male Supremacy,” 5.
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Lisa Tyler
Lisa Tyler is a professor of English at Sinclair College in Dayton, Ohio. She serves on the board of the Hemingway Society and the editorial advisory board of the Hemingway Review; she also edits The Hemingway Review Blog. She has published four books, including Wharton, Hemingway, and the Advent of Modernism (Louisiana State University Press, 2019) and nearly 50 essays in academic journals and edited collections. Her work on Woolf has appeared in Woolf Studies Annual, Virginia Woolf Miscellany, and Journal of Modern Periodical Studies.