Indifference as resistance: Virginia Woolf's feminist ethics in Three Guineas

ABSTRACT

Focusing on the significance of the term “indifference,” I argue that in her 1938 essay Three Guineas Virginia Woolf proposes strategies for resistance to fascism and war that anticipate Emmanuel Levinas's ethics of alterity. Starting with the issue of women's difference from men, Woolf develops a specifically feminist critique of enlightenment thought that stresses the potential of women as “outsiders,” and thereby challenges existing political positions. In this article, I trace the origins of indifference back to John Locke and other eighteenth-century thinkers to reveal the ethical and aesthetic potential of Woolf's call for women's critically disengaged response to the status quo. I emphasize the paradoxical nature of the “society of outsiders” to suggest that Woolf lays the groundwork for a queer and feminist modernist aesthetics, one that radically undermines the supposed split between progressive politics and high modernist form in the 1930s. Reaching beyond readings of Three Guineas that focus on the importance of affect, I argue instead for a full understanding of the political power of indifference.

KEYWORDS:

• Woolf
• ethics
• indifference

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributor

Rachel Hollander is an Associate Professor of English at St. John's University in New York, where she is also director of the Honors Program on the Staten Island campus. Her first book, Narrative Hospitality in Late Victorian Fiction: Novel Ethics, was published by Routledge in 2013, and she has also published articles on George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and Joseph Conrad.

Notes

1. Two early important analyses of anger and Three Guineas are Marcus, Art and Anger, 101–21 and Zwerdling, “Anger and Conciliation,” 68–89. Recent readings of Three Guineas and affect include Winterhalter, “What Else,” 236–57 and Hsieh, “The Other Side,” 20–52. Though Hsieh shares my interest in the politics of indifference, she understands it through Lacanian affect theory. While many critics discuss important links between affect and ethics, I suggest that starting with the issue of ethics opens up new understandings of the essay.

2. Woolf, Three Guineas, 6. Hereafter cited in text.

3. Since its publication, readers and critics have criticized and praised Woolf's decision to direct her essay exclusively to her own class. Woolf addresses the issue herself in a note to Part Three (209–10 n. 13). The best known response in Woolf's time is Leavis, “Caterpillars of the Commonwealth Unite,” 203–14. For a recent consideration of how the Hogarth Press marketed the book to different generations and classes of women, see Staveley, “Marketing Virginia Woolf,” 295–339. Also see Carlston, Thinking Fascism, 173–7 for a balanced discussion of Woolf's understanding of class in the context of the 1930's.

4. There are of course many ethical theories published before, during, and after Woolf's lifetime that might help to shed light on the significance of her call for indifference (including Nietzsche, Spinoza, G.E. Moore, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Arendt, Derrida, and Agamben, among others). Like other critics, I have found Levinas's radical rethinking of the primacy of the ethical relation, and his articulation of absolute alterity, helpful for highlighting the depth of Woolf's earlier ethical refocusing. Responding, in the aftermath, to the same fascist threat that Woolf sees forming, Levinas similarly calls for a new way of understanding the self's relation to the other (and, by extension, to society at large). I also find the more recent feminist responses to Levinas, especially those of Irigaray and Chanter, helpful for thinking through the relationships between ethics, gender, and sexuality.

5. For an opposing argument that calls into question the political effectiveness of Woolf's indifference, see Barker, “Indifference, Identification, and Desire,” 73–9.

6. See Wood, Virginia Woolf's Late Cultural Criticism, 9–17 for an informative recent discussion of Woolf's place in the aesthetic and political debates of the 1930s.

7. See Kohlmann, Committed Styles.

8. Ziarek, Feminist Aesthetics, 3.

9. Berman, Modernist Commitments, 62–76.

10. See Crangle, Prosaic Desires, 71–103 for another recent study of Woolf and Levinas. Crangle's exploration of boredom helpfully illuminates an ethical dimension in Woolf's fiction, but she is less concerned with her more explicit political writings.

11. Hsieh, “The Other Side of the Picture,” 46 usefully discusses the significance of the “free gift” of the guinea donated to this society.

12. See Carlston, Thinking Fascism, 166–7 for a related discussion of chastity of the mind.

13. This might be seen as an example of what Ziarek calls Woolf's chiasmatic logic: “This chiasmatic juxtaposition of the destruction of female art with the revolutionary struggle for a new beginning suggests that relations between women's art and politics escape simple causality or chronology and call instead for a rethinking of the art/politics divide in the context of what no longer exists or does not yet exist: the impossibility and possibility of female freedom.” Ziarek, Feminist Aesthetics, 102.

14. Khalip, “Virtual Conduct,” 888.

15. Ibid., 886.

16. Gaston, “Levinas, Disinterest and Enthusiasm,” 4.

17. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 83. Hereafter cited in text.

18. There have been many other discussions of the tension between Levinas's seemingly abstract ethics and the concrete concerns of the political realm, including: Bauman, “The World Inhospitable to Levinas,” 151–67; Critchley, Ethics-Politics-Subjectivity; Horowitz and Horowitz, eds., Difficult Justice: Commentaries on Levinas and Politics; Perpich, “A Singular Justice,” 59–70; Caygill, Levinas and the Political; Drabinski, Levinas and the Postcolonial; and Topolski, Arendt, Levinas, and a Politics of Relationality. Discussions of Levinas in relation to modernist literature and politics can be found in Wehrs, ed., Levinas and Twentieth-Century Literature and Ryan and West, eds., Modernist Ethics and Posthumanism.

19. Lee, “A Case for Hard-Heartedness,” 44.

20. Ibid., 47.

21. Ibid., 46.

22. Locke, Conduct, 76–7.

23. Ibid., 77.

24. Ibid., 51.

25. For discussions of Levinas and gender, see Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, and Chanter, Ethics of Eros.

26. The origin of the ethics of care is usually traced to Carol Gilligan's seminal work: Gilligan, In a Different Voice. For a more recent consideration of Three Guineas and the ethics of care, see Ruddick, “Peace in Our Time,” 229–40. Berman also distinguishes Woolf's ethics from a feminist ethics of care: Berman, Modernist Commitments, 44.

27. Some critics have linked Woolf's resistance to war and her vision of female community to the work of Jane Harrison. See especially Mills, Spirit of Modernist Classicism.

28. See Friedman, “Wartime Cosmopolitanism,” 33–4 for a recent discussion of this quotation that addresses issues of cosmopolitanism and globalization. Friedman defends Woolf against charges of elitism.

29. For other discussions of the ethics and politics of form in Three Guineas, see: Berman, Modernist Commitments, 71–6; Winterhalter, “What Else,” 236–57; Carlston, Thinking Fascism, 139–41; and Walkowitz, “For Translation,” 35–50. For a recent discussion of anti-authoritarian voice in The Years, see Evans, “Air War,” 53–82.

30. There have been extensive critical discussions of Woolf's engagement with biography as a genre (as distinct from the extensive discussions of Woolf's own biography), including analyses of Orlando and Flush, and interpretations of Woolf's own writings on the “new biography.” Most recently, see Battershill, Modernist Lives. Here, I am limiting my commentary to the specific uses of women's biographies in Three Guineas.

31. See Ziarek, Feminist Aesthetics, 95–6 for a helpful discussion of Woolf's criticism of Bronte's anger.

32. For a detailed account of Woolf's complex relationship to the suffrage movement, see Park, “Suffrage and Virginia Woolf,” 119–34.

33. Woolf, A Room of One's Own, 76. For further discussion of Woolf's ambivalent relationship to the Victorian period, see Homans, “Woolf and the Victorians,” 410–22.

34. While, as noted above, Levinas's own writings on love and intimacy tend to fall into conventional terms of a masculine self and a feminine other/beloved, several feminist critics have discussed other possibilities for theorizing the relationship between intimacy and ethics. In addition to the sources in note 25 above, Irigaray's later work, I Love to You, suggests new models for establishing ethical heterosexual relationships. Here, I am thinking instead about Woolf's interests outside of heteronormative models.

35. The idea of achieving justice by founding a new law anticipates Derrida's discussion of law and justice: Derrida, “Force of Law,” 3–67.

36. For contrasting positions on Woolf's relationship to queer theory, see: Cramer, “Woolf and Theories of Sexuality,” 129–46 and Detloff, “Woolf and Lesbian Culture,” 342–52. I am sympathetic to Detloff's defense of queer readings of Woolf.

37. Ziarek, Feminist Aesthetics, 101.

38. Walker, “The Muse of Indifference,” 198.

39. Woolf's reading of and interest in eighteenth century and Romantic literature and philosophy is well documented. See, for example, Tremper, Who Lived at Alfoxton. In Three Guineas, she devotes an extended footnote to Samuel Taylor Coleridge (221 n. 49).

40. Eliot, “Tradition and Individual Talent,” 33.

41. Leavis, The Great Tradition.

42. Gilbert and Gubar, No Man's Land, 259.

43. Altieri, “Why Modernist Claims for Autonomy Matter,” 1–21; Andersen, “Why Disinterest,” 258–69; Walter, Optical Impersonality. See also DeCoste, “Sentimentality, Silence,” 101–23. For a related reconsideration of the feminist politics of modernist passivity, see Pease, Modernism, Feminism, and the Culture of Boredom.

44. For other discussions of Three Guineas and modernist impersonality, see: Low, “Refusing to Hit Back,” 257–73; Zwerdling, “Anger and Conciliation,” 70, 85; Winterhalter, “‘What Else Can I Do But Write?,’” 244; Carlston, Thinking Fascism, 161–3; and Cook, “Radical Impersonality” 77–9.

45. Pound, “A Few Don'ts,” 200–6 and Eliot, “Tradition and Individual Talent,” 27–33.

46. Woolf, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown.”

47. Ibid., 14–16, 6–9, 20. See Ziarek, Feminist Aesthetics, 103–7 for a detailed reading of the aesthetic vision of this essay.

48. Levinas, “Reality and Its Shadow,” 1–13.

49. Two helpful full-length studies of Levinas and literature are Eaglestone, Ethical Criticism and Robbins, Altered Reading.