Is it possible to cultivate virtuosity (aretē) without succumbing to the kind of arrogance that leads to self-interestedness? Can one strive to be exceptional without falling prey to elitism? These are questions that circle back to the questions of value that Barbara Herrnstein Smith contemplated, for if excellence (aretē) is quality one possesses, then it is something that is intrinsically valuable. But if excellence is a practice that involves negotiation – as value does in Smith's theory – then it is social and relational, rather than intrinsic. This relationality is highlighted in another key Woolfian motif: interdependence. Woolf often alludes to social interdependence through the metaphor of the “pattern” or, as in the case of her metaphor for fiction in A Room of One's Own, through the image of a web (AROO 41).

For example, in one of the most cited passages from A Sketch of the Past, Woolf comments on her capacity for making sense of experience through writing:

There are many ways to read Woolf's ecstatic insistence on connectedness. Perry Meisel writes of Woolf's repeated imagery of patterns, fabrics, and networks: “These figures or, really, metalanguages, are often organic ones, and suggest a vision of life as a pattern of connections ‘drawn out’ on ‘every leaf on the trees.’” Other critics, among them Julie Kane and Donna Lazenby, interpret the high premium Woolf places on interdependence as a form of mysticism – an emptying of the self and appreciation of our apparent oneness with the world. Yet others, including Gillian Beer, Holly Henry, and Paul Tolliver Brown, show the influence of scientific discourse – Darwinism, astronomy, and quantum physics – on Woolf's conception of the “pattern” behind the “cotton wool” of everyday existence.

One cannot speak of value without implicitly or explicitly speaking of values. Barbara Herrnstein Smith made this point eloquently clear in her meticulous study of the “double discourse” of value, Contingencies of Value. “On the one hand,” Smith explains, “there is the discourse of economic theory: money, commerce, technology, industry, production and consumption, workers and consumers; on the other hand, there is the discourse of aesthetic axiology: culture, art, genius, creation and appreciation, artists and connoisseurs.” These two “hands” may use different yardsticks for measuring what is worth one's time, money, effort, or attention, but both participate in the same complex, dynamic system of evaluation – a system that is social and interdependent, rather than presocial or transcendent. Arguing that “All value is radically contingent, being neither a fixed attribute, an inherent quality, or an objective property of things but, rather, an effect of multiple, continuously changing, and continuously interacting variables,” Smith eschews the notion of intrinsic aesthetic value (a value that inheres in things, in works), and claims, rather, that value is conferred through communal processes – that is, through the work of valuing.

This work goes unnoticed when there is a high degree of agreement in a community. When there is less consensus in a community about particular practices, inclinations, or forms, cultural artifacts that align with those practices, inclinations, or forms will be regarded as matters of personal preference: some people prefer Beethoven to Bach, Beyoncé to Taylor Swift, blue to green. When there is general agreement in a community – say, that Beethoven's music is worthy of more regard than Taylor Swift's, or that a Michelangelo fresco is worth preserving while a spray-painted wall in Los Angeles can (and, some would say, should) be targeted for removal – the preference for Beethoven or Michelangelo will seem to be intrinsic to the music or the painting, rather than the result of unacknowledged, perhaps unconscious, communal decision-making. For Smith, “Here, as elsewhere, a co-incidence of contingencies among individual subjects who interact as members of some community will operate for them as noncontingency and be interpreted by them accordingly.”

It is perhaps impossible to write the word “civilization” in the context of modernist literary expression without conjuring up the image of Joseph Conrad's Mr. Kurtz imploring Marlow to safeguard his supposedly altruistic report for “The International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs,’” on which he has scribbled “Exterminate all the brutes!” in a fit of delirious self-recognition. As Porter Abbott notes, “All rivers in early twentieth-century fiction are not necessarily fed by the great river in Heart of Darkness, but Conrad's vexed rendering of the classic male story of penetration had a lasting impact on the figuration of narrative.” In addition to convoluting the traditional narrative of exploration and discovery, Conrad's tale exposes the “civilizing” mission of European colonizers as an alibi for economic exploitation and brute conquest. As Walter Benjamin suggests, “There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a document is not free of barbarism, barbarism taints also the manner in which it was transmitted from one owner to another.” Woolf's oeuvre is not immune to the force of Benjamin's insight. Alongside (or, more precisely, embedded within) her cogent critiques of colonialism, fascism, and sexism are troubling, ethically indigestible references to marginalized others – persons with cognitive disabilities (as I noted in Chapter 3) and ethnic and racial others (from “natives … so beautiful … half naked” to a “very fine negress,” to stereotypically portrayed Jews, Gypsies, and Turks, among others).

It is important to register these moments in Woolf's work – that is, to be humbly honest about the aspects of Woolf's prose that disappoint and hurt. Pointing these moments out, however, is not the end of critical reading, but rather the beginning of a process of critical questioning and discussion – a practice that Woolf herself advocated in her 1934 essay, “Why?” In that essay for Somerville College's literary magazine, Lysistrata, Woolf not only asks the question “why?” repeatedly, but also questions how knowledge is formed and disseminated. “Know?” her fictional interlocutor in the essay asks, “What d'you mean by ‘know’?” Woolf's questions are intended to be followed by discussion, not authoritative answer.

For readers who are familiar with the recent scholarly turn to affect studies, or for those who know of Woolf mainly from depictions of her in popular culture (as the brooding and suicidal “Mrs. Woolf” of The Hours, for example), the suggestion that “happiness” is a core value for her as a writer and thinker may seem counterintuitive. It is highly likely that Woolf suffered from some form of bipolar disorder that contributed to a number of psychological breakdowns, and her youth especially was inundated by personal losses and traumas, notably the deaths of her mother, half-sister, father, and brother when Woolf was between the ages of thirteen and twenty-four, and her molestation by two older half-brothers, Gerald and George Duckworth. Given that difficult start to her life, and the well-known ending (her 1941 suicide by drowning in the River Ouse), wouldn't one be more likely to associate Woolf with unhappiness than happiness? Kirsty Martin challenges this notion in a thoughtful essay that situates Woolf's many depictions of fleeting, almost impressionistic happiness within the context of public efforts to bolster “mental well-being” in the U.K. population. Martin's reading, an important corrective to the image of Woolf as a perpetually brooding depressive, considers “happiness” in its vernacular sense – a contented feeling or joyful affect. In what follows, I examine Woolf's imperative to “make happiness” a performative (something one does, rather than something one is) and Aristotelian “end,” something that “is always desirable in itself and never for the sake of something else.” For the sake of clarity, I use the term eudemonia (often translated as “happiness”) to describe the activity or flourishing that Woolf advocates and cultivates in her work. The less familiar Greek term has the advantage of distinguishing happiness (as affect) from flourishing (as performative process). This is an important distinction, for, as Sara Ahmed has argued, the concept of “happiness” as affect has been deployed in a way that pathologizes cultural outsiders – “unhappy queers,” “feminist killjoys,” or “melancholic migrants” – who may have good reason to express unhappiness with social systems that oppress or marginalize them. The ideology of happiness (as affect), in Ahmed's analysis, suppresses social criticism that might lead to improvements in the conditions for the flourishing of members of oppressed groups. To put it another way, happiness, as coercive affect, can impede eudemonia, a way of living and thriving.

Virginia Woolf drowned herself in the River Ouse on March 28, 1941. Her suicide has become one of the most-known things about her life, due in part to the lyrical and haunting representation of that event in Stephen Daldry's 2002 Hollywood film, The Hours. While it is impossible to know exactly what was going through Woolf's mind on that Friday in March, many have nevertheless speculated on her psychological state. Some, such as the wife of the Bishop of Lincoln, presumed to know Woolf's mind and to find it wanting. According to Hermione Lee, the Bishop's wife wrote “an outraged letter to the Sunday Times” castigating the coroner at Woolf's inquest for apparently showing compassion with his suggestion that Woolf felt “the general beastliness of things more than most people.” As both Lee and archivist Sybil Oldfield point out, the Bishop's wife's nasty public letter got the facts of the case wrong, in part due to the coroner's misquotation of Woolf's suicide note to Leonard Woolf. The accurate text of Woolf's letter makes it clear that Woolf was worried about the onset of another mental breakdown (potentially a severe manic episode) that would encumber her loved ones (Leonard and Vanessa) should the Nazis succeed in their threatened invasion. This worry was not the paranoid fantasy of someone in the grip of unreason: the Germans were pounding Britain with heavy air strikes in March of 1941, and Sussex, where the Woolfs lived, is close to the English Channel. Lee, commenting on a draft of Woolf's suicide note, argues, “this generous, careful, precise letter … is not the letter of an irrational or mad person, but of a person … suffering from a terrible fear of the possibility of a breakdown with no recovery. The writing of the letter, and the act it presaged, though an act in extremis, was rational, deliberate, and courageous.”

After Woolf's death was made public, Leonard Woolf received scores of condolence letters from friends, neighbors, business acquaintances, and the general public. As Oldfield notes, Woolf's death occurred during an extremely difficult time for the British, as Nazi Germany and its allies controlled much of continental Europe, and the United States had yet to enter the war as allies to the British.

Lily Briscoe achieves her “vision” at the end of To the Lighthouse, but her vision is not a property of the painting that she sardonically imagines hanging obscurely in some future attic. Rather, the vision that Lily achieves is a habit of mind, a way of seeing the world with what philosopher Iris Murdoch calls “careful and just attention.” This way of seeing is connected to a concept Woolf introduces in A Room of One's Own – “incandescence.” She uses the term to describe a “mind” that is “disinterested” – or, at the very least, not self-interested. This is a challenging concept to grapple with, as “disinterestedness” risks being mistaken for “objectivity,” implying that one can transcend one's embodied existence and develop a perspective on the world that appears to come from “nowhere” rather than from a living, breathing, human being subject to material, psychological, cultural, and cognitive factors that inform that view. Philosopher Thomas Nagel describes the “view from nowhere” in his theory of the development of objectivity, arguing that objectivity is achieved through transcendence of one's limited perspective. While such transcendence is upheld as an ideal for scientific reasoning, it is ultimately an impossible ideal, for we are embodied, socially situated creatures who can only attempt to reason as if we were located “nowhere,” rather than coming from somewhere and somebody in particular. To be clear, incandescence is not this type of “transcendence.”

Perry Meisel describes the Paterian resonances of “incandescence,” suggesting that Shakespeare, for Woolf, “is the perfect Paterian artist because the implicit flame of his genius has fired out all kinetic residue … and made his work perfectly expressive of his already luminous temperament.” Given that all writers, including Shakespeare, are situated in particular sociocultural contexts that shape their ways of experiencing the world, they can't help but betray interests, dislikes, or preferences (a preference for Tudors over Plantagenets, for example, or negative perceptions of Jews, Moors, and Frenchmen, or belief in the divine right of kings) in their work. In an interaction akin to the dynamic system that, according to Barbara Herrnstein Smith, determines literary value, a writer's interests and preferences will be seen simply as “truths” or observations about “human nature” if the writer's interests align neatly enough with dominant cultural perspectives.

Let me begin by crossing my fingers as a sign of my ambivalence about what I am about to undertake here. I fear that I may be walking a little too close to the edge of apologetics for dominant cultural (white, Western, US-based, educated, middle-class) privilege than is comfortable or safe for my soul—but I am willing to risk that damnation in order to reassert the value of the imaginative, the well-wrought, the beautiful, to the common weal—the public good. This may sound a bit too much like David Brooks, who wrote a moving, but ultimately mistaken, lament for the state of the humanities last year in The New York Times :

The culprits in this sad story of lost faith are those who allegedly abandoned notions of “truth, beauty, and goodness” in order to espouse ideas about “political and social categories like race, class and gender” (Brooks). In other words, according to Brooks, you can have your truth and beauty or you can have your social justice but you can't have both because that will just confuse the youth of America and drive them away from our inspiring exemplars to more prosaic pursuits like accounting or engineering.

Iwant to take the opportunity presented by the conference theme of Interdisciplinary/ Multidisciplinary Woolf to think about Woolf from the perspective of critical disability studies, or what Robert McRuer has called “Crip Theory” in his 2006 book of that name. I do so in part because much has been written over the past several decades on Virginia Woolf's apparent mental illness—situating her according to either a medical model of disability conforming to what Eve Sedgwick calls a “minoritizing” conception of identity, or a constructionist model that conforms to what Sedgwick would call a “universalizing” conception of identity (40). That is, those who believe that Woolf's break-downs were congenital, for example the result of untreated (or mistreated) bipolar disorder, as Thomas Caramagno does, tend to understand Woolf from the perspective of a medical model of disability, as part of a unique and relatively small minority of people who share an immutable physiological characteristic (Caramagno 2). Those who read Woolf's breakdowns (including her suicide) as symptoms of traumatic abuse and dysfunctional family dynamics such as Louise DeSalvo does, imply that Woolf was just like everyone else, or would have been, if she were not literally driven mad by patriarchal gender norms and abuse. I don't want to dwell on this critical polarity overlong, as I have written about it elsewhere in relation to depictions of Woolf's mental illness, but it is worth reiterating Sedgwick's caution that neither a universalizing position (as in “we're all potentially queer” or “we're all potentially disabled”) nor a minoritizing position (as in the assertion that the queer person or the disabled person is “born this way”) guarantees a beneficent outcome (Detloff 25; Sedgwick 40).