While consensus may be rare in the field of modernist studies, there are surely few scholars of modernism left who will insist on there being one immutable canon of modernist writers (or texts), covering a strictly demarcated historical period. As Sonita Sarker puts it in her contribution to this collection, ‘modernisms are plural … they intersect multiply, and … the term “modernism” is synchronically and diachronically viable’ (p. 113). In other words, to speak of modernisms has become the new orthodoxy. Yet within this plurality of modernisms that make up the subject matter of contemporary modernist studies, some constants remain, and Virginia Woolf appears to be one of them.

As Jane Goldman observes, the modernism which emerged as a critical term in the mid-twentieth century ‘positioned and introduced Woolf, first as the handmaiden to the literary men of modernism (Joyce, Lawrence, Conrad, Ford, Eliot, Pound, and Yeats)’.¹ Goldman goes on to indicate the proliferation of modernisms since then, with different critical and theoretical approaches breaking this original mould: ‘subsequent criticism has found Woolf’s work … the epitome of feminism’s modernism, of lesbian modernism, of postmodernism’s modernism, of gender studies’ modernism, and an important object of postcolonialism’s modernism, of new historicism’s and cultural materialism’s modernism, and of queer modernism’, each area privileging different texts as particularly significant.² Yet despite this variety of modernisms, a simple counting exercise, noting the frequency with which certain authors appear in the indices of survey or introductory texts on modernism, is revealing not only about Woolf’s centrality to modernist studies in the early twenty-first century, but also about the consistency of the company she keeps.

The once-standard text by Bradbury and McFarlane (1976) reflects the emphasis at the time on the ‘men of 1914’/Pound generation; Eliot is cited 43 times, Joyce, 34 and Pound, 32 – twice as frequently as Woolf, whose citation count is surpassed here by Baudelaire, Conrad, Ibsen, Lawrence, Mallarmé, Mann, Rilke, Strindberg, and Yeats.³ Here, Woolf’s position as ‘handmaiden’, as Goldman has it – certainly of secondary importance – is clear. More recent guides to modernism reflect the more substantial role that Woolf now plays in formulations of modernism. For example, the index to the 1999 Cambridge Companion to Modernism has 39 entries for Woolf; the only figures to have more entries are James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound, with 51, 47 and 43 respectively, and the next most-cited author is Yeats with 20.⁴ Eysteinsson and Liska’s more Eurocentric two-volume collection of essays, from 2007, still has Joyce in the lead with 71 entries; Eliot is second with 60, and Woolf third with 47 (Proust has 44; the next most-cited female writer is Stein with 26 entries, the same number as Kafka).⁵ The second edition of Peter Childs’s introductory text Modernism (2008) again emphasises the usual suspects; Eliot has 39 entries, Joyce, 37, and Woolf, 32 (Conrad and Pound also make a strong showing with 29 and 24 entries respectively),⁶ and a similar pattern can be found in The Cambridge Introduction to Modernism (2007) where Joyce has 55 entries, Eliot, 54; Woolf, 49, and Pound, 41 (here Yeats makes a particularly strong showing with 52 entries).⁷ Woolf is, however, the runaway winner in The Cambridge Companion to the Modernist Novel (2007) with 114 citations; the runner-up is Joyce with only 76 entries, and Conrad is next with 58.⁸ Of course, simply counting the number of index entries (some of which might refer to a discussion spanning several pages, others only to a passing mention) is rather a blunt instrument for gauging the significance of particular authors. But it is signal that, in texts which aim either to provide an introduction to the field, or to offer a wide, if not comprehensive, survey of perspectives on modernism, Woolf consistently appears in the top three or four.

The fact that no-one is likely to be very startled by these findings should perhaps be put into the context of what I have suggested is the new orthodoxy of multiple modernisms and the many reframings of modernism outwith this familiar nexus, of which, in contemporary modernist studies, we are aware. Naturally, scholarly monographs that explicitly aim to reframe modernism are likely to emphasise a slightly, or indeed dramatically, different constellation of writers from those offered elsewhere (compare for example the key figures in the monographs of Peter Nicholls and Marianne DeKoven).⁹ But in texts specifically designed for those approaching modernism for the first time or to offer an overview of modernism, Woolf and three or four others remain the most prominent figures. Indeed, there are circumstances under which (I would suggest) all modernist scholars of whatever theoretical persuasion find themselves falling back on these traditional touchstones of modernism, and that is in a pedagogical situation. One might tell a student beginning the study of modernism that there is no single adequate definition of modernism, but this proposition cannot end the discussion if it is to be of any use to the student. Most teachers of modernist literature do of course include this caveat prominently in their teaching, but most of us also find ourselves evoking at some point the Joyce/Eliot/Pound/Woolf nexus (and thus most likely the years between 1910 and 1940). This may be in order to alert students to the existence, and persistence, of this frame for modernism, in order to encourage them to question it.¹⁰ But, especially given the evidence of the continued dominance of the ‘big four’ in introductory critical works on modernism, it would be difficult to persuade students that this model of modernism is totally out of date and has been entirely dismantled since the days of the New Criticism.

Certainly, one can imagine a course on modernism which mentions none of the ‘big four’ writers and even completely avoids works written between 1910 and 1940 and which would still be framed in a way which complies with at least one acceptable critical definition of modernism – indeed, perhaps such a course exists. Whether it would serve its students well in terms of offering an understanding of the genesis of modernism as a concept, and its place in literary history, is, however, questionable. In any case, the persistent prominence of the ‘traditional’ modernist grouping in the indices from which I’ve gathered the statistics above suggests that we as a scholarly community are a long way from being able to let go of offering this grouping as at least an initial answer to the vexed question of what modernism is (or was), even were there agreement that this would be a good idea. What is more, most (though by no means all) critics of early twentieth-century literature appear to wish to retain the term ‘modernism’ itself, while allowing it to be as expansive as possible, as expressed by Eysteinsson and Liska in the introduction to their recent collection: ‘One of the premises of the volume is that modernism is a vital concept for literary-historical developments in the various European languages and that it is therefore necessary to present a fairly broad, although necessarily eclectic, international account of modernism’.¹¹ This construction indicates the perceived need for breadth to coexist with a measure of specificity – modernism here, in all its eclecticism and internationalism, remains a singular, ‘vital’ concept.

So, despite modernist scholars’ insistence on ‘modernism’ as a term which embraces a broad, diverse, and fractured terrain, Woolf apparently remains indisputably – if not for every modernist scholar, then at least collectively – one of its key figures. A new definition of modernism is not within the scope, nor is it the aim, of this essay, whose focus is rather on looking at Woolf in contemporary context. I will, instead, turn to an example of recent criticism which apparently runs counter to all the evidence of Woolf’s continued centrality to modernist studies, an essay whose brief yet loaded mention of Woolf raises some of the questions already touched on above.

Woolf the ‘Quintessential English “Modernist”’?

In a 2002 essay investigating the concepts of ‘modernism’ and ‘modernity’ by one of the most eminent literary theorists of the late twentieth century, Woolf makes just one appearance (against five by each of Eliot and Pound and eight by Joyce) and a rather surprising one at that. The critic in question is Fredric Jameson, and the essay is his ‘A Singular Modernity’. We catch our fleeting glimpse of Woolf in a section titled ‘Transitional Modes’ which marks the transition from part I of the essay, Jameson’s ‘formal analysis of the uses of the term “modernity”’ to part II, which turns to ‘a related concept in the aesthetic sphere, modernism’.¹² Having made what he acknowledges are ‘seemingly disparaging remarks about English cultural life and development’ in the context of a discussion of the paradoxes and discontinuities in the ‘modernization’ of different nations, Jameson then avers that these remarks ‘stand wholly disarmed in the face of Virginia Woolf’s astonishing certification, namely, that “on or about December, 1910, [sic] human character changed”’.¹³ His word choice is arresting. ‘Certification’ not only has institutional, hierarchical associations, of a kind anathema to the Woolf of A Room of One’s Own or Three Guineas (not to mention the Woolf who turned down honorary degrees – Woolf had little interest in receiving certificates, let alone issuing them), but it also has overtones of a different kind of institutional certification, issued to indicate insanity – a particularly unfortunate resonance in relation to Woolf, since accounts of her ‘madness’ have frequently been used to undermine her literary, and indeed political, significance.

Admittedly, the status that Jameson apparently accords Woolf’s declaration might initially appear gratifying to the Woolf devotee but must ultimately appear absurd if taken at face value. Does Jameson mean that he views Woolf’s statement as a serious proposition, specifically that the start of modernity takes as its co-ordinates those English events with which Woolf scholars are so familiar as possible referents of ‘December 1910’ (the post-impressionist exhibition, the death of the King, suffragist action, strikes, the governmental crisis and so on), and thus that he must rethink his disparagement of England’s place in the formation of modernism? If we bear in mind what must be read as the tongue-in-cheek quality of Woolf’s all-too-emphatic judgment, such an interpretation appears unworthy of the critic (although there may of course be a satirical edge to Jameson’s own statement – in homage to Woolf, perhaps?). Jameson, as is consistent with his dense and tantalising style, refuses to provide any gloss on Woolf’s 1910 statement which might help us interpret his understanding of this phrase. We are left with the feeling that Jameson wishes to credit Woolf with some key contribution to the discussion about definitions of modernism but is not prepared to be explicit about what that contribution is.

His next sentence complicates matters further, firstly by apparently toppling Woolf from the position in which his earlier sentence appears to place her: ‘Yet the revival of interest in Woolf’s writing in the wake of the feminism that has developed into trauma theory constitutes a significant displacement of the view of Woolf as the quintessential English “modernist”’.¹⁴ This proposition is again opaque; Jameson provides no explicit explanation of what he means by ‘quintessential “modernist”’ at this stage in his dialectical analysis. But, in its opacity, the statement is profitably suggestive. Via those scare quotes, it explicitly begs the question of the definition of ‘modernist’ – and no wonder, since the whole question of definitions (of modern, modernization, modernity, and modernism) is central to Jameson’s project. So we know that Jameson too is treating the term as under erasure. The minimum we can deduce is that the definition of ‘modernist’ that is left is one which cannot accommodate Woolf as understood through ‘the feminism that has developed into trauma theory’ (by which presumably he means the work of scholars such as Louise deSalvo, Suzette Henke, Jane Lilienfeld, Karen DeMeester, and Toni McNaron and, since the publication of Jameson’s essay, Patricia Moran, Kaley Joyes, and others whose work appears in Suzette Henke and David Eberly’s recent collection – though Jameson gives us no critical co-ordinates himself).¹⁵

I offer this example from Jameson’s essay not because I aim to solve the puzzle of what precisely he means here, but rather because that passage is intriguing to the Woolf scholar, whose responses might follow this pattern: initially, indignation is roused; alert to the decades of disparagement heaped on Woolf’s work and that of her female contemporaries, often by male critics, an instinctive reaction is perhaps to protect Woolf from what appears at first to be an attack on her hard-won position as a major figure in twentieth-century literature and criticism. But immediately afterwards follows a question: Why should one be indignant that Woolf is displaced from the position of ‘quintessential English “modernist”’?

For a start, why should we not be gratified rather than displeased by the displacing of Woolf as poster-woman for Englishness? While the image of Woolf as Englishwoman par excellence is ubiquitous – and indeed her close association with Englishness is not without foundation in Woolf’s own stated attachment to her native country¹⁶ – it has been soundly challenged by critics insisting on Woolf’s cosmopolitanism and anti-nationalist position; ‘as a woman’, after all, she ‘ha[s] no country’.¹⁷ One might argue that Woolf’s nationality is included in Jameson’s formulation simply in order her to distinguish her from those others who otherwise might also lay a claim to the status of ‘quintessential “modernist”’; the Americans Eliot and Pound and the Irishman Joyce. But the fact that her nationality is mentioned harks back to the reading of Woolf familiar in U.S. scholarship of mid-century which yoked her supposed elitism and snobbery with her nationality; England being, in such a reading, defined by class in a way that the United States is not. Thus any dismantling of this simplistic national identification would, surely, be welcome to the Woolf critic.

And then, what about ‘modernist’? If by the reading of Woolf through ‘the feminism that has developed into trauma theory’ we understand the image of her as primarily defined by being a victim of sexual trauma, the Woolf of Louise DeSalvo’s 1990 monograph, then many scholars would feel uncomfortable; they might agree that such a reading risks repeating a marginalizing tendency. Important though DeSalvo’s book was, it has fed the persistence of some unfortunate and limiting biographical emphases in readings of Woolf’s work, as well as perpetuating some gender stereotypes, or at least leaving the door open to them. But if we take a broader perspective, what definition of modernism of any value would not include some acknowledgement of, for example, the trauma of World War I? So, alternatively, we might happily accept the validity of a modernism informed by trauma theory, as explicated in texts on war and modernist writing by Santanu Das, Trudi Tate and Sharon Ouditt;¹⁸ a recent work by Ariela Freedman has argued for the importance of the traumatic figure of the dying man in modernist literature before World War I¹⁹ and of course it is present in the writing of those Woolf scholars already mentioned. Yet Jameson seems to have in mind a specifically gendered kind of trauma theory, bringing us back to the question of ‘the gender of modernism’. Perhaps, then, the problem with accommodating Woolf as a ‘quintessential … “modernist”’, English or otherwise, is that the criticism to which Jameson refers (and indeed those strands of feminist criticism that have not ‘developed into trauma theory’) re-genders a de-gendered modernism.

In Jameson’s figuration, Woolf is ‘displaced’ from a position which she was apparently central in forming. Peter Childs describes Woolf’s ‘token inclusion in the modernist canon’ before 1980;²⁰ this sense of Woolf as supplementary is also implied in Goldman’s description of her early status as the ‘handmaiden’ to the literary men of modernism. So while it may have taken some time for her to be rescued from this marginal status, she is nevertheless present from the start. But, as Brenda Silver’s discussion of these issues makes clear, Woolf is from the outset a problem for the category of modernism. In a discussion of the intersection of (cultural) class with gender, Silver notes ‘the many arguments by cultural critics that have aligned high culture with the masculine, and low or popular or mass culture with the feminine’ (presumably by way of description rather than validation).²¹ In particular, she reminds us of Andreas Huyssen’s identification of ‘a powerful masculinist mystique’ underpinning much of what has become the modernist canon, explicitly connected with high art: speaking of ‘some of the greatest works of modernism’, Huyssen notes ‘the one-dimensional gender inscriptions inherent in their very constitution as autonomous artworks of modernity’.²² Silver argues that, given the underlying sexism of constructions of modernism, some rationale has to be given for Woolf’s inclusion in the modernist matrix – being a woman, but one who also ‘aligned herself with both “highness” and the modern’ – and suggests that under these conditions it would only be possible were we to ‘grant [Woolf] honorary masculine status’.²³ This masculinisation is, according to Silver, paradoxically ‘what happens when she gets subsumed into the supposedly gender-free, androgynous, disinterested world associated not only with high art but with “intellectuals” and the “public sphere”’ (my emphasis).²⁴ And this is precisely the status she apparently still holds, if we remember the statistics presented above, where Woolf makes a fourth along with Joyce, Pound, and Eliot. Indeed, it was as recently as 1999 that Silver wrote ‘in American versions of the story the intellectual or highbrow or hallowed modernist artist is always already male’.²⁵ By a decade ago this was I think already thoroughly challenged, not least through the rehabilitation of Woolf, but it may indicate the dominant ‘version’ of modernism which Jameson (an American) has in mind – though this does not of course necessarily imply it is one of which he approves. In any case, to return to Jameson’s text, the ‘feminism that has developed into trauma theory’ would, doubtless, refuse to accept this de-gendered and/or masculinised Woolf or the modernism which apparently demands such a figure, instead insisting on the necessity of reading and recognising Woolf’s gender and more broadly the significance of gender in her texts. Perhaps trauma theory will be particularly insistent on our noticing the corporeal reality of women’s bodies, and it is true that until even quite recently Woolf has tended to be read as a writer of the mind rather than the body, as resistant to the corporeal both personally and aesthetically.²⁶ This may be the significant shift which Jameson has in mind and which would remove Woolf from the (still persistent) central definition of modernism as an aesthetic of ungendered, autonomous and ethereal art. And yet, as we know, the story of critical reappraisal of modernism and thus Woolf (and vice versa), in terms of gender, begins at least as far back as the 1970s. Arguably, then, we might entirely dismiss any concerns we might have about Jameson’s displacement of Woolf, or any critical purchase with which we might have credited it, by assuming that Jameson’s ‘“modernism”’ is one he knows to be sexist and outdated, one which has been rewritten many times since its initial formulation.

Resolving this question does not trouble me unduly; again, my interest is not in working out how precisely his assertions about Woolf fit into Jameson’s wider argument, but in exploring the reverberations of these assertions in relation to Woolf and modernist studies. However, we should note that, as the later parts of Jameson’s book show, he is concerned with looking at the ideology of modernism rather than modernism as an object or field, which he recognises is something formulated as such after the event. Indeed, he explicitly addresses the problem of formulating a ‘theory of modernism’ in the very paragraph in which he mentions Woolf, sketching a situation familiar to any scholar of modernism and indeed alluded to above, though not in quite these terms:

In other words, and as we have seen in the quotation from Eysteinsson and Liska above, a definition of modernism must be broad enough to be capacious, but not so broad that it is meaningless. How, then, could there be a ‘quintessential’ modernist, English or otherwise? If ‘quintessential’ means ‘the purest, most typical, or most refined of its kind’²⁸ then contemporary modernist studies will not recognise modernism as having such a thing; something that is plural, internally inconsistent, fractured and diffuse cannot, logically, possess a quintessence. Yet Woolf’s position as certainly a if not indeed ‘the quintessential English “modernist”’ is often taken as read – even bearing in mind those scare quotes. It is, therefore, worth imagining her otherwise, of imagining Woolf both outwith, and without, the category of modernism. How attached need we be to the term – what might be the implications of accepting, even welcoming, a reading of Woolf outside of this category?

One way of doing this might be through evoking the Derridean supplement here, or at least a version of it (strict Derrideans have surely, by now, become used to critics playing what they would view as fast and loose with Derridean terminology; my concern here, as with my discussion of Jameson, is to search for what is useful, without being unduly concerned with fidelity to the master). The supplement, Derrida says, ‘adds itself, it is a surplus, a plenitude enriching another plenitude’, but, and at the same time, ‘the supplement supplements. It adds only to replace. It intervenes or insinuates itself in-the-place-of; it fills, as one fills a void’.²⁹ Or, as Leslie Hill has glossed it in terms which help to see how this might approximate Woolf’s relationship with modernism:

Is Woolf a supplement to modernism? Is she that which lies at the heart of modernism, apparently the very condition of its being, but always appearing as ‘unnatural, other, or improper’? Again, this idea might arouse resistance. Feminist and socialist approaches to modernist studies might, rather, want to insist on a modernism within which Woolf sits comfortably, because to retain the notion of Woolf as ‘unnatural, other, or improper’ might appear to reinforce the notion that ‘proper’ modernism is, still and all, the masculinist modernism observed by Huyssens. And yet, if we consider Woolf’s own resistance to ‘-isms’, to establishment structures, and indeed to internal coherence, to suggest that the most appropriate frame for modernist studies is one where Woolf is central might neutralise the particular strength which, Woolf herself recognised, comes from a position on the margins. Seeing Woolf in the context of modernist studies and its history emphasises that Woolf’s relationship with modernism – indeed, modernisms – remains radically undecidable – she is both a founding figure of modernism, but always already a provoking problem for it. This in turn appealingly evokes the endless but compelling tension between the need to formulate ever more new modernisms, to multiply their meanings, and the apparent need for us to retain a single term, ‘modernism’, that has at least some critical purchase. Woolf’s emergence from the margins of modernist studies (from her original position in the hierarchy of ‘Joyce, Eliot, Pound, and Woolf’), not to mention her own attachment to the marginal, peripheral and non-institutionalised, makes her particularly apt to keep challenging the very definition she continually contributes to constructing.