Rooms of Memory: “A Sketch of the Past”

Abstract

Drawing on recent work on “emotional geographies” in the fields of geography and cultural studies, this chapter offers an account of rooms, memory and affect in Woolf’s unfinished memoir “A Sketch of the Past.” Zink reads Woolf’s memoir-writing in the troubled context of the late 1930s and early 1940s, a time when memory, private space and her readership were threatened by the imminence of war. The rooms in this fragmentary memoir are material spaces reconfigured imaginatively as loci of memory, mapping out a geo-history of the self, which not only anticipates Gaston Bachelard’s “topoanalysis” but also problematises his view of the house as benign space.

These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

At the beginning of “A Sketch of the Past,” the main piece in the collection of autobiographical writings published as Moments of Being in 1976, then again in extended form in 1985, Woolf wonders whether it is possible for “things we have felt with great intensity” to “have an existence independent of our minds,” to be “in fact still in existence” (MB 67).¹ What she seems to be asking is whether the past and present can “co-exist side by side,” whether the past can underlie, albeit in the form of trace, the mental topography of the present moment. A similar question lies at the heart of Freud’s analogy between the mind or memory and the eternal city of Rome, in “Civilization and Its Discontents,” a work she appears to have been reading in 1939.² Freud uses the analogy in the context of “the more general problem of preservation in the sphere of the mind” and suggests that “in mental life nothing which has once been formed can perish” (256). As Steve Pile has noted,

Rome […] appears to offer a way of materialising or embodying memory and forgetting. […] The adult mind would, then, be like the modern city in that it would contain visible and invisible (not immediately apparent, that is) histories. More than this, these histories co-exist side by side, in both the mind and the city. (112)

In the end, Freud discards the image as incapable of expressing “[t]he fact […] that only in the mind is such a preservation of all earlier stages alongside of the final form possible” (259).³ However, the analogy remains suggestive to the extent to which it conveys “a set of interlocking relationships between space, time, memory, forgetting and narratives of the self” (Pile 113).

Written in the last years of Woolf’s life, against the background of the cataclysmic events of World War II, “Sketch” explores a similar set of relationships, mapping the linkage between the self, space and memory onto urban desolation and wartime trauma. Temporality is inherent in the process of remembering, and Woolf explores that dimension repeatedly by juxtaposing past and present (“I now, I then”), by travelling back and forth between the two temporal planes and by acknowledging the unstable nature of both—in Hermione Lee’s words, a “violent internal zigzag between living in memories and living in the fractured present” (Virginia Woolf 714). However, this exploration of the self and the workings of memory leads to “sketching” an emotional geography, in which memories are conveyed through the “socio-spatial mediation and articulation” of emotion (Davidson et al. 3). In other words, to adapt Davidson et al.’s formulation, memories “coalesce around and within certain places,” which emerge in all their vividness as “scenes,” snapshots of a past at once accessible and irretrievable (3).

Freud’s juxtaposition of mental and urban landscapes is again suggestive here. The impending war threatened both private and collective memory, Woolf’s domestic rooms as well as the city she loved. During the writing of “Sketch,” from 18 April 1939 to 15 November the following year, this threat became increasingly real, materialising in the heavy bombing of London in 1940, which altered both the space of the city and the topography of Woolf’s life through the destruction of the houses in 37 Mecklenburgh Square and 52 Tavistock Square. The meaning of Woolf’s tentative autobiography, then, emerges not only as the outcome of an exercise in self-exploration but also from the tension between private remembering and collective trauma. As Anna Snaith has shown, life writing was a way for Woolf “to carve out a private space […] but even this work, her memoirs, was invaded by the war” (Virginia Woolf 132). The hybrid genre of the text, which “slides between autobiography, memoir and diary,” testifies to the way in which the war destabilised the act of private remembering , forcing it into a form of resistance similar to that outlined in the 1940 essay “Thoughts on Peace in an Air-Raid” (Snaith, Virginia Woolf 132). As this chapter shows, writing autobiographically was not only an attempt to provide a sort of discursive unity for a self and a world threatened with destruction, but also a means to work through that threat.

“The Little Platform of Present Time”: Writing Autobiographically

Woolf started “Sketch” on 18 April 1939. The date is recorded at the beginning of the text in the manner of a diary entry, framing her explanation for undertaking to write autobiographically: “Two days ago – Sunday 16th April 1939 to be precise – Nessa said that if I did not start writing my memoirs I should soon be too old” (MB 64). Vanessa’s observation, set against the example of Lady Strachey’s scanty “Recollections of a Long Life” and her own dissatisfaction with Roger Fry’s biography, justifies the autobiographical impulse. Gabrielle McIntire suggests that Woolf needed an external motivation—her sister’s urging—in order to overcome her natural reluctance, in the same way she had needed Molly MacCarthy’s when starting to write pieces for the Memoir Club⁴ back in the 1920s (149–50).

The memoir presented itself as an antidote to forgetting, a private act of reconstruction of the past through retracing the “visible and invisible […] histories” mapped onto the mind (Pile 112). Moreover, it was meant to provide some relief from struggling to mould into words someone else’s life. Roger Fry’s biography, initially conceived of as a freer form of biographical writing, which would take liberties with chronology, had become submerged in the drudgery of factual documentation (Lee 708). Her own memoir, on the other hand, offered her the freedom to take the plunge “without stopping to choose my way, in the sure and certain knowledge that it will find itself – or if not it will not matter” (MB 64).

If so, however, Woolf came to it with all the self-consciousness derived from being “a great memoir reader,” as she describes herself in the opening lines of “Sketch” (MB 64). She was, of course, more than just an avid memoir reader. As Max Saunders has pointed out, Woolf’s work is “the most sustained and diverse [modernist] exploration of the relation between fiction and auto/biography ” (438). Before attempting her own memoir in 1939, she had thought about, and experimented with, that relation in a variety of texts, including essays, reviews and some of her novels. Significantly, Saunders devotes little attention to “Sketch,” mentioned only in passing. Instead, he focuses on texts such as Jacob’s Room , Flush and Orlando, viewed as “groundbreaking works,” which confirm Woolf’s subversive rewriting of the “Victorian ‘official’ biographic tradition” embodied by Leslie Stephen’s Dictionary of National Biography (Saunders 438–40).

Woolf’s reminder about her thorough familiarity with the genre, used to preface her “first memory,” indicates her awareness of the difficulties of memoir writing, explicitly and repeatedly expressed throughout the text. More specifically, these difficulties revolved around the question of the possibility of representation, a typically modernist concern intensified by “psychoanalytic views of the mind,” which had come to the fore in the 1920s (Saunders 485). As Max Saunders puts it: “If a crucial component of your psyche is obscure to your conscious mind, what is the value of whatever degree of self-knowledge you can attain? And if you don’t know the sources of your self, how can you represent yourself?” (485). In “Sketch,” Woolf expresses similar concerns, questioning her capacity to “g[et] at the truth” (MB 69): “The reason is that it is so difficult to describe any human being. […] Who was I then?” (65).

However, she also understands the self historically. Engaging with it is not exclusively a question of pure introspection. It also means engaging with the time and space(s) of being, as she acknowledges in a section of “Sketch” written on 2 May 1939:

Consider what immense forces society brings to play upon each of us, how that society changes from decade to decade; and also from class to class; well, if we cannot analyse these invisible presences, we know very little of the subject of the memoir; and again how futile life-writing becomes. (MB 80)

The context to the creation of “Sketch” complicates the notion of the utility of life writing, which Woolf evokes here. The imminent war and the socio-economic and intellectual climate of 1939 made the act of memorialisation both urgent and futile. If, as Anna Snaith notes, “[t]he threat of death undoubtedly triggered a desire to immortalize herself,” it also raised questions as to the meaning, if any, of writing at such a time (Virginia Woolf 139).

This dilemma is clearly expressed in Woolf’s letter to Ling Su-Hua from Monk’s House on 17 April, one day before starting “Sketch.” The letter centres on the impact of the international crisis on publishing and the contemporary readership. Woolf urges Ling Su-Hua not to abandon her autobiography , but deems the prospect of publication unsure, speaking of the “difficul[ty] to continue our publishing for nobody will read anything except politics” and “to go on working under such uncertainty” (L6: 327–8). All the same, writing is, in Woolf’s words, “the only possible relief from the perpetual strain,” an idea which she had already expressed in her previous letters to her Chinese correspondent (L6: 327).⁵

In her letter of 5 April 1938 from 52 Tavistock Square, Woolf had encouraged Ling Su-Hua to write her life “not merely as a distraction, but as a work that would be of great value to other people too,” adding that she “f[ound] autobiographies much better than novels” (L6: 221). In the same letter, Woolf expressed her sympathy for Ling Su-Hua and the situation in China as well as the hope that “[t]he worst may be over” (L6: 222). One year later, the political situation justified a much gloomier outlook for both women, but Woolf’s advice was the same: “work without caring what becomes of it” (L6: 328).⁶

In urging Ling Su-Hua to write her autobiography, Woolf implies that the autobiographical act has added value as testimony to the historical context in which it takes place. In the face of war , however, life writing turns into a distraction, and the fate of memorialising one’s self uncertain; what is supposed to last, becomes, in Anna Snaith’s words, “partial, contingent and fragmentary” (Virginia Woolf 53). The point of departure for the memoir is thus a precarious “platform” to stand upon, and this sense of precariousness permeates the process of remembering. The “past is much affected by the present moment” (MB 75); at the same time, memories such as the summer holidays at St Ives “can […] be more real than the present moment” (67).

The letter addressed to Ling Su-Hua on 17 April echoes the pervasive feeling of uncertainty recorded in the diary. In the diary entry closest to the beginning of “Sketch” on Saturday 15 April, Woolf wonders at the “extreme depression a little influenza & a cold in head produces,” a personal and domestic concern which coexists with that of “our dear old war – now postponed for a month” (D5: 215). The term of endearment simultaneously conveys the sense of familiarity with, as well as the menacing presence of, the war. A few lines later the tone changes when she reflects on “the severance that war seems to bring: everything becomes meaningless: cant [sic] plan” (D5: 215). The admission of her own private impasse is followed by the acknowledgement that “there comes too the community feeling: all England thinking the same thing – this horror of war – at the same moment,” after which “one lapses again into private separation” (D5: 215).

The passage illustrates the constant shift between public and private in Woolf’s diaries starting from 1938 (Snaith, Virginia Woolf 136), as well as her ambivalence towards communal feelings, “all sentimental & emotional parodies of our real feelings” (D5: 302). For Adam Piette, this “is not mere Bloomsbury disdain for the masses” but “a genuine expression of fear that the language of feeling is being sacrificed to total-war policies aiming at control of public and private opinion” (179). In Piette’s view, Woolf’s writing of the period is perfectly symptomatic of what he identifies as “two very deep fears across the range of British wartime experience”: one related to “war’s theatricality” and the other to the threat the war posed to individual privacy (2). “Sketch” voices both a sense of the unreality of war and the feeling that the boundaries separating the private home from the international conflict raging on its doorsteps were slowly collapsing.

In the diary, the alienation brought about by the intrusion of war into the private sphere and the writer’s mind is expressed spatially as a form of placelessness: “the war – our waiting while the knives sharpen for the operation – has taken away the outer wall of security. No echo comes back. I have no surroundings” (D5: 299). The “I” is laid bare in the same way that bombed houses are burst open, the writer’s voice, no longer validated by the reader’s response⁷:

I have so little sense of a public that I forget about Roger coming or not coming out. Those familiar circumvolutions – those standards – which have for so many years given back an echo & so thickened my identity are all wide & wild as the desert now. (D5: 299)

The instability of the present moment and the fragility of the self deprived of its protective layers inform “Sketch.” The memoir emerges as an essentially “palimpsestic text,” not only in the way Elizabeth A. Shih and Susan M. Kenney read its palimpsestic nature, namely as one derived from the existence of different versions of the text and inherent “gaps, conflicts, and editorial inconsistencies” (132). Within the text itself, the process of remembering involves uncovering the various layers forming the emotional makeup of the self. This exploration, however, is also a form of recovery, a rebuilding project of sorts in the face of the human and material destruction of war.

The Spatiality of Memory

As well as striving to produce a coherent narrative of the past/self, Woolf’s memoir displays a constant preoccupation with the nature of remembering. “Sketch” returns obsessively to questions of how we access past experiences and emotions, and how these can tear through the fabric of the present and feel just as real, if not “more real than the present moment” (MB 67). These reflections are repeatedly framed in spatial terms, in ways which resonate with a number of current formulations on the nature of memory.

In Remembering: A Phenomenological Study (1987), the philosopher Edward S. Casey notes that memory has been seen as “primarily a temporal phenomenon,” which, in his view, would mean that memory was “largely disembodied” (181–2). For Casey , however, “we do not experience time or its depredations directly” and “there is no memory without a bodily basis,” which is itself anchored in place (182). Thus:

To be disembodied is not only to be deprived of place, unplaced; it is to be denied the basic stance on which every experience and its memory depend. As embodied existence opens onto place, indeed takes place in place and nowhere else, so our memory of what we experience in place is likewise place-specific: it is bound to place as to its own basis. Yet it is just this importance of place for memory that has been lost sight of in philosophical and common sense concerns with the temporal dimensions of memory. (182)

Memory and remembering are, then, indissociable from the spatial dimension of experience. In Casey’s words, “memory is naturally place-orientated or at least place-supported” (186–7). Analysing the link between place and memory, Casey posits that “place is selective for memories” and “memories are selective for place” (189, emphasis in the original). In other words, “a given place will invite certain memories” whilst memories “can deploy themselves” in specific environments, which for Casey “serve to situate what we remember” (189). Casey terms places “congealed scenes” (189), which recalls Woolf’s own insistence on scene-making as her “natural way of marking the past” and, therefore, of writing memory (MB 142).

Casey spatialises memory itself as “a place wherein the past can revive and survive,” thus conceiving of human interiority in spatial terms (186–7). Comparing Western thought to a different cultural mindset, such as the Chinese conception of place and memory, he notes that in Western thinking the house is viewed “as an archetypal place for the most significant remembering” (211). Built space thus provides what Diana Fuss calls “architectural model[s] for the human interior,” such as Emily Dickinson’s poetic conceptualisation of remembrance as “something like a House” with “a Rear and a Front” (6).

The link between memory and “something like a house” is prominently expressed in the work of the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, cited by Casey alongside Martin Heidegger as examples of the prominence of built space in Western thinking about place , memory and the ontological function of dwelling. In The Poetics of Space, Bachelard displays an understanding of memory which anticipates Casey’s arguments. Like Casey , Bachelard sees memory as inextricably bound up with space, positing that duration cannot be recorded as such but is retrievable in “fossilised” form “in and through space” (9). For him, “[t]o localize a memory in time is merely a matter for the biographer and only corresponds to a sort of external history,” unlike the “localization in the spaces of our intimacy,” which yields “a knowledge of intimacy” (9). Taking this one step further, Bachelard suggests that “[m]emories are motionless, and the more securely they are fixed in space, the sounder they are” (9). He sees the house as the perfect container for the memories of our intimate lives, visualising it as a kind of shell which envelops the human being in the same way as the body.

In a much more recent discussion of memory, space and emotion, Owain Jones postulates that “[l]ife is inherently spatial, and inherently emotional” (Davidson et al. 205). Jones conceives of lived existence as topographically inscribed onto the mind and body, turning us into “vast repositories of past emotional-spatial experiences” (206). In his words, “[e]ach spatialized, felt, moment or sequence of the now-being-laid-down is […] mapped into our bodies and minds to become a vast store of past geographies which shape who we are and the ongoing process of life” (206). Jones draws on a number of scientific and literary sources, including the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio’s conception of memory. Summarising Damasio’s theory of how memory operates, Jones notes that “memory is not just a retrieval from the past or of the past, it is always a fresh, new creation where memories are retrieved into the conscious realm and something new is created” (208). Woolf expresses the same idea intuitively, when, in her memoir, she writes: “this past is much affected by the present moment. What I write today I should not write in a year’s time. But I cannot work this out; it had better be left to chance” (MB 75).

Two of the questions Jones raises in his article are particularly resonant with Woolf’s undertaking in “Sketch”:

Can we recollect past emotional-spatial experiences for the purpose of some attempt at representation? Can we go back to the past terrains and past encounters which are mapped inside us and which colour our present in ways we cannot easily feel or say? (206)

“Sketch” asks the same questions, anticipating both Bachelard’s and Casey’s understanding of memory through its recurrent use of spatial images, not only to recreate “scenes” of the past but also to probe into the process of remembering. As Gabrielle McIntire puts it, the text “might be understood as Woolf’s manual for reading memory” (161). The spaces/places recalled to the writer’s mind are significant by virtue of their “emotional associations” and as a way to access, and articulate, past experience (Davidson et al. 3). Woolf, however, incorporates into her writing of memory a more dynamic sense of space than that suggested by Bachelard’s image of “motionless” memories.

Throughout “Sketch,” she qualifies images and words which are “too static” (MB 79). This is manifest, for instance, in her “rough visual description of childhood” as “[a] great hall […] with windows letting in strange lights” to which she adds, of necessity, “the sense of movement and change,” a literal expression of time passing (MB 79). The unfolding of time is expressed cinematically as a series of moving images: “One must get the feeling of everything approaching and then disappearing, getting large, getting small, passing at different rates of speed” (MB 79). Repeatedly in “Sketch,” Woolf suggests that remembering is also a question of adjustment of focus, of perspective, of recovering her younger self’s way of looking and experiencing things.

Despite this acknowledgement of the instability of memory, Woolf’s exploration is persistently situational, attuned to the mind’s intimate geography of the past. Remembering involves a movement between different spaces, a mapping out of the self through the identification of loci of emotional significance. The geography of “Sketch” brings together two main locations, St Ives and London , each with its own emotional associations. The text itself significantly opens between the two, with the evocation of a journey. Its direction is deemed secondary: “Perhaps we were going to St Ives; more probably, for from the light it must have been evening, we were coming back to London ,” but St Ives is preferred to London for “artistic” purposes, as the setting for her famous “first memory” (MB 64). Here, the autobiographer takes liberties with memory, favouring narrative fluidity over mere accuracy. A compositional choice, it is also one that is truthful to an emotional reality—as such, it reaffirms the centrality of the memories of St Ives and Cornwall for young Virginia’s later life.

Woolf’s choice of St Ives is not surprising since that is “where she sites, for the whole of her life, the idea of happiness” (Lee, Virginia Woolf 22). As the opening of “Sketch” shows, Talland House occupies a unique place in her spatial mythology of childhood. In Hermione Lee’s words, “[h]appiness is always measured for her against the memory of being a child in that house” (Virginia Woolf 22). The nursery at St Ives, where Woolf situates her much quoted first memory, is her place of origin: despite being born in London , “she ‘conceives’ her first sense of herself, gives birth to herself, out of that room, half a century away” (Lee, Virginia Woolf 23). Thus, the memories of that place have a lasting consolatory effect: writing “Sketch” in 1940, she thinks of St Ives when “trying to soothe myself to sleep” (MB 126).

As Woolf critics have noted, the memories of almost inexpressible “rapture” evoked in relation to St Ives are, to a great extent, associated with the figure of the mother. Although the mother’s evocation in “Sketch” is not wholly unproblematic, in the opening of the memoir, her presence gives the place a paradisiacal quality, infusing the scene: “Talland House was full of her. Hyde Park Gate was full of her” (MB 83).⁸ Julia’s death marks the brutal end of childhood felicity, leaving a lasting emotional imprint on the memory of both St Ives and the Stephens’ Kensington home.

Reminiscing in the whole of “Sketch” oscillates between the two destinations, and the mind sometimes “shirk[s] the task” of leaving one for the other, as in the section dated 11 October 1940, when Woolf has to transpose “this boy [Thoby] from the boat to my bed sitting room at Hyde Park Gate ” (MB 136). The difficulty, as Woolf intimates, does not lie in the imaginative act of taking (her memory of) Thoby from one place to another, but rather in dealing with the emotional content of the space evoked. The leap from St Ives to the Stephens’ London home proves painful, hence the mind’s resistance to “go into the room at Hyde Park Gate ” (MB 136).

Remembering also involves the excavation of various spatial, temporal and emotional layers, conveyed through images of depth, layering and juxtaposition. Thus, the past presents itself to the mind as “an avenue lying behind,” at whose end are the loci of childhood: “the garden and the nursery” (MB 67, emphasis added). At times a different spatio-temporal plane is accessible behind the canopy of the present in the form of “pictures,” a term immediately replaced with “impressions” as more adequately suggestive of the synaesthetic nature of the memory evoked (MB 67). Woolf illustrates their “strength” and the fact that they “can still be more real than the present moment” by an experiment:

This I have just tested. For I got up and crossed the garden. Percy was digging the asparagus bed; Louie was shaking a mat in front of the bedroom door. But I was seeing them through the sight I saw here – the nursery and the road to the beach. (MB 67)

Past and present overlap to strange effects, like two films whose juxtaposed realities interfere with one another. The past does not so much rupture as permeate the present, allowing the memories that have left an indelible mark on the writer’s psyche, and the emotions attached to them, to “come to the top” (MB 67). The image of “[a] scene always com[ing] to the top” reoccurs over one year later, in the 11 October 1940 section, suggesting that layering provided a satisfactory metaphor for conceptualising the persistence of past existence within the mind (MB 142).

The thought of St Ives causes a detour within the textual space of the memoir: “the strength […] of these impressions makes me again digress”—a digression which itself turns to memory, suggesting that the two share their tortuous nature (MB 67). Remembering destabilises the apparent solidity of the present moment, raising the question of the co-existence of different temporal planes, as well as of present versus past emotions. “I feel that strong emotion must leave its trace,” she writes, while admitting to the difficulty of “discovering how we can get ourselves again attached to it” (MB 67). Wishfully, she imagines tapping into the past by “fit[ing] a plug into the wall” and “turn[ing] up August 1890” as one would a radio (MB 67). The technological metaphor allows her to express “the tangibility, touchability, and physicality of the past” (McIntire 168–9).

The superposition of past and present, and the multilayered nature of memory and remembering are suggestively expressed in a passage written on 19 July 1939, a month after the Woolfs’ last trip to France. Crossing the Channel and thinking of Stella trigger an aquatic image: “[t]he past only comes back when the present runs so smoothly that it is like the sliding surface of a deep river. Then one sees through the surface to the depth” (MB 98). As Woolf goes on to explain, paradoxically, she sees such moments as “one of my greatest satisfactions,” as if turning to the past was not a way of escaping the present but a means of rendering it complete: “the present when backed by the past is a thousand times deeper than the present when it presses so close that you can feel nothing else” (MB 98). The condition for this to happen is “peace;” any disturbance will otherwise break the “smooth, habitual” surface of the present, reducing the past to “hard thin splinters” (MB 98).

As “Sketch” progresses, such peace comes increasingly under threat from the turmoil surrounding the prospect of war, intensifying the feeling of unreality expressed in her questions to Leonard: “What’s there real about this? Shall we ever live a real life again?” (MB 98). The fear voiced here confirms Adam Piette’s observation cited at the beginning of the chapter. The image of “hard thin splinters” perfectly captures the difficulty of holding on to a unified sense of self, making the memoirist’s undertaking even more urgent. As Gabrielle McIntire suggests, “writing the past constitutes both the possibility for healing and the source of what she calls ‘the real’” (168). In McIntire’s reading of “Sketch,” healing is connected to past rather than present trauma but, as shown later, the memoir also provides the space to deal with, and compensate for, present destruction and loss.

The next section, dated 8 June 1940, expresses a pervasive sense of contingency. The memoir is a “sheaf of notes” salvaged from the “waste-paper basket,” whose completion is made uncertain by “[t]he battle […] at its crisis” (MB 100). The narrative about Jack Hills and Stella offers refuge, an alternative to the “dismal puddle” of the present moment (MB 100). On 19 June 1940, it is the father’s turn “to be described” against the aural background of “a blue bottle buzzing and a toothless organ grinding and the men calling strawberries” in the vicinity of her home at 37 Mecklenburgh Square—details which emphasise the juxtaposition between the past memorialised and the present of writing (MB 107).

Woolf tackles the task with caution, hesitant about the point of view to adopt, the child’s perspective from which the father loomed large and threatening, or that of her older self—now “much nearer his age” (MB 107). She also approaches it with fresh insight into her own feelings toward the paternal figure—“this violently disturbing conflict of love and hate”—as well as a name for them, “ambivalence,” derived from her reading of Freud (MB 108). Despite this ambivalence, she attempts to do justice to the father’s memory by acknowledging the different facets of his persona, from the delicate and irritable child, to the Cambridge intellectual, to “the sociable father” and “the writer father” (MB 109–16).

The evocation spills over into July, when she settles on the “tyrant father—the exacting, the violent, the histrionic, the demonstrative, the self-centred, the self pitying, the deaf, the appealing […] father”—as that best fit to account for her experience of the family home at 22 Hyde Park Gate (MB 116). She sums up the experience in terms of “being shut up in the same cage with a wild beast,” portraying herself as the “nervous, gibbering, little monkey” and the father as “the pacing, dangerous, morose lion” (MB 116). The description of 22 Hyde Park Gate follows as an expansion of the metaphor: the house constitutes a figure of containment for the father-as-lion memory, as well as the spatial frame within which she can explore her ambivalence.

Unlocking Rooms

In the July 1940 section of “Sketch,” the house at 22 Hyde Park Gate functions mnemonically as the gateway to memory, the means by which the memories of the “seven unhappy years” following her mother’s death can be accessed (MB 136). Woolf sets the scene of reminiscing at night, in her London house, where she projects herself back in her childhood home: “Two nights ago I lay awake in Mecklenburgh Square going over each of the rooms” (MB 116). The former house provides the perfect “grid” for the retrieval of memories: its architectural outline alongside the shape and content of each room is what enables “impressions” of those years to resurface in the mind.

The functioning of memory in this passage is reminiscent of the classical “art of memory,” which Edward S. Casey cites as an example of the prominence attributed to place in relation to memory in ancient Greece (The Fate of Place 182). As Frances A. Yates has shown, the “method of loci,” which consisted in associating images with a number of loci, most often architectural, was a way of training the memory in order to facilitate oral delivery (18). Citing Quintilian, Yates explains that “[t]he first step was to imprint on the memory a series of loci or places” such as, for instance, the rooms of a building (18). Then, “[t]he images by which the speech is to be remembered […] are […] placed in imagination on the places which have been memorised in the building. This done, as soon as the memory of the facts requires to be revived, all these places are visited in turn” (Yates 18). Thus, in the mnemonic model described by Yates, built space appears as particularly suitable for “housing” images. Another significant element is the emphasis on sight as a medium of remembering , both of which can be found in Woolf’s writing of memory in “Sketch ” (Yates 19).

Woolf’s revisitation of her parents’ Kensington home is highly suggestive of the type of process described by Yates, although the loci she evokes are not imaginary places imprinted onto the mind, but memories of real spaces. In other words, there is an organic relation between the places and memories evoked. In Woolf’s own “art of memory,” the rooms of 22 Hyde Park Gate conjured by the mind are saturated with emotion, so that the mental tour of the house does not only unlock memories of people and events but also generates an intimate geography of childhood. What she performs here is akin to Gaston Bachelard’s topoanalysis, the “psychological study of the sites of our intimate lives” (8). The way memories arise as she explores every nook and cranny of the house with the mind’s eye anticipates Bachelard , but her house of memory is not the purely benign space described in The Poetics of Space.

As Andrew Thacker has shown, Bachelard’s view of the house as “felicitous space” is problematic in several respects (16). First, his notion of “place as wholly benign” leaves no room for the possibility that domestic space may be an arena for conflict and power relations. Moreover, Bachelard’s focus on the house and interior space excludes “[a]ny sense of exterior space, whether of streets, cities or nations” (Thacker 16). Nor does his topoanalysis “address questions such as how the architectural design of a house might influence one’s topographic attachments, or how the social and political history of architectural forms might alter one’s intimate inhabitation of a place” (Thacker 16). For Thacker , a more complex notion of how the interior space of the house might be understood in relation to the exterior spaces of the city is provided by Henri Lefebvre’s concept of “social space” (16). Lefebvre’s idea of space as bound up with social relations calls into question Bachelard’s static view of interior space and its Heideggerian “valuation of place as a site of dwelling” (Thacker 16).

In his discussion of D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf, Youngjoo Son further questions “Bachelard’s valorization of domestic space in terms of timelessness, stasis, order, and maternity” (21–2). Drawing heavily on the Lefebvrian notion of “social space,” Son reads the family house in “Sketch” as “a contested battleground for different genders and generations, a multifaceted site for oppression and resistance” (58), testifying to Woolf’s awareness of “the multiple meanings of domestic space ” (22). Her confessed reluctance to return to the painful memories of the years separating her parents’ deaths—“I do not want to go into my room at Hyde Park Gate . I shrink from the years 1897–1904”—supports Son’s reading (MB 136).

Projecting herself back into her childhood home entailed accessing memories of a time and space of conflict, which saw the family drawing room turn into the theatre of a generational rift opposing “[t]he Victorian age and the Edwardian age” (MB 147). Her recollections offer a multilayered reading of the tensions played out against the backdrop of 22 Hyde Park Gate , involving not only different generational mindsets but also issues of class and gender. These tensions were materialised in the spatial/architectural layout of the house itself, “from the dark servants ’ sitting room, through the ‘very Victorian’ dining room and the tea table […] to her father’s great study, the ‘brain of the house ’” (Son 60). The topography explored here recalls the description of Abercorn Terrace in The Years.

Woolf’s mental tour of her parents’ Kensington home starts at the bottom of the house, works its way to the top and ends with a survey of the neighbourhood, which indicates her attention to the wider urban geography within which the house was situated. The rooms are conjured up successively, starting from the basement, described as a “very low and very dark” space, whose main decorative element—“a vast cracked picture of Mr and Mrs Pattle”—was an object discarded from the realm of better art “upstairs” (MB 116). The dining room—“a very Victorian dining-room; with a complete set of chairs carved in oak; high-backed; with red plush panels”—was where Julia Stephen helped her children with French and Latin grammar and where candle-lit dinners “looked very festive” (MB 117). She continues with the hall and its heterogeneous collection of decorative and functional objects, and, opening out of it, “the front and the back drawing room” (MB 117). She tours the remaining rooms floor by floor from the parents’ bedroom, to the Duckworth siblings’ bedrooms above it, to the younger siblings’ “night and day nurseries” higher up, to the father’s study and the servants’ bedrooms at the top (MB 118–9).⁹

Remembering the house takes the shape of seeing, reconstructing the familiar interior with the minds’ eye, with the two temporal planes (seeing now/seeing then) superposing almost to the point of confusion: “One could hardly see it – who was the woman? I cannot see her – or anything else; for the creepers hung down in front of the window” (MB 116). In this passage, sight is the main medium of remembering: objects take shape one after another, mapping out the different sections of the house, furnishing the rooms of memory, marking thresholds, like the “red plush curtain” which signalled the spatial segregation between the servants’ and the masters’ quarters (MB 117).

The spatial evocation is both emotional and critical. At times, Woolf sees the spaces described as through an anthropologist’s lens, observing the rituals housed by the different rooms and enabled by specific objects within the household, such as “the tea table round which sat innumerable parties” (MB 118).¹⁰ She appears aware of the nature of her reflections, as the analogy below shows:

Savages I suppose have some tree, or fire place, round which they congregate; the round table marked that focal, that sacred spot in our house. It was the centre, the heart of the family. It was the centre to which the sons returned from their work in the evening; the hearth whose fire was tended by the mother, pouring out tea. (MB 118)

The spatial division of gender roles in this passage is replete with meaning: she associates “the sons” with the public sphere of work and “the mother” with the private space of the home, which anticipates the more direct critique in the final sections of the memoir. In similarly anthropological terms, she sees the bedroom as “the sexual centre; the birth centre, the death centre of the house,” but the spatial analysis takes a less “scientific” turn as she imagines the room “soaked” with the private life witnessed within its walls (MB 118). The image emphasises the interplay between space and affect, reinforced in the description of her former room and its two halves, “the living half” and “the sleeping half,” which “fought each other,” modelling their occupant’s emotions of “rage,” “despair” or “ecstasy” (MB 122–3).

In conjuring up the tensions inhabiting 22 Hyde Park Gate as well as her younger self, Woolf describes herself as an observer of the spectacle performed in the family drawing room: “I felt too what I have come to call the outsider’s feeling. I felt as a gipsy or a child feels who stands at the flap of the tent and sees the circus going on inside” (MB 152–3). This follows an account of her reluctantly giving in to George Duckworth’s authority on grounds of “his age and his power”; by adopting the spectator’s position, young Virginia attempts a form of resistance (MB 152). The outsider’s perspective—promoted in her feminist writing, most notably in the polemical essay Three Guineas—distances her from her “weaker” self and disentangles her from the web of emotions produced by the spectacle of the male “intellectual game” (MB 153). The autobiographer’s hesitation to relive her memories of those years—to “go into” the room—re-enacts that resistance at a remove.

The circus metaphor in this passage proves a suggestive means of evoking the performance under way in the family drawing-room, as well as the gender polarisation of men as “acrobat[s] jumping through hoops” and of women as spectators “only asked to admire and applaud” (MB 153). The metaphor also emphasises the importance of competitiveness and success, extending the notion of “w[inning] the game” to “scholarships; triposes and fellowships” and subsequent career prospects as “a Head Master, an Admiral, a Cabinet Minister, or the Warden of a college” (MB 153).

On the other hand, the image of the “great patriarchal machine”—comprising “the intellectual machine” and “the social machine”—raises questions about the extent to which young men voluntarily engaged in this game (MB 153). The idea of men “shot into that machine at the age of ten” suggests little choice, although, as Woolf notes, her step-brother George Duckworth eagerly sought admission to both “machines” but only “entered” the latter, coming out with all the endowments attendant on adept game-playing (MB 153). In the passage, George is portrayed both as “an acrobat” and as a source of pressure on his half-sisters to conform, which suggests that he replicates inherited patterns of violence, an idea particularly resonant with the connection between war and patriarchy articulated in Three Guineas.

Later, Woolf uses the term “machine” in relation to her younger self as a way of stressing the difficulty of resisting a system which discouraged pursuits other than those sanctioned by society: “Society in those days was a perfectly competent, perfectly complacent, ruthless machine. A girl had no chance against its fangs. No other desires – say to paint, or to write – could be taken seriously” (MB 157). Over four decades and a successful career as a writer separate the autobiographer from the young woman striving to succeed in this passage.¹¹ The deictic “in those days” itself underscores the distance between “now” and then. Nevertheless, Woolf’s reflections on the “patriarchal machine” in the last section of “Sketch” bear direct relevance for the troubled present of writing, as well as for her understanding of the causes of war previously exposed in her 1938 polemical essay.¹²

In Three Guineas, she established a direct link between militarism and the patriarchal education and traditions criticised in “Sketch.” In the essay, these traditions are visually represented through photographic illustrations of “the advertisement function” of male ceremonial dress (TG 179). Woolf, however, places a different set of photographs at the heart of her denunciation of war in Three Guineas, namely “photographs of dead bodies and ruined houses” from the Spanish War—a vivid reminder of the consequences of military conflict upon private lives (252). Those photographs are not included in the text but made accessible through the mediation of the narrator, who examines them in the domestic context of home:

Here then on the table before us are photographs. […] This morning’s collection contains the photograph of what might be a man’s body, or a woman’s; it is so mutilated that it might, on the other hand, be the body of a pig. But those certainly are dead children, and that undoubtedly is the section of a house. A bomb has torn open the side; there is still a bird-cage hanging in what was presumably the sitting-room, but the rest of the house looks like nothing so much as a bunch of spillikins suspended in mid-air. (TG 164)¹³

The photographs are introduced as “statements of fact addressed to the eye,” but their force invalidates their factual nature. Their sight forces the brain and the nervous system into a form of “fusion” resulting in “violent” emotions (TG 164–5). The narrator extends these “sensations” onto the reader, both united in their instinctive reaction of “horror and disgust,” “however different the education, the traditions behind us” (TG 165). The pairing of children’s dead bodies and sectioned houses makes for a powerful image of human and material loss, whose poignancy lies in the sense of arrested existence, of life cut short, “suspended in mid-air” like the bird-cage in the cracked shell of a former room. As Maggie Humm points out, the focus is emphatically domestic—the house recalls “a child’s game of ‘spillikins,’ a domestic game” (“Memory, Photography, and Modernism” 650). This reinforces the senselessness of war beyond any ideological justification.

The bombed houses in the Spanish photographs anticipate the desolation of World War II and the heavy bombing of London , which Woolf records in her writings of the period. As the next section shows, she often expresses the threat of death and destruction in terms of a threat to the private home , as she had done in the parenthetical section “Time Passes” in To the Lighthouse or, closer to the writing of “Sketch,” in The Years. This threat constitutes the background to the memoir, accounting for what Lyndsey Stonebridge terms its “aesthetic under pressure” (5). The focus on built space and its fragility in the face of destruction provides an expressive means of materialising loss and voicing her affective response to the traumatic experience of war.

War: A Spatial Poetics of Loss

In To the Lighthouse, Woolf sketches a poetics of loss by inscribing the passage of time and the destruction of war onto the family summer house on the Isle of Skye. The section offers a poetic account of the house’s different stages of decay and its ultimate victory against the elements, made possible by the titanic work of Mrs. McNab. The description of the house as prey to the destructive forces of nature successfully replaces the narrative of historical change, conveyed obliquely, by means of allusion and metaphor. The characters’ lives, too, are bracketed off, so that major events such as Mrs. Ramsay’s, Prue’s and Andrew’s deaths feature in the text only parenthetically, as marginal incidents of human drama.

The domestic scene of the extinction of lamps by the Ramsay children and the house guests at the beginning of “Time Passes” prefaces the change coming over the house, including the “downpouring of immense darkness” in section 2 of the passage, both thinly veiled allusions to the start of war (TL 103).¹⁴ Darkness is shown to invade the house gradually, “creeping in at keyholes and crevices,” “swallow[ing] up” the contours of lived space, obliterating furniture, decorative objects as well as the human bodies themselves (TL 103).¹⁵ The house’s occupants become ghostly presences, mere limbs and disembodied sounds, evocative of the human loss on the war front. Initially, the sleeping bodies in the bedroom counter the threat of general dissolution with something “steadfast” (TL 104).¹⁶ The “certain airs, detached from the body of the wind,” which inspect the house room by room, testing the resistance of both human and material life, find in it something they “can neither touch nor destroy,” although later, the family does not remain immune to death and destruction (TL 103–4).

In section 3 of “Time Passes”, the siege mounted on the empty house by the same “airs, advance guards of great armies,” encounters little resistance. With friends and family gone, what is left is “only hangings that flapped, wood that creaked, the bare legs of table, saucepans and china already furred, tarnished, cracked” (TL 105–6). As in the description of Jacob’s room, where the young man’s slippers offer a material reminder of their departed owner, here, too, the impression of emptiness is heightened by the clothes left behind, which “indicated how once they were filled and animated” (TL 106). Halfway through the description, however, the bleakness of the decaying house is qualified by more positive attributes such as “[l]oveliness and stillness,” conveying a sense of aesthetic beauty which transforms its emptiness and gives it an “air of pure integrity,” suggestive of permanence and indestructibility (TL 106). In the end, the house “remains,” and Mrs. McNab’s scrubbing campaign proves successful, marking the victory of built space over destruction (TL 106).

In To the Lighthouse, the war remains an elusive presence, evoked through indirectness and metaphor. By the late 1930s, however, armed conflict had got much closer to home again. In the caesura between the last 1939 section of “Sketch,” dated 19 July, and the recovery of the “sheaf of notes” on 8 June 1940, waiting stopped and the war began, and with it, the advent of “an empty meaningless world” (D5: 234).¹⁷ The diary entry three days after the official announcement of the outbreak of war on 3 September 1939 reads like a telegram of desolation:

Boredom. All meaning has run out of everything. Scarcely worth reading papers. […] Emptiness. Inefficiency. I may as well record these things. My plan is to force my brain to work on Roger. But Lord this is the worst of all my life’s experiences. (D5: 234)

The sense of desolation expressed here erupts into her memoir so that, when she resumes work on “Sketch” in June 1940, she wonders: “Shall I ever finish these notes – let alone make a book from them?” (MB 100). Death is evoked as a real possibility, not only as a consequence of the battle “com[ing] closer to this house daily” but also as the outcome of a conscious, joint decision to commit suicide with Leonard in the event of defeat (MB 100).¹⁸ As she wrote, the fighting was getting nearer and nearer, an intrusion which surfaces in the text in the form of short notes prefacing the mind’s hasty return to the past. On 18 August 1940, as “five German raiders passed so close over Monks House that they brushed the tree at the gate,” the closeness of war becomes unnerving, making “being alive” and able to write the following day a matter of mere chance (MB 124).

The war had also started to maim the face of the city she loved; going back to London in 1940 occasioned desolate accounts of the changed urban landscape. That year, both 37 Mecklenburgh Square and 52 Tavistock Square were hit by bombs. The house at 37 Mecklenburgh Square was only a recent home to the Woolfs. They had found it after their trip to France in June 1939 and moved there during August, leaving behind 52 Tavistock Square, their home of fifteen years, which “was threatened with demolition” (L6: 336). Unluckily, the Mecklenburgh house was the first to be hit in September 1940, followed by Tavistock Square in October.

Writing an account of the state of their bombed house in Mecklenburgh Square in her diary on Sunday, 20 October 1940, Woolf muses on the loss of possessions and the sense of “relief” the prospect engenders: “I shd like to start life, in peace, almost bare – free to go anywhere” (D5: 332). The passage uncannily recalls the note made nearly forty years earlier, where young Virginia extolled the virtues of Gipsy living, longing for “[a] house that is rooted to no one spot but can travel as quickly as you change your mind” (PA 208). However, the fleeting sense of liberation from the weight of material possessions is overshadowed by the realisation of the impact of air-raids on the urban landscape so familiar to her, described in vivid terms in two letters to Ethel Smyth.

The letter of 11 September from Monk’s House relates the couple’s trip to London the previous day and the sights of bombed London : the house opposite theirs in Mecklenburgh Square, “nothing but a heap of brick, smoking still,” and “Holborn […] [a]ll heaps of glass, water running, a great gap at top of Chancery Lane” (L6: 429). In the postscript to the letter, dated 12 September, she writes:

What touched and indeed raked what I call my heart in London was the grimy old woman at the lodging house at the back, all dirty after the raid, and preparing to sit out another. We, after all, have at least been to Italy and read Shakespeare. They havent: dear me, I’m turning democrat. And then, the passion of my life, that is the city of London – to see London all blasted, that too raked my heart. (L6: 431)

Her self-mocking awareness of class privilege over the London poor betrays a trace of lightness, but her response to the sights of destruction is full of emotion.

Woolf recreates the experience of wartime bombing in “Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid,” a text composed around the same time. The link between creativity and memory in the midst of wartime trauma which she draws there resonates with her undertaking in “Sketch.” As Stuart N. Clarke has recently documented, the essay had been long in the making, its beginnings dating back to September 1938, when Woolf was asked to write something “controversial” for the New York Forum by its editor Phyllis Moir (E6: 245). In December 1939, the request was specifically “to write about women & peace” (D5: 249). However, as Woolf reflected in a letter to Shena Simon, her “views on peace […] sp[rung] from views on war” (L6: 379). These revolved around questions she had already raised in Three Guineas, including the possibility of “alter[ing] the crest and the spur of the fighting cock” (L6: 379).¹⁹

In “Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid,” the writer’s voice is located inside the private home under threat of imminent bombing, registering, as it were, the different stages of the air-raid. These are mainly perceived aurally, from “the zoom of a hornet, which may at any moment sting you to death” to “[t]he drone of the planes […] now like the sawing of a branch overhead,” to the dropping of a bomb causing the windows to “rattle,” followed by the few seconds of intense dread when a bomb is expected to fall “on this very room” (E6: 242–4). The house offers precarious shelter: the Englishwoman’s body is both housed and trapped inside the home, “a gas-mask handy,” just as the airman is “boxed up in his machine with a gun handy”—the two “equally prisoners” to the ideologies justifying war (E6: 243).

As I have detailed in the previous chapter, in the 1917 section of The Years, Woolf adopts the same narrative strategy, locating her characters’ experience of war inside the domestic home and doing away with the depiction of the wider political context leading to international conflict.²⁰ Forced to retreat into the “crypt-like” cellar with the remnants of their meal, Maggie, her husband René and their guests experience the air raid perceptually, which, as in “Sketch” or the 1940 essay, emphasises their vulnerability as passive subjects:

The Germans must be overhead now. She [Eleanor] felt a curious heaviness on top of her head. One, two, three, four, she counted, looking up at the greenish-grey stone. Then there was a violent crack of sound, like the split of lightning in the sky. The spider’s web oscillated. (TY 212)

The effects of the threat are expressed elliptically in the scene. The sense of “heaviness,” the “dead silence” accompanying the wait in the cellar contrast with Maggie’s soothing reassurance to her children—“That was nothing. Turn round and go to sleep” (TY 212). The juxtaposition sets into sharp relief the gap between the reality of private life and the alien presence of enemy planes overhead.

In “Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid,” the psychological effects of the shock are pictured in more vivid terms as a form of emotional and intellectual paralysis, a freezing of “all thinking” and “[a]ll feeling save one dull dread” deemed “sterile, unfertile” (E6: 244). The mind, however, is quick to recover, resorting to memory as a reconstructive tool: “Directly that fear passes, the mind reaches out and instinctively revives itself by trying to create. Since the room is dark it can create only from memory” (E6: 244–5). In the air-raid darkness, memory is what allows the mind’s creative impulse to overcome the “emotion of fear and hate” by recalling “other Augusts – in Bayreuth, listening to Wagner; in Rome, walking over the Campagna; in London ” (E6: 245). Remembering is thus a restorative process, which draws on the fluidity of the past to smooth over the fractures of the present, in much the same way as writing about the past in “Sketch” involves a “holding together” of the present.

The mind’s ability to withstand the “queer experience” described in the essay (E6: 242) is reminiscent of what Woolf calls her “shock-receiving capacity” in her memoir (MB 72). Lyndsey Stonebridge links this capacity to the notion of anxiety, which she distinguishes from trauma, following Freud’s reading of it in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Thus, “[a]nxiety is a ‘protection’ against trauma; it is a way of staying in relation to history without being consumed by it” (Stonebridge 4).²¹ As evidenced by the account of the mind’s coping mechanisms, for Woolf, writing constituted both an outlet for anxiety and a refusal to give in to the “sterile dread” of war trauma.

The essay makes the home the site of private resistance to war and its supporting ideologies, although in Three Guineas, Woolf shows the two spheres (private/public) to be inextricably linked. The resistance outlined here is meant to extend beyond the private realm and reach out to the young men caught up in war, freeing them of “their fighting instinct, their subconscious Hitlerism,” whose origins and manifestations she analysed in Three Guineas (E6: 244). A fragile shelter for its inhabitants, the house is nonetheless the place where peace can be “thought into existence” through “private thinking, tea-table thinking”—an alternative to “officer tables and conference tables” as well as loud war propaganda (E6: 242).

Woolf’s incomplete memoir testifies to a desire to resist the meaninglessness of war by opposing to it an, albeit fractured, narrative of the self in which past and present sustain each other. As Avrom Fleishman notes, turning to the past does not result in “an estrangement from the present but a heightened sense of its reality” (467). It is this sense of the troubled reality of the present that gives the autobiographical voice in “Sketch” its raw, urgent quality, revealing “the war’s power to displace and unsettle, its violent dismantling of ordinary ideas of home and private life” (Piette 7). Ultimately, the text is only a succession of fragments, scenes conjured up in the interstices of the mind, traces of past emotional geographies filtering into the troubled topography of the present, but its appeal and testimonial value lie precisely in the imperfection of this reconstruction.