Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (1938)

Virginia Woolf Season

Claire Davison, Lecture on Three Guineas and Music, 8 May 2021

Blog by Lisa Hutchins

Is Three Guineas (1938) the work in which Virginia Woolf broke with the conventions of Bloomsbury? In it she switches gears from the civilised conversation and discussion beloved of E.M. Forster, Clive Bell or Roger Fry, into angry polemic. In this latest lecture for Literature Cambridge, given by Claire Davison, Professor of Modernist Studies at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris, and former Chair of the French Virginia Woolf Society, we heard how Forster in particular had not liked the work. But, with so many of the men of Bloomsbury benefiting from the injustices that Woolf exposes, is it really surprising they would find it difficult reading?

Claire's theme was music throughout Woolf's work, and in particular Three Guineas – an extremely challenging work, for first-time readers especially, due to its mass of detail. She suggested one fruitful approach might be to regard it as a soundtrack of the dissonant 1930s:

Even now the clamour, the uproar, that infantile fixation is making even here is such that we can hardly hear ourselves speak; it takes the words out of our mouths; it makes us say what we have not said. As we listen to the voices we seem to hear an infant crying in the night, the black night that now covers Europe, and with no language but a cry, Ay, ay, ay, ay… But it is not a new cry, it is a very old cry. Let us shut off the wireless and listen to the past. We are in Greece now; Christ has not been born yet nor St Paul neither. But listen:

(Three Guineas, part three)

The late 1930s saw efforts by the BBC (established in 1922) to popularise music through the medium of radio. The Woolfs were music lovers and keen listeners to ‘the wireless’. They numbered broadcasters among their friends, Leonard wrote about music and gave lectures on the radio, and Virginia used many musical elements in her writing. Claire explored recurring musical parallels, themes and allusions in Woolf's work, highlighting how these were most prominent in her earliest and latest writing, and less so in the high modernist novels that mark the middle of Woolf's output (although she did describe The Waves as having the form of a fugue).

Woolf's use of music could include direct mentions of works, composers or performances; how characters respond to music or other sounds; or the relationship of sound to silence and to relations between characters. In Three Guineas, however, it provides explicit commentary on the role of women in society.

Claire discussed music's role in supporting patriarchal authority, where the pageantry of church, state and army silences women's voices. She demonstrated how music is used in the text to subvert this, using nursery rhymes, carnival, pantomime, and even hints of witches' sabbaths:

Let us write that word in large black letters on a sheet of foolscap; then solemnly apply a match to the paper. Look, how it burns! What a light dances over the world! Now let us bray the ashes in a mortar with a goose-feather pen, and declare in unison singing together that anyone who uses that word in future is a ring-the-bell-and-run-away-man. A mischief maker, a groper among old bones, the proof of whose defilement is written in a smudge of dirty water upon his face.

(Three Guineas, part three)

We saw how Woolf shifts music from within the gated academy (barely open to women) to an outdoor setting where people are more comfortable and where collective action is more easily imagined. Claire likened the following extract to the modernist ‘everyday epiphany’, a moment of transcendent realisation that occurs in everyday life:

It has been possible, during the last performances, to step out of the opera house and find oneself in the midst of a warm summer evening. From the hill above the theatre you look over a wide land, smooth and without hedges; it is not beautiful but it is very large and tranquil. One may sit among rows of turnips and watch a gigantic old woman, with a blue cotton bonnet on her head, and a figure like one of Dürer's, swinging her hoe. The sun draws out strong scents from the hay and the pine trees, and if one thinks at all, it is to combine the simple landscape with the landscape of the stage. When the music is silent the mind insensibly slackens and expands, among the happy surroundings: heat and the yellow light, and the intermittent but not unmusical noises of insects and leaves smooth out the folds.

(Impressions at Bayreuth, 1909)

The result is a work that Claire described as not just feminist historiography and an archive of the rise of feminism, but also a radical modernist artwork. As Woolf's most polemical and misunderstood text, it shocked its first readers with its feminist, pacifist arguments and its bewildering structure.

If Three Guineas shows Bloomsbury’s influence lessening, what replaced it? Claire pointed to the ‘essential, indelible influence’ of composer and former suffragette Ethel Smyth. Three Guineas was first conceived, as A Room of One's Own had been, as a talk to an audience of women. The talk Professions for Women was given to a branch of the National Society for Women’s Service on a stage shared with Smyth in 1931. Woolf and Smyth were friends for a decade and carried on a correspondence that included sharing work. We heard how Woolf was fascinated by Smyth's archive of suffragette material. Smyth had been imprisoned, force-fed and had conducted her work The March of the Women from her prison window, using a toothbrush, as women sang in the exercise yard. Claire suggested her conversation with Woolf resembles a duet and that Woolf’s writing contains many motifs identifiable in Smyth’s music, including madrigals and nursery rhymes.

Claire ended the lecture with a recording of The March of the Women and a hope that both Smyth’s work and Three Guineas could enjoy the serious attention from scholars and readers that they deserve.

Links: Performance of March of the Women by the Glasgow University Chapel Choir.
Retrospect Opera have recently recorded some of Ethel Smyth’s compositions, including Fete Galante.

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Coming up: Claudia Tobin will repeat her lecture on art in To The Lighthouse on Sunday 16 May 16, and Ildiko Csengei will lecture on Mary Shelley's Franenstein on Saturday 22 May.

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Further reading from Claire on literature and music:

Albright, Daniel, ‘Untwisting the Serpent’: Modernism in Music, Literature and Other Arts, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2000.

McParland, Robert P: Music and Literary Modernism: Critical Essays and Comparative Studies, Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2009.

Halliday, Sam, Sonic Modernity: Representing Sound in Literature, Culture and the Arts, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013.

Murphet, Julian and Helen Groth, Sounding Modernism: Rhythm and Sonic Mediation in Modern Literature and Film, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017.

Leighton, Angela, Hearing Things: The Work of Sound in Literature, Cambridge MA: Belknap Press, 2018.