Charles Andrews seeks resources for an enlivened theopolitical imagination in an unusual quartet of modernist authors: Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, Evelyn Waugh and Sylvia Townsend Warner. Within their experimental forms that resist closure and encourage new practices of readerly attention, he finds political theologies disruptive to the sacralized nationalism of their day. These “theopolitical fictions,” Andrews argues, offer resources for resisting our own sacralized politics and developing more “dynamic, sensitive, empathetic and resilient ways to live” (8).
Andrews begins with a skillful reading of Virginia Woolf’s third novel, Jacob’s Room. He rightly notes that, in the recent growth of scholarship on Woolf and religion, Jacob’s Room is rarely discussed. Her first fully experimental novel, it is often read as a precursor to the masterpieces that followed it: Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse. Jacob’s Room is often understood to mark a place in Woolf’s work between apprenticeship and mastery, the practice room where she learned to do the things she would do to such great effect in the later novels.
Andrews positions Jacob’s Room instead as an accomplished and devastating critique of the national liturgies of sacrifice which, as he puts it, “conscript us into the state.” In Andrews’s reading, Jacob’s Room seems less like a practice run for Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse and more like a companion piece to Three Guineas, Woolf’s 1938 antifascist work which critiques the rituals and institutions of public life that undergird fascist, misogynistic power, not only in Europe but in England itself. Jacob’s Room, Andrews argues,makes such rituals visible in the context of the first world war and brings both their formative power and the ends toward which they lead into focus. There is no redemption in the novel’s tragic ending, no solutions offered in the face of Jacob’s death. Following Karen Bray, Andrews suggests that Woolf invites us to dwell fully in this “unredeemed” place as a form of resistance to the relentless narratives of optimism and success by which we are shaped. It is precisely the refusal to turn away from the unsolvability of Jacob’s death that might allow new political possibilities to come into view.
Jacob’s Room is overdue for this kind of reading, and Andrews’s rich analysis deepens our understanding of Woolf as a theological thinker. He finds in her refusal to offer definitive answers a space for new theopolitical thinking. There is a discordant note of definitiveness, though, in the way Andrews sometimes opposes “political theology” to “spirituality” and “mysticism.” Political theology, we are told, is concerned with the communal, the material, the public, while spirituality is concerned with the individual, the spiritual, the private. This dichotomy has a long history in Woolf studies, born of the fear that exploring the religious dimensions of Woolf’s work will undermine its political power. Jane Marcus famously wrote of her discomfort with writing about Woolf’s mysticism, fearing “that acknowledging her as a visionary was a trap that would allow her to be dismissed as another female crank, irrational and eccentric,” preferring “her most anticapitalist, anti-imperialist novels.”[1] Andrews, too, seems to divide the novels along these lines, writing that Jacob’s Room “is a theopolitical novel,” marked by its lack of “the mystical comforts” of her later works. “Thinking theopolitically about Woolf’s fiction,” Andrews writes, “shifts the angle of focus away from personal, individualized belief or private, transcendental mysticism toward the ways her writing intervenes in the rituals, symbols, and narratives of the sacralized state” (37).
Andrews seeks to reframe how we conceptualize the “religious” in Woolf’s work beyond “the privatized transcendence of personal, individual ‘spirituality’ or ‘belief,’” (37) and by enlarging our focus, he makes a vital intervention in the study of Woolf and religion. But by opposing the political to the mystical, he risks missing her theopolitical reach. Some of the most politically transformative moments in Woolf’s fiction are located in what she called “moments of being”—moments when reality breaks through the ordinary and gives us a glimpse of something larger, more true, more real. These mystical moments of being are often potential points of resistance to the narratives of civil religion.
In Mrs. Dalloway, for example, Clarissa Dalloway’s daughter, Elizabeth, has a revelatory moment of being in London that blurs the boundary between the individual and communal. The energy of the city, marked by “sisterhood, motherhood, brotherhood,” awakens some dormant part of herself and offers her a ‘revelation, which has its effects for ever.’[2]
But the divine life of the city is not only revelatory for Elizabeth; it is also genuinely consoling. For Woolf, Christian consolations failed to console because they relied on a capricious divinity choosing some to live and others to die. The divine power of the city, however, is available to everyone. Even for the dying and their caregivers, Elizabeth thinks, the tumult of the city would be “consolatory, indifferent.” Elizabeth hears the sounds of the city as a “voice” that pours out endlessly, taking everything with it: “this vow; this van; this life.” (MD 135) Elizabeth’s tutor, the Christian Miss Kilman, describes Westminster Cathedral as “the habitation of God” (MD 130) in the midst of the city; for Elizabeth, the city itself is sacred space, where all are chosen. The God of Elizabeth’s outdoor cathedral is a God of change and motion—even the clouds above the city, which seem “assembled for the conference of gods above the world” (MD 135) are constantly moving, casting light and shadow over everything below. Elizabeth’s God is not the underwriter of England’s civil religion. The God of the city is movement itself, life itself, an inclusive indifference that makes room for everything and everyone. It is the indifference of the “god of rain” that Woolf will imagine in The Years who sustains the life of religious believers and unbelievers alike, sending rain “over the mitred and the bareheaded,” a God who says “let all breathing kind . . . share my bounty.”[3] It is something hidden which unites, “the pattern behind the cotton wool” at the center of Woolf’s “philosophy” (MB 72). Although born of one individual’s moment of being, Woolf’s theological work in this scene seems less like “private, transcendental mysticism” and more like a resource for a theopolitical imagination grounded in inclusion and connection.
To the Lighthouse also offers an example of the inseparability of the mystical and the political in Woolf’s fiction. In one of the quintessential moments of solitude in Woolf’s work, Mrs. Ramsay finds a moment within her busy family life to be alone. Watching the lighthouse beam appear and disappear, she falls into a reverie from which this thought arises: “We are in the hands of the Lord.”[4] In her early short story, “A Mark on the Wall,” Woolf refers to thoughts like these as “automatic fancies”[5]—images and ideas absorbed in childhood that float up into our minds unbidden. Annoyed, Mrs. Ramsay immediately begins scrubbing the automatic fancy of God from her mind, resenting this “insincerity slipping in among the truths.” She enumerates the reasons the phrase is a lie: “there is no reason, order, justice: but suffering, death, the poor.” Having been interrupted by this automatic fancy, Mrs. Ramsay follows the beam of the lighthouse out of her solitude. The light is “pitiless”—impersonal and indifferent, like Elizabeth Dalloway’s divine voice. Contemplating it, a “mist” lifts “from the lake of her being” like “a bride to meet her lover.” The light strokes “some sealed vessel in her brain” until “the ecstasy burst in her eyes and waves of pure delight raced over the floor of her mind and she felt, ‘It is enough! It is enough!’” (TTL 65). The automatic fancy of God is banished as unnecessary to Mrs. Ramsay’s ecstatic, erotic experience of life itself.
This scene, like the one with Elizabeth Dalloway, rejects the idea of God as an automatic fancy that obscures the political realities of “suffering, death, the poor” and makes us vulnerable to the demands of the sacralized state. It makes room, instead, for an impersonal presence—attached here to the beam of the lighthouse—that offers itself to all. This is, perhaps, a mystical theopolitics that does not divide the political from the mystical, the material from the spiritual but rather finds a place of open-ended theopolitical imagination at their intersection.
The appeal to the dichotomy of mystical and political aside, however, Charles Andrews offers us a crucial vantage point from which to consider Woolf as a theopolitical thinker who speaks both to her time and to ours. His reading of Jacob’s Room is genuinely illuminating and requires us to face the dangerous power of the liturgies of civil religion that structure our lives. Rather than seeing Jacob as a not-wholly-successful literary creation, Andrews finds in Jacob’s aloofness, unknowability, and failure a witness to the difficulty of finding leverage to resist the “false enchantments of the sacralized state” (63) as well what we stand to lose, as individuals and communities, if we do not.
[1] Jane Marcus, “Liberty, Sorority, Misogyny.” In The Representation of Women in Fiction, edited by Carolyn G. Heilbrun and Margaret R. Higonnet, 60-97. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983, 71.
[2] Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway. Annotated and with an introduction by Bonnie Kime Scott. Orlando: Harcourt, Inc., 1925), 134.
[3] Virginia Woolf, The Years. Annotated with an introduction by Eleanor McNees. Orlando: Harcourt, 1939, 45.
[4] Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse. Orlando: Harcourt, Inc., 1927, 63.
[5] The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf, Second Edition, ed. Susan Dick. Orlando: Harcourt, Inc., 1989, 83.
