Eclats de Sel
1997; Inanna Publications and Education Inc.; Volume: 17; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0713-3235
Autores Tópico(s)Modernist Literature and Criticism
Resumodefinitive judgments. All agree that Leonard played a caretaking, controlling role toward Virginia, monitoring and limiting her activities, though the question ofwhether--or to what extent-this was beneficial or harmful remains open. Lee forestalls the reader's impulse to view Leonard too critically by including of the story of T. S. Eliot's unstable wife, Vivien, who sought-invaina possible ally in Woolf, before she disappeared into life-long incarceration-the very fate which Leonard hadprotectedvirginiafrom in 1913. O n the much mentioned matter of their sex life, Bell's early presentation of Leonard's incontestably passionate andVirginia's sexual congenital inhibition has by now undergone significant challenges-for example, from Claire Tomalin, who writes instead o f Leonard's failure to arouse her sexual nature, followed by his complete denial of it, and his refusal to let her have children, pointing to Leonard's personal anxieties and repugnances toward women as revealed in his letters to Lytton Strachey. Lee also calls attention to the violent expressions ofsexual disgust in Leonard's early fiction. Yet at the same time, and despite Lee's recognition of Woolfs sexual squeamishness, her intense feelings for other women, and what appears in conventional terms as the non-sexual nature of the Woolf marriage, Lee repeatedly emphasizes her subject's powerful, intense sensuality . . . erotic susceptibility to people and landscape, language and atmosphere . . . [her] highly charged physical life; and Lee argues convincingly for evidence of an erotic secret life between Virginia and Leonard, carried on with pet names . . . animal games . . . cuddling and nuzzling and kisses. The Virginia Woolf who emerges from these pages is complex and contradictory, courageous, timid, sensuous, snobbish, iconoclastic, susceptible to the prejudices of her class and culture, cruel, kind, and humane. Lee has painted a fascinating, variegated canvas, bringing us somewhat closer to the remarkable woman who wrote those wonderful books. And her copious citations from Woolfs own writings will encourage the reader to return to these in the light of new insights and connections.
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