“Opening Flowers in a “Sketch”: A Phenomenological Blooming.”

PRESENTATION DRAFTS Elisa Kay Sparks June 9, 2012 (~2400 wds; 2777 counting slide refs+ notes) Opening Flowers in a “Sketch”: A Phenomenological Blooming (#2: GOK: Crazy Day) Although I do not comment on it, I have illustrated this talk with many images by Georgia O’Keeffe, some of which seem strikingly similar to Woolf’s own imagery. I have identified these by the full title in the slide descriptions should anyone want to find a particular image Treatments of Woolf’s collection of autobiographical fragments, gathered together as “A Sketch of the Past,” tend to emphasize the random nature of her entries. However, the opening pages of the document demonstrate an underlying phenomenological pattern of awakening consciousness, similar to that developed some years earlier in the Interlude sections of The Waves, an expansion that is at critical moments intimately linked to a succession of flower images which open up into a complexity of germinating metaphors. (#3GOK Blue and Pink Circles) Following the patterns of repetition in flower imagery in the manuscript of “A Sketch” reveals traces of what might have become a more systematic framework for a more finished version of the piece. In particular, her first liminal memory of the anemones on her mother’s dress (MOB 64) and her association of her mother with the passion flowers which grew across the front of Talland House, (#4 Talland House) along with a systematic development of flower imagery as an organic metaphor for the creative process chart a coherent progression through consciousness to self-consciousness, from awareness of space and time to encounters with others. Woolf begins “A Sketch” in classic phenomenological fashion with a coming to consciousness. (#5 GOK Black Abstraction) Her first two memories take place on the borderland between sleeping and waking, and both connect to flowers and to her mother. She begin her memoir with her first memory: of red and purple flowers on a black ground -- my mother’s dress; (#6 Fabric) and she was sitting either in a train or in an omnibus, and I was on her lap. I therefore saw the flowers she was wearing very close; and can still see the purple and red and blue, I think, against the black; they must have been anemones, I suppose. (#7 Anemones) Perhaps we were going to St. Ives; more probably, for from the light it must have been evening, we were coming back to London. (MOB 64) Her memory of her mother’s dress has several liminal features: (#8 GOK Lake George, Coat and Red) it takes place on a train, travelling from one location to another; the time of day is shifting, crepuscular, and the vivid colors of the flowers emerge into visual consciousness from the black background of her mother’s dress (MOB 64). The next memory -- “of lying half asleep, half awake, in bed in the nursery of St. Ives” -- is even more obviously a transition into consciousness (MOB 64). (#9 Nursery) Described as “the most important of all my memories,” it begins with rhythmical sound and light and encompasses both movement and an awareness of space: “hearing the waves breaking one two, one two. . . behind a yellow blind. . . hearing the blind draw its little acorn across the floor as the wind blew the blind out. . . hearing this splash and seeing this light” (#10 GOK From Pink Shell) (MOB 64-5). Again there is a sense of liminality -- being half awake, hearing the waves crash on the border between land and ocean -- coupled with a sense of expansion and contraction as the blind swells like a lung filling with air, leading the child to experience “the purest ecstasy I can conceive” (MB 65). This nursery sensation seems at first to be described in fruity, womb terms; she has the feeling “of lying in a grape and seeing through a film of semi-transparent yellow” (65) (#11 GOK Light Coming Across the Plains). But a perusal of the typescript of the passage reveals an interesting substitution with floral implications; the word "base" in the sentence, "if life has a BASE that it stands upon, if it is a bowl that one fills and fills. . . " was originally "stem" The typescript is available at: http://www.woolfonline.com/timepasses/?q=image/tid/124 (accessed May 17, 2021). The passage in question is on p. 2. (#12 MS) “If life has a STEM that it stands upon, if it is a bowl that one fills and fills. . . .” Two images immediately spring to mind. One refers to the stem of a champagne glass overflowing.  (#13:Champagne) Another possibility continues the floral theme: it is the image of a bowl-shaped flower atop a stem, tipping to spill its contents of light and color (#14 GOK Series 1, no.2), a visualization also found in the 1917 short story “The Mark on the Wall” where it is associated with the very colors -- purple and red-- of her mother’s dress: "But after life. The slow pulling down of thick green stalks so that the cup of the flower, as it turns over, deluges one with purple and red light" (CSF 84). This memory of the nursery links in turn with another vision of Woolf’s mother associated with flowers as she remembers seeing her mother come out on her balcony (#15 THBalcony) “in a white dressing gown” and stand among the “passion flowers growing on the wall . . . (#16 passif) great starry blossoms, with purple streaks, and large green buds, part empty, part full” (66). The phrase “part empty, part full,” was added to page 4 of the typescript. Separated from her mother, the narrator has now become an independent entity, and the flowers are much more distinctly seen; the “green buds,” like cups “part empty, part full” continuing the theme of liminality, placing the young girl at the beginning of the Victorian story of blooming into womanhood. Inspired by the vision of her mother, Woolf moves on to imagine another act of artistic patterning: painting a picture that would be “globular; semi-transparent. . . a picture of curved petals. . . showing the light through but not giving a clear outline” (MOB 66). (#17 GOK: White Sweet Peas) A third memory -- of the bees buzzing in the orchard -- across the road from the house and garden (#18 TH below road) -- expands the narrator’s sensory penumbra a little further beyond sight and sound to include smell and the pressure of touch: The garden gave off a murmur of bees; the apples were red and gold; there were also pink flowers; and grey and silver leaves. (#19 GOK Apple Blossoms) The buzz, the croon, the smell, all seemed to press voluptuously against some membrane.” (MOB 65) A more “robust” recollection, it repeats elements of her second memory, in particular, the amniotic feeling of “Lying in a grape and seeing through a film of transparent yellow” (MOB 66), and is a synesthetic experience so intense that time seems to expand to include the merger of spring blossom and summer harvest, recalling the shift from autumn to a more metaphorically convenient experience of spring in the gardens of Fernham in A Room of One’s Own (ROO XX). (#20 Rep GOK Pink Shell) Woolf’s first three memories are all pleasurable; two of them are even ecstatic or rapturous. All reiterate a state of imminent transition and together they constitute a kind of pathway back into the past, an avenue at the end of which are “the garden and the nursery” (#21TH Ghosts) (MOB 67). The next cluster of memories is, however, more complex, enacting a kind of fall into self-consciousness by first exploring the sense of shame she felt in seeing herself in the looking glass (MOB 67-70). (#22 GOK Blue Abstraction) Woolf then proceeds to enumerate three more memories, not simply sensory impressions but “shocks” which include bits of plot -- events, actions. Two of these are experiences of powerlessness: the hopeless surrender to a beating by her brother Thoby, and the later moment of paralysis by the apple tree which she connects with the horror of a neighbor’s suicide (MOB 71), (#23 GOK: Old Maple), an exact reversal of her earlier ecstatic communion in the orchard. Mediated by a floral encounter, the middle shock restores her sense of wholeness and potential ability to act, dramatizing the double perception provided by metaphor: I was looking at the flower bed by the front door; (#24 TH Julia anemones) Though Virginia herself never mentioned it, we know from a letter Leslie Stephen wrote to Julia when he first discovered Talland House that wild anemones grew profusely in Cornwall (qtd. by Hermione Lee in her biography, 29). The photo of Julia Stephen sitting amongst the anemones in the niche at the front of Talland House is contained in Leslie Stephen’s Photograph Album, held by Smith College (#38B). See my entry on anemones in my Herbarium: https://woolfherbarium.blogspot.com/p/anomone.html “That is the whole”, I said. I was looking at a plant with a spread of leaves; and it seemed suddenly plain that the flower itself was a part of the earth; (#25 Roots) that a ring enclosed what was the flower; and that was the real flower; part earth; part flower. It was a thought I put away as being likely to be very useful to me later. (MOB 71) This heightened understanding of the flower as a symbol for autonomy-integrated-with context not only substitutes satisfaction for despair, it also becomes itself a metaphor for Woolf’s creative process. (#26 GOK Pink Abstraction) As she explains, the insight about the flower gave her a “reason” and she “was thus able to deal with the situation; I was not powerless” (MOB 72). This leads to the speculation that “the shock-receiving capacity is what makes me a writer,” creating the “revelation of some order” that appears when she makes things real and whole by putting them into words (MOB 72). The experience of the flower thus becomes a paradigmatic (and Wordsworthian) moment of being, marking the transition from having an experience to making it mean something. The flower in the bed becomes the conceptual “rod” that she says she would have to find if she were painting, the “pattern behind the cotton wool” (MOB 73). This, of course, seems to relate directly to To the Lighthouse, to both the diagonal line Lily draws to finish her painting and to the lighthouse itself as a unifying device. Woolf’s next entry extends this new perception of structure by announcing that she thinks she has “discovered a possible form for these notes,” (#27 GOK Series 1, No, 12) one that involves making them “include the present as a “a platform to stand on”(MOB 75), a phenomenological extension of temporal consciousness that enables the uncovering or creation of a pattern. Her very first example of uniting the past and the present circles back to a displaced reiteration of her first childhood memory of the anemones on her mother’s dress. (#28 rep GOK Coat) Recalling two old women, threshold guardians who sat at the gates to Kensington Gardens, (#29 Queen’s Gate), she describes her childhood fascination with the billowing mass of balloons or air-balls held by the “round and squat” woman at the Gloucester Road entrance: (#29A Ballons) “They glowed in my eyes always red and purple, like the flower my mother wore” (MOB 74). (#29B Anemones) Linking these two childhood impressions of color to the present, she goes on to say that “Anemones, the blue and purple bunches that are now being sold, always bring back that quivering mound of air-balls” (MOB 76). Interestingly enough, the very name “anemone” is derived from the Greek word aenomos or wind, supposedly because of how the flowers open and seem to dance in in the slightest breeze (Heilmann 22). In the Victorian language of flowers, the designated meaning of anemones is “Forsaken love,” a rather appropriate reference to Woolf’s mother (Greenaway 8). The core importance of the generalized flower metaphor is reiterated a few pages later when Woolf again spirals back to summarize her previous batch of reminiscences: (#31 rep GOK Circles) “Many bright colors; many distant sounds; some human beings. . . several violent moments of being, always including a circle of the scene which they cut out” (MOB 79.) Like the experience of the flower, these scenes of childhood are always surrounded by circle of context, an air-balloon tied to the earth by the tunneling roots of character she discovered as a writing method with Mrs. Dalloway. Providing an additional affirmation of the importance of the flower metaphor, Woolf then goes on to describe her childhood in floral terms, identifying herself with a flower: (#32 OK Blue Flower) “a little creature. . . driven as a plant is driven up out of the earth, up until the stalk grows, the leaf grows, the buds swell,” linking her first memory of being “a baby, who can just distinguish a great blob of blue and purple on a black background” to “the child who thirteen years later can feel all that I felt. . . forty-four years ago -- when my mother died,” again stacking three temporal platforms (MOB 79). At this point, Woolf begins to shift her reminiscences from individual memories of “floating incidents” (MOB 77) to descriptions of character, of the “invisible presences,” the “consciousness of other groups impinging upon ourselves” (MOB 80). (#33 GOK: Apple Family 3) The first portrait, of her mother, makes a transition into this new stage of consciousness with a last evocation of her earliest floral references. The memory of being in her mother’s lap is now displaced away from its vivid, visual center to the feeling of “the scratch of some beads” on her dress (MOB 81), and the memory of the “purple star” (#34A PassFl) on the petals of the passion flower associated with her mother “in her white dressing gown on the balcony” (#34B Mucha) dwindles into the sound of her mother’s voice, “in particular the little drops with which her laugh ended -- three dimishing ahs . . . ‘Ah, ah, ah” (MOB 81). Throughout the rest of the manuscript, flowers appear only very intermittently, along with occasional mentions of other plants, but with nothing really approaching such repetitive patterning. There is a vivid contrast between “how gold the laburnum shone in Kensington Gardens” (#35 laburnum; Virginia creeper) after her mother’s death and the overgrown Virginia Creeper whose curtains turn the back drawing room into a green cave” (MOB 94). The virginal whiteness of flowers associated with Stella -- cow parsley, and large white roses (MOB 97) (#36A CowP, white rose)-- is similarly and rather conventionally contrasted with the “official” love signaled by Stella’s engagement to Jack Hills which made Virginia feel (#36B CowP) “My Love’s like a red, red rose” (MOB 105). And some flowers are simply listed as existing at Talland House: Mesembryantheum, (#37 Mesembr) the escallonia hedge (#38 Escal , Escallonia blooms in the spring, so it is doubtful that the flowers were among Woolf’s memories of Talland House. the purple “jackmani” or (#39 Jack) Jackamanni clematis which grew across the front of the house along with the passion flower (MOB 129). Of course, it is sheer speculation to imagine what Woolf would have done with “A Sketch of the Past” if time and circumstances had allowed her to revise and complete it. Perusal of flower references in her various holograph drafts has shown me that flowers were often added later, frequently as a repetitive structural motive, typically in threes, as in (#40 JR cover) where a single appearance of the purple petals of anemones which fall off the chest of drawers in Jacob’s bedroom (JRHD 5) Vanessa’s cover design suggests she was working from the holograph rather than the final draft. in the holograph of Chapter One is replaced in the published version by a purple aster in three stages of dishevelment foreshadowing Jacob’s eventual demise. -- first standing in the lawn, then trembling violently in the wind, and finally beaten to the earth by the rain (JR 9, 10,11). In Roger Fry, which Woolf was working on while writing “A Sketch,” red oriental poppies (#41 OK Oriental Poppies) also appear three times, providing a structural scaffolding for the entire biography. Bookending her writing career are triple rhododendrons (#42 Rhodies) in both “An Unwritten Novel” (CSF 118) and Between the Acts (BTA 6, 21,75). Anemones are mentioned twice in “A Sketch”; their metaphorical correlates “air-balls” are mentioned three times, as are passion flowers. (#43 comp) Key imagistic touchstones, weaving back and forth, their repetition outlines a progressive pattern initially unifying Woolf’s fragments of being. (#434Sprial PassFl bud) 1