Seashore Essays

Many people are familiar with Virginia Woolf’s most famous novels, but few people besides academics and students are familiar with her essays, the myriad short pieces she published in magazines like The Times Literary Supplement throughout her life. These are brilliant examples of literary criticism of the most imaginative kind, where Woolf freely blends her readings with her own reflections, until they become so inextricably bound together that if we happen to read the same books she writes about, we cannot help but see everywhere her shadow.

In a few of these essays she develops an interesting theory, one which occupies the grey area between literature and life and makes it hard to know which of the two it originally belongs to. This theory says that the human mind, or soul, has two sides: a ‘light’ side and a ‘dark’ side. In ‘How Should One Read a Book?’ Woolf explains it this way:

we should bethink us that there are at least two sides to the human soul; the light side and the dark side. In company, the light side of the mind is exposed; in solitude, the dark side. Both are equally real, equally important. But a novelist will always tend to expose one rather than the other […].¹

The light side and the dark side. Like many of Woolf’s most suggestive reflections, this starts from an extremely simple observation we can all relate to: we are different when we are in company as compared to when we are alone. We don’t show to others the same side we show to ourselves. While in company we focus on relationships and action, in solitude we are more inclined to dream and speculate. In ‘Notes on an Elizabethan Play’, Woolf considers how much we need solitude, sometimes, to let the dark side of the mind express itself; at these moments, we turn to the reading of introspective, confessional texts, preferring them to the open interactions of theatre plays: ‘as if tired with company, the mind steals off to muse in solitude; to think, not to act; to comment, not to share; to explore its own darkness, not the bright lit-up surfaces of others.’  (E 4: 69)

The ‘light’ and ‘dark’ metaphors are not just an obvious way to express a stark contrast. Woolf’s images are never self-contained, they are always used to illuminate and visualise chains of related concepts, until concepts become views, or landscapes. The ‘light’ and the ‘dark’ sides of the mind each determine how we see things when we are under the mastery of the one or the other. Our whole perspective changes. The light side shows us the world as it appears under the bright sun, precise and definite, peopled with individuals, dialogues, relationships, facts, problems. Woolf calls Jane Austen a novelist of the light side, because she describes everything with ‘clear, exact brilliance’ and her characters are ‘closely observed in drawing-rooms’ (E 4: 392). But the dark side shows us the world differently: vaguer, larger, a place where objects fade into impressions and people who bear no definite features replace conversation with soliloquy. Thomas Hardy, she writes, is a novelist of the dark side, because his characters don’t interact so much with each other but relate to great existential issues and to Nature: ‘they come in contact with moors, sheep, the sky and the stars, and in their solitude are directly at the mercy of the gods.’ (E 4: 392) The chief difference between these two perspectives, if we had to strip them down to their essence, is that the first perspective focuses on the details of our individual lives, the second on our shared human condition. And because this is a theory of literature as well as of life, Woolf also argues that conventionally the dark side of the mind is the realm of poetry, while the light side is the realm of prose (though of course there are some authors, like Hardy, who blur this distinction). A reader is inclined to approach poetry when in a special state of mind:

One then desires the general, not the particular; the whole, not the detail; to turn uppermost the dark side of the mind; to be in contact with silence, solitude, and all men and women and not this particular Richard, or that particular Anne. Metaphors are then more expressive than plain statements.

(‘How Should One Read a Book?’, E 4: 395)

Yet, the dark side of the mind is not only called dark because of its preference for the night and solitude; it is ‘dark’ also because it is best to keep it hidden: it generates thoughts that are difficult to communicate to others, unless the exchange is made indirectly, privately, through writing. When Woolf examines the work of Montaigne she finds – and here her own voice mingles with that of Montaigne – that any honest exploration of the ‘darkness’ of the soul cannot but find an unruly, unconventional substance, which always thinks and feels the opposite of what we are taught to think and feel, and moreover always thinks and feels differently, inconsistently: this version of the soul is ‘far from heroic, variable as a weathercock’. It is so different from ‘the version which does duty for her in public’, that acknowledging it fully would irreparably damage, alas, ‘one’s worldly prospects’. (‘Montaigne’, E 4: 73)

And here comes the trouble, which makes the matter more interesting: the two sides of the mind struggle to coexist side by side, in literature as in life. Let us start with literature. We may disagree, but Woolf thought that readers stop believing in a book if it shows ‘two different kinds of reality’ at the same time: each artist must be ‘careful to observe the laws of his own perspective’ to avoid confusing us (‘How Should One Read a Book?’, E 4: 392). The reason is that, even though we are well aware that a world of imaginative and incongruous thinking runs alongside our ordinary reality, being flung from one to the other in a novel messes up with our expectations, producing an aesthetically unpleasant, jarring effect. Woolf reproaches a confessional writer, De Quincey, precisely for making this mistake. He is a visionary, but ‘again and again, it is in returning to earth that De Quincey is undone. How is he to bridge the horrid transition? How is he to turn from an angel with wings of flame and eyes of fire to a gentleman in black who talks sense?’ Performing these transitions is extremely difficult for a writer, who moreover risks, in so doing, to provoke the reader’s distaste (‘Impassioned Prose’, E 4: 364).

So our minds are two-sided, varied, but not flexible. When we inhabit one side we instantly dismiss the other, for showing us a world that, from the shore we currently stand on, looks completely unreal. Thus, turning now to life, we can see how this happens if we recall our latest restless night. Feeling the sheets, our eyes closed, we lie awake, but the square edges of the bed are the only vestiges of the physical stability we relied on during the day. Everything else is drifting: worries, previously manageable, now soar like balloons taking off in the cold air; acts and faces alter their proportions, from dubious become threatening; our life, usually an intricate but viable path, now looks obstructed, or a simple straight line we have walked too much of. The dark side of the mind can make us infinitely happy, too. It may bring to the foreground our deepest desires and give them flesh so that they look close, within reach, precisely at the moment when we are least able to act. How strange it is to look, then, at our daily business. Why do we, each morning, find keys, reopen a laptop, divide our day in slots, and ask about someone’s weekend? Yet, by way of a strange miracle, when we do eventually sit at that desk, and we happen to remember the night hours, we wonder whether we were fools. The mirror of the ordinary never bent: here is my colleague with her little obsessions, here is coffee, and stuff to be done by the end of today. This is real.

Virginia Woolf’s strict reproach for ‘lesser’ writers who don’t ‘observe the laws’ of their own perspective was, of course, all pretence (E 4: 392). This is precisely what she was trying to do in her novels, tirelessly searching for the missing link between the coffee table and our dreamworld, and then, having found a slim channel, taking the step as silently as possible so as not to wake the reader up. As we read her, a century later, we may wonder whether this putting up fences between the two sides of the mind is innate behaviour, or it is something that we have learnt from necessity. We keep doing it, even though our society is far more liberal than the age Woolf lived in. In fact, we now talk openly about our dark side, we seek treatments for it, and recognise that it may be a powerful source of depth and creativity whose waters may occasionally be allowed to come to the surface and flow into the light side – provided they do so productively, and within the allocated time slots. Perhaps what we long for is a dialogue between the two sides of the mind that is not necessarily less secret, but just more frequent, peaceful and free.

1. The Essays of Virginia Woolf, ed. by Andrew McNeillie and Stuart N. Clarke, 6 vols (London: The Hogarth Press, 1986-2011), vol. 4, p. 392. All quotations from Woolf’s essays are from this source, from now on abbreviated as E. ↩︎