Whitman in The Waves

For Virginia Woolf, as for much of Europe, 1918 showed little change from the chaos and disillusionment that had become a staple of the modern world for the previous four years. The Great War, midway through its fourth year, recently claimed among its casualties Leonard Woolf’s brother Cecil and among its injured his other brother Philip. Hogarth Press had just begun after three years of labor and planning, and the work involved in such an endeavor was immense. It was in this context in early January 1918 that Virginia Woolf published a glowing review in the Times Literary Supplement of Visits to Walt Whitman in 1890–1891, by J. Johnston, and J. W. Wallace. At the conclusion of her review, Woolf writes:

In Whitman the capacity for pleasure seemed never to diminish, and the power to include grew greater and greater; so that although the authors of this book lament that they have only a trivial bunch of sayings to offer us, we are left with a sense of an ‘immense background or vista’ and stars shining more brightly than in our climate.¹

Pleasure, inclusiveness, and unity: these were the features that drew Woolf to Whitman when these same features seemed stripped from her own surroundings and the stars in the sky above Bloomsbury in 1918 seemed dimmer than those above Camden in 1891.

Woolf expresses these same features in different guises when she discusses “the common reader” in her essay by that title. There she describes the common reader as someone differing from the scholar or critic in three ways. First, “[h]e is worse educated, and nature has not gifted him so generously.”² (Considering Woolf’s view of critics and scholars, such as the beetles of Oxbridge in A Room of One’s Own, it is perhaps best to read “nature has not gifted him so generously” ironically.) Second, the common reader “reads for his own pleasure rather than to impart knowledge or correct the opinions of others.”³ Finally, “he is guided by an instinct to create for himself […] some kind of whole—a portrait of a man, a sketch of an age, a theory of the art of writing.”⁴ The common reader, in other words, reads with an eye to unity and pleasure, and the common reader as a concept is inclusive to the same degree that the critics and scholars, the arbiters of right opinion, are exclusive. These common readers, though looked down on by the critics and scholars, do have “some say in the final distribution of poetical honours” and are thus worthy of note.⁵ According to Hermione Lee, in The Common Reader Woolf “wanted to make clear, not so much whom she thought her book of essays was for, but how she thought of herself as a reader: non-specialist, adventurous, and open.”⁶ In other words, Woolf has described herself, her own reading habits, and she has identified herself “with the self-educated reader.”⁷

Whitman, likewise, writes in the 1855 Preface to Leaves of Grass, “The messages of great poets to each man and woman are, Come to us on equal terms, Only then can you understand us, We are not better than you, What we enclose you enclose, What we enjoy you may enjoy.”⁸ Here again the themes of literary democracy arise: unity, pleasure, inclusivity. And, like Woolf, Whitman identifies with the common reader. With such similarities, it is easy to see why at the end of her 1917 essay “Melodious Meditations,” Woolf writes:

[I]f anyone is sceptical as to the future of American art let him read Walt Whitman’s preface to the first edition of Leaves of Grass. As a piece of writing it rivals anything we have done for a hundred years, and as a statement of the American spirit no finer banner was ever unfurled for the young of a great country to march under.⁹

In an essay ironizing the “melodious meditations” of American essayists whose tropes—“Life is difficult, but the good man triumphs; sorrow is not always evil; happiness depends upon what we are and not upon what we have; our truest friends are to be found among our books”¹⁰—fail in the midst of the First World War to sound like anything more than just so much cant, the one place where Woolf is not ironic is in her praise for Whitman. While the other essayists are “more civilized, gentler, lower in tone,” Whitman alone writes anything “to blush at.”¹¹

Woolf reviews Henry Dwight Sedgwick as representative of these “civilized” essayists, and it is he, she writes, who “looks to literature to refine and restrain the boisterous spirit of democracy.”¹² Borrowing language from Whitman, she continues: “The men of genius and learning are to constitute a priesthood, held in special reverence; and the intellectual traditions of generations of educated men should be taught by them as a special cult.”¹³ This “plan,” she says, will “freeze literature at the root.”¹⁴ Standing in stark contrast to this artistic elitism is Whitman, from whose 1855 Preface Woolf quotes at the end of her essay:

There will soon be no more priests. Their work is done. […] A new order shall arise and they shall be the priests of man, and every man shall be his own priest. […] They shall find their inspiration in real objects today, symptoms of the past and future … . They shall not deign to defend immortality or God or the perfection of things or liberty or the exquisite beauty and reality of the soul. They shall arise in America and be responded to from the remainder of the earth.¹⁵

Whitman and Woolf here share a democratic artistic vision. It is not that poets will cease to be the unacknowledged legislators of man; rather, the democratic en masse—real people and real things, not the aristocratic intelligentsia—will become the poets and they will legislate themselves. All of the old Romantic concepts of the artist still obtain, but they are re-appropriated as a part of a democratic ideal. Likewise, in his poetry Whitman accounts for the nitty-gritty, real-world people and activities that make up our lives outside of the academic cloister of Mr Sedgwick. Woolf herself was acutely attuned to “the distractions, worries, absurdities, that make up one’s life,” calling days that were particularly full of such things “specimen days” after Whitman.¹⁶ In light of such specimen days, the old cant of the melodious meditations rings hollow.

Woolf writes against these very same speakers of cant in Three Guineas, which begins with a question: An educated man asked her how she thought war could be prevented.¹⁷ One can easily imagine this man to be the same sort of educated man whom she criticizes in “Melodious Meditations” and A Room of One’s Own, speaking the same clichés: “Life is difficult, but the good man triumphs,” and so forth.¹⁸ So, at the end of the book she answers that the “daughters of educated men” can best “help you to prevent war not by repeating your words and following your methods but by finding new words and creating new methods.”¹⁹ What are these new words and new methods? She answers in a note with a quotation from Whitman: “Of Equality—as if it harm’d me, giving others the same chances and rights as myself—as if it were not indispensable to my own rights that others possess the same.”²⁰ Democracy, in other words, is the answer—true democracy, the aim of which is “the rights of all—all men and women—to the respect in their persons of the great principles of Justice and Equality and Liberty.”²¹ Whitman, through his “new bible of democracy,” wished to keep the looming war of a divided nation at bay by proclaiming the message of equality, and Woolf shared Whitman’s vision of democratic unity in the face of both World Wars.

One could interpret the timing of the review of Visits to Walt Whitman taken by itself as a form of escapism, as Melba Cuddy-Keane points out.²² When the times got tough, Woolf retreated into an ideal democratic community: Whitman and his visitors from England. However, taken alongside her reference to Whitman at the end of Three Guineas, Woolf’s timing indicates, not an attempt to escape, but a desire to quell pugnacious divisiveness with democratic equality and liberty. “Instead of a retreat from political issues,” Cuddy-Keane writes, Woolf’s timely references to Whitman “point […] the way to a political answer.”²³ Not all victims of war fall on the battlefield; democracy itself becomes a casualty. However, according to Whitman (through Woolf), democracy can also prevent such conflicts by providing “others the same rights and chances as myself” because their rights are “indispensable to my own.”²⁴

Woolf’s appreciation for Whitman, therefore, centers on his view of democracy, and it comes in two forms: the rhetorical and the psychological. James Dougherty calls these forms the “two principles of inclusion,” to which he gives the terms “the Cosmos” and “the Self.”²⁵ In respect to both forms, Woolf finds in Whitman a symbol for her democratic ideal. Whitman represents a kind of democratic “hotch-potch” (as D. H. Lawrence puts it) wherein the individual and community can coexist, not in conflict with one attempting to overthrow or overshadow the other, but in harmony with both the individual and the community finding its identity in the other. Regarding the rhetorical principle, Woolf’s appreciation of Whitman relates to this view of democracy as it pertains to public discourse. Both writers are interested in the deliberative role of the writer, not as an elite, but as one of the democratic en masse. Likewise, their shared democratic vision as it functions psychologically focuses on the many aspects of one self, where the psyche is made up of a multiplicity of personalities functioning in unity.

By drawing on the Whitmanic ideal, in The Waves Woolf criticizes failed attempts at achieving this hotch-potch that are ultimately destructive to democracy. These failed attempts fall into two categories in the novel: assimilation and anarchy. For Woolf, assimilation is the subjugation of the individual for the sake of the community, and she criticizes this perspective as a part of her larger critique of British imperialism. In anarchy, in contrast, individuals avoid or destroy unity. This struggle is represented in the novel in the competing voices of the individual psyches. However, since identity comprises both the individual and the community, lacking either of these results in an identity crisis. Whitman’s “I” has achieved this difficult balance, and Woolf looks to it and to Whitman’s theory of democracy more generally as a way of mediating extremes and finding stability in both the rhetorical and psychological aspects of community.

Whitman’s Democratic Ideal

Whitman’s concept of democracy has been so thoroughly studied that it has become commonplace to say, as M. Jimmie Killingsworth does in The Cambridge Introduction to Walt Whitman, that “Whitman’s individualism, or personalism (as he sometimes called it), formed a dialectical relation with his faith in the American people en masse, so that poems like ‘Song of Myself’ strive to reconcile individuality with the cause of union and community.”²⁶ Although this perspective of Whitman—that he strives to unify the individual with the en masse—is now generally accepted, it is nevertheless important to cover briefly this familiar territory in order to show more clearly how Whitman and Woolf connect over this issue of democracy.

In his book Walt Whitman, David S. Reynolds succinctly presents a perspective of Whitman’s “I” that is in keeping with this democratic vision:

The ‘I’ celebrates himself but also announces his complete equality with others—the ‘you.’ Whitman announces to us that this individual-versus-mass tension can be resolved not by arguments over states rights and nationalism but by reference to something much larger: the physical operations of nature, “For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.” All humans occupy the same physical world. They share atoms. There is a fundamental democracy in nature itself.²⁷

As both Killingsworth and Reynolds note, Whitman’s is a democracy that merges the individual and the many. Whitman’s perspective is thus necessarily opposed to inequality and any form of elitism because it is only on the basis of parity that such merging can take place.

As Reynolds also notes, Whitman’s democratic vision stems from what he observes in nature—that is, both in the natural world and in the natural body politic. The very title of Whitman’s new bible of democracy points to this fact. As Reynolds points out, Leaves of Grass refers “not only to the ‘leaves’ (pages) of his volume but also to the earth’s most basic form of vegetation.”²⁸ “Metaphorically,” Reynolds continues, “grass resolved the issue of individualism versus the mass. It was comprised of individual sprouts that could be admired on their own,” and “grass was the earth’s ultimate symbol of democracy and human togetherness, for it grew everywhere.”²⁹ Not only is Leaves of Grass an apt metaphor for Whitman’s poetic vision of democracy, but the term body politic also functions both literally and metaphorically in much the same way. After acknowledging that “general humanity” (by which he means the mob) “has always […] been full of perverse maleficence,” Whitman goes on to write in Democratic Vistas that “the mission of government [ … is] to train communities through all their grades, beginning with individuals and ending there again, to rule themselves.”³⁰ The mob, it would seem, is a group of people who lose individuality. A community, in contrast, is a group made up of individuals working together. This is the kind of collusion of the one and the many that Whitman seeks in his democratic vision.

Whitman’s discussion of the role of the people in government stems from his belief in “the aptness of that phrase, ‘the government of the People, by the People, for the People,’ which we inherit from the lips of Abraham Lincoln.”³¹ Here Whitman has taken advantage of what Gary Wills calls Lincoln’s “stunning verbal coup,” in which he changed American’s perception of both the Civil War and the Constitution through his Gettysburg Address.³² “[T]he Civil War is, to most Americans,” according to Wills, “what Lincoln wanted it to mean. Words had to complete the work of guns,” and Lincoln “would cleanse the Constitution […] from within.”³³ “Everyone in that vast throng of thousands,” Wills writes, “was having his or her intellectual pocket picked.”³⁴ The “proposition that all men are created equal,” according to Wills, was never intended to include African Americans, but Lincoln changed that perception. When Lincoln says at the beginning of the address that the founding fathers were “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” he means “all” in a way that most of the founding fathers never intended—he implies African Americans and any other social outcast who can call himself “American.” And when he concludes the address by saying the government is “of the people, by the people, and for the people,” he is saying that not only are Blacks and Whites equal, but they also have a role in government. This was truly revolutionary, and Whitman could not be happier, writing of democracy’s

rule that men, the nation, as a common aggregate of living identities, affording in each a separate and complete subject for freedom, worldly thrift and happiness, and for a fair chance for growth, and for protection in citizenship, &c., must, to the political extent of the suffrage or vote, if no further, be placed, in each and in the whole, on one broad, primary, universal, common platform.³⁵

Whitman is not only referring to African Americans; he is also referring to all of the “[g]rand, common stock” from both the south and the north. Just as Lincoln’s own words of the Gettysburg Address are more revolutionary than many realize, Democratic Vistas, written during the difficult times and political stress of Reconstruction, have perhaps more weight than a modern audience can easily understand. These words are important for understanding Whitman’s democratic ideal, but we are mistaken if we think they are merely the musings of an armchair intellect; these words held a particular weight for a man who had witnessed first-hand the horrors of the Civil War while volunteering as a nurse for wounded soldiers, a man whose entire oeuvre is dedicated to unifying a nation that refuses to heed his warnings.

So far I have focused on democracy as an abstract, exterior, political ideal; however, for Whitman democracy was not just a concept for civil government—it was also an aesthetic principle. In thinking about Whitman’s concept of democracy in this manner, it is important first to understand what Whitman is not doing: He is not following in the footsteps of the British Romantics, despite many similarities. Wordsworth, for instance, begins to assert the equality of the poet with everyone else, but he can only go so far: “[The Poet] is a man speaking to men: a man, it is true, endued with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind.”³⁶ This passage contrasts sharply with the 1855 Preface to Leaves of Grass in which Whitman writes, “The messages of great poets to each man and woman are, Come to us on equal terms, Only then can you understand us, We are no better than you, What we enclose you enclose, What we enjoy you may enjoy.”³⁷ Whitman spends several Wordsworthian pages extolling the many virtues of the “great poet” leading up to this passage, but here he says that the great poet and the common person are essentially the same; the average person possesses the poet’s “powers” and virtues—at least potentially. Also, according to Horace Traubel, “[Whitman] never believed or contended that he possessed exclusive powers or an extraordinary divination. He felt that if the message with which he was entrusted did not get out through him it would get out through some other.”³⁸ Whereas for Wordsworth the poet stands above the average man, Whitman’s great poet is no more or less than, quite literally, the next guy.

In one of his self-reviews published in The United States Review in September 1855, Whitman writes, in contrast to the Wordsworthian egotistical sublime, that “[e]very word that falls from his [Whitman’s] mouth shows silent disdain and defiance of the old theories and forms,” and “[n]o breath of Europe, or her monarchies, or priestly conventions, or her notions of gentlemen and ladies founded on the idea of caste, seems ever to have fanned his face or been inhaled into his lungs.”³⁹ Contrary to traditional, aristocratic, English forms that are divorced from politics, Whitman writes that “[a]ffairs then are this man’s poems.”⁴⁰ And describing his poetics, he continues:

The movement of his verses is the sweeping movement of great currents of living people, with a general government, and state and municipal governments, courts, commerce, manufactures, arsenals, steamships, railroads, telegraphs, cities with paved streets, and aqueducts, and police and gas—myriads of travelers arriving and departing—newspapers, music, elections and all the features and processes of the nineteenth century in the wholesomest race and the only stable form of politics at present upon the earth.⁴¹

Whitman does not distinguish, therefore, between his subject matter and his form. He attempts a kind of mimesis of democratic life through “the movement of his verses.” Indeed, the prose of this passage is not dissimilar to the poetry of Leaves of Grass, so that it is easy to see why he would agree with Hiram Corson that his poetry has a “tendency toward impassioned prose.”⁴² Another contemporary reviewer notes that “the external form” of Leaves of Grass is startling, and by no means seductive, to English ears” because it “is written in wild, irregular, unrhymed, almost unmetrical ‘lengths.’ ”⁴³ This wild, unbound meter is for Whitman a mirror of the American ethos, which is itself wild and unbound—democratic.

In addition to Whitman’s all-encompassing “I” and his mimetic form, his use of the catalog also points to his democratic ideal as a guiding aesthetic principle. In fact, in the passage I quoted above from his self-review, Whitman defines his poetic “movements” as “the sweeping movement of great currents of living people,” which he then exemplifies in a prose catalog. Many other such catalogs show up throughout Leaves of Grass, some spanning several pages. In section 16 of Song of Myself, for example, Whitman catalogs “every known variety of man and woman” (to borrow a phrase from Bernard in Woolf’s Waves), including the opium-eater, the prostitute, the President, and three stately matrons. He concludes this rather comprehensive list by saying: “And these tend inward to me, and I tend outward to them, / And such as it is to be of these more or less I am, / And of these one and all I weave the song of myself.”⁴⁴ Whitman’s democratic ideal, therefore, just as it does not privilege the president over the prostitute, also does not privilege the individual over the mass or vice-versa. Individuals retain their individuality in community, and, in fact, are even more themselves in community than they are separately. Concerning this phenomenon, George Kateb writes (in the voice of Whitman), “All the personalities that I encounter, I already am: That is to say, I could become or could have become something like what others are; that necessarily means, in turn, that all of us are always indefinitely more than we actually are. I am potentially all personalities, and we equally are infinite potentialities.”⁴⁵ I would add (or further emphasize) that for Whitman “all of us are always […] more than we actually are” when we are in community, when we are a part of his democratic ideal.

Whitman in The Waves: Rhetorical Inclusion

This same catalog presents a point of connection between Whitman and The Waves. Bernard, the aspiring writer in the novel (he always aspires, never attains), bears many similarities to Whitman; however, though he often initially sounds like Whitman, his perspective is usually slightly different from Whitman’s and Woolf’s democratic paradigm, and this allows Woolf to criticize ways in which features of ideal democracy frequently become misconstrued.

While on the train home from school in the beginning of the novel, Bernard muses, “I do not believe in separation. We are not single. Also I wish to add to my collection of valuable observations upon the true nature of human life. My book will certainly run to many volumes embracing every known variety of man and woman.”⁴⁶ This passage sounds like much of Leaves of Grass—one might even easily mistake it for Whitman out of context. Bernard believes people are more themselves in community than outside of it. Like Whitman’s catalog, Bernard’s book will “embrace” (how Whitmanic) all types of people. In its context, however, Bernard’s statement is not as similar to Whitman as it initially appears. Prior to this passage, Bernard has been thinking about the entrance of another person into his cart: “An elderly and apparently prosperous man, a traveler, now gets in. And I at once wish to approach him; I instinctively dislike the sense of his presence, cold, unassimilated, among us.”⁴⁷ The word “unassimilated” is the key. Whitman finds unity in individuality, but Bernard is looking for “assimilation”—he desires unity through conformity. Although Bernard’s philosophy is close to the Whitmanic ideal, it contains fundamental differences. Bernard wants, not to give to and receive from the man on the train, but to obliterate any sense of this intruder’s personality, autonomy, or individuality.

For Woolf, as for Whitman, the poetic self that is all-inclusive is quite different from what Bernard has in mind. For instance, when she discusses reading a book by Mr A in A Room of One’s Own, she writes:

But after reading a chapter or two a shadow seemed to lie across the page. It was a straight dark bar, a shadow shaped something like the letter ‘I.’ One began dodging this way and that to catch a glimpse of the landscape behind it. Whether that was indeed a tree or a woman I was not quite sure. Back one was always hailed to the letter ‘I.’ One began to be tired of ‘I.’⁴⁸

This is the “I” of assimilation, the “I” that, instead of drawing everything into itself equally, attempts to reflect itself onto everything such that it all seems to look alike and no individual is distinguishable from another. D. H. Lawrence, responding to Whitman’s assertion that “of these one and all I weave the song of myself,” writes: “Do you? Well then, it just shows you haven’t got any self. It’s a mush, not a woven thing. A hotch-potch, not tissue. Your self. Oh, Walter, Walter, what have you done with it? What have you done with yourself? With your own individual self? For it sounds as if it had all leaked out of you, leaked into the universe.”⁴⁹ Lawrence laments Whitman’s loss of personal self, not recognizing that Whitman actually desires the hotch-potch. Whitman’s “I” both gives and receives, and it does so equally; he retains individuality within community. Thus, Woolf does not direct her concern that the masculine “I” will “obliterate” the feminine toward Whitman; rather, her concern is directed toward Mr A, Lawrence, Bernard, and their ilk.⁵⁰ These authors desire assimilation, an outworking of an imperialist ideology that, according to Renée Dickinson, “enacts violence ideologically by reducing its subject to an object and by placing it within the realm of the Other.”⁵¹ These Others are those who will not assimilate, who will not lose their autonomy. Their failure to assimilate (willingly or otherwise) results in expulsion from the community, whose members now look on them with derision.

The subject of Bernard’s scrutiny on the train has been made an Other, but his characteristics seem oddly concordant with what we might expect the British imperial ideal to be. He is, first, a he. He is also elderly and wealthy. If to Bernard this man is an Other, then what or who could Bernard’s ideal be? Percival fills this role, at least partially. Percival is partially Bernard’s imperial ideal because, more than Percival, Bernard is his own ideal. From the very beginning of the novel, Bernard has been thinking about what he will say to his biographer once he becomes a great writer. However, he never actually writes anything. And yet, despite his comic absurdity, Woolf gives him the entire stage at the end of the novel. Is this an artistic depiction of the masculine overshadowing “I?” I am inclined to think so. Bernard takes for himself the entire final chapter of the book, not allowing anyone else to speak. He has become the “poet” of the status quo, the elegizer of the empire, the advocate of assimilation. Of the conclusion to the novel, Renée Dickinson writes: “Despite ending with an episodic chapter solely in Bernard’s voice, the novel proposes that there is yet a more powerful and persistent voice that is beyond the containment of the narrative and that, through its cyclical and perpetual nature in the elements of the solar and oceanic repetition, is one that will survive even Bernard’s attempts to conquer death.”⁵² If Dickinson is correct, then Woolf allows Bernard to take center stage at the novel’s conclusion not only to show how he as a representative of colonialism attempts to overshadow others, but also to show that despite his attempts to do so, another power is even greater than his colonial “I.”

Nevertheless, all of the six main characters in The Waves laud and revere Percival. “Bernard and his friends idolize Percival, the violent last of the British imperialists,” according to Jane Marcus; “Percival embodies their history, and Bernard, the man of letters, ensures by his elegies to Percival that this tale, the romance of the dead brother/lover in India, is inscribed in the story of modern Britain.”⁵³ While in a British regiment in India, Percival one day notices an overturned cart and attempts to right it. Here is Bernard’s account:

But now, behold, Percival advances; Percival rides a flea-bitten mare, and wears a sun-helmet. By applying the standards of the West, by using the violent language that is natural to him, the bullock-cart is righted in less than five minutes. The Oriental problem is solved. He rides on; the multitude cluster round him, regarding him as if he were—what indeed he is—a God.⁵⁴

The very notion that Percival might solve “the oriental problem” by righting a cart and thereby prove himself to be a God is clearly absurd. That Bernard, the (would-be) poet, should accept this business—that Percival might stand apart from the rest of humanity in some way—this contradicts the democratic visions of Whitman and Woolf at their most fundamental level.

But does Bernard accept this perspective? Woolf is clearly ironizing the imperial project through Bernard’s voice, but is Bernard aware of the absurdity of his words (and thus their irony), or does he think that Percival really is a God for solving the oriental problem by righting a cart while riding a flea-bitten mare? If he intends to create this absurd picture, then perhaps his views of democracy have shifted and become more in line with the Whitmanian ideal. After all, when he was skeptical of the man on the train, he was a child, but when he discusses Percival’s solution to the oriental problem, he is at university. He does say in his long monologue at the end of the novel, “For I changed and changed; was Hamlet, was Shelley, was the hero, whose name I now forget, of a novel by Dostoevsky; was for a whole term, incredibly, Napoleon; but was Byron chiefly.”⁵⁵ However, his “I,” his ego, is not yet inclusive, and he continues to change: “I rose and walked away—I, I, I; not Byron, not Shelley, Dostoevsky, but I, Bernard. I even repeated my own name once or twice.”⁵⁶ Bernard’s “I” does not in the end become the inclusive “I” of Whitman; rather, it becomes the tall, over-shadowing “I” of Mr A. Though he has changed, Bernard has not come any closer to the Whitman–Woolf democratic ideal. Just as Woolf parodies British imperialist ideology through Percival, she also ironizes the egotistical sublime through Bernard, and through both she paints a picture of democratic pretensions gone awry.

Whitman in The Waves: Psychological Inclusion

At this point one might question my exclusive focus on Bernard. There are, after all, five other important characters in the novel. It is Bernard’s subjectivity, though, that washes over the reader in the final chapter of the book when the other characters have fallen silent. It is Bernard to whom Woolf has given the task of summing up. Bernard is an apt choice, for it is he, finally, who says, “[T]his is not one life; nor do I always know if I am man or woman, Bernard or Neville, Louis, Susan, Jinny or Rhoda—so strange is the contact of one with another.”⁵⁷ Bernard recognizes his function “as observing eye and interpreter seeing things on the periphery of life unseen by the others, glimpsing inarticulate motives and relationships,” as Jean Alexander puts it,⁵⁸ for he is a poet in the mode of Wordsworth who is “endued with more lively sensibility,” and so forth, than the average man. And, as we have seen, Bernard is never very far from truly Whitmanian pretense. From this perspective he presumes to offer the final précis and explain “the meaning of [his] life.”⁵⁹ Bernard comes close near the end of the novel to Whitmanian inclusivity:

And now I ask, ‘Who am I?’ I have been talking of Bernard, Neville, Jinny, Susan, Rhoda and Louis. Am I all of them? Am I one and distinct? I do not know. We sat here together. But now Percival is dead, and Rhoda is dead; we are divided; we are not here. Yet I cannot find any obstacle separating us. There is no division between me and them. As I talked I felt, ‘I am you.’ This difference we make so much of, this identity we so feverishly cherish, was overcome.⁶⁰

Once again, although this passage may initially seem similar to Whitman in many respects, the “I” of Bernard serves, not to include Neville, Jinny, Susan, Rhoda, and Louis, but to overshadow them. His perspective is difficult to understand because on the one hand he recognizes his unity with the others, but on the other hand he desires to be separate and distinct from them.

Both Whitman and Woolf share this difficult perspective of unity. In a now-famous letter to G. L. Dickinson, Woolf writes, “I did mean that in some vague way we are the same person and not separate people. The six characters were supposed to be one.”⁶¹ These six personae are, on one level, six parts of a single mind. The mind, made up of its distinct parts, is an appropriate metaphor for democracy, not merely as an interesting thought exercise or artistic enterprise, but also as an issue of great personal significance for both writers. In a notebook entry Whitman writes (as quoted by Thomas Gardner), “ ‘I cannot understand the mystery, but I am always conscious of myself as two—as my soul and I: and I reckon it is the same with all men and women.’ Or, in a slightly different formulation: ‘behind all the faculties of the human being, as the sight, the other senses and even the emotions and the intellect, stands the real power, the mystical identity, the real I or Me or You.’ ”⁶² These passages are remarkably similar to another passage in Woolf’s letter to G. L. Dickinson: “I come to feel more and more how difficult it is to collect oneself into one Virginia; even though the special Virginia in whose body I live for the moment is violently susceptible to all sorts of separate feelings.”⁶³ Both Whitman and Woolf are aware of “the mystical identity” that comprises “all sorts of separate feelings” and personalities, and their sense of the mind as a kind of interior democracy finds artistic representation in Bernard’s role as summarizer of the many voices in The Waves.

Bernard, however, does not long remain certain that he “cannot find any obstacle separating” him from the other five characters: “But now Percival is dead, and Rhoda is dead; we are divided.” Bernard realizes on the final page of the novel that “Death is the enemy” because death has managed to tear asunder his community.⁶⁴ According to Leonard Woolf, death “was always near the surface of Virginia’s mind, the contemplation of death. It was part of the deep imbalance of her mind.”⁶⁵ Whitman’s “I,” however, is even able to embrace Death in section 49 of Song of Myself:

And as to you Death, and you bitter hug of mortality, it is idle to try to alarm me. […]

And as to you Corpse I think you are good manure, but that does not offend me […].

And as to you Life I reckon you are the leavings of many deaths,

(No doubt I have died myself ten thousand times before).⁶⁶

For Whitman, death is just a part of his inclusivity—his “I,” expansive as it is, contains even death, against which Bernard feels he must rebel because, though death is in many ways the great Assimilator, its assimilation is opposed directly to Bernard’s imperial belief that the sun sets neither on the British Empire nor on his ego. And where Woolf was ultimately overcome by thoughts of death (as, indeed, her biography bears out), Whitman is able to embrace it. He does not attempt to fight it the way that Bernard does when he says, “Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!”⁶⁷ Bernard’s resolution is, in fact, merely a sign of his self-deception. By separating him from his community, Death has already vanquished him. Whitman does not fight it because he knows that to fight it at all is ultimately to yield and become vanquished.

Conclusion: Redefining Democracy

Whitman thus redefines the parameters of democracy such that it includes even death. Democracy becomes, then, “a force of nature, an antidiscriminatory law manifested in the fullness of the natural world,” according to LeMaster and Kummings.⁶⁸ And what is more natural than life and death? Yet Whitman chooses to portray these imposing themes not only in the grand language of section 49 but also in the minutiae of everyday life, for it is from such particulars that, according to Geoffrey Hill, democracy derives its potency and spontaneity. Spontaneity is, as Hill writes, “the contexture in which the simple is simply rejoiced in, and which can leave the standard affirmations of belief […] looking stranded if not useless and wasted. […] ‘Spontaneity’ is, in a sense indifferent, as all power considered in the abstract is indifferent.”⁶⁹ Hill continues: “And there is some danger in the fact that […] happiness, spontaneity, and indifferency are equally ciphers of potency, with an exponential range of implications for the political imagination.”⁷⁰ Hill speaks specifically of Whitman here, but we can see that this notion of “the simple” being “simply rejoiced in” is precisely one of the aspects most commonly noted in the work of Virginia Woolf, and through its potency, it necessarily eschews cant (“the standard affirmations of belief”). Mrs. Dalloway provides an excellent example of rejoicing in the mundane in its very first sentence: “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.”⁷¹ What could be more simple? What more mundane? And yet, how Woolf rejoices in its simplicity. Through simply rejoicing in this simple moment (and Mrs. Dalloway is, in a very basic sense, a collection of such moments), Woolf is able to avoid the kind of cant she accuses other authors of in essays like “Mr. Bennet and Mrs. Brown.”

This notion of “the simple” being “simply rejoiced in,” however, might also seem at odds with Woolf, the modernist innovator and experimentalist, who, according to Neil Heims, “repeatedly redefined the scope and capacities of the novel and drew it further and further away from the characteristic form it had assumed in the nineteenth century.”⁷² However, Woolf both rejoices in the mundane and expresses it experimentally. In Orlando, Woolf expresses the notion this way: “[T]he most ordinary conversation is often the most poetic, and the most poetic is precisely that which cannot be written down.”⁷³ Woolf’s experimentation is in the way she attempts to write down the unwriteable. The old forms simply will not do, but perhaps some new form will. So in The Waves, one of her most experimental novels, she turns to Whitman, another innovator who also rejoices in the mundane. In section 3 of “Children of Adam,” for instance, Whitman writes of “a common farmer” who, “[w]hen he went with his five sons and many grand-sons to hunt or fish, you would pick him out as the most beautiful and vigorous of the gang.”⁷⁴ This is a common farmer who is the most beautiful and vigorous, not a celebrity or a model or a president but a normal old man. Through such commonnesses Whitman creates in Leaves of Grass a “word of reality.”⁷⁵

Whitman thus provides a model for Woolf. He is one of his own “beginners,” who are “simultaneously begetters, initiators, novices, learners, tyros.”⁷⁶ When Woolf needed a new form for expressing the ordinary, she looked to Whitman who had done just that. His “development of his long-lined free verse and his absorptive catalogues that melded presidents and prostitutes in the same line were all part of his attempt to break out of the discriminating poetry of the past and open literature to a democratic sensibility.”⁷⁷ Woolf uses this model to critique the political problems prevalent in her own day and to offer a vision of what democracy would look like in the modern world. However, Woolf is less optimistic about this vision than Whitman. She shows through Bernard just how difficult it is to walk the fine line of democracy between anarchy and assimilation. Nevertheless, Whitman and Woolf share a vision that seeks to reveal the necessity of a community built on unity in diversity. This vision, ultimately, if it is to be put into words at all, must be put into new words in a new form. Bernard, as close as he gets to this ideal, recognizes this and says, “I need a howl; a cry.”⁷⁸ Whitman as well realizes this and writes, “I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, / I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.”⁷⁹

¹ Virginia Woolf, Granite and Rainbow, ed. Leonard Woolf (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1958), 231.

² Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader (New York: Harcourt, 1953), 1.

³ Ibid.

⁴ Ibid.

⁵ Ibid., 2.

⁶ Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), 408.

⁷ Ibid.

⁸ Walt Whitman, Poetry and Prose (New York: Library of America, 1996), 14.

⁹ Virginia Woolf, The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 2: 1912–1918, ed. Andrew McNeillie (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987), 81–82.

¹⁰ Ibid., 80.

¹¹ Ibid.

¹² Ibid., 81.

¹³ Ibid.

¹⁴ Ibid.

¹⁵ Ibid., 82. I have kept the quotation exactly as Woolf has it except for some minor adjustments to keep the formatting consistent with my own. The original passage appears on pages 24–25 of Poetry and Prose.

¹⁶ Quentin Bell, Virginia Woolf: A Biography (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972), 190.

¹⁷ Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (Orlando, FL: Harvest, 2006), 5.

¹⁸ Woolf, The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 2: 1912-1918, 80.

¹⁹ Woolf, Three Guineas, 169–70.

²⁰ Ibid., 222. This is one of several poems entitled “Thought,” which appeared in By the Roadside in the deathbed edition of Leaves of Grass (Poetry and Prose, 414). It was first published as a part of the “Thought” sequence in 1860.

²¹ Ibid., 170.

²² Melba Cuddy-Keane, Virginia Woolf, the Intellectual, and the Public Sphere (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 42.

²³ Ibid., 45.

²⁴ Woolf, Three Guineas, 222.

²⁵ James Dougherty, Walt Whitman and the Citizen’s Eye (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993), xiii.

²⁶ M. Jimmie Killingsworth, The Cambridge Introduction to Walt Whitman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 14.

²⁷ David S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 38.

²⁸ Ibid.

²⁹ Ibid.

³⁰ Walt Whitman, Poetry and Prose (New York: Library of America, 1996), 946–47.

³¹ Ibid., 943.

³² Garry Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), 40.

³³ Ibid., 38.

³⁴ Ibid.

³⁵ Whitman, Poetry and Prose, 947.

³⁶ William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, ed. R. L. Brett and A. R. Jones (London: Methuen, 1968), 255.

³⁷ Whitman, Poetry and Prose, 14.

³⁸ Horace Traubel, “Forward,” in An American Primer, Walt Whitman (Stevens Point, WI: Holy Cow!, 1987), vi.

³⁹ Kenneth M. Price, Walt Whitman: The Contemporary Reviews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 9.

⁴⁰ Ibid.

⁴¹ Ibid., 10.

⁴² C. Carroll Hollis, Language and Style in Leave of Grass (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983), 28. Walt Whitman, Daybooks and Notebooks, Vol. II: Daybooks, December 1881–1891, ed. William White (New York: New York University Press, 1978), 353.

⁴³ Price, Walt Whitman: The Contemporary Reviews, 50.

⁴⁴ Whitman, Poetry and Prose, 202–3.

⁴⁵ George Kateb, “Walt Whitman and the Culture of Democracy,” in A Political Companion to Walt Whitman, ed. John E. Seery (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2011), 25.

⁴⁶ Virginia Woolf, The Waves (Orlando, FL: Harvest, 1959), 68.

⁴⁷ Ibid., 67.

⁴⁸ Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (Orlando, FL: Harvest, 1989), 99–100.

⁴⁹ D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (New York: Penguin, 1977), 173.

⁵⁰ Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 100.

⁵¹ Renée Dickinson, Female Embodiment and Subjectivity in the Modernist Novel: The Corporeum of Virginia Woolf and Olive Moore (New York: Routledge, 2009), 53.

⁵² Ibid., 21.

⁵³ Jane Marcus, “Britannia Rules The Waves,” in Decolonizing Tradition: New Views of Twentieth-Century ‘British' Literary Canon, ed. Karen R. Lawrence (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 144.

⁵⁴ Woolf, The Waves, 136.

⁵⁵ Ibid., 249.

⁵⁶ Ibid., 253.

⁵⁷ Ibid., 281.

⁵⁸ Jean Alexander, The Venture of Form in the Novels of Virginia Woolf (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat, 1974), 159.

⁵⁹ Woolf, The Waves, 238.

⁶⁰ Ibid., 289.

⁶¹ Virginia Woolf, The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 4: 1929-1931, ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 397.

⁶² Thomas Gardner, Discovering Ourselves in Whitman: The Contemporary American Long Poem (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 9.

⁶³ Woolf, The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 4: 1929-1931, 397.

⁶⁴ Woolf, The Waves, 297.

⁶⁵ Leonard Woolf, The Journey Not the Arrival Matters: An Autobiography of the Years 1939 to 1969 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1969), 73.

⁶⁶ Whitman, Poetry and Prose, 245.

⁶⁷ Woolf, The Waves, 297.

⁶⁸ J. R. LeMaster and Donald D. Cummings, Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia (New York: Garland, 1998), 173.

⁶⁹ Geoffrey Hill, Collected Critical Writings, ed. Kenneth Haynes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 511.

⁷⁰ Ibid.

⁷¹ Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (Orlando, FL: Harvest, 1981), 3.

⁷² Neil Heims, “Recomposing Reality: An Introduction to the Work of Virginia Woolf,” in Virginia Woolf, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 2005), 67.

⁷³ Virginia Woolf, Orlando: A Biography, ed. Mark Hussey (Orlando, FL: Harvest, 2006), 186.

⁷⁴ Whitman, Poetry and Prose, 252.

⁷⁵ Ibid., 49.

⁷⁶ Hill, Collected Critical Writings, 517.

⁷⁷ LeMaster and Kummings, Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia, 173.

⁷⁸ Woolf, The Waves, 295.

⁷⁹ Whitman, Poetry and Prose, 247.