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Dialogues@RU is published
annually
by the
Writing Program at
Rutgers, The State
University of New Jersey
Volume Three
Spring 2004
Finding “Being” through “Non-Being" - Page 1
by
Rachelle Wander
In an ever-expanding world, there are numerous ways in which to define identity. Writing is one form that serves as a method to express artistically a personal perception and self understanding, mostly in the form of autobiography. But what is the most accurate way in which one can present one’s identity? Through the exploration of modernist writer Virginia Woolf’s autobiography, Moments of Being, I examine one woman’s method of identity expression in order to better understand not only how one defines herself, but also how her concepts connect to everyday experiences in my own life. Through an exemplary presentation of her own life and work, Woolf’s unique style of subjectivity suggests an atypical autobiographical construction. She states her beliefs about what shapes meaning to life and how to discover the meaning. These discoveries prelude her reasons for recounting the specific experiences she incorporates into her works. Through her endeavor to create meaning to her life, Woolf explores her identity by creating a pattern between those moments that left powerful impacts upon her and those moments that connected one crucial incident to the next. By synthesizing daily life with potent events and past with present, Woolf creates her identity in a holistic fashion that encompasses not only her own self, but all those people and events that somehow unite within her life. Woolf’s concepts on her own existence and identity formation act as an archetype to anyone who seeks self-affirmation.
British novelist Virginia Woolf exemplifies her self-comprehension in her autobiography Moments of Being. Presented as a compilation of three separate sections (the last one being three accounts within a single chapter), and written during various stages of her life, Woolf reveals a solid self-perception in her ability to construct her past and understand how it affects her present. Posthumously, Woolf’s husband, Leonard Woolf, and her editor Jeanne Schulkind composed this collection of Woolf’s personal writing. Woolf wrote the first section, “Reminiscenses,” early in her career and intended the passage as a letter to her unborn niece. The last section, “The Memoir Club Contributions,” written during the height of her literary maturity, contains three separate anecdotes designed to be read aloud to the intimate group of writers that once formed this exclusive club. Woolf created the main body of the text, “A Sketch of the Past,” during the last few years of her life. Notably, Woolf begins and ends her career as an autobiographer, a fact that illustrates her own obsession for self-understanding as well as being a product of an autobiographical era (Albright 1). It also illustrates Woolf’s repeated effort to retrieve her past and the pattern that helps to grasp her present.
In order to appreciate Woolf’s abstract autobiographical writing, I must explore her framework for identity apprehension. In “A Sketch of the Past,” directly after Woolf introduces herself through several early childhood memories, she delves into what she calls her “own psychology” (70). Her “psychology” is a breakdown of a person’s life into two distinct classifications: “Moments of Being” and “moments of non-being” (70). She describes the more numerous moments of “non-being” as “cotton wool” or the day-to-day activities of life, such as eating, sleeping or conversing; she describes “being” as moments of “sudden violent shock[s]” or the anti-thesis to “cotton wool.”(71). Woolf elaborates on the power of “being” moments by explaining that they are a “blow from an enemy hidden behind the cotton wool of daily life; it is or will become a revelation of some order ; it is a token of some real thing behind appearances” (72). Therefore, these moments of “being” override those of “non-being”; they strive to apply meaning to life. In Woolf’s case, the only way to achieve a sense of these “shocks” is to write about them. Perhaps the most important concept in understanding Woolf’s identity is her need to write in order to form it. Woolf shows this by noting,
It proves that one’s life is not confined to one’s body and what says and does; one is living in relation to certain background rods and conceptions. Mine is that there is a pattern hid behind the cotton wool. And this conception affects me everyday. I prove this, now, by spending the morning writing, when I might be walking, running a shop, or learning to do something that will be useful if war comes. I feel that by writing I am doing what is far more necessary than anything else. (73)
This passage elucidates a desire to use her own recognition of “being” and “non-being” moments to uncover the “pattern” that forms her identity. She confesses that the only way in which she can investigate the pattern is by writing. She believes that the time she spends writing is the time when she is closest to forming her “being.” However, after introducing these two discrete types of “moments” she barely mentions them again throughout her project. This lack of actual reference between each experience and type of moment is essential to conceptualizing how Woolf employs an abstract method of writing in order to connect each recount to a type of moment. The acknowledgement that the two forms of moments exist is the basis for the narrations that follow her concepts on identity. After Woolf establishes how to look for her identity, only then she can freely write to conceptualize it.
Once Woolf starts to write about her life, she discusses feelings, moods, and thoughts from her early childhood. However, as she delves deeper into her life, there is an obvious subtraction of these personal descriptions, as her various relatives and their roles in her life begin to fill her pages. Though her attempt is to “extract a pattern from the cotton wool” (Gindin 324), nonetheless in this venture,
one often feels that something is missing, and that the missing thing is Virginia Woolf. It is as if this vast self attentiveness existed as camouflage and deception as for revelation. In the autobiographical writings, as in the novels, the reader is drenched in impalpable subjectivity, in which the subject is not a definite body or face but a watery medium. It is a kind of autobiography which seems, in mysterious ways, to exclude the author. (Albright 2)
Writer Daniel Albright’s observations of the lack of Virginia Woolf within her actual autobiography also set up her writing technique. This “mysterious” exclusion is due most likely to her belief that a person is made up of many selves, and various moments. Thus, she expresses herself by describing those people and events that molded her into Virginia Woolf. Her elusiveness happens because she masks her identity in the form of others who surrounded her as a child. This exclusion is due to her endeavor to explain her life of “non-being” by describing those who most influenced her developmental years. Those influencers assisted her manufacture of “non-being” moments, and only by identifying the “non-being” or “cotton wool” of her childhood can she recognize her “being.” Like theorist Nancy Chodorow explains, “a girl continues to experience herself as involved in issues of merging and separation, and in attachment characterized by primary identification and the fusion of identification and object choice” (Friedman 83). Although she seeks to identify with and separate from other family members besides her mother, as Chodorow’s concepts implies, this idea holds true to Woolf’s project. By describing her family and those that affected her most during her childhood, she not only attempts to “merge” and “separate” from them in order to grasp who Virginia is and how she became Virginia, but also, as literary critic James Gindin points out, to attain the pattern of “being” and “non-being” within her recounts of each family member.
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