Jane Harrison and lesbian plots: The absent lover in Virginia Woolf's The Waves.

 
   as the current answers don't do, one has to grope for a new 
   one; & the process of discarding the old, when one is by no 
   means certain what to put in their pace, is a sad one. Still, ... 
   what answers do Arnold Bennett or Thackeray, for instance, 
   suggest? Happy ones--satisfactory solutions--answers one 
   would accept, if one had the least respect for one's soul? 
 
   Virginia Woolf, Diary 1:259 

In 1927 when planning for The Waves, Virginia Woolf wrote about her intention to invent "a new kind of play" that resulted in a work praised as an "exemplary high modernist text," "taking to the brink her experimentalism in plot, lyric, and character" (Goldman 6, 21). However, unlike male modernists of her generation, Woolf's experimentalism is informed by a feminist and lesbian mindset; in regard to gender, for example, she writes that men's and women's different experiences necessitate "not only marked differences of plot and incident, but infinite differences in selection, method and style" ("Women Novelists" 29). Earlier, Woolf centered her objections to the writings of Arnold Bennett and his kind on their inability to accurately portray the life of a woman, the exemplary Mrs. Brown. However, Woolf singles out as most inadequate heterosexual love stories--"the incessant, the remorseless analysis of falling into love and falling out of love" ("The Narrow Bridge of Art" 19); and in A Room of One's Own, when she suggests a plot that might inaugurate a new women's literary tradition, she suggests a lesbian plot about how "Chloe likes Olivia" (88). (1) Thus, to Beth Daugherty's well-argued insight that Woolf's feminism informs her rejection of novel conventions, I add that it is Woolf's lesbianism, together with her feminism, that inspires her narrative innovations in The Waves, as well as her other fiction.

In The Waves Woolf's search for a woman's narrative tradition led her to model her "play-poem" on the woman-centered ritual drama described by Jane Harrison. Harrison (1850-1928), classicist and archaeologist, was one of the most influential scholars of her generation. Among the first women to graduate from Newnham College, Harrison was also a charismatic lecturer at Cambridge, where she became the center of the Cambridge Group, from 1900 to 1922. The Cambridge Group, which also included Francis M. Cornford and Gilbert Murray, developed theories about the ritual origins of myth, drama, and literature and founded myth criticism. Woolf listed Harrison among the great women in history along with Jane Austen, Emily Bronte, and George Eliot ("Intellectual Status" 339), and in A Room of One's Own, Harrison appears as the "famous scholar ... J--H--" (17). The Hogarth Press published Reminiscences of a Student's Life (1925), and Woolf owned Epilegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (1921), Aspects', Aorists and the Classical Tripos (1919), and Ancient Art and Ritual (1913), which was inscribed as a Christmas gift from Harrison in 1923 (Marcus, Virginia Woolf and the Languages' 148).

Thus Woolf thought highly of Harrison and of her work: in a 1923 letter Woolf describes her as "gallant" and "sublime" and praises her "superb high thinking" (Letters 3: 58). Woolf's diaries record several visits to Harrison and her life partner, Hope Mirrlees, including an afternoon she spent walking about Cambridge with Harrison discussing "tragedy from start to finish, and Choristers" (Letters 1: 498). Additionally, the kinship between Woolf and Harrison entailed more than a casual friendship and respect for each other's intellectual accomplishments, for Woolf found in Harrison a sensibility and a point of view similar to her own. Like Woolf, who proudly defined herself as "outsider" (Diary 5: 189) and "revolutionist" ("Sketch of the Past" 126), Harrison took a rebel stance toward her time, once having described herself as a "philosophical Radical with a dash of the Bolshevik" (Mirsky 5). Both preferred collectivity over individualism, opposed heroic masculinity, and were passionately anti-war. (2)

Each in her own way resisted compulsory heterosexuality: Woolf-through her companionate marriage with Leonard and extra-marital relationship with her lover, Vita Sackville-West, and Harrison through spinsterhood and her nearly twenty-year intimate relationship with Hope Mirrlees. To Woolf, Harrison's relationship with Mirrlees was indisputably lesbian: in 1925, she refers to Hope's "passion for Jane Harrison," and to their "billing and cooing together" (Letters 3: 200; 164). Both Woolf and Harrison could be described, in Harrison's terminology, as having "matriarchal soul[s]" ("The Pillar and the Maid" 4) (3) because they preferred women-centered communities and mystical fantasies over the heterosexual couple as real-life and literary ideal.

Woolf originally planned The Waves as a study of "some semi mystic very profound life of a woman," a book in which she would "come to terms with [her] mystical feelings" (Diary 3: 118; 203). Therefore, it is helpful for understanding Harrison's influence on this novel's exploration of ecstatic states to remember that both she and Woolf were atheists prone to mystical experiences (see also Froula). Like Woolf, Harrison was drawn toward "shadowy nameless intangible forces dwelling" below and behind the surface status quo (Our Debt xvii), "the pattern," in Woolf's language, "behind appearances" ("Sketch" 72-73). As Mirrlees notes, Harrison's entire career can be seen as a search for patterns, and like Woolf, Harrison insisted on the human rather than divine origins of ecstasy. Thus, for both, mystical experience led to a revelation of hidden patterns, not fusion with an abstract god--or goddess.

Harrison's gift for discovering patterns hidden behind the surfaces of art and everyday life contributed to her discovery of pre-Olympian fertility rites that she believed centered on women and generative emotions. According to Harrison, in pre-patriarchal communities, fertility rites centered on women and nature; in male-centered societies, art and ritual centered on the exploits and death of the male hero cut off from nature and, therefore, the regenerative powers of the old matriarchal rites. As Martha C. Carpentier notes, Harrison preferred the early pre-patriarchal fertility rituals over the religion of the Olympians: she disparaged Olympian myths for being too abstract, lacking the emotional dynamism and uncertainty that female-centered fertility rites derived from nature (29, 34, 46). In the Prolegomena, Harrison complains that the Olympians "are not the source of life nor are they its goal.... They are not one with the life that is in beasts and streams and wood as well as in man" (650).