Virginia Woolf's "Wild England": George Borrow, autoethnography, and Between the Acts.(Virginia Woolf's novel Between the Acts and George Borrow's Lavengro)

Publication: Studies in the Novel

Publication Date: 22-JUN-07

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George Borrow's domestically focused Lavengro (1851) influenced Virginia Woolf's last novel Between the Acts (1941) in its capacity as an autoethnographic, autocritical portrait of England. Faced in the late 1930s with a fascist nationalism that would challenge the logic of her fierce attachment to home and nation, Woolf found in the anglocentric work of the early Victorian British translator, amateur ethnographer, philologist, gypsiologist, eccentric, and travel-writer-cum-picaresque-novelist a template that made possible a reinvention of the idea of home and "the heart of England" in a space not delimited by mainstream nationalist topography, "a national space outside the culture of colonialism" (Gikandi 194). The hybrid quality of Borrow's work-the elliptical nature of his prose, his resistance to disciplinarity, his intensely personal approach, and the playful and spontaneous tone of his portrait of England and the English in Lavengro--appealed to Woolf as she sought to build a tribute to her native land that was free of the jingoism and the suffocating nostalgia that such an enterprise risked. (1)

Now little read, Borrow (1803-1881) was a figure much loved in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. He influenced George Eliot's poem "The Spanish Gypsy," and figures as diverse as Woolf's father Leslie Stephen, Matthew Arnold, French writer Prosper Merimee, and English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams admired him. He was an inspiration for the painter Augustus John and John's Bohemian crowd-which included Wyndham Lewis and Lady Ottoline Morrell (Tickner 58, 62; Nicholson 242)--and for Vita Sackville-West and Violet Trefusis, for whom Borrow's Romani provided a coded language of love (Glendinning 93). Not only did Virginia Woolf read Borrow, but also her husband Leonard and sister Vanessa Bell (53); E. M. Forster refers to him in Howards End (88), and Ford Madox Ford weaves extracts from Borrow's Lavengro into his poem "The Cuckoo and The Gipsy." D. H. Lawrence mentions Borrow in his letters (Moore 81; Hyde, Borrow 67) and James Joyce adapts names and titles from Borrow's books in Finnegans Wake (210, 472, 600).

The broad appeal of Borrow's writing at this period lay in his provision of a model of the English landscape for those who were fleeing stultifying propriety, strict sexual and artistic codes, and the insularity that accompanied the threat of war. As Borrow biographer Michael Collie has noted,

In the years that followed the publication of The Romany Rye [1857, the sequel to Lavengro] this assertion of Borrow's that a bohemian existence was possible had a great appeal, because it was an imaginative escape route from Victorian prudery, jingoism, class consciousness and parochialism. The man of the road was a patriot, but one who had freed himself from those aspects of Empire that were a blight upon English life. (228)

Borrow's work represented a pastoral nostalgia at odds with that of imperialist rhetoric.

Recent arguments for the existence of an "anthropological turn" in English modernist writing of the late 1930s and 1940s are useful in terms of framing an analysis of Woolf's turn in Between the Acts to Borrow's amateur ethnography (see Esty 2, 9). In A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England, Jed Esty argues convincingly that in the face of contracting imperial territories, T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, and Woolf sought a means to "reenchant" (41 ; see Buzard 11) England, that is to reassert cultural integrity at home (41). Esty's analysis counters conventional readings of work of the period as still primarily committed to cosmopolitanism and to the "redemptive agency of art" (2). He contends that this retrenchment, this effort to revitalize English culture--"a transition from metropolitan literature to national culture" (107); a turn "from tribal and tropical rituals to homespun and folkloric ones" (54)--was characterized by the adaptation of empire-inspired anthropological thinking to the home culture in a kind of autocritical autoethnography (see Esty 46). In his reading of Woolf's Between the Acts, Esty focuses on the ritual qualities of the neo-traditional pageant play--its capacity "not just ... [to] rehearse the tropes of Merrie Englande but to gauge the vitality of native rituals" (55)--and its bringing to the fore, especially in its closing scenes, the question around which the novel as a whole is built: how to portray "the community to the community, [how to perform] an anthropology of the here and now" (93). Esty argues that although Woolf's deployment of the conservative pageant form is subversive and parodic--the common reading of the pageant--it nonetheless betrays in this way a commitment to an integrated culture.

Shifting the focus away from the pageant play, I propose Borrow's playful portrait of England and the English in Lavengro as an alternative source for Woolf's anthropological thinking, for her efforts to portray "the community to the community" and for her autoethnographic turn in Between the Acts. (2) In an attempt to reconcile her desire to celebrate England with her horror of militant nationalism, Woolf borrows from Lavengro not only the foreign quality of the domestic landscape, a kind of 'othering' of England, but also Borrow's deployment of a nomadic ethnographer figure with a sharp autocritical capacity. Woolf also creates her own version of Lavengro's ethnographic interviews with eccentric Englishmen and women as she engages, after Borrow, the anthropological trope of nomadism. Borrow's England represents neither the "green and inviolate core" of empire nor "its lost inner essence" (Esty 47) and in this regard, it proved a fertile place for Woolf to start thinking about a new native culture. While a focus on the influence of Borrow's amateur autoethnography largely supports Esty's hypothesis about an anthropological turn in England in the late 1930s, the eccentric and nuanced nationalism of Borrow's work provides a context for the ambivalence that Esty detects in the anglocentrism of Between the Acts.

Prompted by Borrow's attention to interstitial spaces, to contested places as constitutive of an authentic picture of his native country, and to the role characters play in redefining spatial relationships, my focus is the topography and the social geography of the England in Between the Acts. I explore the implications of Collie's statement, which sets a mobile patriotism in opposition to a static jingoism. My reading of Between the Acts as a Borrovian domestic travel narrative, as a kind of picaresque novel in which homelessness and vagabondage are central figures, challenges conventional interpretations of the novel as a work about house-dwelling and about physical stasis (see Peach 197, Hussey 150, and Esty 88). Such a focus is also suggestive (although somewhat beyond the bounds of this essay) in terms of situating Woolf's last novel as part of a tradition of nineteenth-century domestic social commentary that includes the work of Henry Mayhew, for example, or as contributing to a tradition of early-twentieth-century English domestic travel narrative that incorporates works such as Edward Thomas's The Heart of England (1906) and Ford Madox Ford's trilogy England and the English (1905-1907).

Borrow's Lavengro: The Scholar, the Gypsy, the Priest

Borrow's domestic ethnography was shaped by his experience abroad. Before settling in England, he traveled extensively, spending long periods in both Russia (1833-1835) and Spain (1835-1838). In the course of these journeys, he co-edited a Manchu translation of the New Testament, translated Pushkin and Russian folktales (published in 1835) and wrote his Spanish Gypsy book The Zincali (1841). Despite his questionable adherence to Christian tenets, the book that established Borrow's reputation was The Bible in Spain (1842), an account of his travels through Spain and Portugal as a Christian missionary. Boasting a knowledge, wobbly by all accounts, of some thirty languages, the Zelig-like Borrow conversed with those he visited as much as possible in their own language (Collie 24; Thomas 318).

The best known of Borrow's work, and the work on which I focus here, is the anglocentric Lavengro : The Scholar, the Gypsy, the Priest. In this semi-autobiographical work, the narrator, named Lavengro (Romani for "word master") by his Gypsy acquaintances, recounts his itinerant childhood as the son of a soldier, his haphazard education as an amateur philologist and ethnographer, and his mostly unsuccessful stint as author and reviewer in London. The book records his decision to take to the road and work as a tinker and blacksmith and his stay in the dingle with the never realized love interest of the work, Isopel Berners. Borrow's protagonist is a rebel and an outsider who, according to his father, "entertains an opinion of his own ... one which militates against all established authority" (125). In love with wild and out-of-the-way places, Lavengro shuns conventional home life and a classical education. He gravitates, to the chagrin of his parents, toward itinerancy and the cultivation of obscure, minor languages, tongues "[b]roken, corrupted, and half in ruins" (110) spoken on the peripheries or in isolated pockets of his own British Isles--among them Scottish, Irish, Welsh, Romani, and Armenian--the roots of which Lavengro believes can be found in Romani. Unlike his artist brother, the good son, foreign cities do not tempt Lavengro. He asks his brother, "Didst thy blood never glow at the mention of thy native land?" (130). Lavengro senses possibility in the domestic. This sentiment occurs in Borrow's prefatory assertion to Lavengro where he writes, "there are no countries in the world less known by the British than these selfsame British Islands, or where more strange...

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