Virginia
Woolf’s Idea of Privacy
Posted by
Joshua Rothman
These days, when we use the word “privacy,”
it usually has a political meaning. We’re concerned with other people and how
they might affect us. We think about how they could use information about us
for their own ends, or interfere with decisions that are rightfully ours. We’re
mindful of the lines that divide public life from private life. We have what
you might call a citizen’s sense of privacy.
That’s an important way to think about
privacy, obviously. But there are other ways. One of them is expressed very
beautifully in “Mrs. Dalloway,” in a famous scene early in the book. It’s a
flashback, from when Clarissa was a teen-ager. One night, she goes out for a
walk with some friends: two annoying boys, Peter Walsh and Joseph Breitkopf,
and a girl, Sally Seton. Sally is sexy, smart, Bohemian—possessed of “a sort of
abandonment, as if she could say anything, do anything.” The boys drift ahead,
lost in a boring conversation about Wagner, while the girls are left behind.
“Then came the most exquisite moment of her whole life passing a stone urn with
flowers in it.” Sally picks a flower from the urn and kisses Clarissa on the
lips:
The whole world might have turned upside down! The others disappeared;
there she was alone with Sally. And she felt that she had been given a present,
wrapped up, and told just to keep it, not to look at it—a diamond, something
infinitely precious, wrapped up, which, as they walked (up and down, up and
down), she uncovered, or the radiance burnt through, the revelation, the
religious feeling!
Woolf often conceives of life this way: as a
gift that you’ve been given, which you must hold onto and treasure but never
open. Opening it would dispel the atmosphere, ruin the radiance—and the
radiance of life is what makes it worth living. It’s hard to say just what
holding onto life without looking at it might mean; that’s one of the puzzles
of her books. But it has something to do with preserving life’s mystery; with
leaving certain things undescribed, unspecified, and unknown; with savoring
certain emotions, such as curiosity, surprise, desire, and anticipation. It
depends on an intensified sense of life’s preciousness and fragility, and on a
Heisenberg-like notion that, when it comes to our most abstract and spiritual
intuitions, looking too closely changes what we feel. It has to do, in other
words, with a kind of inner privacy, by means of which you shield yourself not
just from others’ prying eyes, but from your own. Call it an artist’s sense of
privacy.
Many people accept the idea that each of us has a
certain resolute innerness—a kernel of selfhood that we can’t share with
others. (Levin, at the end of “Anna Karenina,” calls it his “holy of holies,”
and says that, no matter how close he grows to the people around him, there
will always be “the same wall between my soul’s holy of holies and other
people, even my wife.”) What interested Woolf was the way that we become aware
of that innerness. We come to know it best, she thought, when we’re forced, at
moments of exposure, to shield it against the outside world.
There can be something enjoyable, even revelatory
about that feeling of self-protection, which is why we seek out circumstances
in which we can feel more acutely the contrast between the outside world and
our inner selves. Woolf was fascinated by city life—by the feeling of solitude-on-display
that the sidewalk encourages, and by the way that “street haunting,” as she called it,
allows you to lose and then find yourself in the rhythm of urban novelty and
familiarity. She was drawn to the figure of the hostess: the
woman-to-be-looked-at, standing at the top of the stairs, friendly to everyone,
who grows only more mysterious with her visibility. (One of the pleasures of
throwing a party, Woolf showed, is that it allows you to surprise yourself:
surrounded by your friends, the center of attention, you feel your separateness
from the social world you have convened.) She showed how parents, friends,
lovers, and spouses can become more unknowable over time, not less—there is a
core to their personhood that never gives itself up. Even as they put their
lives on display, she thought, artists thrive when they maintain a final
redoubt of privacy—a wellspring that remains unpolluted by the world outside.
“A thing there was that mattered; a thing, wreathed about with chatter,
defaced, obscured in her own life, let drop every day in corruption, lies,
chatter,” Clarissa thinks, at the end of “Mrs. Dalloway.” Of course, it’s the
chatter—the party—that helps her know that she has something to lose in the
first place.
There are costs and benefits to maintaining this kind
of inner privacy. About halfway through “Mrs. Dalloway,” Clarissa’s husband,
Richard, decides that, during his lunch hour, he’ll buy roses for Clarissa; his
plan is to walk home, hand them to her, and say, “I love you.” It’s an
unusually romantic thing for him to do, but, for whatever reason, he’s overcome
with the realization that it’s “a miracle he should have married Clarissa.”
Richard strides into the drawing room, gives her the flowers, but then finds
himself unable to say the words. He is elated, overflowing with love:
“Happiness is this, is this,” he thinks. A wave of feeling is cresting inside
him. But, despite his feelings, he can only speak about trivial things: lunch,
that night’s party, and their daughter’s tutor. Finally, he stands up to go.
Clarissa watches him. “He stood for a moment as if he were about to say
something,” Woolf writes, “and she wondered what? Why? There were the roses.”
As Richard takes his leave, Clarissa thinks:
There is a dignity in
people; a solitude; even between husband and wife a gulf; and that one must
respect … for one would not part with it oneself, or take it, against his will,
from one’s husband, without losing one’s independence, one’s
self-respect—something, after all, priceless.
It’s typical of Woolf to take a romantic scene and
make it steely—that’s the price, you might say, of inner privacy. Marriage,
love, and intimacy only take you so far; at the end of that path, you fall back
on the austere, solitary dignity of the inner life. And yet Clarissa prefers
austerity to intimacy. She thinks, from time to time, about Peter Walsh, who
was in love with her, and whom she might have married instead of Richard. Peter
was thoughtful, intellectual, romantic, passionate. He loved to talk, and took
her thoughts seriously. He was determined to know her, soul-to-soul. To people
who hold intimacy to be the highest good in a relationship, that’s a desirable
thing. “But with Peter everything had to be shared; everything gone into. And
it was intolerable,” Clarissa thinks. Years later, sitting in the park, she is
still rehearsing, in her mind, the arguments she and Peter once had: “Suddenly
it would come over her, If he were with me now what would he say?” Richard
gives her privacy, and, therefore, inner solitude; he lets her soul remain her
own. Of course, he never says “I love you.” Meanwhile, Peter thinks, of
Clarissa, that there has always been “this coldness, this woodenness, something
very profound in her … an impenetrability. Yet Heaven knows he loved her.” (The
case of Septimus Smith, which makes up roughly half of “Mrs. Dalloway,” shows
the saddest consequence of inner privacy: hurt to his core, Septimus remains
beyond the reach of even those who would help him.)
At the same time, the benefits of remaining
“impenetrable” can be profound. Clarissa, famously, buys the flowers herself,
and that allows her to enjoy the coolness, stillness, and beauty of the flower shop;
the same, Woolf suggests, happens in Clarissa’s inner life, where her
heightened feelings are allowed to stay pure, untouched. Even Peter, with time,
comes to regard himself in this way: “The compensation of growing old,” he
thinks, is that “the passions remain as strong as ever, but one has gained—at
last!—the power which adds the supreme flavour to existence,—the power of
taking hold of experience, of turning it around, slowly, in the light.” By
learning to leave your inner life alone, you learn to cultivate and appreciate
it.
And you gain another, strangely spiritual power: the
power to regard yourself abstractly. Instead of getting lost in the details of
your life, you hold onto the feelings, the patterns, the tones. You learn to
treasure those aspects of life without communicating them, and without ruining
them, for yourself, by analyzing them too much. Woolf suggests that those
treasured feelings might be the source of charisma: when Peter, seeing Clarissa
at her party, asks himself, “What is this terror? what is this ecstasy? … What
is it that fills me with extraordinary excitement?,” the answer might be that
it’s Clarissa’s radiance, never seen directly, but burning through. Clarissa,
meanwhile, lets her spiritual intuitions lift her a little above the moment.
Wandering through her lamp-lit garden, she sees her party guests: “She didn’t
know their names, but friends she knew they were, friends without names, songs
without words, always the best.” That’s the power of artist’s privacy. It
preserves the melodies otherwise drowned out by words, stories, information.
***
Woolf’s abstract, inner sense of privacy bears the
stamp, of course, of a very particular time and place (not to mention Woolf’s
very particular biography—she had an unusually rich hidden life). It’s indebted
to feminism, and to the realization that men, but not women, have long been
granted a right to solitude. It also flows from the particularly modernist idea
that there is a coherent, hidden, inner self from which art springs. Today, we
may be more likely to see art as a collaborative process—the product of a scene, rather than a person. We are
also, I suspect, especially aware of how much we rely upon on social networks
to help us know ourselves. In recent years, philosophers have argued that other people may know us better than we do.
To me, though, Woolf’s sense of privacy still feels
relevant; when I keep it in mind, I see it everywhere. Adelle Waldman’s novel “The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.” is, among
many other things, a gender-reversed retelling of the love story at the center
of “Mrs. Dalloway”: like Clarissa, Nate chooses the lover who can’t know him
over the lover who’s determined to. (He does this, in part, so that he can
continue to surprise himself—that is, continue to create.) Meanwhile, on Tumblr
and Facebook, we seek out the same private sociality that Woolf described.
Usually, we think of social media as a forum for exhibitionism. But,
inevitably, the extroverted cataloguing of everyday minutiae—meals, workouts,
thoughts about politics, books, and music—reaches its own limits; it ends up
emphasizing what can’t be shared. Talking so freely about your life helps you
to know the weight of those feelings which are too vague, or too spiritual, to
express—left unspoken and unexplored, they throw your own private existence
into relief. “Sharing” is, in fact, the opposite of what we do: like one of
Woolf’s hostesses, we rehearse a limited openness so that we can feel the
solidity of our own private selves.
Every now and then, too, you come across some artwork
that expresses Woolf’s sensibility in an altogether different idiom, refreshing
it. Since I first stumbled across it a few years ago, I’ve watched Lucinda
Williams’s 1989 performance of “Side of the
Road” hundreds of times. The song is built around a simple
metaphor: Williams is driving down the road with a loved one, and happy to be
driving. Still, she wants to pull over to the side of the road and stand there
by herself. “I want to know you’re there, but I want to be alone,” she sings.
If only for a minute or two, I want to see what it feels like to be
without you.
I want to know the touch of my own skin
Against the sun, against the wind.
I
walked out in a field, the grass was high, it brushed against my legs. I want to know the touch of my own skin
Against the sun, against the wind.
I just stood and looked out at the open space, and a farmhouse out a ways.
And I wondered about the people who lived in it,
And I wondered if they were happy and content.
Were there children, and a man and a wife?
Did she love him and take her hair down at night?
If I stray away too far from you, don’t go and try to find me.
It doesn’t mean I don’t love you, it doesn’t mean I
won’t come back and stay beside you.
It only means I need a little time
To follow that unbroken line,
To a place where the wild things grow,
To a place where I used to always go.
From an entirely different angle, Williams has
captured the same idea that we find in Woolf’s novels: that there is no final,
satisfying way to balance our need to be known with our need to be alone. The
balance is always uncertain and provisional; it’s always a matter of
dissatisfaction, give-and-take, and sacrifice. Because an artist’s privacy is a
state of mind, rather than a matter of law, there are no rules to help us
master it. It’s up to each of us to balance the risks and rewards—to trade, in
right proportion, loneliness for freedom, explicability for mystery, and the
knowable for the unknown within ourselves.
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/joshuarothman/2014/07/virginia-woolf-idea-of-privacy.html
Nenhum comentário:
Postar um comentário