Visuality and Spatiality in Virginia Woolf's Fiction

Visuality and Spatiality in Virginia Woolf's Fiction. By Savina Stevanato. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2012. Pp. xvi, 293. $63.00.Much has been written about the organizing structures of modernist fiction and poetry, from the shifting rhythms, subject rhymes, and circular structures of Ezra Pound's Cantos to the allusive, intertextual schemata that lend order to T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land and James Joyce's Ulysses. Savina Stevanato's exploration of Virginia Woolf's fiction and its relationship to the visual arts culminates in an exhaustive analysis of the rhythms, subject rhymes, and meta-frames that structure three of Virginia Woolf's novels: To the Lighthouse, The Waves, and Between the Acts.Stevanato carefully presents, first, the importance of the visual arts to Modernism and to Woolf (Chapter 3) and then, the central thematic role of the visual arts in these three novels as well as in several of Woolf's short stories (Chapter 4). The first of these chapters is both cogent and comprehensive, but the second is one of the finer parts of this study, for in it not only does Stevanato show just how central the visual arts are to Woolf's fiction, but she charts how Woolf's faith in the spatial arts falters as her writing career progresses. In To the Lighthouse, Woolf regards sight as a medium: seeing entails both severance and unity, which Lily Briscoe comes to understand in the vision which allows her to complete her painting at the end of the novel. In The Waves, Bernard comes to understand the relational power of seeing, but his accomplishment, and thus the unifying power of the visual, is qualified by Woolf's denying him the artistic accomplishment of Lily. Finally, Between the Acts dramatizes the failure to find in either the words of the represented artwork, the play, or in sight and seeing. Though Woolf relied on the relational power of visuality to secure unities, her faith in the unifying power of the visual arts clearly diminished. This account of how Woolf turns to the visual arts to counter the nihilism that the Moderns accepted as an actuality of 20th- century life (and her distancing herself from that solution) forms a wonderful investigation into Woolf's relationship to the visual arts.The final chapter (Chapter 5), then, is offered as a counterbalancing exploration of these same three novels. Stevanato argues that if thematically, Woolf finds it increasingly difficult to rely on the visual arts as a solution for the disconnections of modern life, then formally, the structuring patterns of the novels undermine Woolf's growing skepticism. Their spatially organized form-their echoes or subject rhymes, the circularity of their meta-structures, and even the rhythm of their language-Stevanato contends, achieves a vision of lasting unity and offers a resistance to fragmentation that Woolf herself cannot maintain on the thematic level of these novels. In this way, Stevanato cleverly turns on their heads so many investigations into these spatial structures of Modernist literature: these structures are to be investigated not because they allow the critic access to the fleeting epiphanies and unifying moments that Modernist literature offers as an answer to nihilism, but because the structures themselves enact those epiphanic moments. …