Toward a Feminist Theory of the State: Virginia Woolf and Wyndham Lewis on Art, Gender, and Politics

On October 11, 1934, Virginia Woolf learned that she was included in Wyndham Lewis’s newly published Men Without Art; and she wrote in her diary: In todays Lit. Sup. [sic] they advertise Men without Art by Wyndham Lewis. Chapters on Eliot, Faulkner, Hemingway, Virginia Woolf … Now I know by reason and instinct that this is an attack … My instinct is, not to read it. (Diary 4, p. 250) But she did read it, taking the ‘arrow of W. L. to [her] heart’ (Diary 4, p. 250), at exactly the right time for the evolution of her thinking about the fascist state. Woolf tried to console herself that, despite his mockery of ‘Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown’ and her fundamental prudery, Lewis considered her ‘one of the 4 or 5 living (it seems) who is an artist’. Nowhere in Lewis’s chapter on Woolf can one find that judgment. It is hard to imagine, for example, that Lewis meant to send Woolf accolades when he wrote: ‘While I am ready to agree that the intrinsic literary importance of Mrs. Woolf may be exaggerated by her friends, I cannot agree that as a symbolic landmark — a sort of party-lighthouse — she has not a very real significance’ (VW, pp. 159–60).