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A review by fionnualalirsdottir
Night and Day by Virginia Woolf
Night and Day indeed!
He: would like to write verses comparing her eyes to the stars.
She: would like to take a compass and a ruler and measure the distance between the stars.
He: believes women can only feel and not reason.
She: believes she must renounce a life of reason to satisfy his feelings.
There are several versions of He and She in this book as if Woolf set out to analyse men and women in general and offer us examples, some very diametrically opposed, as in the example above, and some hardly at all. Surprisingly, it is between the portraits of the women that there is the most opposition; the men offer less variation of type. This fits with the period in which the book seems to be set, the early decades of the twentieth century; there are horses and carriages but also motor omnibuses, a focus on the suffragette movement yet no talk of war. The suffragette movement offered women possibilities for change, so alongside the portrait of the woman who is eager to please, happy to be loved and eager to found a family, we get the portrait of the woman who has made the the cause of humanity her life’s work, and also the woman who is seeking freedom simply to be by herself, measuring the stars.
In the middle ground of this novel two of the characters stand alone, one male (not the He of the first paragraph) and one female, and they are almost interchangeable: they differ in outward aspects of course but when it comes to thinking and feeling, they overlap, both searching for the forbidden freedom to live without obligation or duty. And surprisingly, it is the She of the pair who has the most difficulty in the area of ‘feeling’. Woolf takes a contrary view to the usual one that states that men cannot access their emotions because their upbringing trains them not to, and instead points out how a woman’s upbringing can make her into an automaton in the area of the emotional, acting as is expected of her without accessing what she truly feels, as if her sentient self is locked inside the hard shell of her corset. I would hazard that the encounter between these two characters had never before been written in fiction.
He had a strange sensation that he was both lighthouse and bird; he was steadfast and brilliant; and at the same time he was whirled, with all other things, senseless against the glass.
She could not reduce her vision to words, since it was no single shape coloured upon the dark, but rather a general excitement, an atmosphere, which, when she tried to visualise it, took form as a wind scouring the flanks of northern hills, and flashing light upon cornfields and pools.
This is Woolf’s longest novel at well over five hundred pages so the analysis of the characters is quite in-depth and there are plenty of plot twists, some more melodramatic than we are used to finding in Woolf. Her mission in [b:Night and Day|116056|Night and Day|Virginia Woolf|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1368337020s/116056.jpg|1019503] was to prove that she could write a traditional novel; she believed that she couldn’t begin to dismantle what she hadn’t yet mastered, in a similar way to an artist who first learns drawing and perspective before leaving them behind in favour of experimentation.
This is also the novel that is principally responsible for Woolf’s reputation for being a snob. Katherine Mansfield maintained that it ‘reeked of intellectual snobbery’; other critics questioned the absence of any mention of the war or the wider world even though it was written during the war. One of the characters is the granddaughter of a famous poet and lives in perfect privilege. There are minute descriptions of the beautiful interior of her home, and some descriptions of houses belonging to members of other social classes as well: one memorable one describes her visit to a middle-class home where she cringes inwardly at the tasteless wallpaper and ornaments. But I trusted Woolf here, and was not surprised that it was from that very middle-class home that the most interesting character springs, or that the poet's granddaughter is eventually able to see past her petty prejudice and recognise the ferment of intellectual curiosity that fizzes forth from that shabby house.
The novel was written during a period when Woolf was in very fragile health, so it is perhaps not surprising that she didn’t mention the war.
In any case, her next book, [b:Jacob's Room|225396|Jacob's Room|Virginia Woolf|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1388466257s/225396.jpg|3272732], would address WWI from her own unique angle.
He: would like to write verses comparing her eyes to the stars.
She: would like to take a compass and a ruler and measure the distance between the stars.
He: believes women can only feel and not reason.
She: believes she must renounce a life of reason to satisfy his feelings.
There are several versions of He and She in this book as if Woolf set out to analyse men and women in general and offer us examples, some very diametrically opposed, as in the example above, and some hardly at all. Surprisingly, it is between the portraits of the women that there is the most opposition; the men offer less variation of type. This fits with the period in which the book seems to be set, the early decades of the twentieth century; there are horses and carriages but also motor omnibuses, a focus on the suffragette movement yet no talk of war. The suffragette movement offered women possibilities for change, so alongside the portrait of the woman who is eager to please, happy to be loved and eager to found a family, we get the portrait of the woman who has made the the cause of humanity her life’s work, and also the woman who is seeking freedom simply to be by herself, measuring the stars.
In the middle ground of this novel two of the characters stand alone, one male (not the He of the first paragraph) and one female, and they are almost interchangeable: they differ in outward aspects of course but when it comes to thinking and feeling, they overlap, both searching for the forbidden freedom to live without obligation or duty. And surprisingly, it is the She of the pair who has the most difficulty in the area of ‘feeling’. Woolf takes a contrary view to the usual one that states that men cannot access their emotions because their upbringing trains them not to, and instead points out how a woman’s upbringing can make her into an automaton in the area of the emotional, acting as is expected of her without accessing what she truly feels, as if her sentient self is locked inside the hard shell of her corset. I would hazard that the encounter between these two characters had never before been written in fiction.
He had a strange sensation that he was both lighthouse and bird; he was steadfast and brilliant; and at the same time he was whirled, with all other things, senseless against the glass.
She could not reduce her vision to words, since it was no single shape coloured upon the dark, but rather a general excitement, an atmosphere, which, when she tried to visualise it, took form as a wind scouring the flanks of northern hills, and flashing light upon cornfields and pools.
This is Woolf’s longest novel at well over five hundred pages so the analysis of the characters is quite in-depth and there are plenty of plot twists, some more melodramatic than we are used to finding in Woolf. Her mission in [b:Night and Day|116056|Night and Day|Virginia Woolf|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1368337020s/116056.jpg|1019503] was to prove that she could write a traditional novel; she believed that she couldn’t begin to dismantle what she hadn’t yet mastered, in a similar way to an artist who first learns drawing and perspective before leaving them behind in favour of experimentation.
This is also the novel that is principally responsible for Woolf’s reputation for being a snob. Katherine Mansfield maintained that it ‘reeked of intellectual snobbery’; other critics questioned the absence of any mention of the war or the wider world even though it was written during the war. One of the characters is the granddaughter of a famous poet and lives in perfect privilege. There are minute descriptions of the beautiful interior of her home, and some descriptions of houses belonging to members of other social classes as well: one memorable one describes her visit to a middle-class home where she cringes inwardly at the tasteless wallpaper and ornaments. But I trusted Woolf here, and was not surprised that it was from that very middle-class home that the most interesting character springs, or that the poet's granddaughter is eventually able to see past her petty prejudice and recognise the ferment of intellectual curiosity that fizzes forth from that shabby house.
The novel was written during a period when Woolf was in very fragile health, so it is perhaps not surprising that she didn’t mention the war.
In any case, her next book, [b:Jacob's Room|225396|Jacob's Room|Virginia Woolf|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1388466257s/225396.jpg|3272732], would address WWI from her own unique angle.