The ethics of indecency: censorship, sexuality, and the voice of the academy in the narration of 'Jacob's Room.'

Although much of the plot of Jacob's Room deals with Jacob's sexual education, the narrative voice is spectacularly reticent when it comes to actually recording his progress. Throughout the novel, anything spoken on the topic of sexual desire or sexual activity is subjected to a very specific and ostentatious kind of censorship that cuts overt discussion of sex or sexual desire out of the text even as it directs the reader's attention to the lacunae left behind. This "artificial and deliberate . . . narrative reticence" (Zwerdling 900) is partially a critique of how Jacob's (and Woolf's) contemporaries dealt with sexuality; it also helps Woolf parody the conventions of the bildungsroman, which require the hero's sexual education to assume a central role.(1) But the narrative's refusal to record Jacob's sexual education is more than just a satire on Edwardian prudery. The narrative censor in Jacob's Room dramatizes what Foucault calls "the great process of transforming sex into discourse" (22); it "speaks verbosely of its own silence" and "takes great pains to relate in detail the things it does not say" (Foucault 8). Its object is not to remove sexuality from the novel, but to police it by turning it into a narrative that can be controlled.

By deliberately incorporating this censor into the narration, and by inviting the reader to observe its methods and motives, Woolf makes the policing of sexuality in Edwardian England one of the central issues of Jacob's Room. The main business of this study is to trace the operations of that censor and examine the intimate relationship between the project of regulating sexuality and the other, apparently unrelated, effects of power that are dramatized in the novel, including Jacob's death in World War I. Naturally Foucault's discussion of the regulation of desire in The History of Sexuality will provide much of the framework and some of the vocabulary for this argument; but while Foucault's model is in many ways peculiarly applicable to this novel, there are also some important points of divergence between Foucault's construction of sexual discourse and the discourse circulating in Jacob's Room.

Perhaps the most significant point of divergence is that while Foucault is infamous for eliding the question of agency and refusing to locate the power that regulates sexuality in any specific "group of institutions and mechanisms" or any discrete "system of dominance exerted by one group over another" (92), the narrative construction of Jacob's Room argues that Woolf had specific ideas about who and what wielded that power. Woolf carefully entwines the narrative strand that follows Jacob's sexual education with the one following his intellectual education until the two finally become inseparable; the same narrator that regulates sexual discourse in the novel also trumpets the values of the intellectual culture that molded Jacob. By showing that the success of this regulatory project is necessary to the continued dominance of the academy and its values, Woolf ensures that the reader's knowledge of the censor's misdeeds also indicts Cambridge and what it represents, and that the war that rips Jacob out of his narrative finally becomes a damning metaphor for the academy's attempt to protect its secrets.

Before we can discuss this peculiar form of censorship we must come to some understanding of how narration works in Jacob's Room. Critical opinion on this head has evolved over time from an assumed equation between Woolf and the narrative voice of her novel to a recognition of the complicated ironic distance between Woolf and her characters (Morgenstern 351). Still, a puzzling determination to see the narrator as a monologic, unitary voice with a distinct identity seems to prevail. Writing in 1972, Barry Morgenstern announced that the narrator of Jacob's Room was in fact "a thirty-five year old woman," and proceeded to draw her a short personality profile (353); 14 years later, Karen Lawrence's more sophisticated critique of narrative voice in Jacob's Room still insists on a single narrator who is "a woman, ten years older than Jacob" with "a distinct personality" (33-4). In 1992, Edward Bishop, while recognizing that the narrator is "both character and device," still treats her as "an autonomous self" ("Subject" 166). Even Zwerdling's illuminating discussion of the narrator's satiric function assumes a single narrative voice whose underlying intentions are essentially sincere. Because that assumption continues to identify the narrative voice as a more or less disguised version of the author's, it cannot admit the operation of a voice within the narrative whose language is disingenuous and whose manipulations of character, plot, and structure are dishonest and destructive. And because the censorial narrator is precisely this type of presence, we must complicate that conception of the narrator before we can understand the function of the censor.

Judy Little's observation that much of the humor in Jacob's Room derives from a "radically unconventional switch in perspective" between an "omniscient narrator" with access to "the ironic truth" and a second narrator who can only "[guess] at Jacob's words or thoughts" (106) is helpful here. As Little points out, the question of whether these two narrators can be characterized as separate, discrete entities or as two modes of the same voice is not particularly important; what matters is the interplay between these different modes and especially, for our purposes, the power struggle in which they are joined. It is with the "omniscient" and ironic narrator that Little defines, and with that narrator's methods of taking and keeping control of the narrative, that this paper will be primarily concerned.