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Across the widest gulf: nonhuman subjectivity in Virginia Woolf's Flush

Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 2002 by Craig Smith

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Yet the charge of sentimentality continues to dog this text. Initial critical response to Flush ranged from David Garnett's praise in the New Statesman to an unsigned attack in Granta, which condemned the book for being at once facile and popular (Hussey 89). In a youthfully arrogant statement which he later regretted, Christopher Isherwood dismissed Virginia Woolf as a politically uncommitted intellectual likely to write "a novel about the hopeless love of a Pekingese dog for a very beautiful maidenhair fern" (113). This preemptive ridicule occurs in a letter to Stephen Spender of 14 November 1932--one month before Woolf completed Flush. Spender would have been aware of Woolf's current project, and no doubt shared his information with Isherwood. This reception, growing out of what was thought and said about Woolf and her subject rather than from an examination of the text itself, would prove characteristic of the book's critical history. Down the decades since, the negative reaction has remained dominant eve n as the work's popularity has faded. By 1972, Quentin Bell could characterize Flush as "one of the least read of her novels" (409). Woolf's other parodic biography, Orlando--a work whose critical history has moved in the opposite direction--receives 19 columns of text and illustration in Mark Hussey's encyclopedic reference guide, Virginia Woolf A to Z; Flush receives three. Suiting the word to the deed, Hussey notes that "Flush has not received very much critical attention" (89).

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Most studies of Woolf do not mention Flush. With perhaps a dozen exceptions in the vast Woolf literature, those studies that do acknowledge the book's existence grant it only a paragraph, a sentence, a clause, or a descriptive adjective. These persistently recurring adjectives--"sentimental," "minor," "trivial"--are disturbingly redolent of the terms by which women's writings were once dismissed as suitable subjects for critical study, and by which women's lives were dismissed as suitable subjects for biography.

Leonard Woolf reported that Flush was "a great success" in material terms: "The Hogarth Press sold 18,739 copies in the first six months and Harcourt, Brace 14,081 in America, where it was an alternative selection of The Book-of-the-Month Club" (144). But he went on to insist that the author "never took [the book] seriously," and became the first of many critics who would quote Virginia Woolf's own diary entry of 23 December 1932 as evidence against the artistic merit of the book she had just completed. In this entry Woolf expresses her fear that Flush was "too slight and too serious" (L.Woolf 151-52;V Woolf Diary 134).

In her letters and diaries, Woolf habitually expressed self-doubt about her writing--from her book reviews to her novels. She typically expressed impatience and dissatisfaction with her current project and eagerness to move on to her next one. It is dangerous to rely on these passages to confirm one's own assessment of a given text. Hermione Lee quotes Woolf's letter to John Lehmann of 3l July 1932--after the death of Lytton Strachey--in order to establish that the author dismissed her own book as a joke: "She went on with Flush. But it did not seem so much fun now, 'as I meant it for a joke with Lytton, and a skit on him"' (82). Lee omits Woolf's qualifying phrase about the potential of her ongoing project: "But I'll see" (Letters 83). It is true that Woolf also dismissed the book as "a joke on Lytton" in her letter to Ottoline Morrell of 23 February 1933 (Letters 161-62). Writing less defensively to correspondents whom she did not suspect of being hostile, however,Woolf took a different tone.

Across the widest gulf: nonhuman subjectivity in Virginia Woolf's Flush

Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 2002 by Craig Smith

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