Modernism/modernity

At its most ambitious, postcolonial literary criticism attempts to show the ways in which the very tools of signification available to writers have been complicit with the culture of imperialism. Thus Benedict Anderson can claim that novels which make no explicit mention of empire or nationalism nonetheless promote notions of space and time that crucially underwrite the politics of modern statehood and nationality. Likewise, Edward Said points out the importance of narration to incipient nationalism and proves that seizing control of the means of representation is necessary to anti-colonial and anti-imperialist movements. Such approaches rely on an understanding of the aesthetic which takes into account its social function as well as its ideological aspect.

Kathy Phillips’s study of Virginia Woolf is interesting in that it uncovers an anti-imperialist message where one might expect to find complicity instead. Phillips’s exhaustive examination decisively demonstrates that Virginia Woolf’s novels contain a comprehensive critique of empire in the widest possible sense of the term. But despite the fact that Phillips participates in the genre of postcolonial studies and makes reference to post-structuralism, her methodology is a very traditional one. What she draws out of Woolf’s novels is a more or less explicit moral: oppression in all its forms is wrong. Phillips is not concerned with the way in which literature is implicated in imperialism and anti-imperialism, but the way in which literature represents imperialism. She might be described as using an “Images of Empire” approach, in that her work resembles the “Images of Women” style of feminist literary criticism that catalogues representations of women in literature and judges them in terms of their political progressiveness. Indeed, the sections of Virginia Woolf Against Empire that deal with the relationship between imperialism and the oppression of women contain many examples of this old-fashioned kind of feminism. The narrowness of Phillips’s approach necessarily limits the ambitiousness of the claims her findings certainly justify.

In spite of its theoretical limitations, Phillips’s argument is persuasive in its insistence on the connection between Woolf’s avowedly political essays, Three Guineas in particular, and her novels. Although Woolf’s importance to the feminist debates of the 1980’s have made her views on the position of women well-known, Phillips points out that Woolf’s related political opinions have received less attention and have often been assumed to be discontinuous with the aims of her art. Phillips asserts that from her first book to her last Woolf “associates empire making, war making, and gender relations in a typical constellation” and “links the items in a complicated and shrewd critique” (vii). The lesson that Phillips draws from Woolf’s novels is that empire leads to war, first because it necessitates its own defense, and second because it deadens and dehumanizes both imperial ruler and imperial subject to such a degree that the [End Page 123] value of human life is lost. Further, Woolf associates empire and gender relations because the oppression of women serves as training for men in the oppression of colonial peoples. Finally, the displacement of sexual energy made necessary by repressive British social life fuels both militarism and imperialism. For each of these points Phillips supplements the ample literary evidence with her own historical examples and analysis. The result is less a critical reading than a comprehensive and well-researched tract against imperialism.

To the extent that Phillips engages the literariness of the texts she addresses, she is very attentive to language and descriptive detail. Although her approach leaves her vulnerable to the charge of reductionism and crude historicism, she is in fact a good close-reader. The main rhetorical technique which Phillips finds at work in service of Woolf’s critique of empire is that of incongruous juxtaposition. Repeatedly Phillips shows how Woolf weaves together two conversations or two pieces of description, one about war or empire and another about men and women, in order subtly to suggest a connection between the two. In Mrs. Dalloway, for example, Peter...