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University of Oregon
Moments and Metamorphoses: Virginia Woolf's Greece

Author(s): Rowena Fowler
Source: Comparative Literature, Vol. 51, No. 3 (Summer, 1999), pp. 217-242
Published by: Duke University Press on behalf of the University of Oregon
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1771668
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ROWENA FOWLER
Moments and
Metamorphoses:
Virginia Woolf's Greece
. here we are at Monks House, & Greece is perceptibly
melting: just for a moment England & Greece stood side
by side, each much enlivened by the other."
I)ar~ 4: 100, 15 May' 1932
T HEingGREEKS HAUNTED WOOLF. Her essay "On Not Know-

Greek" stresses both their aloofness and unfamiliarity and
our ignorance of how their minds worked, of how and why their
literature was written; as a woman, she found them more primitive,
puzzling, and alluring than their legitimate male heirs in Cambridge
and Bloomsbury could imagine. "When I think of the Greeks I think
of them as naked black men," says Miss Allan in The Voyage Out
(114), "which is quite incorrect, I'm sure."' Yet Woolf's essay also
conveys a profound sense of intimacy and recognition. Picked up
through private study rather than beaten in at public school, Greek
worked its way into her imagination, elusive but persistent: "how
Greek sticks, darts, eels in & out!" (Diary 5: 236, 11 September
1939). A solid "grounding" gave way to shifting and unbidden
moments of insight: "A strange thing-when you come to think of
it-this love of Greek, flourishing in such obscurity, distorted,
discouraged, yet leaping out, all of a sudden" (Jacob s Room 126).
Her first Greek essay (now lost) was to have been called "Magic
Greek"; it explored the closeness yet unknowableness of the Greeks,
the "veil" she still felt between her and the ancient texts. There
For "On Not Knowing G(reek" I have consulted both the first British
(Hogarth Press, 1925) and the first American edition (Harcourt, Brace,
The (Cotnmon Reader, as well as Woolf's proof c'orrections for the first A
edition, which are now in the Frances Hooper Collection at Smith College.
Quotations are from the first American edition. References to Woolf's novels and
to A Room 0o nes One wn, Three (Guieas and Roger Fry': A Biograpihy are to the first
(Harcourt, Brace) American editions. Unpublished manuscripts are cited with their
accession numbers (MH: Monks House Papers; Berg: Henry W. and Albert A. Berg
Collection). Permission to quote flrom unpublished work is granted by kind per-
mission of the Society of Authors as the Literary Representative of the Estate of
Virginia Woolf.
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE /218
followed a prose sketch ("A Vision of Greece"), a story fragment, a

dialogue, and a review ("The Perfect Language"), before the major
essay, "On Not Knowing Greek."' Magic, vision, dialogue, perfec-
tion, elusiveness: Greek is the perfect language, which we can never
truly know.
Woolf's England and her Greece enlivened each other through
a lifelong encounter that began with her first Greek lesson in October
1897 and was interrupted only by her death, on the eve of the fall
of Greece, in March 1941.' In 1900 Greek was her "daily bread,
and a keen delight" (Letters 1: 35,June 1900); in the shadow of war,
a lifetime later, she was still turning naturally to Greek authors:
"Trying to anchor my mind on Greek. Rather successful" (Diary 5:
236, 11 September 1939). The study of Greek (never, she felt, her
"mastery" of it) remained a precondition of her intellectual and
creative life, of her self-respect as a woman and of her fulfillment
as a writer. The Greek language held out the possibility of absolute
clarity, and yet offered Woolf the alternative eloquence of pure,
pre-verbal, non-verbal sound. Her two visits to Greece, in 1906 and
1932, helped her transmute the classical past into personal history
and played a role in defining her sense of "Englishness." Woolf's
Greek reading and study, including her attempts at editing, trans-
lating and teaching, were continuous both with her critical and
autobiographical writing and-most importantly-with her fiction,
where she re-accommodated classical myth and naturalized the con-
ventions of epic and tragedy. Her dialogue with Greece was often
carried on in letters and conversations and even in the dialogue
form itself. It admits the voices not only of Woolf and the ancient
and modern Greeks but also of many of the people and texts
through which their worlds had been mediated: eminent Victorians,
modern scholars, earlier English writers, and a whole-predomi-
nantly male-classical and philhellenic tradition.
In an earlier paper on women writers and the classics, I dwelt
too much on the ambivalences in Woolf's attitude to Greece, on
her sense of exclusion, her mockery of conventional scholarship,
and the congeries of images in her writing linking the classics, male
bonding, sexual violation, war and death. Following WalterJ. Ong
and Edmund Leach, I evoked in lurid terms the acquisition of Latin
and Greek as a male initiation ritual requiring sexual segregation
2 For "Magic Greek" see Passionate Apprentice 252, 15 March 1905; much of this
material probably found its way into Woolf's later Greek writings. Other references:
"A Vision of Greece" (MH/A23.i); fragment of a story (MH/B4.e); "A Dialogue
Upon Mount Pentelicus," Comnplete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf 64-68; "The Per-
fect Language," Essays 2: 114-19.
1 Letters 1:10, 24 October 1897. See also Leslie Stephen's letter of 1 November
1897 to George Warr. Woolf studied for two years with Warr at the women's annex
of King's College, and then with Clara Pater, before starting private lessons with
Janet Case in 1902.
VIRGINIA WOOLF'S GREECE/219
and physical suffering, and emphasized the role of a jealously

guarded classical education in the formation of intellectual and
political elites. I read women's writing in terms of "subversion,"
compensation and revenge, their appropriations of the classics as
both the symbol and instrument of rebellion. Since that time, how-
ever, we have learned that the relationship between women and
the classical literatures and languages is often considerably more
complicated than this account suggests. We now know much more
about both Woolf's connections with the Greek scholarsJanet Case
andJane Ellen Harrison and the meaning of the classics for Woolf's
contemporaries and counterparts (HD, Christina Stead), as well as
for more recent women writers (Fleur Adcock, Margaret Atwood,
Sylvia Plath). Recent scholarship, giving readier access to Woolf's
library and manuscripts, suggests that her relationship to Greek
was pervasive and complex. I should like therefore to propose a
reading of Woolf and the Greeks that takes its cue from her own
version of dialogue, in which 'just for a moment England and
Greece [stand] side by side."
Woolf's ideal relationship with Greece was an unattainable combi-
nation of magic and familiarity. S.P. Rosenbaum has shown that it
was from her Greek studies that Woolf first began to work out her
idea of the "common reader" and the "common mind" (143). She
wondered if she could share common ground with the Greeks,
assimilating them to everyday experience (as symbolized by the
homely potato): "Whether it is possible to {read/know} Greek &
dig potatoes?" (MH/B2.q). She lacked the unselfconscious facility
of a natural scholar like Janet Case, who "reads Greek with one hand,
while she slices potatoes with the other" (Letters 2: 446, 4 November
1920). Woolf's professional scholars tend towards the pathetic or
rancorous: old (or young-old) men with unappealing critical appa-
ratus and desiccated emotions such as Richard Bentley ("Outlines,"
Essays 4), Ambrose Ridley and Mr. Pepper (The Voyage Out), Mr.
Bankes (To the Lighthouse), Sopwith (Jacob's Room), Edward Pargiter
(The Years), even Neville (The Waves). She was scathing about the
kind of scholarship that strained after some utilitarian "legacy" or
"message": "I detest pale scholars with their questioning about life,
and the message of the classics, and the bearing of Greek thought
upon modern problems" (Letters 1: 386, 19 February 1909). Her
own experience of the connection between Greece and England
was unsystematic, intermittent, unbiddable: by turns dazzling and
puzzling. She was capable of an almost physical empathy: "I think I
see for a moment how our minds are all threaded together-how
any live mind today is of the very same stuff as Plato's &
Euripides... It is this common mind that binds the whole world
together." This sense of the transhistorical continuities of human
thought comes by way of an intensely felt bodily excitement-"as
though the physical stuff of my brain were expanding, larger &

larger" (Passionate Apprentice 178, 1903). Occasionally she lends h
characters her own flash of insight, as in the scene of Edward at
Oxford studying the Antigone:
He read; and made a note; then he read again. All sounds were blotted out. He sa
nothing but the Greek in front of him. But as he read, his brain gradually warme
he was conscious of something quickening and tightening in his forehead. He
caught phrase after phrase exactly, firmly,.. Little negligible words now revealed
shades of meaning, .... (The 'ars 49-50)
This spontaneous, transformative spurt of energy is the antithes
both of the casual sense of entitlement of the public schoolbo
and of the grinding perseverance of the less privileged: the 'Jew-
boy from Birmingham" studying far into the night with a wet tow
round his head (The Years 63). Woolf fantasizes a painless, instant
method of filling the brain with Greek by siphoning it off from
one of the keepers of the mysteries-Saxon Sydney-Turner, fo
instance, with his famous Double First in the Classical Tripos: "if
could attach a little sucker to the back of your neck and drink
through it without any effort" (Letters 4: 269, 30 December 1930).
Similarly, North imagines raiding Edward's store of knowledge:
"There it was, he thought, locked up in that fine head, the head
that was like a Greek boy's head grown white; the past and poetry.
Then why not prise it open? Why not share it? What's wrong with
him, he thought" (The Years 408). Greek could catch fire and come
alive, but in the wrong hands it was cold and dead; thus, Neville
spends his life as a don running "in and out of the skulls of
Sophocles and Euripides like a maggot" (The Waves 71).
Woolf always claimed to be inept at grammar, which she found
"hopelessly dull" (Passionate Apprentice 231, 2 February 1905). The
children in The 1Waves imagine the Latin conjugations as colors
(Susan and Jinny) or as fluid fish shapes (Bernard); only Neville,
the future scholar, visualizes them as a systematic structure (20-21).
Woolf's Greek teacher Janet Case judged her Greek exercises
"detestable": "she saw that my foundations were rotten ... & bade
me start with the very first exercise-upon the proper use of the
article-which I had hitherto used with the greatest impropriety"
(Passionate Apprentice 183, 1903). In the end, though, with Case's
help, "the masterpieces of Greek drama were stormed, without
grammar, without accents."'' Woolf rarely used accents or breathings
(though she was punctilious when writing for publication, as her
proof corrections show) and never marked scansion: "The lack of
a sound university training has always made it impossible for me to
distinguish between an iambic and a dactyl" ("Letter to a Young
Poet" 697). She needed to read Greek quickly, even if inaccurately;
when reading Greek with her, her father, Leslie Stephen, put gram-
* Quoted from Woolf's Times obituary of(;Case, rptd. in Alley; see also Turnbull.
mar aside and went straight for the sense (Essays 1:129). Her Greek
reading notebooks record process, pace and sensation; a success-
ful reading always rapid; a disappointing one slow or distracted.
The Birds, for example, is "Read at a gallop"; and with The Bacchae
"The difficulty of reading Greek is not the words, but getting the
fling of the sentence entire-as it leaves the mouth. I am always
being knotted up." Her reading needed to keep up with the action,
which, in her favorite plays such as the Antigone, was "much quicker
-more terrific. One wants to read on." She felt in the Trachiniae
"The words flickering out"; of the Oedipus Coloneus, she reco

that "no language can move more quickly, dancing, shakin
alive but controlled" (Berg RN1.19). Less impressionistically
in the notebooks, but making the same point, she wrote in "T
Perfect Language" that "It is important to read quickly, if
because the friction of speed creates in the reader the arr
gant... belief that he knows precisely what Aeschylus mea
(Essays 2:115).
Woolf read as a writer, with an eye to craft, but also as a responsive,
sometimes resistant, reader, with a tendency to ascribe naturalistic
and transhistorical motives and emotions to ancient texts. In Book
3 of the Odyssey, rumor circulates "Very like Cornish villages" (B

RN1.25). Along with the women of the Pargiter family she cou
enter into the part of Antigone: a woman buried alive, a broth
unburied.5 She could judge Antigone "the perfect type of heroi
woman: unflinching & uncompromising" (Berg RN1.19), but
another reading be dismayed by Antigone's unwavering attachme
to her father and brother and dismissive tone to her sister: "her
bitterness to Ismene is always unpleasant" (MH/B2.o). Woolf wa
also struck by other tragic heroines, especially Dejaneira (Trachin
and Electra (Choephori); she particularly noted the way that Elec
affiliates herself to her father rather than her mother and is to
ened but not diminished by restrictive conventions: "Electra li
a far more hedged in life than the women of the mid Victoria
age, but this has no effect upon her, except in making her hars
splendid. She could not go out for a walk alone; with us it would
a case of a maid & a hansom cab" (Diary 1:185, 19 August 1918).
Setting her reading notebooks alongside the texts she was studying
we can see what caught her interest and where she disagreed with
or went beyond the scholarly authorities; in her notes on the Ion of
Euripides, for instance, she copies A.W. Verrall's translation of
Creusa's confession, adding in her own words, "This is a lovely
exclamation -she will not answer his charge of cruelty, one line
shows how unutterably she had felt it" (MH/A.21). Woolf could
' On Woolf's use of Antigone see Joseph and Oldfield; on the unburied brother
in particular see Steiner (141). For the Anligone as "anti-fascist propaganda" see
Three (Guijeas 124, 158-59.
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE/222
also find herself brought up short by cultural and historical di

tance-particularly, as in the Ajax and the Philoctetes, by Gr
notions of law, justice and honor. She felt for the wounded and
isolated Philoctetes but was alienated by arms and armor; in he
notes to the Ajax she suggests we imagine some substitute to wh
the present-day reader can attach an equivalent value. Of all Gr
drama Woolf returned most often to the Agamemnon of Aeschy
reading and misreading with verve: "Read the Agamemnon,
see whether, in process of time, your sympathies are not almo
entirely with Clytemnestra. Or consider the married life of th
Carlyles" (Essays 3: 422).
During her lessons with Janet Case, Woolf was combative (he
own word for herself was "contradictious"); the two women were
intellectually and temperamentally poles apart and disagreed over
the direction and purpose of studying Greek literature, as later
they would disagree over Woolf's own writing. Woolf played the
part of ungrammatical but nubile pupil to Case's crabbed scholar:
"I read a very lovely description of a maiden in Euripides (?) ... how
the maiden hangs like ripened fruit within the orchard ... I paused
with some literary delight in its beauty. Not so Miss Case. 'The use
of the instrumental genitive in the 3rd line is extremely rare"'
(Passionate Apprentice 183, 1903). The scene seems familiar; the
scholar reducing passion to a grammatical gloss is a common topos
in literature and biography. We can, though, reconstruct this
exchange, instrumental genitive and all, as it took place over the
Supplices of Aeschylus in G.T. Tucker's edition. The passage in ques-
tion (11. 966-73), an erotic evocation of virginity and defloration, is
textually obscure, and the footnotes wrestle with ripening fruit,
opening doors, and men who cannot stop themselves plundering.
The older woman may already have had some idea of Woolf's sexual
distress, though it was some years before Woolf explicitly confided
in Case her half-brother's sexual approaches (Letters 1: 472, ?25
July 1911).
Woolf later came to appreciate that scholarship, ethics, and polit-
ical activism were interdependent in Case's life, that her Greek
studies were the source for, and an integral part of, her radicalism:
"Her Greek was connected with many things. It was connected
... with the life, with the politics of her day. She found time for
committees, for the Suffrage... for all the causes that were ad-
vanced and in dispute." Woolf wrote this in her obituary for Case
in 1937, that is, at exactly the time she was exploring her own rela-
tion to the classics and to politics; thus, in her notebooks for Three
Guineas a quotation from the Antigone is filed next to a contempo-
rary parallel, the Evening Standard's reaction to the pacifist Mayoress
of Woolwich: "Mayoress Would Not Darn Socks for War: Speech
Upsets Arsenal Employees" (MH/B 16.f).
Fittingly, Woolf's own earliest voluntary service to a "cause" wa

her series of adult education lectures at Morley College. This coul
be seen as an extension of her family's tradition of philanthropy
but it is characteristic of Woolf that instead of visiting the sick sh
chose to teach working women Greek mythology. Acutely aware of
class contradictions, she both patronized and admired her students
just as later she would ambivalently commend George Gissing, the
lower-class philhellene for whom "the columns of the Parthenon
... still rose above the fogs and the fried-fish shops of the Euston
Road" (The Second Common Reader 244). Ironically, Woolf's lecture
coincided exactly with the Cambridge ballot on keeping Greek com
pulsory for all undergraduates. Woolf and her brother Thoby dis
cussed the issue heatedly before Thoby went up to cast his vote,
unavailingly, against. As she set off to teach her Greekless women
"Greek," she noted, "is still compulsory" (Passionate Apprentice 248
5 March 1905).
In spite ofJanet Case's efforts, Woolf continued throughout her
life to feel a lack of grammatical "foundation," not just in under-
standing Greek, but in forging her own style of English. To Clive
Bell, who had criticized a draft of The Voyage Out, she wrote: "I see
all you say of my looseness-great gaps are in all my sentences,
stitched across with conjunctions-and verbosity-and emphasis.
If I had had a good grounding in Greek I might have done better"
(Letters 1: 330, 6 May 1908). It is tempting to read this ironically, as
a rejection of Bell and a covert defense of her own unclassical syn-
tax, especially as she so often uses images of sewing for women's
alternative modes of creativity. But she had made unequivocally a
similar point in her essay "The Feminine Note in Fiction" (1905),
predicting that women's writing will improve with readier access
to the Greek and Latin classics and their "sterner view of literature":
"having blurted out her message somewhat formlessly, she [t

woman writer] will in due time fashion it into permanent artist
shape" (Essays 1:16). The contrasts are already established between
concrete and permanent underpinnings and a culpable "looseness"
-a problem of style and expression triumphantly solved in To
the Lighthouse.
The English style of "On Not Knowing Greek" is itself founded
on the same contrast: an assured and shapely account of gaps and
inadequacies, an intuition of meanings that lie '"just on the far sid
of language." Edward Bishop has shown how Woolf's handling
metaphor and syntax in this essay is both extravagant and firml
anchored (both "shifting" and "solid," to use Woolf's own terms),
creating a dialogue in the minds of both writer and reader, an
pivoting on a series of disclaimers. Almost half the paragraphs beg
with "but" or "yet" or with the characteristically Woolfian pseudo
sequential "for": "For it is vain and foolish to talk of knowing Greek,"
the essay begins. Greek authors are evoked through metaphors fo

their style, from "Sappho with her constellations of adjectives" t
"Sophocles gliding like a shoal of trout smoothly and quietly, appar
ently motionless, and then with a flicker of fins off and away" (50
Jottings from the reading notebooks-about the cruelty, starknes
spareness, abruptness of the Greeks-are carried over into the essa
without much re-working; the distance between the Greeks and us
as Woolf sees it, is increased by interpretative blurring or a hazy
softening of outline. Individual Greek words are starkly highlighte
-O-dArcxoc, OdCvaCTo, dvOog, ~oTrip, GEArjvrlv-(transliterated an
italicized in the American edition) and Cassandra's "naked cry"
(11. 1056-57) stands untranslated: "O6TOTOTOI rr6rrot &a. CW 'rroAov,
Wi 'nohAov."
What effect does untranslated Greek (here or in the novels) have
on the reader? To the Greekless reader it appears as abstract visual
pattern, typographically set apart, unassimilable to the surround-
ing text. Those with some Greek may make out sounds and take in
approximate meanings; only a few will pick up the connotations of
the original language. Woolf herself knew all these responses.
Clarissa Dalloway "dreams of great Greek letters stalking round the
room" ( The Voyage Out 55); Septimus Smith (who only knows English
translations) pictures and feels Greek as fragmentary parings, "hard,
white, imperishable words" (Mrs. Dalloway 105). In Woolf's own
mouth, Greece is a taste, a flavor, as it is for Jacob: "when one's
rinsed one's mouth with every literature in the world.. . it's the
flavour of Greek that remains" (Jacob's Room 125). Huge bunches of
grapes in the Peloponnese drew from her one of the few Modern
Greek words she records herself successfully speaking: "Stafeele
[aoTCXr~A t] stafeele-I cried" (Passionate A)pp)rentice 318, 14 September
1906). She heard the demotic language as a corrupted, but
seductive, "babble": "A language one doesn't understand is always
unaccented, sibyllant, soft, wavy, unidentifiable with words" (Diary
4: 99, 10 May 1932). The magic misspelling of "sibyllant" even hints
at an oracular power.
Woolf was always drawn to the inexplicable effects of language
and languages. She found Homer's scene of Nausicaa playing ball
in Book 6 of the Odyssey "quite beyond the translator, & worth look-
ing into for that reason" (Berg RN1.25). But she also felt the
frustration of the uninitiated when scholars take refuge in untrans-
latability: "'Translate it,' he said. Edward shook his head. 'It's the
language,' he said" (The Years 414). Her reading notes often com-
ment on the style of the translation (if she is using an English or
French version) and confidently fault even the most respected
scholars: BenjaminJowett's Plato is "not happily rendered" (MH/A21).
Reading the Choephori, she feels that "almost all A. [Aeschylus's]
epithets profit by a literal translation" (Berg M19), and she generally
admires the direct but subtle versions of A.W. Verrall. On the other
hand,J.M. Mackail's fondness for words like "wan" in his translation

from the Greek Anthology sound too vague and Pre-Raphaelite an
so can "flood a whole page for the English reader with the wrong
associations ("The Perfect Language," Essays 1: 118). Where Mackai
is languid and flowery, R.C. Jebb is "stiff, safe, prosaic," reducin
resonant phrases to "separate and uncongenial accuracies"; Woo
rememberedJebb coming to visit her parents and "there and then
saw and perhaps said that he had the soul and innumerable legs of
a black beetle" (Letters 2: 221, 25 February 1918). When a marvelou
Sophoclean word-echo (Antigone, 1. 943) is dissipated in Englis
paraphrase she writes: "TqrV EUGEIc(xV OEPtocxucx becomes in Jeb
because I feared to cast away the fear of Heaven & thus the whole
force is lost" (MH/B2.o). Of the famous chorus in Jebb's Antigon
("Love unconquered ..." etc.-ll. 781 ff) she comments: "A tran
lation gets the stresses all wrong, the importance [sic] words ... Th
weight is altered; it slips much too smoothly slips along insignifi
cantly compared with the Greek" (MH/B2.o). A similar exampl
of enfeeblement in the English is the example she chooses for "O
Not Knowing Greek," this time fromJebb's Electra: "thee, who ever
more weepest in thy rocky tomb." When Sara in The Years skips
"quickly and inaccurately" through her cousin's ceremonious and
stuffy Antigone ("done into English verse by Edward Pargiter," 135
Woolf puts together "from the litter of broken words" a powerfu
re-enactment of the whole play in less than a page.
"The Perfect Language," a review of W.R. Paton's Loeb edition
of the Greek Anthology, begins with a tribute to the Loeb librar
of classical texts, reminding us of their impact on the early
twentieth-century common reader-the "amateur" reader as Woolf
calls him here-who has been given the "gift of freedom" and mad
"respectable" by these plain-text, bilingual editions (Essays 2: 114
Parallel texts create and display particular kinds of dialogue. Befor
Loeb started publishing in 1912, Greek texts were typically printe
with editorial and explanatory notes taking up to two-thirds of th
page (Woolf offers a feminist account of this "vast deposit of note
in an endnote to her own Three Guineas 274 n. 31). Older editions
offered Latin, rather than English, translations of the Greek; wher
translations were in English they might not be on the facing pag
but in an appendix, so that you had to read with one finger in th
back of the book, or at a desk with a dictionary or crib at hand.
With Loeb, the "amateur" could read a whole play at a time, "wit
his feet on the fender." Both Leonard and Virginia Woolf had bee
brought up under the old dispensation, but Leonard bought all
the Loebs as they came out; much used and annotated by him, they
had a special place in the "Apple Room" at Monks H-ouse. Virginia,
however, for the most part remained loyal to her old editions.
In 1922 Woolf set about making her own "edition" of the

Agamemnon of Aeschylus (Berg RN3). She had watched the play
being edited, years before, by the Cambridge scholar Walter
Headlam,` and had also admired Janet Case's attractively produced
Aldine House edition of the Prometheus Bound. She began by cut-
ting out the Greek text from an old Blomfield edition and pasting
it onto the right-hand side of a blank notebook. She then copied
Verrall's translation from an appendix in his 1889 edition onto the
left-hand page: copied, but-she stressed-"carefully gone into
by me" (Diary 2: 215, 3 December 1922). The English for individual
hard words has been written in. The "edition" is not fully annotated
but includes comments, usually following Verrall, on special points,
such as the untranslatable ominousness of the "purple path"
(nropcdpcxj CXraTTOV6) of the doomed Agamemnon: "It is to the eye of
the Queen [Clytemnestra] as though he already walked in blood ..."
What impression did this reading and study leave on the style
and form of Woolf's fiction? Can we discern a Greek influence in
the connotations of her words or the shape of her sentences?

original and suggestive study, Idris Anderson has traced the
optative mood through the characteristically wistful verbal f
expressive of non-fulfillment and fulfillment in the novels.
grammatical and syntactic features native to Greek but lacki
unusual in English-verbal aspect, for instance, or the voca
case-may also be latent in Woolf's prose. Individual words
("tyranny," "reverenced," suppliant") re-assemble the mental and
emotional world of the tragedians on behalf of a British sister and
daughter: "For they must fight tyranny to the death, she thought.
Of all human qualities she reverenced justice most. Her brother
was most god-like, her father most suppliant" (To the Lighthouse 251).
Woolf certainly absorbed Greek models of form and genre: finish-
ing the Poetics in ten days in 1905, she concluded that she had
already anticipated most of Aristotle, perhaps because it had been
so thoroughly incorporated into the European literary tradition:
"A great deal of this seems to me common property now" (Berg
RN1.25). Three formal conventions from ancient Greek literature,
all of them anti-naturalistic, awkwardly foreign to the modern
reader or spectator, enjoy a radical renewal in Woolf's novels: the
reporting of action, the Socratic dialogue, and, most memorably,
the chorus.
Woolf was sometimes irritated by the convention of reporting

offstage action: "there is always a messenger arriving," she grumbled,
" Headlam, with whom XWoolf conducted an intermittent flirtation in her early
twenties, was trusted with some of Woolf's early manuscripts and in return prom-
ised to dedicate his Agamnemnon to her; he died in 1908, and an incomplete and
defective edition was published posthumously. In 1938 George Thomson discov-
ered Headlam's working notes and was able to publish his full edition of the Oresteia.
failing to get into her stride in the opening scene of the Oedipus Rex;
or again, "Why are there always messengers & nurses to announce
catastrophe?" (Berg RN1.19). And yet she came to appreciate the
resonance of violent or tragic events that we do not see happening
directly. The deaths of Jacob in Jacob's Room and of Prue and Mrs.
Ramsay in To the Lighthouse, as well as the suicide of Rhoda in The
Waves, are reported almost in passing. William Herman likewise
suggests that Neville's telegram announcing the death of Percival
recalls Aeschylus: "'He is dead,' said Neville. 'He fell. His horse
tripped. He was thrown'" (The Waves 151). The manner of Woolf's
own death now adds a particular poignancy to her comment on
the death of Dejaneira in the Trachiniae: "women always go indoors
to kill themselves" (Berg RN 1.19).
Towards the Dialogues of Plato Woolf felt both attraction and
suspicion; they reminded her of her brothers and their Cambridge
friends and were also indelibly associated with memories of her
father and of family life at 22 Hyde Park Gate (Essays 1: 129; Moments
of Being 177). She had known from Plato ("since I was sixteen or
so") about male homosexuality; appropriately, it was at a dinner
party that she first regaled her audience with earnest allusions to
sodomy (Moments of Being 104, 174). In Woolf's first published dia-
logue, two women, busy embroidering parrots, feel at liberty to
speculate, since "there is no gentleman present," how Greek women
would have spent a wet morning, or the dark hours between tea
and dinner: "Judith: The mornings never are wet in Athens. Then
they don't drink tea.... Ann: Ah, that explains!" ("A Talk About
Memoirs," Essays 3: 180-81). The all-male indoor world of the dia-
logues is infiltrated, but not merely replicated parrot-fashion. "'You
men! Where would you be if it weren't for the women!'" exclaims
Mrs. Thornbury; "'Read the Symposium,' said Ridley grimly" (The
Voyage Out 199). Woolf read the Symposium-and the Phaedrus, the
Protagoras, and the Euthyphron-in Greek.7 Her nine pages of notes
on the Symposium, dating from a concentrated period of study in
the summer of 1908, offer a detailed commentary on the emotional
atmosphere of the evening banquet, the ebb and flow of talk, and,
especially, the irresistible, maddening presence of the symposiarch:
"He [Alcibiades] feels all Socrates' grandeur-yet wishes the man
dead sometimes-such is the conflict he raises in the bodies of his
followers" (MH/A.21). It is as if Mr. Ramsay himself is beginni

to take shape: "Such were the extremes of emotion that Mr. Ram
excited in his children's breasts" ( To the Lighthouse 10).
In To the Lighthouse, Woolf conducts her own dialogue with Pl
Whereas her husband buries his head in his "little [Plato] with the
shiny cover mottled like a plover's egg" (282), Mrs. Ramsay pre-
Symposium: MH/A21 and MH/B2.d; Protagoras: MH/B2.o; Phaedrus: MH/A21;
Euthyphron: Berg RN1.25. On the importance of the Phaedrus see Lyons.
sides over her own loving banquet." Jean Wyatt has explored th
ways in which Woolf's novel rewrites Plato's themes: at the heart of
the dinner party/banquet is the quest for knowledge through love
and for permanence by way of momentary unity. Woolf's under-
standing of artistic form (Lily's painting) is quite different from
Plato's "Forms" in that it is recovered and recreated from moments
in ordinary life rather than existing independently of human co

sciousness. And whereas Plato imagined Socrates as Eros, Alcibiad
as Dionysus, Woolf transforms Mrs. Ramsay into Aphrodite
Augustus Carmichael into Poseidon. The diners/symposiasts ar
brought together by Mrs. Ramsay's gifts of food, wine, conversati
and courtship, stimulated by Paul and Minta's erotic discovery of
each other, so that Lily can glimpse "in the midst of chaos" h
own abstract vision of love and beauty.
It was in the Greek chorus, however, that AWoolf discovered th

mode of expression her art demanded: a collective, anonymou
voice beyond the individual, subjective, or omniscient voice of t
novelist. The chorus no longer belongs on the stage but in the nov
where, as "Always in imaginative literature ... the need of that vo
is making itself felt" ("On Not Knowing Greek" 47). We can trac
AWoolf's search for an alternative to Victorian narrative conventi
from her use of a single choric figure (Mrs. McNabb in To the Lig
house), to her choruses of birds and of revelers (The Waves), of care-
takers' children ( The Years), and of villagers (Between the Acts).
The Greek chorus is both singular and plural, individual and
communal; transcending gender, it is performed by men who often
speak as women; it can be both ecstatic and commonplace, and
simultaneously inside and outside the action; it witnesses terrible
events but evokes an ideal world beyond human suffering. Lastly,
it is supremely eloquent but, to the English ear, unintelligible,
"broken syllables," magic chant. Woolf's reading notes show she
could be puzzled and alienated by the rituals of the chorus, "These
old men got up with ivv & fawn skins" (Berg RN1.19). She first
appreciated the choric odes in terms of sound and feeling rather
than overall meaning or dramatic function: in the Ajax of Sophocles
the choruses "have a rough kind of beauty & pathos ... a music of
words-transcending meaning" (MH/A21); in Aristophanes' Frogs
they have "some lyric beauty" as well as "a rude boisterous kind of
joking, mostly about parts of the body not usually mentioned" (MH/
A21). In the great odes of the An tigone "the dazzle & the splendour
are in the words whether known or not" (MH/B2.o); but, although
the choruses of the Antigone are "unforgettable," "It is," she notes,
The descriptionll exactly fits Leslie Steplhen's copy of the Taiichnitz edition
(Leipzig, 1850) of Plato's works with its marlbled binding, vols. 2-8 of' which are
now in the collection o(f W\ashington State University. Mv. M Ramsav's manner of read-
ing this little "closely printed" book with "yellowish pages" fascinates and infuriates
his children ( To the Lialhouse 273, 282-83).
"difficult to see exactly what bearing a chorus has upon a play

(Berg RN1.19).
Her visits to the Cambridge Greek plays (in 1900 and again in
1903) probably hindered rather than helped her awareness of wh
the chorus could have been, or one day, in her fiction, might be-
come. The Cambridge Greek play was (and remains) an established
event. The productions Woolf saw were presented indoors, artifi-
cially lit, to an audience in evening dress. The Agamemnon of
Aeschylus was produced in 1900 in a naturalistic style, without masks
and with elaborate props and painted scenery. The Greek was pro-
nounced in the traditional English way. The actors were all men;
even so "the impersonators of the male parts seemed to be rather
ill at ease in their armour" ("'Agamemnon' at Cambridge" 7). The
Clytemnestra of Mr. F.L. Lucas was generally admired by the review-
ers, though "Max" (Beerbohm) remained unimpressed by the
chorus of "grey-bearded undergraduates." Woolf remembered and
stored away such incongruities: "Seems a long time since he acted
in the Greek play,... in a toga," says Edward of a fat railway mag-
nate in a white waistcoat ( The Years 412). The chorus in The Birds of
Aristophanes, produced in 1903, apparently sang and danced to
graceful effect and managed their gauze wings "most skilfully"; if
the comic business was somewhat overdone, "this was a venial excess
and testified to the enthusiasm of the players."' No wonder Woolf
believed that plays are better read than seen ("On Not Knowing
Greek" 46).
Nevertheless, something came through in these productions. "I
shall never forget the Antigone. I saw it at Cambridge years ago,
and it's haunted me ever since," insists Mrs. Dalloway in The Voyage
Out: "I don't know a word of Greek, but I could listen to it for
ever-" (46)."' Hearing a whole play in Greek, which for Woolf
would have meant catching many of the words but not understand-
ing the whole, chimed with her fascination with sound without or
beyond meaning. That both the plays she attended were largely
sung to music by Hubert Parry may also have helped her to imag-
ine the choric voice as song or chant. She never forgot the
' The only reference to Woolf's having seen the Agamemiuoni is an inscription by
Thoby in a copy of Fox's Book of Martyrs he gave her as a present: "Sunday Nov.
18th 1900, being the day after the performance of the 'Agamemnon' of Aeschylus
at Cambridge." (The book is now in the collection of Washington State University.)
Woolf's letters mention her plans to visit Cambridge to see The Birds (Letters 1:107,
undated; 1:109, 27 November 1903). For the review of' The Birds see F. For the
history of the pronunciation of Greek in England see Allen, Appendix A.
'" In Nlelmbrosia the Greek play is the one Woolf herself saw: "By the way, I was
so fearfully interested by the Agamemnon at Cambridge the other day. I wish you'd
tell me all about it" (Melymbrosia by iVirginia oolf 31). Although changing the play
to the Antigone in The Vo yage Out (45) muddies Clarissa's subsequent reference to
Clytemnestra, it furnishes a pretext for the quotation from one of Woolf s favorite
choruses (Antligoe, 11. 332-37).
Agamemnon; and of course in The Birds she heard, for the first time,
birds talking Greek:"
TopoTopoTopoTopoTi~. Toro-toro-toro-torotinx!
KLKKCGIBG KIKKGaBPa. Kikkabau, Kikkabau!
TopoTopoTopoTopoAI At A (4. Toro-toro-toro-toro-lililinx!
(11. 260-62)
What other experiences fed Woolf's understanding of the Greek

drama? In September 1906 she stood in the theater at Epidaurus
and felt the continuity of the circular outdoor space-"the grey
seats scooped out of the hillside, with wide air & country all round"
(Passionate Apprentice 330 ?25 September)-with the landscape
beyond it and the community in which it played a central role. In
the Greek theater of Syracuse in Sicily she saw a play rehearsed-
"Medea in a sulphur-coloured wig, and Alcestis, in a bowler and
overcoat ... It was rather beautiful" (Letters 3: 364, 14 April 1927)-
and in Athens she and Leonard sat in the theater of Dionysos: "we
said that Sophocles, Euripides & Aristophanes must have sat here"
(Diary 4: 98, 8 May 1932).
In the early 1920s, in preparation for writing "On Not Knowing
Greek," Woolf read Jane Ellen Harrison's Ancient Art and Ritual,
with its even-handed sympathy both for the chorus of "doddering
and pottering old men" (121) and for the alienated modern spec-
tator. 2 Woolf absorbed from Harrison insights about the way Greek
ritual conventions embody archetypal emotions and states of mind;
the enigmatic presence of Harrison herself presides over A Room of
One's Own, working her ritual magic on the vegetation and the
seasons in the garden of "Fernham," the women's college (27-28).
Harrison refers to the chorus as "undifferentiated," a word that
would become a keynote of The Waves and is used in Woolf's most
explicit evocation of the chorus: "the old men or women who take
no active part in the drama, the undifferentiated voices who sing
like birds in the pauses of the wind; who can comment, or sum up,
or allow the poet to speak himself or supply, by contrast, another
side to his conception" ("On Not Knowing Greek" 46-47).
Although Harrison was sure "the old choral dance" could never
be revived, she also believed that modern art may still bear traces
of its "collective, social origin." (Harrison cites Arnold Bennett in
this regard, perhaps picking the wrong author but instinctively cor-
rect in looking for these traces in the novel rather than in drama.)
Indeed, the fashion for verse drama in the 1930s offered Woolf
ample examples of how not to transplant Greek choruses. We see
' In "Old Bloomsbury" (Moments of Being 162) Woolf remembers hearing birds
singing in Greek during her illness in the summer of 1904. She saw The Birds in
December 1903. For an account of some of the many interpretations of these Greek-
speaking birds see Hermione Lee (195-97). Quotations are from the Bickley Rogers
parallel text of The Birds, which Woolf studied in 1924 (Silver 101 ).
2 For Harrison's influence on Woolf see Robinson, Hoffman, Maika, and Shattuck.
her becoming more sure of her own methods through her reac-
tions to Eliot's plays, which she hated. Sweeney Agonistes was "a kin
of Crippen, in a mask"; the choruses from The Rock were "tainted"
(Diary 4: 261, 12 November 1934; Letters 5: 315, 10July 1934). Murd
in the Cathedral felt chilled and dead, but also queasy: "came away
as if I'd been rolling in the ash bin; and somehow filled my mout
with the bones of a decaying cat thrown there by a workhouse drab
(Letters 5: 442, 13 November 1935). By the time she saw The Family
Reunion she simply had nothing to say (Diary 5: 211, 29 March 1939
The problem was essentially one of embodiment: "The truth is whe
he [Eliot] has live bodies on stage his words thin out, and no
rhetoric will save them" (Letters 5: 448, 1 December 1935). Her dis-
cussion of Murder in the Cathedral modulates naturally into a refle
tion on her own current project, The Years: "I think what is wante
is for some actress to make plays in which people are like ourselve
only heightened; what is so bad [in Eliot] is the complete brea
between the acting, the words and the scenery... I am almost daze
with writing my book; and think it would be better acted" (Letter
5: 444-45, 17 November 1935). Of course, Woolf didn't write The
Years as a play, but she did write a chorus-of the caretakers'
children, who utter a kind of raucous prophecy, a blend of Greek
and nursery rhyme, fragments, as Amy Richlin (268) has described
them, "not only of an ancient tongue, but of a future tongue" (cf.
Marcus 49):
Etho passo tanno hai
Fai donk to tu do,
( The Years 429)
Reading Woolf's novels alongside "On Not Knowing Greek" and

in the light of her comments on Eliot we can see that she had al-
ready solved the problem of embodying the "general and poetic"
without breaking the movement of the whole. In Mrs. Dalloway the
London sparrows blend a kind of Euripidean jubilation with the
detached compassion of Aristophanes' chorus in their famous
Parabasis: up6oxrETE TOV VOOV TOqq dOc(VdrTOlq iPiv, TOq CRiV
So00tv... .o"a y&p ivOdS' iarTiV ClOXp& TC vd6Pa KPC(TOdpEVCQ,
TC0TC( 1TXdVT' ioTiV 1"Tap'X ?lIV TOIoIV "pvictyv K aAd. ("Listen with
care to the birds of the air, the ageless, the deathless... All that
here is reckoned shameful, all that here the laws condemn,/With
the birds is right and proper, you may do it all with them." The Birds,
11. 688, 755-56). In Woolf,
A sparrow perched on the railing opposite chirped Septimrnus, Septimus, four or
five times over and went on, drawing its notes out, to sing freshly and piercingly in
Greek words how there is no crime and, joined by another sparrow, they sang in
voices prolonged and piercing in Greek words, from trees in the meadow of life
beyond a river where the dead walk, how there is no death. (24-25)
In To the Lighthouse, an elderly Scottish woman replaces the elders,
attendants and serving women of the Greek tragic chorus. "T

Passes" thanks to her doddering and pottering presence an
wordless song, which is both contemporary and timeless: "As
lurched.., .and leered.., .she sang" (196). In manuscript
McNabb "chanted," but in the published text she is explicitly
Greek chorus; rather, she is "something not inspired to go ab
its work with dignified ritual or solemn chanting" (209). Wool
replaced her classical-sounding "elegy" with a humdrum "d
The manuscript claims a classical, universalizing role for
McNabb-"the voice of the <indomitable> principle of life, & its
power to persist" or "what in moments of high great emotion great
poets have said"-and there are even echoes of Sophoclean
choruses in "how it was not good, not happy .., this world" (To the
Lighthouse: The Original Holograph Draft 162-63). The published
novel, on the other hand, grounds Mrs. McNabb's song in a more
specific context-modern, urban, communal, and already old-fash-
ioned: "something on the stage," "the old music hall song" (197).
It is in The Waves that Woolf weaves the choric voice most closely
into her text. The novel is all chorus, transcending the choric style
of any individual Greek dramatist. The voices are divided between
the six individual speakers, an undifferentiated "community" to
which the six do not belong, and the birds, who wordlessly play
out the tension between communal and solitary expression. "'The
birds sang in chorus first,' said Rhoda"; but with dawning self-
consciousness, "one sings ... alone" (10-11), "Outside the undif-
ferentiated forces roar" (255). Bernard in particular fears the
loneliness of soliloquy ("We who have sung like eager birds each
his own song," 123) and is "drawn irresistibly to the sound of the
chorus chanting its old, chanting its almost wordless, almost sense-
less song" (246). The community is terrifying-raucous, hearty,
heartless, anonymous-but also seductive: "The sound of the chorus
came across the water and I felt leap up that old impulse, which
has moved me all my life, to be thrown up and down on the roar of
other people's voices, singing the same song" (278-79). Its allure is
both atavistic and modern, its utterances non-verbal, pure (but not
mellifluous) sound: "wheels; dogs; men shouting; church bells"
(27), drunken revelry with smashing china (91), city traffic (135),
or "some wild carol ... a hunting song" (243). The "boasting boys"
who haunt Bernard not only make noises in unison but, like a Greek
chorus, also have a shared body language, "all turning their heads
the same way" (234); on the sports field or the river "All divisions
are merged-they act like one man" (91). In The Waves Woolf dis-
solves soliloquy and chorus into a new language, counterpointing
the comforting, threatening, wordless sounds of "ordinary" people
in social groups with the voices of individuals in isolation: "now
together; as if conscious of companionship, now alone ... " (73).
The Greek past is also present in Woolf's characters, their rela

tionships and resonances. Anyone in her circle might be tran
formed into a classical figure: she saw Thoby Stephen and Ruper
Brooke as Greek gods,Janet Case as a "noble Athena," even Grizz
the dog as Ajax (Diary 2: 311, 15 August 1924). Characters in her
fiction-in particular, beautiful males-are pictured as Greek
statues: from Ralph, with "the brow of a young Greek horseman"
(Night and Day 227) to Edward, "a Greek boy on a frieze" (The Years
49, 54). Ralph himself tests whether Katherine is beautiful by con-
sulting his "book of photographs from the Greek statues; the head
of a goddess." Making up his mind, and "Shutting the book of Greek
photographs ... he ran downstairs" (385-86). Helen Ambrose and
Mrs. Ramsay are both beautiful after the Greek fashion, though
Helen's "was much warmer than a Greek face" (The Voyage Out 14).
Percival, the splendid and obtuse servant of empire, is any Greek
hero ("Alcibiades, Ajax, Hector") and none, standing only for him-
self (The Waves 181). It will be left to Bernard, the unheroic, to
fling himself against oblivion with Ajax's words c OvcvaT OvcivaTE:

"O Death!" (Sophocles, Ajax, 1. 854; The Waves 297). Three particu-
larly instructive examples of Woolf's mythical method, of Greek
correspondences invoked in a spirit of celebration, tragedy and
irony, are Mrs. Ramsay as Demeter, Septimus Smith/Evans as the
dead soldier of the Anthology, and Doctors Holmes and Bradshaw
as the Erinyes, or "Kindly Ones."
Since Joseph Blotner's pioneering essay on mythic patterns in
To the Lighthouse, many scholars have contributed to a discussion of
the novel in terms of Greek myth, and specifically in terms of the
relationship of Mrs. Ramsay and Lily to Demeter and her lost/found
daughter, Persephone (see also Barr, Taylor, Stewart, and Frazer).
Charles Tansley imagines Mrs. Ramsay walking through the fields
"With stars in her eyes and veils in her hair, with cyclamen and wild
violets" (25). The "Time Passes" section, in this reading, encom-
passes both history (the Great War, the General Strike) and the trans-
formation of the earth through the cycle of seasons (the descent
to the Underworld). Mrs. Ramsay is identified with flowers and fruit-
fulness but also with darkness and loss. The perfect bowl of fruit at
the center-piece of the dinner table is not a shrunken, parodic bathos,
like Mr. Eugenides' currants in The Waste Land; it enjoys an equal
and simultaneous existence with its classical avatar/forerunner, the
cornucopia. Woolf's elegy for her dead mother finds a balance
between loss, resistance and reconciliation through the alterna-
tion of illumination and shadow (the lighthouse).
In Mrs. Dalloway Greece casts a different kind of shadow, as the
home of the fallen warrior, the place from which Evans, his com-
rade killed in the war, haunts the shell-shocked Septimus: "The
dead were in Thessaly, Evans sang, among the orchids" (105-6). The
uniform headstones of the War Graves Commission merge into th

"hard, white, imperishable words" of a classical ode; a London pa
becomes the remembered battlefields of the Greek Anthology
Regent's Park is peopled with classical figures and imbued wi
the Greek supernatural: pipe-playing shepherd boys (103), dryad
sirens, bacchantes-benevolent or mischievous figures watched ov
by one of the Fates, an old nurse, impassively knitting (83, 85, 88
Septimus cannot be saved by his wife's kindness, for she and he
Italian sisters are also Fates: "That was the doom pronounced in Mi
when he came into the room and saw them cutting out buckram
shapes with their scissors; to be alone forever" (220). Because
Woolf's reading notes on the Choephori of Aeschylus share a not
book with her working notes for Mrs. Dalloway, critics have pai
special attention to the strands of vengeance and propitiation
the novel. Septimus is pursued by the Erinyes-male versions
the Furies in the shape of the doctors Holmes and Bradshaw, un
kindly brutes with "red nostrils" (223): "For that made Septimus
cry out about human cruelty-how they tear each other to pieces
The fallen, he said, they tear to pieces" (213).
Septimus's disordered mind claims the powers of metamorphos
to transform and be transformed. But Woolf is less concerned with
explicit allusions and classical parallels than with keeping alive t

suggestive insights of the metamorphic tradition. Her most del
erate and self-conscious exploration of the mode of metamorph
is Orlando, which offers a critique of and escape from the Ovid
mode. As Orlando changes sex and century, as countries and
sons overlap and merge, Woolf returns continually to the tapes
that we first see stirred by an Elizabethan breeze: the woven tal
Daphne (14). Sarah Brown has explored the intricacies of the
Ovidian metamorphosis in Orlando, showing how such transformation
blur the boundaries of male and female, of historical period, of write
text and reader."' There is no record of Woolf's having read Ov
and there are no references to him in her writings. Neverthele
she knew how his influence imbued the English Renaissance; ne
to the Greeks she loved the Elizabethans, and Brenda Silver (15-16)
has shown how often Woolf planned her schemes of reading so as
to bring the two into juxtaposition. Orlando is the text in which she
brings the two literatures together in dialogue and ultimately sepa-
rates them. As a man and a poet, Orlando composes the kind of
classicizing pieces dear to the Elizabethans: "The Death of Ajax,"
13 For the identification of a particular epitaph from the Greek Anthology see
Latham. Thessaly and death are also linked in another poem from the Anthology,
Simonides' "Epitaph on a Thessalian Hound." Woolf kept well-used copies of
Mackail's bilingual edition of the Anthology at both her Sussex and London homes.
" Unpublished paper on Orlando and the Metamorphoses, part of a forthcoming
monograph on Ovid and English literature. See also Skulsky.
"The Birth of Pyramus" (76). To his Ovidian imagination, the gra

darkens "like a flight of girls fleeing the embraces of hairy satyr
from enchanted woods" (102). He defends his style to his friend
Greene, who believes "the great age of literature was the Greek; t
Elizabethan was inferior," because it was "marked by precious co
ceits and wild experiments-neither of which the Greeks would
have tolerated for a moment" (88-89). Leaving Elizabethan England,
Orlando travels to Greece and Constantinople; as a woman and a
gypsy she affronts male prohibitions, even grazing her goats "on
the slopes of Mount Athos" (150). Throughout, Woolf naturalizes
the pastoral and the supernatural; there is something decorative
and over-elaborated in Elizabethan metamorphosis which she both
emulates and mocks. Daphne flies through the book and is still
flying in the present-day episode. It is Orlando who is metamor-
phosed-into a woman, but first into a tree, an English oak.
How did actually setting foot in Greece as an Englishwoman affect

Woolf's sense of the relationship between the two countries? On
her two Greek visits, in 1906 and 1932, she ran the gamut of the
usual English emotions: anticipation, euphoria, betrayal, speechless-
ness, belatedness, bathos, irritation, physical discomfort, love. As
Hermione Lee has shown in her brilliant account of the 1906 visit,
nowhere else was Woolf so lost for words and so conscious of her
own inarticulateness (229). The country was simply too old

encrusted with associations, its landscape too harsh and un
posed. Woolf shared and parodied the typical responses of he
sically educated companions, their disappointment with t
modern inhabitants who could no longer speak their own lan
properly or measure up to their own history. She tried to en
the experience in "A Vision of Greece"; during the trip she k
diary, and afterwards she mulled it over in a comic dialogue
fragment of a story. "A Vision" moves from the first shock of
pointment to a moment of insight and back again to a more
headed accommodation with the contemporary. The whole
of traveling to Greece in the present day was, she decided, in
gruous-Woolf's word is the Platonic "impious": "It seems a
impious" even to think of railway stations and porters at Oly
and Tiryns and Mycenae-those "sacred" names (MH/A23.i).
Greece, after all, ceased to exist "in about the year one A.D." (a
common assumption among non-Greeks) and "what railway can
possibly bridge that gap?" The modern Greeks crowd and jostle
beneath the Acropolis "talking a <foreign> lisping in a foreign
tongue, & the curved noses & the swarthy cheeks proclaim them
Turks & <barbarians> strangers <beside the straight> for there can
be no kinship <can there be> between them & the straight fea-
tured & grave eyed men and women who seem still to rule the <city>
land even in their effigies." At night, however, with the "terrib

wounds" of the modern city obscured, "the august ghosts com
forth once more." Re-peopling Athens, Woolf places at the cente
not "grave men" and their "beautiful boys" but the statue of Athen
"the maiden goddess" with her olive crown and wreath of wild
flowers. Hers is a distinctly feminized version of the old gods;
Athena, as figure of wisdom and female nobility, remains a potent
force, domesticated but not mocked. The vision ends as it began,
with an act of impiety: a farmer who is momentarily enchanted
with Athena and "half inclined to lay a cabbage as offering at her
feet" ends up merely cursing her and dedicates his votive carrot to
a male god's shrine.
Woolf finds it as challenging to "read" Greece as to "write" it. In
the diary, Epidaurus is chaotic, fragmentary, the landscape of the
Argolid "too fierce, too precipitous"; she feels at home only when
it occasionally reminds her of Cornwall, just as the narrow streets
of Athens recall St. Ives. Her mind and gaze are "vagrant," focus-
ing on thyme and lizards rather than sites and statues, though she
was moved by some of the sculptures she saw, particularly the
Hermes of Praxiteles at Olympia. She often breaks off a sentence,
declining to "write guide book." At Mycenae, perhaps the most reso-
nant site of all because of her involvement with the story of
Agamemnon, she is also most at a loss for words, yet ultimately
captures the moment through the most immediate of her associa-
tions-the Greek language and its literature, encompassing three
senses in as many sentences: "the taste of Homer was in my
mouth... the words of the poets begin to sing & embody them-
selves . . . if statues & marble are solid to the touch, so, simply, are
words resonant to the ear" (Passionate Apprentice 331, September
1906). At Achmetaga on Euboea and at Salamis she saw archaeolo-
gists at work, and in an unpublished fragment of a story she adopts
an unusual perspective (never repeated), writing in the first per-
son as an imaginary French archaeologist, Theophile, who dreams
of unearthing "pale stone figures" and laying them out in the sun
among the insects and herbs of a Greek hillside (MH/B4.e).
In Athens it was harder to bring the past to life; the Acropolis,
which Woolf visited almost every day of her stay, became the tangi-
ble center of her vision, helping to erase the ugly modern city
(Passionate Apprentice 328, September 1906). A long passage in her
diary records the heavy, homesick days she passed in Athens at the
bedside of her sister Vanessa, who had fallen ill. Woolf describes
reading-not a classical text or an English novel, but Merimee's
Lettres a une inconnue, which she found "rather comforting in the cir-
cumstances" (Letters 1: 378, 4 January 1909). The "inconnue" is a
dark-eyed woman who knows Greek but never speaks; the reader has
to try to interpret her. Merimee's text reflected back to Woolf her
own sense of the unknown or unknowable aspects of Greece.

In her own Platonic/Peacockian "Dialogue upon Mount
Pentelicus" Woolf makes a shapely and witty story from all the pre-
conceptions, disillusionments and incongruities she had experi-
enced. A party of Englishmen (there are no women) goes for an
outing on donkeys to Pentelicus: we must not call them tourists for
"Germans are tourists and Frenchmen are tourists but Englishmen
are Greeks." The dialogue then hinges on the "tough old riddle of
the modern Greek and his position in the world today," as Woolf
explores the ironies of her brothers' attachment to their borrowed
ancestors and their condescension to the modern Greeks, the disin-
herited heirs of that idealized classical past. One speaker (sounding
like Woolf's brother Adrian) speaks for the Victorian philhellenism
which saw ancient Greece as the acme of beauty and culture, time-
less and never to be equalled. His partner in the dialogue (brother
Thoby) counters with an argument which Woolf later explored in
"On Not Knowing Greek"-that no such people existed except as
an idealization of the dreams and aspirations of the modern
European mind: "there is no reason why you should read their writ-
ings, for have you not written them?" The dialogue is interrupted
by an apparition, a "great brown form" emerging from the bushes.
A bear? In fact, an Orthodox monk, whose gaze sparks a vision of
connectedness and continuity across time: "the Greeks, that is Plato
and Sophocles and the rest, were close to themr... and breathed
the same air as that which kissed the cheek and stirred the vine."
Her brothers' condescension to the disappointing natives is expi
ated by a demotic KahtrruOpa spoken "as a Greek to a Greek." Th
bidding the monk good evening, the English descend in the sud
dusk to Athens.
Much of the 1906 visit found its way into Jacob's Room, where chap
ters 12 and 13 are set in Greece, a destination to which, as Mary
Koutsoudaki argues, everything in Jacob's background and upbrin
ing has tended. The quest forJacob, who can never be apprehend
directly, is channeled through his philhellenism and all that it sug
gests about his attitudes to art and literature, to male friendship
to women, to England, and to his fate, his death. At Cambridge,
Greek is privilege, beauty, homosociality; in London, at the Britis
Museum, it is the Elgin marbles and the classic authors inscribed
round the dome of the Reading Room. In Greece itself, philhelle
ism is put to the test, and the gap between Jacob and the voice
the narrator fluctuates: Alex Zwerdling has shown how predictabl
even banal, are the responses recognizable through the indire
free style as belonging to 'Jacob," how complex those of the oth
voice(s) in the dialogue (77). And yetJacob and Greece are iden
flied; the elegy for his death is a darkness over the classic/modern lan
scape from Athens north to Euboea and Troy, mingling Homeric
memories with the contemporary catastrophe of Asia Minor:'5

The mainland of Greece was dark; and somewhere off Euboea a cloud must have
touched the waves and spattered them-the dolphins circling deeper and deeper
into the sea. Violent was the wind now rushing down the Sea of Marmara between
Greece and the plains of Troy. (272-73)
On her second visit to Greece, in 1932, Woolf encountered a
very different country and saw it interpreted by different compan-
ions; in place of Thoby Stephen, the reticent, classically educated
Greek god, she had Roger Fry, the garrulous, puritanical middle-
aged polymath, whose project was Byzantine art. Wryly, she went
along with his dismissal of ancient Greece in favor of Byzantium
("Roger raves about the Byzantines," Letters 5: 60, 7 May 1932). Her
own project was not to bury Greece but to claim it for herself as a
way of understanding history and cultural formation; throughout
the trip the book was taking shape that was to become Three Guineas.
Putting together Woolf's letters and diary and her biography of
Fry, we can overhear her dialogue not only with her traveling com-
panions (Leonard Woolf and Fry's sister Marjorie came too) and
several correspondents but also with her own history, a younger
self defined against the ruins: "but what can I say about the
Parthenon-that my own ghost met me, the girl of 23, with all her
life to come" (Diary 4: 90, 21 April 1932). In spite of Fry's researches
she continued to think of Greece as a land lacking a continuous
history; for her, the fourth century B.C. and the present day shared
a single and simultaneous existence without intervening epochs.
This she contrasted with the layerings and comfortable accretions
of English history: "In Greece one was always going back two thou-
sand years. Here it was always the eighteenth century. Like every-
thing English. . .the past seemed near, domestic, friendly" (The
Years 196).
For Woolf the two countries can be reduced to a series of con-
trasts-England, snug, serious, modest, fresh; Greece flippa

flimsy, gimcrack, unaccommodating-but they can also merge i
and sustain each other, and Woolf is not always sure if she
Greece or London. As in 1906, she notices that Greece becomes
magic at dusk; she enjoys the volta, when, brightly lit, the drabbest
Greek town can come into its own. To Fry's painter's eye, Greece
was "bare of trees, angular and over-dramatic ... He admired, he
analysed, but he did not fall in love" (Roger Fry: A Biography 281).
Woolf herself felt more passionately, pondering the possibilities of
sympathies between people and places and joking to friends about
going to live in Greece-perhaps moving the Hogarth Press to
Crete: "I could love Greece, as an old woman, so I think, as I once
loved Cornwall, as a child" (Diary 4: 97, 8 May 1932).
" For Woolf's understanding of contemporary Balkan politics see Roessel.
Woolf's love of England, which she carefully distinguished from

a chauvinistic patriotism, is often explored in terms of a contrast
between Greece and England, of the differences that might strike
someone who is just setting out from, or who has recently returned
to, one or the other place. The Voyage Out takes a group of English
passengers, among them a Greek scholar, on a journey of discov-
ery, growing-up and death aboard the steamer Euphrosyne. Although
their destination is ostensibly South America, where they expect to
find a scene "much bigger than Italy, and really nobler than Greece"
(90), much ofWoolf's first Greek trip, including the Mount Pentelicus
expedition, finds its way into the novel. The "1911" section of The
Years is seen through the eyes of Eleanor, who has been traveling in
Southern Europe; life at home seems civilized, friendly, a little
smug. The same is true of Mrs. Dalloway's London, as it appears to
Peter Walsh, fresh from India: green, soft, well-organized (the traffic
makes way for ambulances). Yet Woolf could also be surprised by
moments of homesickness for Greece, experienced as flashbacks
of sensation: looking at a summer moon through a telescope, for
instance, she seems to feel the earth shrinking until she is aware of
a place "hard blue & white, on the other side of the world; all the
palms flashing, & the dance of heat; people sleeping under umbrel-
las; great melons, & donkeys with water skins, men lounging within
the limits of hard black shadows" (Passionate Apprentice 368, 8 August
1907); or as late as 1938 in Scotland: "Ben Nevis with stripes of
snow. The sea. Little boats; feeling of Greece and Cornwall" (Diary
5:153, 21June 1938). Her last sight of Greece is through the window
of the Orient Express, as the modern train momentarily illumi-
nates the ancient landscape: "a shepherds hut, & two men in long
coats lit up by the electric lights of our restaurant car" (Diary 4: 99,
10 May 1932).
Superimposition, pastiche, and allusion are part of the mythical
method of Modernism, in which metamorphosis, the transformation
of and simultaneous existence of unassimilated modes, is the defin-
ing trope. Modernism is often perceived as an elegy for the classical
tradition, a gathering of fragments in a last-ditch stand against
barbarism. But Woolf's Greece neither mourns the old myths nor
attempts to shore them up. With ingenuity and precision, she con-
jures past into present, Athens into London or a mother of eight
into a Greek goddess, even though--to give her the last word (from
"A Dialogue Upon Mount Pentelicus")-"it is no longer within the
power of the English mind. . . to see fur grow upon smooth ears
and cloven hoofs where there are ten separate toes."
University of Bristol
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University of Oregon

Moments and Metamorphoses: Virginia Woolf's Greece

T HEingGREEKS HAUNTED WOOLF. Her essay "On Not Know-

followed a prose sketch ("A Vision of Greece"), a story fragment, a

and physical suffering, and emphasized the role of a jealously

though the physical stuff of my brain were expanding, larger &

"The words flickering out"; of the Oedipus Coloneus, she reco

3 of the Odyssey, rumor circulates "Very like Cornish villages" (B

also find herself brought up short by cultural and historical di

Fittingly, Woolf's own earliest voluntary service to a "cause" wa

"having blurted out her message somewhat formlessly, she [t

the essay begins. Greek authors are evoked through metaphors fo

hand,J.M. Mackail's fondness for words like "wan" in his translation

In 1922 Woolf set about making her own "edition" of the

the connotations of her words or the shape of her sentences?

Woolf was sometimes irritated by the convention of reporting

followers" (MH/A.21). It is as if Mr. Ramsay himself is beginni

in ordinary life rather than existing independently of human co

It was in the Greek chorus, however, that AWoolf discovered th

"difficult to see exactly what bearing a chorus has upon a play

What other experiences fed Woolf's understanding of the Greek

Reading Woolf's novels alongside "On Not Knowing Greek" and

In To the Lighthouse, an elderly Scottish woman replaces the elders,

attendants and serving women of the Greek tragic chorus. "T

The Greek past is also present in Woolf's characters, their rela

fling himself against oblivion with Ajax's words c OvcvaT OvcivaTE:

uniform headstones of the War Graves Commission merge into th

explicit allusions and classical parallels than with keeping alive t

"The Birth of Pyramus" (76). To his Ovidian imagination, the gra

How did actually setting foot in Greece as an Englishwoman affect

own inarticulateness (229). The country was simply too old

land even in their effigies." At night, however, with the "terrib

own sense of the unknown or unknowable aspects of Greece.

memories with the contemporary catastrophe of Asia Minor:'5

trasts-England, snug, serious, modest, fresh; Greece flippa

" For Woolf's understanding of contemporary Balkan politics see Roessel.

Woolf's love of England, which she carefully distinguished from

"The 'Agamemnon' at Cambridge." Rev. of Agarnemnon. New Theatre,

Max [Max Beerbohm]. "Aeschylus Made Ridiculous." Rev. of Agamemnon. New

Steiner, George. Antigones. London: Oxford University Press, 1984.

. Unpublished manuscripts. Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection. New

Virginia Woolj; A Passionate Apprentice: The Early Journals 1897-1909.

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