Imagine a tipsy room of eminent painters, poets, and intellectuals, laughing as they wait for a play to begin. Virginia Woolf sits alongside E.M. Forster; T.S. Eliot may pop in. Clive Bell’s booming laughter can be heard above the chatter; Woolf will later describe the atmosphere as ‘unbuttoned’. In 1930s London, the Bloomsbury Group often put on amateur plays written and acted by their members. Many were never performed again, written solely for the pleasure of the evening and filled with in-jokes. Woolf’s Freshwater is one such piece.
It is unclear whether Freshwater was intended for the public at all. Published posthumously, it reveals a silly side to Woolf that was almost buried by the melancholy of her oeuvre and suicide. Begun in 1923, Freshwater provided comic relief while writing the heavier Mrs Dalloway. It is less polished than her novels, and Woolf herself laughed it off as ‘tosh’. However, in its jocular satire of rigid Victorian social conventions, Woolf broaches serious themes of masculine egoism, artistic freedom, and female oppression.
Freshwater satirises the turn-of-century dissonance between stuffy Victorianism and an encroaching Bohemian world. Set in the Isle of Wight at the holiday residence of Woolf’s great-aunt, Julia Margaret Cameron, the characters include real-life ‘greats’ from a fast-fading era. The poet Alfred Lord Tennyson, painter George Frederic Watts and his young wife, the actress Ellen Terry, all make up the dramatis personae. Ironically, their congregation reflects the gathering of the Bloomsbury Group, yet Woolf devotes Freshwater to poking fun at the male artists who cling to the vestiges of their outmoded influence.
Woolf is unafraid to paint Watts as a stick in the mud. His long-suffering wife is his muse: he forces her to ‘keep perfectly still’ for hours on end, arms stretched out and eyes raised upwards in a martyred vision of Modesty, before forgoing the project anyway after deciding that he has failed to depict idealised womanhood. Modesty is but one of the metaphysical concepts that Ellen is forced to embody: ‘Sometimes I’m Poetry. Sometimes I’m Chastity. Sometimes, generally before breakfast, I’m merely Nell.’ The multiplicity of these roles satirises the notion that women must charmingly and quietly assume all of them at once. Woolf subverts this patriarchal paradigm to present men as tired failures: Ellen promptly abandons Watts for a sailor she has just met, leaving him muse-less and moaning.
Having spied on Ellen and her new love, Watts cries, ‘Ellen! Ellen! My wife- my wife- dead, dead, dead!’ He echoes Shakespeare: convinced that he has been cuckolded by his wife Desdemona, Othello cries: ‘O Desdemon! Dead, Desdemon! Dead!’ Only Watts’ idealised vision of a pure, acquiescent wife has ‘died’ here, whereas Tennyson believes that she has actually drowned. This romantic, Ophelia-esque death gratifies him: ‘There is something pleasing about the death of a young woman in the pride of life. Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course with stocks and stones and trees’. Here he quotes Wordsworth: Woolf limits the men’s vernacular to phrases from masculine ‘greats’ of old to depict their stagnation and antiquity. Upon realising that Ellen has not drowned, Tennyson mourns the loss of a potentially majestic elegy and tears up its beginnings in childish melodrama.
John Craig, Ellen’s sailor, is the only male character shown mercy by Woolf. He is also the only fictional man in the play: as such, he becomes an imaginative vessel through which Ellen can liberate herself. When they kiss, Ellen dreams of ‘beef steaks; beer; standing under an umbrella in the rain’; she is emancipated from a life of posing to indulge in desires typically afforded to men. She returns to announce their elopement in a pair of boys’ trousers: Woolf criticises the limitations of gender roles on female creative potential. Unlike Watts, John has no interest in literary allusions nor embodiments of abstract values: ‘I like Nell best’. Reminiscent of Woolf herself, they move to Bloomsbury, where Ellen can pursue a life of creative freedom as an actress.
Thus the innocuous Freshwater grasps generational change and applauds aesthetic freedom within its comedic framework. While a light-hearted tone fit for a ‘Bloomsbury party’ prevails, Woolf seems to have underestimated her work. The intricate weaving of her own experiences in the character of Ellen, perspicacious critical commentary, and moments of absurdity make Freshwater the perfect antidote to Victorian puritanism.
Image: “Virginia Woolf lived here” by kootenayvolcano is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.