Plutarch and Woolf's notions of identity
Sun 05 July 2009
Claire Lai, Communications
The identities Plutarch constructed in Consolation to His Wife and Virginia Woolf in Street Haunting facilitated argument and forms of reasoning behind the ideas.
While both authors employed intimacy through their narrotorial identity for their personal essays, they directed that intimacy differently to enable their different styles.
Plutarch established an authoritative identity, writing intimately to his wife to advise, protect and comfort her, while he asserted his ideas and negated alternatives to a broader audience.
Woolf did not assert or negate, but constructed a shared personal identity, presenting her ideas as a series of questions.
While Plutarch’s reasoning was established by the conventions of the rhetorical form and was instructive, Woolf’s was exploratory and reflective within a stream-of-consciousness form.
Though a precise definition of an essay remained doubtful, the defining characteristic of a personal essay was its intimacy (Lopate 1995, p. xxiii and Walker 1915, p. 5).
Both Woolf and Plutarch as author and narrator used an intimate style.
Plutarch communicated directly with his wife and indirectly with the intended broader audience of his letter, while Woolf spoke directly with her audience.
Plutarch (cited in Lopate 1995, p. 17), in Consolation to His Wife, addressed his letter intimately to “my dear wife”, both asserting the identity of husband and father and imbuing that with understanding it would be read by a wider audience.
Plutarch wrote his consolation with “considerable sensitivity, while at the same time addressing issues which can easily be viewed as didactic and intended for a wider audience, a feature common to ancient epistolary writings” (Baltussen 2009, p. 68).
The ongoing tradition of writing letters of consolation and general counseling intended for both the public and private sphere began with Crantor, a member of Plato’s academy.
The form gained sophistication and conventions developed as it was practiced by philosophers such as Cicero and Seneca (Baltussen 2009, pp 75-77).
Plutarch’s intention to reach a public audience was not only supported by the traditions of the form in which he wrote, but by the public office he held as a priest of Apollo at Delphi, which Pomeroy (cited in Baltussen 2009, p. 68) established entailed important responsibilities.
His identity was constructed from his attempts to balance his roles as husband, father and public figure (Baltussen 2009, p.84).
This public office, understood by the wider audience though not alluded to within the letter, also strengthened the authority of Plutarch’s identity.
Plutarch almost immediately used the intimacy he shared with his wife to reinforce the authority of his preoccupations when he wrote “if I find your grief exceeds due measure I shall be more greatly distressed than by the misfortune itself. Neither am I ‘fashioned of oak or stone’, as is well known to you, who have shared with me in the nurture of our several children, all of whom we have ourselves brought up at home” (cited in Lopate 1995, p. 17).
Plutarch’s references to their shared understanding of each other, gained from a shared past demonstrated his disapproval for excessive displays of grief, was not directed at his wife.
He established that his aversion stemmed not from a lack of feeling, for he had a genuine concern for his family.
This “evocative image of caring parents…signals how Plutarch seeks to present his wife and himself as special and atypical” (Baltussen 2009, p 79).
Furthermore, it was said that “the collaborative strand in their relationship” (Baltussen 2009, p 79) excluded external criticisms.
Unless the reader had shared the raising of Plutarch’s children, his criticisms of Plutarch’s sensibilities were negated.
Whereas Plutarch positioned the reader to witness the intimacy he shared with his wife, Woolf created an intimacy directly with the reader.
Woolf stated that a good essay “must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in, not out” (Woolf 1925), and so, in Street Haunting, she deliberately constructed an intimate shared identity with the reader with the inclusive personal pronouns “we” and “us” to speak not at, but with, the reader.
With phrases such as “the evening hour, too, gives us the irresponsibility which darkness and lamplight bestow” (Woolf 1927, cited in Lopate 1995, p. 256), Woolf placed readers through the feelings mutually experienced in settings she evoked.
Woolf freed the reader from the constraints of existing identity when she stated that “we are no longer quite ourselves. As we step out of the house on a fine evening between four and six, we shed the self our friends know us by and become part of that vast republican army of anonymous trampers” (Woolf 1927, cited in Lopate 1995, p. 256).
Receptivity and existence beyond specific self was like “a central oyster of perceptiveness, an enormous eye” (Woolf 1927, cited in Lopate 1995, p. 257) that she would direct, shaping our responses without guiding every step (Zwerdling 1986, p. 44).
Plutarch and Woolf used constructed identity to direct reasoning.
Plutarch’s reasoning was assertive and, just as Plutarch’s address to his broader audience was embedded in his letter to his wife, his instructions on appropriate behaviour for the broader audience were embedded in his kindnesses towards her.
This didactic aspect of his identity was seen when he encouraged her to lighten her grief, saying that “if you have omitted any ceremony which you think might lighten your grief because you wished to await my approval, do carry it out. But excesses and superstitions should be avoided; I know it is not in your character to indulge in them” (Plutarch cited in Lopate 1995, p.17).
When he sought to guide his wife in matters that would bring her comfort, there was always an elucidation that criticisms of poor behaviour were not applicable to her.
Plutarch’s identity of caring husband and father was demonstrated and situated him as the person most able to empathise with his wife.
This position, combined with the authority of his public office, allowed him to dictate to the broader audience his criticisms of inappropriate behaviour.
He contrasted repeatedly her virtue against these criticisms, for the purposes of instruction of the broader audience.
In this way his instruction asserted his opinion of what constituted good behaviour and negated the opinions of others.
This was demonstrated with Plutarch’s negation of the common practice of lamentations.
Plutarch asserted that lamentations were harmful and unseemly, an opinion consistent with the stoics, without considering what could be gained by them.
The practitioners of lamentations believed that with their pain, pleasure and cathartic relief would be mixed (Markus 2004, p. 106).
Plutarch described only its harm when he wrote “but the dreadful thing which does so much mischief in these cases I need have no fear of—I mean the visits of silly women and their cries and lamentations by which they fan and whet grief and prevent it from abating either through other causes or of itself. I know the good fight you lately fought when you supported Theon’s sister and resisted the women who were charging in with wails and shrieks, simply to pile fire upon fire” (Plutarch cited in Lopate 1995, p.20).
Plutarch not only outlined the harm of lamentations to his broader audience and distanced his wife from its practice, he defended his wife’s self-control to people who might judge her poorly for it (Baltussen 2009, p.96) and made clear to a wider audience it would not be appreciated in his household.
In stating this, Plutarch was protecting his wife from would-be lamenters and so the criticisms embedded in the kindness became an act of kindness.
When Plutarch instructed by contrasting praise with inappropriate behavior, he employed a traditional rhetorical device (Baltussen 2009, p. 80).
He also used an apology, advice (to regain calm or happiness by suggested methods of right thinking), bridging comments and consideration of appropriate customs (Baltussen 2009, p. 80).
The devices of the form Plutarch used not only established his audiences but gave Plutarch’s reasoning the validity of tradition.
They were enabled by the authority of his identity while increasing that authority.
The form allowed Plutarch’s comfort of his wife to provide a model of conduct for his broader audience.
The form of Plutarch’s reasoning was the antithesis of the form of Woolf’s reasoning, but both were enabled by the identities constructed.
Unlike Plutarch, Woolf did not begin by asserting her preoccupations, but constructed a receptive shared identity to lead the reader on a street ramble where the sights and their thoughts collided and interrupted each other in a stream-of-consciousness.
Woolf linked real experiences of the senses with the imagined ones they triggered.
She encouraged the reader to see “how beautiful a London street is then, with its islands of light, and its long groves of darkness” (Woolf cited in Lopate 1995, p.257), and hear “little cracklings and stirrings of leaf and twig which seem to suppose the silence of fields all round them, an owl hooting, and far away the rattle of a train in the valley” (Woolf cited in Lopate 1995, p.257).
Woolf contrasted these sensory experiences with characters like the dwarf, as Woolf described the dwarf’s changes of manner between peevishness and soothed.
The mood of characters altered the perceptions of the narrator, such as when Woolf said “the dwarf had started now a hobbling grotesque dance to which everybody in the street now conformed” (Woolf cited in Lopate 1995, p.259).
The reader, like an ordinary mind on an ordinary day, received what Woolf described as “a myriad of impressions—trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel” (Monk 2007, p.7).
With metaphors, Woolf painted flights of imagination, with the reader walking down Oxford Street where “the tide of trade …had this night cast up nothing but treasure” (Woolf cited in Lopate 1995, p.260).
She added detail with alliteration when she imagined what was happening behind Mayfair windows, stating “there are few lights in the bedrooms of … silk-stockinged footmen …Love–making is going on sibilantly, seductively” (Woolf cited in Lopate 1995, p.260).
Woolf (cited in Lopate 1995, p.261), unlike Plutarch, introduced her ideas to the reader not as an assertion but as a series of questions in the middle of her essay, and said “but what could be more absurd? It is, in fact, on the stroke of six; it is a winter’s evening; we are walking to the Strand to buy a pencil. How, then are we also on a balcony, wearing pearl’s in June? What could be more absurd?”
“Is the true self this which stands on the pavement in January, or that which bends over the balcony in June? Am I here, or am I there? Or is the true self neither this nor that, neither here nor there, but something so varied and wandering that it is only when we give the rein to its wishes and let it take its way unimpeded that we are indeed ourselves? Circumstances compel unity; for convenience sake a man must be a whole.”
The placement of these questions in the middle of the work, allowed the reader to consider the evidence without bias.
Had the questions been posed at the start of the essay, the reader would frame an answer based on their own experience and view the evidence in the shadow of that bias.
The questions not only provided the answer that they sought, they also presented its complexity.
Sim (2005, p. 45) argued that Woolf’s conception of truth like Plato’s “emphasises the various and ‘many-sided’ nature of truth", stating that Woolf used the word "life" synonymously with the words “truth” and “reality” (Sim 2005, p. 41).
Woolf developed over her works the idea that there were two states of consciousness, being and non-being.
Moments when life was not lived consciously were states of non-being, and moments when ordinary things were seen with great clarity and awareness were states of being (Sim 2005, p. 42).
This preoccupation with the dichotomy of existence was presented by Woolf clearly with examples then questions.
The stream-of-consciousness style in which Woolf explored the evidence of her preoccupations was also the answer to her questions about the nature of reality.
Her style was also her theme, considering the idea of where reality began and ended.
Is it physical, meta-physical or both?
Woolf and James Joyce developed the style during the Modernist period of western culture when a perception of the dislocation of contemporary human life prompted an attempt to find new forms of value (Fuery & Mansfield 1997, p.113).
Froula (2004, p. xii) claimed that the voyage of exploration was Woolf’s central metaphor for modernity’s great adventure towards “new lands …new civilizations”’.
Stream-of-consciousness became not just the method, but the truth discovered.
Woolf returned readers from her questions to the walk, allowing the reader’s minds to turn the questions over while they experienced more moments of being and shifts between the currents of being.
Woolf’s identity became less questioning but remained reflective before returning the reader to their room, when she decided “into each of these lives one could penetrate a little way, far enough to give oneself the illusion that one is not tethered to a single mind, but can put on briefly the bodies and minds of others” (Woolf cited in Lopate 1995, p.265).
Her form, instead of following rhetorical patterns of argument, followed the way in which a mind experienced events, which raised questions and then tested the answer against evidence for its universal truth.
The identities which Woolf and Plutarch established defined the relationship of the reader to the evidence presented for their preoccupations.
The style in which they reasoned their arguments was enabled by these identities.
Plutarch’s identity lent authority to his assertive style and negation of alternate ideas.
Woolf’s reflective identity created an explorative style that was able to consider complex preoccupations.
Plutarch used the techniques of rhetoric style and form to comfort and advise his wife while holding her up as an example of the good behaviour he was prescribing to a wider audience.
Woolf used the techniques of metaphor, alliteration and stream-of-consciousness to develop her idea of reality.
Sources
Baltussen, H 2009, ‘Personal Grief and Public Mourning in Plutarch’s Consolation to His Wife’, American Journal of Philology, Vol. 130, Number 1 (Whole Number 517) Spring, pp. 67-98.
Froula, C 2004, Virginia Woolfe and the Bloomsbury Avant-Gard, Columbia University Press, New York.
Lopate, Phillip 1995, The Art of the Personal Essay, Random House, Inc, New York.
Markus, D 2004, ‘Grim Pleasures: Statius's Poetic Consolationes’, Arethusa, Vol. 37, Number 1, Winter, pp 105 – 135.
Monk, R 2007, ‘This Fictitious Life: Virginia Woolf on Biography, Reality, and Character, Philosophy and Literature, Vol. 31, Number 1, pp 1-40 viewed 12 June 2009
Sim, L 2005, ‘Virginia Woolf Tracing Patterns through Plato’s Forms’, Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 28, Number 2, Winter 2005, pp. 38-48, viewed 21 May 2009
Walker, H 1915, The English Essay and Essayists, J.M. Dent & sons Ltd, New York.
Woolf, V 1925, ‘The Modern Essay’, The Common Reader, First Series, viewed 30 May 2009,< http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300031.txt>.
Zwerdling, A 1986 , Virginia Woolf and the Real World, University of California Press, Los Angeles, California, viewed 21 May 2009, http://books.google.com.au/
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