In this post, I am going to trace the influence of Impressionism in one of Virginia Woolf's most famous short stories, Kew Gardens. However, before I begin examining the text, I would like to provide a brief introduction to Impressionism.
The Impressionist movement rejected the conventional
tendency to document the precise details of a moment in time, and instead sought
to capture its general essence, or pervading emotion.[1]
Impressionists were interested in
finding new ways to represent light and movement, and often spurned
studio-based composition, in favour of painting en plein air – in the
open air.[2]
It was Claude Monet, perhaps the most well-known Impressionist, who gave the movement its name, with his painting ‘Impression, Sunrise’ (1872), depicting a hazy morning in the harbour at Le Havre – the artist’s
hometown.[3]
Impressionism was hugely influential,
prompting artists the world over to imitate its style. The painter Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf’s
sister, exhibited
substantial influence of the movement in her work.
Woolf was inspired by her sister’s
paintings, in which the depiction of light featured heavily and people’s faces
were often indistinct – yet the work still conveyed so much emotion and
meaning.
Woolf began to wonder whether the same
could be done with literature. In Modern Fiction, she seeks to distance
herself from the Materialist style of writers like Arnold Bennett, who were obsessed
with representing life exactly as it was.
Look within and life, it
seems, is very far from being “like this”. Examine for a moment an ordinary
mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions – trivial,
fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel.[4]
This much-quoted passage is perhaps a
good segue into discussing Woolf’s Kew Gardens, and its unique exploration of time,
characterisation and place.
The opening paragraph is replete with
Impressionist influence. Woolf notices the ‘spots of colour’[5]
on the surrounding flower petals, gesturing to the techniques of Monet and his
contemporaries.
This noticeable influence continues with
the sustained treatment of natural light, as Woolf artfully describes its delicate
movement across the lush summer foliage in the following passage.
[…] the light now settled upon
the flesh of a leaf, revealing the branching thread of fibre beneath the
surface, and again it moved on and spread its illumination in the vast green
spaces beneath the dome of the heart shaped and tongue shaped leaves.[6]
As the narrative continues, people are
introduced, but Woolf chooses not to dwell on providing accurate physical
descriptions of each character, preferring instead to focus on their relation
to space.
The figures of these men and
women straggled past the flower-bed with a curiously irregular movement not
unlike that of the white and blue butterflies who crossed the turf in zig-zag
flights from bed to bed.[7]
The writer’s interest in painting is
evident in her description of one of the first characters, Eleanor, who recalls
an evocative memory with her husband. Here, Woolf alludes to Impressionism, and
specifically Monet.
Imagine six little girls
sitting before their easels twenty years ago, down by the side of the lake,
painting the water-lilies, the first red water-lilies I’d ever seen.[8]
As Eleanor, along with her husband Simon
and their two children, walk on and out of sight, Woolf presents an image of
the family as if one were gazing directly at an Impressionist painting.
They walked on past the
flower-bed, now walking four abreast, and soon diminished in size among the
trees and looked half transparent as the sunlight and shade swam over their
backs in large trembling irregular patches.[9]
As Woolf moves around Kew Gardens,
flitting from person to person, fecund descriptions of the vegetation, and
animal (snail) life, punctuate the moments spent with the different characters.
Firstly, we meet a married couple with
children, then two men, followed by two elderly women and finally, a young
couple. We catch snippets of their conversations – some are trivial; some are
inane – but this of little importance.
Woolf’s aim is to present a series of
fragmented moments, or impressions, that when brought together, reveal a sense
of what one’s experience of life might actually be like, in direct contrast to
her Materialist forebears.
This is Woolf, the writer, using the philosophy
and the techniques of the Impressionist artists to present an image of life at
its most vivid, where everything is symbiotically linked, as described in the
closing lines:
[…] all the time the motor
omnibuses were turning their wheels and changing their gear; like a vast nest
of Chinese boxes all of wrought steel turning ceaselessly one within another,
the city murmured; on the top of which the voices cried aloud and the petals of
myriads of flowers flashed their colours into the air.[10]
Seth Armstrong-Twigg.
[1] Robert L. Herbert, Impressionism:
Art, Leisure, and Parisian Society (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1988), p. xiv.
[2] Jessica Gunderson, Impressionism
(Mankato: Creative Education, 2009), p. 21.
[3] Ibid, p. 15.
[4] Virginia Woolf, Modern
Fiction, ed. by Andrew McNeille, The Essays of Virginia Woolf, 6 vols
(London: The Hogarth Press, 1984), v4, p. 160.
[5] Virginia Woolf, Selected
Short Stories (London: Penguin, 2000), p. 46.
[6] Ibid, p. 46.
[7] Ibid, p. 46.
[8] Ibid, p. 47.
[9] Ibid, p. 48.
[10] Ibid, p. 52.
