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Echo's Voices: Virginia Woolf, Irena Krzywicka, and The Well of Loneliness
- from In the Archives
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- By Paulina Pająk, doctoral candidate at the University of Wrocław
- Edited by Nicola Wilson, Claire Battershill
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- Book:
- Virginia Woolf and the World of Books
- Published by:
- Liverpool University Press
- Published online:
- 16 January 2020
- Print publication:
- 27 September 2018, pp 31-38
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Summary
“Every burned book or house enlightens the world; every suppressed or expunged word reverberates through the earth from side to side,” announced Ralph Waldo Emerson in his essay “Compensation” (299). This dream of global solidarity has come true for Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness, one of the first novels with an undisguised lesbian/transgender theme. When in 1928, Sir Chartres Biron judged the novel obscene and all copies were burned, it seemed probable that novel would perish. Indeed, The Well was not published in Britain again until 1949 (Doan and Prosser 1–3). Nevertheless, not only did Hall's novel survive the destruction and censorship, but it traveled across countries and continents, both in the original version and in numerous translations.
While Hall's trial has become one of the most studied events in British LGBTQ history, the fascinating story of The Well's early global reception has remained unwritten, despite fruitful areas of research enabled by the transnational turn in modernist studies. Already in 1929, the novel became a bestseller in the United States, and was translated into Danish and German. In 1931, The Well was available in Czech, a year later in French, and in 1933 it entered Polish culture under the title Źrodło samotności (see Figure 2, on next page). In this paper I would like to compare the reception of Hall's novel in Britain and Poland, juxtaposing two important statements by public intellectuals: Virginia Woolf 's A Room of One's Own and Irena Krzywicka's preface to Źrodło. I argue that the Polish reception casts some light on how The Well became the “bible of lesbianism” in different cultures for at least half a century, while also revealing new networks of transnational modernism.
Although many factors are responsible for the global popularity of Hall's novel, there are two most likely explanations. First, The Well is an emancipatory landmark and an important legacy to the LGBTQ community, raising issues still relevant in the debates on LGBTQ rights such as minority stress and marriage equality. Moreover, its hero(ine) Stephen Gordon becomes an Every(wo)man, rendering the diverse faces of LGBTQ people, oscillating between the contemporary concepts of transgender, gender queer and lesbian identity.
Woolf 's Imaginarium: Exploring Virginia Woolf 's Legacy to Contemporary Polish Culture
- from WOOLF'S LEGACIES
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- By Paulina Pająk, University of Wroclaw
- Jane deGay, Tom Breckin, Anne Reus
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- Book:
- Virginia Woolf and Heritage
- Published by:
- Liverpool University Press
- Published online:
- 12 January 2018
- Print publication:
- 08 June 2017, pp 236-243
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Summary
In recent years, the popularity of Virginia Woolf's oeuvre has substantially increased in Poland. There has been little prior attempt to explain “Woolf's Renaissance,” although it can be beneficial to comparative literature and reception studies. In contrast with numerous works on Woolf 's influence on American and British culture, there has been no research into Polish intertextual dialogues with this author. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to examine Virginia Woolf 's legacy to contemporary Polish culture, as well as its possible causes. To illustrate the scope of “Woolf 's Renaissance,” I would like to quote Sylwia Chutnik, a Polish writer:
I would never rid myself of admiration for Virginia Woolf…For my generation of thirty-year-old feminists, Woolf was one of the most important teachers. She wrote, among others, about the androgynous character (Orlando), exceeding the dull sexual dualism. She shared with us the stream of consciousness (The Waves). And finally, she gave us A Room of One's Own— that is the possibility of being an independent artist without the feelings of guilt and shame.1 (Chutnik, “Jakub od Virginii”)
This brings us to the question of why Woolf 's oeuvre has become such an important influence on Polish women writers at the turn of the centuries? The first thing to consider is her delayed reception in Poland and the recent revival of interest. Furthermore, Woolf 's formal experiments could be inspiring for the postmodernist writers. Finally, as Urszula Terentowicz-Fotyga has pointed out, Woolf “seems to write herself much better into the contemporary Polish context than other modernists” (127). As Claire Davison has shown, Woolf 's “versatility” is connected with her ability of “working from a sense of dislocation—an outland or landscape gradually revealed to the mind that is neither homely and familiar, nor closed, alien, and unknowable” (73). Yet, I will suggest that Polish intellectuals also find Woolf so inspiring because of the similarities between the patriarchal culture of interwar Britain and contemporary Poland.
Towards ‘Woolf's Renaissance’
Terentowicz-Fotyga established that Woolf 's reception in Poland develops from “silence to a polyphony of voices” and could be divided into three phases (127–8). In the first period, which extended until the late 1950s, she remained relatively unknown.