Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

One way of describing Night and Day might be a comedy of manners without the comedy. Much of the novel takes place in a Victorian drawing room. Katherine Mansfield famously took exception to Woolf’s utter disregard of the war that had recently taken place. And it’s true there’s something distasteful about the relentless vivisection of nuanced sexual emotion that occupies much of this novel. Like Lawrence but without his vitality and flaming insights.

It’s difficult to place exactly when this novel is set. There are allusions to the suffragettes but no mention of the war which is a jarring contradiction. It’s as if Woolf is warping historical context for her own artistic ends. Nothing wrong with that if the end product is successful but it just isn’t here. At times the various characters seem to be living in different centuries. The house in which Katherine, the heroine, lives is Woolf’s childhood home which would place it in the late 19th century. It’s apparently a portrait of her sister Vanessa but at this time in her life Vanessa was already ripping to shreds many of the Victorian social constraints Katherine struggles with. What Woolf is attempting to do is show through the divergence of generational social mores the transition from the Victorian to the Edwardian age, something Forster was already doing with much more subtlety. There’s little of Forster’s playful disregard for realism, his mischievous lightness of touch here. This is porridge in comparison.

Katherine has two choices for a husband. William, a slave to convention and appearances and Ralph, the penniless idealist who tends to fall in love with creations of his imagination rather than flesh and blood women. Not much of a choice, in other words. It was odd to trawl through nearly 500 pages of Woolf writing about romantic sexual feeling considering how little interest she was to take in it in later life, both in literary and personal terms. I’d say she was wise to drop it as a principal theme of her writing. It’s also interesting how dismissive she was of the novel’s suffragette. There’s barely any indication in this novel that Virginia would go on to write the ground-breaking novels that followed. She had a breakdown after finishing The Voyage Out, and perhaps fearing she had ventured too far into perilous parts of her mind played it safe with this one. True, it’s a more controlled novel than her debut but essentially, it’s hard to view it as anything but much ado about next to nothing. It’s a novel the interfering Victorian aunt in this novel probably wouldn’t disapprove of. Perhaps an act of clearing out her closet and all its Victorian appendages. Katherine Mansfield did her an invaluable favour by dismissing it as decorous. It stung her into changing her entire perspective.