Philosophy + Literature Workshop: Andrew Huddleston - Virginia Woolf, Epiphanies, and the Modernist Novel

The second and third decades of the 20th century saw the publication of some of the greatest works of literary modernism, with the groundbreaking novels of Proust, Joyce, and Woolf. None of these writers, by the time of their artistic maturity, were religious in any conventional sense. Yet despite this shared rejection of religion, and to some degree outright hostility to it, all three writers, as has often been noticed, centrally thematize in their work a concept that is familiar from a religious context—namely, that of the epiphany, recast in a secular form. For Proust and for the early Joyce, the epiphany has a transformative, salvific trajectory: as the religious epiphany pointed one to a new life in God, the aesthetic epiphany points toward a new life in art. With Proust and the early Joyce established as points of comparison, Huddleston turns to consider the work of Virginia Woolf, focusing his discussion on Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse. While the epiphany, in secular form, is a notable feature of these novels, Woolf’s treatment, Huddleston suggests, is more critical and less grandly redemptive. For Woolf doesn’t simply keep the epiphanic experiential structure (vision heralding redemptive life transformation) and transfer it to a new this-worldly object. Rather, she queries that experiential structure itself, and makes it, and its implications, less determinate. Woolfean epiphanies are powerful yet also questionable, suggestive but not clearly directive, vaguely promissory but not salvific. They take a cue from religion, but interrogate it and move beyond it, into a sphere more deeply informed by the open-ended character of art.