2.5: EVOLUTION OF ROMANCE

Successful or not, the attempt to return romance to its evolutionary origins is bold and in subtle ways original to Woolf’s fiction. The obvious precursor once again is Heart of Darkness, where there is not Woolf’s company of tourists adventuring into the heart of the jungle but an imperial crew of merchants and mercenaries led by Marlow to retrieve Kurtz and return him to civilization. No doubt, Woolf has this narrative in mind, as Conrad’s collection Youth that included it was the text she claimed a few years later to have appreciated more than any other by a living author.108 Her first novel is in some important aspects a parodist’s response to it. Conrad’s story is remarkably absent of women, but there are two powerfully evocative figures with whom Kurtz is romantically entangled: the fierce savage queen of the natives and “the

103_{Ibid 321.} 104_{VO 311.} 105_{VO 315.} 106_{VO 316.} 107_Ibid.

108_{See Modern Novels, for starters, where Woolf gives Conrad (and Thomas Hardy) her “unconditional gratitude” over any of} her contemporaries or immediate living predecessors. Woolf wrote several essays on Joseph Conrad’s fiction during this time period, and mentions him often in her diaries. More on this to come.

Intended” bride waiting for him in a European capital. The savage woman, whose arresting presence Marlow describes as “wild-eyed and magnificent,” who comes to stand for the “colossal body of the fecund and mysterious life” at the heart of the wilderness, who is “an image of its own tenebrous and passionate soul,”109 disappears back into the jungle. She remains as inscrutable as the final moral of Kurtz that Marlow never reveals to the Intended or the

civilization she represents. Marlow famously lies to the Intended, tells her that the last words Kurtz pronounced were her name rather than “The horror! The horror!” It keeps the romance of Conrad’s Romance uncanny and divided, the dual presence of the savage woman and the

Intended suggestive of each other, but situated in their proper, respective places.

With sincerity, Woolf brings her intended to the jungle not only to find love and herself, but also to come face to face with the savage woman. If the ultimate answers remain at best mysterious, at worst incommunicable, no lie will be told. Rachel and Terence believe in their passion for each other and call it love, but they are quickly enveloped in the natural world and by the obfuscating inability to make sense of it. Their feelings render them less communicative, their declarations of love less sure, and their very sense of selves unsettled in relation to each other and the procession of birds, beasts and humans. In the thick haze of their emotions, Mrs. Flushing interrupts them with a little amateur reading of Darwin about love and life: “One reads a lot about love—that’s why poetry’s so dull. But what happens in real life?” she coyly asks them. “It ain’t love!”110 Such a dressing down of sexual discussion and marital convention renders Terence “unintelligible” and Mr. Flushing attempts to return a little urbanity to the conversation by explaining his wife’s position with her upbringing. It was “very unnatural— unusual, I should say. They had no mother” and a father who cared only about racehorses and

109_{Heart of Darkness, ed. with intro. By Ross C Murfin (New York: Bedford, 1989) 76.} 110_{VO 320.}

Greek statues. He bathed his children in the stable, even when a sheet of winter ice covered the bath: “We had to get in; if we didn’t, we were whipped. The strong ones lived—the others died. What you call the survival of the fittest—a most excellent plan, I daresay, if you’ve thirteen children!”111 Mr. Flushing attempts to mollify the story by exclaiming, “And all this going on in the heart of England, in the nineteenth century!” But his wife’s reduction of marriage and family to sex and survival is not dismissed by the developing narrative.

The final destination of the journey is the native village in the heart of the jungle. The tourists go to observe primitive man in his natural habitat, but the observed gazes back at them. “As they sauntered about, the stare followed them, passing over their legs, their bodies, their heads, curiously not without hostility, like the crawl of a winter fly.” The stare comes from the villagers, not the English, the final eyes the most unsettling to Terence and Rachel: “As she drew apart her shawl and uncovered her breast to the lips of her baby, the eyes of a woman never left their faces, although they moved uneasily under her stare, and finally turned away, rather than stand there looking at her any longer.”112 Instead of a lovers’ embrace, or an affirmation of marital continuity from savage to homo Britainicus, you have the evolutionary purpose, the shawl of romance uncovered—the savage woman sits alone, nursing her baby, fully conscious of the foreign presence, but unashamed of the exposure. Those exposed are the two newly

engaged: “’Well,’ Terence sighed at length, ‘it makes us seem insignificant, doesn’t it?’ Rachel agreed.” The social implications of Darwin in this passage are quite clear. The whole

convention of matrimony and the tradition of the romance novel, at its biological source, is the continuation of the species, and the consequence of erotic love, idealized or not, is the woman bearing and nursing progeny. Rachel is ill equipped to either accept her engagement or to fight

111_Ibid. 112_{Ibid. 332.}

off the jungle fever, yet she still experiences them both bodily. Woolf’s novel does not buckle to the expectations of romantic convention, and the social consequences of her heroine’s

acceptance of a marriage remain unfulfilled.