Generic images,gendered responses: Virginia Woolf and the representation of belligerent violence

Regarding the wars of others

In her 2003 essay Regarding the Pain of Others, Sontag examines the ethics of photographic images of disaster, war in particular. She opens her argument by taking issue with Woolf’s treatment of photos of Spanish Civil War atrocities in Three Guineas. According to Sontag, Woolf believes that the sight of photos of war atrocities would unite ‘people of good will’ in a common reaction of horror that transcends all social cleavages, including the gender divide that Woolf had hitherto emphasized in the essay, and this shared emotional experience creates the preconditions for the pacifist stance Woolf’s essay subsequently adopts. Sontag’s critique of Woolf’s text runs as follows: there is no such thing as a photo of war as such, only images of particular wars, showing non-interchangeable groups of combatants and victims and bearing witness to specific technologies of killing that cannot be abstracted from their context. Woolf, however, treats the Spanish Civil War photos as generic images of belligerent violence, and therefore silences the historical specificity of the conflict at hand. According to Sontag, this strategy allows Woolf to assume, first, that common emotional reactions to images of war are possible and, second, that these shared emotions will lead to the adoption of pacifist political positions. Sontag argues that other reactions remain not only legitimate but also, in the case of the Spanish Civil War, preferable. She drives her point home thus: ‘To read in the pictures, as Woolf does, only what confirms a general abhorrence of war is to stand back from an engagement with Spain as a country with a history. It is to dismiss politics’ (Sontag, 2003: 9, emphasis added).

There can be no doubt that Woolf’s essay does abstract the Spanish Civil War photos she analyses from their historical context, nor that her treatment of these photos forecloses taking sides in the Spanish Civil War. This is surprising coming from such a staunch anti-fascist as Woolf, all the more so in an essay that explicitly targets the dictators in power in Germany and Italy. It cannot be explained by a lack of knowledge or interest in the Spanish context. There is ample evidence that Woolf followed the events of this particular war closely, not only through her (albeit brief and relatively distant) association with The Daily Worker, a communist newspaper that regularly published articles on the Republican struggle, which also published an article Woolf (2011 [1936]) penned on art and political engagement, but also on a personal level, through her relationship with her nephew, Julian Bell, who volunteered for the Republicans and was killed at the battle of Brunete in 1937 (Gualtieri, 1999). Julian’s death affected Woolf greatly: though he is never mentioned in Three Guineas, her diary records how much he occupied her thoughts as she wrote the text. This is not only palpable in the entries from 1937 onwards, but also in the comment, after the essay’s publication in 1938: ‘Yes I was always thinking of Julian when I wrote’ (Woolf, 1984: 148). How then might one understand her treatment of the Spanish Civil War photos as generic images of war and her lack of a political stance on the conflict?

Far from dismissing politics, treating the Spanish Civil War photos as representative of modern war atrocities in general is a strategy Woolf uses to make a very political point about the interpretations which socially marginalized viewers – in this case, women – make of images of belligerent violence, both in the case of this war and other conflicts – the First World War clearly comes to mind in Woolf’s case. By turning the viewer’s attention from the politics of the international conflict represented by the war photographs towards the politics of these images’ reception in Britain, Woolf forces the reader to analyse representations of violence closer to home and consider not only the explicit effects of war but also its more insidious causes. Far from ‘subsiding’ into a pacifist ‘we’, as Sontag suggests (2003: 7), Woolf’s text points to deep, and perhaps insurmountable, divisions within the pacifist movement, which must be addressed if its goal, to ‘avoid war’, might really be reached.

If Sontag’s reading of Three Guineas does not acknowledge this, it is primarily because it falls short on two accounts. First, Sontag focuses only on the beginning of Woolf’s essay, and even then, her discussion remains deaf to the irony in Woolf’s text. This leads her to attribute to Woolf the very argument she is in fact attacking: that consensual emotional reactions to images of war are both possible and desirable. Second, and perhaps more seriously for the photography critic that Sontag was (she had published On Photography in 1977), she ignores the broader argument Woolf is making about the epistemological authority of photography as a medium, and her attack on the affective responses and the political positions such an epistemology is made to serve. Indeed, Woolf uses the photos of the Spanish Civil War to critique the enrolment of photography’s claim to objectivity in the construction of coercive consensus. She shows how the doctrine of photographic objectivity masks the socio-politically determined coordinates of the viewing subject and privileges the dominant point of view. Woolf’s text makes far-reaching political points that surpass the ethical imperative Sontag pleads for: that is, to inform oneself about the conflict depicted and act upon that information. For Woolf’s analysis of our reactions to images of violence takes us from the obvious destruction of war to the more subtle, daily destructions of gendered social structures. Let me now turn to this analysis in more detail.

The photograph: false objectivity and coercive consensus

Suspicion of consensus structures Three Guineas both thematically and formally, and must be taken into consideration when discussing Woolf’s treatment of photography. ¹ Indeed, in the epistolary conceit the essay adopts, the narrator, who defines herself as the ‘daughter of an educated man’, is responding to a letter, written by an ‘educated man’ requesting her help in preventing war. Though the interlocutors are explicitly identified as belonging to the same class, ² their gender separates them: the historical exclusion of women from education and the public sphere means that in 1938 women remain at the margins of social and political power, a situation that creates so great a rift between the two interlocutors that, Woolf’s letter writer claims, ‘Though we look at the same things, we see them differently’ (2000: 156). Finding a shared perspective on reality, and on the reality of belligerent violence in particular, therefore becomes the letter writer’s challenge. This common point of view, consistently framed in visual terms throughout the essay, proves, however, to be elusive. The writer first considers the range of written sources that might give her access to her male counterpart’s point of view: biography, autobiography and the daily paper (2000: 162). These accounts, however evocative, fail to span the divide between the interlocutors, the implication being that they are too subjective and rely too heavily on the mediation of language, which, with all its polysemy, gives rise to too many different potential interpretations for them to be used as the basis for agreement between the sexes. ³ Language-based images therefore do not seem capable of providing the ‘absolute point of view’ Woolf seeks (2000: 163). And so she turns to photography, as its claim to provide ‘pictures of actual facts’ promises to provide a solution. For ‘photographs’, the writer states, are ‘not arguments addressed to the reason; they are simply statements of fact addressed to the eye’ (2000: 164).

The writer thereby invokes a common claim made that photography faithfully and objectively represents the real. The camera supposedly does no more than record truth in the raw, which imprints itself directly onto the negative and then directly onto the eye of the viewer in turn. This is what Roland Barthes described much later as the ‘ça a été’ (‘that-has-been’) effect of photography, which guarantees its proof value (2000: 76–8). Such an understanding of photographic production and reception conveniently overlooks not only the necessarily situated nature of the photographer, the constraints his or her technical choices place upon the framing and focus of the image, and the possibilities offered by development techniques such as blow-up, reframing, over-exposure, etc., but also the role played by subjective factors in the act of seeing itself. That the doctrine of photographic objectivity squeezes out such factors is made explicit when Woolf’s letter writer describes the masculine and feminine viewing experiences of the Spanish Civil War photos understood as representing ‘actual facts’ in the following terms:

the eye is connected with the brain; the brain with the nervous system. That system sends its messages in a flash through every past memory and present feeling. When we look at those photographs some fusion takes place within us; however different the education, the traditions behind us, our sensations are the same, and they are violent. You, Sir, call them ‘horror and disgust’. We also call them horror and disgust. And the same words rise to our lips. War, you say, is an abomination; a barbarity; war must be stopped at whatever cost. And we echo your words. War is an abomination; a barbarity; war must be stopped. For now at last we are looking at the same picture; we are seeing with you the same dead bodies, the same ruined houses. (2000: 165)

Just as the photograph is taken ‘in a flash’, the viewing process here is reduced to an extremely rapid instant of ‘fusion’ that suppresses all differences in ‘education’ and ‘tradition’ in the viewing subject, differences necessarily shaped by gender positions. When the temporality of the gaze is restricted to the simple present and the subjective determinations of the viewer excluded, only one emotional response, ‘horror and disgust’ becomes possible. The idealization of the photographic medium’s objectivity thereby provides the basis for a homogeneous point of view and a single emotional response that surpasses the gender divide.

However, one cannot help but notice in Woolf’s account that the ‘educated man’ is still the one who speaks first and that his emotive reaction is still implicitly understood to be the right one. The daughters of educated men, finally able to adopt their brothers’ and father’s perspective thanks to photography, therefore now have no choice but to repeat after them. The letter writer, however, is no dupe: the echo structure of this passage provides an ironic denunciation of any such ‘fusion’ that excludes ‘memory’ and ‘tradition’ in the viewing experience, and throws suspicion on the harmonious affective reaction it produces, by highlighting the parroting role women are obliged to play in this scenario. This irony is, however, what Sontag, and many others before and after her, have missed. ⁴ For the vision of photographic objectivity that such subtly coercive consensus emotional reactions rely upon is in fact not defended in Woolf’s essay, but rather presented as an opening salvo to be countered, both covertly and overtly.

The recourse to the generic: shifting attention to the home front

The techniques Woolf uses to denounce the supposed ‘absolute’ point of view provided by photography and the illegitimate consensus it generates begin quite simply with the decision not to publish the photos of the war atrocities along with the essay. In contrast to a second set of photos that the letter writer analyses in the course of the essay – photos of uniformed men in positions of power within the British establishment – which are reproduced and which are explicitly presented as the object of conflicting interpretations, the Spanish Civil War images are withheld from the reader’s view, making them no less the product of language than the other ‘pictures’ created by history and biography. They are therefore no less subject to multiple and divergent forms of interpretation. Critics have primarily focused on the refusal to sensationalize violence such a decision involves (Bernard, 2008; Cassigneul, 2015; Dalgarno, 2001; Gualtieri, 1999). However, it is equally important to note that by structurally emphasizing the role language plays in our perception of photographs, Woolf undercuts the claim that these particular photos may provide an ‘absolute’ point of view that the essay’s reader can access too, and interrogates the superiority of images over discourse in representing the real.

But the technique of most interest here is Woolf’s treatment of the Spanish Civil War photos as generic images of war atrocities. By providing scant ekphrasis and no details concerning victims or perpetrators, the letter writer undermines their informative value by making it impossible to identify the photos she describes with a particular battle or event in the Spanish conflict. Elena Gualtieri’s research (1999) has shed light on the images Woolf might have had access to at the time of writing, which most likely depicted the German air-raid on Getafe, a suburb near Madrid, in 1936. However, this does not get us very far, as the gap between these images and Woolf’s letter writer’s description of the photos remains significant. Indeed, there is nothing in the essay that allows us to draw any certain links between known images of the Spanish Civil War and the photos described in Woolf’s text. This means the reader is obliged to treat these photos as representative samples of a genre: not just the genre of Spanish Civil War photography which was being developed at the time, as Sontag points out, but that of modern warfare in general. One might therefore situate the images described in Woolf’s text within the aesthetic tradition of historical painting and sculpture depicting battles – that is, within a tradition where the mediation of the artist and his or her subjectivity is widely recognized, and no claim to objective truth is made as it might be in photography. Indeed, Woolf’s description of the photos, with its emphasis on indeterminacy and the possibility for interpretation, as well as the details she emphasizes, gives them a status comparable to Pablo Picasso’s 1937 painting Guernica, of which Woolf was certainly aware, since she sponsored its being exhibited in London in 1938, the year Three Guineas was published (Spalding, 2014: 155). The doctrine of photographic objectivity thereby takes another hit.

The paucity of the ekphrasis makes the details the writer does identify all the more significant. Here is the passage in question:

They are photographs of dead bodies for the most part. This morning’s collection contains the photograph of what might be a man’s body, or a woman’s; it is so mutilated that it might, on the other hand, be the body of a pig. But those certainly are dead children, and that undoubtedly is the section of a house. A bomb has torn open the side; there is still a birdcage hanging in what was presumably the sitting room, but the rest of the house looks like nothing so much as a bunch of spillikins suspended in mid-air. (Woolf, 2000: 164)

Two details are particularly salient here: first, the indeterminacy of the gender and then of the very humanity of the dead bodies; second, the ripped-open home with its birdcage in the sitting room. Both of these features, read in the context of the essay, are likely to generate not simple but complex emotions in both male and female viewers. For they give visual form not only to the questioning of the gender divide that the essay explores, but also of the public–private dichotomy that keeps gender hierarchies in place and limits the role of women in the public sphere, which restricts them, precisely, to the private sitting room. Seeing a private home opened up may well generate both horror and desire for the female viewer, just as, the letter writer affirms, in the lead-up to the First World War, women confined to the private home consciously hated war, but unconsciously desired it as a means of liberation from the home:

So profound was her unconscious loathing for the education of the private house with its cruelty, its poverty, its hypocrisy, its immorality, its inanity that she would undertake any task however menial, exercise any fascination however fatal that enabled her to escape. Thus consciously she desired ‘our splendid empire’; unconsciously she desired our splendid war. (Woolf, 2000: 208)

A similarly complex process is conceivably at work in the educated man, who may, consciously or unconsciously, recognize in these images the disruption of patriarchal gender hierarchy, which, of course, represents a threat to his own social status. His emotions, then, may be no less complex in their nature than the ambivalence the essay authorizes us to attribute to the female viewer. This means that while both the daughter of the educated man and her male counterpart may both be horrified and disgusted by what they see, their acknowledged horror and their unacknowledged desire may well arise from different sources. Rather than considering the emotional response to images as the result of a ‘fusion’ which evicts an individual viewer’s ‘education’ and ‘tradition’, Woolf invites us on the contrary to consider how reactions to these images might vary according to this very ‘education’ and ‘tradition’, shaped by the gender divide. She therefore gives us the tools to detect, beneath the consensus, a more profound dissension.

What is more, when one considers the details of the Spanish Civil War photos that Woolf has retained here, one can also see that her gaze alights on motifs that recur in her previous work in relation to war and female suffering. Perhaps the most obvious of these is the aforementioned ‘Time passes’ section of To the Lighthouse. This dense and poetic passage relates the passing of ten years in an abandoned private house and introduces, in parenthetical asides, the deaths of three of the family members: Mrs Ramsay, that figure of female sacrifice exhausted by the demands of family and husband; Prue Ramsay, her daughter, who dies in childbirth; and Andrew Ramsay, who was killed on the French battlefield in the First World War. The presentation of these three events in an equally brief form between parentheses places the deaths of these two women on the same plane as the deaths of a soldier in the First World War, and situates them in the context of a description of their private home that is disintegrating in the face of the elements. It is clearly not the same image as the house destroyed by war that Woolf describes more than a decade later in Three Guineas, but it can be read as its negative reflection: far from the frontlines of the war, a home is ‘torn open’ as both obvious belligerent and insidious patriarchal violence claim their victims among the family members. ‘Time passes’ thereby draws a link between losses in the war and losses that may be ascribed to gender positions within society, and it establishes this link in the context of a private home that is in the process of being painfully, but in many ways liberatingly, opened up to the world.

Connecting Woolf’s rendering of the Spanish Civil War photos with such motifs elsewhere in her œuvre allows one to better understand the continuities in her analysis and treatment of gender and violence on the one hand, and the role her own specific and gendered gaze plays in her analyses of images of belligerent violence on the other, as it revives obsessive motifs one finds in her work more generally. Such an analysis, however, requires that the ‘tradition’ of the viewer – in this case, Virginia Woolf – not be excluded but analysed in order to grasp the emotional reactions one might feel in the present, and the political positions they might give rise to.

It therefore becomes quite clear that Woolf’s recourse to the generic in her discussion of the Spanish Civil War photos, which Sontag sees as preventing political engagement, should rather be read as a conscious effort to shift the attention away from the particulars of the Spanish situation so as to highlight the effects of gender positions on the gaze of British viewers exposed to images of belligerent violence. This allows Woolf to sketch out a political position that sabotages pacifist unity by suggesting that our reaction to images of warfare cannot only be limited to the theatre of war alone, and that the power differentials that traverse the home front, in particular those structured by gender, must also be examined if one is to ‘avoid war’.

Regarding soldiers at home

This is made all the more clear when the second set of photos that the letter writer analyses is introduced. It comprises five photos of uniformed men in positions of institutional power: an army officer, a judge, palace heralds, a university professor and an archbishop, and all these photos are reproduced in the essay. ⁵ These images are explicitly described from a feminine point of view: that is, the point of view of those excluded from such positions of power. The letter writer’s defamiliarizing anthropological interpretation of the images has often been analysed. ⁶ Vision, here, is a question of exteriority, of distance: the letter writer’s point is that a British woman does not see these images in the same way a British man does. What is more, the letter writer again has recourse to the generic. She uses techniques of accumulation of these images within the essay such that a generic figure of ‘a Man’, with a capital ‘M’ emerges in the viewer’s mind’s eye and is rapidly associated not only with power but with the exercise of dictatorial, abusive, illegitimate power:

It is the figure of a man; some say, others deny, that he is Man himself, the quintessence of virility, the perfect type of which all the others are imperfect adumbrations. He is a man certainly. His eyes are glazed, his eyes glare. His body . . . is tightly cased in a uniform. Upon the breast of that uniform are sewn several medals . . . His hand is upon a sword. He is called in German and Italian Führer or Duce; in our own language, Tyrant or Dictator. (Woolf, 2000: 364)

In other words, when considered en masse, everyday images of patriarchal authority are in fact fundamentally linked to images of authoritarian power. Woolf’s argument here reverses Sontag’s: where Sontag claims that treating images of war in generic terms blinds us to the politics of a particular situation, Woolf shows that treating a figure of authority in particular without comparing it to similar images and identifying common tropes, runs the risk of blinding us to the politics inherent in manifestations of the social structure, of which each singular image is but an ‘adumbration’.

Woolf’s letter writer concludes her argument by juxtaposing the two series of photos she has drawn upon in her essay: the image of the tyrant produced by the accumulation of the images of uniformed figures of authority within the British establishment conjures up the images of the Spanish Civil War atrocities: ‘Obviously the connection between dress and war is not far to seek; your finest clothes are those that you wear as soldiers’ (Woolf, 2000: 180). Such a montage delivers a very clear message: that ‘the public and the private worlds are inseparably connected; that the tyrannies and servilities of the one are the tyrannies and servilities of the other’ (Woolf, 2000: 363–4). In other words, the horror a woman might feel at the sight of war atrocities has something to do with the horror she might feel when looking at photos of uniformed men in positions of authority. This recognition allows her to make a structural critique of her social condition, to realize that her own social marginalization might be a form of violence comparable to the more obvious physical violence of war. What is more, patriarchy is thereby also associated with the rising fascist movements in Europe at the time, of which General Franco’s regime was but one. This montage suggests not only a causal relationship between structures of patriarchy and belligerent devastation but also a more insidious equivalence: that the images of smiling, competent and proud uniformed men are also images of structural violence.

This is where Woolf turns the tables on her educated male interlocutor and drives her point home: any genuine pacifism, any real attempt to stop war, must begin by attacking the structures of violence that may be observed not only in Spain, Italy and Germany at the time, but along Whitehall and in Westminster. By limiting the scope of the violence to be rejected to that of war, by asking for the automatic adhesion to a reaction of horror when faced with images of belligerent destruction, the ‘educated man’s version of pacifism remains blind to the patriarchal violence exercised on a daily basis within Western societies. Any pacifism that does not take this into account, Woolf’s essay suggests, is doomed to fail.

To claim, therefore, that Woolf adheres to the doctrine of photographic objectivity, that her recourse to the generic allows her to transcend gender differences and adopt a consensual pacifist standpoint that runs the risk of being apolitical – Sontag’s critique – is not only to misinterpret Woolf’s understanding of photography and attitude towards pacifism, it is also to sideline the radically political thrust of her analysis. For Woolf does not content herself with denouncing fascism abroad, but seeks to uncover, through a more profound, structural analysis of the origins of authoritarian violence, the roots of such fascism at home, which her previous fiction had already been exploring in its depiction of the British home torn apart by the First World War. Woolf’s essay uses photography to turn the spotlight onto British society, to the forms of conflict that structure it and nourish the rise of fascism – forms to which the pacifist movement is not immune, but, as she shows, reproduces in spite of itself.

The gaze that remembers

To seize the politics involved in looking at photographs of the atrocities of modern warfare is therefore not only a question of accounting for exactly which houses have been torn open and whose bodies have been rendered genderless. It is just as important to analyse the conflicting emotions such images solicit in viewers and how they might be linked to the historical and social structures, inevitably traversed by forms of domination and violence, of the society in which such images are received. This, in turn, involves accounting for the images the ‘memory’ and ‘traditions’ of viewers might throw up. A reading of Woolf’s fiction of the 1920s, and notably ‘Time passes’, in which the home is fractured by gender violence, set on an equal footing with the belligerent violence of the First World War, allows one to see that Woolf the novelist was already making this ‘important connection’ between private and public spheres, between belligerent destruction and gender hierarchies, preparing the ground for Woolf the essayist to do so when looking at Spanish Civil War images in 1938. Three Guinea’s analysis of the phenomenology of our gaze on images of belligerent violence emphasizes the home politics such a viewing experience engages, and therefore might be seen as a necessary complement to the historical analyses of the conditions of a photo’s production that Sontag sees – rightly – as so important. For both Sontag and Woolf do agree on one thing: knee-jerk reactions of ‘horror and disgust’ are not enough.