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Imagining the Artist: Images of Virginia Woolf in Postmodern Narratives
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In Orlando, Virginia Woolf writes,“a biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves, whereas a person may have many thousand”1. This statement prefigures the hundreds of selves that Woolf herself has acquired in postmodern media culture. However, in dominant adaptations of Woolf, we find that several major narratives emerge,especially the image of the Romantic artist. This paper examines the trajectory of Woolf-as-artist, beginning with the plurality present in Woolf’s own stream-of-consciousness and comparing the difference between two popular textual adaptations of Woolf and their later Hollywood adaptations. Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and Michael Cunningham’s novel The Hours both represent Woolf as the romanticized artist in order to critique the narrowness of this image. However, this critique is ignored in the two Hollywood film adaptations of these texts, where stars Elizabeth Taylor and Nicole Kidman are evaluated by how well, in Albee’s words, they are able to cast off “the beautiful-young-woman image”2 and become ugly for the sake of art.Drawing on the work of Brenda Silver and Hermione Lee, this paper concludes that plurality disrupts classic Hollywood narrative form, which is why Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and The Hours must endorse the singular image of Woolf-as-artist. These film adaptations fundamentally shape the way Woolf’s image is represented to postmodern audiences.
Woolf, Virginia. Orlando. New York: Mariner Books, 1973. p. 295. Print.
Albee, Edward. Interview with William Flanagan. The Paris Review vol. 39 (1966). Online.
http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4350/the-art-of-theater-no-4-edward-albee
