Search for Beauty and Vivid Values in the Everyday: Virginia Woolf and Process Aesthetics

Abstract

This article explores the parallels between Virginia Woolf’s aestheticized account of reality in her fiction and Alfred North Whitehead’s process aesthetics that emphasizes the fact that any experience may be classified as aesthetic enjoyment of vivid values. While scholars often associate Woolf with the high modernist aesthetics and formalism, the writer was fascinated by the everyday and the lure of common objects that generate a strong emotional response on the part of the perceiving subject. Especially in her early short stories “The Mark on the Wallˮ and “Solid Objectsˮ, the main characters manifest a childlike compulsion to explore surrounding objects and the need to penetrate “deeper, away from the surface, with its hard separate factsˮ. Similarly, in his philosophical system, Whitehead wants to go beyond what we already know about the external world and explore the inner organic relations behind the appearance of a thing, or in Woolf’s words the “pattern behind the cotton woolˮ of the everyday. In Science and the Modern World Whitehead argues that the problem of the modern civilization is the lack of art, experience, and value in the mundane and that it is the artist who should cultivate “the habits of aesthetic apprehension.ˮ Woolf likewise rejects the dichotomy between art in its narrow sense and its broad sense, conceived as the aesthetic enjoyment of reality, and claims in her famous essay “Modern Fictionˮ that the subject of modern art can be anything and that fiction should translate artistically the impressions of “an ordinary mind on an ordinary dayˮ.