Friday, March 6th, 2009 Bloomsbury and Beddagama: Leonard Woolf and Narrating the Village

Description

Leonard Woolf’s 1913 novel The Village in the Jungle and the much-admired short story collection, Stories from the East (1921), were a result of his seven-year stint in Ceylon (1905-1912) as a British colonial administrator. Woolf’s Ceylon writings comprise a remarkable document of the times and his novelistic configuration of Beddagama, a small village in Ceylon modelled on the many he encountered himself in the colony, provides the basis for a powerful critique both of the Empire and of the nascent impulses of English literary modernism, of which he was as much part as he was a critic. In the talk, I re-examine Woolf’s novel, conventionally read either as an Orientalist fantasy or dismissed as inferior/marginal to the work of other modernists, especially that of his iconic wife Virginia, as implicitly concerned with the equivocal radicalism of Bloomsbury’s politics. I suggest that through sleights of narrative and the rhetorical trope of an essentialized village, Woolf presents the unaccommodated colonial Other to whom Bloomsbury’s radical politics did not reach, and who was indeed a victim of the politics Woolf presciently saw had only limited possibilities for engendering any lasting social change.

Anupama Mohan is a Doctoral candidate at the Department of English and Centre for South Asian Studies in the University of Toronto. Her dissertation is entitled “The Country and the Village: Representations of the Rural in Twentieth Century South Asian Writing.”