Virginia Woolf as cultural icon: the visual word and the visual world

Abstract

I want to start off from the most polemical argument, Woolf’s “re-canonization”. Brenda Silver in her remarkably original study of Virginia Woolf as a cultural icon, argues that there are two possible ways of looking at this phenomenon of “re-canonization”, which she describes as follows: “ the fact that so many people today see the film or television versions of Woolf’s works before they experience (if they ever do) the versions she wrote or published” (Silver, 1999: 213). First, she argues, we can read/see these adaptations of Woolf’s texts as “more than an activity of literary criticism”, for they themselves become “originals” in their own right, constructing assertions about Woolf (Ibid.). Adaptations, as Silver argues, are “re-fashionings” or “re-dressings” of other texts (the true “originals” or the ones that lie behind the new ones), to be globally understood as “performances” existing in an intertextual relation with the former text, as a product of a particular encoding: historical, geographical, cultural, etc. (Ibid., 12), much in the same way as a translation exists in relation to the original or source text. However, in a second move, one cannot help seeing that the adaptation itself easily assumes the status of “original”, being read or seen against (instead of) their archetypal “versions”.