Patterned Ambiguities: Virginia Woolf, Mathematical Variables, and Form

Abstract

This article argues that Virginia Woolf's most central, memorable symbols share the semantic properties of mathematical variables: markers that are designed to flexibly denote multifarious, undetermined meanings. Woolf uses the generality that characterizes pure mathematics to reinvent the scope and shape of ambiguity in Jacob's Room, and in turn variables allow for an understanding of form in terms of the patterns that characterize "the life of anybody" in The Waves. Mathematics offers its own definitions of form, tied to mathematical formalism, a revolutionary 1920s movement. Ultimately, mathematical attention to Woolf's patterns offers an understanding of what it is that we call literary form, an understanding built from pattern rather than particularity. In his preface to the second edition of Seven Types of Ambiguity, William Empson writes, "I claimed at the start that I would use the term 'ambiguity' to mean anything I liked." 1 That is, ambiguity is itself ambiguous. We know, in literary studies, that ambiguity is important and that it is everywhere. But I am not sure if we know what it is or how it works. When ambiguity's range is large, directed toward not two or three potential confusions but innumerable and unlimited possibilities, then how, exactly, does the symbol still symbolize? Virginia Woolf tells us that her "ambiguity is intentional. .. as much elasticity as possible is desirable," 2 and her most central terms

Counting Form: Gender and the Geometries of Address, in Frances Presley and Carol Watts

“…8 Interestingly these have so far been, for the most part, trained on works of prose by writers who are male: Borges and Beckett attract particular attention (from Culik, Bloch, Brits andEngelhardt (2018, 2019), among others). Treatments on Gertrude Stein (Hoff 2010), and Virginia Woolf (Rodal 2018;Priest 2003;Engelhardt 2018) break the rule. and discourses of geometry.…”