But despite these resemblances between Katharine and Virginia, Woolf insisted that her protagonist was inspired by her sister Vanessa, to whom she was extremely close all her life. Indeed, she urged her friend Janet Case to “try thinking of Katharine as Vanessa, not me,” told Vanessa in a letter of 1916 that she was considering “writing another novel” about her, and in another letter called Vanessa “mysterious and romantic,” adjectives that certainly suit Katharine. It is easy to see how Katharine’s fascination with the nonverbal discipline of mathematics suggests Vanessa’s talent and success as a painter. In fact, in a passage Woolf later deleted, Katharine observes, “If I had to be an artist... I should certainly be a painter; because then at least you have solid things to deal with.” But the most simple and powerful evidence of Woolf ’s tribute to her sister is the novel’s dedication: “To Vanessa Bell.”
E. M. Forster, in his biography Virginia Woolf, remarks that Night and Day “is an exercise in classical realism, and contains all that has characterised English fiction, for good and evil, during the last two hundred years: faith in personal relations, recourse to humorous side-shows, geographical exactitude, insistence on petty social differences.” And he is right: In this novel, Woolf displays little interest in overturning the conventions that had served her forbears so well. She works within the time-honored genre of the Bildungsroman, the novel of education. Her characters’ personal appearances and socio-economic positions are described with loving precision. Unlike The Waves, whose six characters never speak to each other directly in 300 pages, Night and Day teems with dialogue. And of course the plot—with its strictly chronological advancement and its central question of whether and to whom Katharine will get married—proves Forster correct as well.
But to condemn Night and Day as a “traditional” novel for these reasons is to overlook the endlessly inventive ways that Woolf, grappling with complex questions of gender and genre, has woven the debate between tradition and innovation into the very fabric of the novel. Woolf ’s treatment of marriage is a case in point: Just because readers are heavily invested in the labyrinthine twists and turns of Katharine’s love life from the novel’s opening chapter does not mean they are not also exposed to a dizzying spectrum of opinion concerning the institution of marriage in particular, and the value of tradition in general.
To be a member of the Hilbery household is to be steeped in the past: The talk brims with allusions to literature and history; the Cheyne Walk house is crowded with books, portraits, and the ever-present ghost of Alardyce; and the street itself is one on which a Who’s Who of nineteenth-century writers and artists—Thomas Carlyle, George Eliot, Henry James, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, James McNeill Whistler—had lived. Amid these hallowed surroundings, an ongoing battle between the centuries plays itself out. Conversation among the Hilberys is predictably boisterous, but nevertheless their domestic rituals suggest a world where relations between the sexes have changed little since the last century:
Daily life in a house where there are young and old is full of curious little ceremonies and pieties, which are discharged quite punctually, though the meaning of them is obscure, and a mystery has come to brood over them which lends even a superstitious charm to their performance. Such was the nightly ceremony of the cigar and the glass of port, which were placed on the right hand and on the left hand of Mr Hilbery, and simultaneously Mrs Hilbery and Katharine left the room. All the years they had lived together they had never seen Mr Hilbery smoke his cigar or drink his port, and they would have felt it unseemly if, by chance, they had surprised him as he sat there. These short, but clearly marked, periods of separation between the sexes were always used for an intimate postscript to what had been said at dinner, the sense of being women together coming out most strongly when the male sex was, as if by some religious rite, secluded from the female (p. 88).
Several of the novel’s characters come down firmly on the side of such a “clearly marked” world. Although Mrs. Hilbery muses in a letter to her sister-in-law that “one doesn’t know any more, does one? One hasn’t any advice to give one’s children” (p. 126), she is still eager to see Katharine married, and admits, “I don’t believe in sending girls to college” (p. 86). She also bemoans the previous generation’s “vitality” that “we haven’t got! We’re virtuous, we’re earnest, we go to meetings, we pay the poor their wages, but we don’t live as they lived. As often as not, my father wasn’t in bed three nights out of the seven, but always fresh as paint in the morning” (p. 103).
Even more staunchly conservative is William Rodney. “A man naturally alive to the conventions of society,” Woolf mockingly writes, “he was strictly conventional where women were concerned, and especially if the women happened to be in any way connected with him” (p. 215). Marriage, to him, is the sum and glory of a woman’s existence, and while Katharine, in a revealing scene, stares distractedly at the skies, Rodney rhapsodizes on the joys of wedlock:
“But for me I suppose you would recommend marriage?” said Katharine, with her eyes fixed on the moon.
“Certainly I should. Not for you only, but for all women. Why, you’re nothing at all without it; you’re only half alive; using only half your faculties; you must feel that for yourself” (p. 56).
Rodney admires Katharine’s beauty and intelligence, but he is also deeply threatened by her unwillingness to admire him uncritically: “Beneath her steady, exemplary surface,” he reflects, “ran a vein of passion which seemed to him now perverse, now completely irrational, for it never took the normal channel of glorification of him and his doings” (p. 214). Not long after Katharine has rejected Rodney’s first proposal of marriage, he indignantly remarks to Denham:
“She lives... one of those odious, self-centred lives—at least, I think them odious for a woman—feeding her wits upon everything, having control of everything, getting far too much her own way at home—spoilt, in a sense, feeling that every one is at her feet.... She has taste. She has sense. She can understand you when you talk to her. But she’s a woman, and there’s an end of it” (pp. 60-61).
As his feeble attempts at poetry make hilariously clear, Rodney’s blind allegiance to the past has a cost: an inflexibility that makes him sadly unfit for the complex demands of modern life and love.
But Katharine, as is only proper for a heroine, does not yield to propriety’s pull so easily. Whether working on her grandfather’s biography or simply wandering around her house, she feels both drawn to and overwhelmed by the past:
Sometimes Katharine brooded, half crushed, among her papers; sometimes she felt that it was necessary for her very existence that she should free herself from the past; at others, that the past had completely displaced the present, which, when one resumed life after a morning among the dead, proved to be of an utterly thin and inferior composition (p. 35).
Yet even though “a great part of her time was spent in imagination with the dead” (p. 32), Katharine also has a fine and searching mind of her own. Alone among the Hilberys, she has a passion for mathematics, rather than for more traditional accomplishments like music or poetry. This passion gives rise to guilt as well as rapture:
Perhaps the unwomanly nature of the science made her instinctively wish to conceal her love of it. But the more profound reason was that in her mind mathematics were directly opposed to literature. She would not have cared to confess how infinitely she preferred the exactitude, the star-like impersonality, of figures to the confusion, agitation, and vagueness of the finest prose. There was something a little unseemly in thus opposing the tradition of her family; something that made her feel wrong-headed, and thus more than ever disposed to shut her desires away from view and cherish them with extraordinary fondness. Again and again she was thinking of some problem when she should have been thinking of her grandfather (pp. 37-38).