Virginia Woolf’s ‘bewildering world’

In his 1941 Rede Lecture, E. M. Forster remarks that reading Virginia Woolf transports us to ‘a bewildering world’. Woolf is ‘like a plant which is supposed to grow in a well-prepared garden bed – the bed of esoteric literature – and then pushes up suckers all over the place, through the gravel of the front drive, and even through the flagstones of the kitchen yard’. This chapter takes Forster’s botanical simile as a starting point to theorise what it means to read Woolf as a ‘bewildering’ writer in the context of the Anthropocene epoch. Beginning by examining the re-evaluation of the wild and wildness in recent critical and ecocritical theory, the chapter follows use of the noun ‘bewilderment’ and its verbal and adjectival forms (‘bewilder’, ‘bewildered’ and ‘bewildering’) across Woolf’s oeuvre, beginning with her reviews and essays before turning to her novels. If the modernist Anthropocene is characterised by ontological and ethical entanglements of various kinds, this chapter shows how bewilderment can be an animating force that injects affect into these entanglements, unsettling processes of human meaning-making via attunement to the nonhuman.