Twenty Essays On the Practical Improvement of God'S Providential Dispensations

Finally, Woolf highlights the peculiarity of Edward's feeling for Kitty, its difference from his feeling for his male friends, by pointing out that it is imaginary (he hardly knew Kitty). As telling as Woolf's arguments are, even more powerful are the things she does not say: that although Edward would become an expert on Antigone (in The Years, he gives a copy of his translation of it to his cousin Sara Pargiter), he seems completely unaware of the ironic appropriateness of such "expertise." Antigone, whom he admires as "fierce and daring," is punished for these qualities by being buried alive at the end of the play, and it is precisely the practice of burying women alive that Woolf herself seeks to expose. The subtle evocation of women's buried lives is reinforced by Edward's allusion to Kitty as Persephone, whose marriage to Pluto, god of Hades, condemns her to spend half of every year in hell. What Edward cannot see is that he, too, wants to kill the girl he professes to admire, first by idealizing her, and then by marrying-and effectively burying-her. -792- Woolf's essays in The Pargiters invite us to contrast two pictures: a picture of young men joining the "great fellowship… of men together," a fellowship promoted by five hundred years of male boarding schools; and an image of girls, isolated from the company of both sexes and kept in ignorance of culture ...»