Orlando Bochum

auf'n Schluck ab 20.00 Uhr mit djane la rouge,

freue mich auf euch 

Samstag, 18. Februar um 22:00

Peter Witzik fühlt sich keinen Regeln und Techniken verpflichtet. Seine Kunst, mit einem breit gefächerten Aktionsradius, ist ein wahrer Mix aus Experiment, Intuition und Lebenserfahrung. Seine exzellenten Kreationen beeindrucken ungemein. Der Betrachter befindet sich in einer bunten Traumwelt, in der er auch recht fröhlich assoziieren kann, ohne zwanghaft interpretieren zu müssen. Inhalt und Aussage, eingelassene Assoziationen, Korrespondenz und Ästhetik: Diese Kriterien erfüllt Witzik meisterlich mit gefühlvoller Hand. Seine Bilder weisen deutlich assoziativ auf die heutige Gesellschaft hin, in der viele gezwungen sind, eine Maske zu tragen bzw. ihre Seele zu entzweien. Die Werke korrespondieren miteinander, was auch wichtig ist, zeigt es doch, dass der Künstler sich treu ist und eine Entwicklung durchgemacht hat. Seine Arbeiten sind gekonnt harmonisch und weisen auf eine tiefe Sicht in die Dinge hin. So kommt man nicht umhin festzustellen, dass man es hier mit einem lebenserfahrenen Menschen zu tun hat, der mit analytischem Blick die Welt umwandert, um seine Spuren zu hinterlassen.

am letzten Donnerstag im Monat um 20.00 Uhr,

im Februar am 23.2.2012 mit dem Publikumsthema:

Unterwegs nach "gen Italien"

am Samstag, dem 3.März um 20.00 Uhr

Einlass:19.00 Uhr

Lesen werden:
Wilfried Eggers, Reinhard Junge, Theo Poitner, Jan Zweyer

Eintritt. 12€

10.3.2012 um 18.00 Uhr

Passionate friendships with women were essential to the life and work of novelist Virginia Woolf.

Woolf was born Adeline Virginia Stephen on January 25, 1882, in Hyde Park Gate, London, the daughter of Leslie Stephen, a man of letters, who in the same year began editing the Dictionary of National Biography and Julia Pattle Duckworth, a Victorian beauty immortalized in the photographs of Julia Margaret Cameron.

Virginia's mother's first marriage ended with the death of her husband, leaving her with three children, one of whom, Gerald Duckworth, is known to have sexually molested Woolf as an adolescent.

Her adolescence was marked as well by a sequence of deaths and the first bout of a mental illness that would haunt her for the rest of her life: Her mother died in 1895; her half-sister Stella, who served as mother-substitute, in 1897; her father in 1904 and her brother Thoby in 1906.

She experienced her first mental breakdown at the age of thirteen following her mother's death, while the final one ended with her suicide when she walked into the river Ouse on March 28, 1941.

Virginia and Vanessa

Woolf developed her closest attachment to her sister Vanessa, what she called "a very close conspiracy." The two sisters functioned as co-conspirators in their alliance as women artists, on the one hand against the tyranny of the father who repeatedly sought to enlist their services as surrogate wives; on the other hand, against Victorian mores that considered marriage the only suitable profession for middle-class daughters.

Vanessa likewise served as surrogate mother, by taking over the maternal function after Stella's death, and by eventually becoming herself a mother, in contrast to the younger Virginia.

As women artists, the two sisters recognized a clear division of labor: Virginia the writer in her study, Vanessa the painter in her studio. All children were educated at home, in the father's library and with private tutors, although the two brothers eventually attended Cambridge University.

The Beginnings of the Bloomsbury Group

Following Leslie Stephen's death, the four siblings moved to Bloomsbury, a section of London that would eventually give name to a group of artists and intellectuals, the Bloomsbury Group. This group began when Thoby and his Cambridge friends moved back to London and met every Thursday evening to discuss art and literature, as well as pressing political issues such as pacifism and socialism.

Initially, Virginia and Vanessa were the only two women present, as Thoby's sisters but also as intellectuals and artists.

Several of the male participants were avowed homosexuals, including Lytton Strachey, who proposed to Virginia in 1909, although the engagement was almost immediately broken off.

Her Relationship to Gay Men

Woolf's relationship to gay men remained an ambivalent one. On the one hand, she appreciated a lack of sexual interest that made it possible for her to have access to an intellectual environment based on an indifference to her gender; on the other hand, the absence of women meant a lacking female eroticism that for her prohibited creativity.

Much later, on August 19, 1930, she wrote in a letter to Ethel Smyth: "It is true that I only want to show off to women. Women alone stir my imagination."

Marriage to Leonard Woolf and the Founding of the Hogarth Press

In 1912, she married Leonard Woolf, "a penniless Jew," also a member of the Bloomsbury Group, a political writer who had recently returned from service in India. This marriage is considered to have been a supportive although passionless one.

In 1917, the Woolfs established Hogarth Press as an attempt to engage Virginia in more practical work in the hope of keeping at bay further bouts of mental illness. The Press published the works of several lesbian and gay writers, including E. M. Forster, Christopher Isherwood, and Vita Sackville-West.

The move to Bloomsbury also marked Woolf's initiation as a writer. Her first publication took the form of an unsigned review in the newspaper Guardian, facilitated by Violet Dickinson.

Her Relationships with Women

The relationship with Dickinson was one of several intense friendships Woolf had with women throughout her life. These affairs of the heart left their traces in passionate letters and diary entries characterized by a mutual attraction and a desire for emotional intimacy expressed in highly eroticized language.

They often resulted in literary works, not always published, written as tribute to friendships that greatly fostered--but were ultimately confined to--writing.

Often these women were older, unmarried, more masculine in appearance, and highly successful artists; often they offered Woolf some form of maternal protection as she struggled with another incident of physical or mental illness.

All of them shared with Woolf an interest in art and provided critical readings of her work. None of these relationships is known to have had a sexual component.

Woolf's first passionate friendship was with Madge Vaughan, the daughter of the well-known writer and sexologist, John Addington Symonds, whom Woolf met at the age of sixteen and who was to serve as a model for Sally Seton in Mrs. Dalloway (1925).

Violet Dickinson, almost twice Woolf's age when she nursed her during the mental breakdown following the death of her father, was an unmarried Quaker for whom she wrote "Friendship Gallery" (1907), a spoof biography that anticipates Orlando (1928). It describes a utopian community of women inspired and led by Dickinson with Woolf as the artist figure, a model for other women writers and recorder of the community's development.

Much later Woolf looked back on this friendship as the one that enabled her to say for the first time with confidence, "I am a writer."

The final of such friendships was with Ethel Smyth, a well-known composer, whom Virginia met in 1930, when Woolf was forty-eight and Smyth seventy years old. Woolf named her in the original draft of her essay "Professions for Women" as the model for the professional woman but also, once again, as the artist who engages in a different artistic medium, a more public and therefore more ambitious one for women than that of the writer.

Their friendship was also based on a bond over the loss of the mother; Smyth wrote in a 1930 letter to Woolf: "Now you can imagine how much sexual feeling has to do with an emotion for one's mother."

Virginia and Vita Sackville-West

Woolf met Vita Sackville-West, with whom she had the only intense friendship to include a physical relationship, in 1922. In this case, the age difference was reversed, Virginia was forty and Vita thirty years old and Virginia was the more confident and recognized of the two writers.

But Vita was the experienced "Sapphist." The affair began in 1925, the point at which Woolf wrote in her Diary, "These Sapphists love women; friendship is never untinged with amorosity" (December 21), and is thought to have lasted until 1928.

During that time, Vita took two trips to Persia to visit her husband who was working in the British embassy in Tehran. The second time she traveled in the company of another woman, which began to create a rift as Woolf became less and less tolerant of Vita's other affairs.

In 1928, Woolf and E. M. Forster wrote a letter defending Radclyffe Hall's Well of Loneliness, not as a good novel or because of its lesbian content, but in the name of free speech.

Various members of Bloomsbury appeared at the obscenity trial prepared to testify as expert witnesses, including Woolf, who described her presence as a way of also defending Vita's Sapphism.

At the end of the same year, Woolf delivered the lectures at Newnham and Girton Colleges, which were to become A Room of One's Own (1929), accompanied by Vita, to whom she had dedicated Orlando, which had appeared just a few months earlier.

By then, the affair had ended but a strong friendship continued until 1934. These ten years were the most productive in the lives of both writers. Their emotional attachment to each other was completely severed only by Woolf's death.

Woolf has been named "the Invalid Lady of Bloomsbury" (E. M. Forster), a "sexless Sappho" (nephew and biographer Quentin Bell), and "a guerilla fighter in a Victorian skirt" (Jane Marcus, feminist literary critic).

Most recently, she has been described, in conjunction with Vita, as a "married lesbian" (Suzanne Raitt), someone for whom lesbianism was an emotional, even a sexual orientation, but not a political identity necessarily incompatible with or even disruptive of marriage.

Nor do any of her works contain explicitly lesbian characters who are not somehow deficient of a femininity associated with social respectability. And yet as the most revered modernist woman writer, Woolf is also considered to be the author of the first positive "Sapphic" portrait in the form of "the longest and most charming love letter in literature," Orlando.

Woolf and Female Homoeroticism

Same-sex desire in the form of eroticized relationships between women remains fundamental to Woolf's thinking about the connection between women and creativity.

Female homoeroticism most often takes the form either of mourning for a lost maternal femininity or of a conflation between female artist, spinster, and lesbian: on the one hand, a sexually charged but always elusive relationship to the mother; on the other hand, a nonsexualized female artist--unmarried, celibate, childless, but independent.

The female artist has access to an artistic medium that allows her to put into question a compulsory heterosexuality that leaves the attractions between women unrealized, both sexually and aesthetically. At the same time, the figure of the lesbian as unmarried woman threatens to politicize the erotic, thereby producing the "mannish lesbian" as sexual and thus social outcast.

Woolf repeatedly describes the nature of female homoeroticism in terms of "that vast chamber where nobody has yet been," as in this passage from A Room of One's Own. In what is considered the first example of feminist history and literary criticism, she makes her most explicit statement about the relations between women as both existing in real life and nonexistent in literature.

By introducing "Chloe and Olivia," characters in a novel authored by the fictitious Mary Carmichael, she suggests that women exist not only in relation to men but also in relation to each other (these two share a laboratory). They can even like each other, a liking that has served as a sign for many readers of the possibility of love, and therefore lesbian desire.

Mrs. Dalloway

The first and only novel to deal explicitly with both female eroticism and the figure of the lesbian is Mrs. Dalloway, a novel about a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, the wife of an M.P., a day spent preparing for a party she will host.

This ostensibly meager plot is meant to focus attention on both a subplot, Clarissa's memories of Sally Seton, with whom she fell in love as a young girl, and a parallel plot, that of Septimus Smith, a shell-shocked veteran who commits suicide during Clarissa's party.

Although Clarissa and Septimus never meet, they are connected by the importance of and yet impossibility of same-sex desire, for Clarissa because she and Sally both chose marriage to rich, respectable men, for Septimus because his love object was killed during the war.

By choosing Richard Dalloway over Peter Walsh, who intercepted the kiss from Sally that marks "the most exquisite moment of her whole life," Clarissa is allowed to retreat to the virginal bed in the attic that preserves the memory of a pastoral and premarital homoeroticism.

Sally represents the beautiful adolescent given to self-abandonment who has a way with flowers and a passion for envisioning the abolition of private property and the attainment of equal rights for women. She is the one through whom Woolf represents lesbianism as an erotic attachment brought to a close by marriage but also as the occasion for a highly eroticized language.

Mrs. Dalloway's love for Sally is described as follows: "Then, for that moment, she had seen an illumination; a match burning in a crocus; an inner meaning almost expressed. But the close withdrew; the hard softened. It was over--the moment."

Although Sally inspires in Clarissa an identification with the desire men must feel for women, she herself remains at a far remove from the masculinized lesbian, Miss Killman, the tutor of Mrs. Dalloway's daughter, Elizabeth.

Miss Killman is described as poor, clumsy, over forty; she works for a living, is prone to religious fervor and pro-German sympathies, and always wears the same mackintosh. At the same time, she is a highly knowledgeable historian and economically independent.

Her attraction to Elizabeth is presented as a sexual orientation rather than a passing phase, and thus unlike the eroticized language used to elicit Sally, Miss Killman's lesbianism is described in terms of an authoritarian politics:

For it was not her one hated but the idea of her, which undoubtedly had gathered in to itself a great deal that was not Miss Killman; had become one of those spectres with which one battles in the night; one of those spectres who stand astride us and suck up half our life-blood, dominators and tyrants; for no doubt with another throw of the dice, had the black been uppermost and not the white, she would have loved Miss Killman! But not in this world. No.

In this world, such a politicized identity, embodied by the masculinized woman, evokes the familial patriarch.

To the Lighthouse

In To the Lighthouse (1927), the Miss Killman figure is more positively portrayed via Lily Briscoe, who is also poor and unmarried, yet nevertheless an artist. Like Elizabeth Dalloway, she has "little Chinese eyes," connoting an exoticism associated with a younger generation of independent women.

This novel also recounts a day and another day ten years later in the life of a family, the Ramsays with their six children, in the Hebrides. The homoerotic content takes the form of the relationship between Lily, a guest at the summer house, and Mrs. Ramsay, who both is and isn't a figure for the mother.

Mrs. Ramsay once again represents the hostess who views Lily in terms of an inferior version of femininity, not beautiful, not marriageable, whose paintings hold no interest for her, or potentially anyone else.

Lily needs Mrs. Ramsay as the lost maternal figure whose recovery remains essential to the production of art and yet whose renunciation must be complete if a woman is to actually become an artist.

Again the language is highly eroticized:

Could loving, as people called it, make her and Mrs. Ramsay one? for it was not knowledge but unity she desired, not inscriptions on tablets, nothing that could be written in any language known to men, but intimacy itself, which is knowledge, she had thought, leaning her head on Mrs. Ramsay's knee.
The novel also contains two minor characters, two of the Ramsays' children, a daughter who imagines Constantinople when another woman about to become engaged holds her hand, and a son who becomes the mourned love object of the poet Mr. Carmichael, when he receives news of his death on the battlefield.

Between the Acts

In her final novel, Between the Acts (1941), Woolf represents her protagonist, Miss La Trobe, as not only a more successful artist than Lily Briscoe but also as an avowed lesbian:

Since the row with the actress who had shared her bed and her purse the need of drink had grown on her. And the horror and the terror of being alone. One of these days she would break--which of the village laws? Sobriety? Chastity? Or take something that did not properly belong to her?
Reminiscent of Miss Killman, the more openly lesbian, the more socially deviant the character becomes. And yet she is also the author and producer of a literary historical pageant held yearly at a country house, where it remains unclear whether the audience or the actors are those enacting a performance, and where every person is simply an assumed part, the most worn-out being that of the heterosexual couple.

Orlando

A similar retelling of literary history as parody structures Orlando, the work that has most contributed to Woolf's reputation as a lesbian writer. Subtitled "A Biography," it attempts to revolutionize the genre by telling the life of Orlando who lives for three hundred years--from Queen Elizabeth I's reign to the present day (October 11, 1928).

Sometime during the eighteenth century, while ambassador to Turkey, Orlando changes from a man into a woman, although the sex of the original love object, Sasha, remains unchanged:

though she herself was a woman, it was still a woman she loved; and if the consciousness of being of the same sex had any effect at all, it was to quicken and deepen those feelings which she had had as a man. For now a thousand hints and mysteries became plain to her that were then dark.
As a woman, the character continues to cross-dress although she eventually marries and bears a child.

Yet the most important relationship in the novel remains the one between Orlando and the biographer, who frequently enters the text to discuss how difficult it is to adhere to the conventions of biography. One such convention assumes that the person being written about is dead.

Vita, who posed for several of the photographs that accompany the text, was delighted with what Woolf had written. On her first reading, she writes in a letter, "you have invented a new form of Narcissism,--I confess,--I am in love with Orlando--this is a complication I had not foreseen" (October 11, 1928).

Not only does the novel make Vita immortal, Woolf in addition is able to grant her several wishes: having the best of both sexes and the most of each one, sexually. Woolf enables her to inherit the family estate, Knole, which Vita had been disinherited of due to her gender.

She makes her an accomplished writer, rather than giving her the "pen of brass" she thought she really had. And finally she bestows on her beauty through Orlando's stately legs, thereby representing her as a "real woman," in contrast to her own sense of herself as a "eunuch."

And yet Woolf's one venture into female eroticism ended with Orlando, capturing in print what she wasn't able to have in life due to Vita's infidelity and her own stifled sexuality. Originally entitled "The Jessamy Brides" ("Jessamy" referring to a dandy or fop), Orlando represents both what Woolf could never be or have except through her art.