The Service of an Ideology: Bloomsbury in the 1930s
Date
2002
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Haverford College. Department of History
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Thesis
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Award
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eng
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Haverford users only
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Abstract
Bloomsbury experienced the political atmosphere of the 1930s as an attack upon civilization. "A struggle is taking place," Leonard Woolf wrote, "in the heart of society, and instinctively the barbarians throw the whole of their weight upon the side of barbarianism." Bloomsbury resisted the pull of barbarism by introducing a critical, pacific voice that countered the jingoistic and belligerent tone of European nations. Its members expressed this alternative resistance through an examination of "civilization." They cast off the layers of nationalistic rhetoric attached to the concept and introduced a revised notion of civilization that adhered to the Bloomsbury pacific philosophy. Because Bloomsbury's pacific ideology countered the mainstream period's aggressive and fearful tone, scholars tend to suggest that the group was silenced into dissolution by the force of events in the 1930s. As I will argue, however, the threat to civilization, the tensions and anxieties which seemed to sweep people into irrationality and violence compelled Bloomsbury to express even more fervently and clearly what its members had always believed. Bloomsbury, so far from being silenced, located in its particular focus upon "civilization" a means of expression and action in accordance with its ideology.