Heritage Hoarding: Artifacts, Archives, and Ambiguity, or, the Saga of Virginia Woolf’s Standing Desk

Arranging to give a talk to celebrate Duke University’s acquisition of Virginia Woolf’s writing desk, I was both delighted and dismayed. Dismayed, because engrained in my mind is Walter Benjamin’s famous maxim: “For without exception the cultural treasures he surveys have an origin which he cannot contemplate without horror.” Woolf, too, curses a famous library for its exclusive guarding of archival treasures (AROO) and makes scathing remarks about pilgrimages to regard the possessions of dead writers. Contemplating archives as institutional hoarding, considering the archival turn in theory (with Derrida, Foucault, feminist critiques of archive politics, and the work of historians, curators and librarians between the lines), this paper interrogates the fate of artifacts in the archives, focusing on the material trace of Woolf’s writing desk. My saga begins with Quentin Bell’s letter about the history of the desk and continues through archives such as the Berg Collection (repository for Virginia Woolf’s walking stick as well as Charlotte Brontë’s writing desk), letters, diaries, and essays. Analyzing the gender politics of Woolf’s inherited view of writing desks, from her mother’s drawing room desk to her father’s rocking writing chair in an ivory tower studio, we witness her intervention in that heritage, moving from a standing desk to a writing table to a plywood writing board and overstuffed chair. In closing, the paper situates Woolf's writing space on the threshold of Hogarth Press and private space: a dynamic site for a writer.