2009.01 不完美的结合

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Imperfect Union
A brilliant new book probes the intimate, unequal relationship between Virginia Woolf and the woman who cared for her.

By Mona Simpson
JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2009 ISSUE
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IF I WERE reading this,” a 1929 entry in Virginia Woolf’s diary records,

if it were a book that came my way, I think I should seize with greed on the portrait of Nelly, and make a story—perhaps make the whole story revolve around … her character—our efforts to get rid of her—our reconciliations.
“Nelly” is Nellie Boxall, Woolf’s cook for 18 years.

“By rights,” Woolf wrote, Lottie—the parlormaid—“should have a whole chapter to herself.” But as we know, Woolf’s great servant novel doesn’t exist. The literary historian Alison Light suggests, in her penetrating, nuanced book Mrs. Woolf and the Servants: An Intimate History of Domestic Life in Bloomsbury, that though she tried, Woolf never could write about poor people. Perhaps not least, Light posits, because she was wary of the “glamour” of slumming. Woolf criticized work by Edith Sichel, a Victorian “poor peopler,” because her accounts avoided the mention of “copulation or w.c’s.”


Woolf herself stinted on copulation, and I don’t remember even one WC in her work. Having grown up in a house with seven servants who lived in what Woolf referred to as “dark insanitary places” in the basement or the attic, the writer understood that she knew very little about the poor. But she did write about her servants in her letters and diaries. For a time, Virginia and her sister, Vanessa Bell, wrote to each other “every day about their servants’ doings.”

Why didn’t those doings make it into her fiction?

LIGHT TELLS US two resonant facts in her preface. Her own grandmother had been a live-in servant, after she’d been put in a workhouse following her parents’ death. She’d said she was “treated like dirt” by other women; at 16 her hair turned white following a breakdown. Light also tells us that her own feelings about the material of this book changed after she cared for her husband before his death. “It was my first experience of looking after someone else’s every need since I was not a mother.” I assume this to mean that caregiving is not always an experience of degradation and that dependency, even in its extremes, can offer opportunities for great acts of tenderness. Light tells us:

I wanted to write this book to get to the bottom of some of those feelings which I associated with the “class consciousness” I had grown up with … the messy, painful, intimate, damaging feelings of inferiority, envy, deference and belligerence.
While she attempts to chronicle the unrecorded lives of servants, another subterranean movement follows Light’s developing understanding of the nature of dependency, from her first position—granddaughter of a woman who was “treated like dirt”—to her role as the wife who nursed her dying husband. Light had hoped to present the lives of servants in a way that would “upstage those of their employers,” but that didn’t turn out to be possible, because the servants’ versions of their own stories don’t exist. In her research, she encountered tantalizing close calls. A Bloomsbury governess left a half-written novel about her time with the Bells (Vanessa found the writings “bitter”), but the document didn’t survive. Unable to tell the story in the servants’ own words, Light gleans their lives through the records left by those they worked for. “Servants may leave only vestigial traces in the official histories of the past,” Light writes, “but they have always loomed large in the imagination of their employers.”

Well, in the case of Woolf’s mother, not really. Julia Stephen moved through her home with serene efficiency, supervising servants who, by all accounts, loved her. One doesn’t feel that the servants loomed large in her imagination. She was at peace with the idea of having them. Woolf’s relationship with servants—her caregivers—was always more central and thus more fraught. Woolf attempted suicide for the first time after her father’s death, when she was 22, and for the first years of her marriage, she was in a state of breakdown or recovery. Symptoms that plagued her early life—headaches, sleeplessness, depression, anxiety, guilt, and an aversion to food—returned. (Several books have been written about her anorexia.) Her inability to eat if she was agitated made food and the person who prepared it for her a matter of paramount importance. Vanessa told the newlywed Leonard “how much better Virginia ate when she was helped,” and the sisters’ childhood cook, Sophie Farrell, was summoned back for a short stay.

ALTHOUGH LIGHT’S BOOK follows the lives of several Bloomsbury servants and traces the changing supply and demand for domestic service from the Victorian age to the postwar period, the central story chronicles Virginia Woolf’s turbulent relationship with Nellie Boxall. Boxall came as a live-in servant in 1916. Light imagines that Woolf must have appeared a “fragile woman” 10 years her senior, “in an old dressing-gown propped up on the sofa.” Like her new employer, Boxall had lost her mother at a young age (she began working at 14, just two years after her mother’s death) and also suffered from “nerves.”

Neither Virginia nor her sister knew how to cook. As different as the talented daughters were from their Victorian mother, they too found themselves dependent on servants, but much less happily so. And, while Vanessa could somehow work amid the clutter of bohemian family life, Virginia needed her comforts—particularly carefully prepared food—in order to write. The Woolf household “revolved around the routines which made it possible for her to write,” Light tells us: “regular meals, a rest after lunch, not too many visitors, no late nights.”

Boxall lived with the Woolfs for 18 years; for more than half that time, she was the only servant in the house. Reading their saga, one has the sense of a marriage. As might be expected with two such similar people, it was a ride with sulks, recriminations, weeping, supplication—and pages of analysis in Virginia’s diaries, where the fights dramatized their closeness.

This is … one of those stupendous moments—one of those painful, ridiculous, agitating moments which make one half sick … I’m excited too; & feel free & then sordid; & unsettled; & so on—I’ve told Nelly to go; after a series of scenes … And in the midst of the usual anger, I looked into her little shifting greedy eyes, & saw nothing but malice & spite there she doesn’t care for me [italics mine].
While servants may have lingered somewhere in Woolf’s mother’s imagination or at least on her to-do lists, it’s hard to imagine Julia Stephen, or her incarnations as Mrs. Ramsay or Mrs. Dalloway, so plaintively wanting to be liked by a just-fired cook.

Mrs. Woolf and the ServantsALISON LIGHT,BLOOMSBURY
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After the “series of scenes,” Nellie bicycled four miles to get cream for the Woolfs’ supper; the two fought when Nellie would not make marmalade. Nellie prepared Virginia’s bath, and carried food and milk to her on a tray. For Virginia’s 36th birthday, she hand-knit red socks, which the writer apparently enjoyed wearing in the mornings. Nellie danced the foxtrot listening to the gramophone. Virginia had her take lessons with the celebrity chef Marcel Boulestin (many of their rapprochements involved food). In 1924, Nellie gave notice “for the 165th time.” She would work for the Woolfs another 10 years.

Like most intense relationships, Woolf’s with Nellie mingled anger and kindness, forgiveness and grievance. The Woolfs “lent” Nellie to Vanessa. When Nellie made jam from seven pounds of hand-picked blackberries (a reversal from her former refusal to make marmalade), Woolf took it as “her way of thanking me for having Lottie—after all, she has no other. And one tends to forget it.” In her diary, Woolf described Nellie as “almost insufferably mean, selfish & spiteful … a human mind wriggling undressed.” But as a postscript to a letter to Leonard, she scrawled, “Love to Nelly.” She named a kitten Boxall after Nellie—“to ingratiate her.”

Most of the complaints on Nellie’s part seemed to be about having too much work. She angled for another helper. On Virginia’s side of their eternal fight was an avalanche of hurt feelings. What is this, if not the story of a durable bond between people who form an imperfect fit? Or is it the story of the ways one woman uses another, because she can? The distinction plagues Light and generates the conflicted momentum of her book. The Woolfs obsess about “the question of Nelly.” Light endlessly worries the problem of Virginia Woolf, who left behind beautiful work but required a servant’s help to stay sane enough to do that work.

Woolf achieved financial success with the publication of Orlando in 1928. But as their standard of living rose, the Woolfs began to wonder whether they needed to keep Nellie.

I am sordidly debating within myself … the perennial question ... It is an absurdity how much time L. & I have wasted in talking about servants.
Woolf thought she wanted a “daily,” a “liver out” who would treat her “as an employer, not friend.” In the summer of 1929, Woolf attempted to cook the dinners. She wrote to Vita Sackville-West that she was “free forever of cooks. I cooked veal cutlets and cake today. I assure you it is better than writing these idiotic books.”

As Light observes, Woolf was happy to cook, but apparently not to clean.

On a rare occasion when Virginia found herself doing the dishes, she was amazed at the effort: “I’ve been washing up lunch—how servants preserve either sanity or sobriety if that is nine 10ths of their lives—greasy ham—God knows.”
In 1929, after Woolf published A Room of One’s Own, during another of their “scenes,” Nellie asked Woolf to leave her room. “Sick and shivery” (as Light imagines the nervous writer), Virginia decided to fire her the next day, but instead the Woolfs compromised again, hiring a char to do more of the rough work (cleaning lavatories).

Light’s attempt to understand the contagious sense of shame surrounding service drives her emphasis on sloppers, chamber pots, and the work involved in cleaning up human excrement before the installation of modern plumbing. According to Light, Woolf’s father, Leslie Stephen, considered American plumbing extravagant and mildly corrupting (one wonders whom he thought would be corrupted! The servants?) and preferred to hire a slopper to empty chamber pots into the water closet and clean the basins. This resistance to modern plumbing turned out to be inherited. Shortly before the Woolfs’ marriage, after weighing the options, Virginia decided to use earth-closets at their country house—which would be cleaned out by an elderly worker—rather than install a drain for a WC.

This must have been exceedingly frustrating for the servants, to whom the Stephens and the Woolfs seemed rich. Why wouldn’t these people pay for the new, sanitary plumbing? But the Woolfs weren’t rich during most of the time Nellie worked for them. Their refusals to hire the helper she wanted no doubt had to do with money. (The persistent problem of the artistic upper-middle class: rich in their servants’ eyes, they are nonetheless stretching to make ends meet.)

In 1930, when Nellie got sick, Woolf brought her to the hospital and, as Light relates, “what with doctors, planning and cooking dinner,” she lost two weeks of writing. (Leonard’s work went on uninterrupted.) When Nellie came home, she was met with a letter of dismissal claiming that relations between the two women had changed since “the famous scene last November” (when Nellie asserted the idea that, in Woolf’s house, she had a room of her own—by demanding Woolf leave it). Woolf recorded parts of their hours-long talk in her diary.

Still I can’t understand why you won’t have me back …

But Nelly, you gave me notice 10 times in the past 6 years—& more …

But I always took it back.

Yes, but that sort of thing gets on the nerves.

Oh ma’am I never meant to tire you—don’t go on talking now if it tires you—but you wouldn’t give me any help. Now Grace has all the help she wants—Well, I says, this is long service.

But then Nelly you forgot that when you were with us.

But then for 3 years I’ve been ill. And I shall never like any mistress as much as I like you.
Nellie would continue working for the Woolfs for another three years. One might wonder if the main reason she stayed really was, as she said, a liking for her mistress. In fact, by the standards of her time, Nellie’s job was a good one, as Light observes. She wore no uniform. (In Clive Bell’s home, the maids served dinner in black alpaca frocks and white caps and aprons well into the 1930s.) Nellie called Virginia “Mrs. Woolf,” not “Ma’am.” No members of the household bothered to dress for dinner, and the meal was not “served.” No table linens had to be ironed. Once, Nellie and her mistress even worked together to empty the tubs when the pipes froze.

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Finally, in 1934, after yet another “great Nelly row,” Woolf decided it really was time to fire the servant. She was so distressed by her decision that she had to stop working on her novel. Then, after “the most disagreeable six weeks of my life,” she did it, feeling “executioner & the executed in one.” In one of the last glimpses we have of Nellie in the diary, she is standing “by the drawing-room door in the full light, white & pink, with her funny rather foolish mulish face.”

She would not accept a check from Virginia, saying, “But you don’t owe me anything.”

The last sentence Virginia ever wrote about Nellie appeared in her diary a few months later. “After eighteen years I at last got rid of an affectionate domestic tyrant.” She makes no further reference to Nellie (or “Nelly,” as Woolf misspelled her name—for almost two decades) in her diary or letters. After their 18 years of living together, that silence, more than any of the flashes of hatred, shocks.

BUT NELLIE THRIVED. She found a job with Charles Laughton and Elsa Lanchester, then Britain’s best-known stage couple, just returned from Hollywood. The movie stars were significantly richer than the literary Woolfs, and Happy Powley, the maid who worked alongside Nellie there, remembered “Dietrich bringing out the dirty plates to a cupboard on the landing.”


And Nellie had her own moment of fame: she was featured in an advertisement for a porcelain-enameled gas cooker, under the heading “Mr. and Mrs. Charles Laughton’s Cook Tells You How to Roast Beef to Perfection.”

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When the Laughtons went to the United States, in 1939, they asked her along, but she returned to Surrey, where she’d grown up, and lived again with Lottie. Nellie worked as cook in a hospital canteen during World War II. Lottie worked in the local laundry. In the 1950s, Nellie bought a house; the Laughtons had given her furniture. “The girl from the family of 10 got her own house,” Light tells us. Nellie was “the first to have an extension built, and a bathroom and indoor toilet put in, the first to have a television … Lottie did all the cleaning; Nellie, the cooking.”

Nellie died in 1965, without a will. (Although Lottie owned nothing, the Boxall family allowed Nellie’s longtime friend to remain. But without Nellie, Light tells us, Lottie fell apart and moved to a public home that had once been a workhouse.) By all outward signs, Nellie was able to shake off her history of cleaning Virginia Woolf’s chamber pots. Even on her own, she never cleaned house again.

As we all know, Virginia fared less well.




After they fired Nellie, the Woolfs mainly hired “livers out.” Their income increased throughout the ’30s, profits from Flush bought a “new pond, regrouted the old one, and paved the front garden.” The couple constructed a summer studio for Virginia. New fireplaces were added, and a dormered room under the roof became a library.

Despite all this optimistic renovation, the cottages where Leonard’s gardener and their “liver out” lived, each with spouses and children, remained damp, “without hot water, bathrooms, or water-closets.” For four adults and five children, they had only an outside privy until after the Second World War.

On the morning of the day she died, Woolf dusted the house with her “liver out,” who treated her more like “an employer” than Nellie ever had. One wonders, as one wonders after every suicide, whether at that last moment, an intimacy, even an ambivalent intimacy, could have saved her.

Virginia and Leonard frequently used the word housemaid as an insult. “What a housemaid[’]s mind he has,” Woolf said of Edward Sackville-West, the cousin of her lover, Vita Sackville-West. She found the noise of servants in the house agitating, with their “talk talk talk.” She noted the bad teeth of the poor. Yet, the worst passage of class ugliness is this sober opinion, drenched with pity:

The poor have no … manner or self-control to protect themselves with; we have a monopoly of all the generous feelings.
But though Woolf had described Nellie as a “mongrel,” a “poor drudge,” and a “domestic tyrant,” when the BBC interviewed Boxall in 1956, she recalled making ice cream with chocolate sauce and crème brulée. “All was harmony in the kitchen (except that Mrs. Woolf, being a lady, always used up all the saucepans when she tried to cook).” Nellie said Woolf was “always very nice” to her relatives. And “I had to go to hospital and she was very kind. She came to see me in the ward carrying a huge pineapple.


“I was sorry to leave, but I wasn’t out of a job for long,” Nellie said.

Woolf’s most productive years, Light observes, coincided with the years when Nellie Boxall was the writer’s “liver in”: She wrote her great novels—Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, The Waves. She published myriad reviews and essays, including A Room of One’s Own and the literary criticism that she collected in The Common Reader. “She became wealthy for the first time in her life; she began her love affair with Sackville-West; her marriage to Leonard still delighted and invigorated her,” Light avers.

The idea of independence was central to this life But these were also years when … it was Nellie who drew the curtains, brought the lemonade and the trays, who tempted Virginia’s appetite with invalid foods, and presumably emptied the chamber-pot which continued to reside under the bed.
Light’s original ambition—to discover the inner lives of women like her grandmother—was destined to fail, because the Nellies of the world, including her immigrant descendants in America, don’t write memoirs. They’re too busy working their way out of poverty into the middle class. Their children and grandchildren—like Light, like most of us—will, because of our gratitude and guilt, forever want to know how they felt. The best window yet is fiction—think of Stendhal’s Julien Sorel’s resentment of and infatuation for his betters, think of Flaubert’s A Simple Heart, think of the German tutor in War and Peace who records every dish of the banquet to describe in his letter home.


Although writing about characters of another class is exceedingly hard (as difficult as crossing boundaries of gender and race), that doesn’t explain why Woolf didn’t write a book about servants—when the subject forms a leitmotif in her journals and letters. A clue may be found in one instance when she did manage to write about Nellie outside her diaries and letters.

In a famous passage Light cites, Woolf flatly asserted, “On or about December, 1910, human character changed.” The change could be observed, she argued, “in the character of one’s cook … The Victorian cook lived like a leviathan in the lower depths,” but the “Georgian cook” was “a creature of sunshine and fresh air; in and out of the drawing-room, now to borrow the Daily Herald, now to ask advice about a hat.”

One can imagine the pleasure Woolf took in writing those lines (she once described the diversions she forfeited for her writing: “I’ve shirked two parties, and another Frenchman, and buying a hat”), and no doubt scenes like the one above in the drawing room did transpire between the two women; yet the happy frivolity of exchanging millinery opinions hardly characterizes Nellie’s true position in the Woolf house. Nellie was an employee, taking orders and emptying chamber pots. Part of the difficulty of the job must have been the emotional component that required her to act the part of an equal—a daughter or a friend—while bringing Woolf food on a tray and washing her chemises.


Perhaps Woolf encountered a blind spot writing about the servants because she was too invested in believing a version of her own life, in which the household rhythm and taste and temper she required was best not only for her and for the work she hoped would become literature, but also for the person who made that rhythm and temper (and those great meals). What Nellie gave Woolf, what Vera (who typed her husband’s manuscripts and sat in on his Cornell lectures, in addition to doing most of what Nellie did) gave Nabokov, what numberless wives have given great men and what artist’s colonies have given artists since the turn of the 19th century is routine maternal care. That elixir allows artists—famously prone to “nerves”—to work. But unlike Nabokov and the young composer who is a guest at Yaddo, Woolf had to pay Nellie. And therein lies the problem. That seemed to her a little bit sordid. None of us wants to pay for love.

Orwell, observing the coal miners, presented a picture very different from that of Woolf working alongside Nellie or the char. Orwell’s relation to coal production remained abstract, whereas Woolf would see her own dinner cooked, her underwear scrubbed, and her chamber pot from the night before emptied and washed. Domestic work has always put the people doing the work and the ones benefiting from it in a deeply intimate and unequal relationship. Woolf needed to hire a woman in order to write. None of us, least of all a woman given to inward examination, wishes to think that the emotional conditions necessary for her to do the work she loves involve some form of oppression. These messy feelings of guilt and dependence may have been Woolf’s obstacle in depicting Nellie. Light’s book proves one thing that could not have been the problem: it wasn’t that Woolf didn’t love her enough.

Mrs. Woolf and the ServantsALISON LIGHT, BLOOMSBURY



不完美的结合
一本出色的新书探究了弗吉尼亚-伍尔夫和照顾她的女人之间亲密而不平等的关系。

作者：莫娜-辛普森
2009年1月/2月号
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如果我在读这个，"弗吉尼亚-伍尔夫1929年的日记中写道。

如果它是一本以我的方式出版的书，我想我应该贪婪地抓住内莉的肖像，并编写一个故事--也许让整个故事围绕着......她的性格--我们摆脱她的努力--我们的和解来进行。
"Nelly "是Nellie Boxall，伍尔夫的厨师，长达18年。

"按理说，"伍尔夫写道，洛蒂--那个客厅女佣--"应该有一整章属于自己"。但正如我们所知，伍尔夫的伟大的仆人小说并不存在。文学史家艾莉森-莱特（Alison Light）在她深入浅出的《伍尔夫夫人和仆人》一书中提出。An Intimate History of Domestic Life in Bloomsbury》一书中指出，尽管她尝试过，但伍尔夫从来没有写过穷人。莱特认为，这也许是因为她对贫民窟的 "魅力 "保持警惕。伍尔夫批评了维多利亚时代的 "穷人 "伊迪丝-西谢尔（Edith Sichel）的作品，因为她的描述避免提及 "交媾或w.c's"。


伍尔夫自己对交媾也不屑一顾，我不记得她的作品中有哪怕一个WC。在一个有七个仆人的房子里长大，他们住在伍尔夫所说的地下室或阁楼的 "黑暗的不卫生的地方"，作家明白她对穷人的了解很少。但她确实在她的信件和日记中写到了她的仆人。有一段时间，弗吉尼亚和她的妹妹凡妮莎-贝尔 "每天都在互相写关于仆人的事情"。

为什么这些事情没有被写进她的小说？

光在她的序言中告诉了我们两个有共鸣的事实。她自己的祖母曾是一个住家的仆人，在她的父母去世后，她被送进了一个救济院。她说她被其他妇女 "视如粪土"；16岁时，她的头发因崩溃而变白。莱特还告诉我们，她自己对这本书的材料的感觉在她丈夫去世前照顾他之后发生了变化。"这是我第一次经历照顾别人的每一个需要，因为我不是一个母亲"。我认为这意味着照顾别人并不总是一种堕落的经历，而且依赖性，即使在极端情况下，也能为伟大的温情行为提供机会。光告诉我们。

我想写这本书，以了解我与我成长过程中的 "阶级意识 "有关的一些感受......那些混乱的、痛苦的、亲密的、破坏性的自卑、嫉妒、敬畏和好斗的感受。
在她试图记录未被记录的仆人生活的同时，另一个潜移默化的动作是跟随莱特对依赖性本质的理解的发展，从她的第一个位置--一个被 "视如粪土 "的女人的孙女--到她作为护理她垂死丈夫的妻子的角色。莱特曾希望以一种 "超越他们的雇主 "的方式呈现仆人的生活，但这并不可能，因为仆人们对他们自己故事的版本并不存在。在她的研究中，她遇到了诱人的险情。一位布鲁姆斯伯里的家庭教师留下了一本写了一半的小说，讲述了她在贝尔家的日子（瓦妮莎发现这些文字很 "苦"），但这份文件没有保存下来。由于无法用仆人们自己的语言来讲述故事，莱特通过他们工作的人留下的记录来了解他们的生活。莱特写道："仆人在过去的官方历史中可能只留下残缺的痕迹，""但他们在雇主的想象中总是很重要"。

好吧，就伍尔夫的母亲而言，并非如此。朱莉娅-斯蒂芬以平静的效率在她的家里走动，监督仆人们，无论如何，他们都爱她。人们并不觉得仆人们在她的想象中占据了很大的位置。她对拥有他们的想法感到很平静。伍尔夫与仆人--她的照顾者--的关系总是更加核心，因此也更加充满矛盾。伍尔夫在她父亲去世后第一次试图自杀，当时她22岁，在她结婚的头几年，她一直处于崩溃或恢复的状态。困扰她早期生活的症状--头痛、失眠、抑郁、焦虑、内疚和对食物的厌恶--又回来了。(有几本书是关于她的厌食症的。)她在情绪激动的情况下无法进食，使食物和为她准备食物的人成为最重要的问题。瓦妮莎告诉新婚的伦纳德，"当弗吉尼亚得到帮助时，她吃得有多好"，姐妹俩小时候的厨师苏菲-法雷尔被召回来做短暂停留。

虽然《光之书》讲述了几个布鲁姆斯伯里仆人的生活，并追溯了从维多利亚时代到战后对家政服务的供需变化，但中心故事记录了弗吉尼亚-伍尔夫与内莉-博克索尔的动荡关系。博克索尔是在1916年作为住家佣人来的。莱特想象，伍尔夫当时一定是一个比她大10岁的 "脆弱的女人"，"穿着一件旧的睡衣撑在沙发上"。和她的新雇主一样，博克索尔在年轻时就失去了母亲（她14岁开始工作，就在她母亲去世后两年），也患有 "神经病"。

弗吉尼亚和她的妹妹都不知道如何做饭。尽管这对天才女儿与她们的维多利亚时代的母亲不同，她们也发现自己对仆人的依赖，但却不那么令人高兴。而且，虽然瓦妮莎可以在波希米亚家庭生活的杂乱中工作，但弗吉尼亚需要她的舒适，特别是精心准备的食物，以便写作。伍尔夫的家庭 "围绕着使她有可能写作的例行程序"，莱特告诉我们。"定时吃饭，午饭后休息，没有太多的访客，没有深夜"。

博克索尔与伍尔夫夫妇一起生活了18年；其中一半以上的时间，她是房子里唯一的仆人。阅读他们的传奇故事，人们有一种婚姻的感觉。正如人们所预料的那样，对于两个如此相似的人来说，这是一个充满生气、责备、哭泣、祈求的过程，在弗吉尼亚的日记中也有好几页的分析，其中的争吵将他们的亲密关系戏剧化。

这是......那些令人震惊的时刻之一，那些痛苦、可笑、激动的时刻，让人半身不遂......我也很兴奋；感到自由，然后又感到肮脏；不安宁；等等，我让耐莉离开；在一系列的场景之后......在通常的愤怒中，我看着她那双小小的、变换不定的贪婪的眼睛，只看到恶意和怨恨，她并不关心我。
虽然仆人们可能在伍尔夫母亲的想象中的某个地方徘徊，或者至少在她的待办事项清单上徘徊，但很难想象朱莉娅-斯蒂芬，或者她化身为拉姆塞夫人或达洛维夫人，如此朴素地希望得到一个刚被解雇的厨师的喜欢。

伍尔芙夫人和仆人们ALISON LIGHT，BLOOMSBURY
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在 "一系列场景 "之后，内莉骑自行车走了四英里，为伍尔夫家的晚餐买了奶油；当内莉不愿意做橘子酱时，两人吵了起来。内莉为弗吉尼亚准备了洗澡水，并把食物和牛奶放在一个托盘上给她送去。在弗吉尼亚36岁生日的时候，她亲手编织了一双红袜子，作家显然很喜欢在早晨穿上它。内莉听着留声机跳狐步舞。弗吉尼亚让她和名厨马塞尔-布利斯坦（Marcel Boulestin）一起上课（他们之间的许多和睦关系都涉及到食物）。1924年，内莉 "第165次 "发出通知。她将为伍尔夫夫妇再工作10年。

像大多数激烈的关系一样，伍尔夫与内莉的关系混合了愤怒和仁慈，宽恕和怨恨。伍尔夫夫妇把内莉 "借 "给了瓦内萨。当内莉用七磅手工采摘的黑莓制作果酱时（与她以前拒绝制作橘子酱的做法相反），伍尔夫认为这是 "她感谢我拥有洛蒂的方式--毕竟她没有别的人。而人往往会忘记这一点"。在她的日记中，伍尔夫将内莉描述为 "几乎令人难以忍受的刻薄、自私和唾弃......一个没有穿衣服的人类思想"。但在给伦纳德的信的后记中，她写道："爱奈莉"。她用内莉的名字给小猫博克索尔命名--"为了讨好她"。

内莉的大部分抱怨似乎都是关于工作太多。她想再找一个帮手。在弗吉尼亚这边，他们永恒的斗争是一场伤害感情的雪崩。这不是人们之间形成的不完美的持久纽带的故事是什么？还是一个女人利用另一个女人的故事，因为她可以？这种区别困扰着莱特，并在她的书中产生了矛盾的势头。伍尔芙夫妇痴迷于 "奈莉的问题"。莱特无休止地担心弗吉尼亚-伍尔夫的问题，她留下了美丽的作品，但需要一个仆人的帮助才能保持足够的理智来做这些工作。

伍尔夫在1928年出版了《奥兰多》，取得了经济上的成功。但随着他们生活水平的提高，伍尔夫夫妇开始怀疑他们是否需要保留内莉。

我在自己的内心深处肮脏地辩论着......这个常年的问题......。荒唐的是，L和我浪费了多少时间来讨论仆人的问题。
伍尔夫认为她想要一个 "每日"，一个 "肝胆相照 "的人，他会把她 "当作雇主，而不是朋友"。1929年夏天，伍尔夫尝试着做晚餐。她在给维塔-萨克维尔-韦斯特的信中说她 "永远摆脱了厨师。我今天做了小牛排和蛋糕。我向你保证，这比写这些愚蠢的书要好"。

正如莱特所观察到的，伍尔夫很乐意做饭，但显然不愿意打扫。

在极少数情况下，当弗吉尼亚发现自己在洗碗时，她对这种努力感到惊讶。"我一直在洗午餐，如果那是他们生命中十分之九的时间，仆人们是如何保持理智或清醒的--油腻的火腿，上帝知道。
1929年，伍尔夫出版了《一个人的房间》之后，在他们的另一个 "场景 "中，内莉要求伍尔夫离开她的房间。"弗吉尼亚决定第二天解雇她，但伍尔夫夫妇再次妥协，雇佣了一个慈善家来做更多的粗活（清洁厕所）。

莱特试图理解围绕服务的传染性羞耻感，这促使她强调拖把、夜壶，以及在安装现代管道之前清理人类排泄物的工作。根据莱特的说法，伍尔夫的父亲莱斯利-斯蒂芬认为美国的水暖系统是奢侈的，而且有轻微的腐蚀作用（人们想知道他认为谁会被腐蚀？ 仆人？），他宁愿雇用一个拖把，把室内的盆子倒进水柜，清洗盆子。这种对现代管道系统的抵触，原来是遗传的。在伍尔夫夫妇结婚前不久，经过权衡，弗吉尼亚决定在他们的乡间别墅里使用土壁橱--这将由一个年长的工人来清理--而不是为厕所安装下水道。

这一定让仆人们非常沮丧，在他们看来，斯蒂芬夫妇和伍尔夫夫妇都很富有。这些人为什么不为新的、卫生的管道系统付钱呢？但在内莉为他们工作的大部分时间里，伍尔夫夫妇并不富裕。他们拒绝雇用她想要的帮手，无疑与钱有关。(艺术界的中上层阶级一直存在的问题：在他们的仆人眼里，他们很富有，但他们还是在为生计而奔波）。

1930年，当内莉生病时，伍尔夫把她带到了医院，正如莱特所说，"由于要应付医生、计划和做晚饭，"她失去了两周的写作时间。(当内莉回家时，她收到了一封解雇信，声称自从 "去年11月的著名一幕"（当时内莉坚持认为在伍尔夫的房子里，她有一个自己的房间--要求伍尔夫离开）以来，两个女人之间的关系已经改变了。） 伍尔夫在她的日记中记录了他们长达数小时的谈话的部分内容。

我还是不明白为什么你不愿意让我回来......。

但是，耐莉，在过去的6年里，你给了我10次通知，甚至更多......。

但我总是把它收回。

是的，但这种事情让人感到紧张。

哦，夫人，我从来没有想过要让你感到疲倦--如果它让你感到疲倦，现在就不要继续说了--但是你不会给我任何帮助。现在格蕾丝有她想要的一切帮助--好吧，我说，这是长期服务。

但是，耐莉你忘了，当你和我们在一起时。

但是，三年来我一直在生病。我将永远不会像喜欢你一样喜欢任何女主人。
内莉将继续为伍尔夫家工作三年。人们可能会想，她留下来的主要原因是否真的如她所说，是喜欢她的女主人。事实上，按照她那个时代的标准，内莉的工作是一份好工作，正如莱特所观察到的。她没有穿制服。(在克莱夫-贝尔的家里，女仆们穿着黑色的羊驼衫，戴着白色的帽子，围着围裙，一直到1930年代还在为晚餐服务）。内莉称弗吉尼亚为 "伍尔夫夫人"，而不是 "夫人"。家里的人都懒得穿衣服吃饭，饭菜也不 "上桌"。桌子上的亚麻布也不用熨烫。有一次，内莉和她的女主人甚至在水管结冰时一起清空浴缸。

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最后，在1934年，在又一次 "伟大的耐莉之争 "之后，伍尔夫决定真的是时候解雇这个仆人了。她对自己的决定感到非常痛苦，以至于不得不停止创作她的小说。然后，在 "我一生中最不愉快的六个星期 "之后，她解雇了仆人，感觉 "刽子手和被害者合二为一"。在日记中我们对内莉的最后一瞥中，她站在 "客厅的门边，光线充足，白色和粉红色，带着她那张有趣而愚蠢的闷骚脸"。

她不接受弗吉尼亚的支票，说："但你不欠我什么"。

几个月后，弗吉尼亚在她的日记中写下了关于内莉的最后一句话。"18年后，我终于摆脱了一个多情的家庭暴君"。在她的日记或信件中，她没有再提到内莉（或 "内莉"，因为伍尔夫把她的名字拼错了，差不多有二十年了）。在他们共同生活了18年之后，这种沉默比任何仇恨的闪现都更令人震惊。

但内莉却茁壮成长。她在查尔斯-劳顿和艾尔莎-兰彻斯特那里找到了一份工作，他们是当时英国最著名的舞台夫妇，刚从好莱坞回来。这些电影明星比文学界的伍尔夫夫妇要富有得多，在那里与内莉一起工作的女佣Happy Powley记得，"迪特里希把脏盘子拿出来放在楼道的一个柜子里。"


内莉也有自己的成名时刻：她出现在一个瓷釉燃气灶的广告中，标题是 "查尔斯-劳顿夫妇的厨师告诉你如何将牛肉烤得完美"。

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1939年，当洛顿夫妇去美国时，他们邀请她一起去，但她回到了她长大的萨里，并与洛蒂重新生活在一起。二战期间，内莉在一家医院食堂担任厨师。洛蒂在当地的洗衣店工作。20世纪50年代，内莉买了一栋房子；洛顿夫妇给了她家具。"莱特告诉我们："这个10口之家的女孩有了自己的房子。内莉是 "第一个扩建的人，第一个装上浴室和室内厕所的人，第一个有电视的人......洛蒂负责所有的清洁工作；内莉负责做饭。"

内莉于1965年去世，没有留下遗嘱。(虽然洛蒂一无所有，但博克索尔家族允许内莉的长期朋友留下来。但莱特告诉我们，如果没有内莉，洛蒂就会崩溃，并搬到一个曾经是工作场所的公共住所。） 从所有的外在迹象来看，内莉能够摆脱她为弗吉尼亚-伍尔芙清洗室内锅具的历史。即使在她自己身上，她也没有再打扫过房子。

我们都知道，弗吉尼亚的情况没有那么好。




在他们解雇内莉之后，伍尔夫夫妇主要雇用 "肝脏"。在整个30年代，他们的收入增加了，从同花顺获得的利润买了一个 "新池塘，重新铺设了旧池塘，并铺设了前花园"。这对夫妇为弗吉尼亚建造了一个夏季工作室。增加了新的壁炉，屋顶下的一个荷叶边房间成了图书馆。

尽管进行了所有这些乐观的翻新，伦纳德的园丁和他们的 "肝脏 "所住的小屋，每个人都有配偶和孩子，仍然很潮湿，"没有热水、浴室或水柜"。对于四个成年人和五个孩子来说，他们只有一个外面的厕所，直到第二次世界大战之后。

在她去世的那天早上，伍尔夫和她的 "肝脏 "一起为房子除尘，后者对待她的态度比内莉更像 "雇主"。人们不禁要问，就像人们在每次自杀后都要问一样，在那最后一刻，一种亲密关系，甚至是一种矛盾的亲密关系，是否能拯救她。

弗吉尼亚和伦纳德经常把女佣这个词作为一种侮辱。伍尔夫在谈到她的情人维塔-萨克维尔-韦斯特的表弟爱德华-萨克维尔-韦斯特时说："他的思想真是个女佣[']，"。她发现房子里的仆人们的噪音让人烦躁，他们 "谈天说地"。她注意到穷人的牙齿不好。然而，关于阶级丑恶的最糟糕的一段话是这个清醒的观点，浸透着怜悯。

穷人没有......方式和自制力来保护自己；我们垄断了所有的慷慨情感。
但是，尽管伍尔夫将内莉描述为一个 "杂种"、一个 "可怜的苦工 "和一个 "家庭暴君"，当英国广播公司在1956年采访博克索尔时，她回忆起用巧克力酱和奶油做的冰淇淋。"厨房里一切都很和谐（除了伍尔夫夫人是位女士，她想做饭时总是用完所有的锅）"。内莉说伍尔夫对她的亲戚 "总是非常好"。而且 "我不得不去医院，她对我非常好。她抱着一个巨大的菠萝来病房看我。


"内莉说："我很遗憾离开，但我并没有失去工作很久。

莱特观察到，伍尔夫最富有成效的几年，恰好是内莉-博克索尔成为作家的 "肝脏 "的那几年。她写了她伟大的小说--《达洛维夫人》、《到灯塔去》、《海浪》。她发表了无数的评论和文章，包括《一个人的房间》和她收集在《普通读者》中的文学批评。"她一生中第一次变得富有；她开始了与萨克维尔-韦斯特的爱情；她与伦纳德的婚姻仍然使她感到高兴和振奋，"莱特说。

独立的想法是这种生活的核心，但这些年也是......是内莉拉上窗帘，端来柠檬水和托盘，用无效的食物来诱惑弗吉尼亚的胃口，而且估计是清空了继续在床下居住的夜壶。
莱特最初的野心--发现像她祖母一样的女性的内心世界--注定要失败，因为世界上的内利人，包括她在美国的移民后代，都不写回忆录。他们忙于摆脱贫困进入中产阶级的工作。他们的孩子和孙子像莱特一样，像我们大多数人一样，因为我们的感激和愧疚，永远想知道他们的感受。最好的窗口是小说--想想司汤达的朱利安-索莱尔对他的贵族的怨恨和迷恋，想想福楼拜的《一颗简单的心》，想想《战争与和平》中的德国家庭教师，他记录了宴会上的每一道菜，在他的家信中描述。


虽然写另一个阶层的人物是非常困难的（就像跨越性别和种族的界限一样困难），但这并不能解释为什么伍尔夫没有写一本关于仆人的书--当这个主题在她的日记和信件中形成一个主旋律。一个线索可以从她在日记和信件之外设法写到内莉的一个例子中找到。

在莱特引用的一个著名段落中，伍尔夫断言："在1910年12月左右，人类的性格发生了变化"。她认为，这种变化可以从 "一个人的厨子的性格中观察到......维多利亚时代的厨子就像生活在深渊中的利维坦"，但 "乔治亚时代的厨子 "是 "阳光和新鲜空气的生物；进出客厅，现在是为了借《每日先驱报》，现在是为了询问关于帽子的建议。"

可以想象，伍尔夫在写这些句子时有多高兴（她曾经描述过她为了写作而放弃的消遣。"我推掉了两个聚会，还有一个法国人，以及买了一顶帽子"），毫无疑问，像上述客厅里的场景确实发生在这两个女人之间；然而，交换制帽意见的快乐轻浮并不能代表内莉在伍尔夫家的真实地位。内莉是一名雇员，负责接单和清空房间的水壶。这份工作的部分难度在于要求她扮演一个平等的角色--女儿或朋友--同时用托盘给伍尔芙送食物，给她洗衣服。


也许伍尔夫在写仆人时遇到了一个盲点，因为她过于相信自己生活的版本，在这个版本中，她所要求的家庭节奏、品味和脾气不仅对她和她希望成为文学的作品来说是最好的，而且对创造这种节奏和脾气（以及那些美味佳肴）的人来说也是如此。内莉给了伍尔夫什么，薇拉（除了做内莉所做的大部分工作外，还为她丈夫的手稿打字并旁听他在康奈尔大学的讲座）给了纳博科夫什么，无数的妻子给了伟人什么，自19世纪初以来艺术家殖民地给了艺术家什么，都是例行的母性关怀。这种灵丹妙药使艺术家--通常容易 "神经质"--能够工作。但与纳博科夫和在亚多做客的年轻作曲家不同，伍尔夫必须向内莉付钱。而问题就在这里。这对她来说似乎有点肮脏。我们没有人愿意为爱付费。

奥威尔在观察煤矿工人时，呈现出的画面与伍尔夫与内莉或慈善家一起工作的画面非常不同。奥威尔与煤炭生产的关系仍然是抽象的，而伍尔夫会看到她自己做的晚餐，她的内衣被擦洗，她前一天晚上的锅被清空和洗净。家务劳动总是将从事劳动的人和从中受益的人置于一种非常亲密和不平等的关系中。伍尔夫为了写作，需要雇佣一个女人。我们中没有一个人，尤其是一个喜欢内省的女人，希望认为她从事自己喜欢的工作所必需的情感条件涉及某种形式的压迫。这些混乱的内疚和依赖的感觉可能是伍尔夫在描绘内莉时的障碍。莱特的书证明了一件事，这不可能是问题所在：不是伍尔夫不够爱她。

伍尔夫夫人和仆人》ALISON LIGHT, BLOOMSBURY