Bloomsbury and "Disinterestedness"

Paper Summary:

This paper discusses how the Bloomsbury group went to great lengths to employ the ideal of disinterestedness in their works, adopting it as a primary ideology for creative work, across all fields, from economic theory to literature and art. It looks at how the dedication to disinterestedness is responsible for the effectiveness of much of their creation and how it is present in many Bloomsbury group writings such as Virginia Woolf's "A Room of One's Own", "To The Lighthouse", and "The Leaning Tower", Roger Fry's "An Essay in Aesthetics", Lytton Strachey's "Eminent Victorians" and E. M. Forster's "Howards End".

From the Paper:

"Woolf presents this problem in To The Lighthouse, with Lily Briscoe's painting. She is always under the influence of the men around her. In the beginning of the book, she is unwilling to let a man see her painting, and when he does, she feels as though something was taken from her. In the same way, years later, she is affected by Mr. Ramsey: "She woke in the night trembling with rage and remembered some command of his; some insolence: 'Do this,' 'Do that,' his dominance: his 'Submit to me'" (170). Her resistance of Mr. Ramsey affected her creativity: "The sympathy she had not given him weighed her down. It made it difficult for her to paint" (170). Until she could finally overcome her self-consciousness of the judgment placed on her, she could not complete the painting. She was painting with interest in something other than beauty."

Sample of Sources Used:

• "Disinterest" <http://www.webref.org/sociology/n/norm_of_disinterestedness.htm> 01 Dec. 2003
• Forster, E. M. Howards End. Barnes & Noble, Inc., 1993.
• Fry, Roger. "An essay in Aesthetics." Vision and Design. London: Chatto and Windus, 1920.
• Himmelfarb, Gertrude. "A Genealogy of Morals: From Clapham to Bloomsbury." Marriage and Morals Among the Victorians. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986.
• Strachey, Lytton. Eminent Victorians. San Diego: Harcourt, Inc., 1918.

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