“I Always Destroy What I Love Most”:Julian Bell’s Romantic Failure

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to examine how Hong Ying and Susan Sellers sublimate Julian Bell’s spontaneous nature and what he destroy including people into artistic novels rather than biographies or memoirs in K: The Art of Love and Vanessa and Virginia. This research is significant for it serves as an example to show extended nature of Virginia Woolf studies. Through their imagination as authors, Hong Ying and Sellers have recycled Woolf to recreate or revive members of the Bloomsbury including her as vividly fictional characters. They keep a fictional gap or aesthetic distance and attempt ‘defamiliarization’ with their fictional characters in order to overcome the limits of biographies and memoirs. In Hong Ying’s case, she aligns a series of events in which Julian’s spontaneous nature continues to lead him to unfamiliar territories repeatedly. He initially leaves for China to evade his parents’ and the Bloomsbury’s influence. He falls in love with a Chinese woman named Lin, but cannot keep a monogamous relationship with her. He, then, escapes from a suicidal woman to the heart of the Chinese Revolution that is the beginning of his romantic failure. He is shocked by the bloody battlefield of the revolution and ironically decides to return to his initial point of romantic failure, Lin to deviate from the revolution. His immediate decision portrays his spontaneous nature and his act of returning to his initial romantic failure ruins his authenticity to the revolution. His repeated failure leads to another catastrophe that takes him to another revolution in the west. His continual pursuit of seeking his public self as an independent individual overcoming the influence of his parents’ generation drives him to destroy what he loves most including his precious life. Julian, who fails to surpass his parents’ reputation, is a paradigmatic romantic failure that assumes the burden and expectation of his parents’ generation. As he dies an untimely death, he has become a romantic failure and the greatest victim of the Bloomsbury at the same time.