Seeing With the Eye of God: Woolf, Fry and Strachey Anonymous

"When you're down on the lower levels of this pyramid, you will be either on one side or on the other. But when you get up to the top, the points all come together, and there the eye of God opens" (Campbell, 31). Joseph Campbell presents this description of the Masonic symbol of the pyramid, which is an appropriate analogy of a reoccurring goal in Bloomsbury artistic creation. This goal is a detached, disinterested artistic vision, one free of a personal bias that places a persons' vision on a side of the pyramid. This artistic integrity was highly valued in Bloomsbury creation. Virginia Woolf explores this phenomenon through gender in her essay A Room of One's Own, as well as through the art of Lily Briscoe in the novel To the Lighthouse. This vision is not limited to creation, but applies also to experiencing art, as presented by Roger Fry in "An Essay in Aesthetics." Likewise, Lytton Strachey, in his biography of Florence Nightingale in Eminent Victorians, exhibits the importance of detachment and a degree of objectivity when striving for a goal, by describing the aftermath that incurs when she has to overcompensate for the societal limitations of her gender.

"What one means by integrity,...