Critical Summary: Leslie Hankins

Leslie Kathleen Hankins writes in her essay “A Splice of Reel Life in Virginia Woolf’s ‘Time Passes’: Censorship, Cinema and ‘the Usual Battlefield of Emotions’” of the role emotion has in the arts, explaining how Woolf believed emotion could not be separated from political issues because they are a primary trigger of emotional response. During a time when critics and peers often censored notions of political motivation in favor of pure aestheticism, Woolf saw a need to include these aspects as she believed emotional aesthetics encompassed all that which affected one’s emotional life, including the political issues (such as gender) that affected them. Hankins argues that Woolf sought to relate emotion through imagery, inspired partially by the emergence of the cinema in the early twentieth century. While Woolf was writing the “Time Passes” section of To the Lighthouse, she was also writing her essay “The Cinema,” and Hankins suggests that there is a clear correlation between the way in which emotion is expressed in moving images and the way Woolf uses imagery in this section of her novel. Hankins argues that Woolf perceived symbolism inherent in images such as those produced by the cinema, and that she was also influenced by the relationship between images and time in the cinema in her own use of time in “Time Passes.”