"It is curious how instinctively one protects the image of oneself from idolatry or any other handling that could make it ridiculous, or too unlike the original to be believed any longer"
About this Quote
Woolf catches a peculiarly modern panic: not the fear of being ignored, but the fear of being turned into an object. The line hinges on "instinctively" - a sly admission that self-protection happens before we can dress it up as principle. We don’t defend some stable, authentic core; we defend an image, a portable likeness that other people can pick up, misread, and circulate. That’s why "idolatry" sits beside "any other handling". Praise is not the opposite of distortion; it can be a more dangerous form of it. To be idolized is to be simplified, flattened into a symbol that no longer has to answer for the messier original.
The subtext is Woolf’s distrust of what social attention does to inner life. She was writing in a culture that loved public portraits - the Victorian habit of turning writers, especially, into moral statuary - and she lived through a new publicity machine: photographs, profiles, reputations that could outpace the work itself. Her point isn’t that the self is sacred; it’s that the self is fragile in the face of interpretation. Once the image becomes "ridiculous" or "too unlike the original", it stops being credible, and credibility is a kind of social oxygen. Without it, the person is either a joke or a myth.
It lands because it refuses the comforting binary of insult vs. compliment. Woolf diagnoses a quieter violence: being remade by other people’s devotion, until the remaking becomes unbelievable even to the one being remade.
The subtext is Woolf’s distrust of what social attention does to inner life. She was writing in a culture that loved public portraits - the Victorian habit of turning writers, especially, into moral statuary - and she lived through a new publicity machine: photographs, profiles, reputations that could outpace the work itself. Her point isn’t that the self is sacred; it’s that the self is fragile in the face of interpretation. Once the image becomes "ridiculous" or "too unlike the original", it stops being credible, and credibility is a kind of social oxygen. Without it, the person is either a joke or a myth.
It lands because it refuses the comforting binary of insult vs. compliment. Woolf diagnoses a quieter violence: being remade by other people’s devotion, until the remaking becomes unbelievable even to the one being remade.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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