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| Virginia Woolf |
Where is "here"? It's the place where feminist thought happens. Or gets interrupted. Or happens through interruption.It's a fictional place (Oxbridge) governed by a real law (no women in the university library). It lies at a threshold, between the open air and the protected space of the library, of the literary tradition itself. And here is where I hesitate to decide between meaning and style.
Such hesitations in Woolf's essay have sometimes dismayed her readers. She seems to defer indefinitely a more decisive response as to the place of women in society, or in literature--as if she's aloof, or merely at play on serious ground. What could style, after all, have to do with the meaning of a long history of injustice and oppression? And isn't it merely perverse to say that when it comes to gender, "fiction here is likely to contain more truth than fact"? (4, my emphasis).
We might begin by noticing, in response to such questions, how close Woolf comes, almost fifty years before The History of Sexuality, to Foucault's central insight: "At any rate, when a subject is highly controversial--and any question about sex is that--one cannot hope to tell the truth" (4). At a time that Foucault identifies as the apex of our modern desire to tell the truth about sex, Woolf demurs. Instead of drawing conclusions, she draws pictures (see 31). One question about her essay, then, is why fiction seems to her an appropriate mode for taking up the question of sex: how does the style of Room affect its meaning? (There's no single best answer to this question, of course; it is better asked of particular sentences and paragraphs than of the book as a whole).
Woolf's life
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| Woolf's bedroom at Monk House, in rural Sussex, where she spent most of her summers and holidays beginning in 1919. |
Yet also on its margins: unlike their brothers Thoby and Adrian, Virginia and her sister Vanessa weren't sent to prestigious private schools (Clifton College for Thoby, the Westminster School for Adrian) or to Cambridge for a university education. They studied at home with tutors, and while their father encouraged their intellectual development, when his literary friends came to visit, it was Virginia and Vanessa's job to serve the tea. After their mother's death, when Virginia was thirteen, the two sisters felt increasingly alienated from their father.
Yet the Stephen sisters' relationship with their brothers was less vexed by conventional gender roles. Thoby introduced Virginia and Vanessa into the circle of friends he made at Cambridge, a circle that Woolf and her sister remained a part of after Thoby's early death in 1906. This rather extraordinary circle included Roger Fry, the most important art critic of his generation in England, the painter and art critic Clive Bell, who became Vanessa's husband, the biographer Lytton Strachey, and the economist John Meynard Keynes. With her husband, Leonard Woolf, Virginia founded the Hogarth Press. Among other important works, they published the first English translations of Freud.
Woolf and psychoanalysis
Woolf isn't narrowly Freudian, but she's deeply and often amusingly aware of psychoanalysis by the time she writes A Room of One's Own (1929). Leonard Woolf had written reviews of Freud's early works, and James Strachey, the brother of Woolf's friend Lytton, was a psychoanalyst and, with his wife Alix, the primary translator of Freud's works (including our edition of Three Essays) into English. Woolf's youngest brother Adrian and his wife also became psychoanalysts, and in 1926 they hosted the first London lectures of Melanie Klein, founder of the "object-relations" school of psychoanalysis. (Woolf met Freud only near the end of both their lives, in 1939 when he fled the Nazis and settled in London.)
The opening scene of To the Lighthouse (1927), a semi-autobiographical novel that Woolf had completed shortly before she began work on Room, is to some extent a manifestly Oedipal one: a mother, Mrs. Ramsay, reads to her young boy, James; he feels at once exhilarated and protected by her closeness, and becomes enraged when his overbearing father interrupts them. His image for the father's intrusion is a phallic "beak of brass" (cf. Room 26).
Yet To the Lighthouse is also an attempt to take a critical distance from this oedipal family structure, which Woolf had experienced primarily as a trauma in her own life. The novel is divided into three sections: a first section focuses on a dinner-party given by the family; in the second, the mother's death coincides with the first World War (Woolf's mother had of course died long before that); in the third, the narrative is focalized primarily through an aspiring painter, Lily Briscoe, who feels alienated by 19th-century norms of gender and sexuality. Her affections for others aren't clearly sexual at all, but they flow most powerfully toward Mrs. Ramsay. It's through her eyes that we look back at the Ramsays in the novel's final section.
Keep an eye out, then, for "Freudian" moments in Room, and think carefully about their content and tone (you might discuss these in your comments).
While there's of course no causal connection between Lacan or Foucault and Woolf, we'll see some startling resonances in her text with their thinking as well: you might consider Woolf's use of the mirror as a trope in these early chapters in relation to "The Mirror Stage," and her trip to the library (ch. 1) and to the British Museum (ch. 2) in light of Foucault's ideas about sexuality as discourse.
Women & the Great War: a new "structure of feeling"
Like To the Lighthouse, A Room of One's Own will see World War I as marking a turning point in the relations of men to women. There are of course some very concrete ways in which this is true: the massive number of men drafted into the army created job openings for women in areas traditionally closed off to them. The appalling death toll of the war--about 1 million men in Britain; 4% of the male population and a much higher proportion of young adult men--also gave women numerical superiority. The most important political result of these demographic and economic changes for women was the right to vote (1920 in the U.S.; in the U.K., 1919 for women 30 and over, 1928 for women 21 and over). Woolf speaks, too, of the feeling that the carnage of World War I was a moral failing, of catastrophic proportions, on the part of male leaders.
Yet her own interest in Room is in something harder to name, matter of tone or form or style rather than content. People say the same things after the war as they did before, she says, but they now say them in a different tone, with a different feeling. The hum of the voice has changed.
The Marxian literary critic Raymond Williams' concept of "structures of feeling" is helpful for thinking about this kind of change. Williams notes that historians, when they speak of the ideologies or world-views of a particular period, describe the past as already formed, as if attitudes and ideas that shape that are clearly important in retrospect were equally clear as they were being formed. Williams argues that the "experience of the present" is rarely altogether articulate, and thus can't be accounted for completely in terms of consciously held beliefs. We should pay attention, then, to
This gives us, perhaps, an approach to the idiosyncrasies of Woolf's essay, but it doesn't explain any one of them in particular. That's our job for the next two classes. You might consider for Friday (and comment upon below, if you wish) the following rather odd and wonderful details from these first two chapters:
*the Manx cat
*the many descriptions of food
*the professor who gallops if he hears a whistle
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| Trinity College, Cambridge. Both of Woolf's brothers attended. |
Woolf and psychoanalysis
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| Newnham College, Cambridge. One of two women's colleges on which Woolf's "Fernham" is based. |
The opening scene of To the Lighthouse (1927), a semi-autobiographical novel that Woolf had completed shortly before she began work on Room, is to some extent a manifestly Oedipal one: a mother, Mrs. Ramsay, reads to her young boy, James; he feels at once exhilarated and protected by her closeness, and becomes enraged when his overbearing father interrupts them. His image for the father's intrusion is a phallic "beak of brass" (cf. Room 26).
Yet To the Lighthouse is also an attempt to take a critical distance from this oedipal family structure, which Woolf had experienced primarily as a trauma in her own life. The novel is divided into three sections: a first section focuses on a dinner-party given by the family; in the second, the mother's death coincides with the first World War (Woolf's mother had of course died long before that); in the third, the narrative is focalized primarily through an aspiring painter, Lily Briscoe, who feels alienated by 19th-century norms of gender and sexuality. Her affections for others aren't clearly sexual at all, but they flow most powerfully toward Mrs. Ramsay. It's through her eyes that we look back at the Ramsays in the novel's final section.
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| The reading room at the British Museum: "the vast dome in which I was a single but by now somewhat harassed thought" (29) |
Keep an eye out, then, for "Freudian" moments in Room, and think carefully about their content and tone (you might discuss these in your comments).
While there's of course no causal connection between Lacan or Foucault and Woolf, we'll see some startling resonances in her text with their thinking as well: you might consider Woolf's use of the mirror as a trope in these early chapters in relation to "The Mirror Stage," and her trip to the library (ch. 1) and to the British Museum (ch. 2) in light of Foucault's ideas about sexuality as discourse.
Women & the Great War: a new "structure of feeling"
Like To the Lighthouse, A Room of One's Own will see World War I as marking a turning point in the relations of men to women. There are of course some very concrete ways in which this is true: the massive number of men drafted into the army created job openings for women in areas traditionally closed off to them. The appalling death toll of the war--about 1 million men in Britain; 4% of the male population and a much higher proportion of young adult men--also gave women numerical superiority. The most important political result of these demographic and economic changes for women was the right to vote (1920 in the U.S.; in the U.K., 1919 for women 30 and over, 1928 for women 21 and over). Woolf speaks, too, of the feeling that the carnage of World War I was a moral failing, of catastrophic proportions, on the part of male leaders.
Yet her own interest in Room is in something harder to name, matter of tone or form or style rather than content. People say the same things after the war as they did before, she says, but they now say them in a different tone, with a different feeling. The hum of the voice has changed.
The Marxian literary critic Raymond Williams' concept of "structures of feeling" is helpful for thinking about this kind of change. Williams notes that historians, when they speak of the ideologies or world-views of a particular period, describe the past as already formed, as if attitudes and ideas that shape that are clearly important in retrospect were equally clear as they were being formed. Williams argues that the "experience of the present" is rarely altogether articulate, and thus can't be accounted for completely in terms of consciously held beliefs. We should pay attention, then, to
characteristic elements of impulse, restraint, and tone; specifically affective elements of consciousness and relationships: not feeling against thought, but thought as felt and feeling as thought: practical consciousness of a present kind, in a living and interrelating continuity. (Marxism and Literature, 132)Williams sees these affective experiences--think of Woolf's laughter, anger, distaste for prunes, and the particular circumstances in which these occur--as signs of "social experience in solution," in process, not yet "precipitated" into fully articulate forms. It's all the more important to attend to them as social experiences because we don't usually think of them as such: they are "not yet recognized as social but taken to be private, idiosyncratic, and even isolating" (132).
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| "It is a queer animal, quaint rather than beautiful. It is strange what a difference a tail makes" (13). |
*the Manx cat
*the many descriptions of food
*the professor who gallops if he hears a whistle
It is extremely possible that I’ve been reading too much Freud; however, one of Woolf’s diversions from her description of the luncheon party called to mind the castration complex discussed briefly in The Oedipus Complex. Woolf (or her fictional counterpart) suddenly bursts into laughter at a cat that she sees through the window. She describes the cat as an “absurd, poor beast, without a tail, in the middle of the lawn. Was he really born so, or had he lost his tail in an accident?” (13) If this observation (and its being noticed incongruously) served the sole purpose of a distraction, Woolf could have noticed a bird – or even a tailed cat. I didn’t take time to analyze this image the first time I read A Room of One’s Own, but it did catch my attention because it seemed out of place in a discourse on the importance of an income and a private room for successful writing.
ReplyDeleteIn light of Woolf’s familiarity with Freud, the “queer animal, quaint rather than beautiful” serving as a symbol for women authors, and possibly women in general, does not seem too radical an inference to make (13). I think that, if intentional, this symbol is employed brilliantly; it is subtle, but apparent enough to strike the reader as odd. The cat is only discussed briefly and is then brushed aside as the more everyday issue of gathering one’s belongings takes precedence over noticing the exotic rarity. In doing so, Woolf seems to highlight the prevalent attitude surrounding women with opinions; they were interesting, but their thoughts were only of trifling significance. After all, “It is strange what a difference a tail makes”. (13)
When I first started reading A Room of One's Own, I had some trouble trying to figure out who exactly the speaker was--I knew that it was an essay, so I assumed that Woolf would be writing from the position of herself, but instead it seemed that she had created a fictional narrator in a fictional place--Oxbridge (which I found interesting, Woolf was born in London, and would have, of course, been aware of both Oxford and Cambridge, and it's kind of a combination of the two names). Instead of writing about women and fiction in a way that the audience would expect--mentioning famous female authors, and important literary characters--Woolf explores this topic in a narrative style. I think that this narrative style is important for the message that the essay is trying to communicate--a woman writing about women and fiction in a fictional manner. Through writing the essay in a narrative fashion, it also becomes easier (and, I think more enjoyable) to read. It was, however, difficult to figure out where exactly Woolf (or, I guess, the narrator) was going with her thoughts. As best as I could tell, the thesis of the essay is that women must have both money and room of their own in order to write fiction. Which brings us back to Oxbridge, where she cannot even enter the library without a man to accompany her (clearly, she doesn't have access to a room of her own). The narrator reflects upon the history of Oxbridge, and upon other things, and is continuously interrupted and distracted. Perhaps this is why having "a room of one's own" is so important--so that there won't be quite as many distractions? I am definitely interested to see where the rest of the book goes, I think that Woolf's way of telling the story is intriguing and, although I kind of have to keep reminding myself what is really being investigated, it is interesting to find the different symbols.
ReplyDeleteOverall I enjoyed the Virginia Woolf piece. Although I did not necessarily understand what was going on throughout the whole two chapters, I did greatly enjoy Woolf’s writing style. She uses many metaphors and different literary devices to enhance the quality of her writing. For example, one quote that I particularly liked was, “I must have opened it, for instantly there issued, like a guardian angel barring the way with a flutter of black gown instead of white wings, a deprecating, silvery, kindly gentleman, who regretted in a low voice as he waved me back that ladies are only admitted to the library…” (Woolf 8). In addition Woolf uses alliteration and states, “to ditch, to dig, and to drain” (Woolf 9). Overall she uses language like “gold and silver flowed” and fluttering red to the ground” (Woolf 8). The piece overall resembles light and airy language and in class I would like to go over what some of the metaphors and word choice means.
ReplyDeleteI was especially intrigued by Chapter 2 in this reading. Here, Woolf expresses the history of men who have written about women, even if "they have no apparent qualification save that they are not women" (27). Women really are the most "discussed animal in the universe" (26), and Woolf points out the numerous ways in which men attempt to understand the opposite sex. Men over the years could not seem to reach a consensus on what women were; some men valued them, others despised them, there were debates on whether women even had souls, etc. This confusion culminates with a very frustrated Woolf: "It was distressing, it was bewildering, it was humiliating. Truth had run through my fingers. Every drop had escaped" (30). This particular statement interested me. I can see how Woolf is frustrated; there's all this history with no definite conclusion to make of it. Woolf can sense the truth within the texts, but it finds no way of jumping out at her. Statements like this in the text make me look forward to finishing the rest of the book. What is the truth behind a man's "hatred" of women? Is it as simple as a Freudian theory of a wounded male ego (see page 31)? Are women (in man's eyes) merely the control group by which the men can judge their own growth and superiority? I look forward to discussing this further in class tomorrow.
ReplyDeleteIn the beginning of Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, she makes a statement which I find to be particularly interesting: “Fiction here is likely to contain more truth than fact.” This comes after having previously stated that “one cannot hope to tell the truth.” It seems that in being able to write fiction, one is allowed more freedoms of speech than allowed in daily life, simply because it seems to be removed from reality. But fiction is of course rooted in reality and humanity. She ponders throughout Room what women’s place in fiction really is (and as noted, remains particularly aloof). By remaining aloof, she doesn’t take one specific stand or state one specific truth. What I take from this is that women, like men, can make fiction whatever it means to them and use it however they need. Fiction is whatever you need it to be, whether it be an escape from reality—a chance to release yourself, your mind, your thoughts, your being, without the constraints of society—or to show and examine reality (i.e. a novel that might take place in real events, whether present or past). Both of which speak vivid truths, the former showing that truth cannot exist in reality, while the latter showing that truth is all around us, but remains to be unseen.
ReplyDeleteI also found it particularly interesting that Jane Austen was one of the first people she mentioned when asked to speak of women and fiction being, of course, a cliché model of a pioneer in women’s literature. She was the first person that came to my mind, which of course immediately made me think of a passage from one of her novels, Persuasion. Throughout her novels, Austen observes and criticizes gender in society/societal norms and how it is portrayed. In Persuasion, her main heroine is having a discussion with a male character about the nature of women and how they are portrayed in books. The dialogue went as such:
Anne Elliot: We [women] do not forget you [men] as soon as you forget us. We cannot help ourselves. We live at home, quiet, confined, and our feelings prey upon us. You always have business of some sort or other to take you back into the world.
Captain Harvile: I won't allow it to be any more man's nature than women's to be inconstant or to forget those they love or have loved. I believe the reverse. I believe... Let me just observe that all histories are against you, all stories, prose, and verse. I do not think I ever opened a book in my life which did not have something to say on women's fickleness.
Anne Elliot: But they were all written by men.
Woolf touches more on this topic in the second chapter of Room. It is something interesting to think of, how women are portrayed in literature by both men and women. Woolf herself seems to try to take a more neutral standpoint, although is not shy from stating how men have no qualification to write about women. It is important to note how women are portrayed in fiction by both men and women, given the differences society has portrayed gender. Here, Austen points out that men are lead to believe (by other men!) that women are fickle and forget men easily and cannot truly understand or feel love (perhaps because they are too weak?). Austen, however, points out that women have failed to be represented by their own sex, reflecting on her own position as a female writer of female fiction.
I enjoyed this reading. It was confusing at times but she has an interesting style of writing. I found her approach of looking at gender inequality interesting. She does not blame men or rant about how they degrade women. She sees that men can be victims too. I found it interesting that she looks at what men experience in society and how they are shaped.She tries to rise above looking at gender and look at thing objectively. She says people cannot be grouped together and blamed. Each individual is different.
ReplyDeleteSince she has money from her aunt she says she will lose hatred and bitterness. She cannot be hurt by men and they have nothing to give her. This confuses me. Is she saying that men have nothing to give her strictly financially? Is she also talking about in other ways? Maybe she also means men have nothing to give her because she is stable, confident, secure, happy.
Woolf's writing style is really interesting and engaging. Instead of outlining her points and giving straight examples, she conveys her ideas through metaphor and narrative. I found it especially interesting how she portrays the obstacles women face in the pursuit of knowledge and creativity in the beginning of chapter one. For example, she likens the first stirrings of an idea to a fish tugging on a fishing pole--a small fish, but one bursting with potential to grow with time. But before she can further think about her idea and let it grow, she is intercepted. She is a woman, not a scholar, and her idea has been lost. I seems like she's saying here that women have the potential and capacity for great ideas, but they are often not allowed or do not have the means to let them flourish.
ReplyDelete