Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediment...
—Shakespeare, Sonnet 116
A Room of One's Own, chs. 3-6
In the later chapters of Room, Woolf's fictionalized narrative somewhat gives way to a speculative (though also extraordinarily well-informed) history of women's literature in England.
It's stunning, at nearly a century's distance, to see how utterly our sense of literary history has changed, in part because so many of the projects that Woolf recommends to "some student at Newnham or Girton," England's most prominent women's colleges at the time, have been fulfilled by the generations of scholars who grew up reading her book. Chaucer is now often taught alongside the spiritual writings of Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich; the 17th-century canon includes the poetry of Katherine Phillips and Mary Wroth, as well as that of Anne Finch; from the 18th century onwards, a host of the women's novels that Woolf sees as forgotten and unavailable except for a pittance at obscure used book stalls are now back in print as Oxford, Penguin, or Broadview classics. Dorothy Osborne, whose letters Woolf so movingly invokes as testimony to a talented woman writer's inhibitions about (public, published) writing (62), is now counted as an important writer in the pages of the Norton Anthology of English Literature.
Yet this wealth of rediscovered literature hardly invalidates Woolf's sense that there are tremendous gaps and silences in the literary and historical record concerning women's experience, or her speculative account of the "impediments" (societal, cultural, psychological) responsible for these silences. Shakespeare's sister remains a fiction: no plausible female literary counterpart to the male poets of the Elizabethan age has been found buried in the archives (though Queen Elizabeth herself was probably the most brilliant European ruler of her age).
Anger and Literature: Woolf's account of how best, as an artist, to overcome these impediments has been controversial, though. Here, the theme of anger that we began discussing on Friday has been of central importance. One place where this theme comes to the fore is in Woolf's comparison of Austen to Charlotte Brontë (65-74). The laughter of Grace Poole, which Woolf describes as "upsetting," as a "jerk" marring the expression of Brontë's genius (68-9), was taken as the very emblem of the female literary tradition by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar (who introduces our edition of Room) in their landmark work of feminist literary criticism: its title, The Madwoman in the Attic, alludes to precisely this scene from Jane Eyre.
To what extent does Woolf's rejection of anger as a motive for literature seem right or interesting or useful to you? How might it, on the other hand, be limiting or unjust as a criterion by which to judge women's literature? Does it seem possible, on Woolf's terms, for a literary work to be a work of genius and also political--is there such a thing as political fiction on her terms?
(It might be interesting, in this context, to consider the example from Austen's Persuasion that Katie included in her comment to last week's post:
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.Should this count as angry on Woolf's terms? Is its manner of protest significantly different than the passage from Jane Eyre that Woolf criticizes?)
Captain Harville: 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.
Writing as a woman: We looked last week at Woolf's account of the male anger and bias underlying the many works about women that she came across at the British Library. One implication of this account, it seemed, might be that Woolf saw these men as blinded to the "truth" that men and women are equal. Nicole quite reasonably suggested that Woolf saw this equality as an objective fact. We might expect her to move towards an ideal of gender neutrality in the chapters that follow, then, to advocate a disregard of gender when it comes to judging the capabilities of men and women.
It might come as a surprise, then, to see her place so much emphasis, at first if not necessarily at last, on the difference between men and women. She praises Jane Austen and Emily Brontë over other great women writers, for example, because "they wrote as women write, not as men write" (74). Woolf avoids, I think, the sort of impoverished conceptual binarism that would make a distinction like this feel merely silly--she doesn't, that is to say, follow it by predicating women's writing as, say, "intuitive" rather than "rational," and so forth. Yet she does in these middle chapters of the essay develop this thought that there is a difference between the sexes, one that marks their styles of thought and expression. What do you take her to mean by this, then? What does it mean to "write as women write"? (I intend this question first of all as an invitation to further attentive reading of Room--that is, as an invitation to look out for later passages that help to flesh out how and why Woolf values some version of sexual difference, and not as a demand that we ponder this sentence about Austen and Emily Brontë out of context).
Androgyny: It may come as a further surprise, after this emphasis on the value of women writing "as women," that Woolf seems to complain in her final chapter that her own time is far too conscious of sex -- "The Suffrage campaign was no doubt to blame" (!; 98) -- and turns to a discussion of "androgyny" (97ff.) as a remedy, at least in the arts, for this condition.
 |
| Virginia Stephen (later Woolf), at left, with friends in 1910, disguised for the so-called "Dreadnought Hoax." Pretending to be a royal delegation from Abysinnia (now Ethiopia), the group asked to inspect a British warship. They were received with full diplomatic honors, much to the later embarrassment of the Royal Navy. |
How should we understand this turn in Woolf's argument? What are the important qualities of "androgynous" creativity and literature? Does she stumble here into self-contradiction, wishing to erase sexual difference after arguing for its value? Or is this a sort of dialectical synthesis of the earlier steps in her argument, a subsumption that contains and transforms (as opposed to simply abandoning or contradicting) the value of sexual difference?
We might also pose here the question of how sexuality (and not gender alone) figures in these late chapters of Woolf's essay. Freud, of course, describes the human mind as originally "bisexual," as containing the potential for both same-sex and opposite-sex attractions. It's not clear to what extent Woolf's idea of the androgynous mind has implications for the relation of sexuality and artistic creativity. On the one hand, the language of sex in these late chapters is what Freud might call sublimated, active on a metaphorical rather than a more literal and embodied register. Yet Woolf quietly--decorously? prudishly? prudently? humorously? -- evokes the place of same-sex eroticism in recent women's writing when she alludes to the trial for obscenity of Radclyffe Hall's Well of Loneliness (see page 80 and the endnotes), a novel about a woman's love for another woman. Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway (1925) includes a kiss between its title character and another woman, easily the most erotically charged moment in that book, and Woolf herself had been in a relationship during the 1920s with the writer Vita Sackville-West, which partly inspired Woolf's novel Orlando (1929) (and see 63 and endnotes). Her remarks about the importance of the sentence "Olivia liked Chloë" (82ff.), then, are at once suggestive and reticent about the sexual implications of a literature free of the presumptively heterosexual depiction of women. How should we hear this reticence, this suggestiveness?
One moment that I found particularly interesting in this reading was when Woolf commented on how men and women are portrayed in literature:
ReplyDelete"Suppose, for instance, that men were only represented in literature as the lovers of women, and were never the friends of men, soldiers, thinkers, dreamers. [...] Literature would be incredibly impoverished... beyond our counting the doors that have been shut upon women. Married against their will, kept in one room, and to one occupation, how could a dramatist give a full or interesting or truthful account of them?" (82).
Here, it seems that Woolf is suggesting a different kind of function that a "room of one's own" has. In this case, the room acts a holding cell; it's the kitchen or sitting-room where women are perceived to spend the majority of their time. Before the surge of female writers, the literary world didn't have access to how women behaved when men weren't around, and if such a moment did occur in literature, it was almost exclusively defined by how the women related to men. Through this perspective, Woolf suggests that the success of literature is the emergence of women out of "one room" and into a world of possibilities.
This emergence seems to have brought on a surge of women who forget their differences from men, according to Woolf. She writes about Mary Carmichael: "She wrote as a women, but as a woman who has forgotten that she is a woman, so that her pages were full of that curious sexual quality which comes only when sex is unconscious of itself" (91).
It seems that in being liberated from one room leads to walking straight into another, one in which the differences between the sexes become blurred through a sort of androgyny of the mind. Woolf seems to celebrate how the women of literature have broken out of one room, but is weary of how some women who write literature forget that they are part of a unique and opposing gender.