...a woman must have money and a room of her own
if she is to write fiction...
-Virginia Woolf,
A
Room of One's Own
Such is the basic message of this long essay--adapted from two lectures the author gave in 1928 at Newnham College and Girton College, Cambridge. Her basic thesis is that there was no extant body of great women's literature because, in the past, women did not have the education, the income, the privacy, the experiences of the broader world, or the time to write. As a result, not only is the body or works written by women fairly small, most of the little that is known about the women of the past was also written by men. Therefore, there is no tradition of women's literature, nor a history of womankind, from which prospective authors could draw upon.
Her call then is for women to acquire for themselves the intellectual freedom which economic self-sufficiency will provide and to create a women's literature, which metaphorically, will also occupy a room of it's own. She encourages them to write about all of the "minutely obscure lives" which men have ignored and about themselves and their feelings and their reactions to the world around them. But she does not envision a complete dichotomy between male and female:
It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple;
one must be woman-manly or man-womanly. It
is fatal for a woman to lay the least stress on
any grievance; to plead even with justice any cause; in
any way to speak consciously as a woman. And
fatal is no figure of speech; for anything written
with that conscious bias is doomed to death.
It ceases to be fertilised. Brilliant and effective,
powerful and masterly, as it may appear for a day
or two, it must wither at nightfall; it cannot grow
in the minds of others. Some collaboration
has to take place in the mind between the woman and
the man before the act of creation can be accomplished.
Some marriage of opposites has to be
consummated. The whole of the mind must lie
wide open if we are to get the sense that the writer
is communicating his experience with perfect fullness.
There must be freedom and there must be
peace.
Ms Woolf seems to have had little interest in politics or feminism or anything much else, except for art itself. But the dichotomy she was trying to do away with in writing is fundamental to men and women and does not simply manifest itself in books. Boiled down to simplest terms, there is a male impulse towards freedom and a female impulse towards security (peace).
The several thousand years of Western Civilization consist of nothing more than the struggle between freedom and security, a struggle in which freedom finally has the upper hand. In politics this is reflected in the rise of the modern liberal democracy; in economics by the triumph of capitalism; in religion by the ascendancy of protestantism in Christianity, Judaism and Islam; and in literature it is reflected in novels ranging from Moby Dick to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. It is no surprise then that a women's literature, a literature that must be rooted in the desire for security, was repressed, found no audience or was not written--it would after all have tended to provide succor to the enemy, the powerful repressive institutions which held mankind in thralldom until recent centuries. It is a little acknowledged and vastly underappreciated fact that it was only once freedom had been won that men granted women full civil rights and societal privileges. Woolf in fact was writing in the first light of this moment.
What then has been the result of her call? well, the overwhelming majority of fiction by women has not met her androgynous standard, instead it has been the literature of grievance and feminine causes. But that was to be expected, if, as Woolf herself perceived, the female ethos is one of peace (security), then the fiction (and the politics) of women would be expected to celebrate security at the expense of freedom, to elevate the particular over the general, to emphasize the moment rather than age, and so it does. [There are, of course, exception, including : Sharon Kay Penman, Hope Muntz, Flannery O'Connor, and Harper Lee.]
More interesting is the fate of Woolf's fiction and her own attempt to write androgynously. Here is an assessment by Michael Cunningham, author of the Pulitzer Prize winner The Hours which is based on Woolf's novel Mrs. Dalloway:
To a greater extent than any novelist except Joyce,
Woolf invented the modernist novel, a drastic
departure from the traditional form, with its heroics
and high emotions; its morality; its unwavering
point of view and its unambiguous beginning, middle
and end. The novel, in Woolf's hands,
became prismatic, ambiguous, at least slightly chaotic,
amoral and poetic, and concerned itself
primarily with outwardly unremarkable people. It
strove less to tell an uplifting tale and more to
render life as lived, in its endless overlaps of
the quotidian and the profound. Since Woolf's time,
novels in the traditional mode have continued to
be written by the boxcar load, but the novel as an
art form has never been the same.
In essence, Woolf and the Modernists rejected morality, objectivity, heroism, and linear form, all of them necessary antecedents to the establishment of liberal, capitalist, protestant, democracy. In their fiction, they replaced these ideals with amorality, subjectivity, formlessness, and ordinariness. When conservatives speak of moral relativism or the death of outrage or the decline of the West, they speak with particular reference to these Modernist intellectuals and to the tremendous influence they have had on the culture. But it is hard to see how these androgynists differ much from women in general. The fundamental mission of both is to replace a culture based on freedom, morality and justice, with one based on security, egalitarianism, anti-heroism, and sameness--a sort of dictatorship of the lowest common denominator.
The same thing has happened, perhaps more demonstrably, in politics. At the time women were given the vote, Western democracy was at perhaps it's most unfettered. Since then, government, though democratic, has become an enormous restraining force upon people's freedom in general and on their economic freedom in particular. Commentators often speak of a gender gap in politics, but only acknowledge the gap in the women's vote in favor of Democrats. In fact, the Democrats--the party which favors big government and equality of economic results and opposes risk, morality, and choices--have become the party of women. The Republicans--the party of small government, equality of opportunity, and freedom generally--has become the party of men. The political system is androgynous to the extent that it tries to balance these fundamentally male or female concerns.
Virginia Woolf may be right that it is possible to write (or to govern) androgynously; I doubt it. The long history of Western man suggests that the ideological divide between men and women is inherent in the gender (as groups not as individuals). One suspects that the next great political crisis in the West will be the struggle of men to overthrow the repressive government imposed by women. Such has been the previous pattern as mankind has suffered under periods of tyranny but has always eventually won through to greater freedom. A more happy alternative would be that our rapidly increasing technological prowess might provide such a universally high standard of living that women's security concerns will gradually retreat. Either way, we needn't look for Woolf's androgynes to show up anytime soon.
A Room of One's Own tiptoes right up to the door of perception
but then retreats. No one can seriously quarrel with the right of
women to create their own literature. It just should not be expected
that this literature will go much beyond the political concerns of women,
nor that it will have a salutary effect on society.
(Reviewed:02-Sep-00)
Grade: (C+)
