| Elaine Showalter, in A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton U P, 1977), responds to Carolyn Heilbrun’s notion of androgyny (Towards Recognition of Androgyny) as it applies to Virginia Woolf. Heilbrun had said that Woolf was free, within the milieu of the Bloomsbury group, to develop both sides of her nature (masculine and feminine). Heilbrun said that Bloomsbury was the first example of an androgynous way of life. |  |
Showalter argues that VW, despite her immense gifts, was as thwarted as the women she describes in A Room of One's Own. Showalter says that VW knew and was obsessed by the female traditions a century old, yet by the end of her life she had gone back, full circle, to become like the melancholy, guilt-ridden, suicidal women whom she had studied and pitied. "In her fiction, but especially in A Room of One's Own, she is the architect of female space," a space that is "both sanctuary and prison." (263).
Showalter cites Phyllis Rose's essay on "Mrs. Ramsay and Mrs. Woolf" (Women’s Studies I, summer 1973: 212). Rose analyzed VW’s fear that writing was an act that unsexed her, made her an unnatural woman, unlike her sister Vanessa and her mother. After producing every work of art, VW felt unlovable and needed reassurance. Showalter blames Leonard Woolf for his decision that VW should not have children, even though VW had happily anticipated having them. LW and others held old stereotypes about childbearing and art, and subsequent male critics such as Michael Holroyd also reinforce these ideas. Showalter contends that VW was very angry at being sent away for rest cures and that we can see this anger in Septimus Smith’s characterization of such cures in Mrs. Dalloway. Yet she also felt conflicted about this anger, and guilty, and so she tended to censor herself. In A Room of One's Own Woolf’s androgynous ideal has a negative side "that is the sphere of the exile or eunuch"(285).
In Woolf's terms, Showalter says,
"androgyny is a response to the dilemma of a woman writer embarrassed and
alarmed by her feelings too hot to handle without risking real rejection
by her family, her audience, and her class" (286). Virginia Woolf was not
comfortable with her feminist anger at injustice, and sought the serene
comfort of a more ‘manly’ androgynous mind. Her doctor had told her in
1925 to "practice equanimity." In the androgynous solution VW provides
"there lurks a psychological equivalent of lobotomy" (287). Woolf hated
partisanship in fiction and developed a utopian ideal of an androgynous
mind, calm and "unimpeded" by consciousness of sex. "Whatever else one
may say of androgyny, it represents an escape from the confrontation with
femaleness or maleness. Her ideal artist mystically transcends sex, or
has none. One could imagine another approach to androgyny, however, through
total immersion in the individual experience, with all the restrictions
of sex and anger and fear and chaos" (289). Woolf’s description in "Modern
Fiction" of life as a "luminous halo" and the need for a passive receptivity
to moments leads to an excess passivity, to the point of self-destruction.
In To the Lighthouse, Showalter suggests, Mrs. Ramsay "spends" herself
in sympathy with others, and becomes exhausted with the constant effort
to attend to others (cf. pp. 60-61 in TTL.) For Showalter, this is what
happens to Woolf because of her avoidance of her own feminist anger at
injustice. Woolf's vision of womanhood, Showalter says, "is as deadly as
it is disembodied. The ultimate room of one's own is the grave" (299).
Do you agree or disagree with Showalter? You may take the entire semester
to decide.
Rose Norman has asked the following question on her website at http://www.uah.edu/woolf/roomquestions.html :
Some critics have argued that
A
Room of One's Own can be linked to the obscenity trial against Radclyffe
Hall's The Well of Loneliness
going on at the same time.
Woolf and others had written letters supporting Hall. Jane Marcus identifies
Judith Shakespeare with Radclyffe Hall herself (who was descended from
Shakespeare's daughter Susanna Hall) as the symbol of the oppressed woman
artist, and Room’s fictional narrator (whom she identifies as Mary Hamilton,
rather than Mary Beton, Seton, or Carmichael) with Mary Llewelyn (the lover
of Hall's main character, Stephen Gordon, a woman trapped in man's body).
What do you make of this "still practice"? What difference does it make
to think of Woolf's narrators in this way?
more links for A
Room of One's Own
