In the Conversation'sFeminism 101 thread I somewhat jokingly said that everyone should read A Room of One's Own (1929) by Virginia Woolf. I was then asked in a pm, to explain, "why? why particularly that one [book]?" I asked if the poster minded if I answered hir questions here, and so here we go.
So, first, a reminder that I initially plugged the book in the context of feminism, presenting it as an assignment:
it's quite funny, it's not very long (although her sentences sometimes are, but that's just good practice) maybe 120 pages? Please pay particular attention to her argument that women's criticism of men/male activities is 1) less frequent but more visible than male critique of women, and 2) often met with a disproportionate, frequently even dare I say panicked male response, in our culture. Then come back and let's talk--here or in the quiet old books forum. I'll bring the tea, if one of you men will bring the crumpets.
(And, btw, I have a nice pot of tea brewing as promised. Did someone else bring some treats?)
Woolf's humor is subtle and quite pleasureable, and her argument is that you can't understand the contemporary relationships between men and women, you can't even understand men and women, full stop, unless you have a material understanding of history: basic questions like: who has had money? why haven't women had money? what's been the effect of women not having money?
And, in particular, she's addressing a group of young college women, so she's warning them that people's ability to write and produce complex texts has been remarkably dependent, it would seem, on their ability to have time and privacy and financial support and a kind of physical and intellectual free rein--which very few people have been willing to grant to women in the past. (Her metaphor for this mix of time, privacy, freedom and finance, is "£500 and a room of one's own with a lock on the door")
But, despite there being these grave differences in access to the things that have allowed for the production of Shakespeares and Professors, male critics continue to assert that it is impossible for women to write well. This strikes Woolf as poor reasoning.
But this faulty reasoning, this blindness to history, has a root, she argues in the functions women serve for men. For, Woolf argues, beyond women's being as they are due to material conditions, men have needed women to serve some very critical functions for their own work. Here's one of my favorite passages:
"Life for both sexes--and I looked [out the window] at them, shouldering their way along the pavement--is arduous, difficult, a perpetual struggle. It calls for giganitc courage and strength. More than anything, perhaps, it calls for confidence in oneself. Without self-confidence, we are as babes in the cradle. And how can we generate this imponderable quality, which is yet so invaluable, most quickly? By thinking that other people are inferior to oneself. By feeling that one has some innate superiority--it may be wealth, or rank, a straight nose, or the portrait of a grandfather by Romney--for there is no end to the pathetic devices of the human imagination--over other people. Hence the enormous importance to a patriarch, who has to conquer, who has to rule, of feeling that great numbers of people, half the human race indeed, are by nature inferior to himself. It must indeed be one of the chief sources of his power."
I like that passage because it does begin on common ground: we are all struggling here. Life is not easy for anyone. I still think we regularly need to be reminded of that.
She then goes on to quote a male friend, a "modest" good sort of man, who seemed, to her, disproportionately upset by a passage in which Rebecca West apparently implied that "men are snobs." Here's Woolf's analysis of the situation:
The exclamation [of my friend] . . . was not merely the cry of wounded vanity; it was a protest against some infringement of his power to believe in himself. Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice his natural size. Without that power, probably the earth would be swamp and jungle. The glories of all our wars would be unknown . . . Whatever their use in civilised societies, mirrors are essential to all violent and heroic action.
Women, she is partly arguing, have functioned in a peculiar way to prop up the patriarchy, and we have partly done that only by reflecting back to men a pleasing image of themselves: by smiling and flattering and being very very politic in whatever critiques we may have. If a few women become more overt in their critique, even calm and jovial men tend to get very upset by that, because it's not just about the issue at hand, it's about deep issues of identity.
In fact, she argues that these very notions of "man" and "woman" are thus known and knowable only through their cultural trappings; that if the cultural trappings are radically changed, these "timeless" identities will disappear in some vital ways, becoming something we can't quite imagine, but certainly radically different than the Victorian womanhood of her own childhood.
And, finally, on a larger scale, the text was, and is, especially important, then, because, as the passage above hints, it explored the possibility of a linkage between patriarchal structures in Western families, the structures of Western cultures and Western imperialism.
And it does all this with wit and irony and humor. And, moreover, its mix of personal narrative, historical discussion, fictionalizing, and logical argument was almost without precedent, althought it has subsequently had deep effects on both academic argumentation style (in the humanities, anyway) and the broader tradition of the essay.
Now, Woolf's approach is not without it's own problematics, and Woolf's work has been critiqued for the way it, too, reinforces "appropriate" female voice and tone*, and mostly unconsciously reifies class divisions and racialized modes of thinking, among other things. Her analysis of the relationships between patriarchy and imperialism, for example, has needed to be supplemented and challenged by the voices of people who have been on the receiving end of imperialism. But it remains a work that is deeply important, and one that I love. I hope others will take some time to read it and talk it over with me.
Now, do you fancy a cup of tea?
* Here, I'm thinking especially of Adrienne Rich's critique of Woolf, as articulated in her essay "When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision." |
