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Home > Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf

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In many ways development of the conceptual and practical dimensions of women’s lives is the fulcrum of Modern history. While undoubtedly there were remarkable women in intellectual and cultural effect before the 19th Century, the idea of an expanding concept of human dignity profoundly affected the lives and opportunities available to women. In a parallel way, attitudes towards non-European peoples also underwent remarkable transformation. The concerns over gender and race are parallel, however since women represent slightly more than half of all populations, the question of women’s autonomy was and remains central to all societies. James Joyce, not always viewed as a feminist voice, declared calmly in the 1920’s, that the idea of women’s full equality with men was the most momentous shift in the Modern world.

Virginia Woolf, essayist and Modernist novelist, was and remains one of the most eloquent spokespersons for the autonomy of women. While Woolf came from a traditional upper-middle class background, she gradually became a major voice of the potential and the promise of women in literature and society at large. After finishing her great novel, To The Lighthouse (1927), she delivered lectures to the relatively new women’s colleges at Cambridge and Oxford. The published version of these lectures, A Room of One’s Own (1929), addressed the explicit theme of women and fiction. Within this framework, Woolf explored some of the psychological and social conditions that had limited the opportunity for women to express their thoughts and imaginations in literary form. She famously asks the question early in these lectures, “What would have become of Shakespeare’s sister, Judith, a young woman with the similar genetic and mental capabilities of her brother, if she had attempted to enter the world of theater and literature in the Elizabethan Age?”

Woolf writes as an extraordinary accomplished novelist, certainly one of the finest in the English language, and reflects on what has allowed her to achieve, in the 1920’s, a literary refinement and success that was so elusive in previous centuries. While Woolf’s topic is women and fiction, clearly it involves the assumptions of the woman as a fully achieved human being. Extraordinary artistic expression, while a rare commodity for anyone, represents both artistic excellence and the social and psychological confidence and experience that can allow that excellence to flourish. Through her novelist’s imagination, Woolf offers narratives of women’s personal talents and the social barriers opposed to them. In another episode early in the lectures, she describes herself, now one of the two finest novelists in the English speaking world, approaching a library in Cambridge, wanting to see the manuscript to Thackeray’s novel, Esmond. A guard, called the beadle, shoes her away from the library, exclaiming that women are not allowed to enter the library unaccompanied by a member of the college. This abrupt and startling impediment to her own natural literary curiosity, comes to represent the clash between women’s innate talent and achievements, and the structures and denials of those achievements by the social power structure around her. The denial of Virginia Woolf’s access to the manuscript of Thackeray’s novel becomes a practical and symbolic dramatization of the clash between women’s personal human nature and the social and legal reading of that nature by current power structures.  Woolf comments on the situation in this way:

“Instinct rather than reason came to my help: he was a Beadle; I was a woman. This was the turf; there was the path. Only the Fellows and Scholars are allowed here; the gravel is the place for me. Such thoughts were the work of a moment. As I regained the path, the arms of the Beadle sank, his face assumed its usual repose, and though turf is better walking than gravel, no very great harm was done. The only charge I could bring against the Fellows and Scholars of whatever the college might happen to be, was that in the protection of the turf, which is rolled for three-hundred years in succession, they had sent my little fish into hiding…Here I was actually at the door which leads into the library itself. I must have opened it, for instantly their 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 if accompanied by a Fellow of the College or furnished with a letter of introduction.
       That a famous library has been cursed by a woman is a matter of complete indifference to a famous library. Venerable and calm, with all its treasures safely locked within its breast, it sleep complacently and will, so far as I am concerned, so sleep forever. Never will I wake those echoes, never will I ask for that hospitality again, I vowed as I descended the steps in anger.”

Woolf tells the young women that certain practical support is needed to provide the space for thinking and creative effort. As her title suggests, A Room of One’s Own is the claiming of a private space for private activities and also for a private, personal existence. The room is a workplace but as Bacelard suggests in his work Poetics of Space, the room has psychological and existential meaning in giving the woman her own arena, both in the literal world of space and in the mental world of thought and creativity. She also notes that her own ability to write was immensely helped by a modest, but sustainable personable income from an inheritance from a distant aunt. In the practical world, a woman’s autonomy involves both the securing of a private space and of sufficient income to support time for reflection and creativity. Room and money are literal elements of the social world, but they are equally parts of the mental and spiritual potential and expression of the individual. While in the 21st Century it might seem relatively unusual that such simple means were not generally available, but as Woolf’s discussion reminds us, the privacy of women and their access to their own practical means cannot be taken for granted. In her reflections, Woolf interweaves artistic and intellectual achievement with women’s claims for full humanity and autonomy.

Virginia Woolf’s provocative discussions of women and fiction, are strongly connected to the history of women’s rights and capabilities in the Modern world. One major aspect of this, of course, is the concept of women’s franchise to vote, their claims to have authority and choice within the political structures of societies. While we have some awareness of the suffragettes in England and women’s protests to achieve the vote in the United States, the question of women’s political equality is by no means an ancient one. When we look up the question of women’s suffrage on Wikipedia, we find that relatively new Westernized nations, like New Zealand, offered women the franchise to vote in 1893. Britain awarded the franchise to women in 1918, and the United States in 1920. We may be surprised to find that in certain bastions of civilization, like France and Italy, women were granted the right to vote only in 1944 and 1945 and we may be even more astonished to learn that women were only granted the right to vote in Switzerland, in 1971.

Along with the beginnings of political credibility through voting, the most pervasive condition of women’s lives is the ability to conceive and bear children. Margaret Sanger in the United States began the first broadly successful movements to introduce practical means of birth control into women’s lives in 1913. The connections between sexual activity and pregnancy and the ability of women to control their own fertility are central to both the biological and the religious and political currents of the Modern world. Even into the 21st Century, arguments over women’s rights to the control of their own biology remain volatile issues. While the experience of most women in Westernized countries is the relatively easy access to birth control, even there, there are debates and for the women of many other societies, that access to a woman’s control of her own fertility, remains inconstant and often absent.

Virginia Woolf’s lectures and essays on women and fiction are so persuasive because of her intellectual and artistic achievement. But clearly, the question of women’s creativity and autonomy are closely linked to their political and biological freedom. Without necessarily seeming to be radical, Woolf makes available to us the cultural and psychological fruits of women’s creativity and their connection to the political and physical worlds that we inhabit. Whatever the Modern period might be, it includes a variety of experiences for women and also for men, that are admitted to imagination and expression that had been largely censored in early eras. Questions of imagination, projection, an immense range of preoccupation and activity, the biological and practical implications of human behavior, all become a part of the reflective and artistic mind.

Author: Alyssa Samson
Last modified: 8/27/2009 6:33 AM (EST)