Liberation, Feminism, and Androgyny
 

Two

In Chapter Two of A Room of One's Own, the scene shifts to London and the scope of the narrator's journey widens. Now she is in the British museum, where, in a wonderful image, "one stood under the vast dome as if one were a thought in the huge bald forehead."

Here, she suggests, one might hope to find "the essential oil of truth," and discover answers to questions like:

To answer these questions, the narrator looks at books that have been written about  women by men. The focus now, in terms of the earlier discussion of "Women and Fiction" as a subject, is  "women and what they are like."

The narrator wonders , at the outset of her inquiry, why men write the kind of books that they do about women; for she finds men's thinking about women to be full of prejudice and contradiction.

Are women capable of education, for example? Napoleon says: no; Dr. Johnson: yes

Have they souls or have they not souls? "Some savages say they have none," she notes. Others, on the contrary, maintain that women are half-divine...

(As addendum, one might remember, in this regard, in Crime & Punishment at one point Raskolnikov is offered the possibility of a job translating a book called "Is Woman a Human Being." There doesn't seem to be anything in Dostoyevsky's reference to such a book that suggests that he or his characters see anything illegitimate about such a work.)

Men's books about women are at best unscientific, the narrator concludes. Usually by professors, they seem to be written "in the red light of emotion rather than the white light of truth"; and their anger is obvious by their lack of dispassionate argument.

But why are men mad at women, the narrator asks.

"How to explain the anger of the professors?" and especially since England "is under the rule of a patriarchy." The professors are dominant in power, money & influence. What bothers them?

Woolf's answer is that it comes down to fear.

The professors, which is to say many men, are angry with women because they realize that women provide an essential psychological function which they are afraid of losing. The function is the insurance of self-confidence

Everyone, the narrator suggests, needs self-confidence to face the "arduous, difficult, perpetual struggle" that is life. And one way to gains self-confidence is by believing that you arte superior to others.

The professors are not concerned about women's inferiority, she concludes. What worries them is their own superiority, which has been preserved throughout time by the viewpoint of the other sex.

"Women," the narrator says, "have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting man as twice his natural size"

Without that power, she observes sarcastically,

probably the earth would still be swamp and jungle. The glories of all our wars would be unknown. We should still be scratching the outlines of deer on the remains of mutton bones . . . That is why Napoleon and Mussolini both insist so emphatically on the inferiority of women, for if they were not inferior they would cease to enlarge.

One can face the world with some confidence if one believes that he begins as superior to half the population of the planet; and if one adds a few racist presumptions, all the better

Furthermore, this explains why a man experiences criticism from a woman as so much more hurtful than the same would be if it came from a man. If women tell the truth, the narrator says, the figure in the looking glass shrinks.

But truth is valuable in its own right and the narrator claims that with an independent income of the sort that she herself has, women would be free to relate differently to men and to explore the nature of the other sex as theirs is explored. Trusting in women to be "magnanimous: in their assessments, she suggests that a regular stipend of about five hundred pounds a year would do the trick (an amount, by the way, according to an economist friend of mine, equivalent to about $15,000 in 1992).

And with these observations, the narrator concludes her "contributions to the dangerous and fascinating subject of the psychology of the other sex."

In these first two chapters of A Room of One's Own, Woolf has mainly been focusing on ways in which women have been treated unjustly, either in access to benefits, such as education; or in the way in which they've been portrayed. And implicit in this viewing is the notion that liberation from such injustice consists in women being treated in much the same manner as men are treated.

Freed from injustice, this is say, women would have access to the same sorts of goods that men have access to  and they would be portrayed with equal accuracy . The liberation standard essentially looks to the status quo and to values pre-established for males:

If men enjoy the luxury of good food and drink in their education. women should be free to enjoy much the same pleasure.

If men aren't portrayed as inferior by the books in the British museum, women shouldn't be either

If men can think as they like, women need to be liberated from the economic dependence that keeps them from being able to think as they like.

In this cultural perspective - the perspective of liberation - the concern is to be freed from constraints that keep one from enjoying what others enjoy. This is a familiar perspective. having been a dominant point of view, e.g., in the fight for racial justice in the U.S., especially in its earlier stages.

What black people sought - the right to vote or the right to sit in the front of the bus - was something that white people already had.

Woolf is suggesting something similar for women in relation to men.

And this focus on liberation, with its male standard in the background, will also largely inform the next two chapters of A Room.

 


  

 Introduction | One  | Three |   Four |  Five  | Six  | Conclusion

Virginia Woolf on Women and Fiction  home

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