Three
In the third Chapter of A Room of One's Own, the narrator turns to the witness of history.
What can one learn about Women and Fiction by considering what historians have to say concerning the conditions under which women lived, for example, in the Elizabethan age?
This period is interesting, the narrator suggests, because "it is a perennial puzzle why [during this time] no woman wrote a word of that extraordinary literature, when every other man, it seemed, was capable of a song or a sonnet.
What the narrator discovers from history is mystifying.
On the one hand, during the Elizabethan Age, women's lot was extremely servile. Wives were beaten without recourse; daughters were sold into marriage.
But this is also a period - not unlike many others, in fact, classical and modern - in which women figure prominently as objects (as the stuff) of literature, as something that men write about, often in an exalted manner.
A mere reciting of names like Cleopatra and Lady Macbeth makes this point.
Thus, the narrator observes, "a very queer composite picture emerges." Imaginatively, woman is of the highest importance; practically she is completely insignificant.
She pervades poetry from cover to cover; she is all but absent from history.
The contrast between women's imaginary and real life provides a curious slant on Women & Fiction, and in response to it the narrator calls for what we now describe as Women's Studies.
Since the Elizabethan woman - Woolf believed - never wrote about her own life and hardly kept a diary, what one wants, the narrator says, is "some brilliant student at Newnham or Girton" to study parish registers and such to discover what the ordinary life of Elizabethan women was like.
Only when one knows how women were educated, for example, and whether or not they had sitting rooms to themselves can one know why they didn't write poetry.
In the absence of this data, however, the narrator, being herself a woman of fiction, has recourse to her own imagination. And with this, she weaves her famous image of Shakespeare's Sister.
Judith Shakespeare, she imagines, was a young woman who possessed her brother's genius but not his opportunities. She isn't sent to school or encouraged to read at home. She's allowed little experience of the world and no outlet for her talent.
Finally, threatened with a forced marriage, she runs away to London, desiring an acting career.
However, her ambition is ridiculed and she's driven to become a man's mistress.
Finding herself pregnant, she kills herself.
This, or something like it, the narrator imagines, would have been the fate of any woman who had Shakespeare's genius.
Creativity, Woolf contends, requires certain conditions that have typically been absent for women. She observes that:
Genius, like Shakespeare's is not born among laboring, uneducated servile people. Undoubtedly, it has existed among such people, but it lacked a mode of expression.
Among women, she notes, witches are probably lost novelists. Society would have no sympathy for their unconventional vision. But under different conditions their vision might been seen as imagination and could have been directed toward artistic production.
Moreover, the difficulties of creating a work of genius are great enough for anyone, male or female, the narrator observes:
Dogs will bark; people will interrupt; money must be made; health will break down. And all such difficulties are accentuated by the world's indifference. The world does not ask people to write poems and novels and histories; it does not need them.
These difficulties, again, affect any artist, but they have been much worse for women artists, whose efforts were typically discouraged, and for whom a private room was out of the question, unless the family was very rich.
Therefore, in an aside, the narrator calls again for Women's Studies to consider the effect of "the enormous body of masculine opinion" hat nothing could be expected of women intellectually.
It's hard enough for anyone to have the courage to create," she observes, "but how much it has to lower the vitality to be continually told: 'you can't do this,' 'you are incapable of doing that.'" And concludes that:
The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself." Indeed an amusing book might be made of it, she suggests, if some young student of Girton or Newnham would collect examples and deduce a theory.
"However," the narrator goes on, "she would need thick gloves on her hands and bars to protect her of solid gold."
In A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf is challenging an assumption that informed much of intellectual history, the belief that women are intellectually or artistically incapable of producing great literature.
In response to this view, Woolf argues that women of genius have always existed, but unlike their male contemporaries, few women have been granted the basic material and spiritual conditions (an independent income and privacy) to develop their talent.
Since Virginia Woolf's time, literary and historical research has restored to us the poetry and prose of a large number of hitherto unknown women writers, including a number who wrote during Shakespeare's time
Indeed, the Feminist Companion to Women in Literature gives biographical data on over 2700 individual women writers, including over 75 who were born between 1501 and 1600.
Frankly, the Feminist Companion is a somewhat mixed bag. Not all its entries, for example, are creators of literature in the usual meaning of that term. Nevertheless, the shear bulk of the work gives an indication of what scholarship has revealed.
The daughters and sisters of the women of Girton and Newnham have put on their gloves and we are much more aware of early women writers than Virginia Woolf was able to be.
Nevertheless, our increased knowledge need not mitigate Woolf's point in this chapter regarding the effect of material conditions on women's creativity.
For this point could as easily be made using the Reading List of the Basic Program of Liberal Education for Adults, the sponsor of this lecture.
For example, the Basic Program of Liberal Education for Adults - the sponsor of this lecture - is a four- course of study of the classics in which quite a few books by a good many authors are read and discussed in class, over a period of 132 weeks or 396 hours.
On the Basic Program Reading List for 1991-1992, there are forty-one different writers represented, with some listed more than once. Plato, for example, is listed five times; Aristotle, four times; and Shakespeare, three.
And there are some weeks devoted to works, such as the US Constitution, for which no individual writer is indicated.
But these last aside, the four-year program is devoted to forty-one different individual writers.
And two of these writers (2.4%) are women.
Similarly, one might note that 381 classroom hours in the Basic Program are devoted to the writings of individual authors, and 6% of these hours are devoted to the writings of women.
Perhaps Woolf's point in A Room that women's genius often goes unrecognized still needs to be considered in some quarters.
(NOTE: The 2004-2005 Reading List of the Basic Program includes three female writers: Woolf (To the Lighthouse), Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice), and George Eliot (Middlemarch). Woolf was removed from the 2005-2006 List.)
Introduction |
One |
Two |
Four |
Five |
Six |
Conclusion
© copyright 2005. Joel Rich. All rights reserved
