Liberation, Feminism, and Androgyny
 

FOUR

In Chapters Four and Five of A Room of One's Own,, the focus on Women & Fiction shifts to a consideration of women writers, both actual writers and ultimately one of the author's own creation.

The special interest here is one raised earlier in the work: the effect of tradition on women's writing.

Woolf believes that women are different from men both in their social history as well as inherently, and that each of these differences has had important effects on the development of women's writing.

Women writers, this is to say, have been treated differently from men because they were women; and this has affected how they developed.

Furthermore, Woolf maintains, women writers are different from men writers because they are women; and this has also affected how they developed.

The narrator explores both of these elements.

In this chapter, the cultural perspective will begin with a "liberationist" viewpoint, with a focus especially on women's not being able to write with the freedom that men have had. Women's lack of men's freedom to experience the breadth of the world, for example, is a significant constraint on women's ability to create.

However, during the chapter, a different viewpoint emerges which will continue as the dominant perspective in the following chapter.

This is what I call a "feminist" view.

The feminist focus is on women developing independent of men and on their expressing capacities that are inherently different from those which are characteristic of males.. A feminist perspective might be seen as growing out of one that is liberationist, but its impulse and direction are quite different.

In a word, feminism moves toward FEMININE standards, a concern for what is good or appropriate for women as women.

In any case, the narrator begins this chapter by considering a series of women who wrote in the Seventeenth Century. These writers are important because they are the first women who are know to written.

However, being the first, the narrator suggests that they were twisted, to a greater or lesser degree, because their efforts to write were seen as highly eccentric. Ridiculed, or fearing ridicule by society, they were unable to attain the impersonality that she believes is essential to great fiction They couldn't stop being aware that the world thought ill of what they were doing.

There is, for example, Lady Winchilsea, who was sufficiently talented to have written some lines said to have been appropriated by Pope; but who still was demeaned by a contemporary male poet as "a blue stocking with an itch for scribbling."

Her mind can be seen to be torn by emotion when she writes:

"So strong the opposing faction still appears - The hope to thrive can ne'er outweigh the fears."

Men are the "opposing faction" which have the power to bar her from what she wants to do - which is to write.

Then there is the Duchess of Newcastle, who was driven into eccentric behavior by ridicule. Admittedly "hare-brained and fantastical in her writings," the narrator says, but also, clearly, a "generous, untutored intelligence." "She should have had a microscope put in her hand… instead, she became a vision of loneliness and riot …a bogey to frighten clever girls with."

Clever girls like Dorothy Osborne. The narrator sees her as  a woman with " a real turn for writing.," but who, with the model of the Duchess before her, could only believe that it was absurd for a woman to write books. Therefore, she wrote only admirable letters.

These were all unsuccessful writers, the narrator points out, individuals whose talent was somewhat wasted by its depreciation by "the opposing faction." They were followed, however, by Aphra Behn, the first Englishwoman to support herself as a professional writer.

With Behn, the narrator observes, we meet "not a woman who was shut up among the folios, writing without an audience or criticism," but one who "rubs shoulders with ordinary people in the streets"- what Shakespeare's sister was unable to do without coming to ruin - and who demonstrates her ability, through writing, to make a living by her wits - and. on equal terms with men.

For women, the narrator contends, "here begins the freedom of the mind," the possibility that in the course of time one will be able to write whatever one likes. With Mrs. Behn, writing by women cased to be "a sign of folly" and became an activity of practical importance. "Money dignifies what is frivolous if unpaid for" she observes, and Mrs. Behn's success in the Seventeenth Century led to very many women earning money through writing in the Eighteenth Century.

These women became the necessary forerunners of the successful women writers of the early 19th Century: Jane Austen, the Brontes, and George Eliot.

With the 19th Century writers, one can begin to consider women's writing in a more expanded manner - as a kind  of writing that has its own nature based on what it is to be a woman.

First, the narrator wonders why the early 19th century writers were all novelists despite their apparent differences in temperament. And one answer that she gives focuses on women's common social role.

Functioning at the heart of the family, she observes, women's training inevitably includes the observation of character and the analysis of emotion. These are faculties women acquire unconsciously in the course of daily activities and they are more easily put to use in a novel than elsewhere in fiction.

Domesticity, thus, was not always a disadvantage for women.

However, she goes on to consider, to the extent that women's domestic role seriously narrowed her range of experience it could depreciate her creativity. This wasn't a problem for Jane Austen, perhaps, in that she may well have been quite content to write only about social life; but it clearly was for Charlotte Bronte who yearned for wider horizons, and whose creations suffered because she couldn't find them.

"I longed for a power of vision," Bronte wrote,

which might reach the busy world ... full of life that I have heard of but never seen ... I desired more of practical experience than I possessed ... more of intercourse with my kind, of acquaintance with variety of character than was within my reach.

A novel has "integrity," the narrator says, it rings true, when it matches in some indirect way with reality, and being unable to experience the fullness of the world, as Bronte lamented she was unable to do, has often compromised the integrity of women's fiction.

If women are unable to go out alone, or are kept ignorant of certain sexual matters, they will be unable to fully convey the range of human life that a more experienced writer like Tolstoi can convey.

The fiction of women, thus, has been diminished by social restrictions that limit her experience.

The contemporary character of Woolf's observation here may be striking.

If one thinks beyond fiction, one can realize how, in the modern urban environment, women's range of experience is clearly limited by the fact that it's often dangerous for women to go out alone. There are simply certain experiences - quite mundane ones even, such as walking home from work - which some women can't have because of their gender. And more directly to women's writing, in journalism, equality of experience between men and women has been an issue in controversy that broke out over women's access to the sports locker room; and perhaps has been a feature of the murder of a number of female journalists around the world, including Irish Veronica Guerin in 1996.

The liberationist battle for equal access to experience might be seen as not completely over.

Be that as it may, the narrator goes an to contend that it's not only in access to worldly experience that women are at a disadvantage, but also in the expression of values, and here the discussion begins to move in a distinctly feminist direction.

Since a novel has a correspondence with real life, she argues, to some extent its values must be those of real life; "but it's obvious", the narrator goes on to say, in a nevertheless not uncontroversial statement, that

the values of women differ very often from the values which have been made by the other sex. Naturally this is so. Yet, it is the masculine values that prevail.

"Speaking crudely," she observes, "football and sport are 'important'; the worship of fashion and buying clothes is 'trivial.' and these values are inevitably transferred from life to fiction.

"This is an important book, the critic says, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room"

According to the narrator, in the 19th Century, only Jane Austen and Emily Bronte were completely successful in writing as women wrote," i.e. in expressing the values that are naturally distinctive to women.

One might note here, parenthetically, that Woolf is never explicit in this work about what is distinctive about women's values, except perhaps to point to their usually being applied in domestic contexts. Nor is she explicit when she goes on to claim essential differences between men and women which in fiction preclude the former serving as a model for the latter.

Still, her main point is that great male writers cannot be standards for women because "the weight, the pace, the stride of a man's mind are too unlike her own for her to lift anything substantial from him..." Even the appropriate sentences for men and women are different, she claims.

Failures in Charlotte Bronte & George Eliot, for example, can be attributed to their effort to utilize a "male type of sentence." Jane Austen, by contrast, "shaped her own feminine sentence and with less talent than Charlotte Bronte, got more said."

It's never really clear in this work what distinguishes a male from a female sentence. However, maybe the only way to really consider such a view is by actually examining a work by a woman - say a novel - from its perspective, although work by psychologist Carol Gilligan might be instructive.  For the present, we can note that Woolf concludes Chapter Four by applying her view that men and women differ in essential ways to the workplace.

The physical conditions under which people work have an effect on their production, and not only do the usual social roles of men and women differ, but, she says, "the nerves that feed the brain seem to differ in men and women"

Consequently, women's books should be shorter and more concentrated than those of men, since in their roles they are more likely to be interrupted than men are.

 And an effort also should be made to discover what learning regimens work best for women, e.g. whether lectures devised hundreds of years ago for the education of male monks are best suited to women.

Here the focus is clearly feminist, with female nature providing the standard.

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