Liberation, Feminism, and Androgyny
 

FIVE

In Chapter Five, Woolf considers what is distinctive about women and their writing in the modern era, a period in which there are almost as many books written by women as there are by men, and in which many of the debilitating restrictions on women have been lifted

This is a time in which women might be able to make contributions that are only possible because they are women. In the course of the chapter, the narrator considers two such contributions:

• the ability to portray women in an expanded manner, i.e. in a manner which goes beyond the way in which they are portrayed by men; and

• the ability to present features of men that men are unable to see about themselves.

The vehicle for the narrator's exploration in this chapter is the fictional "Life's Adventures" by Mary Carmichael.

This work - indeed any contemporary work by a woman - is seen as significant as " ... the last volume in a fairly long series ... from Lady Winchilsea's poems and Aphra Behn's plays and the novels of the four great novelists."

It is part of the developing tradition of women and fiction.

But also, not unimportantly, the contemporary woman artist can break new ground, especially in her depiction of women, as for example, in her depiction of the relationships between women.

The sentence "Chloe liked Olivia," the narrator says, which she finds in "Life's Adventures" is a radical departure because it depicts something about women that male writers don't notice: that women often actually like one another. This is significant because it allows one to see women as other than how males typically portray them, which largely is only in their relations to men.

Consider, she points out, how literature would suffer if men were only portrayed in a manner comparable to that in which women have been traditionally portrayed by men, as lovers of women only, that is, and never as friends of other men, or as soldiers, or thinkers, or dreamers.

If this were the case, in Shakespeare, we would retain most of Othello, and a good deal of Antony, but no Caesar, no Hamlet, no Lear.

Moreover, literature has in fact been impoverished by the restricted portrayal of women that has largely obtained, and it's the role of the contemporary female artist to explore this new ground- to portray "those unsaid or half-said words which form themselves when women are alone; "those gestures which appear unlit by the capricious light of the other sex" - and thereby to see women as they are and not as they appear to men.

In this regard - and one might think here of Virginia Woolf's own fiction , Mrs. .Dalloway, for example- the narrator urges women writers to go "without kindness or condescension into the ... rooms ... of the courtesan, the harlot, or the woman with the pug dog" and to record such ordinary lives.

Moreover, because of the natural relations that exist between men and women, women writers have a distinctive role to play in the portrayal of men.

Women, that is, are able to see aspects of men that they can't see themselves, and they need, the narrator says, to be able to learn to laugh in fiction at the" vanities - say rather the peculiarities, for it is a less offensive word - of the other sex:"

For there is a SPOT THE SIZE OF A SHILLING," the narrator suggests, "at the back of the head which one can never see for oneself; and it is one of the good offices that sex can discharge for sex to describe that spot the size of a shilling at the back of the head.

"For think," she can't help noting sarcastically, "how much women have profited by the comments of Juvenal; by the criticism of Strindberg."

Perhaps what Woolf has in mind here are a remark such as one finds in Juvenal's Sixth Satire: "if the corrupt woman is a bitch," he writes, "the virtuous woman is a bore."

Presumably, men might profit from the seeing of women in the absence of such acerbity.

But however it's done, the narrator says that if "Mary Carmichael" is

very brave and very honest, she would go behind the other sex and tell what she found there." " For a true picture of man as a whole can never be painted until a woman has described that spot the size of a shilling.

There are many ways, the narrator concludes, that men and women can be useful to one another because they are different; for indeed, she says, men have always gotten from women something that their own sex was unable to supply, "some renewal of creative power which is the gift of the opposite sex to bestow."

Males, for example, can be renewed by their experience of the different (domestic) world of women.

In addition, they can be renewed by the fact that even in the simplest talk there is such a natural difference of opinion between men and women that the dried ideas in the man are fertilized anew [by such intercourse].

Men, this is to say, can be refreshed by

the power of [a] highly developed creative faculty in women; for the creative power of women differs greatly from that of men." [And] it would be a thousand pities if women wrote like men, or lived like men, or looked like men.

[Indeed], she asks, "ought not education bring out and fortify the differences rather than the similarities" [between men & women].

Here, as previously, Woolf is not explicit about how men and women differ, in this case with regard to their respective creative powers. Again, at least in part, it is up to the reader to contemplate how such power is distinctively expressed in women.

Although finally, the narrator seems to suggest, if "Mary Carmichael" continues to develop and "write as a woman would if she wrote as a woman," presumably one will not have further to go than the local bookseller to see the results of that feminine power.

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 ©  copyright 2005. Joel Rich. All rights reserved.