Liberation, Feminism, and Androgyny
 

SIX

The final chapter of A Room of One's Own begins and ends with images.

At the outset, the narrator looks out the window and sees a very ordinary sight: a man and a woman come down the street, meet at the corner, and get into a cab together. It's a common image, but one that the narrator finds herself investing with a "rhythmical order." It was a picture, she felt, of cooperation, even fusion, and seemed somehow to ease her mind.

Perhaps, she contemplates, to think, as she necessarily had to throughout A Room, of one sex as distinct from the other - and indeed, often of one sex in opposition to the other - is an effort.

It interferes with the unity of the mind.

The image of two in the taxi suggests to her that:

 there are two sexes in the mind corresponding to the two sexes in the body, and they [may need to] be united in order to get complete satisfaction and happiness.

So  one might offer a conception of the human soul that goes beyond a strictly feminist perspective.

"In each of us," the narrator proposes,

two powers preside, one male, one female; and in the man's brain, the man predominates over the woman, and in the woman's brain, the woman predominates over the man. The normal and comfortable state of being is when the two live in harmony together, spiritually cooperating.

 This, the narrator suggests, may be what Coleridge meant when he said that a great mind is androgynous.

"When a fusion [of male and female powers] takes place, the mind is fully fertilized and uses all its faculties.

Androgyny, one can suggest, is the third and final cultural perspective presented in A Room.

Derived from the Ancient Greek andro (or male) and gyn (or female, as in gynecology), androgyny views the sexes and the impulses expressed by men and women as open to change, and it posits a blending of what in other viewpoints, such as the feminist, are separated.

From the androgynous viewpoint, the aim of the artist is not to function simply as a male or a female. Rather, the goal is to function as fully as possible as a complete human being, as a fusion of the male and female facets of one nature, even if one's own gender predominates.

A fully developed androgynous mind would not think specially or separately of sex, the narrator suggests.

For the male writer, she contends, it is fatal to focus only on the virile side of their nature, as is the case, e.g., with a "Mr. A," who, Woolf admits, in one of her letters, can be viewed as D.H. Lawrence.

For the female writers, however, it can be equally fatal for them to focus on their sex,

to lay the stress on any grievance; to plead with justice for any cause; in any way to speak consciously as a woman. Anything with a conscious gender bias is doomed ... [because] it ceases to be fertilized.

Rather, some collaboration has to take place in the mind between the woman and the man before creation can be accomplished, the narrator contends. Some marriage of opposites has to be consummated.

With this statement, the author leaves the narrative voice returning to her own persona.

She responds to a couple of objections and concludes the book with a return to her most famous image, suggesting that Shakespeare's Sister lives in the person of the modern woman, and that she can flourish if - but only if - women face reality and work to make an environment conducive to such a genius.

"I told you," she writes in conclusion,

 that Shakespeare had a sister ... She died young - alas she never wrote a word. She lies buried where the omnibuses now stop, opposite the Elephant and Castle ... [but]  my belief is that this poet ... still lives. She lives in you and in me, and in many other women who are not here ... for they are washing up the dishes and putting children to bed. But she lives; for great poets do not die; they are continuing presences; they need only the opportunity to walk among us in the flesh.

If we face the fact that there is no arm to cling to ... that we go alone ... Shakespeare's sister can be born, drawing her life from the lives of those who were her forerunners ... the world must be prepared for … [but] she would come if we worked for her, and that so to work, even in poverty and obscurity, is worthwhile.

 Introduction | One | Two | Three |  Four | Five | Conclusion

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