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In her highly influential critical A Room of One's Own (1929), Virginial Woolf studied the cultural, economical and educational disabilities within the patriarchal system that prevent women from realising their creative potential. With her imaginary character Judith (Shakespeare's fictional sister), she illustrated that a woman with Shakespeare's faculties would have been denied the opportunities that Shakespeare enjoyed. Examining the careers and works of woman authors like Aphra Benn, Jane Austen George Eliot and the Bronte sisters, Woolf argued that the patriarchal education system and reading practices condition (or "interpellate," to use an Althusserian term) women to read from men's point of view, and make them internalise the aesthetics and literary values created/ adopted by male authors and critics within the patriarchal system — wherein, these values, although male centered are assumed and promoted as universal.
It is in this polemical work, that Woolf suggested that language is gendered, thus inaugurating the language debate, and argued that the woman author, having no other language at her command, is forced to use the sexist/ masculine language. Dale Spender (in her Man Made Language) as well as the French Feminists primarily investigated the gendered nature of language- Helene Cixous (Ecriture Feminine), Julia Kristeva (chora, semiotic language) and Luce Irigaray (Ecriture Feminine).
Woolf also realized the need for a narrative form to capture the fluid, incoherent female experiences that defy order and rationality; and hence her employment of the stream-of-consciousness technique in her novels, capturing the lives of Mrs Dalloway, Mrs Ramsay and so on. Inspired by the psychological theories of Carl Jung, Woolf also proposed the concept of the androgynous creative mind, which she fictionalised through Orlando, in an attempt to go beyond the male/female binary. She believed that the best artists were always a combination of the man and the woman or "woman-manly" or "man-womanly".
Commentary
Woolf was already connecting feminism to anti-fascism in A Room of One’s Own, which addresses in some detail the relations between politics and aesthetics. The book is based on lectures Woolf gave to women students at Cambridge, but its innovatory style makes it read in places like a novel, blurring boundaries between criticism and fiction. It is regarded as the first modern primer for feminist literary criticism, not least because it is also a source of many, often conflicting, theoretical positions. The title alone has had enormous impact as cultural shorthand for a modern feminist agenda. Woolf ’s room metaphor not only signifies the declaration of political and cultural space for women, private and public, but the intrusion of women into spaces previously considered the spheres of men. A Room of One’s Own is not so much about retreating into a private feminine space as about interruptions, trespassing and the breaching of boundaries (Kamuf, 1982: 17). It oscillates on many thresholds, performing numerous contradictory turns of argument (Allen, 1999). But it remains a readable and accessible work, partly because of its playful fictional style: the narrator adopts a number of fictional personae and sets out her argument as if it were a story. In this reader-friendly manner some complicated critical and theoretical issues are introduced. Many works of criticism, interpretation and theory have developed from Woolf’s original points in A Room of One’s Own, and many critics have pointed up the continuing relevance of the book, not least because of its open construction and resistance to intellectual closure (Stimpson, 1992: 164; Laura Marcus, 2000: 241). Its playful narrative strategies have divided feminist responses, most notably prompting Elaine Showalter’s disapproval (Showalter, 1977: 282).
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