by Catherine Partin
Does writing have a gender, and if so, how can we account for
the historical differences in literary output between men and women? Is there such a thing as masculine or
feminine writing? What is the difference, if there is one, and why have
women been excluded from this form of cultural production? Virginia
Woolf’s essay, A Room of
One’s Own, examines the history of women in literature and attempts to
explain how and why women have been largely left out of the canon of Western
literature. Woolf argues that women writers are limited not by biological
or intellectual capacities, but by societal barriers that have, for centuries,
designated women as the second sex and deprived them of the range of liberties
and experiences available to their male counterparts. A Room of One’s Own identifies the history of women’s oppression, issues of economic
privilege or poverty, and men’s interest in maintaining their cultural and
literary authority as the determining forces upon which hinge women’s ability
to write. Although Woolf emphasizes the material
independence that women have been denied, and upon which rests the intellectual
freedom necessary for the production of great literature, as the primary reason
for women’s exclusion from cultural production, many societal and psychological
obstacles remain, even in the wake of the women’s movement. Women’s writing continues to reflect the lingering
effects of misogynistic cultural memes that have deprived women of a feminine
literary tradition comparable to the Western canon of literature produced
largely by men. The woman writer’s
creative identity and ways of expression are formed by her experience in a
male-dominated society. Because of the
hindrances women have faced, women’s writing is necessarily marked by the challenges
with which its authors have been forced to contend, and by patriarchal systems
that have historically failed to allow for feminine modes of creation.
As
the primary basis of differentiation between the sexes, the biological traits
that distinguish male from female have historically been cited as signs of
women’s inferiority. The innate
fragility attributed to the female sex, based on generalizations about women’s
physical strength but extending to morality and intellect as well, has been
used as an excuse for benevolent sexism and for the continued subjugation of
women. An ideal world, according to
Woolf, would be one in which women were permitted the same opportunities as
men. “[I]n a hundred years…they will take part in all the
exertions and activities that were once denied them. The nursemaid will heave coal. The shop-woman will drive an engine. All assumptions founded on the facts when
women were the protected sex will have disappeared…” (Woolf 40) The excuse of physical weakness has been used to
dictate women’s work and recreation, and to deny women entry to the masculine
realms of labor, politics, and education.
It has also played a role in preventing women from partaking in the
variety of experiences available to men through work, travel, reproductive
freedom, and personal autonomy. Woolf
notes that the works authored by women such as Colette, Jane Austen, and George
Eliot “…were written by women without more experience of life than could enter
the house of a respectable clergyman” (69).
To the detriment of women’s writing, societal disapproval of women’s
attempts at those masculine endeavors deemed inappropriately strenuous for the
female constitution or intellect has kept women safely ensconced in the
domestic sphere, where they would be expected to fulfill a maternal role, to
the renunciation of any potential career.
After questioning the failure of her generation’s predecessors to
provide their daughters with the educational institutions and funds for
scholarship, Woolf’s narrator concludes, “[T]o endow a college would
necessitate the suppression of families altogether. Making a fortune and bearing thirteen
children – no human being could stand it”; she later notes that none of the
successful female novelists she admires were mothers (22, 65). Yet aside from reproductive realities and the
domestic duties associated with motherhood, women’s bodies have always been
belittled as inherently flawed. Simone
de Beauvoir, in The Second Sex,
describes the ways in which physical features and functions exclusive to the
female body are identified not only as variations from, but signs of
inferiority to, a norm characterized by masculinity:
“Woman has
ovaries, a uterus; there we have the particular circumstances that imprison her
in her subjectivity; one often says that she thinks with her glands. In his grandiosity man forgets that his
anatomy also includes hormones, and testicles.
He thinks of his body as a direct and normal connection with the world
which he believes that he apprehends objectively, while he considers the
woman’s body to be weighed down by everything specific to it: an obstacle, a
prison.” (Beauvoir 5)
Where women differ from men, they are considered
intrinsically flawed, the perceived shortcomings of the female body projected still
further to the mind or immaterial self. Women’s bodies are seen as a barrier between
the self and an objective reality that only men can perceive. Beauvoir cites saints and philosophers whose theories
were nonetheless tainted by misogyny: “’The female
is a female by virtue of a certain lack of qualities,’ Aristotle said. ‘We should regard the female nature as
afflicted with a natural defectiveness.’
And Saint Thomas in his turn decreed that woman was an ‘incomplete man’”
(Beauvoir 5). Women are measured
by male standards and, like the Manx cat of Woolf’s essay, found lacking in
some respect that has been taken as the defining characteristic of the
species. This absence of masculine
traits has been used as justification for women’s categorization as the weaker
sex not only physically but intellectually and morally as well, and for their
subsequent exclusion from the realm of creative pursuits dominated by men.
Women’s
rejection from male educational and artistic institutions has led to the lack of
a substantial feminine literary tradition.
Woolf argues that the one of the greatest difficulties the early women
writers faced, beyond practical and material hardships, was that of being
compelled to adapt to forms and literary standards tailored to men’s creative
strengths. Describing the style and
structure men’s writing took with the development of the novel, Woolf writes,
“A book is not made of sentences laid end to end, but of sentences built, if an
image helps, into arcades or domes. And
this shape too has been made by men out of their own needs for their own uses”
(76). Woolf also speculates that the popularity of
the novel as the genre of choice among nineteenth-century women writers was
rooted in convenience and practicality rather than authors’ creative
inclinations. Women took to novels
because they could suffer the frequent interruptions and obligations that
divided women’s attentions, they required less concentration to write than
poetry, and as the act of writing became possible for women of less privileged
classes than ever before, they could easily fetch an income (Woolf 65-67). Despite this increased literary production,
the growing body of feminine literature still failed to express women’s
creative capacities. Instead, it continued
to reflect external restrictions encroaching upon the creative process.
The
disparities between women and men in their encounters of the world mean that
creativity must be expressed differently between the sexes: women cannot write
like men because their experiences are uniquely feminine. In A
Room of One’s Own, Woolf lauds the novelists Jane Austen and Emily Bronte
for refusing to emulate a masculine style of writing and instead finding their
own ways of writing about the truth, believing that “literature arises when a
human being tries to attend to reality with as much integrity and truthfulness
as she can muster, and then tries to communicate that vision to others” (Moi
268). Reality, however, has
traditionally been defined by men, who perceive their view of reality as the
true and objective one while women must relate to the world subjectively (Beauvoir
5). The argument that gender should be
irrelevant forces women writers to renounce their subjectivity and “to
masquerade as some kind of generic universal human being, in ways that devalue
their actual experiences as embodied human beings in the world,” but to write
intentionally as a woman, Woolf believes, presents and even greater risk
because it means sacrificing the integrity of the work (Moi 265). Only when women can write as men have written
for centuries, unconscious of the hardships and disadvantages unfairly
inflicted upon their sex, will women’s writing be recognized for its own merits
and not because its authors are female. The
fatal flaw that Woolf finds in many novels by women is what she describes as a sense
of bitterness and a hint at the desire for self-expression that women have not
been permitted to openly articulate. Women’s
attempts to defend or compensate for their gender have shaped women’s writing
in ways that lead Woolf to declare, “[I]t is fatal for anyone who writes to
think of their sex…It is fatal for a woman to lay
the least stress on any grievance; to plead even with justice any cause; in any
way to speak consciously as a woman” (103). Nelly Richard writes in Masculine/Feminine: Practices of Difference(s) that both masculine
and feminine forces “…act together in every process of creative subject
formation: it is the dominance of one force over the other that polarizes
writing” (21). This idea bolsters
Woolf’s argument that the essence of creativity itself is not gendered, and echoes
her assertion that both masculine and feminine qualities can and should be
found at work together in good writing, for, “It is when this fusion takes
place that the mind is fully fertilized and uses all its faculties. Perhaps a mind that is purely masculine
cannot create, any more than a mind that is purely feminine…” (97). Only the
androgynous mind is capable of producing truly great works of literature,
unaffected by the societal constraints associated with an author’s
identification as masculine or feminine.
The
labeling of literature in such binary terms can be useful in a historical
context, but as Woolf argues, writers must surpass cultural ideas about gender
if they are to write with integrity to their vision; such binary oppositions as
male and female “are more than theoretically interesting examples of human
cognition, for the processes of defining by negation are sometimes used to
justify the political and economic practices of exclusion” (Penticoff, Brodkey
229). Fixating on the sex of women
writers only serves to underscore gender divisions still fraught with tension. Unless women are allowed to write unimpeded
by and unconscious of their sex, they cannot achieve the creative successes
that their male counterparts have been free to attain. Though Woolf occupies herself with questions
about women’s writing and its place in literature, her ultimate hope is for a
future in which it will be possible to transcend the patriarchal mentality that
has imposed such damaging limitations on writers, both masculine and feminine,
and their creativity.
