While sitting, reading, and thinking in a room of my own with five hundred a year, these series of thoughts came to me.----“For we have too much likeness as it is!” With that quote, Virginia Woolf (or Mary Seton, Mary Beton, Mary Carmichael, or whomever) suggests that Wabash College, a college for men, is a good thing. While Woolf’s lengthy speech fundamentally concerns the need for supplying women with a room of their own and five hundred pounds a year to live on, whether figuratively or literally, I believe it resonates with a suggestion that women and men should be educated separately so as to hone their individual and unique voices. Woolf states, “Ought not education to bring out and fortify the differences rather than the similarities?” She elaborates further, discussing how men and women can only write truly excellent poetry (or prose) if they are unencumbered by competition with the other sex. Competition pits one gender against the other, it forces males to defend their sex and a females their own. However, according to Coleridge and Woolf, for the mind to be resonant and porous, for it to transmit emotion without impediment, for it to be naturally creative, incandescent, and undivided, the mind must be androgynous. It must utilize both voices distinctly, without defending one against the other. It must be free to go where it pleases whether that is to a mark on the wall or to a scene where two people get into a taxi—it must be free to explore. It must be composed of the truth, and not just gender specific truth, rather it must “celebrate some feeling that one used to have, so that one responds easily, familiarly, without troubling to check the feeling, or to compare it with any that one has now” (2098). And it must do so for both men and women—not falling on deaf ears to half of the population. Indeed, it may seem somewhat paradoxical, but for Woolf, the mind becomes androgynous not through mutual interaction and education but through individualized gender specific education that elevates each voice respectively and doesn’t pit one voice against the other. She’s not saying that one sex can’t write about the other sex or can’t think about it or can’t interact with it (in fact by mentioning the shilling size hole on the rests on back of each persons head that only the opposite sex can see, she proposes that these things should happen), she is merely suggesting that in respect to providing for the best the education of women and men, so long as society continues to change in the favor of equalizing the rights and opportunities of women, they must be taught separately.
3 comments:
Interesting connection between Woolf's ideal of writing from an androgynous mind and the means necessary to achieve that mindset. At first, I thought her remarks about writing from an androgynous mind implied not, like you thought, that male and female perspectives needed to both speak, but that one's sex needed to be completely derecognized when writing. However, with recourse to the following quite from page 2146, I think you're right: "one must be woman-manly or man-womanly." Further, "Some collaboration has to take place in the mind between the woman and the man before the act of creation can be accomplished (2146)."
Im not so sure that Virginia's true aim is to keep from pitting one sex against another as I find many of her comments about the nature of men seems to deliberately point at some kind of fundamental weakness on the part of the male mind that is remedied through the suppression of women. Also I think she clearly says that men are unable, and furthermore have no right to paint women in the light that they do. The part about the shilling sized hole is interesting because she says that each sex would notice and do well to notice the shilling sized hole in the back of the other's head and yet she then goes on to mention every instance of man's ridicule for women saying that women then dont have the same right..she then goes on to say "Not of course that anyone in their senses would counsel her to hold up to scorn and ridicule of set purpose—literature shows the futility of what is written in that spirit" suggesting that this has been the nature of the critisism towards woman by men. However, I think by the very first comment I made this is excactly what she proceeds to do.
I also am not sure if I agree with the assumption that the sexes should be separate in regards to education. I believe that Woolf is stressing the fact that, perhaps, they do not in fact need to be separated, that the individual rooms are really a metaphor for, simply, their place in fiction. Meaning, however people may separate women's literature from men's that they should still have a sufficient place where all may be able to partake in the ability to write for a living, for $500 if you will. I think that separating the sexes is just continuing the tradition she hopes to break, that it simply furthers the gap which was already naturally (historically?) created.
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