Читать книгу A Room of One's Own - Virginia Woolf - Страница 10

Casting across the history of literature, Woolf identifies a range of both important and forgotten women writers, including Austen, Eliot, the Brontës, and Aphra Behn. She establishes a new model of literary heritage, which acknowledges not only those women who succeeded, but those who were made invisible or anonymous, prevented from working in the first place due to their sex, or their works cast aside by prevailing value systems. Woolf explores how women's letter‐writing, for example, can demonstrate both a woman's aptitude for writing and the way in which it is cramped and suppressed by other expectations of her time.

Woolf's key idea is that the lack of an identifiable matrilineal literary heritage works to impede women's ability to write and crushes their expectations. To underscore this point, she presents the story of ‘Judith’, an imagined sister of Shakespeare. Judith is a woman equal to her brother in talent, intellect and creativity, but without his encouragement or resources. While he attends school, she must ‘mend the stockings or mind the stew and not moon about with books and papers.’ Resistant to her family's expectation that she marry a local boy, Judith escapes to London and begs at the stage door for a role on the stage. But the pity of a stage manager compromises her dreams once more: ‘she found herself with child by that gentleman and so – who shall measure the heat and violence of the poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body? – killed herself one winter's night.’ Judith's thwarted spark thus comes to stand for the fate of so many women prevented from following their natural talent for fear of transgressing cultural expectations.

For Woolf, the establishment of major women writers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the moment ‘the middle‐class woman began to write’, is in her mind a moment in history ‘of greater importance than the Crusades or the War of the Roses.’ T.S. Eliot in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919) and Harold Bloom in The Anxiety of Influence (1973) both identify the (male) writer's relation to his precursors as necessary for his own literary production. But how is a woman to write if she has no models, Woolf asks? This is, she says, the ‘difficulty which faced [women writers] … when they came to set their thoughts to paper – that is that they had no tradition behind them, or one so short and partial that it was of little help’. Famously, she asserts, ‘we think back through our mothers if we are women.’ Woolf continues:

‘Without those forerunners, Jane Austen and the Brontës and George Eliot could no more have written than Shakespeare could have written without Marlowe, or Marlowe without Chaucer, or Chaucer without those forgotten poets who paved the ways and tamed the natural savagery of the tongue. For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice … It is [Aphra Behn] … who makes it not quite fantastic for me to say to you tonight: Earn five hundred a year by your wits.’

This argument for a matrilineal heritage became central to the feminist revisionist work of literary critics like Toril Moi, Elaine Showalter, Carolyn Heilbrun, Jane Marcus, Gillian Beer, Sandra K. Gilbert and Susan Gubar. Woolf was positioned as ‘the “mother” of feminist critics of the late twentieth century … the alpha and omega of feminist criticism, its origin and its “goal,”’ as Laura Marcus (2010) puts it. Just as the women writers Woolf identifies could not have come into being without their literary foremothers, so too it is hard to imagine contemporary feminism without Woolf.

One of the most important moments in A Room of One's Own is in Woolf's evocation of another imagined character, a writer named Mary Carmichael. As Woolf's contemporary, Carmichael emerges from the strictures that prevented Judith Shakespeare from succeeding as a writer. Her writing suffers from a self‐imposed restriction, what Woolf identifies as a fear ‘of being called “sentimental,”’ but her work is unusual in that it is seeking to inculcate change in both form and content.

Despite her unwieldy sentences, Mary Carmichael's characters ultimately lead to a profound moment in literature: ‘Chloe liked Olivia,’ the reader learns. Having included and noted this nod to women's sexuality, Woolf is then at pains to reassure her readers that ‘these things sometimes happen. Sometimes women do like women.’ Moreover, as Ellen Rosenman (1989) has pointed out, the line is significantly diluted from Woolf's original manuscript. Following hot on the heels of Radclyffe Hall's trial for obscenity in her depiction of a lesbian relationship in The Well of Loneliness (1928), Woolf was loath to attract the ire of the censors. Indeed, it is remarkable that her novel published in that same year, Orlando: A Biography, which depicts a character fluid in both gender and sexuality, did not suffer the same fate (see Parkes 1994). But in recognising that ‘Chloe liked Olivia,’ Mary Carmichael/Woolf not only permits the revelation of women as sexual beings, but also the potential for women's lives to have significance beyond their service or interest to men.

The Mary Carmichael episode of A Room of One's Own is also critical for our understanding of Woolf's perception of the socio‐economic status of women writing in her time, especially for the possible futures she describes throughout the essay. Mary Carmichael comes to stand as the ‘link between the middle‐class women writers of the eighteenth century and Woolf's predicted future woman writer of genius,’ argues Melissa Sullivan (2013). Through the figure of Mary Carmichael, Woolf observes the failures of modern women writers to achieve full intellectual and creative freedom, even as she celebrates the strides this figure has made since the death of her ancestor, Judith Shakespeare.