463699

University of Tulsa
"Untying the Mother Tongue": Female Difference in Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's
Own
Author(s): Frances L. Restuccia
Source: Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, Vol. 4, No. 2 (Autumn, 1985), pp. 253-264
Published by: University of Tulsa
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/463699
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"Untying the Mother Tongue":
Female Difference in Virginia Woolfs A Room of
One's Own
Frances L. Restuccia
Boston College
When Virginia Woolf writes "women alone stir my imagination," we are bound to
consider the power of that influence. She raided the patriarchy and trespassed on male
territory, returning to share her spoils with other women: women's words, the feminine
sentence, and finally the appropriate female form.?Introduction to New Feminist
Essays on Virginia Woolf, Jane Marcus.
"I don't know," said Archer.

"Well, I don't know either," said Betty, humorously and simply, and who shall deny
that this blankness of mind, when combined with profusion, mother wit, old wives'
tales, haphazard ways, moments of astonishing daring, humour, and sentimentality?
who shall deny that in these respects every woman is nicer than any man?? Jacob's
Room, Virginia Woolf.
After wrestling with the sinuous argument of A Room of Ones Own, it

takes considerable self-control not to be disturbed by Quentin BelPs cool
dismissal of Woolf s masterpiece?or, perhaps I should say, "materpiece."1 In
Virginia Woolf: A Biography, Bell cavalierly ranks A Room of Ones Own as
"the easiest of Virginia's books." He claims that it is "held together; not as in
her other works by a thread of feeling, but by a thread of argument," which,
he judges, is "simple" and "well-stated," "easily and conversationally" devel?
oped, "striking home in some memorable passages but [as if to "strike home"
were a defect] always lightly and amusingly expressed." Quentin Bell has, in
fact, compressed Woolfs thesis into a four-sentence nutshell:
The disabilities of women are social and economic; the woman writer can only survive
despite great difficulties, and despite the prejudice and the economic selfishness of men;
and the key to emancipation is to be found in the door of a room which a woman may
call her own and which she can inhabit with the same freedom and independence as her
brothers. The lack of this economic freedom breeds resentment, the noisy assertive
resentment of the male, who insists on claiming his superiority, and the shrill nagging
resentment of the female who clamours for her rights. Both produce bad literature, for
literature?fiction, that is?demands a comprehensive sympathy which transcends and
comprehends the feelings of both sexes. The great artist is Androgynous.2
253
Woolf scholars writing more recently than Quentin Bell have shrunk the
argument to even skinnier proportions: Mark Spilka's passing reference to
"the androgynous vision of Orlando and A Room of One's Ownn in his new
book, Virginia Woolfs Quarrel with Grieving, seems representative.3 More
warily, Phyllis Rose, in Woman of Letters: A Life of Virginia Woolf, cultivates
this same basic perspective: "The major works?Lighthouse, Orlando, A Room
of One's Own?are all in different ways concerned with sex roles, and all in
different ways suggest the desirability of an end to rigid designations of what
is masculine and what is feminine, an ideal which we might?very cau?
tiously?refer to as androgyny."4 And although Elaine Showalter herself
doubts that Woolf had her heart in the theory of androgyny (and in this
respect Showalter's attitude toward Woolfs so-called androgynous vision
coincides with my own), in A Literature of Their Own, she sums up the
prevailing view of Woolf's sexual politics and aesthetics in stating that "In
recent years it has become important to feminist critics to emphasize
Virginia Woolfs strength and gaiety and to see her as the apotheosis of a new
literary sensibility?not feminine, but androgynous."5 We have come to
conceive of A Room of One's Own and the theory of androgyny as
synonymous.
Yet anyone who even half pays attention to current trends knows that
neofeminism of the past decade is headed in the opposite direction from
androgyny: the latest phase of feminism has been dominated by a concerted
effort to valorize the idea of "female difference." Despite the supposed
"Franco-American dis-connection,"6 French as well as American feminists
have supported the recent about-face in feminist attitudes, turning away
from the advocacy of gender-blind equality to an exploration and celebra?
tion of female experience, female development, and "the feminine." In a
1981 Critical Inquiry article, "Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness," Show-
alter names both American critics?Spacks, Moers, herself, Baym, Gilbert,
Gubar, and Homans?and French critics?Cixous, Kristeva, and Irigaray?
as the founders of what she labels "gynocritics," since each of these writers
has taken up the question of "How can we constitute women as a distinct
literary group?" and "What is the difference of women's writing?"7
One might imagine, then, that feminist thought has left Virginia Woolf,
with her theory of androgyny, in the dust, in order to progress to Showalter's
feminist "promised land"?"the tumultuous and intriguing wilderness of
difference itself."8 In the androgynous promised land, one would have
guessed, differences dissolve: but the fact is that in Woolf's vision they do
not. And it is important to note that they do not, because then we may
observe that between Woolf and most contemporary feminist theorists a
vital, unacknowledged kinship exists, based on a feminist revaluation of the
feminine. Despite accumulated cliches fostering the notion of Woolfs
254
dedication to androgyny, A Room of Ones Own actually places more empha?
sis on the difference between the sexes than on their androgynous
mergence.
But before analyzing A Room of Ones Own as a manifesto for female
difference, written "under cover," to borrow Gilbert and Gubar's phrase, it
might be useful to get some preliminary sense of why Woolf may have laid
the veil of androgyny over her apology for women and women's writing. In
New Feminist Essays on Virginia Woolf, editor Jane Marcus portrays Woolf as a
staunch enemy of the patriarchy who "trembled with fear as she prepared her
attacks."9 Marcus implies that Woolf, so as not to be caught, launched
covert attacks: "She always feared she would be found out, that the punish?
ment of the fathers for daring to trespass on their territory was Instant
dismemberment by wild horses', as she told Ethel Smyth. The violence of
men's imagined retaliation was in direct proportion to the violence of her
hatred for their values" (Marcus, 1). Woolf's anxiety, I would add, peri?
odically surfaces throughout A Room of Ones Own. She warns that the bold
writer who set out to produce a history of men's opposition to women's
emancipation (an amusing book she would like to see written) "would need
thick gloves on her hands, and bars to protect her of solid gold."10 She
speculates on "how a woman nowadays would write a poetic tragedy in five
acts"?would she use verse or prose??but worries that wandering from her
subject "into trackless forests" could cause her to "be lost, and very likely,
devoured by wild beasts" (Room, 80-81). She jokes nervously about the
presence of men in her audience: "Are there no men present? Do you
promise me that behind that red curtain over there the figure of Sir Chartres
Biron is not concealed? We are all women, you assure me? Then I may tell
you that the very next words I read were these?'Chloe liked Olivia'" (Room,
85-86). Towards the end of A Room, she continues the jest: "That cupboard
there,?you say it holds clean table-napkins only; but what if Sir Archibald
Bodkin were concealed among them? Let me then adopt a sterner tone"
(Room, 115). And for murmuring that Mary Carmichael "should also learn
to laugh, without bitterness, at the vanities?say rather at the peculiarities,
for it is a less offensive word?of the other sex," she fears "the lash that was
once almost laid on [her] shoulders" (Room, 94).
But what exactly was Woolf so nervous about? What was the nature of her
attack? What did she assault? Marcus' idea seems to be (and I would concur)
that Woolf laid quiet siege on what she perceived as male linguistic property.
And "If language was the private property of the patriarchs, to 'trespass' on it
was an act of usurpation" (Marcus, 1). Like some feminists today, especially
French feminists, Woolf saw herself as "untying the Mother Tongue, freeing
language from bondage to the fathers and returning it to women and the
working classes" (Marcus, 1). But so insurrectionary a project needed a less
255
trepid leader than Virginia Woolf, who looked for and found an alibi?the
theory of androgyny, which made an appeal to feminists even as it seemed, in
its elegant balancing of the male and the female, satisfyingly judicious and
proportional to others. Perhaps self-revealingly, Woolf claims in A Room of
Ones Own that "the desire to be veiled" that possessed women writers who
adopted male noms de plume (Currer Bell, George Eliot, George Sand) still
possesses women (Room 52). A "lightly and amusingly expressed" argument
is all of the revolution that Quentin Bell manages to perceive. Even today,
female authors, such as Alice Walker in The Color Purple, cloak their
revolutionary politics in cute characterizations and imagery; the radical
message, having been rendered palatable, thus has a chance to seep out.
The full extent of Woolf's feminist politics too is now trickling out. Ellen
Hawkes in "Woolf's Magical Garden of Women" (an essay in Marcus' book)
assumes in passing that A Room of Ones Own, despite its deferred call for an
androgynous union of the male and female, establishes "a female tradition
. . . which was the culmination of [Woolf's] many years of 'thinking back
through [her] mothers.'"11 A Room of Ones Own does ostensibly climax on
the note of androgyny. But that theory is a ruse?well disguised for some,
thinly disguised for others. Even when, after about a hundred pages of
dwelling on male and female difference, Woolf appropriates, and expounds,
Coleridge's idea of androgyny, she merely says that "Some collaboration has
to take place in the mind between the woman and the man before the act of
creation can be accomplished. Some marriage of opposites has to be con?
summated" (Room, 108). We may imagine a tiny man and a tiny woman
making love in the artist's mind; we may imagine even a manly man and a
womanly woman. Difference between the sexes has been preserved: with the
theory of androgyny Woolf has not relinquished her impassioned preference
for sexual difference over likeness. Speaking of the creative power of women,
she asserts that it
differs greatly from the creative power of men. And one must conclude that it would be a
thousand pities if it were hindered or wasted, for it was won by centuries of the most
drastic discipline, and there is nothing to take its place. It would be a thousand pities if
women wrote like men, or lived like men, or looked like men, for if two sexes are quite
inadequate, considering the vastness and variety of the world, how should we manage
with one only? Ought not education to bring out and fortify the differences rather than
the similarities? For we have too much likeness as it is. {Room, 91-92)
The incongruity of such a strong statement in a work propounding a theory

of androgyny seems glaring.
Woolf rests her theory that it is natural for the sexes to unite on a
particular image of observed London life. A falling leaf points to "a force in
things," to an invisible river eddying people along. The ghostly river brings
256
together the following triad: "a girl in patent leather boots," "a young man in
a maroon overcoat," and, finally, "a taxi-cab." Woolf remarks casually on the
ordinariness of the scene, but zeroes in on the source of its uniqueness and
hence its fascination for her: "What was strange [she notes carefully] was the
rhythmical order with which my imagination had invested it." It is Woolf's
imaginative re-creation of this quotidian collision?rather than the raw
event?that eases her mind, she tells us, of "some strain," which she decides
was the result of "thinking these two days, of one sex as distinct from the
other." To do that?to think in terms of sexual dichotomy?is, she explains,
"an effort," interfering with "the unity of the mind" (Room, 100).
Woolf virtually spells out here that the vision providing the inspiration
for her theory of androgyny is just that: an artistic vision, effected by "the
rhythmical order with which [her] imagination" invests the taxi scene, and
required for the comfort of her mind. Woolf's androgyny, to speak of it in
terms of the antithesis that most obsessed her, falls on the side of art (or
artificiality) rather than on the side of nature (or naturalness). After at?
tempting to establish the difficult, and I think in her view, more verisimilar,
concept of sexual difference for five chapters (I shall demonstrate shortly her
deep engagement with this idea), she yields, as always, to her desire, her
need, for artistic form. Though to most of us, some "strain" might be the
common result of forging an artistic unity, to Woolf, plagued by impending
madness from which she knew she could escape solely through the order and
wholeness of art, the actual fissiparous state of things is likely to have been
the more nerve-wracking. And so she produces a non sequitur: she finds
mental solace in an artistic vision that leads her to conclude erroneously
"that it is natural for the sexes to co-operate" (Room, 101, my emphasis). Her
leap may leave many readers baffled and behind.
In any case, what is important to get straight is that instead of regarding
feminine and masculine roles as artificial constructs of convention that
should be jettisoned rather than assumed (instead of insisting, as Carolyn
Heilbrun does in Towards a Recognition of Androgyny, "that our definitions of
the terms 'masculine' and 'feminine' are themselves little more than unex-
amined, received ideas"),12 Woolf admits the hand of art in the arrangement
of her thoughts precisely when she entertains the idea of the mergence of
the sexes. For Woolf, that is an imaginative stroke, an artificial construct.
We should not be too surprised; there is no shortage of intimations for
readers who are on their toes that Woolf's apparent thesis is a feint, that her
actual thesis is camouflaged. We have been warned not to accept everything.
The first two chapters of A Room of Ones Own play with the very problem of
"truth":
When a subject is highly controversial?and any question about sex is that?one cannot
hope to tell the truth. One can only show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does
257
hold. One can only give ones audience the chance of drawing their own conclusions as
they observe the limitations, the prejudices, the idiosyncracies [the anxieties?] of the
speaker, (Room, 4, my emphasis)
Woolf has primed us to spot incongruities: even at the moment of explaining

her newly born concept of androgyny she punctuates her explanation with
reminders of the notion that I think stimulated her most of all, and all
along?the idea of sexual difference.
It is at this pivotal point, for example, that she reiterates her assertion
that "a woman writing thinks back through her mothers" (Room, 101). One
might expect that such a sexual legacy would militate against the possibility
of androgyny, if androgyny is, as Heilbrun defines it, "a movement away from
sexual polarization and the prison of gender toward a world in which
individual roles and modes of personal behavior can be freely chosen"
(Heilbrun, ix-x). Yet Woolf traces in A Room of One's Own a genealogy of
women engendering women writers:
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. Jane Austen should have laid a wreath upon the
grave of Fanny Burney, and George Eliot done homage to the robust shade of Eliza
Carter?the valiant old woman who tied a bell to her bedstead in order that she might
wake early and learn Greek. All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb
of Aphra Behn... for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds. (Room,
68-69)
And she states point blank: "It is useless to go to the great men writers for
help. ... Lamb, Browne', Thackeray, Newman, Sterne, Dickens, De
Quincey?whoever it may be?never helped a women yet... .The weight,
the pace, the stride of a man's mind are too unlike her own for her to lift
anything substantial from him successfully. The ape is too distant to be
sedulous" (Room, 79).
And the weight, the pace, the stride of a man's mind produce a male
literary style, against which Woolf defines a female style of writing. After
completing the core of her explanation of androgyny, Woolf lapses immedi?
ately into an analysis of "a man's writing": "Mr. A's" writing is "so direct, so
straightforward after the writing of women. It indicated such freedom of
mind, such liberty of person, such confidence in himself." Mr. A's prose,
furthermore, is blanketed by a "shadow," "a straight dark bar.. . shaped
something like the letter 'I.'" A man's writing is, to Woolf, egotistical, the
ubiquitous ego it embodies overshadowing any landscape?trees, women?
behind it (Room, 103). Speaking of Kipling and Galsworthy, she complains
that "all their qualities seem to a woman, if one may generalise, crude and
258
immature" (Room, 106), and she goes so far as to drop, through her typical
metonymic style, the faint hint that "unmitigated masculinity" (as that
apparent then in Mussolini's Rome) is fascist ic (Room, 106-07). Admittedly,
Woolf is, at least by the end of this diagnosis, lamenting the state of male
writing, and so her attack may be seen as part of her argument in favor of
androgyny?that is, male writers have a lot to learn from the female
sensibility. My point, however, is that evidence of the difference between the
sexes in the middle of an argument for androgyny can only serve to
attenuate such a stance. Though it is apparent that to Woolf a man is better
off writing androgynously than as a man, nevertheless her constant impulse
to characterize writing in sexual terms suggests that she finds the idea that
there is a masculine as well as a feminine language extremely compelling. I
should note here, so as not to be misunderstood, that it is difficult to
pinpoint once and for all in Woolf an essentialist position on the subject of a
feminine aesthetic (or, for that matter, a masculine aesthetic), since she
hints at it as well as at its opposite. I would grant that Woolf, continually
vacillating, sometimes tends to see sexual difference as the product of
historical circumstances (think of Orlando) that take various forms as one
historical period yields to another. But essentialist or not on this issue,
Woolf, writing "under cover" in A Room of One's Own, subtly insinuates the
idea that there are distinct masculine and feminine discourses, and that
women should rejoice in developing theirs.
We may further observe the weakness Woolf's theory of androgyny has for
her by questioning whether she would expect a posited Miss A to temper the
feminine qualities of her writing with a few masculine qualities, as she seems
to expect Mr. A to adjust his prose in reverse. Can femininity, like mas?
culinity, ever be in excess? Woolf holds a double standard. Her abundant
praise throughout A Room of One's Own of the way women writers write as
women undermines the possibility that she wishes they would give up (or
even modify) their style and subject matter and compose more an?
drogynously. Mr. B, the critic, along with Mr. A, Kipling, Galsworthy,
Milton, Ben Jonson, Wordsworth, and Tolstoy have "a dash too much of the
male in them" (Room, 107), but it is never that a writer is excessively
feminine. Although Woolf admits that Proust was perhaps "a little too much
of a woman," she excuses him (illogically) on the grounds that "that failing is
too rare for one to complain of it, since without some mixture of the kind the
intellect seems to predominate and the other faculties of the mind harden
and become barren" (Room, 107). Indeed, in light of Woolf's statement,
made in reference to women, that "the book has somehow to be adapted to
the body" (Room, 81), one wonders if any alteration in the habits of women
writers could even take place without a sex change of some sort. If, as Woolf
says, "the nerves that feed the brain. . . differ in men and women" (Room,
259
81)?if the nervous system is integrally related to writing, as she suggests it
is?then no woman, actually no person, could hope to be able to write
androgynously. But Woolfs theoretical arguments are typically deployed to
deny the possibility that women could write more like men, never to deny
the imperative that men should write more like women.
Perhaps Woolf is intimating that the woman of genius, unlike the ordi?
nary writing woman, possesses the nerves of a woman finely interlaced with
the nerves of a man. In her treatment of writing by the women of genius she
recognizes as such, is it the androgynous quality of their writing that prompts
Woolf to praise it so glowingly?13 Not at all. Jane Austen and Emily Bronte
receive Woolfs accolades by virtue of their refusing to adopt the prevailing
masculine convictions, for example, that "football and sport are 'important';
the worship of fashion, the buying of clothes'trivial'. ... What genius, what
integrity it must have required in face of all that criticism, in the midst of
that purely patriarchal society [Woolf eulogizes], to hold fast to the thing as
they saw it without shrinking" (Room, 77). In Woolfs judgment, the bril?
liance of Austen and Bronte is due precisely to the fact that "they wrote as
women write, not as men write" (Room, 78). Again, it seems there really was,
according to Woolf, no choice, since she tells us that the male sentence, the
essential building block of the literary tradition towering in front of these
women, "was unsuited for a woman's use" (Room, 79-80), Charlotte Bronte
"stumbled and fell" and George Eliot "committed atrocities" upon seeking to
adapt the male sentence to their use. But Austen, lady that she was,
"laughed at it," and designed in its place "a perfectly natural, shapely
sentence" (Room, 80), conforming, one might wonder, to the curves of the
female body?
Rather than as an apology for androgyny, then, I read A Room of One's
Own as an apology for femininity, women, and women's writing. Through?
out the book, Woolf seems enamored of women, of the "intricacy" and
"power" of their "highly developed creative faculty" (Room, 91). She advises
Mary Carmichael, author of Life's Adventure, to "above all.. . illumine [her]
own soul with its profundities and its shallows, and its vanities and its
generosities, and say what [her]beauty means to [her] or [her] plainness, and
what is [her] relation to the everchanging and turning world of gloves and
shoes and stuffs swaying up and down among the faint scents that come
through chemists' bottles down arcades of dress material over a floor of
pseudo-marble" (Room, 93-94). Her advice to Mary catapults Woolf imagina?
tively into a dress shop hung with colored ribbons that, she writes, "would
lend itself to the pen as fittingly as any snowy peak or rocky gorge in the
Andes" (Room, 94). The true history of the shop girl fires her imagination
much more than would another life of Napoleon or study of Keats. (In 1930,
one year after the publication of A Room of One's Own, Woolf writes to Ethel
260
Smyth, "I only want to show off to women. Women alone stir my imagina?
tion.")14 Woolf urges Mary to be a realist of the feminine world. And finally
she compliments Mary for mastering the "first great lesson": "she wrote as a
woman, but as a woman who has forgotten that she is a woman, so that her
pages were full of that curious sexual quality which comes only when sex is
unconscious of itself" (Room, 96). This apparent paradox, which read
cursorily might seem to indicate that Woolf would have women writers
transcend their sexuality, gets cleared up later on: "to lay the least stress on
any grievance; to plead even with justice any cause [is] to speak consciously as
a woman" (Room, 108, my emphasis). Woolfs "first great lesson" teaches no
delicate androgynous balancing of masculine and feminine tendencies; it is
purely a matter of women writers overcoming their anger to achieve "that
curious sexual quality which comes only when sex is unconscious of itself." It
is perhaps here that Woolf sounds most neofeminist: she seems to be subtly,
circuitously, ever so gently nudging women to tap the feminine unconscious.
One comes away from A Room of One's Own with the impression (however
subliminal) that men are bellicose, preoccupied with heroism, instinctively
possessive and acquisitive, incapable of apprehending "things in them?
selves," mentally heavy and dry (their minds separated into chambers),
egotistical, excessively intellectual, full of learning without the ability to
express emotion, direct and straightforward as writers, devoid of the power
of suggestion?in short, to use the term loosely, "phallogocentric." The
female sensibility, on the other hand, is something to extol. Woolf lauds
Mary Carmichael as one might wish to laud Woolf:
She had a sensibility that was very wide, eager and free. It responded to an almost
imperceptible touch on it. It feasted like a plant newly stood in the air on every sight and
sound that came its way. It ranged, too, very subtly and curiously, among almost
unknown or unrecorded things; it lighted on small things and showed that perhaps they
were not small after all, It brought buried things to light and made one wonder what
need there had been to bury them. (Room, 96)
And Woolf seems enchanted with all women, not only writers. She
attributes to women the ability to fertilize anew "the dried ideas" of "il?
lustrious men," to renew creative power. At play with her children in the
drawing room or nursery, or with embroidery on her knee?and therefore
"the centre of some different order and system of life"?the woman refreshes
and invigorates her male observer, confers upon him something that the
male sex is "unable to supply" (Room, 90). Easing into her peroration, Woolf
announces boldly her affinity for the members of her sex: "The truth is, I
often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their subtlety. I like
their anonymity. I like?but I must not run on in this way" (Room, 115). No,
261
she must not unveil the magnitude of her love of the female sex, for how can
an apology for androgyny afford to contain such passion?
Androgyny serves in A Room of One's Own as a curtain draped over the
more subversive defense of female difference. Whereas androgyny at least
retains a respect for "male characteristics," yoking them to "female charac?
teristics," the theory of female difference values the female as it devalues the
male.15 Jane Marcus cannot be accused of hyperbole in assuming that Woolf
"raided the patriarchy." Woolf's attitude toward patriarchs and professors
betrays a deep distaste for the male animal:
Their education had.,. .bred in them defects. . . . True, they had money and power,
but only at the cost of harbouring in their breast an eagle, a vulture, for ever tearing the
liver out and plucking at the lungs?the instinct for possession, the rage for acquisition
which drives them to desire other people's fields and goods perpetually; to make
frontiers and flags; battleships and poison gas; to offer up their own lives and their
children's lives. Walk through the Admiralty Arch... or any other avenue given up to
trophies and cannon, and reflect upon the kind of glory celebrated there. Or watch in
the spring sunshine the stockbroker and the great barrister going indoors to make
money and more money and more money when it is a fact that five hundred pounds a
year will keep one alive in the sunshine. These are unpleasant instincts to har'
bour.. . .They are bred of the. . .lack of civilisation. (Room, 38-39)
I have said that I consider Woolf to have been writing, in Gilbert and
Gubar's phrase, "under cover," concealing her passionate and revolutionary
love for women by means of a genteel, aesthetically attractive argument
(Woolf herself was attracted artistically to it) for androgynous compromise.
(We should recall her caveat: "Lies will flow from my lips, but there may
perhaps be some truth mixed up with them; it is for you to seek out this
truth"?Room, 4). But the case cannot be put quite so simply, as the
ambivalent history of feminism testifies. Indeed, it may be said that Woolf
manages to adumbrate all the major phases of feminist criticism, both sides
of the basic internecine debate. For at the heart of the argument for female
difference is a rhetorical flaw that anti-feminists can exploit. On the one
hand, Woolf denigrates masculinity, men, and men's writing (the epitome of
this is the association she makes between men's writing and fascism), and so
she had good reason to fear the anger of any male chauvinist who penetrated
the veil of her argument; she had buried a verbal bomb in A Room of One's
Own, for which she may actually have needed a cover. But, on the other
hand, Woolf sings the praises of femininity, women, and women's writing (a
dress shop hung with colored ribbons sparks her imagination), a project
which needs not a cover but protection. What we have here are, of course,
two aspects of a single position, one negative, one positive; the problem is
that in its positive aspect the argument seems to dissipate all its ex-
262
plosiveness. For, as Colette Guillaumin argues in Questions feministes (and
here I quote Ann Jones's paraphrasing), "There is nothing liberatory... in
women's claiming as virtues qualities that men have always found conve?
nient. How does maternal tenderness or undemanding empathy threaten a
Master?"16 Or, to put the matter in terms of A Room of One's Own: how many
men would fail to be enchanted with Mary Carmichael's sensitivity to gloves
and shoes and stuffs and scents and colors?
Or again: how many men would fail to be as charmed as Quentin Bell by
how "lightly and amusingly" Woolf has managed to write her tract? (He
recognizes the argument for androgyny, but he responds to Woolf's feminin?
ity, and her feminine style, and thus seems to escape her attack unscathed.)
Here we begin to see how problematic is the concept of writing "under
cover," for in the peculiarly complicated politics of feminist revolution,
subversion is easily absorbed?a challenge to the patriarchy may end up
inspiring a new gallantry. From this perspective we can understand, then,
just how dismissible Woolf's argument for female difference can be. As a
"light" argument by a female for femininity, it seems to entitle any male to
feel absolutely untouched, or even pleasantly attracted by it. As an argu?
ment, however, not from the feminine point of view but from the an?
drogynous point of view, not of femininity but of humanity, "striking home"
occasionally in counterpoint to its apparent lightness, A Room of One's Own
can succeed in discomfiting its male reader. Talk of femininity can be
ignored; talk of humanity is less apt to be.
On this reading, androgyny is the tougher view to assimilate, female
difference the easier. But I have tried to show that "female difference" is
much the deeper strain of Woolfs essay. Then what, precisely, is the rela?
tionship of the two views? It seems to me that androgyny is in the book to
protect?as much as to mask?the idea of difference that is espoused. Just as
androgyny, unprotected, frequently reduces under societal pressure to the
masculinization of women, so female difference frequently reduces, by the
same process, to the re-feminization of women. In this light, the basic and
inevitable conflict in feminism is not so much a dispute as an unavoidably
oscillating attempt to keep the idea and program of feminism unreduced.
Let us presume, as I have suggested, that Woolf took up androgyny to
protect as well as to mask her more basic allegiance to female difference. Her
problem is then how to keep her androgyny from subverting her real view.
She would, we might expect, argue (implicitly if not explicitly) that an?
drogyny in effect means only one thing: that men should grow more like
women, that male writers should write more like female writers. This essay
has been written to propose that that is precisely what Woolf has done. In
A Room of One's Own there is no encouragement of mutual exchange, none
whatsoever.
263
NOTES
!The term is from Gertrude Stein, The Geographical History of America or The Relation
Human Nature to Human Mind (1936; rpt. New York: Vintage Books, 1973), 232,
2Quentin Bell, Virginia Woolf: A Biography (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972
2, 144.
3Mark Spilka, Virginia Woolfs Quarrel with Grieving (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
1980), 109.
4Phyllis Rose, Woman of Letters: A Life of Virginia Woolf (New York: Oxford University Press,
1978), 176.
5 Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Bronte to Lessing
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), 263.1 agree with, and find support in, many of
the steps of Showalter's argument in her essay, "Virginia Woolf and the Flight into Androgyny."
We share the idea that Woolf's androgyny "is a response to the dilemma of a woman writer
alarmed by feelings [about women] too hot to handle without risking real rejection by her
family, her audience, and her class" (286). But the conclusion of Showalter's reading of Woolf is
more dreary than mine. Showalter sees Woolf as evading womanhood?"Refined to its essences,
abstracted from its physicality and anger, denied any action, Woolf's vision of womanhood is as
deadly as it is disembodied" (297)?whereas I see Woolf craftily, clandestinely celebrating it.
6See Domna C. Stanton, "Language and Revolution: The Franco-American Dis-Connec-
tion," in The Future of Difference, eds. Hester Eisenstein, and Alice Jardine (Boston: G.K. Hall,
1980), 73-87.
7Elaine Showalter, "Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness," Critical Inquiry, 8 (1981), 185.
8Showalter, "Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness," 205.
9Jane Marcus, "Thinking Back Through Our Mothers," in New Feminist Essays on Virginia
Woolf, ed. Jane Marcus (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1981), 1.
10Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1929), 57,
hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as Room.
11 Ellen Hawkes, "Woolf's Magical Garden of Women," in New Feminist Essays on Virginia
Woolf, 42. According to the biographical sketch in Marcus' book, "Ellen Hawkes's The Virgin
in the Bell Biography' was the first of the new feminist approaches to Woolf scholarship."
12Carolyn G. Heilbrun, Towards a Recognition of Androgyny (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1973), xiv. Subsequent references are cited parenthetically in the text.
13 Woolf hardly strove to balance her own egoless fiction, for example, with the ego-centered
fiction she attributed to men. As Jane Marcus points out, Woolf "saw the ego as male, aggressive
and domineering," and "the ego is the enemy" (Marcus, 9). Showalter too comments that
"Virginia Woolf herself never approached the state of serene indifference she called androgyny
... she was even able to appreciate the excellence of a partisan art." Showalter, A Literature of
Their Own, 290.
14 Virginia Woolf, The Letters of Virginia Woolf, eds. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann
(New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1978), 4, 203.
15Even if one accepts that difference in the French context, as Josette Feral explains, is not
defined with respect to a "masculine norm?whose negative side it would be," it must still be
recognized that, as Feral also comments, "Difference becomes the negation of phallogo-
centrism" (Josette Feral, "The Powers of Difference," in The Future of Difference, 91), and
consequently of a constellation of stigmatized writing qualities?e.g., logic, structure, linearity,
straightforwardness, distance, emotional control, the non-personal, the critical, the chrono?
logical, and so on.
16 Ann Rosalind Jones, "Writing the Body: Toward an Understanding of L'Ecriture Feminine,"
Feminist Studies, 7 (1981), 257.
264

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"I don't know," said Archer.

After wrestling with the sinuous argument of A Room of Ones Own, it

The incongruity of such a strong statement in a work propounding a theory

Woolf has primed us to spot incongruities: even at the moment of explaining

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