Virginia Woolf published her monograph, all six chapters, ‘A Room of One’s Own’, in 1929, based on a series of lectures she had given the previous year at Girton and Newnham, the two women’s colleges at Cambridge University. By then an established and esteemed novelist, the theme she was exploring was ‘Women and Fiction’. Published just ten years after women gained suffrage in Britain, the book is considered a precursor to the voluminous feminist literary activity of the late 20th century.
Despite the lack of formal academic training, Virginia Woolf was a cultured self-taught. She uses a narrative form of an imaginary young woman named Mary with any of three surnames, investigating the theme of ‘Women and Fiction’. She concludes that, at the very least, a woman needs “a room of her own” (that can be locked) and some money to live on (500 a year in Mary’s case). What she is saying clearly, after careful historical analysis of the lives led by men and women in relation to each other in the past, and up to the day of her deliberations, is that women are deprived of artistic and literary expression because of their economic, personal, and social subservience to men, and not because of any lack of innate ability or talent.
The purpose of this essay is to analyze and comment on the author’s extensive use of binary categories, beginning with the central, historically charged categorization of differences between men and women. Although this essay delves into two sets of binaries, reason/emotion and fiction/fact, Woolf’s awareness of the complexities of apparent binary categories is much more extensive and will be examined more closely in the following paragraphs.
Although there do not appear to be ‘opposites’ in nature, dualism appears to be deeply embedded in human thought and language. Binary opposites or polarizations are not always logical opposites, but they are necessary for units of language to have value and meaning. Following Saussurean structuralism, it is generally held that “binary opposition is one of the most important principles governing the structure of language”, while “paired contrasts” are not always “opposites”, in no exact sense, they are believed to be necessary as a means of ordering the “dynamic complexity of experience”. Most linguists believe that “binary opposition is a child’s first logical operation.” Another powerful influence on binary thinking in the West was Descartes’ mind-body dualism.
Binary thinking is also hierarchical. One of the two terms is considered positive and the other negative. Religious thought cannot exist without the polarization of guilt and innocence. Structuralists believe that the world is organized into masculine and feminine constructions, roles, words, and ideas. For example, masculinity (phallus) is associated with dominance and femininity (vagina) with passivity. Post-structuralists seek to deconstruct the entire edifice of binary thinking, not allowing one to be inherently superior to the other, giving instances of binary opposition that contradict each other and undermine their own authority.
However, there is a growing consensus that such ‘antitheses’ are aspects of a deeper unity and that ‘all so-called opposites such as reason/emotion and spirit/substance are merely ‘apparent’ binary opposites (Forceville, 1996). Woolf’s essay, having used a plethora of binaries in exposing her, concludes with an acceptance of that ‘deeper unity’ in her recognition of the ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine-masculine’ qualities in human nature.
Enough has been said about the fundamental importance of binary thinking in language use up to recent times that it is not surprising that Woolf’s essay is filled with many examples of the complexities between apparent binaries. Of course, the main concern when talking about ‘Women and Fiction’ is to define and delimit the topic. Woolf shows that this is not an easy matter. In the course of her research by reading books written by men about women, she discovers many ‘fictions’ such as the insistence on the inferiority of women on all fronts. Such views are not based on ‘facts’. Woolf dramatizes the effect of discrimination and disempowerment on women by asking the reader to imagine an equally talented sister of Shakespeare. Prevented from achieving any of her creative goals and ambitions, Judith Shakespeare commits suicide only after what women have been expected and allowed from time immemorial: giving birth.
Since Woolf’s lectures are given from a personal point of view and has no claim to be academic, she implores her audience not to expect an orderly conclusion. She uses a fictional device to present her argument based largely on facts that she collects in the British Museum Library. At the Oxbridge college that she visits, presumably by invitation, figures like Beadle, Fellows, and Scholars whom she introduces almost casually in Chapter One return at the end, emphasizing her relevance to the narrative and her theme. She was deprived of trespassing on her ‘territory’, both literally and metaphorically. She, too, was not admitted to a library there because of her sex. She deals with binary issues like illusion and truth. She also dichotomizes the sensibilities of before and after the war. She describes the trees and river in Oxbridge as vague and resigned at sunset, turning glorious and expectant in the morning. She also addresses the binary qualities of ‘laughter’ and ‘angish’. Her thought processes are clear and well articulated mainly due to her use of binary signifiers.
The binary theme continues as she contrasts the sumptuous lunch offered at a well-endowed men’s reserve in Oxbridge with the rather “poor” food for dinner at a women’s college. While the gold and silver are said to be “buried” within the grand 500-year-old buildings patronized by kings and nobles, the women’s college built in the 1860s had a hard time raising the initial $30,000. She contrasts the security and prosperity of men with the poverty and insecurity of women throughout history reflected in every facet of their lives.
In Chapter Two, he deals with the binary concepts of interest and confusion, as well as fun versus boredom, allied with the roles of masculinity and femininity. When he speaks of the liberation from fear and bitterness that the inheritance of Maria’s deceased aunt gave him, he can also contrast that with the pity and tolerance (‘tolerance’) that he feels for women from his position of freedom. Reflecting on the culinary pleasures she enjoyed the day before, he wonders why men drink wine while women drink water. He also contrasts two types of anger that he felt at Professor von X’s spiel on ‘The mental, moral and physical inferiority of the female sex’. His anger at his treatment of women was at first a complex emotion of disgust, while later it morphed into a ‘simple and open’ anger that he could use constructively.
By the time he gets to Chapter Three, he has unearthed no facts, but only opinions that are totally prejudicial to women (fiction). She now turns to historians (fact). He refers to Prof. Trevelyan’s ‘History of England’. There he finds the abominable treatment of women by men during Elizabethan times considered the norm. Wife beating was a regular practice. Marriages were arranged in advance to suit the men. Rather, the women featured in literature possessed a personality and dignity denied to the average middle-class woman. Women ‘burned like beacons in the works of all poets since the beginning of time’. While women in literature, such as Antigone, Cleopatra, Lady Macbeth and Emma Bovary, could be ‘heroic or mean’, ‘gorgeous or sordid’, ‘infinitely beautiful or utterly hideous’, the average woman was a complete nothing, hidden from view. Binaries abound in this chapter as in ‘women are imaginatively of the highest importance’ while ‘she was practically utterly insignificant’.
When we get to Chapter Four, we find Lady Winchilsea’s struggles with poetry, with Aphra Behn having more success with her plays. This further supports Woolf’s insights into why and how women were denied free speech. Woolf first uses the word ‘incandescent’ with which he describes the creative mind, as a quote from Lady Winchilsea. She needed her mind to have ‘consumed all impediments and become incandescent’. But she unfortunately was ‘harassed and distracted with hate and grievances’. Aphra Behn was the first woman in England to earn a living by writing, though her personal life is not said to have been worthy of emulation. However, Behn led the way for eighteenth-century women novelists like the Bronte sisters, Jane Austen, and George Eliot. Describing them and the novels of the early 19th century, Woolf speaks of her virtues in binary terms as quick, not sloppy, expressive without being precious.
In chapter five, Woolf introduces a representative contemporary fiction writer whom she calls Mary Carmichael. She is an imaginary figure chosen to show what is lost in writing from a defensive and demanding position. Woolf praises the fact that Carmichael is no longer aware of being a woman in her imaginative writing. There are binomials such as ‘heavenly goodness’ and ‘infernal depravity’, compared to a ‘serious, deep and luminous’ writing with others, ‘lazy and conventional’. She advises contemporary women writers to ‘illuminate your own soul with its depths and its shallows, and its vanities and its bounties’. Although Carmichael’s fiction may be ‘pulped by the publisher ten years from now’, Woolf is confident that successors to it in another ‘hundred years’ would have reached their full and glorious potential.
In chapter six, Woolf describes a man and a woman approaching from opposite sides of the street. The setting is a London street seen by the author from her apartment window. They get into a taxi and take them away. For Woolf, this is a symbol of the binaries coming together. The tension that she had been going through for the past two days eased and she now has an idea of the ‘unity of mind’. As Coleridge said, great minds are androgynous. The true creator is ‘incandescent’ and ‘undivided’. Sexual awareness gets in the way of creativity. She says that “it is fatal for anyone who writes to think about her sex.” She eventually comes to the conclusion that good writing flows from a marriage of opposites. Gender, masculinity/femininity is no longer relevant. Honest, creative, and enduring fiction springs from a mind that is clear and able to face the facts.
Virginia Woolf has engaged in a comprehensive examination of many binary concepts including masculinity/femininity, reason/emotion, and fact/fiction in her monograph, which is ostensibly about women and fiction. This brief analysis reveals that she came to the conclusion that it is the androgynous mind, which is ‘naturally creative, incandescent and undivided’ that can arrive at ‘truth’ by ‘gathering together many varieties of error’. Her understanding of the vagaries and complexities of binary thinking reflected in this book shows that he was one of the pioneering and shaping minds of her time.
