Femininity: A Room of Another’s Own
Yet women’s censorship does not stop at the bounds of the corporeal materiality of the body, they are objectified in practice as much as in form. Virginia Woolf’s extended essay A Room of One’s Own poignantly calls to attention the censorship and denigration directed against a woman’s creative capabilities. The essay stresses on the fact that should a woman desire to write fiction or poetry, she must first attain the financial independence and the unobtrusive space to do so—both of which were systematically denied for women at that time. She argues that, “Intellectual freedom depends upon material things. Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom. And women have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from the beginning of time,” (1929). Woolf exposes the profound struggle of women by unveiling the undeniable truth of her time, which states that women are not deficient in their creative and cognitive abilities rather than they are divested of the sufficient autonomy to exercise their intellectual prowess.
Woolf then proceeds to cast doubt on the credibility of history, viewing it as inevitably subjective and that there is no such thing as the ‘essential oil of truth” (1979). In the essay, her narrator mentions, “When a subject is highly controversial, one cannot hope to tell the truth. One can only show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does hold.” (Woolf, 1979). This critique of history aligns through parallel proportion with Helene Cixous’s invitation for women to reexamine the past through a filtering sieve rather than taking it for granted along with all the narratives it perpetuated on women. The narrator is showcased in a library perusing a historical scholarship of women, and realizes that all what has been written on woman was by a male pen streaked in fits of mild irritation. It is unthinkable that the lack of emotional fluency paired with the single-sided gendered perspective is both partial and reductive of what woman is in essence.
Virginia then invites the reader to assume a sister counterpart to William Shakespeare, calls her Judith Shakespeare and imagines her no less of an endowed prodigy than her brother. She casts bold and high-spirited Judith into the social climate of her time to zoom in on a scenario where she asks to be admitted into the theatre. The manager, a portly, uncomely-looking man guffaws and chortles at her request associating it with the likability of having poodles dance. She then is left to the mercy of those men, and her end is narrated as such:
“Nick Greene the actor-manager took pity on her; 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 and lies buried at some cross–roads where the omnibuses now stop outside the Elephant and Castle.” (Woolf, 1929).
Woolf exposes us to a fictional scenario circulating around a very real imaginary woman to showcase the blatant and dehumanizing fate of women no less like Judith roaming reality across history. In her mentioning that, “Fiction is likely to contain more truth than fact,” (1929) Woolf demonstrates that history and its facticity are constantly twisted, revised, polished and predominated by the male ink so much so that fiction—under the name of fable which is flicked away as innocuous and composed for purposes such as sport and play—becomes the refuge which receives all the female truths untold by history.
A convenient example of how women of high mental ability were not only denied their rights of expression but were also shunned, derided and ostracized are witches in 19th and 20th century of the west. Woolf is deeply touched by those narratives as she recognizes that the single story portraying these women is a surface-level encounter with their highly resonating brilliance, of them she mentions:
“When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Brontë who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to.” (Woolf, 1929)
Woolf here is insinuating that, by and large, two limiting choices were made available to women: either abide by the limiting social roles they have been prescribed or be damned for wanting to possess qualities man is naturally celebrated and canonized for.
This explains the reason behind having many prominent female writers of that century going by a male pen name, where Amantine Dupin becomes George Sand, Charlotte Brontë twists into Currer Bell and Mary Ann Evans morphs into George Eliot to earn the privilege of holding the pen. It is then of no surprise why many of those so-called witches have sprung to life given that the very demands of society mandated the metamorphosis of a woman for her to be admitted genius and ingenuity. It seems that women are constantly grappling with the impasse of dropping the ‘woe’ to become enough ‘man’, and in either case they are damned if they do and damned if they don’t.
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