Prunes vs. Cigars

Though Woolf's essay demonstrated an anti-elitist clarity throughout, but Marcus's "Saphistry as Lesbian Seduction in a Room of One's Own" certainly helped to both support my own interpretations of a few significant passages as well as open an entirely new window on Woolf's seemingly idiosyncratic references and observations (the tailless, "Man"x cat was a personal favorite). For example, it helped to know that, for the Victorian patriarchy, male homosexuality with its more "hierarchical" relationships was far less threatening than the more horizontal lesbian relations among women -- a dynamic that I feel is reversed in our own society, which is generally more homophobic towards males (perhaps because male androgyny is still unacceptable, while female androgyny is at times crucial for our culture's schizophrenic expectations of women).

Woolf's amusing critique of favored male writing, with its "Big Ideas" about "the Flag, the Battlefield," ect., as a "male orgy" "embarrassing" to the female observer is now illuminated as even more trenchant. This statement may have its homophobic elements, but Woolf's primary purpose seems to be an examination of how homosocial bonding (including homosexual relationships) has served to both exclude women, but, even more harmfully, led to a misguided self-worship that at its extremes results in the fascist society. (Her argument playfully fears the bad poetry that will be effected by this process rather than the bad politics.) Woolf counteracts this tide of masculinity-worship by, as Marcus argues, glorifying the capability of women to write thus far under extreme conditions, and also, as Woolf herself puts it, "noticing the spot on the back of men's heads, as they have noticed ours."

This spot-checking of course willfully excludes men from her discourse, especially since "there is no one in a Room of One's Own for the male reader to identify with," except misogynists or bi-sexuals. However, an emphasis on this tactic may run the risk of neglecting Woolf's concurrent message: just as misogynists or masculinists must lose their disdain for women in order to reach a creative zenith, women must also let go of their indignation at indignities, a difficult task when it is so justly acquired. Indeed, the crux of Woolf's argument implies that more equal societies, just as more "blended" minds, earn greater artistic achievements, just as gender-segregated societies stifle great writing on both ends. Had Woolf lived through the second-wave, I believe she would take issue with both the more essentialist camp that sought to create a removed space for women's writing in its unique glory and those who argue that all differences are fully socially-constructed.

To return to the text, Woolf also observes how the divergence in day-to-day living between the genders, even in "amenities" (20) such as brandy and cigars and trifles such as walking on the grass, has effectively thwarted female genius. Here, I am reminded of just how contemporary her argument remains. Gender inequities are still more insidious, more under-the-radar, than, say, economic ones, and therefore more difficult to examine and transform: while charting her second-rate dinner at the women's college, she notes that it was better than perhaps a coal-worker's. Improvements for women therefore come to be a secondary goal to class-based reforms in the liberal sphere. Attempting to digest my academic material over spring break with the family, where I most definitely do not have a room of my own, underscored Woolf's argument. Intellectual work, particularly of a creative nature, necessitates a certain level of isolation that most individuals, but especially women, have historically not been afforded. While I can accept contemporary critiques of Woolf's proposal, insomuch it reflects a male and upper-class model of the writing process, it still marks the "Sophie's choice" or tightrope act women must yet undergo, between their creative and material offspring.