Re-evaluating Woolf’s Androgynous Mind
Elizabeth Wright
Woolf introduced her theory of the androgynous mind[1] in A Room of One’s Own (1929) and the concept has caused contention among critics ever since. Often worried by the word and its binary baggage, critics have either loved or hated Woolf’s ideal state for a creative mind which alternates between male/masculine and female/feminine. Lovers of the theory, including Carolyn Heilbrun and Nancy Topping Bazin, read androgyny as a balance and union between opposites (“the evanescent masculine and the eternal feminine”[2]) which gives a satisfying pattern to life. However, others have read Woolf’s vision of androgyny as variously: an escape from the body (Elaine Showalter and Lisa Rado), an avoidance of key feminist issues (Elaine Showalter), a “sexist myth in disguise” perpetuating the phallogocentrism it seeks to deconstruct (Daniel Harris, Barabara Charlesworth Gelpi), a vision of self-destructive narcissism (Julia Kristeva, Francette Pacteau) or merely as an insipid form of homogeneity that “lacks zest and energy.”[3] However, Woolf distilled a purer essence from the concept than contemporary critics tend to do. Androgyny, for Virginia Woolf, was a theory that aimed to offer men and women the chance to write without consciousness of their sex – the result of which would ideally result in uninhibited creativity. Whether she succeeded in this aim will be the study of the following essay.
The foundations of Woolf’s androgyny and
For these men of science the correct preponderance of one set
of characteristics over the other led to heterosexuality while the incorrect
preponderence led to homosexuality. To be an “invert” (Freud’s term for homosexual),
whether “absolute” or “amphigenic” (Freud’s version of homo- and bi-sexual),
was still to be degenerate in the eyes of the majority; and yet, it was generally
believed to be a factor in creativity and there were concerted efforts at
the time to demonstrate that a large number of great artists, musicians and
writers were “inverts” including the Romantics, Michael Angelo and Shakespeare.[8] Some psychologists such as Edward Carpenter
even envisaged Uranians as “the advance guard of that great movement which
will one day transform the common life by substituting the bond of personal
affection and compassion for the monetary, legal and other external ties which
now control and confine society.”[9]
Barbara Fassler points out that Ellis and Carpenter were read by members of
the
I went on amateurishly to sketch a plan of the soul so that in each of us two powers preside, one male, one female; and in the man’s brain the man predominates over the woman, and in the woman’s brain the woman predominates over the man. The normal and comfortable state of being is that when the two live in harmony together, spiritually co-operating.[12]
For modern thinkers the definition of androgyny has proven to be more of a problem than for the scientists of Victorian patriarchy. Despite its problematic origins which have led such critics as Mary Daly to pronounce it as a “semantic abomination,” androgyny was for Woolf and many feminist critics, a way of liberating women from the negative forces placed by patriarchy on their sex. Carolyn Heilbrun, who started her critique in Towards a Recognition of Androgyny with its roots in the Greek andros (male) and gune (female), stated that the term “did not mean hermaphrodite, nor … bisexual or homosexual” it meant, for Woolf, to be “fully human.”[13] As a consequence, “instead of referring to androgynous individuals, we [should] call them simply ‘fully human men and women’” thus ridding ourselves of connections with sex and gender and the conceptual baggage attendant on them.[14] The function of androgyny would ideally be to provide “a third term that neutralises the gendered way in which the subject is constructed.”[15]
One of the oddities of the concept of androgyny, and one
which was arguably a part of Woolf’s thinking, was its assignation to sex.
Androgyny all too often escapes out of the grasp of critics and settles back
down into the sexual polarisation it is designed to avoid. Thus we find
ourselves mired once again in theories of binary opposition through male and
female centred androgyny. Beginning with the latter which places the emphasis
on women as the embodiment of androgyny, we can read the concept as either
liberation for women,[16]
as a bisexuality to which women are closer than men[17] or the result of the split that
continually takes place in female consciousness due to women’s position in
society.[18]
Pinkney suggests that Woolf saw women as having a closer connection with
androgyny, because the woman inherits no tradition, she is an outsider and her
mind is already divided into halves similar (though not exactly akin) to the
androgynous ideal. Woolf writes, the woman “is often surprised by a sudden
splitting off of consciousness… when from being the natural inheritor of that
civilisation, she becomes, on the contrary, outside of it, alien and critical.”[19] In this view Pinkney is backed up by
Hélène Cixous who writes, “in a certain way woman is bisexual – man having
trained to aim for glorious phallic monosexuality.”[20] In other words, the precepts of
phallogocentrism keep man homogenous, leaving women, as “outsid[er]… alien and
critical,” to develop heterogeneously. Jane Marcus clearly states her view that
Woolf has leant on the heterogeneity of the female in her theorising, calling
women a “collective sublime” while men, who are “trained to aim for glorious
phallic monosexuality,” are trapped in an “egotistical sublime.”[21] Marcus writes, “While the poet is still
for [Woolf] the legislator of morality, his authority is derived not from an
individual talent but from the expression of collective consciousness. The
‘egotistical sublime’ of the patriarchy,” she argues, “has been replaced by a
democratic feminist ‘collective sublime’.”[22] Elizabeth Abel claims that the
“weighting of androgyny toward the maternal is in fact implicit throughout
Woolf’s discussion” of androgyny in A Room of One’s Own[23] while Ellen Carol Jones argues that
Orlando is more woman than man because “woman is defined by the absence of a
stable position. In this sense,
Recent Woolf scholarship has stretched the female centred
version of androgyny by exploring the lesbian subtext of Woolf’s concept of the
term and thus jettisoning the male altogether. An interesting exploration of
the subject is made by Jane Marcus in her essay “Sapphistry: Narration as
Lesbian Seduction in A Room of One’s Own”. In this essay Marcus argues
that Woolf has “seduced us into sisterhood” by asking her female audience to
collude in the exclusion of men from the lecture.[27] Marcus sets her discussion of Woolf’s
paper, given in a lecture at Girton and Newnham, in the context of Woolf’s
sapphisim, the publication of
In opposition to the female-centred type of androgyny which, although positive, is still not really the balance and unity that Woolf craves, we have the male centred form. A number of critics have argued that androgyny is a conceptual red herring for Woolf because it offers a design for the mind which subsumes the female into the male. Thus, the androgyny which appears as liberation actually achieves the opposite result. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg asserts that the “New Women” of the 1920s saw androgyny as a concept which offered the chance to see themselves as “social and sexual hermaphrodites, as an ‘intermediate sex’ that existed between and thus outside of the biological social order.”[30] However, as Jones points out this strategy failed because “its rhetoric entailed only the inversion of dominant metaphors rather than their deconstruction.”[31] Androgyny could only have served these women if they had first rid themselves of the binary schools of thought on which the “dominant metaphors” were based. For Fayad androgyny is the epitome of patriarchal domination, the fusion of the female other within the male subject. Fayad argues that it is a characteristic of the “patriarchal need for assimilation and sameness.”[32] As a consequence of this need for phallic unity the “splitting off of consciousness” which seemed to place women closer to androgyny than men has conversely be read by Luce Irigaray as a means to keep women as a negative other: “Do women remain divided and assigned to their lot so that men can remain one [un(s)]?” she asks:
Are women the site of an irreparable wound… torn between the yes and the no: the wound of all the “I want – I don’t want, I love – I hate, I take – I reject” which lie below, covered by the Good, the True and the Beautiful men? When you assert that “Man is and remains, as man – and assuming that he exists as man who would not be woman as well, - one” (Lemione-Luccioni, 1976, p.9: 1987, p.3), the “knowledge does not divide him’ (ibid.) aren’t you making women a support for what you call the “splitting of the subject”?[33]
The power of patriarchy is such that even in androgyny its force, these critics suggest, would cause the woman to either sacrifice her personality or remain as a negative “other” existing within the male. Androgyny can therefore be read as a patriarchal construct which has earned the tile of “sexist myth in disguise.”[34]
In her deconstructive reading of androgyny Gelpi enlists the help of history tracing the concept’s long heritage of patriarchal service and implying that its meaning is so deeply inscribed by patriarchy that its re-appropriation to the post-structuralist cause is more problematic than one might think. Gelpi argues, “Gnostics, alchemists, cabbalists of the remote past, as well as social visionaries from the Renaissance to the present, found in androgyny a male ideal of wholeness that, by subsuming the feminine, obviated the need for interaction with actual women.”[35] Thus androgyny, as Irigaray, Harris, Fayad and Gelpi would agree, can offer the chance to avoid confrontation with the female and its attendant femininity and all of the negative otherness that she embodies. In its ultimate negative incarnation male centred androgyny is read as self-destructive male narcissism. The psycholinguistic critic Julia Kristeva, argues that, “The androgyne does not love, he admires himself in another androgyne and sees only himself, rounded, faultless, otherless. Coalescing in himself, he cannot even coalesce: he is fascinated with his own image.”[36] Narcissim as its mythic origins tell us is self-destructive and therefore cannot create or self-fertilise as Woolf would desire it. Certainly, Woolf would never have employed the term had she suspected it to be read as so antithetical to her cause.
Although critics have suggested Woolf’s vision of androgyny to be female centred, the concept as a whole to be secretly in the service of patriarchy and therefore counter-productive to her cause, it is important to establish what Woolf aimed to do with the theory rather than what the word means to others. Ultimately, the term implied, in her usage, the forgetfulness of sex. A way of thinking that would enable women and by implication men to write as themselves, still in a sexed body, but without the attendant prejudices and discriminations that are connected to the body by society. To write without consciousness of sex is to see the piece of work for itself not as its author. When reading the angry writing of men about women, Woolf finds herself thinking “not of what he was saying, but of himself.”[37] The result of this sex conscious anger is to make the reader aware of who is writing not what is written and this consciousness therefore undermines the argument. To be successful the mind must possess an ignorance of sex, Woolf writes in A Room of One’s Own, “the mind of an artist, in order to achieve the prodigious effort of freeing whole and entire the work that is in him, must be incandescent, like Shakespeare’s mind,” Coleridge’s poetry and her sister’s painting.[38] In the “Foreword” to Vanessa Bell’s 1930 exhibition catalogue Woolf writes: “One says, ‘Anyhow Mrs Bell is a woman’; and then half way round the room one says, ‘But she may be a man’.”[39] Woolf is arguing here that sex should enter the mind and, through the medium of its androgynous thinking patterns, re-emerge incandescent and unconscious of itself on the other side.
For Woolf, the enemy of androgynous thinking was summed up in
the Victorian age which forced writers into a consciousness of their sex and
led to the production of abortive works deformed by sexual self-awareness. Thus
we find
Woolf leaves the reader in no doubt that the androgynous mind is the creative ideal, but what marks a text as the production of an androgynous mind? How do women avoid writing as women constructed by patriarchy, or avoid writing like men in the service of patriarchy? How do men prevent themselves from writing angrily about women and pompously or egotistically about themselves? In A Room of One’s Own Woolf demonstrates the turgidity of the male sentence:
The sentence that was current at the beginning of the nineteenth century ran something like this perhaps: “The grandeur of their works was an argument with them, not to stop short, but to proceed. They could have no higher excitement or satisfaction than in the exercise of their art and endless generations of truth and beauty. Success prompts to exertion; and habit facilitates success.” That is a man’s sentence; behind it one can see Johnson, Gibbon and the rest.[44]
She goes on to reinforce her point through the imaginary
character of the poetry critic “Mr B.” whose sentence, due to his “purely
masculine mind,” “falls plump to the ground – dead.”[45] The presence of the male ego in
literature which lies like a “straight dark bar, a shadow shaped something like
the letter “I”’ over their work, is also a sign of a mind which is single-sexed
and therefore uncreative.”[46]
But to think only as a woman is no better. In
For Pinkney, Woolf’s writing is a working demonstration of her thinking, “an androgynous alternation, an impossible dialectic which aims to be ‘integrated’ at the moment of maximum dispersal.”[48] In other words, Woolf’s writing matches the “ebb and flow” of the human mind, it moves like the rhythm of the waves or the pulsation of Kristeva’s semiotic chora. Pinkney states that “this dangerous, impossible dialectic is the existential reality of androgyny. The rhythm of the sea as a metaphor of the semiotic chora – its patterns and pulses of one/two, in/out, rise/fall – cuts across the syntax of sentences and plot throughout the text, yet without dissolving them completely.”[49] This androgynous rhythm in her writing is most evident in sections of Mrs Dalloway, To The Lighthouse and The Waves in which Woolf uses free indirect discourse. Nancy Topping Bazin actually draws a diagram of the pattern of Mrs Dalloway which forms the image of waves alternating between different minds and different locations.[50] The constant flow of the text is a characteristic of the androgynous mind and one which Woolf demonstrates in her own writing as well as in the writing of others such as Shakespeare and the Romantics.
The strength of language and form as a means of realising Woolf’s androgynous vision lies in the fact that “masculine and feminine can be exchanged, or travestied, because words can be.”[51] Language can alter its meaning and as sex and gender are arguably realised through language they too can be changed and exchanged. Jones argues that “gender is a symbolic construct, not an essence that has meaning outside or beyond discursive structures, and is as heterogeneous (and as empty) as writing itself.”[52] Therefore, language offers the ideal medium through which to challenge, deconstruct and then reconstruct gender into a more positive androgynous creative form.
It is important to remember that for Woolf androgyny did not
mean, as some modern critics would prefer it to mean, sexless writing. Preserving
the differences between the sexes is an important part of the creative process
and Woolf does not seem to be advocating the death of that. Rather that the
differences should be played out within the mind of the individual not between
two individuals who are sexed as male and female. This is where Nancy Topping
Bazin’s book falls down in its attempt to see characters as a realisation of
Woolf’s androgynous vision. Mr and Mrs Ramsay, for example, do not make an
androgynous whole simply because they are the embodiment of patriarchal binary
thought and are conveniently married. Topping Bazin goes on to suggest that by
linking disparate notions such as depression and mania, personal and
impersonal, life and death, Woolf creates a sense of homogenous androgynous
unity. But Woolf does not merely want to effect a “resolution of opposites.” As
Pinkney points out, “
However, Woolf’s heterogeneous version of androgyny has its ideological pitfalls. The multiplication of gender and self within the individual leads, Moi would argue, back to biological determinism: “the belief that if we can just turn sex into a more ‘multiple’ or ‘diverse’ category than it has been so far, then social norms will be relaxed. This is nothing but biological determinism with a liberal face.”[57] Woolf, on the other hand, argues that multiplication of the self and the celebration of difference within the self leads to creativity and liberation from sexual prejudice in literature. To think androgynously offers not liberal biological determinism, but freedom to think creatively, with heterogeneity and difference playing a key role in this creative process.
Yet another attack on Woolf’s concept of the androgynous mind has emanated from the theory of narcissism. Kristeva has stated her vision of androgyny as destructive male-centred self-obsession, but other critics have argued that even in perfect sexual balance, “The fantasy of the androgyne is exorbitant… It is a logical impossibility, outside systems of signification and their necessary foundation in difference. The androgyne transgresses the very existence of difference.” Thus Pacteau sees androgynous fantasy as a “narcissistic ‘caress’ in which the subject annihilates itself.”[58] For Kristeva and Pacteau androgyny is not the solution to Woolf’s problem because its love of self inscribed in its seemingly homogenous unity does not make for glorious difference or internalised heterogeneity, but for a narcissism which cannot create and can only self-destruct. However, androgyny in Woolf’s usage did not imply homogeneity or nihilistic self-love. Woolf enjoyed difference and promoted androgyny as a way to express the self not as a self-obsession in which the subject looks back at itself until it expires. Reading androgyny as a form of narcissism would uphold the presence of the ego in literature which is something that Woolf very clearly wishes to dispose of.
Rado translates this self-destructive element detected by Jones, Pacteau and Kristeva in androgyny, not as narcissism or love of the self, but rather as fear of the body and argues that its success as an idea is “predicated on the repression of [Woolf’s] own female identity, her own female body.”[59] Elaine Showalter would agree and calls androgyny a “myth that helped her evade confrontation with her own painful femaleness and enabled her to cloak and repress her anger and ambition.”[60] For Rado and Showalter the body is something that Woolf fears and androgyny offers the chance to get rid of it, but by getting rid of it, Showalter argues, she is reduced to the “sphere of the exile and the eunuch.”[61] Rado uses the comparison between the characters Orlando and Rhoda to illustrate how androgyny, without a strong sense of the body, actually causes insanity and death:
Rhoda – like
Androgyny, to these critics, is an untenable position because it “denies the importance of the body, of sexual desires… of any material markings of sexual difference.”[63]
However, Woolf does not suggest that the body should be suppressed, rather that being a woman or a man is still an important factor – just not the only factor and not the conscious factor. Woolf keeps an awareness of the body in her writing, otherwise why advocate the development of the women’s sentence and state that “Poetry ought to have a mother as well as a father?”[64] Yet at the same time Woolf reminds the reader and writer not to judge or create the work on that basis alone. Ultimately, it is an unconsciousness of sex, not a “void of sexless absence” that Woolf calls for. In A Room of One’s Own, Woolf holds the author, Mary Carmichael, in high esteem for her writing because she has “mastered 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 [are] full of that curious sexual quality which comes only when sex is unconscious of itself.”[65] Notice that there is still a “sexual quality” in Mary’s work which suggests that the body is not to be thrown away.
Perhaps Woolf would have created less critical contention if she had written in A Room of One’s Own, rather than in a letter to Ethyl Smyth: “I believe unconsciousness, and complete anonymity to be the only conditions … in which I can write. Not to be aware of oneself.”[66] By getting rid of the troublesome word, androgyny, Woolf would not have to content with critics arguing that it “underscores and reifies the binary it is attempting to transcend.”[67] Despite all of the drawbacks associated with the word androgyny and the many negative interpretations of Woolf’s use of the term, Woolf’s concept of the androgynous mind should not be read negatively or as counter-productive to her cause. Woolf’s intention by introducing the concept was to promote a positive creative force that gets rid of gender stereotype, prejudice and discrimination in literature. It is not symbolic of a fear of the body, colourless homogeneity, self-dissolution or narcissistic death. That it is a concept based on feminine and masculine and all of the traits connected to them by patriarchal binary thought should not prevent the reader from seeing the concept as offering the possibility of creative transcendence. For Woolf, as for Cynthia Secor, “androgyny is the capacity of a single person of either sex to embody the full range of human character traits, despite cultural attempts to render some exclusively feminine and some exclusively masculine.”[68] The ability to access this “full range of character traits” and subject positions so that we read and write as “fully human men and women” is the ideal that Woolf is chasing.
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The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 5, Nicholson, Nigel (ed.),
[1] Woolf takes the term from The Table Talk and Omniana of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
[2] Topping Bazin, Nancy, Virginia Woolf and the Androgynous Vision, (New York: Rutger’s UP, 1973) 201.
[3] Showalter, Elaine, A Literature of Their Own (London: Virago Press, 1982) 263.
[4] This
concept of a third sex can be traced back to Plato, who, in his Symposium
through the voice of Aristophanes writes, ‘the original human nature was not
like the present, but different. The sexes were not as they are now, but
originally three in number; there was man, woman and the union of the two,
having a name corresponding to this double nature, which has once a real
existence, but now is lost… the word “androgynous”.’ Plato. Symposium. Trans. Jowett,
Benjamin. http:classics.mit.edu.plato/symposium.html
[5]
Ellis,
[6] Arduin, Dr., Die Frauenfrage und die sexuellen Zwischenstufen’, Jb. Sex. Zwischenstufen, 2, 211. (54), quoted in Freud, Sigmund, On Sexuality, (London: Penguin, 1991) 54.
[7] Fayad, Mona, “Aliens, Androgynes, and anthropology: Le Guin’s critique of Representation in The Left Hand of Darkness,” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 30, (Sept 1997), http://lion.chadwyck.co.uk
[8] For example, Christina Dokou provides an interesting insight on androgyny in Byron’s “Don Juan.” Dokou, Christina, “Androgyny’s Challenge to the ‘Law of the Father’: Don Juan as Epic in Reverse,” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 30, (Sept 1997), http://lion.chadwyck.co.uk
[9] Carpenter, Edward, The Intermediate Sex. Homosexuality: A Cross-Cultural Approach, Daniel Webster Cory (ed.), (NT: Julian OP, 1956) 139-204.
[10] Fassler, Barbara, “Theories of Homosexuality as Sources of Bloomsbury’s Androgyny,” Signs, 5(2) Winter 1979, 237-50.
[11] Freud, Sigmund, “The Sexual Aberrations,” in On Sexuality. (London: Penguin, 1991).
[12]
[13]
Heilbrun, Carolyn. “Further Notes Towards a Recognition of Androgyny,” Women’s
Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 2 (Winter, 1974), (
[14] Ibid. 146.
[15] Fayad, Mona. “Aliens, Androgynes, and Anthropology: Le Guin’s critique of Representation in The Left Hand of Darkness,” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 30, (Sept 1997), http://lion.chadwyck.co.uk
[16] Heilbrun, Carolyn. Towards a Recognition of Androgyny (New York: Knopf, 1973).
[17] Cixous, Hélène. The Newly Born Woman. Trans. Wing, Betsy. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). Quoted in Fayad, Mona. “Aliens, Androgynes, and anthropology: Le Guin’s critique of Representation in The Left Hand of Darkness.” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 30, (Sept 1997), http://lion.chadwyck.co.uk
[18] Minow-Pinkney, Makiko. Virginia Woolf and the Problem of the Subject. (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1987) 10.
[19]
[20] Cixous, Hélène. The Newly Born Woman, trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). Quoted in Fayad, Mona. “Aliens, Androgynes, and Anthropology: Le Guin’s critique of Representation in The Left Hand of Darkness” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 30, (Sept 1997), http://lion.chadwyck.co.uk
[21] Jane Marcus, “Thinking Back Through Our Mothers” in Marcus, Jane (ed.) New Feminist Essays in Virginia Woolf (London: Macmillan, 1981) 10.
[22] Ibid., 10.
[23] Elizabeth Abel, Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989) Quoted in Piggford, George. ‘”Who’s That Girl?”: Annie Lennox, Woolf’s Orlando, and Female Camp Androgyny’, Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 30, (Sept 1997), http://lion.chadwyck.co.uk
[24] Ellen Carol Jones, “The Flight of a Word: Narcissism and the masquerade of Writing in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando” Women’s Studies 23 (April 1994), http://infotrac.galegroup.com
[25] Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own. 136.
[26] Ibid., 126.
[27] Jane Marcus, “Sapphistry: Narration as Lesbian Seduction in A Room of One’s Own” in Virginia Woolf and the Languages of Patriarchy, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987) 176.
[28] Ibid., 166.
[29] Ibid., 170, 174.
[30]
Carroll Smith-Rosenberg quoted in Ellen Carol Jones, ‘The Flight of a Word:
Narcissism and the masquerade of Writing in Virginia Woolf’s
[31]
Ellen Carol Jones, ‘The Flight of a Word: Narcissism and the masquerade of
Writing in Virginia Woolf’s
[32] Mona Fayad ‘Aliens, Androgynes, and Anthropology: Le Guin’s Critique of Representation in The Left Hand of Darkness’ Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 30, (Sept 1997), http://lion.chadwyck.co.uk
[33] Luce Irigaray, ‘The Poverty of Psychoanalysis’ The Irigaray Reader. Whitford, Margaret (ed.), (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991) 88-89.
[34] Daniel Harris, ‘Androgyny: The Sexist Myth in Disguise.’ Women’s Studies 2 (1974), 171-184.
[35] Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi, ‘Sex as Performance with All the World as Stage’, Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 30, (Sept 1997), http://lion.chadwyck.co.uk
[36] Julia Kristeva, Tales of Love. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987. Quoted in Fayad, Mona. ‘Aliens, Androgynes, and Anthropology: Le Guin’s Critique of Representation in The Left Hand of Darkness’ Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 30, (Sept 1997), http://lion.chadwyck.co.uk
[37] A Room of One’s Own 43
[38] A Room of One’s Own 73: ‘That the romantic poets were intrigued by androgyny is not particularly surprising, given their interest in an organically whole and transcendent state of being, and given their preoccupation with vision and realising that vision creatively. The androgyne symbolically encompasses all these… a quest for wholeness… and sexual union imaged and longed for as an ultimate oneness – in short, androgyny.’ Baer Cynthia p.25 quoted in Dokou, Christina. ‘Androgyny’s Challenge to the “Law of the Father”: Don Juan as Epic in Reverse’ Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 30, (Sept 1997), http://lion.chadwyck.co.uk
[39] Virginia Woolf, ‘Foreword’, Exhibition Catalogue, 1930. Quoted in Goldman, Jane. The Feminine Aesthetics of Virginia Woolf. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, p. 158.
[40] Virginia Woolf, Orlando (London: Penguin, 1993) 164.
[41] A Room of One’s Own. 134
[42] Ibid.
[43] The couple getting into the taxi was an image which Woolf previously used to spark off the reflection that to think ‘of one sex as distinct from the other is an effort. It interferes with the unity of the mind.’ A Room of One’s Own 126. Minow-Pinkney, Makiko. Virginia Woolf and the Problem of the Subject. Brighton: The Harvester Press, 1987, p.189.
[44] A Room of One’s Own 100.
[45] Ibid., 128, 132.
[46] Ibid., 130.
[47] A Room of One’s Own 100.
[48] Makiko Minow-Pinkney, Virginia Woolf and the Problem of the Subject. (Brighton: The Harvester Press, 1987) 159.
[49] Ibid., p.186.
[50] Bazin Nancy Topping, Virginia Woolf and the Androgynous Vision. (New York: Rutger’s University Press, 1973) 115
[51] Shoshana Felman, ‘Rereading Femininity.’ Yale French Studies 62, 1981: 19-44. Quoted in Jones, Ellen Carol. ‘The Flight of a Word: Narcissism and the masquerade of Writing in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando’, Women’s Studies 23 (April 1994), http://infotrac.galegroup.com
[52] Ellen Carol Jones. ‘The Flight of a Word: Narcissism and the masquerade of Writing in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando’, Women’s Studies 23 (April 1994), http://infotrac.galegroup.com
[53] Makiko Minow-Pinkney, Virginia Woolf and the Problem of the Subject. Brighton: The Harvester Press, 1987, 131.
[54] A Room of One’s Own 1.
[55] Ibid., 132
[56] Ibid., 26
[57] Toril Moi, What is a Woman? And Other Essays. (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999) 38.
[58] Ellen Carol Jones, ‘The Flight of a Word: Narcissism and the masquerade of Writing in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando’, Women’s Studies 23 (April 1994), http://infotrac.galegroup.com
[59] Lisa Rado, ‘Would the Real Virginia Woolf Please Stand Up? Feminist Criticism, the Androgyny Debates and Orlando’, Women’s Studies 26 (April 1997), http://infotrac.galegroup.com
[60] Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own. (London: Virago, 1982) 264.
[61] Ibid., 285
[62] Lisa Rado, ‘Would the Real Virginia Woolf Please Stand Up? Feminist Criticism, the Androgyny Debates and Orlando’, Women’s Studies 26 (April 1997), http://infotrac.galegroup.com
[63] Kari Weil, Androgyny and the Denial of Difference. Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 1992, quoted in Karabdrikas, Carol Anne Costabile-Heming Vasiliki. ‘Experimenting with Androgyny: Malina and Ingeborg Bachmann’s Jungian Search for Utopia’ Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 30, (Sept 1997), http://lion.chadwyck.co.uk
[64] A Room of One’s Own 134
[65] A Room of One’s Own 121
[66] Virginia Woolf, The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 5. Ed. Nicholson, Nigel (London: Hogarth Press, 1975) 239.
[67] Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi, ‘Sex as Performance with All the World as Stage’, Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 30, (Sept 1997), http://lion.chadwyck.co.uk
[68] Cynthia Secor, ‘The Androgyny Papers.’ Women’s Studies 2 (1974). Quoted in Karabdrikas, Carol Anne Costabile-Heming Vasiliki. ‘Experimenting with Androgyny: Malina and Ingeborg Bachmann’s Jungian Search for Utopia’ Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 30, (Sept 1997), http://lion.chadwyck.co.uk
Virginia Woolf’s use of Coleridge’s concept of the ‘androgynous mind’ as a key element in her theory of writing and gender has provoked much debate and contention over the years. A major source of the contention is the slippery nature of the concept of ‘androgyny’, for not only is the word itself open to a variety of interpretations, but critics and commentators have often approached it from particular ideological positions. For example, Elaine Showalter’s well-known criticism of Woolf was made from a committed 1970s Anglo-American feminist position which read her advocacy of androgyny as disloyalty to the cause of women. Elizabeth Wright’s article is useful for considering different ways in which androgyny has been theorized over the years, and for demonstrating how particular articulations of the concept have led to skewed interpretations of Woolf’s ideas.
Wright’s article reflects the recent thinking about gender (as exemplified by the work of Judith Butler) which goes beyond the binary oppositions of male versus female or women versus patriarchy to think of the various ways in which sex and gender are constructed by society. In looking at Woolf from such a perspective, Wright’s article also reflects the contemporary perception that Woolf’s work anticipates recent thinking on gender: for example, critics and commentators have compared her with Jeannette Winterson (particularly noting congruences between Orlando and Winterson’s ambiguously-gendered protagonist in Written on the Body), or have seen Woolf as a figurehead in a tradition which Winterson continues. [1] Studies like Wright’s, written in the wake of this new thinking, help deepen our appreciation of the subtleties and complexities of Woolf’s thinking on gender.
[1] See, for example, A. Harris: Other Sexes: Rewriting Difference from Woolf to Winterson (Albany: SUNY Press, 2000) and L. Haines-Wright and T.L. Kyle, ‘From He and She to You and Me: Grounding Fluidity, Woolf's Orlando to Winterson's Written On the Body’; in B.R. Daugherty and E. Barrett (eds) Virginia Woolf: Texts and Contexts (New York, Pace University Press 1996). 177-83.