an androgynous mind - basing this idea on a statement by Coleridge.
Anger
In the beginning Virginia Woolf ponders over many questions. Why is one sex so prosperous and the other so poor? What effect does poverty have on novels? How many books are written each year about women? How many of them are written by men? Why are men so much more attracted to women than women are to men? She sought the answers to these questions in books written by men about women. In these books, woman’s mental and physical inferiority was mentioned. However, what she found in all cases was an element of rage expressed in different forms: satire, resentment, curiosity, passion, censure - and anger.
Why were these men so upset if, at the time they wrote their books, England was under patriarchal rule and they had all the power, money and influence? When they wrote about the inferiority of women what really concerned them was their own superiority. Life for both sexes is strenuous and complicated and perhaps the most important thing to help us face it is self-confidence. How do we nurture this quality that is so valuable? By thinking that others are inferior to us. Here we see how enormously important it is for a patriarch – who must govern and conquer – to believe that half the human species is by nature inferior to him. Throughout the centuries women have been mirrors gifted with the magical power of reflecting an image of man that is double its natural size. Such mirrors are indispensable.
A Queen in Literature, a Slave in Reality
The second issue raised deals with “the novels never written by women in the sixteenth century.” In sixteenth century England women wrote nothing, while one man out of every two was liable to compose a song or a sonnet. But - even though they didn’t write, women shone like beacons in the works of all men. One would envision them as very significant, multi-faceted persons - of as much consequence as men. But these were women of literature. In reality women of that time were kept locked away, or pushed around and beaten. From this, a very strange and confused being emerges. Some of the most inspired words and deepest thoughts emanate from her lips - in literature. In real life - she could read, but barely knew how to write and was considered the property of her husband.
The Fate of a Brilliant Woman in the Century
What would have happened to a talented woman in the sixteenth century? Virginia Woolf says she’d have refused to marry the young man chosen by her parents; she would have run away from home and gone to London; she’d have shown up at the theater door and told the director how much she wanted to become an actress and he would have laughed in her face. An intelligent, talented woman born in that century would have gone crazy after running into so many difficulties. She would have committed suicide or ended her days in a solitary house in the countryside away from anyone else - half witch, half sorceress, the object of fear and ridicule. A woman with a talent for - let’s say - poetry, was a hapless individual in conflict with herself - all her circumstances including her own instincts were at odds with the mental state necessary for unleashing her intellectual powers
Creative Work and the Androgynous Mind
Before concluding the subject of women and the novel, Virginia Woolf refers to the work of creation and quotes one of Coleridge’s statements about great minds being androgynous. That is to say, in a man’s case it is a masculine mind with feminine elements and in a woman’s case a feminine mind with masculine elements. Perhaps a uniquely masculine or feminine mind is not creative. On the other hand, the point at which this fusion occurs is when the mind becomes completely fertile and utilizes all its faculties. Of course, Coleridge meant by this that the androgynous mind is resonant and absorbent, that it conveys emotion without constraint, that it is naturally creative, incandescent and intact. But if the writer is merely male or female without this androgynous quality, his or her work is ill-fated and will not survive - for anything written with this conscious bias is doomed to die. No matter how brilliant and effective, powerful and masterly it may appear for a day or so - it will wither and fade by evening.
In closing Woolf says, “You need five hundred pounds a year and a room of your own to be able to write novels or poems. I say this because intellectual freedom depends on material things – and poetry depends on intellectual freedom.”
What would have happened to a talented woman in the sixteenth century?
A Funeral On Her Shoulders
How shall I describe Lucía, if Lucía was not particularly different from any other woman? She had the same body, except that she was a little taller than other women; the same parts, only a little more turned on than other women’s; the same dreams, but more tinged with frustration than those of other women; a similar character, just a little more sour than other women; similar sorrows, maybe a little more pronounced; similar joys, though sometimes mixed with sorrow.
How shall I describe Lucía ...
She never understood the saying that there are as many joys in life as sorrows. For her there were more sorrows than joys, though those sorrows weren’t apparent in her – she was so accustomed to them! She even looked like a happy woman: she felt extremely content when she had her morning coffee and smoked a cigarette; she felt immense joy at the slightest caress, whether from human being or animal; she felt happy, even though sometimes she could weep when she heard a song she liked; she experienced joy when she made a new friend, even though she never got to know people the way she wished – she was always a little suspicious about friendship because it was so relative. Despite the thousands of blows she had suffered she continued to halfway believe in friendship and would feel quite stirred when taking a bath, as if that could purge her of her bad habits and impurities of soul. She enjoyed the movies enormously – after all, as Benedetti said, what is life other than killing time before death gets to us with its sickening punctuality? – and she delighted in dancing, as if that was a means of release from her powerful sexuality.
Lucía went through life with a burden of loneliness on her shoulders: she spent endless hours driving around, thinking about the future, making plans, indulging in impossible dreams, infinite hours living in the past wishing she could put back the damned time so she could do those things she’d never had the courage to do. Don’t we always regret what we didn’t do or what we didn’t have the courage to say, spending endless hours of insomnia thinking about the meaning of life, infinite hours trying to find ourselves without knowing whether we’ve succeeded or not?
Lucía was aware that she bore her life like a funeral on her shoulders, each day closer to death – that’s to say, each day a part of her inner self seemed to die. Her body was like a car, wearing out little by little: each day it became more difficult to get her body going, as if its battery was running down. All her dreams had died with her last love – and dreams, alas, can’t be bought at the pharmacy. Her secrets, too, would die within her, like the cigarettes she smoked, her opinions about others and about life, as well as her thoughts about suicide – which provided a little relief to her turbulent interior life – as well as the friends she had lost and those she still had. Day by day all of this was dying in her soul.
One day in trepidation, as if presaging her death, I called her and was told she had hanged herself. She had left a note that said, “Of life I knew no more or no less than my fellows; I could find no answers to my questions and others could not offer me peace with their answers, but I was able at least to anticipate death – or perhaps it was my destiny to contend with death before my time, or life that trapped
