Virginia Woolf | Femininity, Modernity And Androgyny

Virginia Woolf Femininity, Modernity And hermaphrodismShowalter, Elaine, Virginia Woolf and the Flight into Androgyny, in A literary businesss of Their Own British Women Novelists from Bront to Lessing (Princeton, N.J. Princeton University Press, 1977), pp. 263-297.In A Literature of Their Own, Elaine Showalter discusses the young-bearing(prenominal) experiences and their creative processes in British fiction. She shows how womens belles-lettres has evolved, starting from the Victorian period to the Modern one. She has compose nones on the descriptive life of Virginia Woolf in this contingent book. Showalter described the female literary tradition in the English novel and the social backgrounds of the women who composed it. Chapter 10 of the book, under the title Virginia Woolf and the Flight into Androgyny, is devoted to the literary genius of Virginia Woolf albeit the maniac depression. This chapter conveys information ab discover Showalters concerns beyond women writers an d looks at the contradictions and tensions that shape womens social, psychological, and intimate development. It is bound to provoke disagreement, if only because it raised so many irresolutions link to womens coiffe in the literary world. Showalter criticizes their works for their androgynistic records. For all its concern with sexual connotations and sexuality, the writing avoids actual butt against with the body, disengaging from people into a room of ones own. In the light of this, Showalters well-known critique of Woolfs founding of an aesthetic upon the model of hermaphrodism should itself be critically reconsidered. Showalter argues throughout the chapter that Woolfs androgyny represents an escape from the confrontation with femaleness or maleness, and that her renowned definition of life as a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope is an separate metaphor of uterine withdrawal and containment. The false transcendence of sexual identity, or in Showalters phrase, th e flight into androgyny amounts to evasions of reality and of the female experience, and this is presumed to result in Woolfs progressive technical inability to accommodate the facts and crises of day-to-day experience, notwithstanding when she wanted to do so.1What is posited in Showalters stress on confrontation, sexual identity or experience is what we might term a Lukfsian concept of a unified autonomous subject which is the sole agent of its own development in confrontation with the environment. The chapter analyses the androgyny, in general, as an escape of their (women) sexual identity as a woman or/and even as a return to heterosexuality which makes the world go round as Marcus pointed out,2other than of what many other critics in general say that Woolfs androgyny was subversive and feminist in nature and not as Showalter described as.Gilbert, Sandra A, Costumes of the Mind Transvestism as Metaphor in Modern Literature. In Gender Studies New Directions in Feminist Critici sm. Ed. by Judith Spector (Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1986), pp.70-98.Susan Gilbert argues that to the highest degree modernist male writers in English were concerned with reasserting, in a profoundly conservative sense, the dominance and transcendency of masculine sexuality, as well as mans prior claim to masculinity. The post-war assertion of masculinity constituted a male intervention into a broad general field of language and culture rather than the national linked militancy of earlier periods. The readings by Gilbert shape a convincing argument that a number of pretended episodes sometimes regarded as liberating and innovatory were concerned with the reassertion of conventional gender roles and heterosexuality rather than sexual revolution. Men represent an attempt to close off the possibilities for the change in womens roles opened up by the events of the First World War, Gilbert claims. The problem is that Gilberts mode of criticism assumes a direct li nk between the sex of the author and the text. Rather than investigating the way in which writing reveals an inconclusive ambivalency about sexual identity, Gilbert insists on assigning a single position to male modernist writers. Women writers were, for the or so part, with the exception of Virginia Woolf, omitted from the modernist canon constructed by literary critics in the nineteen fifties and sixties. Literary production functioned as a framework in which issues about the rights of women were foregrounded, at the same time as they explored the gains and losings go through by women during that time. On the other hand, the fictions of Virginia Woolf, in particular, depict the difficulties of achieving a sense of female identity, and beyond that, the impossibility of finding any final, stable identity for the subject. Her texts represent the fears, and reconstruct the problematic issues of being a woman, as well as the pleasures of femininity and masculinity, in such a way a s to select into question celebratory and empiricist theories of feminist criticism.Whit outlay, Michael, Virginia Woolf and Modernism, in The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf. Ed. by Sue Roe and Susan Sellers (Cambridge Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 146-63.Throughout her fiction and criticism, Woolf expresses a preference for a reality which is semi-transparent, combining the solidity of granite and the evanescence of rainbow. Though many critics have charmn in modernism an irrationalist rejection of science in favour of myth, in the case of Woolf at least, the short letter is to a greater extent complex. (2000151)In his undertake, Michael Whitworth discusses the deduction of issues such as science, politics, and contemporary culture which are discussed in relation to modernist writings. It is pointed out that critics have enormous neglected the significance of Virginia Woolf in such contexts. The kind of insight into dual reality that Whitworth notices in Wool f attracts more critical attention in recent studies of Modernism, especially knowing that it was not only Woolfs case that the situation was complex but also that many artists, writers, and thinkers of different disciplines, scientific or artistic, of the era shared a strong interest in various fields of science such as life science, eugenics, physics, psychoanalysis, and so on. Moreover, his text delineates the custom to make a modern writing, Modern. The text draws, quite precisely, the use of science in the narratives of fiction of early twentieth century including with a long analyses over Virginia Woolfs works.Farwell, Marilyn R, Virginia Woolf and Androgyny. Contemporary Literature, Vol. 16, No. 4 (Autumn, 1975), 433-451.For Virginia Woolf, androgyny was inseparably linked with a nostalgic wish to evade sexual expiration even as she made the affirmation of sexual difference the basis of a radical sexual politics. Androgyny represents, in Woolfs writing, ambivalence and contr adiction if it could be used to redress the imbalance of patriarchal accounts of accounting, then the plea of the female body as an answer to that imbalance only affirms constructions of sexual difference. Farwells essay, Virginia Woolf and Androgyny discusses Woolfs theory of androgyny. He debates the relation between the etymology of androgyny and its institutionalization into the narrative frame of Modernism. Giving examples from the novel A Room of Ones Own, Farwell points out that androgyny appears to be either an inter-play of separate and unique elements or a fusion of one into the other ad, unfortunately, most critics implicitly choose one side or the other trying not to see the important distinction which is crucial. His essay brings together various instances of critical thought that have problematised an understanding of androgyny by interrogating the assumptions about gender which many critics and scholar are dealing with.Johnson, Reginald Brimley, Some Contemporary No velists (Women), (London Leonard Parsons, 1920), pp. 140-160.Virginia Woolfs essay Modern Novels, which under its later title Modern Fiction became so famous as a manifesto of literary modernism and which constitutes the prelude to Woolfs own most distinctive artistic achievement, was not a sudden revolutionary argument with no wider literary context. In Some Contemporary Novelists (Women) published in 1920, in a chapter dedicated to Virginia Woolfs writing, Johnson discusses an emerging trend among the female novelists of the early twentieth centuryShe has broken-down the old realism She is seeking, with passionate determination, for that Reality which is behind the material, the things that matter, spiritual things, ultimate Truth. And here she finds man an outsider, willfully blind, purposely indifferent.This trend he called New Realism. The text refers mainly to Dorothy Richardson and it is not clear whether or not Brimley Johnson had read Woolfs Modern Novels, but clearly sta tes Richardson account of this New Realism which searches for a new day-dream or truth behind the veil of masculine materialism institucionalized in the Modern era. It also states Woolfs acquire for a new literature. But for Woolf herself at this stage, this new literary vision pertains to a new propagation it is not gender-specific. She periodizes literary history by the reign of monarchs spiritual Georgians against crassly materialistic Edwardians not by the difference between sexes. Johnsons text clearly illustrates the transience that happened inside out Modernism, expressing the most valuable analysis on Woolf and Richardson in their own right.Williams, Raymond. The Politics of Modernism Against the New Conformists (London, 1989), (The Found Era London, 1972), pp.45-53.Women writers were, for the most part, with the exception of Virginia Woolf, omitted from the modernist canon constructed by literary critics in the nineteen fifties and sixties. Raymond Williams in his intr iguing but well written paper remarks that there is still a radical difference between the two generations the struggling innovators and the modernist introduction which consolidated their achievement. (51) He suggests that there was a distinct time gap between the production of uncomplicated texts and academic and commercial institutional responses, although he does not investigate the extent to which this gap was distributed in term of the gender of writers. While womens participation in literary productivity in the nineteen twenties and thirty-something increased, it did so in the context of extensive social and political debate about the rights of women to education (including sexual education), to political power, and to earn a living of their own and in which Woolf was far ahead off. Literary production functioned as a framework in which issues about the rights of women were foregrounded, at the same time as they explored the gains and losses experienced by women during t hat time. On the other hand, the fictions of Virginia Woolf, in particular, depict the difficulties of achieving a sense of female identity, and beyond that, the impossibility of finding any final, stable identity for the subject. Her texts represent the fears, and reconstruct the problematic issues of being a woman, as well as the pleasures of femininity and masculinity, in such a way as to bring into question celebratory and empiricist theories of feminist criticism. Williams discusses the subversive female desires in which most of Woolfs novels are intrinsically pore in a clearly and well presented way.Abel, Elizabeth. Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis (Chicago University of Chicago Press Chicago and London, 1993), pp. 1-29.Virginia Woolf is now unremarkably thought of as a feminist author. Yet the term feminist has a number of meanings, and it is worth considering in what ways the word applies to Woolf. In both her own creative practice and her essays, she show s herself to be a keen advocate of women as writers and of a womens literary tradition. Her literary politics are certainly feminist. In terms of content, it is also clear that Woolf asks questions about womens art, the nature of female consciousness, and the means of literary presentation that must be developed to make the nature of a feminine consciousness visible. Abel pinpoints Woolfs interest in the fictional shapes narrative project on which women were present. Disclosing Woolfs discourse on gender and history, Abel contextualizes it with the idea of psychoanalysis in mid- mid-twenties, hypothesis up discourse over the subject much awaited. This particular chapter treats the progress of psycho-analytic studies, womens position in England during 1920s and what is meant to be a woman in such a society. It also reveals Freuds idea of the Oedipus complex and so forth. Connected with the idea that if the male writer suffers self-consciousness as an aspect of the general experienc e of modernity, with its dissolving of tradition, its skeptical, even nihilistic testing of old sanctities and pieties, then clearly the woman writers sense of the injustice of womens position in society, with its temptations of bitterness, denunciation, resentment, reinforces the danger, Abel is exploring what was Woolfs second dissatisfaction with the modernist texts and what is worth reading. The chapter (En) Gendering History, is slightly complex but precise in what modernism versus history and psychology regard to.