What she does in her book is show us how she came to form this opinion. She doesn’t expect to reveal any truth to us, because she knows that any issue or subject related to the sexes is apt to cause controversy.
She presents the subject from different points of view, but in general develops it as follows:
1. She begins by asking questions; then decides to investigate what men have to say about women in their books. Upon reading them, she finds that men write with intense fervor about the mental and physical inferiority of women.
2. She then goes back to the sixteenth century, around the time of Elizabeth I – a fertile epoch for literature when women wrote nothing. She describes how women lived in that century, and presents us with the following inconsistency: that although women did not write novels or poetry, they were principal characters in the novels of great poets and writers, who portrayed them as significant people with character and individuality.
3. The third point deals with what would have happened to a talented woman if she had wanted to be an artist during the sixteenth century.
4. Before concluding her theme, Woolf says it is essential in creative work that the artist, whether man or woman, should have 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. But 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. And how do we nurture this quality that’s 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 of the human species is by nature inferior to him. Throughout all these centuries women have been mirrors gifted with the magical power of reflecting an image of man that is double its natural size. Without this power, Supermen and Fingers of Fate would never have existed. Mirrors are indispensable for every violent or heroic act!
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 at the time of Elizabeth I, women wrote not a single word of that marvelous body of literature, 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 all of this, a very strange, confused being emerges. Some of the most inspired words, the 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 Sixteenth Century
But, 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 show up at the theater door and tell the director how much she wanted to become an actress, and he would laugh 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 finished
out 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, because all the 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 Woof refers to the work of creation and quotes one of Coleridge’s statements about great minds being androgynous. That’s to say, in a man’s case, it’s 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 the theme of Women and the Novel the author 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.”
