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Towards a Feminine/Feminist/Female Discourse of Virginia Woolf Advisor: Professor Yuan-jung Cheng By Jing-yun Huang A Dissertation Submitted to The Department of Foreign Languages and Literature National Sun Yat-sen University in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy July 2004 i Acknowledgements I would like to express my deepest appreciation to my advisor Dr. Yuan-jung Cheng for her scholarly insight and her patience in helping me through the rocky parts of this dissertation. My sincere thanks also go to the chairperson of our department Dr. Shu-li Chang for her warm support and consistent encouragement when I was in a state of bodily and mental prostration. I am grateful to my friends Susan Lin, Christine Feng and Sheue-yun Huang, who have been very supportive and helpful, and Zoe Chen who helps me with computer problems. At last but surely not the least, I would dedicate this dissertation to my mother and my husband, without whose care and understanding this dissertation would never be achieved. ii 論文名稱:維吉妮亞•吳爾芙的陰性書寫 頁數:166 頁 校所組別:國立中山大學外國語文研究所 畢業時間及提要別:九十二學年度第二學期博士學位論文提要 研究生:黃靜雲 指導教授:陳豔姜教授 論文提要: 本文探討維吉妮亞•吳爾芙對「女性句子」和「女性語言」的理解與表達。 西方文明是父權統治的,歷史敘述的是「他」的故事,文學是以男性為中心, 語言是男性創造的,就連科學,吳爾芙認為也非中性,而是男性。文學史上獨斷、 壓制、恫嚇的男性語言,已根深蒂固,雖然吳爾芙承認當代對女性的不公平和偏 見,的確已漸漸消蝕,但她堅持這條路還很漫長,而且歧視女性的想法仍然存在 於男人心中。 女性作家能否找到足以表達自己的語言,而不要借用男性句子來表達她們截 然不同的特質;我? 可以說終其一生,吳爾芙都在找這個句子。對吳爾芙而言, 陰性書寫(women’s writing/righting)的意義有二,一為撥亂返正,反威權反 体制的抗爭,糾正男性不當的思維,為女性爭取應得的權利﹔二為銘刻女性特質 的語言,玩句造詞,充分展現女性變化莫測之文類界限、語言律動和書寫空間。 本文藉由吳爾芙在其作品中所使用的「意識流」 、 「雌雄同體」與「水的意像」 三項主要敘述技巧,指出她實驗和實踐銘刻女性特質的新書寫形式,有別於傳統 的男性語言,展現多元、流動、多變的陰性書寫特質。 iii Towards a Feminine/Feminist/Female Discourse of Virginia Woolf (Abstract) This dissertation explores Virginia Woolf’s concept of “a woman’s sentence” and the significance and possibility of “a woman’s language.” It demonstrates how Woolf finds a new way to write fiction that expresses women’s values and her resistance and disruption of a traditional discourse. Chapter 1 focuses on the theoretical backgrounds and key points of the debate on the possibility of a discourse, a language or a mode of writing capable of expressing the unique woman’s experience in culture. Using a wide variety of critical approaches (including historical, feminist, psychoanalytic, and post-modernist perspectives), this chapter contrasts the traditional masculine discourse with Woolf’s discursive feminine narrative. Chapter 2 deals with Virginia Woolf’s plural-consciousness narrative technique as the fluidification of the rigid realistic structure, aiming to present its discursive multiplicity and fluidity characteristic of women. It is through the exploration of a language unmarked by culture coded as masculine that Woolf discovers or develops the stream-of-consciousness technique and unconventional representation. She goes back to the pre-referential stage of language searching for a language untouched by culture, as a suitable medium to voice the female consciousness. Woolf presents the pre-speech (semiotic or pre-oedipal) level of consciousness. Her representation of different consciousnesses that “drift” from past to present, and her texts which “flood” with feelings, make the narrative feminine. Chapter 3 rebuts Elaine Showalter’s rejection of Virginia Woolf as “flight into androgyny” to “evade confrontation with her own painful femaleness.” It iv refreshes readers with Woolf’s elusive “woman-manly” or “man-womanly” dialogic narration as de-centering the monologic patriarchal narrative. The idea of “androgyny” defined by Woolf is seen as recognition of the fluidity of gender and an ideal state of mind of a great writer. Since cultures are seen as patriarchal, those experiences of which are specific to women are excluded, and cannot be articulated or shared in available discourse. The “im-masculinization” of a writer’s mind is an “active claim” of feminist criticism instead of a “passive flight” from femaleness. Chapter 4 presentsVirginia Woolf’s central symbol, water as the maternal element and the feminine liquid, as significant in her thinking and writing, and as opposed to the “time-bound, land-locked world of the masculine ego.” Women in Woolf’s novels are associated with the flux, men with the solid. Both metaphysical positions, the solid and the fluid, are elements necessary to Woolf’s vision of life and techniques of narration. In order to capture the elusive tides of life, Woolf’s narrative in her works is streamy, wavelike, and oceanic. Her discursive coup is to overwhelm the land-based, patriarchal tradition of unified authoritative static narrative and chronological plot by infusing her dis-course (disrupting the conventional course of narration) with aqua, an ever-changing dynamic life. Chapter 5 draws attention to Woolf’s idea that there is a “natural” way for women to write, a distinctive “woman’s sentence,” and concludes with the idea that “naturalness” is historically contingent. As women change, and their social roles and circumstantial realities evolve, what is “natural” to them will presumably change as well. Feminine writing has evolved from imitation, through protest, to self-definition. It’s a “writing practice” instead of a “literary theory,” a process instead of a product, a sentence-in-making, and a writing-of-becoming. It is not a stable or coherent body of knowledge. It only presents itself in its narrative experimentation, not in theoretical conclusions drawn or literary traditions outlined. v TABLE OF CONTENTS I. Polyphony and Heteroglossia of the Feminine Discourses A. History: Patriarchal tradition vs. women’s writing B. Psychoanalysis: Women as lack & absence C. Feminism: Women as multiplicity & flexibility D. Bakhtin: Feminine as dialogic & polyphonic II. Stream of Consciousness and Feminine Writing A. History and Development: From realism to modernism B. Theory 1. Feminine equivalent of realism 2. Pre-speech level of language 3. Fluidification of structure C. Practice: Mrs. Dalloway as a “Schizophrenic Novel” III. Androgyny and Feminine Writing A. Critique and Defense: Elaine Showalter vs. Woolf B. Theory 1. Redressing the imbalance of the discourse 2. Immasculination of the discourse 3. Integrity of the creative mind 4. Bisexuality as feminine 5. Lesbianism vs. Fascism 6. Rebirth of Shakespeare’s sister C. Practice: Orlando as a Linguistic Symbol Or/and IV. Water Imagery and Feminine Writing A. Significance: Historical definition & Woolf’s death in water B. Theory 1. Water as feminine liquid 2. Dissolution of masculine ego 3. Fluidity of gender and genre C. Practice: The Waves as Aquatic Aesthetics V. Approximation of the Feminine A. Sentence-in-making B. Subject-on-trial C. Genre-of-becoming Works Cited 1 36 77 118 145 157 vi Abbreviations AROO AWD CE CR D MD “MF” O VO W WW A Room of One’s Own (1929) A Writer’s Diary (1965) Collected Essays (1967) The Common Reader (1932) The Diary of Virginia Woolf (1975-1980) Mrs. Dolloway (1925) “Modern Fiction” (1919) Orlando: A Biography (1978) The Voyage Out (1915) The Waves (1931) Women and Writing (1979) vii Chapter 1 A Polyphony and Heteroglossia of the Feminine Discourses “I have the feeling of a woman, but I have only the language of men.” (Women and Writing 67) Is pen a metaphorical penis? (The Madwoman in the Attic) “[A] woman’s composing is like a dog’s walking on his hind legs.” (AROO 61) “To write, or read, or think, or to inquire, Would cloud our beauty [. . .].” (AROO 66) “I have the feeling of a woman, but I have only the language of men” (WW 67). Female writers were considered by Virginia Woolf as suffering the handicap of having to use a medium which is essentially a male instrument fashioned for male purposes. Since language is male-oriented, is there a form of language which is free from this bias, or even in some way approximates the female, and a discourse, a language or a mode of writing which is inherently feminine? There has been a long-standing tradition of endless debates on this issue. This dissertation aims to put together works about feminine writing, especially the writing practice of Virginia Woolf, in a project to show what a female discourse, or a female sentence, or a feminine writing, or lecriture feminine actually is. Feminine writing has been expressed in two ways. It can be understood from the fate and aim of the women writers. From the perspective about women’s fate, women’s writing is women’s righting. When women write, they try to correct the wrongness imposed upon them from the patriarchal literary tradition because of their female status. Besides redressing the imbalance shown in the literary tradition, women aim to find a true language which can really express female experience. Therefore, writing/righting is a kind of feminist poetics. Feminine writing progresses from women’s righting to women’s writing, no matter it is Elaine Showalter’s three-phase development: feminine (imitation), feminist (protest), female (self-expression), or Toril Moi’s three-period distinctions: feminist (political), female (biological), feminine (cultural), or Julia Kristeva’s three-stage struggle: radical feminism (equality demanded), liberal feminism (femininity extolled), anti-metaphysical feminism (dichotomy rejected). Femininity includes all these struggles and developments of women; it changes with the progression of women’s writing history from oppression through suppression to expression. According to Woolf, “woman’s gift of making a world of her own wherever she happened to be” is “purely feminine” (MD 114). The process is more important than the content and the writing practice counts more than the writing itself. By the end of the 18th century “female” and “feminine” were understood to be synonymous. The reasons for “phasing” as female, feminine, or feminist are complex: partly, it is the result of the view that feminist criticism required a terminology; it was to attain theoretical respectability. More importantly, there is a great need to establish a sense of progress, enabling early and cruder examples of feminine writing to be given rightful credit and acknowledgement. Understanding that female literary tradition comes from the still evolving relationships between women writers and their society, the three words “feminine,” “feminist,” and “female” will be used interchangeably in this dissertation to designate feminine writing is an ongoing writing practice departing from the patriarchal tradition and progressing toward a proper balanced state between sexes. According to Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), one of the most innovative forces within modern literature, one of the founders of contemporary feminism, “a woman’s 2 writing is always feminine; it cannot help being feminine: the only difficulty lies in defining what we mean by feminine” (WW 70). “What is a woman?” Woolf assures us, she does not know. She does “not believe that anybody can know until she has expressed herself in all the arts and professions open to human skill” (60). Through her whole writing career, she never stops trying without wishing to add to and qualify her attempts at a definition. She develops and refines her concept over the course of a lifetime. Feminine writing, according to her, is then left untheorized; it is still in process of formation and modification. A “female sentence,” in fact, is a “sentence-in-making,” and a “feminine writing” is the “writing-of-becoming.” Feminine writing is an experimental writing “process” instead of a finished literary “product,” a writing “practice” instead of a literary “theory.” In Woolf’s words, women writers should keep on writing “to try the accepted forms, to discard the unfit, to create others which are more fitting,” “before there is freedom or achievement” (WW 67). Feminine writing “will not be in this generation or in the next that she will have adjusted her position or given a clear account of her powers” (67). Woolf dwells her hope of a true feminine writing in those “who are in process of showing us by [their] experiments what a woman is” (60), in those “who are in process of providing us, by [their] failures and successes, with that extremely important piece of information” (60), in “the twilight of the future” (AROO 83), and in “the future of fiction” (83). She unceasingly encourages women writers and assures them that “[w]e are approaching, if we have not yet reached” (WW 48) a true feminine writing. She examines the validity with her lifetime and exemplifies feminine writing in her experimental narrative of “stream of consciousness,” of “androgyny,” of “water imagery” as a literary mother of women writers, and provides an alternative view of reality to the male writers. From her “marked differences of plot and incident” and her “infinite differences in selection, method and style,” none of us “can possibly 3 mistake” (71) her writing for a man’s writing. Throughout her work, Woolf consistently argues that the position of women, which is socially and historically determined, has significant consequences on women’s writing. She points to the difficulties in overcoming the proscriptions against women’s intellectual work, and the obstacles encountered in trying to resist the conventional role. Her experimental writing practice constitutes a sustained illustration of the historical determinants of women’s literary tradition. Language is considered as partial and as being not able to tell “the whole story” about human existence. Literary tradition is assumed to be based on Man as the transcendental signified reality meaningful in and of himself, the marker against which everything else is measured, creator of language by which the world is defined and not himself defined by language or the world. Woolf clearly understands herself writing in contention with a sexist literary tradition, in which women are described as imaginatively important but practically insignificant: A very queer, composite being thus emerges. Imaginatively she is of the highest importance; practically she is completely insignificant. She pervades poetry from cover to cover; she is all but absent from history. She dominates the lives of kings and conquerors in fiction; in fact she was the slave of any boy whose parents forced a ring upon her finger. Some of the most inspired words, some of the most profound thoughts in literature fall from her lips; in real life she could hardly read, could scarcely spell, and was the property of her husband. (AROO 51) Woman in literary history, according to Woolf, is “an odd monster,” “a worm winged like an eagle,” and “the spirit of life” (51). These monsters “have no existence[s] save in the fiction written by men” (50). “[T]he best woman,” in her words, was thought to be “intellectually the inferior of the worst man” (60). 4 “[I]t was impossible for any woman, past, present, or to come, to have the genius of Shakespeare” (53). Western civilization is patriarchal, history is his-story, literature is phallogocentric, language is man-made, and “[s]cience,” Woolf claims, “is not sexless; she is a man, a father… too” (WW 8). Literary discourse shapes perception of reality as much as it reflects it, and the monopoly on discourse men have held has distorted the material reality which continues to authorize and monopolize. To defend women from the accusation of inferiority, Woolf suggests that women writers “should rewrite” the “queer,” “unreal,” and “lopsided” history to correct the prejudices. Women’s disabilities are cultural; women writers can only survive despite the prejudices of men, and the key to their emancipation is to be found in their writing which women may call their own and which they can inhabit with the same freedom and independence as their “brothers.” Woman’s writing, for Woolf, is a revolutionary act. It is not a “sign of folly and a distracted mind, but was of practical importance” (AROO 71). Women’s beginning to write, she claims, was “of greater importance [even] than the Crusades or the Wars of the Roses” (72). Woman writer should keep on writing until she finds “a perfectly natural, shapely sentence proper for her own use” (83). Since the writing conditions for women in Woolf’s time were very difficult, feminist literary criticism began with various critiques of the patriarchal culture. Though those in front might fall, those behind should take up their positions. She suggests again and again in A Room of One’s Own that in a hundred years’ time women’s writing situation will be much improved (48, 99, 117). We never can tell how close we are, but we may succeed with another blow. Woolf’s concerns and struggles with feminine writing are dominant in her works, which deal with obstacles and prejudices that have hindered women writers. If women are to achieve as writers, not only does the ghost of father, the patriarchal tradition looming in the background, need to be overcome, but also the 5 “Angel in the House,” the phantom of ideal womanhood that dictates that women must be “sympathetic,” “charming,” “unselfish,” excellent in housework, self-sacrificial, “pure,” and without “a mind or a wish of her own,” needs to be killed (WW 59). Killing the Angel, according to Woolf, was “part of the occupation of a woman writer.” She justifies her necessary murder of the Angel from accumulated rancor as “self defence[:] Had I not killed her she would have killed me[,] [s]he would have plucked the heart out of my writing” (59). The most formidable obstacles to writing as a woman— once they’ve eliminated the more concrete problems of money of money and time— are the perpetual admonitions of the patriarchal male voice. The psychological assaults by patriarchal authority on the female writer’s integrity persistently threaten to divert her mind from its own truth, alter her values in deference to the opinions of others. Woolf’s active murder in her imaginary life and passive suicide in her real life seem contradictory to her reputation as a prominent woman writer but they are symptomatic of her real experience of oppression within a patriarchal world where she must “write this, think that”: “that persistent voice, now grumbling, now patronizing, now domineering, now grieved, now shocked, now angry, now avuncular, that voice which cannot let women alone, but must be at them,” “adjuring them,” and “admonishing them”(AROO 81). These conditions underwrite all literary productions, but they are particularly relevant to understanding the situation of women in the literary tradition because women historically have been deprived of those basic prerequisites for writing. Woolf was looking throughout her life for a writing which would produce female subjectivity without strain. She explored the writing history of women in literature through an unconventional (psychological realism against traditional materialism) and highly provocative (androgyny toward femininity, lesbianism against Fascism) investigation of the social and material conditions required for the writing of literature. She made 6 extraordinarily painstaking efforts to indicate the differences between women as objects of representation and women as authors of representation. Being a woman in her time when criticism was in the hands of men and the image of women presented in the predominantly male literary tradition, she did not have much choice in her fight against the “masculine values” (AROO 80). Though she eventually seemed to grow so depressed and discouraged about World Wars (for Woolf, the expression of fascism, the prevalence of masculine values) and about the patriarchal oppression that she killed herself, women writers still look to Woolf as a liberating, inspiring and empowering force of feminine writing. In fact, Woolf’s suicide is interpreted by Nancy Topping Bazin as “a beautiful act of faith” (Hussey 5) and possibly by herself as “defiance,” as “an attempt to communicate” (MD 280). As well observed by John Lehmann, “[s]he carried out the plan that had long been in her mind for such a crisis [. . .] filled her pockets with stones and went out and drowned herself in the River Ouse” (Lehmann 114). Water is seen not only as the source of life but also as its goal. “To return to the sea” is “to return to the mother,” that is, to die (Cirlot 268). Carrying rocks (symbol of masculine rigidity) with her into the maternal embrace of Mother Sea (waters in flux, symbol of procreation of and fluidity), Woolf left a significant death-dealing note of “relieving” and “re-living” of her writing career. The 20th century saw two World Wars. Two enormously destructive world wars and the economic disruption of the Great Depression brought to an end both Britain’s colonial empire and the social and moral certainties of the Victorian era. Technological changes brought great improvements in the physical comfort of life and also attacks on the materialism and spiritual emptiness of modern life. Freud’s theories of psychology prompted interest in the inner life of individuals. Intellectuals questioned old values in religious, political, philosophical and literary 7 fields. In all the arts, this is a period of experiment and innovation. Generally, 20th-century writers have been torn between expressing the era’s new discoveries (Freudian psychology, for example) and expressing dissatisfaction with Western civilization. Woolf is considered a leading modernist and one of the greatest innovators in the English language. One aspect of the matrix from which Woolf’s innovative writing developed was Woolf’s growing interest in the work of Freud. As well indicated by Michele Barrett, Woolf in her essay “The Leaning Tower” discusses an important difference between the nineteenth-century novelists and her Georgian contemporaries in writing: “By analyzing themselves honestly, with help from Dr Freud, these writers have done a deal to free us from nineteenth-century suppressions. The writers of the next generation may inherit from them a whole state of mind, a mind no longer crippled, evasive, divided” (WW 14). Woolf clearly suggests the inadequacy of a “crippled, evasive, divided” old consciousness of classic realism to describe life and capture reality, hence tries every effort to find a new way to represent female experience. Before the 20th century, realism was dominating the genre of the novel as a means of representing and commenting on life. This mode of writing is based on the belief that reality can be reflected in a narrative particularly by the description of the characters, their surroundings, their actions and their speeches. The attempt to portray events realistically and to provide a convincing illusion of life is common in literature. “Classic realism” aims to give an impression that we are reading about real people in real events, and depends on creating the illusion of lifelikeness, a true representation of the real. In the 20th century, however, this view was shaken by Freud’s research into the subconscious. His discovery that every thought including a dream carries meaning in our conscious life questioned the concept of mimesis. One feature of the modern novel is its tendency towards subjectivism, and away from what 8 might be called “objective realism.” The changing development of the English novel after 1900 and the emergence of new post- and anti-Realist modes of writing could be seen in novels such as Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses, Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, and novels by Lawrence, Forster, Conrad, Kafka and Greene. One starting point might be Virginia Woolf’s comment that, in 1910, “human nature changed” (CE 1: 320). She was writing in response to the first exhibition of Post-Impressionist painting in London. Like the postimpressionist painters she so admires, Woolf has abandoned efforts at comprehensive or realistic representation and is exploring linguistic brushstrokes that would evoke rather than define character. What she meant is not that human nature literally changed, but that the representation of human nature, of “Life” itself had to change in response to the changing nature of modern, urban and post-Freudian experience. Two of her best-known essays— “Modern Fiction” and “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown”— articulate her conception of modernist fiction. Both essays contrast the group of writers she calls the materialistic Edwardians— H. G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, John Galsworthy— with the spiritualistic Georgians— E. M. Forster, D. H. Lawrence, Lytton Strachey, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, and by implication, herself. Faced with the Edwardian “materialists” or realists, who concentrate on superficial “external details” rather than on the more important “inner experience,” Woolf asks “is life like this?” Claiming that “human character changed,” she accuses Arnold Bennett and the other Edwardians of ignoring the change. Were Bennett to write a novel about an elderly couple— named by Woolf Mrs. Brown and Mr. Smith— whom she observed on a train, Bennett would present only “external” details about clothing and property. The Edwardians have not looked at Mrs. Brown, “never at her, never at life, never at human nature” (CE 1: 330). Modern art, according to Woolf, will be possible only “if we are determined never, never to desert Mrs. Brown” (CE 1: 337), 9 the symbol of human spirit and the “soul and heart” of fiction. In the novels of Woolf, Joyce, Conrad, Foster, Lawrence etc, there is an increasing emphasis on the “inner life of individual,” more of a sense of the individual self as more “authentic” than the society “outside.” It was no longer possible to write, or paint, in the established tradition of classic realism, and new modes of expression had to be found to create and portray human character. This was significant of Woolf’s celebrated attack on the solid Edwardian figures who she felt to be both old-fashioned and bound to a materialistic world. Clearly “realism” as understood by Woolf is an exceptionally elastic and elusive term more like what Ian Watt describes: If the novel were realistic merely because it saw life from the seamy side, it would only be an inverted romance; but in fact it surely attempts to portray all the varieties of human experience, and not merely those suited to one particular literary perspective: the novel’s realism does not reside in the kind of life it presents, but in the way it presents it. (Watt 11) It is the conveyance of an authentic impression of actuality that counts instead of the humdrum, dreary day-to-day existence. With a subjective perspective it is no longer possible to rely on the old certainties and securities: Truth, Value, Time, Space, History and Society. Instead, there is an inward moving toward representing individual life as truer than the society “outside.” She infers that Jane Austen “would have trusted less to dialogue and more to reflection to give us a knowledge of her characters” (54) had she lived longer. Her judgment of Jane Austen is interesting as it reveals how important to her the novelist’s vision of reality was. Though realism remained the most popular mode of writing, it has been enriched and developed by the emergence of the experimental novel. Woolf has been credited with “changing the literary canon” (Caughie 180) through her attempt to redefine the 10 important elements in literature. Her call for a different fiction and the example of her nine novels were seen as defining her as a major British high modernist. Her emphases in her novels on the experiences and inner lives of her female characters, and especially her prescience about women and writing in her essays, A Room of One’s Own, Three Guineas, Women and Writing, make her an honorable literary “mother” and her writing an alternative to the many “fathers” available to male writers. Woolf’s primary motivation to experiment with literary forms did not only result from the inadequacy of language to express reality but also her attempt to relocate reality. Language use, according to Woolf, is gendered so that when a woman turns to fiction writing, she finds that there is “no common sentence ready for her use” (AROO 82). A change in the forms of literature, she argued, was necessary because most literature had been “made by men out of their own needs for their own uses” (83). Historically, many women wrote within the constraints of the “rule of the father.” They aped the styles and followed the generic conventions of an essentially male culture. They wrote anonymously or pseudonymously in order to conceal their gender. Their education, according to Virginia Woolf, was subordinated to their brothers’, and their writing was often dismissed as limited. Given freedom and opportunity, women will write differently. Speculating on how Jane Austen might have “enriched the scope of her novels” had she lived longer even “a few more years only,” Woolf argues that she “would have devised a method, clear and composed as ever, but deeper and more suggestive, for conveying not only what people say, but what they leave unsaid” (WW 9). In short, Jane Austen would have trusted the inner portrait more than the outside descriptions of her characters to give the knowledge of reality, would have identified sense perceptions, mental images, feelings and aspects of thoughts as ways to the true reality, hence “would have been the forerunner of 11 Henry James and of Proust” and of Woolf herself (Booth 54). “Before a woman can write exactly as she wishes to write, she has many difficulties to face [. . .] in reality, so baffling – that the very form of the sentence does not fit her. It is a sentence made by men” (WW 48). The great male novelists have written a prose, “swift but not slovenly, expressive but not precious, taking their own tint without ceasing to be common property” (AROO 82). She quotes the following example and says “[t]hat is a man’s sentence:” They have based it on the sentence that was current at the time. The sentence that was current at the beginning of the nineteenth century run 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 generation of truth and beauty. Success prompts to exertion; and habit facilitates success.” That is a man’s sentence [. . .]. (AROO 82) Carefully balanced and patterned in rhetorical sequences, the sentence seems to be characterized by mind instead of soul, clarity instead of enjoyment, intention instead of emotion. Behind the “man’s sentence,” Woolf tells us, we can see “Johnson, Gibbon, and the rest” but “[i]t was a sentence that was unsuited for a woman’s use” (83). Women writers trying to use it (Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot) fared badly. Jane Austen rejected it and instead “devised a perfectly natural, shapely sentence proper for her own use” (83). Woolf clearly suggests that “this [a female sentence] a woman must make for herself” (WW 48). Some critics think that Woolf does not make its qualities explicit enough and that is the cause of endless debates. This dissertation is going to argue that if Woolf’s speculations on female sentence or feminine writing sound vague, her artistic representations in her own fiction serve as clear examples of their possibilities. 12 Behind Woolf stands the wider attempt made by modern novelists to break away from, or simply reject, older forms of artistic and literary representation, and to find new styles and methods to accommodate the “shock of the New.” If Woolf did indeed help to change the literary canon, the accomplishment is tied to her tireless attempts to redirect the content and form of fiction and to open up possibilities for the writing and appreciation of writing by women. Dorothy Richardson (1873-1957) was the first English novelist to adopt the stream-of-consciousness technique. She refers, in the foreword to her autobiographical work Pilgrimage, to her desire “to produce a feminine equivalent of the current masculine realism” (Buck). The questions of gender and language, and of the possibility of a “female aesthetic,” are central to the novel. Virginia Woolf, in her review of Revolving Lights, refers to Richardson’s invention of “a woman’s sentence:” There is no one word, such as romance or realism, to cover [. . .] the works of Miss Dorothy Richardson. Their chief characteristic [. . .] is one for which we still seek a name. She has invented, or, if she has not invented developed and applied to her own uses, a sentence which we might call the psychological sentence of the feminine gender. It is of a more elastic fibre than the old, capable of stretching to the extreme, of suspending the frailest particles, of enveloping the vaguest shapes. Other writers of the opposite sex have used sentences of this description and stretched them to the extreme. But there is a difference. Miss Richardson has fashioned her sentence consciously, in order it may descend to the depths and investigate the crannies of Miriam Henderson’s consciousness. sentence [. . .]. It is a woman’s (WW 191) The sentence is so unconventional that it still needs a name and has not yet been defined. Woolf even suggests that the “woman’s sentence” of Richardson’s is 13 different from that of “the opposite sex,” James Joyce, who has “used sentences of this description and stretched them to the extreme” (191). Stream-of-consciousness technique being a feminine narrative is hence clear in Woolf’s thinking. Richardson’s use of stream of consciousness suggests its commensurability with female experience, and her belief that a woman “thinks flowingly.” If streamof-consciousness technique is a feminine narrative, what’s the difference in men and women using it? The question is briefly answered here and will be explored more thoroughly in the second chapter of this dissertation when Woolf’s stream-ofconsciousness narrative is discussed. Woolf and Joyce both carry the internal emphasis of modernism further than many of their contemporaries, moving their narrative completely within the thoughts and ideas of their characters. By using stream of consciousness, Joyce and Woolf express that a subjective and internal reality is more important than the external or societal forces. In their writings, what sets them apart from the traditional realist novels is the fact that most of the action takes place in the mind of the major characters. They have employed the narrative technique called “stream of consciousness,” in which the random, unshaped thoughts of the characters are quoted directly. Both Joyce and Woolf utilize this narrative technique but in different ways. Joyce tends to keep his narrative within the thoughts of a particular character. The Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man is almost completely composed of the different thoughts that pass over Stephen’s mind. The other characters of this novel have been given somewhat less importance. On the other hand, Woolf presents a collage of internal realities, moving rapidly from one character to the next, from moment to moment. In fact, in Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, readers are repeatedly brought to ask, “Where are we?” “When are we?” and “Who is speaking/thinking?” The stream of consciousness that Joyce uses is composed more of a single threaded stream like the “interior monologue,” whereas the “sea of 14 consciousness” that Woolf uses is converged from multiple streams of “life going on and on.” Joyce’s narratives working through the similar pattern as Woolf might be that he is as marginal (of his Irish identity) in his society as Woolf (of her female identity) in hers, exiled from a language of one’s own. They share the same ambition to produce a writing which is to escape the operations of the Law of the Father, to resist the patterns the paternal authority seeks to impose. Being the outsider of the dominant discourse and its linguistic laws like Woolf, Joyce is closer to “the feminine” than his contemporaries. As Cixous claims that man can also write “feminine,” because “it’s up to him to say where his masculinity and femininity are at” (Cixous 1975, 335). At the heart of the literary innovation called “feminine writing” originated from Woolf, or the feminist movement called l’ecriture feminine founded in France by several women writers, including Cixous, Kristeva, and Irigaray, is a refusal to accept the traditional Western binary opposition of mind and body. As Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar show in their study of 19th century literature The Madwoman in the Attic, artistic practice, including writing, is often metaphorically or almost literally connected with sexuality – traditionally with male sexuality. In the opening chapter of their book, Gilbert and Gubar ask the question: “Is pen a metaphorical penis?” The problem is that the pen/penis metaphor is about the symbolic power over the text similar to the power of the Father. Woman, linked with body rather than mind, was supposed to be antithetical to writing, an activity said to be restricted to the intellect, thus failed to write. The obstacles faced by women writers are “immensely powerful” and “difficult to define” (WW 62), yet Woolf does try to describe them. In her essay “Professions for Women,” Woolf suggests that the two main obstacles are the Angel in the House and the difficulty of “telling the truth about my own experience as a body” (62). Of these two obstacles, Woolf thinks she solved the first 15 one of “killing the Angel in the House,” of rejecting the ideal, pure image of woman, and it is the second one of “telling the truth about [her] own experience as a body,” of frankly exploring sexuality and the unconscious, which is hard to deal with and which she doesn’t think she solved and doubts “that any woman has solved it yet” (62). The stereotypes of womanhood have been accepted by both men and women for quite a long time, hence it needs much time to “give woman herself as herself” (Morris 122). Feminists’ engagement with psychoanalysis has resulted from the construction of a feminine identity. Questions of the relation between being “biologically sexed female” and “culturally gendered feminine” are central to the understanding of the notion of feminine writing. According to Freud, we are born biologically female or male but not with a corresponding ready-made feminine or masculine gender identity. Two aspects of Freudian theory are particularly important to feminists: “his account of sexuality as socially and not biologically constructed, and his theory of the unconscious” (Morris 95). The feminist claim, whatever their differences, is that all Western languages, in all their features, are utterly and irredeemably male-gendered, male constituted, and male-dominated. It is indicated earlier in this chapter of Freud’s impact upon realism and Woolf; Woolf’s interest in psychoanalysis is expressed through her writings of making distinction between the “materialists,” the solid, popular writers of her day, and the “spiritualists,” those experimental writers who are looking for “reality” in unconventional ways. In Woolf’s novels she is concerned with the “exploration of the conscious and the unconscious mind, and also in the relation of states of mind to the public, social relations in which they were embedded” (WW 14). Along with French feminists such as Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva, Helene Cixous’s work draws on the writings of Jacques Lacan. 16 Lacan’s key innovation is to refocus Freud’s ideas through the intense concern with language. The Lacanian model comes out of the work Freud and the structural linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. The importance of this constellation of theorists is an interest in connecting language, psyche, and sexuality. Recasting the basic concepts of psychoanalysis into formulation derived from the linguistic theory of Saussure, Lacan applies these concepts not to people, but to the operations of the process of signification. The unconscious, according to Lacan, is structured like a language. He reformulates Freud’s views of the early stages of psychosexual development and the formation of the Oedipus complex into a distinction between the pre-linguistic stage that he calls the “imaginary” and the stage after the acquisition of language that he calls the “symbolic.” Feminists have drawn attention to evidences that a male bias is encoded in our linguistic conventions; instances include the use of “man” or “mankind” for human beings in general, of “chairman” and “spokesman” for human beings of either sex, and of the pronouns “he” and “his” to refer back to ostensibly gender-neutral nouns such as “God,” “human being,” “child,” “inventor,” “author,” “poet,” and etc. Discourse, it is asserted, is phallogocentric; that is, it is centered and organized throughout by implicit recourse to the phallus (used in a symbolic rather than a literal sense) both as its supposed logos, or ground, and as its prime signifier and power-source. For Lacan, the language system is the totalizing order of culture and it is an order enacting the Law of the Father: phallocentricism as Cixous terms it. Phallogocenticism, it is claimed, “manifests itself in Western discourse not only in its vocabulary and syntax, but also for its rules of logic, its proclivity for fixed classifications and oppositions, and its criteria for what we take to be valid evidence and objective knowledge” (Abrams 238). As well observed by Morris, feminists have confronted and questioned Lacan’s thinking on two central and related areas: his negative account of feminine subjectivity and his conception of 17 language as a totalizing and determining order of meaning – the symbolic order. It is especially the centrality of language in the debate that makes it important to feminist literary criticism. In attempting to rethink patriarchy, feminists working within this framework focus their attention on the intense pre-Oedipal attachment of the child to its mother instead of concentrating, as Freud and Lacan do, on the Oedipal relationship with the prohibiting father. (Morris 113) Feminists have sought to establish a basis for a different order of language. Gender difference is a cultural construction. It is organized and conducted in ways that subordinates women to men in all cultural domains (familial, religious, political, economic, social, legal and artistic). This ideology privileges those writings that have been traditionally considered “great literature” and have been historically written by men for men. The distinction between “masculine” and “feminine” gender is formative in the generation of all discursive practices. Feminine writing can be considered as a feminist political act not simply to interpret the world but to change it by changing the consciousness of those who read and being read. It has been the process of exorcizing the male mind that has been implanted in us through literary history. Psychoanalytic practice is based upon theories of how the mind, the instincts, and sexuality work. Freud’s impact on our vision of reality or how we think about ourselves has been incalculable. A feminist critique of male psychoanalytic theory focuses on its negative constructions of feminine identity within a repressive patriarchal system of language. Feminist theorists emphasize the pre-Oedipal mother-child relationship to propose alternative accounts. “Infantile sexuality” is the notion that sexuality begins not at puberty, with physical maturing, but in infancy, especially through the infant’s relationship with the mother. 18 Connected with this is the “Oedipus complex,” whereby, says Freud, the male infant conceives the desire to eliminate the father and become the sexual partner of the mother. Many forms of inter-generational conflict are seen by Freudians as having oedipal overtones, as reproducing the competition for paternal favor. As the very idea of the oedipal complex would suggest, Freudian theory is often deeply masculinist-biased. It is based on an exclusive privileging of the male as norm and denigrating female as lack and absence: Female sexuality has always been conceptualized on the basis of masculine parameters. Thus the opposition between “masculine” clitoral activity and “feminine” vaginal passivity, an opposition which Freud— and many others— saw as stages, or alternatives in the development of a sexually “normal” woman, seems rather too clearly required by the practice of male sexuality. For the clitoris is conceived as a little penis pleasant to masturbate so long as castration anxiety does not exist [. . .]. About woman and her pleasure [. . .]. Her lot is that of “lack,” “atrophy” (of the sexual organ), and “penis envy,” the penis being the only sexual organ of recognized value. Thus she attempts by every means available to appropriate that organ for herself [. . .]. Woman lives her own desire only as the expectation that she may at least come to possess an equivalent of the male organ. (Irigaray 1977, 350) Freud’s concept of “penis-envy” (Penisneid) is related as women’s “lack” functioning within psychoanalytic discourse to confirm and valorize masculinity as the fullness of phallic possession and power. Thus his theorizing of femininity constructs a model of women’s sexuality which functions only as a lack to affirm the primacy of masculinity. Most importantly, “penis-envy” is used to explain what he believed as the little girl’s relinquishment of her pre-Oedipal attachment to the mother, together 19 with her renunciation of the clitoris as an erotogenic zone in preference for the arguably more passive vagina, and the replacement of her infantile narcissism with a lasting feeling of inferiority. It is allied to his theory of the little girl’s “castration complex” (discovery of anatomical lack) forcing the little girl into the “Oedipus-complex” and desire for the paternal penis. Normal “femininity” is only fully established if the wish for a male child replaces the desire for the father’s penis (Wright 303-05). The theory of female penis-envy was a crucial factor in the rejection of Freud and psychoanalysis by feminists. Luce Irigaray’s work has been at the forefront of psycho-linguistic enquiry. Her radical challenge to psychoanalysis has a two-fold purpose: “to reveal the masculine ideology inscribed throughout our meaning system (the symbolic order) and to construct a feminine order of meaning with which to produce a positive sexual identity for women” (Morris 114). Against Lacan’s theorizing of feminine sexuality in terms of “lack,” she critically re-reads Freud in the light of Jacques Derrida’s critique of binary thought. The significance of Derrida’s work, as of Lacan’s, lies in its radical rethinking of language and identity. Replacing the “valorization of a single male organ, the phallus, in representations of masculinity and the privileging within patriarchal language of a unitary notion of truth” (116), Irigaray locates women’s otherness more positively, crediting female body with the plural forms, with a multiple sexuality and a distinctly feminine psycho-linguistic economy, Her sexuality, always at least double, is in fact plural. [. . .] Plural as the manner in which current texts are written [. . .]. Fondling the breasts, touching the vulva, spreading lips, stroking the posterior wall of the vagina, brushing against the mouth of the uterus, and so on. [. . .] But woman has sex organs more or less everywhere. She finds pleasures almost anywhere. [. . .] 20 “She” is indefinitely other in herself. [. . .] not to mention her language, in which “she” sets off in all directions leaving “him” unable to discern the coherence of any meaning. (Irigaray 1977, 352-53) which she calls “paler femme,” a form of ecriture feminine. Alternatively, Irigaray posits a “woman’s writing,” which evades the male monopoly by establishing the diversity, fluidity, and multiple possibilities inherent in the structure of the female sexual organs as its generative principle, in place of the monolithic phallus. Like Irigaray, Helene Cixous wants a feminine writing practice with which to challenge a repressive and domineering symbolic order. To evade a condition of marginality and subservience, or even of linguistic nonentity, Cixous posits an incipient “feminine writing” (ecriture feminine) which has its source in the mother, in that stage of the mother-child relation before the child acquires the male-centered verbal language: Such is the strength of women that sweeping away syntax, breaking that famous thread (just a tiny little thread, they say) which acts for men as a surrogate umbilical cord, assuring them— otherwise they couldn’t come— that the old lady is always right behind them, watching them make phallus, women will go right up to the impossible. (Cixous 1975, 342) Ecriture feminine is an experimental writing whose impulse is to inscribe femininity and which deconstructs the binarism of patriarchal definitions of sexual difference. Writing against psychoanalysis, she describes how writing is structured by a sexual opposition favoring men, one that “has always worked for man’s profit to the point of reducing writing [. . .] to his law” (340). Man has separated reality by compiling concepts and terms in pair of polar opposites, one of which is always privileged over the other; man is associated with all that is active, cultural, light, high, or generally positive and woman with all that is passive, natural, dark, low, or generally negative. 21 Man is the self; woman is the other. Cixous attacks patriarchy by attacking patriarchal language. The only alternative to male domination, she says, is to construct a woman’s language which can exemplify sexual difference. This kind of writing that Cixous identifies as woman’s own is ever-changing: The woman arriving over and over again does not stand still; she’s everywhere, she exchanges, she is the desire-that-gives. [. . .] She comes in, comes-in-between herself, me and you, between the other me where one is always infinitely more than one and more than me [. . .] she thrills in our becoming [. . .] in the moving, open, transitional space, she runs her risks. (Cixous 1975, 348) In contrast, the kind of writing she associates with man comprises the bulk of the accumulated wisdom of humankind no longer permitted to change. Male sexuality, which centers on what Cixous called the “big dick,” is ultimately boring in its pointedness and singularity. Like male sexuality, masculine writing, usually termed “phallocentric writing” by Cixous, is also ultimately boring. Fearing the multiplicity and chaos that exist outside their symbolic order, men always write in black ink, carefully containing their thoughts in a sharply defined and rigidly imposed structure. On the other hand, female sexuality is, for Cixous, anything but boring: Almost everything is yet to be written by women about femininity; about their sexuality, that is, its infinite and mobile complexity; about their eroticization, sudden turn-ons of a certain miniscule-immense area of their bodies, but about the adventure of such and such a drive, about trips, crossings, trudges, abrupt and gradual awakenings, discoveries of a zone at one time timorous and soon to be forthright. (Cixous 1975, 342) Like female sexuality, feminine writing is open and multiple, varied and rhythmic, full of pleasures, and perhaps more importantly, of possibilities. “Her writing can 22 only keep going, without ever inscribing or discerning contours [. . .]. She lets the other language speak— the language of 1,000 tongues which knows neither enclosure nor death [. . .]. Her language does not contain, it carries; it does not hold back, it makes possible” (345). When a woman writes, she writes in “white ink” (339), the water from the body, the inexhaustible source, letting her words flow freely where she wishes them to go. Thus, for Cixous, feminine writing is not merely a new style of writing; it is “the very possibility of change, the space that can serve as springboard for subversive thought, the precursory movement of a transformation of social and cultural standards” (337). It will “not only ‘realize’ the decensored relation of woman to her sexuality, to her womanly being, giving her access to her native strength; it will give her back her goods, her pleasures, her organs her immense bodily territories which have been kept under seal” (338). Cixous believes that we can escape the dichotomous conceptual order within which we have been enclosed and that women have the capacity to lead the revolt. If woman explores her body, “with its thousand and one thresholds of order,” says Cixous, she “will make the old single-grooved mother tongue reverberate with more than one language” (342). For Cixous, “desire,” instead of “reason,” is the means to escape the limiting concepts of traditional Western thought. “Writing the body” is a revolutionary act to contact the forbidden, the taboo: The exclusion of women from writing (and speaking) is linked to the fact that the Western history of writing is synonymous with the history of reasoning and with the separation of the body from the text. The body entering the text disrupts the masculine economy of superimposed linearity and tyranny. (Groden and Kreiswirth 162) Theories of the body are particularly important for feminists because historically the 23 body has been associated with the feminine, the female, or woman, and denigrated as weak, immoral, unclean, or decaying. Understanding the unconventionality of the idea, even Woolf, the foremother of feminine writing, thinks “writing the body” is the greatest obstacle for a woman writer to overcome: “The first – killing the Angel in the House – I think I solved. She died. But the second, telling the truth about my own experience as a body. I do not think I solved. I doubt that any woman has solved it yet. The obstacles against her are still immensely powerful – and yet they are very difficult to define” (WW 62). In a most sex-conscious patriarchal age and a most masculinist society like Woolf’s, in spite of the “difficulty” and her “unfitness to say,” Woolf defines women’s problems with exceptional caution in writing the body: She was letting her imagination sweep unchecked round every rock and cranny of the world that lies submerged in the depths of our unconscious being. Now came the experience, the experience that I believe to be far commoner with women writers than with men. The line raced through the girl’s fingers. Her imagination had rushed away. It had sought the pools, the depths, the dark places where the largest fish slumber. And then there was a smash. There was an explosion. There was foam and confusion. The imagination has dashed itself against something hard. The girl was roused from her dream. She was indeed in a state of the most acute and difficult distress. To speak without figure, she had thought of something, something about the body, about the passions which it was unfitting for her as a woman to say. Men, her reason told her, would be shocked. The consciousness of what men will say of a woman who speaks of the truth about her passions had roused her from her state of unconsciousness. (WW 62) 24 Women’s imagination can be brought into full play if without the bondage of conventionality. Writing “something about the body, about the passions” has been taboo subject in female literary tradition. Women writers’ difficulties in writing the body could be easily sensed and shared from Woolf’s ineloquent hesitation and uneasy bashfulness of the description of “the experience, the experience” and of “something, something” about the body. If women can set their imagination free and write what they like to write, even the “darkest places” prohibited by patriarchal tradition, they surely can catch the “largest fish,” the source of creativity. The question of what true femininity is, Woolf modestly admits she is still exploring and encourages the future woman writers to join the exploration and provide us, “by [their] failures and successes, with that extremely important information” (WW 60). Following Woolf’s step, the French feminist writers Cixous, Irigaray, and Kristeva, carry forward the idea of writing the body and give free rein to it. Writing the body, in fact, is a refusal to use the tools of the master, instead inventing a new code based not on hierarchy and domination: Women must write through their bodies, they must invent the impregnable language that will wreck partitions, classes, and rhetorics, regulations and codes, they must submerge, cut through, get beyond the ultimate reserve-discourse, including the one that laughs at the very idea of pronouncing the word “silence,” [. . .]. (Cixous 1975, 342) Ecriture feminine, then, is by nature transgressive, rule-transcending, anti-authoritarian, questioning and unsettling. Laughter is one significant way in which feminine writing may be said to inscribe the body. As Cixous indicates, that the purpose of a feminine text is “to smash everything, to shatter the frame work of institution, to blow up the law, to break up the ‘truth’ with laughter” (344). Medusa is the mythological figure who has the petrifying power but who lost her head. 25 Cixous’s usage of the myth implies that “women are body” (343) is just like “Medusa without head” still threatening to men with their laughter. Sharing Medusa’s courage, “laughs exude from our mouths; our blood flows [because of losing head]; we never hold back our thoughts, our signs, our writing; and we’re not afraid of lacking [head or reason]” (336). “Let the priests tremble, we’re going to show them our sexts [sexual texts]” (342)[emphasis mine]! Further expression of the notion of the ecriture feminine is found in the writing of Julia Kristeva. She sees women’s role in language primarily as providing the oppositional force within traditional discourses. Within Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, signification is the result of a separation, a lack, which begins in the mirror stage (Freud’s pre-Oedipal or pre-linguistic stage) and is completed through castration. While Kristeva criticizes Lacan for overlooking processes that take place prior to the mirror stage. She posits the “chora,” or pre-linguistic, pre-Oedipal, and unsystematized signifying process, centered on the mother, which she labels “semiotic.” This process is repressed as we require the father-controlled, syntactically ordered, and logical language that she calls “symbolic”. She uses the terms the symbolic and the semiotic to designate two different aspects of language. In her works including Revolution in Poetic Language, “From One Identity to the Other” in Desire in Language, “The System and the Speaking Subject,” and Power of Horror, the symbolic is associated with authority, order, fathers, repression and control (Groden and Kreiswirth 446; Makaryk 395) . This symbolic facet of language maintains the fiction that the self is fixed and unified. By contrast, the semiotic aspect of discourse is characterized not by logic and order, but by “displacement, slippage, condensation,” which suggests, again, a much looser, more randomized way of making connections, one which increases the available range of possibilities. The semiotic gives rise to and challenges the symbolic. Kristeva 26 describes the relationship between the semiotic and the symbolic as a dialectic oscillation. Her intention is to “seek to give a language to the intra-subjective and corporeal experience left mute by culture in the past” (Kristeva 1981, 447). From “Oscillation Between Power and Denial,” an interview by Xaviere Gauthier in Tel Quel, Kristeva tells us that “[i]n women’s writing, language seems to be seen from a foreign land [. . .] from the point of view of an asymbolic, spastic body” (Kristeva 1974, 166) Women writers “have a role to play in this on-going process, it is only in assuming a negative function; reject everything finite, definite, structured, loaded with meaning” (166). Ecriture feminine, for the French feminists, is characterized by play, disruption, excess, gaps, grammatical and syntactic subversion, and ambiguities; by endless shifting register, generic transgressions; by nonlinear, fluid, figurative, multiple languages, voices, themes, developments etc. Feminine writing, therefore, is a way of writing which literally embodies femininity, thereby fighting the subordinating, linear style of classification or distinction. It is understood as a style which breaks off before the argument reaches a conclusion, splits off into a number of possible meanings, affirms plural interpretations, and thus speaks with more than one “voice.” The diversity of voices is the fundamental characteristic of the feminine writing. Ecriture feminine can be argued as a feminist reworking of the novel theoretician, Mikhail Bakhtin’s (1895-1975) theory of “voices,” of “dialogism,” of “polyphony,” and of “heteroglossia.”. As Diane Price Herndl well observed, “novelistic discourse” defined by Bakhtihn and “feminine language” elaborated by many feminists, “often seem like very similar uses of language despite the fact that the novelistic language Bakhtin described has nothing to do with either women or the feminine” (qtd. in Bauer and McKinstry 7). In the traditional literary hierarchies Bakhtin mentions, novel always joins women’s structural place as the excluded other: 27 dominant/dominated, masculine/feminine, epic/novel, and poetry/novel. This notion of “novel being a feminine genre” shares the same sparkle of wisdom with Woolf when she says: “There is no reason to think that the form of the epic or of the poetic play suits a woman any more the sentence suits her. But all the older forms of literature were hardened and set by the time she became a writer. The novel was young enough to be soft in her hands – another reason, perhaps, why she wrote novels” (AROO 83). According to Woolf, even the youngest and most flexible genre, novel, is doubted to be adequate to satisfy the requirements of a woman writer, or to be “rightly shaped for her use”: Yet who shall say that even now ‘the novel’ (I give it inverted commas to mark my sense of the words’ inadequacy), who shall that even this most pliable of all forms is rightly shaped for her use? No doubt we shall find her knocking that into shape for herself when she has the free use of her limbs; and providing some new vehicle, not necessarily in verse, for the poetry in her. For it is the poetry that is still denied outlet. (AROO 83) Though Woolf does not assume that women can write novels only, novels for her are definitely closer to the feminine. In the feminine text, there is a plurality of voices, put together by “the sex which is not one,” by someone who is “not one” (Bauer and Mckinstry 11). The feminine writer has no name of her own, no language of her own; her name is the name of the Father; she is “other.” Every time when she speaks or writes, she is under the gaze of the Father, she is “aware of all the other silenced feminine voices” (11). Bakhtin allows the dominated (including female) voice rather than the male gaze to construct and dismantle the exclusive community of dominant ideology and patriarchal critical discourse, so that the other voices including women’s, which have been silenced and excluded by hegemonic narrative strategies, can be read back into the dialogue in 28 order to reconstruct the process by which women should have been heard in the first place. The emphasis on voice rather than gaze derives from Bakhtin’s placing of dialogue at the center of his theory of meaning. A voice refers the listener not just to an originating person, but to a network of beliefs and power-relationships which attempt to place and situate the listener in certain ways. As Bakhtin puts it, “Language is not a neutral medium that passes freely and easily into the private property of the speaker’s intentions; it is populated – overpopulated – with the intentions of others. Expropriating it, forcing it to submit to one’s own intentions and accents, is a difficult and complicated process” (Bakhtin 1981, 294). This process is the means whereby language is transformed into a voice, whereby literary works are transformed into many different voices. Language once uttered by human being the carrier of ideas, is discourse, and becomes voices. To avoid total submission to the oppression of a patriarchal society, to gain a place in the so-called universal normal side, and to avoid expulsion from the regime into complete silence, Woolf being a woman novelist has really given much thought to the matter: I will here sum up my impressions before publishing A Room of One’s Own. It is a little ominous that Morgan [E. M. Forster] won’t review it. It makes me suspect that there is a shrill feminine tone in it which my intimate friends will dislike. I forecast, then, that I shall get no criticism, except of the evasive jocular kind, from Lytton [Strachey], Roger [Fry] and Morgan; that the press will be kind and talk of its charm and sprightliness; also I shall be attacked for a feminist and hinted at for a Sapphist. . . . I am afraid it will not be taken seriously. (WW 3) The anticipation of adverse criticism against her “shrill feminine tone” and her “very feminine logic” leads to a defensiveness in her writing, such as her stream-of-consciousness narration, and other experimental narrative techniques to be 29 discussed later. Wishing to speak to effect, women (according to Woolf) and the dominated (according to Bakhtin), constitute themselves as plural consciousnesses, as different voices opposite to the dominant discourse. Woolf and Bakhtin’s similar experience of “struggling with the dominant” bring up their similar attachment of significance to voices. They aim at a discourse of “feminine logic” or “dia-logic” (Baur and McKinstry 7), a variety of thoughts or a difference of voices. The main intention of a novel, according to Bakhtin, is set against a “monologic” (single-voiced) authoritative genre; novelization is to bring different new voices into and revives a dead genre (such as epic, classical tragedy etc.) Voices in a novel could be in agreement, or one against another or one strengthens the other, but they are never merged and we can clearly sense or hear them. “Dialogism,” he claims, tells us that in the novel voices do not just “coexist” together; they must “interact” with one another; they must dialogize with each other (Bakhtin 1984, 28). Bakhtin asserts that no discourse is stable, and that all discourse has multiple meanings. No matter how authors may try to assert definitive meanings, in part by eliminating competing voices so that only one level of vocabulary remains, in accordance with their own ideological positions, other meanings inevitably put through. This is because meaning is never contained solely within an author’s text, since an utterance both reacts to the word before the author’s text and anticipates future responses. Language can never be monologic, because utterances are always spoken in response to another person’s words. A novelistic text must “represent all the social and the ideological voices of its era [. . .] must be a microcosm of heteroglossia” (Bakhtin 1981, 411). A genuine novel is: a diversity of social speech types (sometimes even diversity of languages) and a diversity of individual voices, artistically organized. The internal stratification of any single national language into social dialects, 30 characteristic group behavior, professional jargons, generic languages, languages of generations and age groups, tendentious languages, languages of the authorities, of various circles and of passing fashions, languages that serve the specific sociopolitical purposes of the day, even of the hour (each day has its own slogan, its own vocabulary, its own emphases)— this internal stratification present in every language at any given moment of its historical existence is the prerequisite for the novel as a genre. ((Bakhtin 1981, 262-63) It is the diversity of voices and the split (“which is not one”) “internal stratification” of language that characterize the narrative of Woolf as feminine dis-course disrupting the conventional course of narration. Different voices represent different ideas, consciousnesses, or ideologies. For Bakhtin, “voice-consciousness” (Bakhtin 1984, 88), “consciousness-voices” (88), “voice-ideas” (91) all mean the same thing – voices: Human thought becomes genuine thought, that is, an idea only under conditions of living contact with another and alien thought, a thought embodied in someone else’s voice, that is in someone else’s consciousness expressed in discourse. At that point of contact between voices-consciousnesses the idea is born and lives. (88) In all of Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness novels, these narrative voices are achieved by “represented speeches” suspending the location of the subjects between characters and narrators. Woolf enters the consciousnesses of seemingly unconnected characters and brings their feelings to the surface. The characters are connected, and the narrative moves from one to another, through public occurrences that the characters can see or hear, such as an exhibition of skywriting and the backfiring of a car on the street in Mrs. Dalloway. The narrative of the stream-of-consciousness novels is the vivid example of multi-voicedness. The fuzzy 31 indication of the speakers and the complicated structure of the speeches make for great difficulty in analyzing and the impossibility of exhausting or fixing the meaning. The female “voice” even in a “silenced” zone (characters’ mind) competes and contests for authority. This marginal “voice,” pregnant as it is with meaning, represents the “centrifugal” force which threatens to disrupt authority and liberate alternative “voices” in a heteroglossia which the author has either not detected, or has deliberately tried to suppress. Like Bakhtin’s theory of novelistic discourse, theories of feminine language describe a “multi-voiced” or “polyphonic” resistance to hierarchies and “Medusan laughter” at authority. The concept of “female sentence” or “feminine writing,” first introduced by Woolf, and then carried forward by French feminists such as Cixous, Kristeva, and Irigaray, takes the same direction with Bakhtin without prior consultation. The focus of this concept is the idea that feminine writing must and always occur outside the phallocentric symbolic order, and escape the boundaries of reason and logic. An ecriture feminine would hence create a space for women to share their voices, not being afraid to reveal their side of the story. It writes that for which there is as yet (in phallocentric culture) no language, and which has been marginalized, silenced and repressed in the masculine symbolic order. Its context is the range of feminist difference and desire may be creatively articulated. Women writers, not only Cixous, find it impossible to define or theorize. Their resistance to theorization identifies “theory” as phallocentric, symptomatic of a desire to master and to deny difference, which this writing challenges. Difference and deconstruction are part of this writing’s challenge to logocentrism. They argue that a feminine mode of writing is nonlinear, fluid, figurative, multiple in voices, themes and developments. Feminine writing presents itself in its narrative experimentation (practice again 32 and again), not in theoretical conclusions drawn or literary traditions outlined. As Elaine Showalter summarizes the history of women’s writing as three stages, women writers have created a model which describes their “evolutionary” stages of writing from the feminine period--imitation of male forms with an internalization of patriarchal values, to the feminist phase--protest against dominant male artistic norms and aesthetic standards, arriving finally at the female stage--a search of identity and female experience. Feminine writing has evolved from imitation, through protest, to self-definition. It has moved beyond its early goal for equality, to the later notion of celebrating the difference, to the “present” (post) expression of female values. In Woolf’s words, women writing should experiment “altering and adapting the current sentence until she writes one that takes the natural shape of her thought without crushing or distorting it” (WW 48). Feminine writing, in fact, is a “process” instead of a “product,” a “practice” instead of a “theory.” Virginia Woolf spent all her life trying progressively in her research to free language from patriarchal patterns, to find a way to write woman into an active, independent thinking body, to write a “female sentence.” According to her, even with her ceaseless lifetime effort, “[t]he Mother Tongue” had not been achieved yet. Women writers should keep on writing; continuous writing practice “is only a means to an end, and the end is still to be reached” (WW 48). towards “a female sentence.” She had always been moving As well described by the promoter of the ecriture feminine, Cixous, it can never be achieved; if it is finalized, it is not “a female sentence” anymore: It is impossible to define a feminine practice of writing, and this is an impossibility that will remain, for this practice can never be theorized, enclosed, coded— which doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. But it will always surpass the discourse that regulates the phallocentric system; it does and 33 will take place in areas other than those subordinated to philosophico-theoretical domination. It will be conceived of only by subjects who are breakers of automatism, by peripheral figures that no authority can ever subjugate. (Cixous 1975, 340) Though feminine writing cannot be defined, “theorized, enclosed or coded,” it does “exist,” “does and will take place,” and “will be conceived,” after all. A “female sentence” is, in fact, a “sentence-in-making,” a “feminine writing” is the “writing-of-becoming,” and the fundamental issue of this dissertation is a feminist “subject-in-process.” It is not a stable or coherent body of knowledge. We can only know its “direction” but never arrive at its “destination.” As Woolf suggests in her letter to Ethel Smyth in September 1930, “sentences are only an approximation, a net one flings over some sea pearl which may vanish, and if one brings it up it wont be anything like what it was when I first saw it.” To define “a female sentence” is to nullify the very spirit of a female writing practice as our foremothers conceived it. This dissertation, sharing the spirit of them, does not attempt to describe the specificity of the theorization of a female sentence, but aims to show how the shifting points of view about feminine writing, together with the works of Virginia Woolf, combine to create a picture of the “ecriture feminine.” As Woolf remarks, feminine writing “is always feminine; it cannot help being feminine; the only difficulty lies in defining what we mean by feminine” (WW 70). She believes that the sex of a writing to be an elusive, but unmistakable aura, a matter of values, from which “spring not only marked differences of plot and incident, but infinite differences in selection, method, and style” (71). their voices in a world that often insists otherwise? How can women maintain George Eliot and Miss Bronte’s adoption of male pseudonyms to obtain impartial criticism, Woolf herself and E. M Foster’s defense of Radclyffe Hall’s lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness, James 34 Joyce and D. H. Lawrence’s facing court hearings over the content of their works, all contribute to Woolf’s comprehensive understanding of the material and ideological conditions for the freedom of a writer, and the boundaries of women’s access to literary production. In order to assert but not vainly exert herself, Woolf’s feminist issues are usually raised in an oblique manner. Woolf’s writings inform and echo each other. Woolf’s characters carry Woolf with them in the direction of a new writing. Her writings and her characters are the starting inspiration for a long development in Woolfian text characterizing feminine experience and creativity as the opposite of the masculine. Woolf’s use of “stream of consciousness,” of “androgyny,” of “water imagery” in her fiction, will be carefully explored in the following chapters as her narrative toward the feminine, as expressive of lecriture feminine, as constituting both a woman’s language and a female aesthetic, for sisterhood, and for a politics of feminist survival. This dissertation will present Woolf’s texts not to finalize feminine writing, or to fix it in a message, but to discuss the possibilities that will maintain those elements in movement, “streaming” along like “mother’s milk,” dancing around to the rhythm and shape of “women’s body,” enabling readers to experience the “process” of female creativity. 35 Chapter 2 Stream of Consciousness and Feminine Writing Fragmentation, abstraction, alienation, change, individualization, acceleration of life – these are some of the characteristics of European urban life at the beginning of the 20th century as experienced by contemporary artists and intellectuals. Technological changes brought great improvements in the physical comfort of life and also impacts on the spiritual emptiness of modern life. Wars added to all this a profound sense of disillusionment as to the consequences of technical modernization and scientific progress. At the same time, Freud’s theories of psychology prompted interest in the inner life of individuals. Art, as most other social fields, saw a rapid development of specialization and sought to explore and experiment with new form of expression that would accommodate the experience of modern life. Intellectuals questioned old values in religious, political, philosophical and literary fields. Generally, 20th-century writers have been torn between expressing the era’s new discoveries (Freudian psychology, for example) and expressing dissatisfaction with western civilization. Despairing of coherence in a materialist, chaotic modern life, increasingly bereft of religious, moral or historical certainties, Woolf sees art and the depths of the individual spirit as the only refuge from this disorder. Lack of assurance outside in life forced the writers to seek it within. Many authors during this time were influenced by the new psychological ideas which were becoming accepted as ways to identify the true reality of human consciousness. In literature this involved the rejection of intelligible plots or characterization in novels, or the creation of fiction that defied clear interpretation. Modern writers believed that by rejecting the depiction of material objects they helped art from a materialist to a spiritualist phase of development. 36 Virginia Woolf has been credited with “changing the literary canon” (Caughie 180) through her attempt to redefine the important elements in literature. She thinks human nature has changed since 1910 (CE 1: 320); therefore, the perception of nature must follow the change. Like most of the modernists, it is not external but inner nature that Woolf favors. The primacy of “how we see” over “what we see,” resulted from the Post-Impressionist Exhibition, is delicately expressed in Woolf’s theory of fiction. Interpreting the external world through the internal stream of consciousness of her characters and minimizing the importance of plot, Woolf helps shape the modernist novel. In her essays “Modern Fiction” and “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” Woolf argues that the “Edwardians,” represented by Wells, Bennett and Galsworthy deal life only in surfaces but to get underneath these surfaces one must use less restricted presentation of life: “ if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style, and perhaps not a single button sewn on as the Bond Street tailor would have it. (“MF” 88) In fact, “Woolf raises a clarion call to a new aesthetics of psychological realism” (Hussey 162) against the traditional realism with these two important essays. Claiming “human character changed,” Woolf accuses Bennett and the other Edwardians of ignoring the change. Life itself had to change in response to the changing nature of modern, urban and post-Freudian experience. Sharing the same interest with other contemporary women writers such as Dorothy Richardson and Katherine Mansfield, Woof attempted to break significantly with the traditional conventions of literature. She argued persuasively and strongly for a rejection of materialist writings of the Edwardians who “have given us a house in the hope that we 37 may be able to deduce the human beings who live there” (WW 31). Taking a female, Mrs. Brown as the inner life of fiction, Woolf has already made clear that the “psychological reality” is a woman, and “she” is the symbol of “feminine realism.” Though realism remained the dominant mode of writing but has been enriched and developed by the emergence of the modernist novel especially women’s writing. Wells, Bennett and Galsworthy, are “materialists,” concerned not with the “spirit,” the internal man, but with the “body,” the external man. Life, according to Woolf, is not really like the way they represent it: If we tried to formulate our meaning in one word we should say these three writers are materialists. It is because they are concerned not with the spirit but with the body that they have disappointed us and left us with the feeling that the sooner English fiction turn its back upon them [. . .] the better for its soul. [. . .] Mr. Bennett is perhaps the worst culprit of the three, inasmuch as he is by far the best workman. He can make a book so well constructed and solid in its craftsmanship that it is difficult for the most exacting of critics to see through what chink or crevice decay can creep in. [. . .] And yet--if life should refuse to live there? (“MF” 87) Their description of life is so crafty and well-worked that it is too seamless to “see through” and “creep in.” “The soul, life within us, by no means agrees with the life outside us” (CR I 59). Movement, change, and freedom are “the essence of our being; rigidity is death; conformity is death” (63). Life itself, “escapes” these materialistic writers because “[l]ife is not a series of gig-lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end” (“MF” 88). Her protest against the Edwardian novel is, in fact, a revolt against the tyranny of realistic rules such as chronological time that is “matter” (material), in favor of stream of consciousness that 38 is “spirit.” Her various literary experiments are, in fact, directed towards finding a suitable medium which can render most appropriately this elusive sense of life. Life “grows” when the masculine realism is “cut out”: “There will be books with all that cut out [. . .]. The book of the future will be clear of all that.” [. . .] “if books were written like that, sitting down and doing it cleverly and knowing just what you were doing and just how somebody else had done it, there was something wrong, some mannish cleverness that was only half right. To write books knowing all about style would be to become like a man.” So “him and her” are cut out, and with them goes the odd deliberate business: the chapters that lead up and the chapters that lead down; the characters who are always characteristic; the scenes that are passionate and the scenes that are humorous; the elaborate construction of reality; the conception that shapes and surrounds the whole. (WW 189) When the chapters, the characters, the scenes, the construction of reality and the conception of the happenings do not become “deliberate business,” life presents itself in writing. When all the masculine materialistic stuff is cast away, life, “the small sensitive lump of matter,” “the very oyster within the shell,” “the source beneath the surface” presents itself in the female consciousness (189). According to Woolf, it is “the many-colored and innumerable threads of life” that novelists should try to “plait incessantly” (189) [emphasis mine]. It is this “whether we call it life or spirit, truth or reality, this, the essential thing” (“MF’ 88) that novelists should try to capture. It is “this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display” (88) that novelists should try to convey. Woolf regards the aesthetic act as a means of understanding the “hidden depth” (WW 190), the “regions beneath” (191), the “profound reality” (190), and the underlying order in life, 39 which is concealed from us by everyday existence. In one word, she “saw the novelist as trying to express the elusive reality of character, especially as character is reflected in sensibility” (Booth 53). This deeper sense of “looking within” is expressed by the stream-of-consciousness technique by means of the extent to which it directs readers’ attention upon subjective, inner feeling. The influence is identified at many points in the work of modernist authors in their general readiness to “look within” (“MF” 88). Writers began to characterize using not only spoken words but also by writing streams of thought possibly going through the characters’ minds. Subject matters for the earlier novelists are motive and action (materialistic) and for the later ones, psychic existence and functioning (spiritual). In contrast to those whom Woolf has called “materialists, Mr. Joyce is spiritual” and “concerned at all costs to reveal the flickerings of that innermost which flashes its myriad message through the brain” (“M F” 89). Faced with traditional realists, who concentrate on superficial “external details” rather than on the more important inner experience, Woolf claims that life “refuses to be contained any longer in such ill-fitting vestments” as they provide. Considering that the materialists use the wrong “apparatus for catching life,” Woolf deeply understands the importance of the “immediacy of experience rendered in a fluid medium” (Kumar 65). She tries to create an aesthetic revolution by developing a feminine version of reality, or “psychological realism,” or “spiritualism:” The mind, exposed to the ordinary course of life, receives upon its surface myriad impressions— trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms, composing in their sum what we might venture to call life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old, the moment of importance came not here but there [. . .] if he could base his 40 work upon his own feeling and not upon convention [. . .]. (“MF” 88) This shift in emphasis to the inner lives of characters during the late Victorian period and in the modern period is related to a growing shift away from a belief in an independent, absolutely verifiable external reality. Stream of consciousness represents a new way of rendering reality free from traditional conceptualization, a plea for a free intuitive process of creative evolution against the more mechanistic theories of nineteenth-century materialism. Woolf finds women’s traditional structural position enables them to take an adversarial stance to institutions of dominance. basically outsiders. Women, according to her, are They can and must refuse male society and its values, such as militarism, hierarchy, authoritarianism, materialism and etc. Women must turn its negative markers such as “trivial, fantastic, evanescent” into positive markers of difference. Among Woolf’s contemporary writers, women are by no means alone in using stream of consciousness, but many women who affiliate themselves with this narrative technique write against norms of “realist” narrative from a consciousness stirred by feminist discourses of resistance. Woolf’s depiction of human consciousness offers a kind of reality beyond causality. The heart of Woolf’s feminine writing is that human consciousness is spiritual in fact, and does not belong to the material world. It takes expatriates to introduce modernist innovations to literature. Women, of course, are not the only ones to suffer from the marginalization of language; stream of consciousness becomes the language of the outlaw because of its unconventionality and nonconformity. Joyce, an Irish outsider, has commanded the same technique, but Woolf claims insistently “there is a difference” (WW 191). Joyce is one of the male authors who Dorothy Richardson praises for his creation of what she calls “feminine prose” (Richardson 12), who Cixous appreciates for his “innovation of a 41 New Miss Sexuality,” his “new image of the feminine,” and his perfect “artistic production of the feminine” (qtd. in Birkett 14-15), and who Kristeva compares his language with Woolf as “feminine” (Kristeva 1981, 166). Claimed by so many practitioners of feminine writing as “feminine,” Joyce’s stream of consciousness is still lack of something to be true feminine. According to Woolf, Joyce’s writing may be a man-womanly (man writing feminine) sentence but definitely not a woman-womanly (woman writing feminine) sentence because it is not “used to describe a woman’s mind by a writer who is neither proud nor afraid of anything that she may discover in the psychology of her sex” (WW 191). In the novels of Woolf, Sinclair, Richardson, Stein, Joyce, Conrad, Foster, Lawrence etc, there is an increasing attention to the “inner life of individual” as more “authentic” than the external reality. Priding himself on his very distinctive style of expression, which is energetic and concentrates on presenting the externals of human nature with icy clarity, the major opponent of Woolf, Lewis Wyndham claims the stream-of-consciousness technique a “feminine art” and not “quite meat for men” (Lewis 3). Under his pen, Woolf becomes “an introverted matriarch, brooding over a subterraneous ‘stream of consciousness’-a feminine phenomenon” (6). Woolf’s spiritual world, according to him, is an “unreal city” with “pale kings, and princes,” and “pale warriors” (6), “a novel with a dramatis personae of disembodied spirits” (3). For all the forerunners of stream of consciousness such as James, Joyce, Forster, Lawrence, Dostoievsky or other, he implies that they are the “feminine men,” “the Prousts and sub-Prousts,” “the poor lost ‘Georgian’ would-be novelists, using the “feminine art,” “in their way,” “in the same unenviable position” (2-7). “All were boxed up with some Mrs. Brown or other, longing to ‘bag’ the old girl, and yet completely impotent to do so” (5). The narrative method of Marcel Proust, the father of psychological novel, in his A la recherché du temps perdu, and Laurence 42 Sterne, the father of stream of consciousness, in his Tristram Shandy, is often described as “feminine.” Jane Wheare gives a very good reason why stream of consciousness is termed as feminine narrative: What is meant in this context is not that it is female, but rather that it is subversive or anti-conventional. The “feminine” approach to narrative is typified in the early twentieth century in the work of Dorothy Richardson. In her unfinished novel, Pilgrimage, Richardson uses the fictional narrator, Miriam Henderson, to put forward her own criticisms of what she deems the traditional “masculine” (or conventional) world-view, criticisms which correspond very closely to those contained in Woolf’s experimental novels and essays. [. . .] Like Woolf, Richardson defines her own narrative method in opposition to the “Edwardian” tradition of Galsworthy, Bennett, and, particularly, Wells. When she praises a narrative technique for its “femininity,” the implication is that it subverts this tradition. A “masculine” style, on the other hand, is conventional and imitative. (Wheare 9) Therefore, it is the sense of subversion and unconventionality that makes stream of consciousness feminine. Though stream-of-consciousness narrative cannot be claimed totally or extremely feminine, it is absolutely not the so-called traditionally masculine style; it was generally acknowledged and has been certainly considered closer to the feminine. If we do not know what a true feminine writing is, Woolf suggests it means “we haven’t written enough,” we are still “in process of showing [our] experiments” (WW 60), and “we are still in the thick of the battle” (“MF” 1). Moving within toward the feminine, Woolf speculates that her literary foremother Jane Austen would have devised a spiritual narrative which is “deeper and more suggestive,” for conveying not only what things are, but what life is had she lived 43 longer (WW 9). She “would have been the forerunner of Henry James and of Proust” (Booth 54), and of Woolf, hence would have been the mother of stream of consciousness. Similarly, Dorothy Richardson “defended her endless stream-of-consciousness as a route to ‘reality’; her method she said, expressed her first experience of letting ‘a stranger in the form of contemplated reality’ have ‘its own say’” (qtd. in Booth 54). Woolf is like Austen and Richardson in her desire to make her fiction closer to “life itself.” An acute sensibility and an almost uncanny awareness of the complexity of inner life enable her to present successfully the subjective aspect of experience. Human life pulsates simultaneously at many levels, each corresponding to a particular ebb or flow of the psychic stream. Stream of consciousness is a phrase used by William James in his Principles of Psychology (1890) to describe, “the unbroken flow of perceptions, thoughts, and feelings in the waking mind”; it has since been adopted to describe a narrative method in modern fiction. Its forerunner was the psychological novel as exemplified by Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, which had an enormous influence on many such novelists, such as Dorothy Richardson, James Joyce, and Woolf. Another forerunner was Henry James, who created what he called “central consciousness” or a governing intelligence, a character that he would stay with throughout a story or a novel and whose mind we might thus be limited to in our perception of the action of the novel. Some critics use stream of consciousness interchangeably with the term “interior monologue.” Dostoievsky was also kin to interior monologue; “long self-communing passages” were found in his novels (Cuddon 919). Joyce, who is believed to have “exploited the possibilities and [taken] the technique almost to a point of ne plus ultra in Ulysses (1922) which purports to be an account of the experiences (the actions, thoughts, feelings) of two men, Leopold Bloom and Stephen Daedalus” (Cuddon 919). The purpose of most 44 stream-of-consciousness writers, according to Robert Humphrey, is to reveal “the psychic being of the characters,” “to analyze human nature,” and “to present character more accurately and more realistically” (qtd. in Booth 54). Several original minds had been working towards this unconventional and nonconformist method of writing fiction. The technological and intellectual innovations of the early 20th century had a striking impact on women of all classes. Women’s changed perception of contemporary society and their roles within it affect not only the subject and ideas of fiction, but also its form and style. Controversial innovations marked the development of modernist fictions by different modern writers especially women. These texts focus on the mental processes of characters and enacted the disruption of the consciousness by unconscious material. Women writers’ break with the materialist tradition came in the form of the centrality in their works of women’s experience, more specifically, the reality of female sexuality. This is tied to the further psychological thematic of the exploration of the psyche as an unknown, unconscious realm desperately in need of being made conscious. Richardson’s Pilgrimage (1915-1967) explored the mental evolution of its heroine, Miriam Henderson, while Woolf practiced a “tunneling” technique through which she excavated the dreams and desires of her characters. Gertrude Stein’s insistence on a “continuous presence” is her adoption and adaptation of William James concept of psychology. May Sinclair adopted Dorothy Richardson’s and Henry James’s “psychological realism,” or “stream of consciousness” as she first called it, and experimented successfully with narrative perspective in her novels. They placed language and consciousness at the center of their works structurally, thematically and stylistically. The works of Woolf and her contemporary women writers exemplify the feminine modes of writing within their sociological and psychological context. 45 Woolf did indeed help to change the literary canon; her accomplishment is tied to her tireless attempts to redirect the content and form of fiction and to open up possibilities for writing and appreciation of writing by women. Taking Mrs. Brown in “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” as the symbol of inner life, defining Richardson’s stream-of-consciousness technique as the “psychological sentence of the feminine gender” (WW 191), Woolf clearly orientates inner lives as feminine and external reality as masculine. Praising Proust’s creative tendency within as “androgynous, if not perhaps a little too much of a woman” (AROO 108), approving Joyce’s unflinching fight against materialism as “spiritual” and “with complete courage” (“MF” 89), Woolf specifically indicates the inward moving direction of a feminine writing. As Elaine Showalter observes and comments, women writers responded to the war by turning within: In 1920 a critical study called Some Contemporary Novelists (Women) by R. Brimley Johnson attempted to define the collective nature of women’s fiction and to explain what was meant by the female version of realism: “The new woman, the female novelist of the twentieth century, has abandoned the old realism. She does not accept observed revelation. 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.” Johnson romanticized this quest in relating it to the war, which he thought had brought “a new spirituality” to a disillusioned generation. But he also thought it stemmed form feminist ideology. (Showalter 1982, 241) Losing the trust on one side, people may appeal to the other. Showalter’s consideration of the “spiritual things” as the “ultimate Truth,” the “Reality,” and most importantly, the “female version of realism” is the same as Richardson and Woolf. 46 According to Woolf, women’s writers’ anger is because that literature is dominated by “some mannish cleverness that was only half right” (WW 189) and “so much of the enormous labour of proving the solidity, the likeness to life” has been “thrown away” and “misplaced” “on the [masculine] wrong side,” Woolf recommended a narrative direction “within” toward the feminine “closer to life:” Look within and life, it seems, is very far away from being ‘like this [materialistic representation of life]’. Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. [. . .] Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon consciousness. Let us not take it for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small. (“MF” 88-9) Woolf’s idea of the feminine is her idea of writing; a woman’s “writing” is a woman’s “righting.” Woolf writes the feminine by expanding and “righting” its conventional meaning: And since novel has the correspondence to real life, its values are to some extent those of real life. But it is obvious that the values of women differ very often from the values which have been made by the other sex; naturally, this is so. Yet it is the masculine values that prevail. Speaking crudely, football and sport are “important”; the worship of fashion, the buying of clothes “trivial.” And these values are inevitably transferred from life to fiction. This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of woman in a drawing-room. A scene in a battlefield is more important than a scene in a shop – everywhere and much more subtly the difference of 47 value persists. [. . .] There was a flaw in the center of it. (AROO 80) In place of the traditional evaluation of human “feelings” as “trivial,” Woolf value the dreaming elements of life “however disconnected and incoherent in appearance” (“M F” 89) with creative energy. What is commonly thought small is valued over what is commonly thought big. Being revolutionary, obviously Woolf has the genius and integrity with which she credits Jane Austen and Emily Bronte in face of all severe criticism, in the midst of that purely patriarchal society without shrinking. “The mind,” in Woolf’s narrative, which “receives a myriad of impressions— trivial, fantastic, evanescent” makes life exist more fully (89). Such a narrative is supposed to follow not just the unvoiced (“silent”) thoughts of characters, but also the leaps of association that connect these thoughts. Her narration sets out not to tell us what a character thinks, but to follow how he or she thinks. Woolf’s tendency towards subjectivism and away from “objective realism” is one significant feature of modern novels, especially for the women writing. It turns inward from its 19th-century concern with “external reality” to the representation of what Woolf terms the “flickerings of that innermost flame” (“MF” 89). She sought to develop a technique of expression that would capture the essence of the sensibility and render “inner experience.” Woolf’s novels show a feeling for privacy, a need for a mind to exist in its own parameters. It is in her narrative method that Woolf makes her most important contribution to the novel. She ingeniously rejects conventional conceptions of the novel and replaces emphasis on incidents, external descriptions, and straightforward narratives by an overriding concern with character presentation by the “stream of consciousness” method. This “different technique” used by Woolf and her contemporaries has been the definitive break with the past ushered in the modernist era. Searching for a suitable term to describe this not-yet-named innovative feminine narrative, Woolf was quite proud of this “woman’s discovery” 48 and was most willing to be a modest follower, “an intermittent student” (WW 191). She did not claim the credit for herself but to Dorothy Richardson: The method [stream of consciousness], if triumphant, should make us feel ourselves seated in another mind. [. . .] to achieve a sense of reality far greater than that produced by the ordinary means is undoubted. [. . .] Having sacrificed not merely ‘hims and hers [traditional characterization]’, but so many seductive graces of wit and style for the prospect of some new revelation or greater intensity. [. . .] The old method [masculine realism] seems sometimes the more profound and economical of the two. [. . .] We want to be rid of realism, to penetrate without its help into the regions beneath it [. . .] to fashion this new material into something [. . .]. (WW 190-91) Woolf’s delight was mixed with worries for this still-achievable female innovation. Starting “the method,” Richardson did not fully express the hidden depth and did not make the best use of it. Woolf claimed “we still find ourselves distressingly near the surface” only: Things look much the same as ever. It is certainly a very vivid surface. The consciousness of Miriam [major character in Richardson’s stream-ofconsciousness novel] takes the reflection of a dentist’s room to perfection. Her senses of touch, sight and hearing are all excessively acute. But sensations, impressions, ideas and emotions glance off her, unrelated and unquestioned, without shedding quite as much light as we had hoped into the hidden depths. (WW 190) Though Richardson’s feminine writing is considered by Woolf as not good enough, “The Tunnel is [still] better in its failure than most [men’s] books in their success” (191). Though she “never reach[es] that degree of significance,” her failure might 49 be resulted from the “exacting” high standards which we [women writers], perhaps unreasonably, expect” (190-191). According to Woolf, it was just the beginning and women writers still had a long long way to go. Practice makes perfect. In order to find a “perfectly natural, shapely sentence proper for her own use” (AROO 83), Woolf herself or any woman writer should keep on writing until she finds the true feminine. Indeed, she earnestly practiced what she advocated by her series of stream-of-consciousness novels. Jacob’s Room (1922) is her first stream-of-consciousness novel. It has no plot, but through the thoughts of Jacob Flanders, the inner turmoil of the young is remarkably revealed. In Mrs. Dalloway (1925), the stream of consciousness narrative represents the thoughts of Clarissa and a range of other characters with whom she is acquainted, or connected by chance occurrences of the day. Throughout the novel memories of the past are blended with present sensations to register the interaction of different lives and their inner consciousness. To the Lighthouse (1927) plumbs the depth of human experience and such elements as the mystery of personality, the differences between masculine and feminine worlds, and the importance of womanly love to a family. The story is told through the stream of consciousness technique in the minds of the characters, especially James, Lily, and Mrs. Ramsay. The Waves (1931) unfolds the consciousness of six characters from youth to age as they search for identity in a machine-age world. Each character reflects images of the others in his or her own mind. It presents human existence as an organic process, uniting individuals like waves on the sea, tide after tide. Woolf attempts to recreate the stream and pattern of her characters’ thoughts and feelings from a totally “internal” viewpoint, thus emphasizing the uniqueness of each individual. In these works, she uses less restricted presentation of life, therefore abandoning linear narrative and finding an alternative to the male-dominated views of 50 reality. Her use of stream-of-consciousness technique consolidates her position as one of the leading modernist writers. It is through the searching for a language unmarked by culture coded as masculine that Woolf discovers or develops the stream-of-consciousness technique. What makes Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness narrative gendered as feminine? Firstly, it is a language not yet formulated into speech. Woolf tries to present the content of consciousness as it was before it had been shaped in obedience to the demands of practical life. Woolf’s emphasis is placed on the exploration of the pre-speech (semiotic or pre-oedipal) level of consciousness as closer to the feminine for the purpose, primarily, of revealing the true reality, the psychic “being” instead of “states of doing” of the characters. The semiotic, stemming from the pre-oedipal phase, bound up with the child’s contact with the mother’s body, is thus closely connected with femininity. The child in the pre-oedipal phase “does not yet have access to language,” to the symbolic, to the “Law of the father,” but we can imagine its communication by a flow of “body pulsions” (Eagleton 188). This pre-oedipal “rhythmic pattern,” like the stream of consciousness, in its inchoate nature, can be seen as a non-patriarchal language. Since the semiotic is not yet meaningful and not yet organized into the symbolic, it is more typical of woman. In her praise of Richardson’s “woman’s sentence”-- “the denuded, unsheltered, unbegun and unfinished” (WW 189) consciousness, Woolf’s intention for a pre-patriarchal language is clearly shown. According to Woolf, language, the only medium of expression, was already marked by male-dominated culture and thus it was impossible for women to express anything to the world. She went back to the pre-referential stage of language because she was searching for a language untouched by culture, as a suitable medium to voice the female consciousness. Freed from the cultural restraint, the pre-structured, pre-modified flow of language in its inchoate 51 unpolluted or unoccupied stage can have a more healthy balanced development toward the genuinely feminine. The “feminine equivalent” is, in this sense, a vehicle not only for the “voyage out” the constraints of linear time and linear syntax but also a vehicle for the “voyage in” the unconscious: [. . .] that idea of visiting places in dreams. It was something more than that . . . all the real part of your life has a real dream in it; some of the real dream part of you coming true. You know in advance when you are really following your life. These things are familiar because reality is here. Coming events cast light. It is like dropping everything and walking backward to something you know is there. However far you go out you come back. . . . I am back now where I was before [the semiotic chora, the pre-speech realm] I began trying to do things like other people. I left home to get here. None of those things [masculine materialist stuff] can touch me here. They are mine. (WW 189-90) It is through this continuous “going back” to the pre-oedipal realm, to the semiotic “space of the maternal chora (enclosed space, womb, receptacle)” (Roe and Sellers 232) where they were that women writers find life or reality, and find the truth about themselves. The semiotic, proposed by Kristeva and described by Terry Eagleton, though “not exclusive to” women, is “closer to” women: The semiotic is the “other” of language, which is nonetheless intimately entwined with it. Because it stems from the pre-Oedipal phase, it is bound up with the child’s contact with the mother’s body, whereas the symbolic as we have seen, is associated with the Law of the father. The semiotic is thus closely connected with femininity; but is by no means a language exclusive to women, for it arises from a pre-Oedipal period which recognizes no distinction of gender. (Eagleton 188) 52 A feminine writing written by men “is only an oblique consideration” and cannot be true feminine or completely feminine. Secondly, as mentioned earlier, Woolf’s primary motivation to experiment with modernist forms was not only resulted from the inadequacy of language to express reality but also from her ingenious attempt to relocate reality. Stream of consciousness offers Woolf one of the tools to craft an alternate portrait of reality. Following Richardson “to produce a feminine equivalent of the current masculine realism” (Buck), Woolf discovers stream of consciousness an “undoubted genuine” (WW 191) feminine writing. Richardson’s concern “of the silence rather than of the sound” (191) expressed in her stream-of-consciousness novel Pilgrimage deeply attracts Woolf. It is this comment that started a long-standing tradition of debate on this issue within feminism. And it was this effort of producing “a feminine equivalent of the current masculine realism” hence inventing or developing the “the psychological sentence of the feminine gender [stream of consciousness]” that made Woolf “an intermittent student” (191) of Richardson, an earnest practitioner of feminine writing. The issue of stream of consciousness as narrative toward the feminine is argued even clearer in her contrast with the masculine one: if books were written like that, sitting down and doing it cleverly and knowing just what you were doing and just how somebody else had done it, there was something wrong, some mannish cleverness that was only half right [masculine rightness]. be to become like a man. To write books knowing all about style would (WW 189) It is this self-imposed “mannish” rightness of the “masculine realism” that Woolf and her contemporary women writers protest against and try very hard to find the way out. Stream of consciousness obviously holds the supremacy of spontaneity over logic and style; it opens the door for the women writers’ return from a pervasively masculine 53 present to a mythically feminine past. “The voice of protest is the voice of another” (“MF” 91). Speaking from the place of an-other makes a marked difference in the way women use language. Feminine language does not conform to solid male rules of realism, of logic, clarity, and consistency. The questions of gender and language, and of the possibility of a “female aesthetic,” are central not only to Richardson’s works but also to those of Woolf’s. Among Woolf’s contemporary writers, women are by no means alone in pursuing nonlinear, anti-hierarchical and de-centered writing. In this, May Sinclair, Gertrude Stein, Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf, and even James Joyce, were at one. Their emp hasis upon subjectivity, upon “psychological or feminine version of realism” brought to the fore the inner world of the mind, de-emphasizing direct realist representation of the social context in favor of its indirect portrayal through the consciousness of their characters. Since male writer such as Joyce was the classic exponent of stream of consciousness too, how can we gender the “turning inward of the novel” feminine? Exiles and outsiders bring revolutions and innovations. Feminine writing, as well observed by Cixous, can only be imagined and worked out by “breakers of automatisms, by peripheral figures that no authority can ever subjugate” (Cixous 1975, 340). Many writers who affiliate themselves with this tendency write against norms of tradition. Because of the permissiveness of the stream-of-consciousness technique, Woolf was not the only novelist who used it in opposition to a patriarchal society or the dominant masculine discourse. Women had been outsiders of a phallogocentric world, hence naturally had the potential for a new departure in art. Joyce was both an artist and a Dubliner, and his self-knowledge grew as he understood more about the history of an Ireland dominated by the English, which had pushed his own culture to the margins and denied him his own language. Joyce, 54 being a literary outsider, feels with increasing intensity the anguish of that marginalization. He transcends the anguish by finding techniques of writing that released the repressed energies of a frozen culture and turns an ossified inheritance into a streaming and becoming process. As well observed by Woolf’s biographer John Lehmann, “the idea of using such a technique was clearly ‘in the air’” at that time, and “though all three, James Joyce, Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf, developed a style in which ‘stream of consciousness’ played its part, each used it in a different way” (48). Joyce’s stream is undeniably Joyce’s. undeniably Richardson’s. Richardson’s stream is Stein’s stream is undeniably Stein’s. Sinclair’s stream is undeniably Sinclair’s. It seems quite clear that stream of consciousness allows a freer and more fluid female expression that traditional narrative cannot. Woolf differentiated Joyce’s stream from Richardson’s by indicating Joyce’s “extreme” use of language and different state of mind (WW 191). Male writers without “female consciousness” cannot write a complete or pure “woman’s sentence,” even he has the “feminine technique.” It still needs some requisites: “It is a woman’s sentence, but only in the sense that it is used to describe a woman’s mind by a writer who is neither proud nor afraid of anything that she may discover in the psychology of her sex” (191). As explained earlier in this chapter, Woolf was not the first or only practitioner of this technique, and this technique may be not fundamentally or totally feminine. However, in the task of representing a peculiar and particular female reality, women are more appropriately placed than man. Thirdly, Woolf’s representation of different consciousnesses that “drift” from past to present, and her texts which “flood” with feelings, make the narrative feminine. Stream of consciousness, the flow of inner experiences brings water into “the desert of male arrogance and intellectuality” (Poole 260). It creates a flowing communication among time-bound and land-locked selves. 55 The solid unified structure, according to Woolf, is another masculine expression of language. Her multiple “stream[s] of consciousness,” moving back and forth, aims for a melting fluidity and a communicating polyphony. The fluidification of the rigid realistic structure aims to present its discursive multiplicity and fluidity characteristic of women. Cixous, being the later comer, yet possibly the most avant-garde and challenging practitioner of ecriture feminine, carries on Woolf’s idea of consciousness and enhances it: “Women’s imaginary is inexhaustible, like music, painting, writing: their stream of phantasms is incredible” (Cixous 1975, 334). All the watery, womby, wet imagery--flow, flood, blood, milk (white ink), and sea (“we are ourselves sea”)--which will be discussed more thoroughly later in Chapter Four (Water Imagery and Feminine Writing) is Cixous’s stream. All of these streams of the women writers, Sinclair’s, Richardson’s, Stein’s, Richardson’s, Cixous’s, and others’, flowing together with Woolf’s make a sea, an oceanic text, the feminine writing. with their infinity and fluidity are not limited like facts. Thoughts Woolf’s psychological realism based on mind is surely different from the traditional materialistic realism based on human actions to present reality. Her stream-of-consciousness novels, Jacob’s Room (1922), Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and The Waves (1931) exemplify her less restricted presentation of life, hence providing an alternative to the male-dominated views of reality. Woolf’s unique feminine writing began with her attempt to render the flow and play of consciousness. Language and consciousness are placed by Woolf at the center of her works structurally, thematically and stylistically. She both discusses and illustrates her idea of feminine writing: they are not linear or logical, which means that they are not contained by traditional (masculine/ patriarchal/ phallogocentric) notions of argumentation and developments. The narration of her works is more fluid than direct, more experimental than argumentative. She aims for 56 her reader to understand the nature of women’s writing as much from the way in which she writes, as from what she writes about. As in so many other kinds of oppositional definitions, such as mind/body, reason/passion, one term has historically been privileged at the expense of the other, and one has been linked with the male, one with the female. Stream of consciousness as narrative might also be Woolf’s refusal to accept the traditional Western separation of mind and body. Woman, linked with body rather than mind, is supposed to be antithetical to writing, an activity said to be restricted to the intellect. Stream of consciousness, the “content of people’s mind”— memories, dreams, perceptions, sensations, impressions, aspirations, illusions, feelings, intuitions, thoughts— associated by Woolf with the feminine has challenged this [masculine vision of] body/mind notion in theory and practice. Simultaneously, Woolf’s works is about and is “feminine writing.” What really distinguishes Woolf’s novel is the aesthetic effect of her exploration of the minds of her characters. Her probing into the human consciousness in Mrs. Dalloway is not so simplistic that it emerges as a typical feminine presentation. She presents the mental worlds of her characters with an unprecedented depth and intensity. By virtue of her depth and intensity, Woolf creates a novel both with an unconventional plot, and an unconventional prose characteristic of women called feminine. The conscious is never in a “state.” Life itself, according to Woolf, is in characters which spring from the lively and fertile fusion of consciousnesses. Mrs. Dalloway helps to understand these comments more fully as we follow the narrative dis-course in her works. Through the “voyage out” with Woolf’s characters, the treasure of her feminine writing or “the very oyster of the truth,” will soon drift into our sight. This metaphorical reading ship here tries carrying the passengers toward exploring “madness,” the “split consciousness” as a delicate writing technique and an allegorical 57 subject especially of the women novelists to create "voices" in modern fiction. Stream of consciousness is understood as a mad discourse which breaks off before the argument reaches a conclusion, splits off into a number of possible meanings, affirms plural interpretations, and thus speaks with more than one voice. As a result of her dislike for what she calls the masculine-biased “egotistic” quality in writing, Woolf tries to evolve a dis-course with multiple-“I”s which is more commensurate with the female experience. By relinquishing the power of writing and embracing a plurality of consciousness between activity/passivity and masculinity/femininity, Woolf attempts at generating the non-phallogocentric language at beginning and a true feminine language in the future. The multi-personal representation of consciousness is the portrayal of consciousness as containing many voices. Stream of consciousness as a narrative both reflects and represents the dissolution of the self in the modern world and the irrationality of the modern self. What is reason? What is madness? Where lie the dividing lines? And who can discern and police them? Can reason itself be unreasonable? What do we mean by madness? Or isn't that what we call idiocy or mental illness? Is it the absence of reason? Or is it, rather, the antithesis of right reason - wrong reason, drawing consistent deductions from false premises? Or is it all these things together, in some amalgam that defies analysis? What is sanity? Can reason itself be unreasonable? Is there a method in madness, a truth in folly? How is madness related with women? What is the significance that madness represents in literary works? According to Bakhtin, each consciousness represents one voice. Madness as split plural consciousnesses represents multiple voices. The combination of ruptured plots, with the undecidability of “who is speaking” orchestrates a text rich in voices. “The voice of protest is the voice of another” (“MF” 91). “[T]he feminine voice cannot be identified as ‘one’ because it cannot be named and because every time she speaks, she 58 is aware of all the other[s’]” (Baur 11). In Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness novels, it is never clear who speaks, where the speaking is coming from, but it is clear that there is always more than one speaker, more than one language, because it is always “an-other’s” speech, serving “an-other’s” language. The difficulty of determining what belongs to the narrator and what to the character is further complicated by the similarity of their voices. In the feminine writing, there is plurality of voices, put forward by someone, who is “not one.” This diversity with language is especially to a woman’s writing for it allows for the questioning of the many identities of woman. This diversity of voices, elaborated by Bakhtin as heteroglossia, is the fundamental characteristic of prose writers, and of novel as a genre. The “dis-course of madness” which aims at disrupting the conventional course of narration in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway (1925) is, in fact, the "novelistic discourse" as defined by Bakhtin, and is the major concern of this dissertation. Stream of consciousness allows Woolf a wonderful display of narrative fluidity, as she moves us around places, between the thoughts of different characters. Managing such glimpses of many minds is certainly not an easy thing to imitate. The word “dis-course” is divided intentionally and shown slantwise, since “not following one particular, or regular course” is just what Virginia Woolf intends, and where this metaphorical reading ship is going to sail. In a culture which glorifies reason, madness or unreason becomes particularly threatening and must be subjugated. Women have been attributed with what amounts to a constitutional proneness to insanity. Michel Foucault in his Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason holds the assumption that society has not been able to enter into a genuine dialogue with madness and that treatment of madness at any age is an expression of fear and an attempt to either banish or control. “Language of psychiatry,” according to Foucault, is only “a monologue of reason about madness” (xi), a lopsided partial definition. For Virginia Woolf, a woman novelist, the 59 outsider to the male-dominated realm of official art, how she breaks this cultural imposition of madness without losing her voices is a great challenge. To avoid total submission to the oppression of a so-called rational society, to gain a place in the so-called normal side, and to avoid expulsion from the regime into complete silence, she needs a more subtly defensive strategy to let her indignation take effect. “Madness” as subject and “dis-course (no single unified course)” is Woolf's knack of writing in Mrs. Dalloway. In the novel, Woolf successfully gives voices to the place of women and rejects masculine discourse without being marginalized into madness and silence. Though risking “sanity,” it's a nice try for Woolf and her characters to make known their resistance to the social definition of “madness” and also invite the self-criticism of the “sane.” If “split consciousnesses,” or “divided selves,” or “schizophrenia” (yearning for many) can be defined as an “illness,” isn't the “Unified Self” (biased to one) elaborated by Louis Althusser also an illness called “paranoia?” The psychiatrist John Wing in his Reasoning about Madness (1978) defines the term "illness" in two ways. His first reference to "any experience or behavior which departs from a generally accepted standard of health" could best explain the term "madness" (qtd. in Skultans 141). His taking Locke's distinction between two kinds of madness -- "the first madness involves opposition to reason, the second involves being overpowered by unruly passions" -indicates the difference between unreasonableness (eccentricity) and illness (141). It is the first madness that involves “opposition to reason” that Woolf uses to create "voices" in modern fiction, for madness has its unconventional and non-patriarchal significance. Though reason and unreason are two sides of a coin and only the two together claims a healthy balance, yet the priority has always been given to reason. It seems obvious in history, as proposed by Foucault, that the so-called “rational” side shuts out the heaven with one hand, and that the traditionally admitted “truth” is always the 60 majority-claimed “truth.” Madness, in fact, is but a label pinned by the respectable majority on those they cannot tolerate, on the deviants. The result of the conflict between the majority and the minority is that the majority becomes the only voice and the minority's voice is muffled: “They called me mad, and I called them mad, and damned them, they outvoted me” (Porter 1). Submitting yourself to the dominant voice, you are sane; otherwise, you are mad: Much Madness is divinest Sense To a discerning eye Much Sense - the starkest Madness 'Tis the Majority In this, as All, prevail Assent - and you are sane Demur - you're straightway dangerous [insane] And handled with a Chain Emily Dickinson, “Much Madness is divinest sense” (2-3) Concepts of rationality, justice and the human good are thought exclusively based on male-centric shared understandings. Woman is by definition in culture labeled as madness. A woman writing was not merely “a sign of folly” but “a distracted mind” (AROO 71). The imposition is ingrained in culture: “One can measure the opposition that was in the air to a woman writing when one finds that even a woman with a great turn for writing has brought herself to believe that to write a book was to be ridiculous, even to show oneself distracted” (70). Aphra Behn, the first woman making her living by writing, is the victim of the false binary opposition. She “proved that money could be made by writing at the sacrifice, perhaps of certain agreeable qualities” (71). For a woman writer, the situation is intolerable. “[B]y living the life of Aphra Behn!” Woolf claims, “Death would be better” (71). The recurring identification in literature of male as reason, light, revelation and female with madness, antireason, primitive darkness, mystery represents the traditional stereotypes. Feminism questions the received view of the past; women writers point both to the exclusion and marginalization of women 61 from most historical traditions and to the patriarchal prejudices that have stereotyped women in demeaning and disenfranchising ways. Menaced by the paternal paranoia and the mother’s schizophrenia, women writers must maintain themselves in a difficult equilibrium between the two. The narrative voice is fractured, wavering, and multiple. In terms of feminist theory, what Woolf’s writing effects is “a denial of the unified subject which supports all discourse and is necessarily ‘masculine’, since the symbolic order is established with the phallus as its fundamental signifier” (Minow-Pinkney 58). The narrative in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway clearly points out that the so-called “insane” character Septimus "could reason; could read, Dante for example, quite easily,” and “he could add up his bill; his brain was perfect" but he "could not feel" (MD 133). The definition of “insanity” as “absence of reason” is therefore not unproblematic. Septimus lost his “sanity” because he thought that either to kill men as a natural thing in war or to feel natural about his friend Evans' death in war was the absence of humanity and was the absence of feeling (MD 130-34). The question of which is “madness,” the “absence of reason” or the “absence of feeling,” hence is doubtful. The narrative goes on to suggest that "it must be the fault of the world then--that he could not feel" and that "it might be possible that the world itself is without meaning" (MD 133). For Woolf, feeling definitely is more valuable than reason. Through the irreverent satirical description of the psychiatrists, Woolf clearly suggests that the extreme “sense of proportion” is “madness.” Her personification of the social system as the famed psychiatrist Sir William Bradshaw, a warrior against the forces of irrationality and a hero to his countryman is, therefore, not without irony: Worshipping proportion, Sir William not only prospered himself but made England prosper, secluded her lunatics, forbade childbirth, penalized despair, made it impossible for the unfit to propagate their views until they, too, shared his sense of proportion.... this is madness, this sense; in fact, his sense of 62 proportion. (MD 150-51) Though Sir William considers himself as a healthy doctor and understands the definition of "madness" as "not having a sense of proportion" (146), he is indicated by Woolf as unhealthy: "a doctor loses his sense of proportion, as a doctor he fails.... and health is proportion" (149). Septimus’ wife, Rezia, though not mad, suffers with his husband from the psychiatric medical system cries that she does not like Sir William for the sake of her husband or maybe for all the victims. “Naked, defenseless, the exhausted, the friendless received the impress of Sir William’s will. He swooped; he devoured. He shut people up” (154). Hence the meaning of "health" also deserves careful reconsideration. Madness, variously defined, is the near neighbor in both Foucault's and Nietzsche's understanding of the term. Tragedy died, claimed Nietzsche, because Euripides (whom Aristotle honored as "the most tragic of the poets") expressing the views of Socrates, refused to concede that the world had any irrational aspects and thereby robbed tragedy of all its Dionysian elements. The central value of tragedy, as Nietzsche understands, as Tracy B. Strong analyzes, is: the denial of a single master narrative whose telos is self-recognition. The dramatic "proto-phenomenon" from which tragedy emerged was the procession of the chorus. The chorus is not, for Nietzsche, the representation of the spectator on stage, but instead a double process: "To see oneself transformed before one's eyes and to begin to act as if one had entered into another body, another character." [. . .] Nietzsche goes on to indicate that one encounters oneself "epidemically," that is, on a scale that is not only individual. Moreover, the spectator is not only spectator and actor, s/he is also, in a sense, the author. [. . .] tragedy is not that of a single narrative. (qtd. in Magnus 136) Great minds are alike. Foucault indicates in that the language of psychiatry (madness) 63 is defined only by the so-called normal side. It is "a monologue of reason about madness" (Foucault xi). He argues that we now can only have the "erased forms" (28), or "tamed" (36) forms, or "silenced" (38) forms of madness, which in fact is the "emptied" one: “By a strange act of force, the classical age was to reduce to silence the madness whose voices the Renaissance had just liberated, but whose violence it had already tamed” (38). The Renaissance "tamed" the violence of madness by banishment, the classical age (Age of Reason) "silenced" the voice of madness by confinement, and the modern men "lose" the essence of madness by psychiatry. He also quotes Dostoevsky's words, “It is not by confining one's neighbor that one is convinced of one's sanity" (ix). From the accusation and intention against a monologic definition towards “madness,” Nietzsche and Foucault obviously share the same sparkle of wisdom. Madness, in fact, is but a label pinned by the respectable majority on those they cannot tolerate, on those deviate from them. “Split consciousness” is "the impasse confronting those whom cultural conditioning has deprived of the very means of protest or self-affirmation" (Warhol 7). And “mental illness” as Shoshana Felman clearly points out is a "request for help, a manifestation both of cultural impotence of political castration" (7). The odds are always against the so-called “abnormal” side, and “reason” becomes the only voice. The other side is then marginalized to or labeled as madness. What we consider “madness,” whether it appears in women or in outlaws, is either the acting out of the devalued female role or the total or partial rejection of one's sex-role negative discrimination. Society in Mrs. Dalloway produces many such examples of excessive patriarchal dominance. Clarissa and Septimus can be seen in their relationship to society, as essentially “feminine” in that both are victimized, to varying extents, by a male-supremacist system. The world is thus perceived by both Clarissa and Septimus as threatening to one’s individuality. Woolf depicts a universalized vision of virility 64 manifesting itself as fascism. Its victims are those members of humanity who are powerless, “feminine” men as well as women. War, as a weapon of tyranny and as a manifestation of that “quintessence of virility,” is an ominous presence. Septimus is diagnosed as suffering from deferred shell shock, his mind being a casualty of war. Woolf subtly indicates the lopsided masculine tenor of the postwar British society. The youngest generation in this novel is almost exclusively male: Sally Seton repeatedly announces her pride in her “five great boys;” the Bradshaws have a son at Eton, in fact "everybody in the room [party] has six sons at Eton" (MD 289); Rezia mourns the loss of closeness with her sisters but craves a son who would resemble his father; Elizabeth Dalloway is the sole daughter, and she identifies more closely with her father than her mother. Sir William Bradshaw and Dr. Holmes, “the repulsive brute, with the blood-nostrils” (223), in league with the “clocks of Harley Street,” uphold the tyranny of external time over the inner stream of experience. Thus, for both Woolf and Septimus, the two doctors are the powerful representatives of the masculine aspect of human nature. Male authority is partially incarnate in the relentless chiming of Big Ben, the London clock. Big Ben, the famous London landmark, symbolizes British authority. It is a British institution which represents society's attempt to extirpate creativity and human differences in the service of proportion and order: “the clocks of Harley street nibbled at the June day, counselled submission, upheld authority, and pointed out in chorus the supreme advantages of a sense of proportion [. . .] a commercial clock [. . .] announced, genially and fraternally, as if it were a pleasure to Messrs” (MD 154). The tick of the clock, "shredding and slicing, dividing and subdividing" (154), promises the smooth functioning of society yet at the expense of individuals like Septimus and Clarissa. Its general function for all the characters is to remind them of their “dis-ease.” The heavy "leaden circles," the oppressive reminder, the inevitable ticking of the clock, presses not only Clarissa's (5, 71, 73, 142, 154, 192-3), but Peter Wash's (72), and also Elizabeth's 65 (73), and Rezia's (142) mind like the psychiatrists, who occupy a position of authority "forcing the soul" of Septimus (281) and drives them “mad.” The relentless patriarchal dominance of clock "striking... with extraordinary vigour, as if a young man, strong, indifferent, inconsiderate, were swinging dumb-bells this way and that" (71) is more ominously embodied in the medical professionals, Holmes and Bradshaw, the modern officers of coercion. Septimus is obviously the dramatic victim of this authority, but who is not in this novel? Lady Bradshaw's feminine concession is equally significant: "Fifteen years ago she had gone under.... There had be no scene, no snap; only the slow sinking, water-logged, of her will into his. Sweet was her smile, swift her submission." (152) The connections Woolf suggests in World War I and a bolstered male authority have no basis in actual social change, but within the image created by the novel the war assumes a dysfunction of a masculine rational society. The illness is in fact on the so-called normal side. Woolf offers adequate proof in the presentation of "the world" as seen by the "insane" and by a whole series of those generally regarded as "sane." Madness as the subject in the novel is hence a literary device to invite the self-criticism of the society about the meaning and cause of “madness.” Being an outsider to the so-called normal discourse, Woolf’s major concern is to break out this cultural imposition of madness without losing her voice. The challenge facing her is nothing less than: to "re-invent" language, to re-learn how to speak: to speak not only against but outside of the specular phallogocentric structure, to establish a discourse the status of which would no longer be defined by the phallacy of masculine meaning. An old saying would thereby be given new life: today more than ever, changing our minds--changing the mind--is a woman's prerogative. (Warhol 18-19) If women are drowned out or denied, how can their voices be heard? How can they 66 give voices to the place of women and reject masculine discourse without being marginalized into madness or silence? To increase the voices and balance the loss is Woolf's stratagem of being heard. Wishing to speak to effect, women constitute themselves as split consciousnesses to enter the symbolic and play a language game with men; that is, they "give voice to the specificity of a female subject who is outside any principle of identity-to-self, which can identify with multiple scenes without fully integrating herself into them" (Minow-Pinkey 83). The invention of Septimus, the feminine man without a stable identity is thus a defensive “splitting,” whereby Clarissa's most dangerous impulses are projected into another figure that can die for her as Christ the scapegoat: “the voice which now communicated with him who was the greatest of mankind, Septimus, lately taken from life to death, the Lord who had come to renew society, who lay like a coverlet, a snow blanket smitten only by the sun, for ever unwasted, suffering for ever, the scapegoat, the eternal sufferer” (MD 37). She and he, in fact, are one composite character. What is implied here is that Mrs. Dalloway is not the only victim of the society; the repressed need an eternal sufferer to suffer for them and the problem raised here is not individual but general. The figure of "Septimus as scapegoat, as victim of society's own illness called war, oppression and insensitivity" serves well to illustrate the society's own state of madness called normality (Rigney 62-63). Literary works reflect the philosophical, medical, social, religious and political assumptions regarding mental aberration characteristic of the periods in which they were created. Mad protagonists and personae of literature convey the intricate connections between psychic requirements and the social and cultural milieux in which these, however obliquely, are expressed (Feder xiii). Different characters in Mrs. Dalloway are all “mad” of a different degree. Clarissa and Septimus are threatened more than other characters because more than any others their private selves diverge from public 67 expectations of them. The so-called “sane,” whether men or masculinized women like Miss Kilman, are not the only assailants in Woolf's dangerous society; at times the very atmosphere of London becomes profoundly threatening for Septimus: In the street, vans roared past him; brutality blared out on placards; men were trapped in mines; women burnt alive; and once a maimed file of lunatics being exercised or displayed for the diversion of the populace (who laughed aloud), ambled and nodded and grinned past him, in the Tottenham Court Road, each half apologetically, yet triumphantly, inflicting his helpless woe. And would he go mad? (MD 135-36) When judged under the so-called sane logic, he represents insanity. Clarissa only stands closer than Septimus to what is considered the norm, that is, the consensus or majority behavior. Torn between her private self as a person she likes to be and her public social identity she must commit, she is somewhat insane, though to a less drastic extent. Her uneasy relationship with her lover Peter, with her husband Richard, with her daughter Elizabeth, and with her daughter’s teacher Miss Kilman shows her incompatibility with the society. The social order of Britain in 1923 was resolutely inimical to the reality of actual life cherished by Clarissa and Septimus. It created standards that, far from allowing for free, individual expression, forced individuals into rigid roles with unfulfillable expectations. The regime's ideals were antithetical to life itself. No one measured up to these standards. Peter is a failure, and Richard has not gone as far as expected. The accomplished Lady Bruton, due to her putative non-rationality, felt she cannot write a letter. The Prime Minister would look more in place selling bread: “One couldn’t laugh at him. He looked so ordinary. You might have stood him behind a counter and bought biscuits— poor chap, all rigged up in gold lace. [. . .] He tried to look somebody. It was amusing to watch” (MD 261-62). Even Whitbread and Bradshaw, the enthusiastic enforcers of the ideal, are almost universally 68 disliked. The regime works on ideals and ideal symbols relating to the glory of a “supernormal” society which is in fact abnormal. It is this “split consciousness” of the society instead of the “madness” of any individual that Woolf tries to expose. This is the reason why “madness” becomes Woolf's continuous theme, and why the “mad dis-course (no single unified course)” is her knack of writing. Working under the oppression of a so-called rational society at the risk of negating women's difference, Woolf looks to a feminine language as a means of undermining the male domination from within. Being a woman novelist, she has really given much thought to the matter. Clarissa's oscillation between “sanity” and “insanity” is Woolf’s stratagem of being heard. Clarissa marries Richard Dalloway instead of Peter Wash to keep a title of the public self “Dalloway” which is the symbol of society-claimed “sanity” but still keeps the privacy: So she would still find herself arguing in St. James's park, still making out that she had been right--and she had too--not to marry him. For in marriage a little license, a little independence there must be between people living together day in and day out in the same house; which Richard gave her, and she him [. . .]. But with Peter everything had to be shared; everything gone into. And it was intolerable, and when it came to that scene in the little garden by the fountain, she had to break with him or they would have been destroyed, both of them ruined, she was convinced. (MD 10) The privacy which the society labels as “insanity” is valued by Clarissa as "priceless" (181). Such privacy is a paramount value for all Woolf’s “feminine” characters. Mrs. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse dies for the lack of it. Septimus, the feminine man, ultimately, commits suicide to achieve it. The social institution in which the self is most vulnerable is marriage, especially for women. Bonds with men, especially their culmination in marriage, are a menace to the freedom of women. Clarissa and Sally 69 Seton “spoke of marriage always as a catastrophe” (50). Septimus takes marriage as bondage. When his marriage with Rezia was over, he thought, “with relief. The rope was cut; he mounted; he was free” (101). Clarissa refuses the victimization; she survives despite of her contradictions with the symbolic order. To behave like a lady, as patriarchy’s “perfect hostess,” is thus a cautious program for survival. Her early suitor, Peter Walsh, has posed a subtle threat to psychological security. Peter’s negative masculinity is also evidenced by his ever-present phallic pen-knife. Loving Peter but marrying Richard, Clarissa has her female consideration. Although vacillating emotionally between the allure of Peter and that of Richard, she remembers Peter’s courtship only glancingly; the burden of that plot is carried by Peter, through whose memories Woolf relates the tortured end of the relationship with Clarissa. Clarissa’s memories, by contrast, focus more exclusively on a pre-war pre-marriage feminine world, the general ambience of Burton, her childhood time, and her love for Sally Seton. Even marriage to Richard, who permits Clarissa this precious privacy and agrees that she sleeps alone, is not without danger. “She had the oddest sense of being herself invisible; unseen; unknown [. . .] this being Mrs. Richard Dalloway” (14). Clarissa’s present is in a male-dominated London where she does not have any close female bonds (for example, she is not close to her daughter, not invited by Lady Bruton, and hated by Miss Kilman); this is starkly contrasted with her memories of Bourton, the pre-Oedipal stage of female development. Clarissa’s passionate attachment with Seton in Bourton predates Mrs. Dalloway’s female experience of the Oedipal state of marriage in London. She perceives the negative symbol of masculinity Peter as an irritating intruder; the scene she most vividly remembers, Sally Seton’s kiss, is rudely interrupted by Peter’s appearance. The moment of exclusive female connection is shattered by masculine intervention. Clarissa responds to Peter’s intrusion as an absolute and arbitrary termination: “It was like running one’s face against a granite wall in the darkness! It was shocking; it was 70 horrible” (53)! Her perception of Peter’s motives— “she felt his hostility; his jealousy; his determination to break into their comradeship”— suggests a revised Oedipal configuration: the jealous male attempting to rupture the exclusive female bond, insisting on the transference of attachment to the men, demanding heterosexuality. Clarissa’s revenge is to refuse to marry Peter, to select instead the less demanding Richard Dalloway, who allows “a dignity in people; a solitude,” even “a gulf” between husband and wife, a space that can incorporate the memory of Sally (181). Such tendency to withdraw from what is perceived as a negative, masculine world in which the self can be theoretically violated sexually and psychologically and to enter a feminine world of garden images and security exists in other characters. Similarly, Rezia’s passing from a feminine and pastoral world of sisters and mother in Italy to the arid masculine ugliness of London orchestrates the same tune with Clarissa’s story. The wavering between the symbolic and semiotic, Clarissa and Mrs. Dalloway, public self and private self, reason and madness, or the indirection becomes the only safe way for women to return to the mother (Sally’s arrival at Burton replaces Clarissa’s dead mother and sister.), to balance the social false imposition, to find her language to speak. Voice, therefore, takes a profoundly significant role in the poetics of modern fiction especially for women writers. Language, and particularly the language of women’s writing, is a rich and complex dialogue of voices. Dis-course that is multi-voiced is “dialogic” or “polyphonic” rather than “monologic,” and it achieves this quality primarily through “collision or communication” between or among differing points of view or consciousnesses on the world. A speaker affects not only the listeners, but the collective discourses of social classes, the whole culture. A voice refers to different listeners and signifies differently in different time and different situations. As Bakhtin puts it, language is “populated” and “overpopulated with the intention of others” (Bakhtin 1981, 294). This process is the means whereby language is transformed into a voice, whereby Mrs. Dalloway is 71 transformed into voices by Woolf. Language once uttered by man the carrier of ideas, is discourse, and becomes voices. It is the diversity of voices and the “split internal stratification of language” that characterize the narrative of Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway as “mad dis-course”'. Different voices represent different ideas, consciousnesses, or ideologies. As discussed earlier of Bakhtin, consciousnesses and ideas all mean the same thing – voices (Bakhtin 1984, 88, 91). Multiple voices are heard through Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness narrative. The whole narration of Mrs. Dalloway is a perfect example of multi-voicedness. The fuzzy indication of the speakers and the flowing structure of the speeches evade any effort to fix and to exhaust the meanings. Take the passage from the very first pages as example, What a lark! What a plunge! For so it has always seemed to her, when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now, she had burst open the French Windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air. How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen; looking at the flowers, at the trees with the smoke winding off them and rooks rising, falling; standing and looking until Peter Wash said, "Musing among the vegetables"--Was that it?--"I prefer men to cauliflowers"--was that it? He must have said it one morning when she had gone out on to the terrace--Peter Wash. He would be back from India one of these days [. . .]. (MD 3-4)[emphasis mine] The bold lines marked, the speeches with and without quotation marks, the words in the brackets, the past memories and the present events, the mixture of tenses, the consciousnesses or unconsciousnesses, the multiple voices produced, all together make it 72 hard for the reader to recognize who is reasoning, who is speaking, what is past, what is present, whether it happens in the mind or in reality. This technique of blurring the distinction between direct and indirect speech is common in Woolf and is part of her attempt to make the transitions between speech and thought as fluid. She orchestrates individual speeches between past and present, interior thoughts and outward speeches, and moves the reader to one character and another. The characteristic of Woolf’s feminine writing gives the impression to readers that Mrs. Dalloway “flows in one uninterrupted stream from first word to last” (Hussey 175). The novel can be seen as a “metaphoric ocean whose ‘rhythms . . . surge through the passages describing the loss of clear distinction between the self and the world” (175-6). Generally she avoids identification with any authority and so creates a text as elusive as the old woman's song or the airplane's skywriting. Whenever we try to pinpoint the locus of the subject, we get lost in the discursive mist. This is what the “mad dis-course” is like. If the “Unified Self,” the “Single Consciousness,” is the symbol of “Reason,” the “split selves,” the “plural consciousnesses” would be the symbol of “unreason (madness).” If the linear monologue is the discourse of reason, then the non-linear polyphony is the dis-course of madness. According to Bakhtin, “plural consciousnesses” does not mean “idiocy” “folly” or “insanity;” it means “multiple voices” and it is the smartest and truest expression of a "novel," an innovative writing. A novelistic text, Bakktin emphasizes again and again, is a "polyphonic" (multi-voiced) world: A plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousness, a genuine polyphony of fully valid voices is in fact the chief characteristic of Dostoevsky's novels. What unfolds in his works is not a multitude of characters and fates in a single objective world, illuminated by a single authorial consciousness; rather a plurality of consciousnesses, with equal 73 rights and each with its own world, combine but are not merged in the unity of the event. (Bakhtin 1984, 6) A novelistic text, according to Bakhtin, is in fact a “party of voices.” To present two groups of characters from the extremes of polarity of mental health and connect their worlds is a great challenge which racks Woolf's brains. Mrs. Dalloway's status as the “hostess of the party,” and Mr. Dalloway as the Parliament member is not without profound significance. Clarissa never even glimpses the character Septimus whom Woolf called her double, and yet he plays a central role in her day. She hears of his death through Bradshaw; this news strikes a chord that reverberates with her mood at the party, and she withdraws to consider her party's deeper meaning for her. A meeting is not necessary for their communion; to know what is essential in a person requires only a sort of sympathetic psychic awareness. As the hostess of the party she does more than passing the tray and describing the weather on this fine day in June, she holds not only a physical but a spiritual conversation with people, and she brings different voices of the society together letting them interact with one another. As the wife of a Parliament member, her collection of ideas from the party and her reaction about Septimus' death would become a voice in politics to effect a reformation in the society and a reconsideration about the social “illness” which is called normality. Being a stream-of-consciousness novel, Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway is called by Phyllis Rose as "the most schizophrenic of English novels" (qtd. in Minow-Pinkey 62). The novel which examines the life of Clarissa relies heavily on consciousnesses of different characters to build the narrative. Her “mad dis-course,” which is “dis-course of plural consciousnesses,” which is "multi-voiced discourse" is therefore, in Bakhtin's words, the "novelistic discourse", and Mrs. Dalloway is a "novelistic text". The interaction of voices is not masculinely limited in one single conversation as the "microdialogue" (Bakhtin 1984, 40); it happens in the "novel as a whole as a 'great dialogue'" (40) and 74 also goes far and broad enough to occur in society, culture, history, as the "macrodialogue." Clearly we can see how significant "polyphony--the dialogue of voices" means to the novelistic genre, the genre-in-the-making, the genre-of-becoming, or the feminine writing. It could be the best "capsuled" image of a novelistic text. The purpose of this "polyphonic" genre to which Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway belongs is to open the space of definition, interpretation, discussion, argumentation, and critique to make it an "open-ended," "unfinalizable" genre where everyone can have their "character zones" (Bakhtin 1981, 316) to express their voices. Though risking “sanity,” it's a nice try for Woolf and her characters to make known their resistance to the social definition of “madness” and invite the self-criticism of the so-called “sane.” Each time the words of quotation from Shakespeare's Cymbeline "Fear no more the heat o' the sun [symbol of reason]" (MD 13, 44, 59, 211, 224, 283) are repeated, the voices of their defiance are heard. Being readers, we are the guests of honor of Woolf's Clarissa, the "perfect hostess of the party," and our attention is her greatest expectation. For Woolf, stream of consciousness represents versions of reality; for Bakhtin, novelistic discourse represents languages of truth. Feminine writing, as elaborated by Woolf, and “novelistic discourse,” as defined by Bakhtin, seem very similar in uses of language, despite the fact that the novelistic language Bakhtin described had nothing to do with women, and feminine language Woolf claimed is not necessarily tied to the novel. The very act of giving voice to the female by Woolf and to the unofficial by Bakhtin makes feminine writing and novelistic discourse move toward the same direction against a monologic dominant discourse. For both of them, consciousness is inner speech, and inner speech is the orchestration or interaction of the dialogic, different voices that we have heard. Wayne Booth claims that “if Bakhtin had lived today, he would have come to accept feminist criticism” (qtd. in Bauer and McKinstry 7). Woolf’s remarks of the “Russian influence,” the “Russian 75 mind,” and “their natural reverence of the human spirit” (“MF” 90-91) indicate her evaluation of human consciousness. Stream of consciousness typifies Woolf’s moving toward an articulation of gender within an inclusive instead of exclusive web of relationships between narrator, narrated, and narration to effect a female narrative subjectivity that transcends the traditional paradigms of monologic reading and writing. The narrators always substitute the definitive characterization for streams of images or drifting impressions of characters. The narrated consciousnesses are represented as the fluid ramblings of the mind’s conversations with one another. The female subjectivity of Woolf’s narrative is paradoxically inscribed in her deconstructive narration of the traditional subject (mind/body, reason/madness) by the unconventional plural consciousness of the narrators. She tries every effort in her life to evolve a feminine style which will transcend the masculine Self. If her writing practice does not make sense to us, it means that women writers need more writing practice to achieve the true female sentence. Though praising Joyce’s “complete courage” about his “spiritual” writing against the “materialists” (“MF” 89), working within a system whose terms are phallogocentric, and using an-other’s language from the place of the Other, Wo olf definitely needs far more “courage” and effort to write as a woman against the patriarchal dominance and masculine definition. Though she is not the mother of “stream of consciousness,” she is undoubtedly the mother of “feminine writing.” 76 Chapter 3 Androgyny and Feminine Writing Western culture is seen as patriarchal; “history is too much about wars; biography too much about great men; poetry has shown, I think, a tendency to sterility, and fiction [. . .] I will say no more about it” (AROO 112); those experiences which are specific to women are excluded, and cannot be articulated or shared in available discourse. Patriarchal culture has dispossessed women of motherhood and of mothers in literature. Literature is based on the primacy of masculine terms in the structure of binary oppositions. Each opposition is analyzed as a hierarchy where the feminine side is always seen as the negative. Feminine access to sexuality is complicated by psychoanalysis, by how the presence or absence of the penis in boy, girl and mother is conceived. Feminine writing practice hence is attempted to challenge the universalistic stance of discourse by exposing its inherent dualism. Female scholars assume truths are common to all humanity not just for men. All discourses are relative, and are therefore only true locally or partially, and not universally. The natural shape of men and women has been twisted by patriarchy’s insistence on the inferiority of women. Women writers aim to challenge the age-old assumption about the basis of meaning and reclaim the naturalness of femininity. Androgyny, raised by Woolf, can be seen as a strong expression of support for gender equality. The idea that gender is mutable is central in her fiction Orlando. Androgyny is an archetypal image of the union of masculine and feminine natures in one being. The word is from the Greek andro (male) and gyn (female), and it “defines a condition under which the characteristics of the sexes, and the human impulses expressed by men and wome n, are not rigidly assigned” (Heilbrun x). Woolf was writing at a time when the modern distinction between sex and gender (biological given vs. cultural construct) was hardly thought of. However, she did not 77 blind herself to the coercive power of culture in making people act out a sharply delineated gender role. She contributes most to this shift of emphasis. Being a woman and a writer, Woolf strives to overcome the limits that social indoctrination has placed upon her. In her writing, sexuality refers to culturally acquired characteristics rather than to biologically determined ones. Artistically, this means using sexually liberated language and exploring topics that has traditionally been the province of male authors. Woolf’s depiction of relations between sexes attempts to smash the barriers defining acceptable subject matters for ladies. Like most of her female characters, she longs to be free of both overt masculine authority and the latent mind-control of feminine socialization. In A Room of One’s Own she sketches the ideal fusion of male and female inspired by the sight of a man and a woman getting into a taxi together below her window. Wondering whether “the two sexes in the mind” can “live in harmony together, spiritually co-operating” to get “complete satisfaction and happiness, Woolf presents an image of true androgyny: “If one is a man, still the woman part of the brain must have effect; and a woman also must have intercourse with the man in her. Coleridge perhaps meant this when he said that a great mind is androgynous” (AROO 103). Against the hierarchical dualism of man and woman, androgyny is attempted by Woolf to topple the narrative myths that dominate our culture and rewrite and redefine the inferior, de-privileged side of that dualism. “Androgyny is proposed as a corrective to the masculinization of discourse represented” (Abel 87). In fact, the “immasculinization” proposes a vision for better interaction. Through the new dialogue, a de-valuing of the masculine side of the traditional hierarchical dichotomies and a revaluing of the traditionally feminine or female will occur. Woolf argues for androgyny in writing. 78 She believes that the writer should not allow an undue consciousness of being of one sex or the other to permeate her or his work. The concept of androgyny is a cry with literary works for more balanced human experience. “Literature would be incredibly impoverished, as indeed is impoverished beyond our counting by the doors that have been shut upon women” (AROO 89) by men’s “egotism” and “aridity” (105), expressed by the “straight dark bar”: All this [freedom of mind] was admirable. But after reading a chapter or two a shadow seemed to lie across the page. It was a straight dark bar, a shadow shaped something like the letter ‘I’. One began dodging this way and that to catch a glimpse of the landscape behind it. Whether that was indeed a tree or a woman walking I was not quite sure. Back one was always hailed to the letter ‘I’. One began to be tired of ‘I’. Not but what this ‘I’ was a most respectable ‘I’; honest and logical; as hard as a nut, and polished for centuries by good teaching and good feeling. I respect and admire that ‘I’ from the bottom of my heart. But – here I turned a page or two, looking for something or other – the worst of it is that in the shadow of the letter ‘I’ all is shapeless as mist. have been more indecent. Is that a tree? [. . .] Nothing could But … I had said ‘but’ too often. One cannot go on saying ‘but’. One must finish the sentence somehow, I rebuked myself. Shall I finish it, ‘but – I am bored!’ But why was I bored? Partly because of the dominance of the letter ‘I’ and the aridity, which, like the giant beach tree, it casts within its shade. Nothing will grow there. [. . .] There seemed to be some obstacle, some impediment in Mr. A’s mind which blocked the fountain of creative energy and shored it within narrow limits. (AROO 104-05)[emphasis mine] 79 With the giant masculine tree standing and stopping in front, nothing behind can be seen and nothing under will grow. Stuffing every page or chapter with the masculine ego, any male writer typified by Mr. A cannot produce an interesting writing. Readers will be helplessly “bored.” Androgyny is intended as the antidote to men’s “self-assertive virility” in writing. If men are “writing only with the male side of the brains,” men’s “unimpeded masculinity” (AROO 107) not only “block[s] the fountain of creative energy” but also bores literature and kills sentences. “It is a mistake for a woman to read them, for she will inevitably look for something that she will not find” (105). The feelings of the writer are “no longer communicated”; his mind becomes a soundproof chamber. Losing the power of suggestion, his sentence “falls plump to the ground – dead” (106). On the contrary, the sentence of the androgynous poet Coleridge is the sort of writing which “gives birth to all kinds of other ideas,” and which has the secret of perpetual life” (106). Of the conception of fusion and harmony, androgyny seems to speak for or sympathize with neither men nor women. Toward the idea of impartiality, not all feminists have been content with such a paradoxical approach. androgyny. Showalter is the major pioneer in criticizing the concept of Wo olf’s androgyny is thoroughly refuted and sarcastically critiqued by Showalter. Showalter argues that for Woolf the concept of androgyny--“full balance and command of an emotional range that includes male and female elements”--is the excuse that helps Woolf “evade confrontation with her painful femaleness,” and “enable[s] her to choke and repress her anger and ambition” (Showalter 1982, 264). Woman writers’ anger, according to Showalter, is righteous and appropriate in fighting masculine tyranny. As elaborated by Toril Moi, Woolf’s “greatest sin against feminism” (Moi 2) for Showalter, is that “even in the moment of expressing feminist conflict, Woolf wanted to transcend it” (Showalter 1982, 282). 80 According to Showalter, Woolf is one of the “failures of androgyny” (Showalter 1982, 265); androgyny is the expression of Woolf’s personal tragedy, and the “betrayal of her literary genius.” Virginia Woolf was as thwarted and pulled asunder as the women she describes in A Room of One’s Own. [. . .] Woolf inherited a female tradition a century old; no woman has ever been more in touch with – even obsessed by – this tradition that she; yet by the end of her life she had gone back full circle, back to the melancholy, guilt-ridden, suicidal women – Lady Winchelsea and the Duchess of Newcastle – whom she had studied and pitied. And beyond the tragedy of her personal life is the betrayal of her literary genius, her adoption of a female aesthetic that ultimately proved inadequate to her purposes and stifling to her development. (Showalter 1982, 264) Agreeing with other critics that androgyny is central to Woolf’s thinking not only in A Room of One’s Own but also in her novels, Showalter uses lots of different caustic descriptions to criticize androgyny: “a strategic retreat, and not a victory; a denial of feeling, and not a mastery of it” (285), “a response to the dilemma of a woman writer embarrassed and alarmed by feelings too hot to handle without risking real rejection by her family, her audience, and her class” (286), “a symbol of psychic withdrawal, an escape from the demands of other people” (286), “a rationalization of her own fears” (289), “passive receptivity to the point of self-destruction” (296), etc. Showalter’s rants and raves toward Woolf and androgyny are too numerous to enumerate. Under Showalter’s pen, Woolf’s conception of androgyny “lurks a psychological equivalent of lobotomy” (287); Woolf is not only a coward neurotic psycho who “need[s] equanimity” and was “practicing equanimity” (287), but also an isolated & inexperienced & unpractical literary outsider with a very limited outlook; 81 Woolf’s ideal “perfect artist” is “a figure more pathetic than heroic” (290); Woolf’s “Three Guineas rings false”; Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own becomes “irritating and hysterical” (295). Showalter is “infuriated by” Woolf’s “naiveté” of androgyny. According to her, “Woolf’s female aesthetic” is the “creative synthesis to the point of exhaustion and sterility” (296). A Room of One’s Own, the precursor and structuring metaphor for feminist literary criticism, becomes a “female space that is both sanctuary and prison” of which Woolf is “the architect” (264). Woolf becomes “the victims of this emotional utopia” (264-65). Woolf’s suicide is snubbed as “one of Bloomsbury’s representative art forms” (265). Woolf is mocked as “the Angel herself” by her appeal to the women writers for the killing “the Angel in the House, that phantom of female perfection” (265). Woolf’s feminine aesthetics of androgyny is without a single redeeming feature under Showalter’s pen. As early foretold by Woolf that her “unconventional” feminine aesthetics might not be accepted immediately even by women because “[w]omen are hard on women” and because “[w]omen dislike women” (AROO 114), though Woolf herself enjoyed women’s “unconventionality” (114). Showalter’s comments become personal insults and she has lost the professional objectivity of an acceptably qualified literary critic, when she takes Woolf’s biographical material, private life (relationship with her father, mother, brother, sister, and husband) and physiological record (menstruation, childlessness, and menopause) to be the target of critique of Woolf’s “femaleness” and runs an elaborate passage on her biological lampoon (265-82) in her chapter “Virginia Woolf and the Flight Into Androgyny” (263-97): I am struck by the way in which critics have abstracted and mythologized her experience [. . .]. Considered form another perspective, however, her major breakdowns were associated with crises in female identity; the first occurred in 1895, after the death of her mother and the onset of 82 menstruation; the second from 1913-1915, after Leonard decided that they should not have children. Her suicide in 1940 followed menopause; though less information about it has been published, it seems to have repeated elements of the earlier episodes. While I have no wish to substitute one magical explanation of her anguish for another, it is clear that most of the information we have about her comes form those most concerned to deny or repress their own complicity in her sickness. (Showalter 1982, 267) This kind of emotionalist argument surfaces everywhere in her discussion of Woolf in A Literature of Their Own, “Killing the Angel in the House: The Autonomy Wo men Writers,” “Twenty Years On: A Literature of Their Own Revisited,” etc. A Room of One’s Own paves the way for A Literature of Their Own by its feminist title and by its pioneering conception of womanhood. Showalter’s A Literature of Their Own became well-known soon because of its similar and significant title as A Room of One’s Own which had achieved a widely-recognized status in the literary stage. Arrogantly comparing herself as “Northrop Frye’s sister-the great feminist critic” (an apish appropriation of Woolf’s Shakespeare’s sister), Showalter benefits from Woolf’s achievement but rejects her literary foremother very ungratefully. She justifies herself in the name of future women writers: I felt sure that there would be an audience for my book; and the writers themselves kept me going as I read about their hopes that all their struggles and failures would make a difference to the women who came after. They gave me the confidence to believe that even if I were not Northrop Fry’s sister-the great feminist critic who would get everything right-it was enough to find the courage to write exactly what I thought and to be willing to share my own struggles and errors in the faith that the critics who came after me 83 would know more and do better. (Showalter 1998, 2) With an insolently self-important and provocatively challenging attitude toward the counter-attack feminist critics such as Toril Moi she reflects in her revisiting of her work A Literature of Their Own: The critical reception of A Literature of Their Own by men has been generally respectful, but among women critics the book has been both imitated and reviled. On one hand, it helped create the new field of feminist literary history and gynocriticism, has been translated into several languages, and has influenced similar undertakings around the world. [. . .] For the past twenty years, I have been attacked virtually every point on the feminist hermeneutic circle, as separatist, careerist, theoretical, anti-theoretical, racist, homophobic, politically correct, traditional, and non-canonical critic. I’ve come to expect new critical studies of women’s writing to point out how I have failed [. . .] Still being notorious for failing is better than not being noticed at all. [. . .] I have followed the cycles of criticism and attack with attention and interest, and I have even had the good fortune to live long enough to receive a few apologies, in person or in print. (Showalter 1998, 3) Showalter enjoys her notoriety of her “failing,” or critique toward Woolf, “better than not being noticed at all.” Her argument indefensibly fails when she evokes biographical evidence and physiological material to sustain her thesis about the nature of Woolf’s writing. Readers could have been misled and convinced by appeals to biographical circumstances and biological science rather than texts. “[I]n feminist literary history and criticism, as in other field, being first has its disadvantages, because you become the launching-pad for subsequent work and the starting-point for everyone else’s improvements and corrections” (Showalter 1998, 3). 84 It seems this reflection of Showalter toward her A Literature of Their own (1977) is better suited to Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929) according to the time of their publication and the originality of their works. Obviously, it is not Toril Moi and other counter-attack feminist critics who owe Showalter an apology as she boasted that she has “had the good fortune to live long enough to receive a few apologies, in person or in print” (3), but it is Showalter that owes an apology to Woolf for her appropriation and rejection of Woolf’s works by careless reading and misunderstanding. Woolf’s crucial concept of androgyny is, definitely not as Elaine Showalter argues, a flight from fixed gender identities, but “a recognition of their falsifying metaphysical nature” (Moi 13). Far from fleeing such gender identities because she fears them, Woolf rejects them, and more importantly, she seriously and cordially encourages women writers to overcome all difficulties (earning more money, bearing fewer children) to go to college to be “uneducated” of them: I remind you that there have been at least two colleges for women in existence in England since the year 1866 [. . .] there must be at this moment some two thousand women capable of earnings of five hundred of a year in one way or another, you will agree that the excuse of opportunities, training, encouragement, leisure, and money no longer holds good. [. . .] go on bearing children, but, so they say, in twos and threes, not in tens and twelves. Thus, with some time on your hands and with some book learning in your brains – you have had enough of the other kind, and are sent to college partly, I suspect, to be uneducated – surely you should embark upon another stage of your very laborious and highly obscure career. A thousand pens are ready to suggest what you should do and what effect you will have. My own suggestion is a little fantastic, I admit; I prefer, therefore, to put it 85 in the form of fiction. (AROO 116) Knowing the underlying immense difficulties in changing an ingrained literary convention in reality, Woolf encourages women writers to put the “fantastic” ideal in writing practice at least. The goal of the feminist struggle, hence according to Woolf, is to deconstruct the lopsided, imbalanced binary oppositions of masculinity and femininity. She is not a coward, sexually or otherwise. Though she experienced terrible emotional oscillations exacerbated by the death of loved ones, an awareness of being eternally vulnerable by reason of being female, and horror of the two world wars, she doesn’t allow these personal difficulties to limit her literary scope of inquiry; she doggedly pursues her gender demons throughout her life as a professional writer. The result of this battle is a set of beliefs that anticipate modern feminist ideology. Woolf begins with an intensely personal terror of nervous breakdowns and psychiatric treatment and discovers its origin in the world around her. In doing this she brings to surface many things that had previously remained hidden. From the inner depths of the human heart to the gathering war clouds of her time, Woolf locates her fears, names them, and brings them out for public inspection. The correction of the phallogocentricism of the discourse saturated with masculine ego of a writer’s mind is what Woolf really intends for androgyny. Androgyny is “a movement away from sexual polarization and the prison of gender toward a world in which individual roles and the modes of personal behavior can be freely chosen” (Heilbrun ix). It provides women writers “a way of rejecting biological determinism and undoing the privileging of the masculine over the feminine” (Hussey 5). “The unbounded and hence fundamentally indefinable nature of androgyny” is borrowed from the spirit of Dionysus: Dionysus, who is Euripides’ embodiment of universal vitality, is described variously by chorus, herdsman, commoners, and princes. The descriptions 86 cannot be defined. He can perhaps be totaled but the sum is never definitive; further inspection adds new features to the old. If a definition is at all possible it is a definition by negation or cancellation. For one thing, Dionysus appears to be neither woman nor man; or, better, he presents himself as woman-in-man, or man-in-woman, the unlimited personality. . . . (Heilbrun xi) It is this “woman-in-man, or man-in-woman,” this “definition impossible,” this “definition by negation,” the festive inversion of normal behavior, the comic mocking of authority, the spontaneous eruption of social forces, the “embodiment of universal vitality,” and the image of “unlimited personality,” that Woolf intends for androgyny. There are many “phantoms and obstacles” looming in women writers’way; “only can the labour be shared, the difficulties be solved” (WW 62). Trying every effort herself searching for a new poetic language free from servitude, Woolf encourages women writers to seek their own ideas and forms. Cixous, about half-a-century later echoes Woolf’s cry for sisterhood, for women writers’continuous writing feminine: “I am for you what you want me to be at the moment you look at me in a way you’ve never seen me before; at every instant. When I write, it’s everything that we don’t know we can be that is written out of me, without exclusions, without stipulation [. . .]. In one another we will never be lacking” (Cixous 1975, 348). Androgyny defined by Woolf in A Room of One’s Own or the concept of “bisexuality” carried forward by Cixous in “The Laugh of the Medusa” is not only a positive recognition of the fluidity of gender but also an ideal state of mind of a great writer. She argues that language which is based on oppositions reproduces a patriarchal order which places the feminine as subordinate to the masculine. Bisexuality goes beyond the oppositions to imagine a multiple subject. Though Cixous doesn’t privilege women in achieving this bisexuality, she suggests women are historically and 87 culturally more open or accustomed to accepting different forms of subjectivity. As Cixous significantly suggests, androgyny is intended “to break the old circuits,” “to render obsolete the former relationship and all its consequences, to consider the launching of a brand-new-subject, alive, with defamilialization,” to “demater-paternalize rather than deny woman,” and to “defetishize” (Cixous 1975, 346). Androgyny hence can be understood as Woolf’s subtler way of preserving and regaining “femininity” by active fusion to change within not by passive withdrawal to escape identity. It is this “defamiliarization,” or “de-paternalization,” or “defetishization” of the dominant patriarchal discourse that androgyny intends and makes the century-old wrong balance swerve toward the feminine. Woolf’s dis-course is to disrupt the conventional narrative course toward the feminine. Women are more androgynous than men. opposite to man’s “monosexuality.” As Cixous observes, “woman is bisexual” Against the classical “merger-type bisexuality,” Cixous “oppose the other bisexuality on which every subject matter not enclosed in the false theater of phallocentric representationalism”: Bisexuality: that is , each one’s location in self (reperage en soi) of the presence— of both sexes, nonexclusion either of the difference or of one sex [. . .] for historico-cultural reasons, it is women who are opening up to and benefiting from this vatic bisexuality which doesn’t annul differences but stirs them up, pursues them, increases their number. In a certain way, “woman is bisexual”; man— it’s a secret to no one— being poised to keep glorious phallic monosexuality in view. (Cixous 1975, 341) Among its characteristics is the “multiplication of the effects of the inscripition of desire,” and the tolerance of differences. It is multiple, variable and ever-changing. Men’s glorification of the phallic and rejection of the feminine make them “monosexual,” and women’s “nonexclusion” of the differences make them 88 “bisexual.” Woolf’s androgyny “includes” instead of “excluding” differences. Both in and outside the dominant masculine discourse, women writers are doomed to write “with a spasm of pain” (AROO 82); women’s writing has been to be androgynous. Similarly, Elizabeth Abel also claims that “[t]he weighing of androgyny toward the maternal is in fact implicit throughout Woolf’s discussion”: The very sexuality on which her language insists— the “intercourse” and “marriage” of masculine and feminine that qualifies the meaning of their “collaboration”— returns to the metaphor of birth. The site of textual production is figuratively the womb: the taxicab into which the man and woman enter in Woolf’s allegory of the androgynous mind; the imaginative chamber whose “curtains must be close drawn” so that the mind can “celebrate its nuptials in darkness” and the “marriage of opposites . . . be consummated” (108). (Abel 87) The writing of androgyny as feminine can be seen by Woolf’s representing the image of androgyny as women’s creative process, as “giving birth” from marriage, to “curtains-drawn chamber,” to “nuptials in darkness,” to “intercourse,” to “consummation,” and to pregnancy (AROO 102-03). Kristeva alike expounds that bisexuality provides women writers with “another signifying space” where “the very notion of identity is challenged”: I am not simply suggesting a very hypothetical bisexuality [. . .] an effacing of difference. What I mean is, first of all, the demassification of problematic of difference [. . .]. And this not in the name of some reconciliation [. . .] but in order that the struggle, the implacable difference, the violence be conceived in the very place where it operates with the maximum intransigence, in other words, in personal sexual identity itself, so 89 as to make it disintegrate in its very nucleus. (Kristeva 1981, 458) Androgyny is the “demassification of problematic of difference” instead of “an effacing of difference” (458). It aims at “counterbalancing of aggressive and murderous forces” from men not only for a “personal equilibrium” of woman but also for “social equilibrium itself” (458). The “de-dramatization” of the struggle is a camouflage or cover-up intended to make the “problematic difference” “disintegrate in its very nucleus.” Intended in writing, according to Kristeva, androgyny is “the maximum intransigence” instead of “some reconciliation.” If androgyny is a retreat, it definitely is a “retreat from sexism” instead of a “retreat from feminism” (459). For a long time fair possibilities in literary tradition were never given to women. According to Woolf, “[i]t may have been not only with a view to obtaining impartial criticism that George Eliot and Miss Bronte adopted male pseudonyms, but in order to free their own consciousness as they wrote from the tyranny what was expected from their sex” (WW 70). “Poetry ought to have a mother as well as a father” (AROO 107). Is feminine writing the expression of female experience unique to women or another “guerilla fights” of women against men? According to Woolf, the quality of a woman writer’s style is decided by “whether she has a pen in her hand or a pickaxe” (86). Woolf puts the emphasis on what a man and a woman have to give to each other, on the mystery of completion, and not on the assertion of separate superiorities and inferiorities. She finds a form that would “absorb the new into the old without disturbing the infinitely intricate and elaborate balance of the whole” (90) and covey the movement of things under the surface – the free movement of thought, emotion, and insight. What Woolf clearly states is that the creative mind is a marriage, or balance, of the supposed female traits with the supposed male traits. “It is when this fusion takes place that the mind is fully fertilized and uses all its faculties” (103). It “transmits emotion without impediment; that it is naturally creative, incandescent, and 90 undivided” (AROO 103). It is the token of the “fully developed mind that it does not think specially or separately of sex” (103). Androgyny aims at a “man-womanly and woman-manly” dialogue instead of a “purely masculine” or “purely feminine” monologue (103). Not only does me n’s “aridity” “impoverish” literature, but women’s “acidity” does. Women’s “acidity” (79) “lowers their vitality” and spoils their writing: The imagination falters under the enormous strain. The insight is confused; it can no longer distinguish between the true and the false [. . .]. Would the fact of her sex in any way interfere with the integrity of a woman novelist [. . .]. We feel the influence of fear in it; just as we constantly feel an acidity which is the result of oppression, a buried suffering smouldering beneath her passion, a rancour which contracts those books, splendid as they are, with a spasm of pain. (AROO 79-80)[emphasis mine] Women’s writing would be “hindered,” “strained,” “distracted,” “harassed,” “torn asunder,” “disfigured,” “deformed,” “cramped,” and “thwarted” by their “alien emotions” of protest against men’s oppression shown in writing (66-76). It is exactly this refusal of anger, of protest which sets Woolf at odds with feminists like Showalter. “Alien emotions” such as “hatred,” “anger,” “fear,” “indignation,” “grievances,” “bitterness,” “resentment,” “melancholy,” “loneliness,” “riot,” “rage,” “scruples,” “fire,” “sensitiveness” (AROO 65-69) are “traces of disturbance” that spoil women’s writing. A woman can write well only when her mind is not forced to choose between culturally-constructed gender and self-determined identity, or between herself and society’s expectations of her. “Her mind must have been strained and her vitality lowered by the need of opposing this, of disproving that” (62). 91 Keeping the “masculine complex” in mind, or holding the Showalter-called “righteous anger” in writing does not help to build a genuine female tradition. It will only lower woman writer’s vitality and bar her way to arts. Better spent on writing skills, women’s energy and time should not be wasted and frittered away in complaining and in “scribbling nonsense.” Even the woman writer has enough talent, she would fall short of success for lack of an attentive effort and become “a bogey to frighten clever girls” (AROO 69) if she stops to curse: “If you stop to curse, you are lost [. . .]. Hesitate or fumble and you are done for. Think only of the jump, I implored her, as if I had put the whole of my money on her back; and she went over it like a bird. But there was a fence beyond that and a fence beyond that” (98). Women’s writing is not only a test but also a contest; any distraction would surely affect the performance: And as I watched her lengthening out for the test, I saw, but hoped that she did not see, the bishops and the deans, the doctors and the professors, the patriarchs and the pedagogues all at her shouting warning and advice. can’t do this and you shan’t do that! the grass! You Fellows and scholars only allowed on Ladies not admitted without a letter of introduction! Aspiring and graceful female novelists this way! So they [men] kept at her like the crowd at a fence on the race-course, and it was her trial to take her fence without looking to right or to left. [. . .] Whether she had the staying power I was doubtful, for the clapping and the crying were fraying to the nerves. (AROO 98) Like the racing horses on the “race-course,” women are running and men are watching and staking. Their “shouting warning,” “clapping and crying” are fraying to the nerves” of women. Here Woolf with her professional experiences advises women writers earnestly to focus their attention on writing instead of wasting time 92 complaining, whining, or cursing. Her advice is not pleasing maybe, but well-intentioned. Woolf’s argument for androgyny on man’s side discussed earlier is for a new unpolarized consciousness, but on woman’s side is for a self-styled creative perfection. She insists that writers should shun consciousness of their own sex when they write because pressures to conform to social gender roles or indignation (fear, hatred, bitterness, rage, resentment, grievances) to oppose the pressures create barriers that are “fatal” to creativity: “It is fatal for a woman to lay the least stress on any grievance; to plead even with justice any cause; in any way to speak consciously as a woman” (AROO 108). Woolf reasons that the advantages of the “androgynous writing” of an “unimpeded mind” will come about with time, provided women do not hurt their own cause by wasting energy on ranting and raving. Preventing future women writers from suffering her pain and spasm, she urges them earnestly that “[a]mong your grandmothers and great-grandmothers there were many that wept their eyes out” (62-3) and warns them again and again urgently of the serious consequences of an impeded writing. “Fatal” is not the bluffing words to scare people; anger surely kills writing. Alien emotions will make the writer’s mind “cease to be fertilized” and “grow” (108). It is this “whole of mind,” the “perfect fullness,” and the “free and unimpeded” mind that Woolf claims. She advocates for the women writers to return to “the mind of an artist,” “the state of mind most propitious for creative work” “where no obstacle in it, no foreign matter unconsumed” (63). If women writers do not waste energy whining and complaining, an “incandescent mind” and a bright future are coming soon. Otherwise, even Shakespeare’s sister is born again, she will not survive in a sparse female literary tradition. Because if “her coming without that preparation, without that effort on our part, without that determination that when she is born again she shall find it possible to live and write 93 her poetry, that we cannot expect, for that would be impossible” (AROO 117). Therefore, Woolf maintains that Shakespeare’s sister, the future female genius “would come if we worked for her” even with some sacrifice, “even in poverty and obscurity, is worthwhile” (117). By “obscurity” Woolf implies not only the “obscure” gender of an androgynous mind but also the “not-yet-clear situation of women writers at her time. Measured by Woolf’s self-claimed “impeccable taste” and “fastidious ear” (96), the imaginary woman novelist Mary Carmichael earns Woolf’s praise not so easily through her “unconventional,” sexless, “unimpeded” consciousness: She was no “genius” – that was evident. She had nothing like [. . .] the brooding wisdom of her great predecessors, Lady Winchilsea, Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte, Jane Austen, and George Eliot [. . .] Dorothy Osborne [. . .]. But, nevertheless, she had certain advantages which women of far greater gift lacked even half a century ago. [. . .] she need not waste her time railing against them; she need not [. . .] ruin her peace of mind [. . .]. Fear and hatred were almost gone, or traces of them showed only in a joy of freedom, a tendency to the caustic and satirical, rather than to the romantic, in her treatment of the other sex. (AROO 97) Compared with her “great predecessors,” she is unnoticed and unremarkable but she is praised because she does not lower her vitality, because “she wrote as a woman, but as a woman who has forgotten that she is a woman, so that her pages were full of that curious sexual quality which comes only when sex is unconscious of itself” (98). As mentioned earlier in chapter one, before a woman writer begins to write, she has two obstacles to overcome. Though she killed them, the phantoms kept “creeping back” haunting and annoying her. The “struggle” is still “severe” and there’s a tough way to go; energies “had better” be “spent” on more significant things, such as “learning 94 Greek grammar; or in roaming the world in search of adventures” (WW 60). Women writers’ “vitality” should be spent on developing their “creative faculty” instead of being lowered by the impediments of writing (AROO 62, 68, 76, 86, 97). She should have had a microscope put in her hand. She should have been “taught to look at stars and reason scientifically” (68). She “need not ruin her peace of mind longing for travel, experience, and a knowledge of the world and character that were denied her” (97). The “alien emotions” in mind hinder women’s writing “as if some giant cucumber had spread itself over all the roses and carnations in the garden and choked them to death” (69). Neither the noisy assertive resentment of the male nor the shrill nagging resentment of the female will produce good literature. “The attempt to conciliate, or more naturally to outrage, public opinion is equally a waste of energy and a sin against art” (WW 70). Literature demands a comprehensive sympathy which embraces and comprehends the feelings of both sexes. Women’s disabilities are social and economic. The lack of the social and economic freedom breeds resentment. Woolf patiently and earnestly “implores” women writers to remember their responsibilities, “to be higher,” and to be “more spiritual” (AROO 114) in their writing practice. Being misunderstood and blamed as “materialistic” because of her persistent advocating enough “money” and a “room” for any women writers, Woolf’s intention is in fact directed otherwise for “intellectual freedom.” “[F]ive hundred a year stands for the power to contemplate,” and “a lock on the door means the power to think for oneself” (112)[emphasis mine]. Intellectual freedom depends upon material things. That is why, Woolf claims, she has “laid so much stress on money and a room of one’s own” (112). Woolf’s writing androgyny is a record of her search for integrity, for wholeness, for “the unity of mind.” This “freedom and fullness of expression,” which Woolf 95 takes to be the “essence of the art” (AROO 83), is the “backbone of the writer” (79). Though Charlotte Bronte “had more genius in her than Jane Austen,” she never gets “her genius expressed whole and entire” (76). She is “starved” and “made to stagnate” by anger. Indignation “tugs at her imagination and deflects it from its path.” Her books were “deformed” and “twisted” by “rancour.” Even “to which her entire devotion was due, Bronte never outperforms Austen in writing,” because she “left her story to attend to some personal grievance” (79). She writes “foolishly where she should write wisely.” She writes “in a rage where she should write calmly.” She writes “of herself where she should write of her characters.” According to Woolf, this is the reason why Bronte can’t help “but die young, cramped and thwarted” (76). Shakespeare was able to produce masterpieces because he had no ax to grind. Any “hardship or grievance that was fired out of him” is consumed. His poetry “flows from him free and unimpeded.” If ever a human being gets “his work expressed completely,” according to Woolf, it is Shakespeare (63-4). It is this “unimpeded,” unhindered,” and “undivided” mind that appeals to Woolf and is identified by her as the ideal creative force of a writer. It is this primary desire to retain the androgynous integrity of a work of art taken as weakness that cuts across the feminist drive in her work. Those who have become used to explicit feminist polemic in creative writing find this difficult to sympathize with, yet this argument remains an important tenet of her criticism. She admires Jane Austen for distancing herself from her own anger: “I could not find any signs that her circumstances had harmed her work in the slightest. miracle about it. That perhaps was the chief Here was a woman about the year 1800 writing without hate, without bitterness, without fear, without protest, without preaching. Shakespeare wrote” (AROO 74). That was how Being a woman writer, Jane Austen is placed by 96 Woolf on a par with Shakespeare. Austen does not lose her brightness or “incandescence” though she “suffered from her circumstances in the narrowness of life that was imposed upon her” (AROO 74). To achieve this artistic incandescence, women writers must have an “androgynous mind.” Once a woman writer achieves this stylistic freedom, Woolf claims, she is free to write about women if she likes. Woolf, though sparing no efforts in feminine writing, still modestly implies that she herself had not achieved it and placed her hope on the future writers. Radical feminists are as sexist as masculinists are. According to Gayatri Spivak, the longer feminism holds on to “woman” as its sole essence and cause, it will be doomed to essentialize that name (and all who bear it) in the name of history (especially the history of women), and thus to repeat a history it wishes to overturn. Suffering the Fascist masculinity, Woolf would not be glad to see the feminine version of fascism. Androgyny is proposed by Woolf against the “literary monster of double paternity”: “[I]t is doubtful whether poetry can come out of an incubator. [. . .] The Fascist poem, one may fear, will be a horrid little abortion such as one sees in a glass jar in the museum of some country town. Such monsters [. . .] a prodigy of that sort cropping grass in a field. Two heads on one body do not make for length life” (AROO 107). It is this “Fascist” writing, this literary “prodigy” produced from an “incubator” with “two fathers but no mother” and “two heads on one body” that needs a little “abortion.” Androgyny is intended to “purge language of its sexist aspects” (Lodge 33). It is the wrong proportion of the valorization of the duality of meanings of head/body, intellect/emotion, fatherhood/motherhood, and masculinity/femininity that must be balanced and readjusted. In essence, Woolf claims that this state of androgyny would offer women the same freedom to express themselves that men seem to have been inherently endowed with. Woolf intends an integral writer’s mind which is neither sexist male (linear, 97 “I”-driven) nor sexed female (divided, impeded, crippled, hindered by rancor, anger, bitterness and etc.). Rather than correcting women towards female-attentive essentialism, she valorizes their separation from the male dominance. Rather than advising women from femaleness, she encourages and inspires them to write feminine: [W]rite what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matter for ages or only for hours, nobody can say. But to sacrifice a hair of the head of your vision, a shade of its colour, in deference to some Headmaster with a silver pot in his hand or some professor with a measuring-rod up his sleeve, is the most abject treachery, and the sacrifice of wealth and chastity which used to be said to be the greatest of human disasters, a mere flea-bite in comparison. (AROO 110) To sell a brain, according to Woolf, is worse than to sell a body; “the sacrifice of wealth and chastity” pale into insignificance in comparison with the “sacrifice” of even “a hair of the head of your vision.” Extreme matriarchy, like patriarchy, is a kind of discrimination. tyranny by an-other isn’t what Woolf intends. Replacing one Woolf’s androgyny is intended to correct the imbalance of the state of mind of general writers, to neutralize the overweening masculinity. This “universal-as-being-two,” which informs the perpetual incompletion of self-knowledge suggests the very interaction, the ever-changing mediation, between the two. Androgyny allows a space for entirely new, unpredictable expressions of sexual difference. An intentionally pluralized subject remarkably contests the phallogocentric complacency with which “the happiness of motherhood” is proclaimed and retrieved. It is definitely not what Showalter misunderstood as a flight from, or an evasion of femaleness. Androgyny is more the “other deconstruction of the duality” than “the classical union of 98 masculinity and femininity” (Moi 14). It is the solution of the imbalance of “the masculine and the feminine ‘approach to truth’” (14). One significantly relevant event of the time of Woolf’s conception of androgyny (Orlando 1928, A Room of One’s Own 1929) was the Radclyffe Hall’s obscenity trial, which began in November 1928, Woolf and other writers had offered to testify against censorship in this case. After the trial, Hall’s novel The Well of Loneliness was destroyed and banned in England because of its lesbian subject matter. Knowing very well the tabooed and sensitive subject of lesbianism, Woolf “carefully eschew[s] ‘the arrant feminism’” (AROO 65) and tactfully proposes the “fantasy of double motherhood” – “Chloe liked Olivia” (Chapter 5) before she raises the idea of androgyny (Chapter 6). With a reference to Sir Chartres Biron (presiding magistrate in the obscenity trial of Radclyffe Hall’s lesbian novel), Sir William Joynson Hicks (Home Secretary at the time, responsible for banning The Well of Loneliness and satirized by Woolf and E. M. Forster in a letter of protest written to The Nation), and Sir Archibald Bodkin (Director of Public Prosecutions during the trial of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness) (AROO 87, 91, 115), Woolf’s anxieties (about the lesbian double motherhood of A Room of One’s Own) should have been the liability or risk of “being attacked for a feminist and hinted at for a Sapphist” (D 3:262). Orlando (1928) had just appeared a lesbian love letter, including photographs of Vita Sackville-West. not on trial for obscenity. Vita Sackville-West was real, and Orlando was The strict surveillance of men didn’t stop Woolf’s writing but enriched her apprenticeship in feminine writing, sophisticated and consummated her writing skills. When Woolf asked readers to check that Sir Chartres Biron or Sir Archibald Bodkin were not eavesdropping, that they were all women in the room, the obscenity trial for The Well of Loneliness was still in progress. The names of the patriarchs, seemingly fictional, were in fact real. The audience would have known 99 their roles in the lesbianism case. In responding to Woolf’s request to see that the offending fathers or brothers were not hiding behind the curtain, in a cupboard, the audience understands the secret of the talk, that “literary women gathered in a room to discuss women and writing are, at least symbolically, lesbians,” and patriarchy is the enemy (Marcus 166). The strategy she sets up with her audience is of women in league together against authority. Haunted by the headsmen of motherhood, Woolf ingeniously mocks them and subtly writes “feminine” against “patriarchal,” lesbianism against Fascism, double motherhood against double paternity, “Chloe liked Olivia” against “Napoleon and Mussolini” (AROO 87, 115). Though “motherhood” remained a taboo subject and lesbianism gave rise to a big tumult at her time, women’s writing still advanced a huge step through her effort. Women write what they like. Orlando is Woolf’s truthful realization and vision of the secret psychological realities that shape the most liberated woman’s life. Dedicated to her lover Vita Sackville-West, the novel is not only Woolf’s lesbian fantasy but also a literary pastiche, parodying gender essentialism. Just like the title of the novel Life’s Adventure suggests, life is adventure. Extreme in one side has been tried so long; why not trying the other side, lesbianism will be more satisfactory than fascism; Chole and Olivia of course will be more adorable than Napoleon and Mussolini. If women writers are forced to have “parents,” they are encouraged to take “two mothers” rather than “two fathers.” “Chloe liked Olivia … ” Do not start. Do not blush. Let us admit in the privacy of our own society that these things sometimes happen. Sometimes women do like women. [. . .] Chloe liked Olivia perhaps for the first time in literature. Cleopatra did not like Octavia. And how completely Antony and Cleopatra would have been altered had she done so! [. . .] But how interesting it would have been if the relationship between the 100 two women had been more complicated. (AROO 87-88) If woman writer could write naturally even with lesbian love, the prohibited subject, the “quality in her style” would be more enjoyable. And “she will light a torch in that vast chamber where nobody has yet been” (89). been seen since the world began” (89). unprecedented innovation of women. It will be “a sight that has never Readers will enjoy the “unattempted” and Mary Carmichael, the author of Life’s Adventure, in which “Chloe liked Olivia,” is also the pseudonym of birth control advocate Marie Stopes, whose novel Love’s Creation (1928) begins with two women in a laboratory (like Chole and Olivia). “Chloe liked Olivia,” therefore is Woolf’s “shortest of shorthand” to “catch those unrecorded gestures, those unsaid or half-said words” (90). Though this “forbidden land” seems full of risk and danger, Woolf seems to assure women writers that any kind of writing practice would be an enjoyable and worthy adventure. Androgyny not only entails “the assimilation of maternal generativity” against “the Fascist poem’s double paternity,” “the dominance of the letter ‘I’” (Abel 87), but also provides writers a return to the womb to be born again. Woolf’s comparison of the “taxicab or room” for the source of an androgynous mind, for the artistic integrity is well intended. It aims for women writers a feminine return to the pre-patriarchal wombly status to be regenerated again. Actually, androgyny prepares the rebirth of Shakespeare’s sister: Shakespeare had a sister [. . .]. She died young – alas, she never wrote a word. [. . .] still lives. She lives in you and me, and in many other women who are not here tonight [. . .] they need only the opportunity to walk among us in the flesh. This opportunity, as I think, it is now coming within your power to give her. For my belief is that [. . .] if we have the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think [. . .] then 101 the opportunity will come and the dead poet who was Shakespeare’s sister [. . .] will be born. (AROO 117) Judith Shakespeare was invented by Woolf to stand for the woman artist muted by patriarchy. That Judith Shakespeare being a fiction did not prevent the audience from seeing her death as a sign of the suppression of lesbianism in the obscenity trial. Woolf and Radclyffe Hall are the “female descendants of bi-sexual Shakespeare” (Marcus 167). Judith Shakespeare is a “continuing presence”: “She lives in you and in me, and in many other women who are not here tonight, for they are washing up the dishes and putting the children to bed” (AROO 117). Without women writers’ androgynous writing practice, without our effort in changing the writing environment and circumstances, the true femininity could not be found and women’s genius would be choked and buried again. Androgyny may seem a paradoxical proposal, offering something like de-politicization as a political project for women. It is a subtle feminine discourse for a “tabooed subject”, for women’s lesbian desire, for “double motherhood,” for “triple motherhood” (“when the woman writer seduces the reader”) (Hussey 242), or more specifically, for the long-lost femininity. Far from being a submissive retreat from political issues the project of androgyny is innovative and substantial. To open the gender boundaries for women surely does not lose touch with women-identified experience. Showalter’s accusation of Woolf as non-feminist and her androgyny as “a flight from troubled feminism or painful femaleness” is therefore inadequate and inconvincible. Suggestions of lesbianism or “parthenogenesis” (Abel 89) virtually imply the re-search of literary mothers and the rebuilding or re-creation of a female tradition. As well perceived by Moi toward Kristeva, “it is not the biological sex of a person, but the subject position she or he takes up, that determi nes their revolutionary 102 potential” (Moi 12). Woolf’s views of feminist politics and conception of androgyny “reflect this refusal of biologism and essentialism” (12). Feminine writing and feminist struggle must be seen historically and politically as a three-stage progress: 1 Women demand equal access to the symbolic order. Liberal feminism. Equality. 2. Women reject the male symbolic order in the name of difference. Radical feminism. Femininity extolled. 3. (This is Kristeva’s own position.) Women reject the dichotomy between masculine and feminine as metaphysical. (Moi 12) Moi claims that she would stress with Kristeva that a theory that demands “the deconstruction of sexual identity is indeed authentically feminist” (14). Not to advance is to go back; Showalter advocates femininity through “radical feminism” or “righteous anger” instead of moving ahead for a higher artistic goal; her staying at the second stage of the feminist struggles or writing as defined by Kristeva is in fact a regression. Kristeva’s feminism echoes the position taken up by Woolf some sixty years earlier. Woolf’s remarkably progressive understanding of feminist objectives naturally makes her take up an advanced political position in the feminist struggles: There are books on all sorts of subjects which a generation ago no woman could have touched. There are poems and plays and criticism [. . .] And though novels predominate, novels themselves may very well have changed from association with books of a different feather. the epic age of women’s writing, may have gone. The natural simplicity, Reading and criticism may have given her a wider range, a great subtlety. The impulse towards autobiography may be spent. She may be beginning to use writing as an art, not as a method of self-expression. (AROO 85) Her concept of androgyny could be viewed as the more advanced third stage of 103 feminism, the “deconstruction of the duality” (14) instead of the second one. Toward the idea of feminine writing, in fact, Showalter moves toward the same direction with Woolf and Cixous without self-knowledge. In her “Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness,” Showalter employs the concept of the “wild zone” to explore the basis of women’s writing. She argues that women’s writing is more a “double-voiced discourse” than something entirely separate, “containing a ‘dominant’ [male] and a ‘muted’ [female] story” (Showalter 1981, 350). According to her, “if a man’s text is fathered, then a woman’s text is not only mothered but parented”(349). Doesn’t this coexistence of a “dominant” male voice with a “muted” female voice, the “maternal and paternal parented text” sound a similar tune with Woolf ‘s idea of “androgyny”? Women live double lives, female in a male world, learn androgyny and become bilingual, able to use both male and female discourse: Women writing are not, then, inside and outside of the male tradition; they are inside two traditions simultaneously [. . .] a more fluid imagery of interacting juxtapositions, the point of which would be to represent not so much the territory as its defining borders. Indeed, the female territory might well be envisioned as one long border and independence for women not as a separate country but as open access to the sea.’ (Showalter 1981, 348) Women “were on a pilgrimage to the promised land in which gender would lose its power, in which all texts would be sexless and equal, like angels” (350). According to Showalter, the same as Woolf’s idea of writing as a process approximating the feminine, “we could never reach the promised land at all”(350). “But we could work toward completeness, even as an unattainable ideal” (350). On the promotion of flexibility in writing, Woolf’s version of “androgyny and feminine writing” is similar to Cixous’ understanding of “bisexuality and écriture 104 feminine,” and Showalter’s conception of “dominant/muted story and parented text.” “Androgyny” and “bisexuality” and “parented text” share the same designation of multiplicity instead of singularity, fluidity instead of rigidity, dialogue instead of monologue as the discourse of feminine writing. The elusive identities of characters in Orlando and The Waves and Mrs. Dalloway could be seen as Woolf’s “non-patriarchal” expression and as corrective narration from the patriarchal toward the feminine. Woolf’s androgyny sets up a definition of bisexuality which is not the simple combination of sexualities, but the displacement of the terms “masculinity” and “femininity.” It suggests a state in which “the man in every woman” and the “woman in every man” could be integrated and freely expressed. This describes a blurring or combination of gender roles so that neither masculinity nor femininity is dominant. The important point about the plurality of the subject, “the sex which is not one,” is its non-totality. In short, to know the self is impossible, because the self is always more than its “I.” Woolf’s androgyny pursues “androgynous mutuality” rather than “gendered hierarchy.” Androgyny opens up possibilities. parallel to a political attempt at rethinking sexual difference. It can be read Woolf tries to create an acceptable sexual orientation. The idea of masculine and feminine essences is not implied or reinforced in androgyny. Bisexuality implodes the two groups “masculine” and “feminine,” and therefore it has a valid rhetorical and political function – as a concept of method, more specifically a destroyer of a false and arbitrary dichotomy. Androgyny is a form of inclusiveness supporting feminism and homosexuality by challenging sexism and heterosexism and by seeking equality of the sexes. Androgyny suggests an equality of style which serves to deconstruct and destabilize traditional patriarchal gender roles. Orlando is not simply a hymn to androgyny as is frequently supposed. 105 The novel “revisits the history and development of English literature from the Renaissance to 1928 in the spirit of feminist parody in order to free it— and by extension of its author— from the burden of this largely masculine tradition” (Hussey 204). Orlando embodies Woolf’s feminist poetics and ecriture feminine in an androgynous vision. If Orlando gains freedom from constraint by her “ambiguous gender,” she can become whatever she chooses. It is the very possibility of putting the question in the form of the “or/and” without dema nding a definite, single answer is “feminine,” in the sense of challenging the confidence of an unequivocal judgment. The transformation from man into woman is Orlando’s awakening to flexible sexuality. Orlando begins with he, ends with she, and culminates at sex-changing, age-transcending, cross-dressing and genre-breaking. The novel provides a vivid picture of linguistic variation associated with the sex of the speaker through centuries, and at the same time explores some of the ways in which language mirrors sexism in society in different ages. The biography of a character who lives more than three hundred years through Elizabethan, Jacobean, Carolinean, Restoration, Augustan, Victorian and Modern England, as well as of Constantinople before and after the Sultan's fall is surely not only a biography but also a history. Orlando's story, the tale of a body now male, now female, presents us a flexible perspective of history instead of a fixed point of view from which we must view the world. Experiences of different identities in a variety of situations provide a narrative device in which to explore the linguistic relationships between the sexes. Woolf's flowing "chronotopic" (time/space) narrative presenting the visible world of human space and human history through hundreds of years serves as a mobile background with multiple voices and an inexhaustible source of the artistic visualization. A live film of discourses, then, is projected through Orlando's relationship with people, through Orlando's observation of different societies, of different ages. Being the revolutionary persona, Orlando’s 106 living for more than three hundred years from about 1570 to 1928--through a change of sex, a husband, a wife, and a career in diplomacy and literature--breaks the traditional management of time in biography, and provides a critique of gender essentialism. It is a combination of historical novel and biographical fantasy which parodies the changing styles of English literature and explores the themes of androgyny and women's creativity. Woolf suggests that an ideal writing is an androgynous one. Orlando, the metaphor of "anotherness" or "possibility of meaning" is a synthesis of male and female traits. "[O]bscurity," the paramount value of female writing in Orlando by Virginia Woolf, "is dark, ample, and free" and "lets the mind take its way unimpeded" (O 72). The obscurity of sex or ambiguous gender of Orlando is therefore not without significance. It disrupts all sorts of cultural and conceptual binaries, and s/he offers a challenge to the traditional notions of binarity, putting into question the categories of “female” and “male,” whether they are considered essential or constructed, biological or cultural. As a disturbing challenge to binary thinking, Orlando is identified by Woolf with "anotherness" that is neither the "self" nor the "other" but a mode of articulation, a way of describing a space of "possibility." Towards the refusal of absolute meaning and the openness to the play of innumerable meanings, "obscurity" and "androgyny" are synonymous. Androgyny, proposed in Orlando by Woolf, is an image of the union of masculine and feminine natures in one being, under which human impulses expressed by men and women, are not rigidly assigned. Thus it opens up new possibilities in the fixed rules of genre which are shaped by the politics of gender. Woolf’s androgyny anticipates bisexuality put forth by Cixous on ecriture feminine. Of the advocation of flexibility or "obscurity" (O 72) in writing, Woolf's androgyny or Cixous' bisexuality denotes the co-presence in the human individual of “feminine” and “masculine” psychological characteristics. Androgyny or bisexuality shares the same designation of multiplicity instead of singularity, fluidity instead of rigidity, polyphony instead of 107 monologue as the subject and dis-course in feminine writing. How to achieve the “masculine” paternal identification which supports History (which means men's history, his story) without being silenced but simultaneously preserve anotherness? For the women writers, Woolf suggests, writing is just like carrying "contraband" through the "customs": Orlando now performed in spirit... to compare great things with small - a traveller, conscious that he has a bundle of cigars in the corner of his suit case, makes to the customs officer who has obliging made a scribble of white chalk on the lid. For she was extremely doubtful whether, if the spirit had examined the contents of her mind carefully, it would not have found something highly contraband for which she would have had to pay the full fine. (O 183-4) Woolf’s love for Vita Sackville-West in Orlando, Clarissa’s love for Sally Seton in Mrs. Dalloway, and Chloe’s love for Olivia in A Room of One’s Own are “lesbian subject” present in the texts as “contraband.” Androgyny is her attempt to solve the dilemma for feminine writing. The "transaction between a writer and the spirit of the age," Woolf claims, "is one of infinite delicacy” (O 184). Her insightful solution to any woman writer is: "she need neither fight her age, nor submit to it; she was of it, yet remained herself.... therefore, she could write, and write she did. She wrote. She wrote. She wrote" (O 184). Orlando's "obscure therefore flexible" gender hence androgynous features allow Woolf, through “indirection,” to comment far more vividly than would otherwise be possible on the variety of restrictions imposed upon women. To pass the customs without being caught and fined, to promote an offending issue without offending the male readers, to catch everybody's attention without being muffled, or to flow in the flood of History without being drowned is Woolf's writing stratagem. Adventures in trousers and in petticoats through different ages portray Orlando in a 108 variety of situations in which s/he had to cope as man and woman, thus providing a fluid narrative device through which to hear different voices. Orlando's obscure gender allows him/her to pass through a series of unusual experiences--amorous, political, and literary--which otherwise would have been denied him or her as a fixed gender. Androgyny as subject or dis-course is therefore both revolutionary and tactful. Orlando, the symbol of fluid identities, the female aesthetic ideal, suggests openness to signification and contextualization. Cixous understands feminine writing as bisexual political act that holds open "the very possibility of change" (Cixous 1975, 337). The aims of this androgynous dis-course are to "break up, to destroy; and to foresee the unforeseeable, to project" (Cixous 1975, 334). "A feminine text," Cixous claims, "cannot fail to be more than subversive. It is volcanic" (344). The traits claimed by Cixous for "feminine writing" are vividly shown in Orlando. The sex-changing, age-transcending, crossing-dressing, genre-breaking Orlando is acting to subvert. The outcry of "gender fuck" is subversive enough to deconstruct the gendered or sexed praxis. Orlando's nonentity in small biography provides menacing challenge to the massive canon in History (his story) which is men's history. When a woman writes, said Cixous, she writes in "white ink" that is "mother's milk" letting her words flow freely where she wishes them to go (Cixous 1975, 339). From the elusiveness of Orlando, the flowing and polyphonic narrative through sexes and ages, it can't be denied that the ink used to compose Orlando is definitely “white.” Possibility is what Woolf exemplifies in Orlando. For any woman writer, text is her body. Cixous' outcry "Text: my body" suggests that women can escape the dichotomous conceptual order within which they have been enclosed and that women have the capacity to lead this revolt. The body functions figuratively as what cannot be unified or categorized, what has been excluded or unvoiced. It is through Orlando's body, Woolf opens the "thresholds" of meanings, distributes the fascinating "ardor," and 109 "reverberate[s]" with different voices. The features presented in their definition of feminine writing characterized by play, disruption, subversion, ambiguities, generic transgressions, fluid figurative language, and myths all describe the qualities of Orlando. As a man, Orlando was free to experience the world in all its variety and to speak about those experiences freely. As a woman, she is forced to experience the impositions which men put on women. If patriarchy is the socio-historical fact, can women command a different language instead of imitating a manly one? Can they create their own female story instead of male History within an androcentric society? Orlando, the manly woman or womanly man, the metaphor of linguistic flexibility, shows the possibility. For s[/]he had a great variety of selves to call upon, far more than we have been able to find room for [. . .]. Choosing then, only those selves we have found room for, Orlando may now have called on the boy who cut the nigger's head down; the boy who strung it up again; the boy who sat upon the hill; the boy who saw the poet; the boy who handed the Queen the bowl of rose water; or she may have called upon the young man who fell in love with Sasha; or upon the courtier; or upon the Ambassador; or upon the Soldier; or upon the Traveller; or she may have wanted woman to come to her; the Gipsy; the Fine Lady; the Hermit; the girl in love with life; the Patroness of letters; the woman who called Mar (meaning hot baths and evening fires) or Shelmerdine (meaning crocuses in autumn woods) or Bonthrop (meaning the death we die daily) or all three together - which meant more things than we have space to write out - all were different and she may have called upon any one of them. (O 213) Orlando endowed with different genders and times and costumes and careers, has many “lives” and many “selves” to appeal to. 110 Not only the eighteen Orlandos portrayed here, the biographer Woolf tells us that "a person may well have as many thousand" identities to call upon and many different language to speak (O 213). Orlando's quick changing of selves indicates the indeterminacy and possibilities of meanings in language: What then? Who then? she said. `Thirty-six; in a motor-car; a woman. Yes, but a million other things as well. A snob am I?. . . . Greedy, luxurious, vicious? Am I? (here a new self came in) . . . (here a new self came in) . . . (here another self came in) . . . (here another self came in). . . . (Here another self came in.) . . . (here another self came in) . . . (here another self came skipping over the top of her mind like the beam from a light house). (O 214-15) The metaphor of Orlando suggests that language shifts when it is called upon to describe not only the man around whom a novel or biography is typically composed, but also “the woman who discomposes it” (O 215). The obscurity of sex or ambiguous gender of Orlando disrupts all sorts of cultural or linguistic essentialism. Gender is a system of differences without “definite” terms, without immanent essence. Differences between the sexes exist only in relation to each other and to the representation of it. It is a matter of whether the dividing line is, and its location varies historically and socially. A definition only has meaning in relation to a specific socio-historical context. The characteristics presented in Woolf's representation of language characterized by play, ambiguities, fluidity and myths express the qualities of Orlando. Sex is not a nature but a social product. Woolf believes that the difference between the sexes cannot be defined in terms of biological or immanent essences, then “change” from one sex to the other cannot be specified either. From the very beginning, there is something ambiguous or androgynous about Orlando. 111 When we first meet him, his appearance makes it difficult to determine his gender, “He - for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it” (O 11). There are many similar occasions later on. Nearly all of the characters in this work are unstable in gender, and Woolf seems to be suggesting that the sexual self in its uninhabited state is androgynous. "Different though the sexes are, they intermix. In every human being, a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place, and often it is only the clothes that keep the male or female likeness, while underneath the sex is the very opposite of what it is above" (O 132-33). Orlando's lover, Sasha, the Russian Princess, ambiguous in sex, coming from the pavilion of the Muscovite Embassy, a figure, which, whether boy's or woman's, for the loose tunic and trousers of the Russian fashion served to disguise the sex, filled him with the highest curiosity. The person, whatever the name or sex, was about middle height.... But these details were obscured by the extraordinary seductiveness which issued from the whole person. (O 26) irresistibly attracts Orlando’s attention. Sasha appeared in the "loose tunic and trousers of the Russian fashion," with her "extraordinary seductiveness," though ambiguous in sex of "whether boy's or woman's," still "filled him [Orlando] with the highest curiosity" (O 26). Orlando's sudden love for her emerges prior to the division of gender. His descriptions of her as "a melon, a pineapple, an olive tree, an emerald, and a fox in the snow" are a "pell-mell of categories" (Minow-Pinkrey 122). The "synaesthetic confusion" proves Woolf's further refusal of the sexed praxis or the sexual dividing line (122). When Orlando was a man, he was chased by the Archduchess Harriet. After Orlando has become a woman, the sex of Harriet changes too. S/he and Orlando act “the parts of man and woman for ten minutes with great vigour and then [fall] into natural discourse” (O 126). The Archduchess Harriet, who 112 later becomes the Archduke Harry, provides another example of Woolf's attempt to deconstruct the gendered behavior. The ambiguity of sex for Orlando is by far the most dramatic. As a man at the beginning, he had never been particularly virile. After the change of sex, the former Ambassador becomes a gypsy in the mountains. Unself-conscious about “her” new sexuality, Orlando remains as ambiguous as "Turkish coats and trousers which can be worn indifferently by either sex" (O 98). Leaving the gypsies on the way home back to England, Orlando's female appearance attracts men and her critical disgusts towards their behavior and her present situation make her ambiguous in sex: All I can do, once I set foot on English soil, is to pour out tea and ask my lords how they like it. D'you take sugar. D'you take cream?' And mincing out the words, she was horrified to perceive how low and opinion she was forming of the other sex, the manly, to which it had once been her pride to belong. `To fall from a mast-head', she thought, `because you see a woman's ankles; to dress up like a Guy Fawkes and parade the streets, so that women may praise you; to deny a woman teaching lest she may laugh at you; to be the slave of the frailest chit in petticoats, and yet to go about as if you were the Lords of creation - Heavens!' (O 113) After the severe criticism of men, she counted her one of them instead of women, "what fools they make of us - what fools we are" (113)! Ambiguity of sex is clearly seen in her words as the biographer describes, "she was censuring both sexes equally, as if she belonged to neither [. . .] she seemed to vacillate; she was man; she was woman [. . .] she shared the weaknesses of each" (113). After the transformation, his/her servants’and pets’ “too natural” or “somewhat unaffected somewhat mysterious somewhat suspicious somewhat knowing” reaction designates further obscurity about Orlando's identity: 113 Milord! Milady! Milady! Milord! [. . .] No one showed an instant's suspicion that Orlando was not the Orlando they had known. If any doubt there was in the human mind the action of the deer and the dogs would have been enough to dispel it, for the dumb creatures, as is well known, are far better judges both of identity and character than we are. Moreover, said Mrs. Grimsditch, over her dish of china tea, to Mr. Dupper that night, if her Lord was a Lady now, she had never seen a lovelier one, nor was there a penny piece to choose between them; one was as well-favoured as the other; they were as like as two peaches on one branch; which, said Mrs. Grimsditch, becoming confidential, she had always had her suspicions (here she nodded her head very mysteriously), which it was no surprise to her (here she nodded her head very knowingly), and for her part, a very great comfort... it was time they had a Mistress among them. (O 121) It seems that every one including the animals admit that gender is not fixed. Sexes are "like two peaches on one branch", and there isn't "a penny piece to choose between them" (121). The incident which best reveals that sex is not immanent but culturally-produced occurs after Orlando's change of sex. Her sex together with other issues of property comes under legal litigation. "Thus it was in a highly ambiguous condition, uncertain whether she was alive or dead, man or woman, Duke or nonentity" (O 119). Through hundreds of years, the "lawsuits are settled" and Orlando "is pronounced indisputably, and beyond the shadow of a doubt... female" (O 176). This so-thought authoritative identity proclamation is undercut by the questions raised just after the case by Orlando's lover, Shel: ‘Are you positive you aren’t a man?’ he would ask anxiously and she would echo, ‘Can it be possible you’re not a woman?’ and they must put it to the proof 114 without more ado. For each was so surprised at the quickness of other's sympathy, and it was to each such a revelation that a woman could be as tolerant and free-spoken as a man, and a man as strange and subtle as a woman [. . .]. (O 178-9) Therefore not only is Orlando's sex “still in dispute”(O 162), but Shel’s is mysterious too. Even after the engagement with a man, Orlando’s female identity is considered to be assured but is spoiled by the fact that they have just discovered "You're a woman, Shel!", "You're a man, Orlando" (O 174)! Hence readers' notion of gendered praxis is disturbed not only by most characters' reactions but even more profoundly by Orlando's bisexual life. None of the main characters identity is fixed, let alone Orlando. Woolf's intention to make Orlando (or/and) linguistically androgynous, ambiguous, elusive, and flexible is quite obvious, "for it was this mixtures in her of man and woman, one being uppermost then the other, that often gave her conduct an unexpected turn": The curious of her own sex would argue, for example, if Orlando was a woman, how did she never take more than ten minutes to dress? And were not her clothes chosen rather at random, and sometimes worn rather shabby? And then would say, still, she has none of the formality of a man, or man's love of power. She is excessively tender-hearted. She could not endure to see a donkey beaten or a kitten drowned. Yet again, they noted, she detested household matters, was up at dawn and out among the fields in summer before the sun had risen. No farmer knew more about the crops than she did. She could drink with the best and liked games of hazard. She rode well and drove six horses at a gallop over London Bridge. Yet again, though bold and active as a man, it was remarked that the sight of another in danger brought on the most womanly palpitations. She would burst into tears on slight 115 provocation. She was unversed in geography, found mathematics intolerable, and held some caprices which are more common women then men, as for instance that to travel downhill (O 153). Orlando's sometimes-male sometimes-female and somewhat-masculine somewhat- feminine behaviors make him/her neither a man nor a woman, both a man and a woman. Being a man, he does not have "the formality of man." He "couldn't endure" to see animals mistreated. Being a woman, she doesn't like to do "household matters." She dresses as quickly as men, drives as well as men, and travels as often as men. "Whether, then, Orlando was most man or woman," Woolf claims, "it is difficult to say and cannot now be decided" (O 153). This forever delay or eternal indeterminacy not only suggests the impossibility of transmitting Orlando's personality in the biography but also the inexhaustibility of Orlando as metaphor in language. Society is the cause of difference. If men are located in the status of women, and women situated in the role of men, their linguistic behavior is still decided by their context not by language itself: Orlando curtseyed; she compiled; she flattered the good man's humours as she would not have done had his neat breeches been a woman's skirts, and his braided coat a woman's satin bodice [. . .]. The man looks the world full in the face, as if it were made for his uses and fashioned to his liking. The woman takes a sidelong glance at it, full of subtlety, even of suspicion. Had they both worn the same clothes, it is possible that their outlook might have been the same [. . .]. (O 132) The artifice of gender roles is exposed here. Clothes make the man, and contexts explain the behaviors. It is clothes that "change our view of the world and the world's view of us." Clothes "wear us not we them." 116 The difference between the sexes is "one of great profundity." In every human being, Woolf seems to suggest, a shifting command of language, a "vacillation from one sex to the other" takes place (O 131-2). In moving so deftly and so rapidly from ages to spaces, from gender to genre Woolf is able to tease out any fixed assumptions or stereotypes about the linguistic differences of men and women. Being a flexible linguistic me taphor, Orlando's historical or sexual mobility emphasizes the inherent linguistic instability. Orlando, the protagonist's multiple and fickle personality opens the possibilities of meanings in the novel, Orlando, which is the best example of feminine writing, An act which will not only "realize" the decensored relation of woman to her sexuality, to her womanly being, giving her access to her native strength; it will give her back her goods, her pleasures, her organs, her immense bodily territories which have been kept under seal; it will tear her away from the superegoized structure in which she has always occupied the place reserved for the guilty. (Cixous1975, 338) Whether the emphasis of the novel is on alternative writing or subversive rewriting, Woolf presents an impressive example of feminist poetics of feminine writing. The readers do get significantly unusual "culminations and perorations" from the novel which speaks with quite a different "accent" and sings quite a different tune from men (O 215). 117 Chapter 4 Water Imagery and Feminine Writing Water could be seen as the maternal element or the feminine liquid, as significant in Virginia Woolf’s thinking and writing, and as opposed to the “time-bound, land-locked world of the masculine ego” (Poole 262). Solid ground has conventionally been associated with men, and water has for centuries been the symbolic element of women. Among the symbols of the female principle are included “those which figure as origins of the waters (mother, life), such as Mother Earth, Mother of the Waters, Stone, Cave, House of the Mother, Night, House of Depth, House of Force, House of Wisdom, Forest, etc.” (Cirlot 347). At least three of Woolf’s novels— The Voyage Out, To the Lighthouse and The Waves— have water in their very titles, and water is part of their structure too. Women in Woolf’s novels are associated with the flux, men with the solid: [T]he primaeval waters, the image of prime matter, also contained all solid bodies before they acquired form and rigidity. [. . .] This ‘fluid body’ is interpreted by modern psychology as a symbol of the unconscious, that is, of the non-formal, dynamic, motivating, female side of the personality. The projection of the mother-imago into the waters endows them with various numinous properties characteristic of the mother. (Circlot 345) Both metaphysical positions, the solid and the fluid, are elements necessary to Woolf’s vision of life and techniques of narration. Her attraction to the watery element gives her writing another of its feminine attributes. Reading her works, one has the impression of being immersed in a constantly moving liquid. The water imagery “subverts the ‘Selfsame,’ flowing into the cracks of the symbolic order and infusing it with the semiotic” (qtd. in Hussey 176). The ultimate purpose of any writing is to represent life. 118 Life, as Woolf conceives it, is not a predetermined and precisely patterned thing. It has no spatial symmetry or chronological cohesion about it. Life is full of unpredictable and intangible happenings. There are a lot of ups and downs, twists and turns. Reality seems to be “something very erratic, very undependable” (AROO 113). It could be found everywhere even in “a dusty road,” “a scrap of newspaper in the street,” or “a daffodil in the sun” (113). It will move people’s emotion and hides itself from us. It presents itself everywhere in small things or big events, in silence or uproar, at home or on the street in different forms: It lights up a group in a room and stamps some casual saying. It overwhelms one walking home beneath the stars and makes the silent world more real than the world of speech – and then there it is again in an omnibus in the uproar of Piccadilly. Sometimes, too, it seems to dwell in shapes too far away for us to discern what their nature is. (AROO 113) It is the writer’s business to find it and collect it and communicate it to us. For Woolf, life is just as William James defines: “it flows … let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life” (qtd. in Naremore 64). Assuming that classic realism cannot represent the world as it is, Woolf attempts to render the flux of life in a fluid medium. Life is the “subjective” thinking of human beings instead of the objective presentation of facts. Life escapes: “Like” and “like” and “like”— but what is the thing that lies beneath the semblance of the thing? Now that lightening has gashed the tree and the flowering branch has fallen [. . .] There is a square; there is an oblong. They place it very accurately; they make a perfect dwelling place. Very little is left outside. The structure is now visible; what is inchoate is here stated; we are not so various or so mean; we have made oblongs and stood them upon squares. This is our triumph; this is our consolation. 119 (W 134) No matter how hard any writers try, they can only touch the very surface of things, the appearance of life. Even they sometimes see things or think they see things, their depictions might be still shallow or wrong. They might still have “stood oblongs upon squares” and have caught little left outside. Claiming much of life has been missed, excluded, and ignored; Woolf tries to evolve a discourse more in keeping with what she called “life itself.” To capture the elusive tides of life, to participate in the ebb and flow of existence, Woolf’s narrative in her works is streamy, wavelike, and oceanic. Her discursive coup is to overwhelm the land-based, patriarchal tradition of unified authoritative static narrative and chronological plot by infusing her dis-course (disrupting the conventional course of narration) with aqua, an ever-changing dynamic life. Across all Woolf’s novels, according to Marie-Paule Vigne in her “Reflections on a Theme: Virginia and Water,” “water alone occupies almost one half of the cosmic vocabulary: 48% (about 4,500 words) against 52% (4,850) for all the other elements together” (Poole 259). Water flows and streams in her novels, “52% in The Voyage Out, 53% in Jacob’s Room, 54% in The Years, and a proportion of 2/3 in Orlando and To the Lighthouse” (259). The water images Woolf uses establish her idea of true reality and reject the traditional depiction of literature. intangible, vague, shapeless, and fluid. are no longer important. that experience them. They are chosen to appear The events that traditionally make up a story What matters is the impression they make on the characters Fluidity is the main feature of Woolf’s poetic style; the quality of language which flows follows the most intricate thoughts and stretches to express the most intimate feelings. Woolf’s works is always crafted into a random sea of voices, an ocean of consciousness, a flood of feelings, “each sentence a wave rolling in,” and “each chapter a renewed tide” (qtd. in Wheeler 45). “[B]ringing water into the desert of male arrogance and intellectuality” (Poole 260), challenging traditional 120 modes of writing, Woolf’s aquatic aesthetics not only leads to her elevation as a literary “mother” but also an alternative to the many “fathers” available to male writers. Feminine writing is characterized by Woolf’s construction of fluid identities, wavy texture and flowing dis-course in her works. Women’s mind is described as stream or sea, and the metaphor of thinking as fishing: Thought [. . .] had let its line down into the stream. It swayed, minute after minute, hither and thither among the reflections and the weeds, letting the water lift it and sink it, until – you know the little tug – the sudden conglomeration of an idea at the end of one’s line [. . .] how small, how insignificant this thought of mine looked; the sort of fish that a good fisherman puts back into the water so that it may grow fatter and be one day worth cooking and eating. [. . .] But however small it was, it had, nevertheless, the mysterious property of its kind – put back into the mind, it became at once very exciting, and important. (AROO 15) Writing is a fishing trip into the female element, into the arms of mother water. Feminine writing, like fishing, needs experience and practice by “putting back” the small fish (thought) “into the water” (mind) to let it “grow fatter and be one day worth cooking and eating.” The underwater world of a woman writer’s imagination is commensurate with female “creativity as amniotic bliss” (Marcus 151). Women writers voyage through the discursive path of adventure on the sea. “Without our doing, those seas would be unsailed and those fertile lands a desert” (AROO 116). The fisherwoman, the mermaid and the fish make up a female underwater womblike world of freedom. In water, women writers let their imagination feed unfettered on every crumb of their experience; they let their imagination “sweep unchecked round every rock and cranny of the world that lies submerged in the depths of our 121 unconscious being”: a girl sitting with a pen in her hand, which for minutes, and indeed for hours, she never dips into the inkpot. The image that comes to my mind when I think of this girl is the image of a fisherman lying sunk in dreams on the verge of a deep lake with a rod held out over the water. She was letting her imagination sweep unchecked round every rock and cranny of the world that lies submerged in the depths of our unconscious being. [. . .] It had sought the pools, the depths, the dark places where the largest fish slumber. (WW 61) Women writers are like the fishermen fishing on the continuous flux interrupted by catastrophes called “the extreme conventionality of the other sex”: And then there was a smash. and confusion. There was an explosion. There was foam The imagination had dashed itself against something hard. The girl was roused from her dream. She was indeed in a state of the most acute and difficult distress. [. . .] The consciousness of what men will say of a woman [. . .] had roused her from her artist’s state of consciousness. She could write no more. Her imagination could work no longer. [. . .] women writers – they are impeded by the extreme conventionality of the other sex. (WW 61-62) Water is traditionally an image of life and procreation. Woolf presents ocean not only as a symbol of procreation and life-giving energy but also as the source of creativity. The fish is “a psychic being or a ‘penetrative motion’ in the unconscious” (Cirlot 101). Because of the close symbolic “relationship between the sea and the Magna Mater [great mother]” (101), fish by virtue of the “extraordinary number of its eggs” (103) becomes a symbol of bountiful female creativity. “Fishing” amounts to “extracting the unconscious elements from deep-lying sources,” and from “the elusive treasure” of life 122 (103). Explicit references to maternity or the ambience of fecundity and vitality are present in Woolf’s works. The dominant image of motherhood is significant in undermining the credibility of the Patriarchal society and in creating the feminine version of psychological realism. As quoted earlier, water, the “fluid body” is interpreted by modern psychology as a “symbol of the unconscious, that is, the non-formal, dynamic, motivating female side of the personality” (Circlot 345)[emphasis mine]. Ocean, the “collective of unconscious” (230) stands for the sum of all the possibilities of existence. It is the mother of creations, of things on earth. Water as an image of a repository of the human spirit is repeated in Mrs. Dalloway where Clarissa remembers tossing a shilling into the Serpentine. The image becomes more poignant when we remember that Woolf herself met death by her own hand and by water. In 1941, Woolf filled her pockets with stones and waded into the River Ouse near her home in Rodmell, Sussex. She left a suicide note that seems a significant gesture. The expressions “risen from the waves” and “saved form the waters” symbolize fertility and are “metaphorical images of childbirth” (Cirlot 346). Birth is usually expressed through water imagery. “Water is symbolic of dissolution and, at the same time, renovation and regeneration” (103). Since rock is the “male prejudice,” and sea is the “female imagination” Woolf’s death is a defiant gesture – carrying with her body the “rock” the masculinity and sinking to the bottom of the sea (femininity - “we are ourselves sea”) where the “largest fish slumber” (WW 61). Never is the call of water more powerfully felt in the face of the assault of the rationalist male mind. Having a “female mind” and a “male exterior,” Septimus the feminine man in Mrs. Dalloway reflects: “like a drowned sailor on a rock. I leant over the edge of the boat and fell down, he thought. I went under the sea. I have been dead, and yet am now alive” (MD 163-4). Death in this world does not mean death in the other world. The “death 123 of the soul” (89) is far more horrible than the “death of the body.” Of Septimus’ death, Woolf suggests the “plunge” is a happy act of “holding treasure,” an “embrace” of life instead of sacrificing life: Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate; people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded, one was alone. There was an embrace in death. But this young man who had killed himself— had he plunged holding his treasure? “If it were now to die, 'twere now to be most happy,” she had said to herself once, coming down in white. (MD 280-81) Of Woolf’s understanding, death is not the enemy to be fought, but “a vision to be embraced,” “an escape ‘from here and now’into the other reality behind appearances” (Roe & Sellers 70). Death, for Woolf, is definitely neither what Showalter called “the tragedy of her personal life,” nor “the betrayal of her literary genius” (Showalter 1982, 264). It is a significant, communicative, defiance toward Fascism (World War I), the “increasingly male violence which threatened to blow her apart in pain, blood and guts” (Poole 279). On the other hand, death in water is a happy plunge into Mother’s embrace. Suicide, though severely critiqued by Showalter, yet tacitly accepted by Woolf, is a “fantasized female weapon, a way of cheating men out of dominance”: Martyrdom and self-immolation are viewed as aggressive, as a way of inflicting punishment on the guilty survivors. This passage, with its suggestion that Richardson saw her own mother’s suicide as a protest against her father, is extremely significant; it is a direct advocacy of the art of self-annihilation that is the hallmark of female aestheticism. (Showalter 1982, 250) Suicide, recognized by Richardson in Pilgrimage, is not only the “hallmark of female 124 aestheticism” but “another form of power politics” to live in the world of “egolessness, in the female country of multiple receptivity” (250). Being the apprentice of Richardson’s “feminine equivalent of the current masculine realism,” of “psychological sentence of the feminine gender,” of “woman’s sentence,” Woolf definitely understands the significance of suicide for women. If Woolf dies, she dies a physical death instead of a spiritual one, a worldly death instead of a heavenly one. “While all her tormentors thought that she was dead, she was not dead, but curled up at the bottom of the sea. There she lay, sometimes seeing darkness, sometimes light, while every now and then someone turned her over at the bottom of the sea” (qtd. in Poole 267). She indeed got everyone’s attention even by her death at the very bottom of the sea. As expressed by Richardson’s protagonist Miriam, “life is poisoned for women, at the very source, all women ought to agree to commit suicide” (qtd. in Showalter 1982, 250). Death is a “beautiful act of faith” (Hussey 5), a “perfecting” plan that had long been in Woolf’s mind: In A Room of One’s Own Virginia had already shown herself aware of the menace of Mussolini’s Fascism; but since then, the hopes of mankind had taken a much steeper plunge, Hitler had risen to power in Germany, the hideous, irrational persecution of the Jews had started, and preparations for war were being made everywhere. [. . .] ‘How can one be “happy”? She asked herself, in a world bursting with misery. On every placard at every street corner was death; or worse – tyranny; brutality, torture; the fall of the civilization; the end of freedom. We here, she thought, are only sheltering under a leaf, which will be destroyed . . . .’ (Lehmann 97) Death in water for Woolf is a rebirth, a way she “can be off again, as indeed [she] long[s] to be. Oh to be private, alone, submerged” (qtd. in Poole 279). “Immersion in water signifies a return to the pre-formal state, with a sense of death and annihilation on the 125 one hand, but of rebirth and regeneration on the other” (Cirlot 345). And it is in this sense, the symbolism of baptism represents “death,” “life,” and “resurrection” (345-6). Water takes the sufferers burden, and sea provides the refuge: Such are the visions which proffer great cornucopias full of fruit to the solitary traveller, or murmur in his ear like sirens lolloping away on the green sea waves [. . . ] which fishermen flounder through floods to embrace. Such are the visions which ceaselessly float up [. . .] often overpowering the solitary traveler and taking away from him the sense of the earth, the wish to return, and giving him for substitute a general peace [. . .] out of the waves to shower down from her magnificent hands compassion, comprehension, absolution. (MD 86) The “solitary traveler” seeks and yearns for “solace,” “relief,” and the “figure of the mother” (85, 87). What is true of Woolf applies to most of her characters. This recurrent sea imagery figures some great semiotic chora in which one can lapse out into a state of maternal embrace and consoling bliss: Septimus Warren Smith lying on the sofa in the sitting-room; watching the watery gold glow and fade with the astonishing sensibility of some live creature on the roses [. . .] the sound of water was in the room, and through the waves came the voices of birds singing. Every power poured its treasures on his head, and his hand lay there on the back of the sofa, as he had seen his hand lie when he was bathing, floating, on the top of the waves, while far away on shore her heard dogs barking and barking far away. Fear no more, says the heart in the body; fear no more. (MD 211) Woolf, like her character Septimus in Mrs. Dalloway, and as Bernard in The Waves declares, will fling herself against death “unvanquished and unyielding” (W 248) just like the waves (mothers) keeping on breaking on (fighting) the shore (man). 126 Furthermore, flowing water as an image of source of creativity is strengthened by Woolf in The Voyage Out where the “fountain without any water” symbolizes for Evelyn “the type of her own being” when the “little gush of vitality” had left her, and she felt herself impotent (VO 426). And the image is vividly created in Orlando where the river freezes and life and death intermixes. When, the flow of the river ceases, life is suspended for natural beings: “birds froze in mid air” and “shoals of eels lay motionless in a trance” (O 24-5). For the bumboat woman life is suspended in the course of business leaving only “a certain blueness of the lips” to betray her true condition. All other means of life are present but their spiritual existence is suspended due to the absence of a life giving flow. The artificiality of the court surmounts nature only when the latter is frozen, not surprisingly “it was at night that the carnival was at its merriest.” When the melt comes and real life resumes it is the “gold goblets,” “furred gowns,” “valuables” and “possessions of all sorts” which are swept away (O 45). The release of the water frees the Muscovite ship and releases Sasha but stultifies Orlando at that time still in his male incarnation (O 40-46). Besides, all the stream of consciousness novels by Woolf overwhelm and melt the sense of logical or narrative continuity. As a narrative device, stream of consciousness depicts the discontinuous fluidity of human awareness. As suggested by some critics, Woolf has created new narrative structures and new protagonists, and from moment to moment, into the streams the protagonists and readers plunge. In her works, one is repeatedly brought to ask, “Where are we?”, “When are we?”, and “Who is speaking or thinking?” As stream of consciousness places the narrative voice within the human psyche, it ends the false deification of the narrative voice which was the essence of the “omniscient narrator.” Recent analyses (Sprague 1994, Scheff 2000) of interior monologues in Woolf’s work propose that they are feminine, especially the multi-personal aspects. They show that Woolf portrays extensive interior monologues 127 of her women characters, and that these monologues are dialogic and multi-personal. Stream of consciousness is Woolf’s experiment in dissolving identity in dissolution of the self. That Woolf has written novels which do not comply with the dictates of phallogocentric realism is also manifest through her formal deconstruction of the dominant “I.” In Mrs. Dalloway, no one point of view dominates. Like the dissolving letters etched in the sky by the airplane’s smoke, the narrative continuously flows from on subject’s point of view to another’s. So too are the dissolving circles of Big Ben’s striking characteristic of the novel’s pattern focalization. Even in an argumentative essay A Room of One’s Own, Woolf’s use of mobile, pluralist viewpoints, with her refusal to let herself be identified with any of the many ‘I’s [eyes -- “I (Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael or by any name you please – it is not a matter of importance) (AROO 14) turns her text and London into a psychic river: “a river, which flowed past, invisibly, round the corner, down the street and took people and eddied them along, as the stream at Oxbridge had taken the undergraduate on his boat” (101). The Waves (1931) could be mediated alongside the composition of Orlando (1928), and of A Room of One’s Own (1929) where Woolf more directly challenges the current ordering of society, particularly its disabling of women. The Waves overcomes what she saw as a central problem for women writing: expressing “the body” and “the passions” which were considered “unfitting for her as a woman to say” (WW 61). By going down in The Waves into “the world that lies submerged in our unconscious being” and by sustaining readers’ imagination of her in a trance, “her artist’s state of unconsciousness” (62), Woolf seeks to escape the narrow bounds of social realism which, she perceives, is functioning as a form of censorship. She has found a language that will be less “impeded by the extreme conventionality of the other sex” (62). Masculine insistence on substantiality goes with a sense of how 128 objects warp, bend, melt and how the senses seize a world always irretrievably altered, endlessly contingent: “Everything became softly amorphous, as if the china of the plate flowed and the steel of the knife were liquid. Meanwhile the conclusion of the waves breaking fell with muffled thuds, like logs falling, on the shore” (W 21). The masculine eye’s (I’s) assurance wavers with the changes of light and the splashes of waves. The Waves enacts a formal and thematic deconstruction of general sequence of what Bernard describes as the “military progress” of the sentence. It is a mistake, this extreme precision, this orderly and military progress; a convenience, a lie. There is always deep below it . . . a rushing stream of broken dreams, nursery rhymes, street cries, half-finished sentences and sights . . . nothing one can fish up in a spoon; nothing one can call an event. Yet, it is alive too and deep, this stream. (W 213) Any attempt to regulate the eternal flux of life will be a distortion and misrepresentation of reality. So much has been disrupted, standards overturned, ideas blown skywards, the great body of knowledge has been punched so full of deadly holes that there is no authority to whom women writers need to submit. The cyclical rhythms of Woolf's free-verse in the novel have been likened to the flux and flow of sea waves. She crafts the novel into an ocean, in which her six voices of six characters pour forth their experiences in six streams of consciousness simultaneously. The stream of inner flux flows through all characters, through Bernard who is always tormented by “the horrible activity of the mind’s eye” (W 220). No one voice gives the "privileged perspective"; no one offers a restrictive story. A stream of nine descriptive passages, printed in italics, flowing together with the six streams of consciousness make a sea, the oceanic text. The Waves is, in fact a random sea of voices, an “ocean of consciousness,” “each sentence a wave rolling in,” and “each chapter a renewed tide” (qtd. in Wheeler 45). It marks Woolf’s progression through a 129 flowing writing practice toward a convergence with the feminine source or the maternal sea. As Elizabeth Abel indicates, The Waves is Woolf’s experiment in dissolving identity. The Waves marks “Woolf’s progression through the 1920s toward an ambivalent engagement with maternal origins” (Abel 132). Woolf’s movement from the early drafts to the final version of the novel fully expresses the idea that feminine writing is actually an experimental writing practice. Waves and mothers are indistinguishable, and the characters are shown actually to be born out of the waves themselves: Many mothers, & before them many mothers, & again many mothers, have groaned, & fallen back, while the child crowed Like one wave, & then succeeding each other. Wave after wave, endlessly sinking and falling as far as the eye can stretch. And all these waves have been the prostrate forms of mothers, in their flowing nightgowns, with the tumbled sheets about them holding up, with a groan, as they sink back into the sea, infin innumerable children. (qtd. in Beer xxvi) Water is associated with women because of its metaphorical image of fertility (childbirth). Waves contribute to alternating rhythmic undulations of a woman's mind. Water, the waves, or the ocean -- the maternal element or the feminine liquid -- is Woolf's central symbol. The most essential aspects of the ocean are its ceaseless movement and the formlessness of its waters. Ocean wears motherly garments. The sea waves themselves were, in Woolf's holograph quoted earlier, “many mothers . . . sinking and falling . . . holding up . . . innumerable children.” The Waves is an oceanic text through which the six children characters, Bernard, Louis, Neville, Susan, Jinny, Rhoda, are born. Women's writing expressed through the oceanic text, the wavy texture is wavelike and fluid. Women writers, according to Woolf, must be each like her female characters Rhoda "flooding free" (W 44), "flutter[ing] unattched, without 130 anchorage anywhere, unconsolidated" (100), and Jinny "fluttering," "rippling," "streaming," "flowing this way, flowing that way" (83). Female sentences dissent from men's rigidity and criticize male dominance. Water causes all forms to dissolve and return to a fluid state. The hard rock Woolf trying to wear down is the rock of male prejudice. Pouring water "down the runnel" of the "spine" of the boys who are the future "fathers," women will have their "dry crannies" "wetted" and their "cold body" "warmed" (19). Woolf’s water imagery and stream of consciousness narrative, the fluidifications of the realistic structure, are intended to dissolve the rocky male-rigidity and overwhelm the land-based patriarchal tradition of ossified discourse. Language, the storehouse of discourses, is part of the fabric of our everyday lives; its interrelationship with gender has been at the center of feminist discussions. Woolf thinks that the masculine discourse does not speak to and ring true to the female experience; traditional method of representation is no longer adequate to express the working of the subjective consciousness. Claiming “a man’s sentence unsuited for a woman’s use,” Woolf’s discourse is a process of constructing and reconstructing gender identity in her writing practice. For most of her writing life she feels encumbered by the patriarchal censorship. In her writing she tries to define the subtle context of censorship imposed by the “figure of man.” The censorship of women’s vitality has come about, she claims in A Room of One’s Own, not only through lack of education and the prohibition of access to professional resources, but also through a subtle practice of male elitism which has long ensured that women function as “looking –glasses” reflecting the “figure of man.” In “Profession for Women” she personifies the censor in the figure of the “Angel in the House,” whose function is to edit the thoughts of women novelists as they write, by reminding them that they are in a male world and so “must charm, must conciliate, must tell lies if they are to succeed” (WW 60). Women's difficult position in writing is delicately expressed by Woolf in The Waves as being under 131 surveillance: I look over the wall. That is Elvedon. The lady sits between two long windows, writing. The gardeners sweep the lawn with giant brooms. We are the first to come here. We are the discoverers of an unknown land. Do not stir; if the gardeners saw us they would shoot us. We should be nailed like stoats to the stable door [. . .]. `I see the lady writing. I see the gardener sweeping,' said Susan. `If we died here, nobody would bury us.' `Run!' said Bernard. `Run! The gardener with the black beard has seen us! We shall be shot! We shall be shot like jays and pinned to the wall! We are in a hostile country. (W 12) Writing for women is not only "an unknown land," but also a “forbidden territory.” With the "hostile" male gardeners who have "the black beard" and "giant brooms" sweeping and watching over around, the lady is shut in, and the children (Susan and Bernard: implication of innocent readers) are shut out. The same image repeats many times in the novel (12, 208, 213, 224). How strict and stern the censorship is! If women writers are not tactful enough, how can they have their own ideas read and voice heard? Woolf marshaled her artistic acumen behind her novels. Fluidity is her attempt in her novels to solve the dilemma for feminine writing. Her aesthetic choices themselves have social and political implications. Her novels, which mostly employ the technique of "stream of consciousness" -- constantly shifting from the consciousness of one character to another, perfectly exemplify her idea of a streaming "woman's sentence," a fluid "female writing,” and a flexible "mother's tradition." The Waves (1931), "the most firmly rooted in stream of consciousness of all her books,"1 published 1 Quoted from Melvin Friedman's Stream of Consciousness: A Study in Literary Method by James Naremore (Naremore 152). 132 right after A Room of One's Own (1929), incline significantly and timely to present her desire for not just a room but a sentence for women writers. She tends to write a fiction which is not made from the language in a single consciousness. Her experiments lead her from a set of stream of consciousness to the multipersonal representation of consciousness, to a sort of watery world where all sense of masculine ego, male rigidity, or patriarchal conventionality is dissolved hence flexible enough to include a feminine figure (pun: shape & person). By contrast, Woolf offers in her works an example of the “man’s sentence” (AROO 82) prevalent at the beginning of the 19th century, in comparison with “the woman’s sentence” (WW 191) invented by Richardson. The man’s sentence, as analyzed by Sue Roe, “regenerates itself in a repetitive, circular narrative line,” “reflects the male pomposity and the arrogance of the male ego,” “argues proudly for its own self-perpetuation” (Roe 20). On the other hand, more “elastic,” sensitive, and “capable of stretching” than the masculine sentences, a “woman's sentence” enables Richardson to present honestly “states of being” rather than “states of doing” (WW 191). Claiming herself “an intermittent student” (191) of Richardson, Woolf must have had passages from Pilgrimage such as this in mind: eloquent words, fashioned easily, without thought, a perfect flowing of understanding, to and fro, without obstruction [. . .]. It was like a sea, each sentence a wave rolling in, rising till the light shone through its glistening crest, dropping to give way to the next coming wave, the meaning gathering, accumulating, coming nearer with each rising falling rhythm; each chapter a renewed tide. . . . Nothing was at an end. Nothing would ever come to an end again. (qtd. in Wheeler 45) Women's writing is “like a sea, each sentence a wave rolling in," and "each chapter a renewed tide.” Richardson's effort of finding a language less biased by male attitudes is 133 not unlike Woolf's desire to find a sentence less impeded by the extreme conventionality of the other sex. Her use of stream-of-consciousness technique suggests its apparent commensurability with female experience, and her belief that a woman “thinks flowingly.” Richardson elaborates her views on women and writing in the essay "Women in the Arts" (1925), which appeared prior to Woolf's formulation of similar concerns in A Room of One's Own. The comparison of a woman's writing or thinking to a sea, of sentences to the waves, has its profound significance not only for Woolf but also for every female writer. The development of a “female aesthetic” is central to their writing. Cixous, the practitioner of écriture féminine, identifies a woman's writing with sea: Write! and your self-seeking text . . . a lively combination of flying colors, leaves, and rivers plunging into the sea we feed. "Ah, there's her sea. . . . But look, our seas are what we make of them, full of fish or not, opaque or transparent, red or black, high or smooth, narrow or bankless; and we are ourselves sea, sand, coral, seaweed, beaches, tides, swimmers, children, waves. . . . (Cixous 1975, 345) The fluidity and abundance of the sea, according to Cixous, describe the qualities of a female text against the masculine economy of superimposed linearity and tyranny. Kristeva's common understanding of a “female aesthetic” of fluidity is expressed in her persistence in challenging the discourses that stand. She sees “semiotic” discourse as a challenge to the “symbolic” order. Women must speak and write as outsiders to male-dominated discourse to approach this creative “feminine” linguistic horizon. The semiotic style is characterized by fluidity, multiplicity, and flexibility. Irigaray is more radical in assuming women's exuberant and overflowing sexualities which can be put into practice in writing. A woman’s “geography of her pleasure” is bounteous and infinite like the sea. Her language “goes off in all directions” in which 134 man “is unable to discern the coherence of any meaning” (Irigaray 353). The oceanic expanses or territory of feminist discourse, shared by women writers, appear to be free and boundless. Experimental efforts to write in the feminine have unveiled an ever-shifting fluid field of female discovery across space-time borders by Woolf, Richardson, and the French theoreticians, Cixous, Kristeva and Irigaray. Every woman's work illuminates another's; each helps to define “female aesthetics.” They sought to replace the “men's language” with an emphasis on sentences as less arbitrarily ordered or overtly patterned. Breaking through the barriers of inherited male conventions towards the expression of an authentic woman's voice, Woolf overcomes in The Waves a central problem for women writing by its aquatic form and content. The novel takes its name from its wavy texture and subject. The words associated with water and fluidity such as "foams," "ebbs," "drips," "bubbles," "crests," "melts," "pours," "sluices," "sails," "ripples," "streams," "floods," "drops," "eddies" etc. exude and overflow everywhere in the novel. Woolf's wavelike narrative in the novel properly describes the elusive tides of life which is the content of the novel. She prefaces each chapter with an interlude, each containing four images of waves: the sun (light waves), the birds (sound waves), the sea (waves), and a garden (air and color waves). The interludes, like the time waves, from sunrise to sunset, express the rhythms of the outside nature. Words and sentences have been likened to the flux and flow of sea waves. Streams of characters’thoughts, moving freely with eddies and currents of things, make a watery world, the oceanic text. Each passage mentions the waves and the sea as part of a symbolic landscape, ebbing and flowing through the different lights, moods and weathers of a day. Within the “ocean of consciousness”' causal chronology, unified plot and omniscient authoritative narrative cease; Jinny speaks, Susan speaks, Rhoda speaks, Neville speaks, Bernard speaks, Louis speaks -- Woolf's six voices form a fluid changing pattern that she flows 135 freely from stream to stream. The six characters, taking a wavelike narration without definite order and across gender (as in the very beginning of the novel): Bernard-Susan-Rhoda-Neville-Jinny-Louis Bernard-Susan-Louis-Rhoda-Neville-Jinny Susan-Rhoda-Louis-Neville-Jinny-Bernard (W 5) "rise and fall and fall and rise again" (247). The currents of the outside (the interludes), inside (six streams of consciousness), and beside (Woolf's unprivileged perspective) flowing together make a sea which is the novel. She thus creates a fluid dis-course that substitutes for the conventional coherence of causal chronological plot and omniscient authoritative narrative. Her aquatic aesthetics is used to stress the fact that life is a fluid “process” rather than a solid “product,” a necessary ongoing melting and remelting random drops to form an "incessant renewal" of stories rather than a single restrictive one. As the artist character Bernard well observes, life is a liquid bubble instead of a solid stone: `The crystal, the globe of life as one calls it, far from being hard and cold to the touch, has walls of thinnest air. If I press them all will burst. Whatever sentence I extract whole and entire from this cauldron is only a string of six little fish that let themselves be caught while a million others leap and sizzle, making the cauldron bubble like boiling silver, and slip through my fingers. Faces recur, faces and faces--they press their beauty to the walls of my bubble--Neville, Susan, Louis, Jinny, Rhoda and a thousand others. (W 214) Woolf expresses here through Bernard her writing experience of the novel. No matter how hard she tries, she cannot exhaust the wellspring of life. "Whatever sentence" she "extract[s]" from the ocean of life, she cannot catch all the fish. As in the novel, "only a string of six little fish that let themselves be caught" -- Neville, Susan, Louis, Jinny, Rhoda and Bernard -- "a million others leap and sizzle." She could not help exclaiming 136 at "how impossible to order them [the six characters]; to detach one separately, or to give the effect of the whole [of life]" (214). This multiplicity behind each commonly conceived unitary self makes personality an eternal process of interpenetration of different psychic states. The richness and depth of any stream of consciousness, carries on its surface an endless flow of recollections and anticipations. It is thus clear that if Woolf's fluid "feminine sentence" cannot catch the essence of “life going on,” let alone the patriarchal solid one. Artists, because they are open to all sorts of influences and possibilities, are like waves. Woolf, as is well-known, argues for androgyny in a work of art. They cannot be pinned down to certain fixed traits. It is fatal not merely for men to think of their sex while they write, but for women as well. As mentioned earlier in Chapter Four by Woolf, the purely masculine mind cannot create great art any more than the purely feminine can. She claims that she writes as a woman but as a woman who has forgotten that she is a woman. This explains the androgyneity of many of Woolf's characters. The fluidity of identity is the distinctive feature of Woolf's artists. Her characters, male or female, human or not, earlier in Mrs. Dalloway (Clarissa’s double identities) and Orlando (Orlando’s multiple selves, and male/female identity) now in The Waves are capable of flowing as a liquid. "Everything became softly amorphous, as if the china of plate flowed and the steel of the knife were liquid" (W 21). The six characters, three male (Bernard, Louis, Neville) and three female (Susan, Jinny, Rhoda) often allied across gender together can be considered as a "six-sided flower; made of six lives [. . .]. `Marriage, death, travel, friendship, town country [. . .] a many-sided substance [. . .] a many-faceted flower" (W 191), or actually a multifaceted female sensibility characterized by its floral shape and beauty, its suggestion of Spring and transitoriness. According to the artist character Bernard, they "melt into each other with phrases" and "make an unsubstantial territory" (11). 137 The three female characters are the living presences of maternal fluidity. Susan's fluidity is expressed in her hatred of "restriction," "order," "discipline" and her embracive identification with Nature: I think I am the field, I am the barn, I am the trees, mine are the flocks of birds, and this young hare who leaps, at the last moment when I step almost on him. Mine is heron that stretches its vast wings lazily; and the cow that creaks as it pushes on foot before another munching; and the wild, swooping swallow; and the faint red in the sky, and the green when the red fades; the silence and the bell; the call of the man fetching cart-horses from the fields--all are mine. (W 78) She is the very incarnation of mother Nature, the field, the barn, the trees, the birds, the hare, the heron, the cow, the swallow, the color, the sound, and the voice, or in fact, the maternal fertility. Jinny's fluidity overflows through her body: My imagination is the body's. Its visions are not fine-spun and white with purity like Louis's [. . .] the infinite variety of women's dresses (I note all clothes always) delight me. I eddy with them, in and out, in and out, into rooms, into halls, here, there, everywhere, wherever they go [. . .]. The torments, the divisions of your lives have been solved for me night after night, sometimes only by the touch of a finger under the table-cloth as we sat dining--so fluid has my body become, forming even at the touch of a finger into one full drop which fills itself, which quivers, which flashes, which falls in ecstasy. (W 184) The feminine jouissance2 exudes freely from her body: "like a parasol. I open my 2 A word used by the French critic Roland Barthes in Le Plaisir du texte to describe different kinds of reading experience. Feminists use the word to designate and celebrate the joy of being female (Gray 155-56). 138 body, I shut my body at my will" (50). She enjoys her colorful selves in the “infinite variety of women's dresses.” She goes to everywhere she likes, with anyone she loves at anytime she can. Women's wellspring will never end in her: "Life is [just] beginning. I now break into my hoard of life" (50). Rhoda's fluidity issues from her oceanic fantasies3 and moodiness: I will pick flowers; I will bind flowers in one garland and clasp them and present them--Oh! to whom? There is some check in the flow of my being; a deep stream presses on some obstacle; it jerks, it tugs; some knot in the center resists. Oh, this is pain, this is anguish! I faint, I fail. Now my body thaws; I am unsealed, I am incandescent. Now the stream pours in a deep tide fertilizing, opening the shut, forcing the tight-folded, flooding free. To whom shall I give all that now flows through me, from by warm, my porous body? I will gather my flowers and present them--Oh! to Whom? (W 44) Her abundance comes in an endless flow from her unsteady floating states of being: "I who have no face, who make no difference when I come in (Susan and Jinny change bodies and faces), flutter unattached, without anchorage anywhere, unconsolidated, incapable of composing any blankness or continuity or wall against which these bodies move" (100). Constant water dripping wears away a stone. Even the male characters, the symbol of patriarchal solidity, in Woolf's oceanic text, are capable of flowing. Melting the proud distinctions each has attempted to make throughout the novel, water inundates Louis's business, Neville's "credentials," Bernard's refined phrases. Drop by drop, fluidity dissolves their derived solidity, until each becomes "featureless and scarcely to 3 Rhoda always fantasizes that her Armadas sails on the waves, and she is relieved of hard contacts and collisions (W 20). 139 be distinguished from another" (W 187). Louis and Neville, the worshipper or practician of "discipline," "precision" and "exactitude" (54) are capable of flowing too. Louis, "stone-carved, sculpturesque" (96), pressed by his heavy schedules of business life, yearns for his childhood which is not solidified: “I hang suspended without attachments [. . .] not firm ground to which I go [. . .] now disembodied, passing over fields without lodgement [. . .]. I am the ghost of Louis, an ephemeral passer-by, in whose mind dreams have power [. . .]. I dash and sprinkle myself with the bright waters [. . .]” (W 51-3). Understanding his potential of fluidity, Louis, "now a duke, now Plato, companion of Socrates; the tramp of dark men and yellow men migrating east, west, north, and south" (138) enjoys thinking that "a vast inheritance of experience is packed" in him and that he has "lived thousands of years" (138). Neville, "scissor-cutting, exact" (96), sees everything "with complete clarity" (106). Accepting the fluidity of everything, he softens his suffering of life with the "unceasing excitement" and sloughs off his rigidity: “the person is always changing, though not the desire, and I do not know in the morning by whom I shall sit at night, I am never stagnant; I rise from my worst disaster, I turn, I change. Pebbles [solidity] bounce off the mail of my muscular, my extended body” (W 106). The one character in The Waves who does not speak is Percival, and he does not require a voice because his life is created by “silence, absence, and death.” He never speaks but only reflected by others. His absence or leaving for India put all the other characters at a loss what to do. Percival, whose consciousness the reader never enters, is thought as "a God" (W 111) by the other six characters: "Without Percival there is not solidity. We are silhouettes, hollow phantoms moving mistily without a background" (100). In fact, he is the unity for them: He is like a stone fallen into a pond round which minnows swarm. Like minnows, we who had been shooting this way, that way, all shot round him 140 when he came. Like minnows, conscious of the presence of a great stone, we undulate and eddy contentedly. Comfort steals over us. (W 111-12) Like small fish the six characters teem around a huge rock for safety. Percival's death changes each of them. Without Percival, for Neville as no doubt for the others, everything seems insubstantial. Neville believes that "the lights of the world has gone out" (W 124) and that "we [they] are doomed, all of us [them]" (125). From "a God" to "a stone" to "the lights," life or art for Woolf lies not through Percival, but through the antithesis of those values he represents. Only after Percival falls does the fin4 (Woolf's symbol of inspiration) appear, first in the six interlude, and then as part of Bernard's speculations. Only through the “silence, absence, and death” of Percival, the symbol of patriarchy, do the other characters lose their solidity and recover their fluidity. Woolf's sun is no fixed Apollonian figure either, but "a woman couched beneath the horizon had [having] raised a lamp" (3), no father but a "girl who had shaken her head and made all the jewels, the topaz, the aquamarine, the water-coloured jewels with sparks of fire in them, dance, now bared her brows and with wide-opened eyes drove a straight pathway over the waves" (58). Bernard, the artist character though male reflects about his "eternal flux": “For I changed and changed; was Hamlet, was Shelly, was the hero, whose name I now forget, of a novel by Dostoevsky; was for a whole term, incredibly, Napoleon; but was Byron chiefly” (W 208). Recognizing the inexhaustible richness of an artist's life: "I am not one person; I am many people; I do not altogether know who I am--Jinny, Susan, Neville, 4 Woolf wrote in her diary: "I have netted that fin in the waste of waters which appeared to me over the marshes out of my window at Rodmell when I was coming to an end of To the Lighthouse." This was the period when she was ready to compose The Waves. Taking the fin as her inspiration to write, she repeats the image many times in the novel (Beer xii; W 205, 228, 243). 141 Rhoda, or Louis; or how to distinguish my life from theirs" (W 230), Bernard knows that he does not have a fixed identity, s/he is a stream: "For this is not one life; nor do I always know if I am man or woman, Bernard or Neville, Louis, Susan, Jinny or Rhoda" (234). Obviously, the male composition of "the world of the self, the time-bound, landlocked everyday world of the masculine ego, of intellect and routine" is replaced by Woolf in The Waves with the feminine creation of "the world without a self - watery, emotional, erotic, generally associated with the female sensibility" (Poole 262). When Bernard, the androgynous artist character in the novel, discusses art, he speaks for Woolf. Perpetually looking for a medium that approximates “life,” he fails as a "clinger to the outsides of words all my [his] life" (W 37, 154, 220). Looking always outside of himself for the neatly patterned sequences that can slip smoothly into a phrase extracted from his "methodically lettered" (27) notebook. Bernard remains blind to the intractable, discontinuous, haphazard stuff of reality which is all around him. His commitment to the perfect phrase and the hope of finding a means of linking a number of them together in harmonious sequences with beginnings, middles, and ends, keep him firmly nailed to the surface of experience, unable to penetrate to the core, either in his writing or in his own life. Cutting himself from the free play of imagination and seeking in a wrong direction in solidity for inspiration5: I require the concrete in everything. It is so only that I lay hands upon the world. A good phrase, however, seems to me to have an independent existence. Yet I think it is likely that the best are made in solitude. They require some final refrigeration, dabbling always in warm soluble words. . . . There is about both Neville and Louis a precision, and exactitude, that I 5 Worshipping Percival as a God, Bernard thought "it is Percival I need; for it is Percival who inspires poetry" (30, 111). 142 admire and shall never possess. (W 54) Bernard works to no avail and ensures his artistic failure: "Vain. I, carrying a notebook, making phrases, and recorded mere changes; a shadow, I had been sedulous to take note of shadows. How can I proceed now" (W 238)? He begins now to "doubt the fixity of tables, the reality of here and now . . . [the] solid objects and say[s], "Are you hard" (240)? Drifting with the tides of life, and rising and falling with the waves of the novel, a revelation comes to him and he finally understands "the incomprehensible nature of this our life": Life is not susceptible perhaps to the treatment we give it when we try to tell it. . . . It is strange how force ebbs away and away into some dry creek . . . our waters can only just surround feebly that spike of seaholly; we cannot reach that further pebble so as to wet it . . . an impulse again runs through us; we rise, we toss back a mane of white spray; we pound on the shore, we are not to be confined. (W 223) The solid "stone words" (14) are now inadequate for him to capture the elusiveness of life. Aware that it is precisely this uneven, jagged process of living, this elusive tides of life, not the contours of a well-wrought expression, which he as an artist should be after, Bernard decides to discard something big and solid: What is the phrase for the moon? And the phrase for love? By what name are we to call death? I do not know. I need a little language such as lovers use, words of one syllable such as children speak. . . . I need a howl; a cry. . . . I need no words. Nothing neat. Nothing that comes down with all its feet on the floor. . . . I have done with phrases. (W 246) He now "distrust[s] neat designs of life" and begins to "long for some little language" (W 199) [compared with the "tremendous and sonorous" (24) big one of the "fathers"] -- "a rushing stream of broken dreams, nursery [maternal] rhymes, street cries, half-finished 143 sentences and sights" (W 213). He feels "in me [him] the wave rises" (247). Woolf builds the scenes of her novels around water imagery dependent for their significance on fluidity; invents for her characters’phrases and modes of behavior which reflect meaning. She is seeking in her art, like her artist character Bernard, a fully conscious acceptance of the rhythm of repeated creation and dissolution which is "the eternal renewal, the incessant rise and fall and fall and rise again" (W 247). She conveys her views of life or art (representation of life) in the way she describes waves. The novel is her experimental form to capture the essence of "life going on." Even when the novel ends, Woolf through Bernard questions its completion and reminds us of the elusiveness of life and art: "Should this be the end of the story? [. . .] a last ripple of the wave? [. . .] Life is not susceptible perhaps to the treatment we give it when we try to tell it" (W 223). There is no neat conclusion to Bernard's story, let alone that of his “mother” Woolf's. The language, in which she is writing, is a "woman's language," the mother tongue. Her aquatic aesthetics does not only expand female writers’conception of the feminine writing but also provide more possibilities for male writers. As Woolf indicates at the very end of the novel, the novel does not really end because "The waves broke [break] on the shore" (248). The wavelike women writing will keep on bringing impacts upon the land-based patriarchal values. 144 Chapter 5 Approximation of the Feminine “A woman’s writing is always feminine; it cannot help being feminine; the only difficulty lies in defining what we mean by feminine” (WW 70-71). Woolf believes that the sexual identity of a writing is an elusive, but unmistakable aura, a matter of values, from which “spring not only marked differences of plot and incident, but infinite differences in selection, method, and style” (71). Feminine writing, according to Woolf, is never identifiable as a conclusive formulation. Difference is not a concept. It can be discerned only in the forms in which it comes into play with her writing practice. Feminine writing is a constantly changing writing practice, taking new directions and actions as a result of dialogue and debate with men. It remains a shaping force of literary tradition. Since Woolf claims women cannot “yet” give an answer to the question “what is a woman?” (WW 60), she uses the process of writing as a way of shaping meaning. Her definitions of gender, which are as fluid as subject to redrawing, function as the development of her aesthetic. Writing under a patriarchal tradition, women have been trying to maintain their own voices in a world that often insists otherwise. George Eliot and Miss Bronte’s adoption of male pseudonyms to obtain impartial criticism, Woolf herself and E. M Foster’s defense of Radclyffe Hall’s lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness, James Joyce and D. H. Lawrence’s facing court hearings over the content of their works, all contribute to Woolf’s comprehensive understanding of the material and ideological conditions for the freedom of a writer, and the boundaries of women’s access to literary production. Woolf began her feminine writing by a de-construction of male hegemony in language and in the re-presentation of women in history and literature. Throughout her works, she has contested the normalizing of sexual and gender inequalities in culture. As Sue Roe well describes, Woolf’s feminism might be 145 issued from her writing practice, “linked more closely with her writing problems than with her perception of external conditions or events” (Roe 13). Feminine writing therefore can be understood as a writing process of searching for the feminine. Woolf’s characters move with her in the direction of a new writing. They are characterizing feminine experience and creativity as the opposite of the masculine. “Fluidity, multiplicity, or flexibility,” represented by stream of consciousness, by androgyny, and by water in Woolf’s discourse is her narrative toward writings characteristic of women. Each of the books Woolf wrote strains across genre, attempts to break through or disrupt the limits of the essay, the novel, the biography, to touch realities denied by accepted forms. In all her works there is an astute awareness shown in literary questions of gender, genre, and language that touch the pith of how society constitutes and contains itself. On the way toward the feminine, critiques and judgments are inevitable. If women writers still don’t know what feminine writing is, it’s because they are still trying, they “still strive and press on.” It is difficult not to take it for granted that the modern practice of art is somehow an improvement upon the old. [. . .] We do not come to write better; all that can be said to do is to keep moving, now a little in this direction, now in that [. . .]. Let the historian of literature decide. It is for him, to ascertain whether we are now at the beginning, or middle, or end, of a great period of prose fiction; all that we ourselves can know is that, whatever stage we have reached, we are still in the thick of battle. [. . .] we still strive and press on. (“MF” 86) Knowing they do not write better and they are not qualified to judge the old writing, a woman writer must “keep moving, now a little in this direction, now in that” (86) until she find a “perfectly natural, shapely sentence proper for her own use” (WW 25). Women’s writing conditions though very difficult in Woolf’s time, she suggests 146 that in a hundred year’s time women’s situation will be much changed: “women will have ceased to be the protected sex,” and [a]nything may happen when womanhood has ceased to be a protected sex” (AROO 48). And if women writers keep trying the requirements recommended by Woolf, their opportunity for a better writing conditions will come. Those who are like Judith Shakespeare who possesses her brother’s genius but not his opportunities will be reborn within a better surrounding. women’s voice will be heard and more women’s talents will be shared. More However, even women writers’ situation would be on the way to be bettered, it couldn’t be changed overnight. Men’s words fail to convey women’s idea, and this “dilemma” brings “infinite confusions and complications” in women’s writing. The problems could only be solved by women incessant “energy poured into new forms without wasting a drop.” It takes time, and needs both sides of effort. A woman’s sentence could be attained not only through women’s continuous effort but also men’s “simultaneous evolution and emancipation” (WW 67). Feminine writing and feminist struggle, according to Kristeva, could be seen historically and politically as a three-stage progress: from equality demanded, to femininity extolled, and to metaphysical dichotomy rejected (in Moi 12). It is the same as Showalter’s gynocentric three-tiered (oppression-repression-expression) writing practice “that can rescue the feminine from its stereotypical association with inferiority” (Lodge 336). “Sexual difference,” according to Kristeva, could be experienced “not as a fixed opposition (“man” / “woman”), but as a “on-going process” of revolution and differentiation. Women’s writing for Kristeva hence is an inchoate subject, a “subject-in-the-making,” a “subject on trial,” a “subject of a conceptual quest” (Kristeva 1974, 167). Similarly, women writers, according to Cixous “are at the beginning of a new history, or rather of a process of becoming,” in which women “un-think” his-story and rebuild her-story: 147 Because she arrives, vibrant, over and again, we are at the beginning of a new history, or rather of a process of becoming in which several histories intersect with one another. As subject for history, woman always occurs simultaneously in several places. Woman un-thinks the unifying, regulating history that homogenizes and channels forces, herding contradictions into a single battlefield. (Cixous 1975, 339) Through the continuous “un-thinking” of the masculine things, women writers redress the imbalance of power ingrained in literary tradition. If readers still don’t get what l’ecriture feminine is, it’s because we have been reading about an on-going development. Women’s writing is still young; even novel the latest and not-yet-harden genre, “the most pliable of all forms,” according to Woolf, seems still inadequate to accommodate the ever-progressive femininity (AROO 83). In Woolf’s words, there is a “natural” way for women to write a distinctive “woman’s sentence.” As women change, and their social roles and circumstantial realities evolve, what is “natural” to them will presumably change as well. She represents the idea that “naturalness” is historically contingent and any writing practice is only the preliminary performance to poetry writing. Women should not be confined to write fiction, they should try to “write books of travel and adventure, and research and scholarship, and history and biography, and criticism and philosophy and science.” Different writing practice “will certainly profit the art of fiction.” A woman writer is both the “inheritor” and the “originator” of the female literary tradition. She not only carries on the heritage of “any great figure of the past, like Sappho, like the Lady Murasaki, like Emily Bronte,” but also opens up the future for the Shakespeare’s sisters to come. Carrying heavy responsibilities, women are encouraged by Woolf to hesitate at no subject “however trivial or however vast” (AROO 112). With women’s collective effort, men would “no longer to her ‘the 148 opposing faction’,” and women would not need to write railing and protesting along. They would enjoy “some natural advantages of a high order”: “Fear and hatred were almost gone [. . .]. She had a sensibility that was very wide, eager and free” (97). And they would write better and more naturally. Women’s writing is the loneliest way with extreme hardships and sufferings. Though women’s writing is a path beset with difficulties, and “there is no arm to cling to,” yet she must go alone and write along. But it is this “woman writer’s struggle” that differentiates her writing from that of “her male counterpart.” The history of “inferiorization” brings up and disciplines women’s “artistic self-definition”: Thus the loneliness of the female artist, her feelings of alienation from male predecessors coupled with her need for sisterly precursors and successors, her urgent sense of her need for a female audience together with her fear of the antagonism of male readers, her culturally conditioned timidity about self-dramatization, her dread of the patriarchal authority of art, her anxiety about the impropriety of female invention— all these phenomena of “inferiorization” mark the woman writer’s struggle for artistic self-definition and differentiate her efforts at self-creation from those of her male counterpart. (Showalter 1981, 343) In the struggles big or small searching for identities, women writers learn from their successes and failures for their “self-creation” and “self-dramatization.” Their “opportunity” of showing their true femininity will come because “the dead poet who was Shakespeare’s sister will come and put on the body which she has so often laid down” (AROO 117). With the improvement of the writing situations, women’s writing develops and moves toward a more advanced stage, too. Success is failure turned inside out, and you can never tell how close you are. It may be near when it seems so far. Women writers need some strong mentality. 149 Writing against the current, women need to console themselves that women’s writing is in its transitional course, phallogocentric writing would pass, and everything would be fine. Confusion and doubts are temporary. One step further is one step near the destination. “We are approaching, if we have not yet reached” (WW 48). writing is a sentence-of-becoming. change of attitude.” Feminine Future women’s writing will indicate a “great When a woman’s sentence is “no longer bitter,” “no longer angry,” “no longer pleading and protesting,” it will be “far more genuine” than the old one. The “aloofness” of feminine writing will make women’s writing more “feminine.” Since writing “without distraction” or “foreign influence” makes women’s writing more away from the masculine influence, and more toward the feminine expression. A female sentence, Woolf claims, any “woman must make for herself” (48). Critics think that Woolf doesn’t make the qualities explicit enough, but her artistic realizations in her own fiction discussed in previous chapters serve as clear examples of their possibilities. Women’s creative power differs greatly from the creative power of men, and the different creative power is not gained overnight. It is “won by centuries of the most drastic discipline” (AROO 93). “It would be a thousand pities if it were hindered or wasted,” for “there is nothing to take its place” (93). Women writer should value the “struggling process for feminine” because it’s the true and real feminine writing practice. It would be another thousand pities “if women wrote like me n, or lived like men, or looked like men,” since we need to tell people what we are by ourselves instead of being the “reflecting-glass” of men’s superiority again. Sacrificing either side is sacrificing the natural humanity. Education and exploration should do “greater service to humanity” to “bring out and fortify the differences rather than the similarities” (93). Defining the unique differences of women’s writing, as the literary foremothers (Woolf, Cixous, Showalter, etc.) have warned, women writers must present a flexible, 150 fluid, on-going, open practice. The difference of women’s writing is a “‘delicate divergency’ testifying to the subtle and elusive nature of the feminine practice of writing” (Showalter 1981, 336). A female sentence has been exploring through literary history in the process of discovery, and every woman writer has been playing the role of “an explorer.” Feminine writing presents itself in its narrative experimentation, practice again and again, not in theoretical conclusions drawn or literary traditions outlined. Feminine writing, in fact, is a “process” instead of a “product,” a “practice” instead of a “theory.” This is why Woolf, Cixous, Kristeva, Irigaray, and Showalter all refuse to define or theorize feminine writing. According to Woolf, in spite of her lifetime effort trying progressively to write a “female sentence,” “[t]he Mother Tongue” had not been achieved yet. A woman’s writing, and “the true nature of woman and fiction,” according to her, remains a never-ending and unsolved exploration process: The title women and fiction might mean, and you may have meant it to mean, women and what they are like; or it might mean women and the fiction that they write; or it might mean women and the fiction that is written about them; or it might mean that somehow all three are inextricably mixed together [. . .]. I should never be able to come to a conclusion. I should never be able to fulfil what is, [. . .] women and fiction remain, so far as I am concerned, unsolved problems. (AROO 13-14) With their increasing life experience, their improving learning condition, the going of fashion, the changing of people’s flavor, women writers may be beginning to use writing as an art, not as a method of self-expression. Before writing turns an art, self-expression and sex-consciousness are inevitable. Women’s writing is a subject-in-process because “one cannot hope to tell the truth” “when a subject is highly controversial,” especially when the question is “about 151 sex” (AROO 14). Woolf herself was always moving towards “a female sentence,” and she was always encouraging women writers to keep on moving toward the same direction. The answer of what a woman is hasn’t been found yet; any effort tried “in all the arts and professions open to human skill” on “that extremely important piece of information” will be worthy (WW 60). Any women “who are in process of showing or providing us” by their experiments, failures and successes what a woman is will be much appreciated by Woolf “out of respect” (60). As well described by Cixous, ecriture feminine can never be achieved; if it is finalized, it loses its femininity. Though feminine writing cannot be defined, “theorized, enclosed or coded,” it does “exist,” and “will be conceived,” after all. It will be conceived only by “breakers of automatism, by peripheral figures that no authority can ever subjugate.” Woolf merits the reward of the “greatest breaker and outsider” of the patriarchal literary tradition by her feminine writing practice. A “female sentence” is, in fact, a “sentence-in-making,” the “feminine writing” is the “writing-of-becoming,” and the fundamental issue of this dissertation is a feminist “subject-in-process.” It is not a stable or coherent body of knowledge. It may be in its germination now; it may be not good enough now; while, according to Kristeva, it is the spirit of keeping trying, the doubts of “that’s still not it,” and the energy of disagreeing that make women’s writing feminine: “A feminist practice can only be . . . at odds with what already exists so that we may say ‘that’s not it’ and ‘that’s still not it.’ By ‘woman’ I mean that which cannot be repressed, what is not said, what remains above and beyond nomenclatures and ideologies. There are certain ‘men’ who are familiar with this phenomenon” (qtd. in Jones 359). Women’s writing is a living being; it grows with women’s sensibility. “It feasted like a plant newly stood in the air on every sight and sound that came its way” (AROO 97) “It ranged, too, very subtly and curiously, among almost unknown or unrecorded things.” It lighted 152 on small things and showed that perhaps they were not small after all. It brought buried things to light and made one wonder what need there had been to bury them. Woman’s writing, “without the bearing of long descent,” awkward though when compared with “the pen of a Thackeray or a Lamb,” is flourishing (AROO 97). Developments may be unseen in embryo, but magic and surprises can be detected everywhere. “[T]his organism that has been under the shadow of the rock [patriarchy] these million years” (90) is capable of growth. It might bring along men’s development too: Woman becomes much more various and complicated there. Indeed it was the desire to write about women perhaps that led men by degrees to abandon the poetic drama, which, with its violence, could make so little use of them, and to devise the novel as a more fitting receptacle. Even so it remains obvious, even in the writing of Proust, that a man is terribly hampered and partial in his knowledge of women, as a woman in her knowledge of men. (AROO 88) Without a strong and powerful “tradition behind them” when women writers “think back through [their] mothers,” every step for them is a new challenge and a revolutionary experiment. We can only know the “direction” of women’s writing but never arrive at its “destination.” Without making any conclusion or definition toward a feminine writing, Woolf confidently predicted the future of women’s fiction should be better than her time and insightfully indicated the direction of future women’s writing about “that very dismal subject,” “the body venture” which was carried on later by her future French feminist daughters: I am sure that you do not want me, to broach that very dismal subject, the future of fiction, so that I will only pause here one moment to draw your attention to the great part which must be played in that future so far as 153 women are concerned by physical conditions. The book has somehow to be adapted to the body, and at a venture [. . .] what treatment suits them [. . .] what alternations of work and rest they need [. . .]. (AROO 83-84) It’s obvious the most avant-garde French feminists must credit Woolf for almost all their ideas about ecriture feminine they inherit or develop from her; writing the body is only one of those. As Woolf suggests in her letter to Ethel Smyth in 28 September 1930, “sentences are only an approximation, a net one flings over some sea pearl which may vanish, and if one brings it up it wont be anything like what it was when I first saw it.” To define “a female sentence” is to nullify the very spirit of a female writing practice as our foremothers conceived it. This dissertation, sharing the spirit of them, does not attempt to describe the specificity of the theorization of a female sentence, but tries to show how the shifting points of view about feminine writing, together with the works of Virginia Woolf, combine to create a picture of the “ecriture feminine.” Feminine essence can be disclosed only where masculine difference is located. It can occur only where there is a place for the practice of it. A feminine writing, is well described by Showalter, “not as a transient by-product of sexism but as fundamental and continually determining reality” and the “study of women’s writing” is “not the serenely undifferentiated universality of texts but the tumultuous and intriguing wilderness of difference itself” (Showalter 1981, 350-51). Any feminist writing practice is “a step toward self-understanding”: And insofar as most feminist critics are also women writing, the precarious heritage is one we share; every step that feminist criticism takes toward defining women’s writing is a step toward self-understanding as well; every account of a female literary culture and a female literary tradition has parallel significance for our own place in critical history and critical 154 tradition. (Showalter 1981, 348) Feminine writing is feminine in that a woman writer describes the experience of women through a woman’s eye. It is feminine not only because the aim of the writing to describe the female experience but also because the fate of the writer’s being born a woman. The difference is that women like men have the right to choose the experiences they wish to live through, but they are also “given” certain “pre-destined” experiences that exist only because they are women. The “curious sexual quality” will naturally describe itself even “when sex is unconscious of itself” (AROO 98) Woolf’s use of “stream of consciousness,” of “androgyny,” of “water imagery” in her fiction, has been explored as expressive of ecriture feminine, as constituting both a woman’s language and a metaphor for a female aesthetic, for femininity, and for the politics of feminist survival. This dissertation presents Woolf’s texts not to essentialize feminine writing, or to fix it in a message, but to provide a “step toward women’s self-understanding.” Woolf’s feminine dis-course will maintain those elements in movement, “streaming” along like “mother’s milk,” dancing around to the rhythm and shape of “women’s body,” enabling readers to experience the “process” of female creativity. If the effort and result involved in this dissertation cannot completely catch the true feminine for the readers, Jacques Derrida’s concept of signification as differance, as endless deferral of meanings, may comfort them a little. There are always gaps between the signifiers and the signified, and signification is an ever proliferating network of displacement and deferral of meaning. Woolf’s understanding of feminine writing in literary tradition is vividly revealed as the aeroplane in Mrs. Dalloway flies over London forming letters of smoke: “Only for a moment did they [the letters] lie still; then they moved and melted and were rubbed out up in the sky, and the aeroplane shot further away and again, in a fresh space of 155 sky, began writing a K, an E, a Y perhaps” (MD 29). This “key” provides the solution to the hermeneutic riddle of Woolf’s novels, of feminine writing. 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