Women and Fiction

Opening the pages of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, I suppose I was expecting another one of her novels. Instead, I was faced with a manifesto of sorts – a “story” of the relationship of women and fiction through the eyes of Virginia Woolf and I was not entirely sure what to make of it. I enjoyed the fact that as I was reading, I was able to imagine her in the lecture hall amidst collegiate women of the time, carrying on as a sort of Betty Friedan. Perhaps this story was Virginia Woolf’s version of The Feminine Mystique and now, going back and really considering the issues that Friedan addressed in her book, I can remove the “perhaps” from the beginning of this sentence. While encouraging women to become successful on their terms, Woolf realized the pitfalls of such dreams, most significantly domestic life. She realized that with the position of women being altered, other aspects of “normal” daily life would be forced to change as well. With these realizations at hand, Woolf pushes on in order to come to some sort of declaration about women and fiction to her female attendees. In her attempt to come across answers, she finds out more and more about women writers. Woolf explores the female literary tradition, not only from the masculine, patriarchal viewpoint, but also from within the strongholds of the feminine literary scope as well. Instead of being locked within the confines of the novel, Woolf sees change in the future for women, specifically with experimental writing. It seems that through education and the arduous process of time passing, the stylistic components of female literary works will progress. Her eventual floundering at the end of the essay(?) put me in a state of unrest or at least confusion. Woolf spends over one hundred pages presenting an argument about female oppression and in the end, the artist can not focus on the matter. While I realize her point, it somehow fell short for me. I guess I just expected…well, more.

Moving on to Jane Marcus’s article, I really did not buy it at first. Marcus’s argument that Woolf’s writing was an attack on all the men in her life seemed really far-fetched for me and much too psychoanalytic. Once that was dismissed, I rather enjoyed aspects of Marcus’s article. Her description of where Virginia’s lectures took place was very interesting and something that is intangible in Room alone. I imagined being there with her speaking, but what I imagined and what Marcus described were entirely different. Marcus’s article also made me consider the relationships between women more fully. The relationship, seduction, or interactions even, are much more verbal than physical. The courtship begins through language and is subversive in nature and in reading Room, I am not sure that I grasped that concept initially. Considering the nature of relationships between men and women, it is not at all surprising that women would develop a more fruitful, emotional relationship with other women. My doubts, however, lie within the fact that Marcus seems to make all who attended the lectures to be wholly homosexual. While I am sure that there were some attendees who engaged in homosexual or bisexual behavior, I do not think that everyone participated.

Mrs. Dalloway

After reading Mrs. Dalloway, The Waste Land and Steinberg’s Mrs. Dalloway and T.S. Eliot’s Personal Waste Land, I have really gained an appreciation for each of their works. Steinberg’s inclusion of Virginia Woolf’s diary entries as she wrote what would eventually become Mrs. Dalloway was a great view into her mind. The reasons that I think Mrs. Dalloway is so great (social criticism, the whole workings of sanity versus insanity) is actually what Woolf was consciously trying to convey. The difficulty of writing Septimus’s part had to be extremely difficult for Virginia, as she said, but I wonder if she was basing his insanity on someone she knew or maybe even herself and her own personal demons.

While reading Mrs. Dalloway, I thought that Clarissa and Septimus were foils for one another and after seeing how the relationship progressed between Eliot and Woolf at this time, I would say that it is definite that Woolf used their interactions in the development of her characters. It is hard to believe the correlation between the Eliot and Septimus. From their occupations to their marriages, their lives mimic each other completely. I wonder how Eliot’s estate feels about this glimpse into Eliot’s inner self. Lucrezia’s character is remniscient of Vivienne and just as Woolf did not care for her, that dislike is felt in the story itself. Lucrezia, to me, seems selfish and distant in the novel. While she does love Septimus, she is more concerned with herself and what is happening to her than Septimus’s condition. I actually feel stupid for not seeing all the similarities earlier between the players involved.

Steinberg’s claim that The Waste Land is written for Jean Verdenal seems warranted. An idea I had not thought of previously is that of the hyacinth girl. As we discussed in class, Hyacinth was a man and he was associated with homosexuality. In Eliot’s description of his memory of his friend in Luxembourg Gardens, waving a lilac, I saw Hyacinth. For Eliot, Jean Verdenal was his Hyacinth.

I thought Woolf’s comment that Mrs. Dalloway originally was to kill herself or die at the end of the party was quite interesting. Would the story have the same effect if that end did come to fruition or is it important that Clarissa did not commit suicide? I think the use of Septimus as a foil and his eventual demise allows Clarissa to accept her position in her society. I think Clarissa envies Septimus’s ability to be in control of his life, or in this case death. Steinberg’s idea that Mrs. Dalloway can follow the heroic tale is something that I did not think about, even after our class discussion last week. Steinberg’s claim appears to be very solid, but I think I will need to reread and map out the rest of the story with the corresponding parts of the heroic tale.

I thoroughly enjoyed Steinberg’s arguments regarding the correlation between Septimus and Eliot, as well as the influence of the Eliot-Woolf relationship on Mrs. Dalloway. I would, however, liked to have seen where Virginia herself comes into the characters of Mrs. Dalloway. I know she was overly concerned over writing about herself, but where can glimpses of her own life be seen in the novel. I would hate to think that the entire novel was an exposé on the life of T.S. Eliot.

Eliot's "The Waste Land"

After reading The Waste Land, I immediately noticed the ritualistic nature of the poem and Eliot’s play with life and death. It brought me to some of Frazer’s ideas from The Golden Bough and the other theories of the Cambridge Ritualists (but I will discuss that further on Wednesday). As with Eliot’s previous poems, the use of a wide variety of intellectual property is at Eliot’s beck and call. He uses the words of Dante, Baudelaire, the Bible, and so on. A first that I have seen with Eliot, he uses the device of Virginia Woolf and plays with stream of consciousness in the first section of The Waste Land. It was in “The Burial of the Dead” that I had a rather strange idea.

In line 13, Eliot writes, “And when we were children, staying at the arch-duke’s,/My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled,/And I was frightened. He said, Marie,/Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.” Is the narrator not inferring that her name is Marie? Again, in “The Game of Chess” I thought that it was two women quarrelling with one another, rather than a man and a woman. In “The Fire Sermon”, Mr. Eugenides asks the narrator to lunch and to a weekend at the Metropole, insinuating a possible act of prostitution. Finally, in “What the Thunder Said”, I think considering the act of crucifixion that is occurring, it is possible to see the narrator as a Mary-Magdalene-type figure. I may be way off in making these parallels, however, I also thought that Eliot used this device in Preludes. In Preludes, I thought that the narrator shifted from man to prostitute in the final stanza of the poem, in turn making the prostitute the one who wipes her mouth in the end. I realize that Brooks argues it is homosexuality in his analysis, but if that is the case, perhaps cross-dressing is a possibility within the poem as well. I am unsure if any of this is at all viable criticism, given all of Eliot’s own notes, but it is one that I can no longer ignore as a reader.

In reading Brooks’s article, we came upon the same idea that Eliot was trying to convey; “all wars are one war; all experience, one experience” (191). However, where Brooks witnessed this idea in Eliot’s reference to the war, I did not see the full connection until “What the Thunder Said” in lines 373-377. Eliot’s repetition of cities, “Jerusalem Athens Alexandria/Vienna London” followed by “Unreal” on a single line, for me, blended these cities into Dante’s Limb - all of those cities, renowned for different wars, victories, religions, and cultures become one. There is a similar experience that E.M. Forster writes about in A Passage to India with Mrs. Moore in the caves. Definitely a religious experience for her, once she is within the caves, everything sounds the same. There is no difference between words – they all result in “ou-boum”, everything is nothing.

Brooks and Eliot’s use of the rooster was also extremely interesting to me. In Eliot’s time, anthropology was what my undergraduate colleagues would call “armchair anthropology”. Most of the research regarding human social behavior was done through reading the classics and developing theories from that information. A few decades later, Bronislaw Malinowski delved into the world of ethnography and participant observation, traveling to different parts of the world and coexisting with various peoples. Now, many anthropologists are aware of the importance of the rooster within various native cultures. The most famous example is the Balinese cockfight as studied by Clifford Geertz. While in Bali, Geertz learned the significance of the cockfight and the rooster to the Bali people to be religious. He writes, "In the cockfight, men and beast, good and evil, ego and id, the creative power of aroused masculinity and the destructive power of loosened animality fuse in a bloody drama of hatred, cruelty, violence, and death" (pp. 420-1). This statement perhaps best describes portions of Eliot’s waste land, in ways that I had never imagined. In these rituals, there are battles that occur until an outcome can be produced, ultimately resulting in some sort of meaning. Perhaps for Eliot, that meaning was found in the Upanishad he quoted, “Shantih shantih shantih” – “The Peace which passeth understanding”.