The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System

Virginia Woolf and Androgyny

Author(s): Marilyn R. Farwell
Source: Contemporary Literature, Vol. 16, No. 4 (Autumn, 1975), pp. 433-451
Published by: University of Wisconsin Press
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VIRGINIA WOOLF AND ANDROGYNY

Marilyn R. Farwell

When Coleridge claimed, over a century ago, that the great mind is
androgynous, he had little awareness that this term and his endorse-
ment would be focal points for a number of twentieth-centurycritics,
the most important of whom is Virginia Woolf. * Woolf took this idea,
and in her major comment on androgyny, A Room of One's Own, she
fashioned it into a critical tool that has earned the interest of many
modern scholars. But while the present climate has focused attention
on this idea and particularlyon Woolf's description of it, the sharpness
of its definition has not kept pace. The history of androgyny is one of
eloquent but at times conflicting statements, and Woolf's place in that
history is important because her work is the basis of many contempo-
rary definitions. Critics of Virginia Woolf recognize androgyny's cen-
trality to her theory and practice; and although some, like Winifred
Holtby, believe that it is "stated as clearly and unambiguously as she
could state it,"1the myriad definitions attest to the difficulty of settling
on a coherent statement of the subject.
Nancy Topping Bazin and Herbert Marder, who have provided
the most thorough analyses of Woolf's concept, illustrate the difficulty
of making a definitive statement; at the same time, they outline the
parametersof the controversy. Bazin recognizes the crucial distinction
which has plagued definitions since Aristophanes when she asserts that
in Woolf's concept of androgyny "the masculine and feminine should
* I wish to thank the Graduate School of the
University of Oregon for a
Summer Faculty Award (1974) which gave me the free time to complete this
article.
1 Virginia Woolf (1932; rpt., Folcroft, Pennsylvania: The Folcroft Press,
1932), p. 179.

CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE XVI, 4

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be balanced but not fused."2Although Bazin does not draw out the
implications of this distinction, the difference between balance and
fusion is, I believe, the source of the problems surrounding the defi-
nition of androgyny. Marder, while realizing Woolf's concern for
balance, claims that in the end there is only one test of androgyny-
objectivity-in which the masculine and feminine elements are fused.3
The controversy extends to the rest of her critics. On the one
hand, recent critics have variously described androgyny in Woolf's
works as a balance between the poles of intuition and reason,4 subjec-
tivity and objectivity,' anima and animus,6heterosexuality and homo-
sexuality,7and finally manic and depressive.8On the other hand, some
see androgyny as Woolf's term for the fusion of different experiences
into a mystical moment in which one does not see "connections
between occurrences as causal or chronological, but as indicative of
the oneness of mankind."9Androgyny appears to be either an inter-
play of separate and unique elements or a fusion of one into the other;
and while most critics implicitly choose one side or the other, they do
not see the distinction as crucial, and as a result, they tend to equivo-
cate. But the distinction, as we will see, is crucial; and the fact that
scholars have generally ignored its implications indicates the need for
a thorough analysis of Woolf's definition of androgyny on this basis.
To offer that analysis, I propose a close study of the term in A Room
of One's Own.
2 Virginia Vision (New Brunswick, New
Woolf and the Androgynous
Jersey: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1973), p. 23.
3Feminism and Art: A Study of Virginia Woolf (Chicago: Univ. of
Chicago Press, 1968), pp. 105-52.
4 This
polarity is the most familiar of Woolf's distinctions between male and
female principles. References to these qualities include Bazin, p. 3 and James
Hafley, The Glass Roof: Virginia Woolf as Novelist (New York: Russell and
Russell, 1963), pp. 10lff.
5 See Marder,
pp. 122-24 and Ralph Freedman, "Awareness and Fact: The
Lyrical Vision of Virginia Woolf," in The Lyrical Novel (Princeton: Princeton
Univ. Press, 1963), p. 198.
6 Annis Pratt, "Sexual Imagery in To the Lighthouse: A New Feminist
Approach," Contemporary Literature, 18 (Autumn 1972), 431.
7Carolyn G. Heilbrun, Toward a Recognition of Androgyny (New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 1973), pp. 116-72. This chapter on the Bloomsbury group
assumes that the homosexual tendencies of many of its members led to an
androgynous sensitivity.
8 Bazin, p. 35.
9 Mary Graham Lund, "The Androgynous Moment: Woolf and Eliot,"
Renascence, 12 (Winter 1960), 76.

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 Although Virginia Woolf, along with her critics, ignores the
importance of this distinction for the definition of androgyny and thus
creates enough ambivalence in her book to prompt equivocation, the
difference between balance and fusion is central to the understanding
of androgyny as a practical critical tool, especially when dealing with
women writers. If androgyny is a balance of male and female prin-
ciples-and in Woolf's case these principles would be rationality and
intuition respectively, or as Bazin suggests, knowing by apartness
and knowing by togetherness10-then the male and female sides of the
brain would interact without either side dominating or subsuming
the other. Intuition would be as valid a way to knowledge as
rationality; but for the androgynous mind, especially in the writer,
intuition would qualify the rational element just as the rational would
qualify intuition. This dialectic assumes that human knowledge and
experience are wider than either mode of perception alone and that the
artist must be sensitive to the full range of human insight. As Judith M.
Bardwick claimed in a psychological context, the androgynous mind
would be free from the confining sex stereotypes which society now
imposes but would not therefore be asexual or unisexual.11Annis Pratt
defines this "internal androgyneity"as "that delightful interchange of
the aggressive and the gentle, the adventurous and the nurturing
faculties residing in each personality."12Androgyny in a writer is
defined, then, by the width of perception rather than by a single, uni-
versal mode of knowing. The critical implications of this interpretation
would include a number of terms to describe and validate a wide range
of creative voices and perceptions.
The notion that androgyny is a union, usually mystical, of two
people, two qualities or two principles, however, leads to a radically
different critical tool. Width and breadth of perception are no longer
the criteria, but rather a single mode of response and knowing is vali-
dated. In this case, androgyny would be identified with one supposedly
asexual evaluative quality, usually one which has subsumed and
defined its opposite. In critical terms, either intuition or reason could
become the dominant critical quality. But because the universal is most
often identified with whatever is male, this definition of androgyny
can be and has been another means for demanding that a woman write
10
Bazin, p. 3.
11 "Androgyny and Humanistic Goals or Goodbye, Cardboard People," in
The American Woman: Who Will She Be?, ed. Mary Louise McBee and Kathryn
A. Blake (Beverly Hills: Glencoe Press, 1974), p. 61.
12 "The New Feminist
Criticism," College English, 32 (May 1971), 878.

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like a man. Mary Ellmann notes this characteristic of criticism in
general when she states that "the first [judgment of criticism] is that
women unfortunately are women, and that their ideal condition is
attained by rising above themselves."13Ironically, that same tendency
can be seen in many definitions of androgyny, including the literary
ones. Virginia Woolf senses these choices and their implications; but,
I will argue, her fear of being called a feminist creates ambivalences
in her own approach and leads at the end of her book, after pages on
the uniqueness of women writers, to a concept of androgyny in which
the woman writer is asked to bury those elements which make her
identifiable.
The sources of the ambivalence between androgyny as balance
or fusion are importantto document; for these two words, on which
as
Western society has structuredits ideas of androgyny, inevitably influ-
ence Woolf and her critics. Not coincidentally, the dominant Western
concept is fusion. Because androgynyis a deep-seated fantasy, a dream
of return to the harmony of paradise, or, in more psychological terms,
a dream of return to the innocence and freedom of childhood, it has
been treated as an ideal without the close scrutiny that is needed for
the practical use of the word. Androgyny has a history of equivocal
definitions and implied structures, a history of being used as a cover
term for a multitude of ideal, harmonious states. Carolyn Heilbrun,
who devoted an entire book to the topic of androgyny in literature,
admits at the beginning of her book that the idea has gone undefined,
but even more crucial, she states that it has an "unboundedand hence
fundamentally indefinable nature."14Those scholars who offer state-
ments on the topic, modern thinkers like M. H. Abrams, Ernst Benz,
Suzanne Lilar, Norman 0. Brown, and Carolyn Heilbrun, concentrate
on the sources and the eloquence of the idea; none mentions the possi-
bility of equivocation.1 The recent and important issue of Women's
Studies rightly created doubts about the naive definitions of this ideal,
13 Thinking About Women (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968),
p. 67.
14Heilbrun, p. xi.
Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic
15
Literature (New York: Norton, 1971), pp. 154-63; Benz, Adam: Der Mythus
vom Urmenschen (Munich: O. W. Barth, 1955); Lilar, Aspects of Love in
Western Society, trans. Jonathan Griffin (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965);
Brown, Love's Body (New York: Random House, 1966). See also A. J. L.
Busst, "The Image of the Androgyne in the Nineteenth Century," in Romantic
Mythologies, ed. Ian Fletcher (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1967), pp. 1-95
and Bram Dijkstra, "The Androgyne in Nineteenth-Century Art and Literature,"
Comparative Literature, 26 (Winter 1974), 63-69.

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but no one suggested the paradigms on which the various definitions
have been modeled.16If we look carefully at the implied structures in
the various attempts to define androgyny, we will notice that either
balance or fusion is central to each statement. The implications are
important;for with fusion, the male is equated with the androgynous,
but with balance, both male and female principles are considered valid.
A short history, then, of the attempts to define androgyny will provide
points of reference for the subsequent discussion of the idea in
A Room of One's Own.
Linda Thurston, in an excellent article entitled "On Male and
Female Principle,"describes the relationship of opposing metaphysical
principles in terms which provide a set of paradigms for the discussion
of the distinction I have made above. She claims that the metaphysical
principles like good and evil, light and dark and, she includes, male
and female, can either be opposed to one another or juxtaposed. The
first paradigm and the dominant view of our culture, Thurston argues,
is "based on the idea of the opposition of 'opposites.' There is One and
there is Other which embodies all the opposite characteristics of One.
Each is seen as isolated and separate from its Other. ... In this view
the goal of life is the victory of One triumphing over its Other (Good
over Evil) ."1 She does not describe the way in which the One triumphs,
but I would suggest that this triumph is the result either of the destruc-
tion of the Other or of the incorporation and transformation of the
Other. The Other can be fused to the One or be made a controllable
aspect of it. In Plato, for example, the Good, which is identifiable with
light, reason, the unchangeable and the real, establishes a court of
16 Women's Studies, 2, No. 2 (1974). The appropriate essays are Barbara
Charlesworth Gelpi, "The Politics of Angrogyny," pp. 151-60; Cynthia Secor,
"Androgyny: An Early Reappraisal," pp. 161-69; Daniel A. Harris, "Androgyny:
The Sexist Myth in Disguise," pp. 171-84.
17 "On Male and Female Principle," The Second Wave, 1, No. 2 (Summer
1971). See also the issue on woman in the journal Maitreya, 4 (1973).
Thurston's argument separates the metaphysical principles of male and female
from the psychological realities of men and women, but I find difficulty agreeing.
The symbols which Western thought has assigned to male and female, e.g., light
and darkness, reason and emotion, good and evil respectively, are apparent in
the socialization patterns. Men are socialized into roles which emphasize objec-
tivity and abstract reason while women's roles emphasize subjectivity, emotion,
and relationship (see Sherry B. Ortner, "Is Male to Female as Nature is to
Culture?," Feminist Studies, 1 [Fall 1972], 20-21). Even if this connection
were not a reality, it is difficult to believe that symbols which equate female
with darkness, flesh and evil are not influential and therefore detrimental to the
self-image of a woman. The connection between the metaphysical and the
psychological is assumed in this paper.

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justice by which the relative reality, goodness, etc. of any sensible
object is determined. When ontological and epistemological validity
is invested in one side of a dualism, the two elements of the dualism
are not on equal footing. Thus, in early Christianity, good and evil,
body and soul, heaven and earth were set against each other and One
defined as the ontological and moral basis of the Other. Even those,
like St. Augustine, who fought to establish the validity of the Other-
of nature, of pagan literature,of the body-did so in terms of the One
renewing, transforming and purifying the Other. Milton uses this
paradigm when Raphael teaches Adam that everything which God
created attempts to refine itself, "Each in thir several active Spheres
assign'd,/Till body up to spirit work, in bounds/Proportion'd to each
kind."'8The principle of the One opposed to the Other is, in much of
Western thought, a principle of the One transforming and incorpo-
rating the Other.
The myth of androgyny appears in a number of the Judeo-
Christian accounts of the creation, Fall, and redemption of man; and
these early accounts depend upon this pattern of the One incorporating
the Other. The Zohar, the book of the Jewish Kabbalah, names
"Adam, to comprehend male and female," and then continues its
description of the way in which this unity was attained and then
broken: "The female was fastened to the side of the male, and God
cast the male into a deep slumber, and he lay on the site of the Temple.
God then cut the female from him and decked her as a bride and led
her to him."'9In some accounts of the androgyne the Fall is the cause
of separation. Here what is crucial, and what is central to most
accounts of androgyny, is the assumption that the male and the andro-
gyne are identifiable.Adam is the One, and the female is an appendage
of this basic ontological unit. She is the Other.
When the One is defined as male, the female is allotted all the
concomitant characteristics which Western thought attributes to the
Other. This division becomes important in the accounts of the Fall of
the androgyne. When male and female are united, the female is the
emotional and darker side of the androgyne; when the two are sepa-
rated, the female retains those qualities and becomes the nemesis
which must be controlled. Aristophanes indicates these symbols in his
account of androgyny in Plato's Symposium: "The males were
descended from the Sun, the females from the Earth, and the her-
18Paradise Lost, V, 477-79, in John Milton: Complete Poems and Major
Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (Indianapolis: The Odyssey Press, 1957).
19Zohar: The Book of Splendor: Basic Readings from the Kabbalah, ed.
Gershom G. Scholem (New York: Schocken Books, 1963), p. 32.

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maphrodites from the Moon, which partakes of either sex."20 St.
Ambrose, describing the first man and woman in Paradise, states
with the authority of tradition, "est etiam vous tanquam Adam: est
ei sensus, tanquam Eva."21Thus, in discussing how androgyny has
been defined, we need not quarrel over the definitions, accurate or not,
of male and female. These have been given in the symbolism of the
Western world and in the socialization patterns which reflect these
symbols. The male is usually representedby light, reason, and the sun,
the female by darkness, flesh, and the moon, which in the Ptolemaic
system is the last outpost of the changing material world.
In one account of the Fall from androgynous perfection, Gerrard
Winstanley, a seventeenth-centuryDigger, describes the movement in
sexual symbols: it was that time at which man was "led by the powers
of the curse in flesh, which is the Feminine part; not by the power of
the righteous Spirit which is Christ, the Masculine power."22Like most
Renaissance thinkers, and particularlylike the hermetic and cabalistic
philosophers who spoke of androgyny-Marsilio Ficino, Johannes
Reuchlin, Jakob Boehme, and Paracelsus-Winstanley sees the Fall
as reason succumbing to the passions. In the accepted hermetical
account of the creation and Fall, mind, the male, is the image of God
the Father and falls when he "falls in love" with nature, identified as
female. In the same account of the Fall, notes Francis A. Yates, man
is punished by losing his singular and unified status: "it is true that this
is a Fall which involves loss, that Man in coming down to Nature and
taking on a mortal body puts this mortal body, puts his mortal part,
under the dominion of the stars, and it is perhaps punished by the
separation into two sexes."23The original, undivided man, singular in
his identificationwith mind, falls to the female, who deceives and woos
him; and for his failure to maintain perfection the male must endure
the female as his eternal nemesis.
Redemption in this scheme must come from a man who is once
again able to incorporate and transform the female, the flesh. Christ
20
Symposium, 190b, trans. Michael Joyce, in The Collected Dialogues of
Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, Bollingen Series, 71 (New
York: Random House, 1961), p. 543.
21 De Paradiso, III, 12, in Patrologia Latina, ed. J. P. Migne, XIV (Paris,
1841),296A.
22 "The New Law of
Righteousness," in The Works of Gerrard Winstanley,
ed. George H. Sabine (Ithaca, New York: Cornell Univ. Press, 1941), p. 157.
23 Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago

Press, 1964), p. 28. The hermetic account of the creation and fall can be found
in Hermetica, trans. and ed. Walter Scott, I (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1924),
121-23.

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is that second Adam, the One who returnspower to the spirit over the
flesh. These symbols are obvious in Winstanley's account of redemp-
tion when he claims that "Christsaves his people from their sins; not
only in pardoning evil Actions, and removing the evil of sorrow from
them, but principally to kill and subdue the powers of the flesh, and
to make a man subject to the spirit."24That Christ is neither male nor
female, as St. Paul asserted, is repeated by theologians like John Scotus
Erigena who see the separation of male and female as the result of
sin.25 Although this concept is complicated by the identification of
Christ with the body of believers, Christ remains a male symbol which
transforms the flesh into the spirit, thereby incorporating the female
into the male. Although this paradigm as a definition of androgyny is
an anomaly when one considers the etymology of the word, it is the
structure which dominates Western thought and prompts the theolo-
gian Mary Daly to note that "the Pauline text: 'In Christ there is
neither . . . male nor female' functions in this manner, for it simply
and blatantly ignores the fact that this is a male symbol and therefore
on this level does exclude the female."26The female and all she sym-
bolizes are excluded by being included; by being transformed and
defined by the One, she is negated.
Although such a paradigm for androgyny is more apparent in
the blatantly patriarchalmyths of the past, the modern world has not
delivered itself of this anachronism. Suzanne Lilar accepts and even
justifiesthis pattern in her fascinating book on the couple.27Norman O.
Brown adopts the contemporary wording of psychology rather than
the ontological terminology, but the thrust is the same. Brown, whose
popularizingextension of Freudian psychology was ironically the basis
for much of the radical thought of the 1960s, introduces androgyny as
a remedy for the dualisms and separations which man has had to
endure after leaving the innocence and freedom of childhood. The goal
of life is to return to the unity of Eros and Thanatos; and in his sequel
to Life Against Death, Brown poetically draws upon androgyny as one
definition of that ideal state. But it is significant that he repeats many
24
Winstanley, p. 176.
25 De Divisione Naturae, II, 6, in Patrologia Latina, CXXII, 532B-533A.
26
Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women's Liberation
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1973), p. 80.
27 Lilar's
acceptance of the male as the androgyne rests on a reversal of
the evaluations which I have proposed. She sees the choice as between "a static,
definitive dualism [what I would call balance] and a functional dualism con-
stantly in course of integration into Unity" (p. 124). She seems to be aware of
the inherent sexism of her emphasis on Unity, but she accepts this as natural
(see pp. 140-54).

440 CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE

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of the terms which we have encountered above. Adam and Christ are
once again paradigms of androgyny: "The true form of the unification
of the human race," states Brown, "is not the brothers, Cain and Abel,
but Adam the first man, and Christ the second man: for as in Adam
all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive."28Although he iden-
tifies the androgyne with the male, he is still able to claim that "if we
are all members of one body, then in that one body there is neither male
nor female; or ratherthere is both: it is an androgynousor hermaphro-
ditic body, containing both sexes."'9The identificationof the male with
the androgyne brings with it the identification of traditional male
qualities and symbols with the universal, and it is this structure for
androgyny that is detrimental to the self-image of a woman or a
woman writer; for even when Western thought attempts to include the
female in its concept of the ideal, it can do so only by negating those
qualities traditionallyequated with the female.
The counter to this monistic paradigm is a pattern of balance and
dialectic in which each quality in the set of opposites is equally valid
and equally contributing to the whole. Linda Thurston describes this
second model in the terms of the ancient oriental symbol of Yin
and Yang:

In this view what we call opposites (dualities) are not static states, but
processes,each definingthe other. The ancientsymbol of this view is the
Yin/Yang. Yin and Yang are the dualitieswithin the One which is called
the Tao. The relationbetweenthe dualitiesis not one of antagonism,but of
interdependencefor each transformsitself into the other. Light and dark
are definedeach by the other and are partof a whole for whichour culture
has no word. In this view the goal of life is to achieveharmonyin a balance
of complementaryqualitiesunrestrictedin theirflow of changefrom one to
the other.30

It is curious that she claims, despite the existence of the word andro-
gyny, that the Western world has no term for this interchange of
principles; but perhaps it is one more indication of the Western tend-
ency to favor a concept of androgyny in which one side of the dualism
defines the other side.
In this second paradigm, one quality does not incorporate or
at leisure while still retaining its individual validity. It is important,
transformthe other; each moves back and forth, partaking of the other
here, that there is no identifiable One or Other; rather each member
28 Love's Body, pp. 82-83.
29
Ibid., p. 84.
30 "On Male and Female Principle," p. 38.

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of the pair is the Other and each is the One. Light is not set against
darkness nor does good or spirit stand victorious over evil or body.
Good and evil, body and spirit are differentsides of the same coin, and
in their relationship a dialectic is set up. Neither side is reduced to the
other in defeat, but each contributes to dynamic tension which defines
the unity. It is in this pattern for androgyny that we will discover the
criterion of the width of experience and perception. Androgyny here
is not a limitation but an expansion.
In some social science circles, the patterningof males and females
into stereotyped roles is coming under scrutiny; the ideal human,
claim many, the androgynous human being, will be one who is free to
choose from a number of different roles, free to move back and forth
between roles traditionally segregated into masculine and feminine
categories. In Annis Pratt's terms, androgyneity is a "delightful inter-
change"between qualities usually set in opposition to one another. The
gentleness that is stereotypicallyfeminine will give way to and at times
be qualified by the more masculine aggressiveness and vice versa. In
Woolf's terms, we will have a man-womanly and a woman-manly. The
validity of each approach is assumed, and neither need be subsumed
by a more universal, all-encompassing quality. The rational is not the
final arbiter of reality, nor is unqualified intuition or emotion a sole
source of truth. The androgynous individual will be able to use both
without destroying the other and at the same time break down the
barriers which keep emotion and reason separated. Mary Daly
describes androgynyin such terms:

The adequatemeeting of the two worlds, then, cannot be imaginedas a

simple one-to-onerelationshipbetween representativesof humanity'stwo
halves, for half a person really never can meet the objectifiedother half.
The adequate "cosmosis" will require a breakdown of walls within the male
psyche as well as within the female. It will require in men as well as in
women a desire to become androgynous, that is, to become themselves.31

While this is not the primary paradigm for androgyny in the Western
world, the combination of studies in the social sciences and of a grow-
ing interest in the literary implications, especially in the study of
Virginia Woolf, signals a redirection for the definition of androgyny.
But when we consider Virginia Woolf's comments on this term,
we must first acknowledge the ambivalences and ambiguities which
31 Daly,
p. 172. See also the psychological study of Sandra L. Bem, "Sex-
Role Adaptability: One Consequence of Psychological Androgyny," Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 31 (April 1975), 634-43.

442 1 CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE

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surround the idea in A Room of One's Own. Never applying herself
thoroughly to critical theory, she offers androgyny as a critical tool in
an impressionistic manner, and the result is a masterpiece of brilliant
insight and wit but accompanied by philosophical ambivalence. Woolf
hedges between balance and fusion, only to resort to fusion at the end.
It is curious that in the book, androgyny is introduced as a counter to
the "narrow" consideration of female writers which occupies the bulk
of the text. In the last chapter, as she describes two people getting into
the taxi, she speculates that "perhaps to think, as I had been thinking
these two days, of one sex as distinct from the other is an effort. It
interferes with the unity of the mind."32 Now, instead of discussing the
perceptions of one group of writers, Woolf suggests that the ideal is a
universal state of mind.
The ambivalence of tone and direction is noticeable and has
prompted Adrienne Rich to comment that "it is the tone of a woman
almost in touch with her anger, who is willing herself to be calm,
detached, and even charming in a roomful of men where things have
been said that are attacks on her very integrity. Virginia Woolf is
addressing an audience of women, but she is acutely conscious of being
overheard by men."33 In a diary entry at the time of the publication of
A Room, Woolf exhibits a fear of rejection by her male peers that
begins to account for her ambivalent tone:

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; Sybil [Lady
Colefax] will ask me to luncheon; I shall get a good many letters from young
women. I am afraid it will not be taken seriously. Mrs. Woolf is so accomp-
lished a writer that all she says makes easy reading . . . this very feminine
logic ... a book to be put in the hands of girls. I doubt that I mind very
much. The Moths; but I think it is to be waves, is trudging along; and I
have that to refer to, if I am damped by the other. It is a trifle, I shall say;
so it is; but I wrote it with ardour and conviction.34
32A Room of One's Own (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1929), p.
100. Future references will be to this edition and will be included in the text.
33 David Kalstone, "Talkingwith Adrienne Rich," SaturdayReview, April
22, 1972, p. 57.
34 A Writer's Diary: Being Extracts from the Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed.

Leonard Woolf (London: The Hogarth Press, 1954), pp. 148-49.

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Her general approach to anything which could be construed as feminist
exhibited such ambivalence. When writing of Elizabeth Barrett
Browning's undeniably feminist poem, Aurora Leigh, she is both
drawn to its concern for the woman as writer and repelled by Brown-
ing's attempt to put her complaint into verse. Woolf was dedicated
to women's causes, but her health and her fear prevented her from
radical participation in the movement of the 1920s. We need only
remember that she was surroundedby a number of intellectual males
who were her only peers. It is no wonder, then, given the knowledge
that E. M. Forster later condemned her feminism as a "peculiar side
of her," cantankerousand even grumbling,5'that she shrank in fear at
devising a radical interpretation of androgyny. In A Room, Woolf
spends most of the time describing the uniqueness of women writers,
a uniqueness which comes both from deprivation and sensitivity; but
in her final chapter, she withdraws from this vision and offers andro-
gyny as a way to reconcile the sexes. That reconciliation, I will argue,
is really a definition of androgyny based on fusion, and this fusion
tends to destroy the uniqueness which she so skillfully defended in
her earlier pages.
Her argument begins with an attempt to discover the "truth"
about women and fiction; and not finding it in that bastion of truth,
the British Museum, she offers her own, or more accurately, her
persona's, practical answer. The conditions under which women have
had to write and the conditions normally needed for literary produc-
tion have been strangely at odds; and, she argues, only when women
are free from these limitations, only when they have access to money
and privacy, will they have a foundation for literary activity. Because
women have not been in control of money or their own privacy, they
have expressed themselves in distorted and angry phrases, hindering
the flow of art. Woolf recounts her own movement toward freedom:

Indeed, I thought, slipping the silver into my purse, it is remarkable,

rememberingthe bitternessof those days, what a changeof tempera fixed
incomewill bringabout.No force in the world can take from me my five
hundredpounds.Food, house and clothingare mine for ever. Thereforenot
merely do effort and labour cease, but also hatred and bitterness.I need
not hate any man; he cannot hurt me. I need not flatterany man; he has
nothingto give me. (p. 38)

What, then, is the nature of the woman writer who is free from
anger and hatred? There seem to be two possible responses, and the
35 Virginia Woolf (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1942), pp. 31 and 33.

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fact that Woolf gives both is indicative of her ambivalences. She could
say that women writers will now express themselves and their unique-
ness or she could claim that they will exhibit no recognizable literary
differences from male writers. She claims both. In the major portion
of the book she explores the unique and identifiable qualities of women
writers who are free from traditional limitations. She believes that they
have a perspective from which men have never seen the world:

For womenhave sat indoorsall these millionsof years, so that by this time
the very walls are permeatedby their creativeforce, which has, indeed, so
overchargedthe capacityof bricks and mortarthat it must needs harness
itself to pens and brushesand businessand politics.But this creativepower
differsgreatlyfromthe creativepowerof men. And one mustconcludethat
it would be a thousandpities if it were hinderedor wasted,for it was won
by centuriesof the most drasticdiscipline,and there is nothingto take its
place. It would be a thousandpities if women wrotelike men, or lived like
men, or looked like men, for if two sexes are quite inadequate,considering
the vastnessandvarietyof the world,how shouldwe managewith one only?
Oughtnot educationto bringout and fortifythe differencesratherthan the
similarities?(p. 91)

The validity of one approach is not asserted at the expense of the

other; they must both exist in a creative tension for the artist to express
the full spectrum of human experience. She even takes Charlotte
Bronte to task for trying to write like a man (pp. 76-77).
Woolf points to several areas in which the female writer can and
should be identifiable, notably tradition, style, and perspective. One
of the problems she finds with some of the earlier female writers is that
they had no tradition;while they had a long tradition of male writings,
these works did not fit their experiences or temperaments (p. 79). It
is, I think, like asking a woman in sixteenth-centuryEngland to write
a Petrarchan sonnet. The tradition of the rejected lover pleading with
the blond, disdainful mistress is a perspective with which few women,
even artists like Queen Elizabeth, Mary Sidney or later, Katherine
Philips, would find sympathy. Nor would it be appropriate to satirize
this tradition as did Shakespeare and Donne. The male perspective
dominates the Petrarchan sonnet in the Renaissance; and while one
can find women imitating this popular form, it is not their perspective
in love and therefore not their form.
Virginia Woolf finds this a serious handicap, for with no tradition
there is no steppingstone, no chance for literary reference and play,
nor was there a common sentence structure which women could use.
The male sentence, swift, expressive, authoritative and sure, was not

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one adoptable by women: "CharlotteBronte, with all her splendid gift
for prose, stumbled and fell with that clumsy weapon in her hands.
George Eliot committed atrocities with it that beggar description. Jane
Austen looked at it and laughed at it and devised a perfectly natural,
shapely sentence proper for her own use and never departed from it"
(p. 80). When Woolf introduces her mythical novelist, Mary Car-
michael, and her novel, Life's Adventure, she finds hesitation and a
broken sentence, but she gradually comes to appreciate its drive. She
also finds that the freedom gained by the Mary Carmichaels releases
a wealth of new perceptions. In Life's Adventure, we are given
something unique in literature:

the very next words I read were these-'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.... And
then it struckme how immense a change was there. Chloe liked Olivia
perhapsfor the firsttime in literature.(p. 86)

A new vision has come into literature, one that does not define a
woman from a man's experience:

It was strangeto thinkthat all the greatwomen of fictionwere, until Jane

Austen'sday, not only seen by the other sex, but seen only in relationto
the other sex. And how small a part of a woman'slife is that; and how
little can a man knoweven of that whenhe observesit throughthe black or
rosy spectacleswhichsex puts upon his nose. (p. 86)

A woman writer can both tell the truth about herself and see the bald
spot on the back of a man's head.
Woolf, then, first establishes the validity and uniqueness of
women's literature.The woman writerhas not written long sentimental
phrases which in maturity she will throw away for the tough, analytic
style and ideas of Gibbon and Johnson; rather, her uniqueness comes
from the experience of living thousands of years in houses which have
shaped her mind and her sentences. It is crucial that Woolf establishes
this uniqueness, for it is the basis from which to develop a dialectical
theory of androgyny. When she introduces androgyny in her final
chapter, she first visualizes the human soul balanced by male and
female elements, both valid, both sustaining, both necessary. Like the
literary styles, which have male and female sentences to express dif-
ferent experiences, and like literarytraditions-which on one side may
develop the epic and on the other the stream-of-consciousnessnovel-

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Woolf's two sides of the soul exist separately but in harmony and in
close relationship: "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" (p. 102).
At first this definition is not an attempt to fuse the valid and
independent natures into one asexual nature. Woolf initially seems to
consider the androgynous mind bisexual, one that is basically male or
female but in the process of freeing itself has experienced the other side
of reality. The mind, thus, is not forced into a rigid stereotype but is
allowed to roam the spectrum of experience and perception. The
female side of the soul which has intercourse with the male side will
not be boxed in by conventions which force it to respond in only one
way; rather, by experiencing that which is opposite but complemen-
tary, the female side of the soul will be qualified by its complement.
But Woolf does not explore the potential of her initial statement
on androgyny. Instead, she steps back and withdraws to adopt the
more traditional version. When she deals specifically with the voice of
the artist, with the relationship of the author to the work, she settles
for the comfortable idea of the fusion of male and female. Free from
the twisting emotions of anger in the woman and egoism in the male,
the artist, she argues, will be able to separate himself/herself from the
work of art. This freedom from the emotional extremes of sexual
stereotypes will lead to a complete objectivity. Thus, instead of main-
taining a dialectic between two equally valid and traditionally sex-
identified qualities, objectivity and subjectivity, Woolf argues that they
should merge into a single perspective, objectivity. She calls the
androgynous mind fundamentally incandescent: "it transmits emotion
without impediment; . . . it is naturally creative, incandescent and
undivided" (p. 102). But objectivity here is not meant to free the
uniqueness of women writers, as Herbert Marder's comment implies:
"The final test of whether or not an artist is approaching the ideal state
of androgyny is his objectivity: can he keep his attention whole and
undivided upon his artistic object? In the case of women writers it
follows that one can almost measure their greatness by the extent to
which they have managed to forget their grievances."36Although one
may argue that grievances and the structure of a sentence are quali-
tatively different, for the structureof a sentence can be unique without
the presence of a sexually identifiable voice, it is Woolf's stress on
incandescence which indicates her retreat. The single perspective
which she now advocates is not simply a universal ideal but, not
36 Marder, p. 124.

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strangely, part of the pattern in which the male quality is identified
with the universal.
If one looks carefully at her concern for objectivity, one can
detect the influence of T. S. Eliot's theories of impersonality and unifi-
cation of sensibility. Out of the fear which she exhibits in her diary,
Woolf feels that she is being too partisan in defending women, and
instead of developing a theory of androgyny based on a belief in
uniqueness of the individual parts of the whole, she succumbs to the
pressure of her peers who are advocating a theory of objectivity in art.
Not only Eliot, but also Clive Bell and Roger Fry were instrumental
in the popularity of these new theories of art. Art, they said, should
not be personality or Romantic subjectivity, but form and classical
objectivity. For Woolf, this meant that art should not be sexual, and
the sooner women writers divested themselves of an identifiable voice
the sooner they would be accepted as good writers. In another essay
she claims that impersonality and artistic achievement are directly
related: "The greater impersonality of women's lives will encourage
the poetic spirit, and it is in poetry that women's fiction is still weak-
est."37 By adopting objectivity and impersonality as the basis of
androgyny in A Room, Woolf is precariously close to Eliot. Then
androgyny becomes objectivity overcoming the demon subjectivity,
impersonality transforming personal emotions. In the words of the
paradigmsalready established, the One purifiesthe Other, and as usual
the One is more readily identifiable with the cultural definition of
the male.
A closer look at the theory of impersonality in literature which
Eliot advocates and which Woolf adopts will provide more substance
for this claim. The obsession with unity was highly characteristicof the
generation following World War I, an obsession which was both
aesthetic and religious. Eliot insisted on the standard of a unification
of sensibility that would bind together the thought and feeling which
were separated under the influence of the Romantic theories. The
poet's mind should be constantly "amalgamatingdisparate experience"
and from these experiences "forming new wholes."38Reading Spinoza
and falling in love, the intellectual and the emotional, were brought
under the hard fire of creativity and molded into an aesthetic object.
But while Eliot takes pains to include the emotional in this theory, it
37 "Women and Fiction," in Collected Essays (New York: Harcourt, Brace
& World, 1967), II, 147.
38 "The
Metaphysical Poets," in Selected Essays, 3rd ed. (London: Faber
and Faber, 1951), p. 287. Further references to Eliot's essays will be to this
collection and will be included in the text.

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is not the personal emotions of which he speaks in "Tradition and the
Individual Talent":

It is not in his personal emotions, the emotions provoked by particular

eventsin his life, that the poet is in any way remarkableor interesting.His
particularemotions may be simple, or crude, or flat. The emotion in his
poetry will be a very complex thing.... The business of the poet is not to
find new emotions,but to use the ordinaryones and, in workingthem up
into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.
(pp. 20-21)

The distinction between feelings and emotions is not totally clear, but
one element which is certainly exorcised is the personal. Ridding
poetry of emotions rids the poem of the personal and identifiable, and
forces the voice of the poet to be an incandescent ray of objectivity.
In the same essay, using a word reminiscent of Woolf's scientific
term, "incandescent," Eliot describes the activity of the poet's mind
as a catalyst: "The mind of the poet is the shred of platinum. It may
partly or exclusively operate upon the experience of the man himself;
but, the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him
will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates; the more per-
fectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions which are its
material" (p. 18). It cannot escape notice that, despite Eliot's asser-
tions on feeling, the passions are to be transformed and controlled by
the mind. Feelings are purified emotions and free from any personal
quality. The dichotomy of emotions and mind, which we have seen
before in the early definitions of androgyny, is worked out in the same
way. The male side, the mind, acting as an agent of control, transforms
and purifies the female side, the emotions, into something which is a
unified ontological whole.
While one need not claim that androgyny is what Eliot meant,
too many of the traditional trappings of that idea are present to be
ignored, at the very least as an influence on those, like Woolf, who
wanted to define it as a critical tool. In this vein, Eliot also adopts a
scheme of Paradise, the Fall and redemption that parallels those myths
mentioned earlier. In his essay on the metaphysical poets, Eliot claims
that their poetry, along with the drama of the Elizabethans, illustrates
the ideal of the unity of thought and feeling: "A thought to Donne was
an experience; it modified his sensibility" (p. 288). But "in the seven-
teenth century a dissociation of sensibility set in, from which we have
never recovered; and this dissociation, as is natural, was aggravated
by the influence of the two most powerful poets of the century, Milton

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and Dryden" (p. 289). The music of Milton's poetry overwhelms the
thought and lulls us into a purely emotional experience. The original
unity is broken and left to the modern period to be restored. The poet
who once again unifies thought and feeling, a poet like Eliot, will bring
the wayward emotion under control and sanctify it by transformingit.
This concept of unity is easily translatable into androgyny, and
it is this version of unity which I believe Virginia Woolf adopts for her
concept. Woolf, too, is obsessed with the idea of unity, and when she
falls under these theories of art, androgyny is defined by fusion rather
than balance. In A Room, Woolf speaks more often of the "natural
fusion" (p. 101) and the Eliotic reconciliation of opposites when she
considers the voice of the artist. But it is the use of the term incan-
descent to describe the androgynous mind that is crucial, for it brings
to the surface many of the ideas that Eliot used to describe the uni-
fied sensibility. The image of incandescence takes on the aura of scien-
tific objectivity when one discovers the source of Woolf's definitions
of truth. The image first becomes important after she tries to find
"truth"in the British Museum and is prevented from doing so by the
opinions of men who pretend to be experts on women: "Whateverthe
reason, all these books, I thought, surveying the pile on the desk, are
worthless for my purposes. They were worthless scientifically .... They
had been written in the red light of emotion and not in the white light
of truth" (p. 33). The white light of truth becomes her metaphor for
objectivity, and when she comes to describe the androgynousmind, she
uses a similar and equally scientific image, this time talking about
artistic impersonality.
Woolf is as concerned as Eliot that personal emotions not enter
the aesthetic voice, as she notes when she speaks of those "alien emo-
tions" which sometimes entered the writings of women. When Woolf
first speaks of Shakespeare's incandescence, before she links it to
androgyny, she describes it as a voice free from personality, opinion
and protest: "We are not held up by some 'revelation' which reminds
us of the writer. All desire to protest, to preach, to proclaim an injury,
to pay off a score, to make the world the witness of some hardship or
grievance was fired out of him and consumed. Therefore his poetry
flows from him free and unimpeded" (pp. 58-59). The same fear of
personality and subjectivity leads Woolf to claim that androgyny is
objectivity, a control and transformation of the subjective and emo-
tional. Woolf, then, takes the current theory of objectivity in art and
translates it into androgyny; and in the process the traditional male
quality of objectivity-knowing by apartness-subsumes the tradi-

450 CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE

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tional female quality of subjectivity-knowing by togetherness-and
becomes the universal and androgynous evaluative tool. Her concept
of androgynythus asks women to write like men.
That Woolf was aware of this movement is difficult to determine,
although the ambivalent tone in A Room indicates that she was not
totally convinced of the ideal. Her use of the persona in this work adds
another dimension to that ambivalence, although, in the end, it is not
enough to negate the strong monistic definition of androgyny. Woolf
claims in the beginning of the book that she is not she, not Virginia
Woolf, but someone else: "'I' is only a convenient term for somebody
who has no real being. Lies will flow from my lips, but there may per-
haps be some truth mixed up with them" (p. 4). The disclaimer has
never been enough to separate Woolf from the "I" of this essay, but
it is important when one considers the definition of androgyny as
impersonality. The irony is thick as the tone falters between objective
and subjective. Her anger is not suppressed.With tongue in cheek she
argues that women should forget their grievances, their unique percep-
tions, and separate themselves from themselves and their works of art.
Thus, while she consciously argues for androgyny in terms that will be
accepted by her male peers, she, like Galileo, seems to whisper a
rebuttal. While we are left with an ambivalent and limited concept of
androgyny,we are also given the tools to go beyond that.
Like so many women writers wanting to write from their own
experiences yet knowing well that men will be the final arbitersof their
work, Virginia Woolf did not pursue some of her more radical insights
into the writings of women. If she had, she would probably have out-
lined a much more comprehensive theory of androgyny, one which
would have acknowledged the individual differences of women and
men but insisted on the validity and interdependence of each. As it is,
Woolf withdrew from the implications of that move and spoke of
androgyny in the traditional terms which equated the male with the
universal. We who are attempting to use androgyny as a critical tool
must be aware of these distinctions and of the way in which Woolf
defined the term. We must be careful to distinguish between balance
and fusion; but because we are the heirs of her struggle, we will be
more able to complete her quest and to develop a fuller concept
of androgyny.
University of Oregon

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