Virginia Woolf- A Room of One’s Own

Chapter 1

•Viriginia woolf was asked to give a lecture on women and fiction to the students of Girton Girls college. She did not know what exactly was expected of her.

•Woolf begins her essay by recounting the experiences that she had during the two days preceding the lecture programme. She wanders about the premises of the college. She wants to read the manuscripts of Milton’s Lycidas and Thackeray’s Esmond but she is shut out of the library on silly grounds. Woolf considers this an act of male chauvinism.

•Next Virginia stands outside the college chapel and spends some time looking at the assorted men creased and crushed like ‘crabs’, entering the chapel. She recalls how, five centuries ago, kings and nobles spent vast quantities of gold and silver to found churches. Later, as the age of reason set in, industrial magnates donated huge sums of money to start colleges, laboraties, libraries, observatories, etc., for men and men only.

•Virginia has a sumptuous lunch but a rather poor dinner with her friend, Miss Seton. After this, the two friends have a leisurely chat about the problems of women.

• Miss Seton says that women gathered thirty thousand pounds with great difficulty and started a women’s college which, however, could not be equipped with all necessary facilities for lack of funds. Miss Seton says that her mother bore thirteen children to a priest and led a miserable life. In the past, women were denied higher education. They did not earn money. Even if they did, all their earnings were seized by their husbands. Woolf reflects sorrowfully that if women’s colleges had been started in the past, women would have attained an enviable status in society.

Chapter 2

•Virginia Woolf talks of her experiences at the British Museum where she went to collect material for her proposed talk on women and fiction. She comes across the works of many eminent professors, all uniformly decrying woman as an inferior creature.

•Virginia describes these chauvinistic writers as patriarchs who are obsessed with their own superiority. Virginia says impudently that the inferiority of woman has proved a blessing in disguise. In order to establish his superiority, man has worked hard. But for his superhuman efforts, the earth would have remained a jungle.

•Virginia says that her aunt, Mary Beton, has bequeathed her an annual grant of five thousand pounds. This gives her the economic independence that she badly needs. Now she can engage herself in any activity. She is confident that the condition of women will certainly change for the better in a century. Women will be allowed to do such work as mining and driving of engines which is now done only by men.

Chapter 3

•Virginia Woolf analyses the plight of women artists ill-treated by men from the Elizabethan age down to our own time. She is of the opinion that if Shakespeare had had an artistically talented sister she would have been hounded out and finally made to commit suicide by unfeelingmen. In the nineteenth century novelists like Currer Bell, George Sand and George Eliot assumed male names in order to hide their identity and escape criticism by angry male readers. Female musicians and female politicians are also mercilessly targeted by men.

Chapter 4

•Virginia writes about the women writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Lady Winchilsea, born in 1661, wrote very touching poems about the way household management by male overlords. Margaret of Newcastle was a similar type of writer, focusing on male tyranny. In her eyes women lived like beasts and died like worms.

•Unfortunately, she was driven mad by mental tension. The third eighteenth century writer praised by Virginia Woolf is Dorothy Osborne, author of many perceptive letters about simple shepherdesses. Mrs.Aphra Behn is lavishly praised by Virginia Woolf as the first professional woman writer.

After her husband’s death she did not break down. She ably supported herself by writing and selling her writings. She was a trail-blazer showing succeeding generations that writing could be used as a profitable career by economically backward women.

•Of the nineteenth century women novelists Jane Austen is lavishly praised by Virginia Woolf as being free from anger. Charlotte Bronte’s novels are marred by her rage against male tyranny. George Eliot suffered mental pain because she defied conventional morality and openly lived with a married man. Jane Austen’s language is shapely. The languages of Charlotte Bronte and George Eliot, on the other hand, crumbled under the ponderous weight of their thoughts and feelings. Virginia Woolf advises women novelists to write short, concentrated novels and not bulky ones like those of men novelists because they (the women novelists) are often interrupted by outside forces.

Chapter 5

•Virginia Woolf analyses the works of some contemporary women writers. She is amazed to find that women have started writing on subjects which are traditionally dealt with by men only. Jane Harrison with her books on Greek archeology has broken new ground and so have Vernon Lee with her books on aesthetics and Gertrude Bell with hers on Persia.

•Virginia Woolf is all praise for Mary Carmichael whose novel Life’s Adventure is written in a remarkably vigorous language. Also the sequence of events is deliberately distorted to create a novel effect. The theme of the novel is also unusual- it is about the love between two women, Chloe and Olivia, working in a laboratory. Virginia comments blandly that ‘sometimes women do like women’. Probing such an abnormal relationship is like peering into a dark, serpentine cave with a dim torch.

•Virginia Woolf says that a writer should not limit himself to studying love. There are many matters of vital concern which have not yet been studied by writers. Virginia points to an eighty-year old woman crossing a road with the help of her middle-aged daughter and a bored girl behind a counter- these lives, however dull, also deserve to be studied. Virginia Woolf is sure that, if a woman writer is given five hundred pounds a year and a room of her, she will write good books. In a hundred years, women may even become poets.

Chapter 6

•Virginia says that the best writer is androgynous, having the mental qualities of men as well as women. Shakespeare, Coleridge and Proust were androgynous and were able to portray both men and women with sympathy and accuracy.

•Milton, Ben Jonson and Wordsworth had no womanly quality in them. Virginia Woolf considers it a writer’s serious flaw to be a man or a woman exclusively. She says that a writer must be woman-manly or man-womanly in order to probe the mental processes of both men and women impartially.

•Virginia gives some practical advice to women. It is true that women nowadays enjoy rights that were denied to their predecessors. They have such precious rights as the right to vote and the right to possess properly.

•But they should not rest content with what they have gained. They should strive to scale still greater heights. Women should not degenerate into child-bearing machines. Virginia advises them to bear children in twos and threes, not in tens and twelves. Virginia’s advice is most appropriate in over-populated India. 

Feminism Elaine Showalter – Towards a Feministic Poetics

•Showalter discusses :

  Woman as reader (Feminist Critique)

  Woman as writer (Gynocritics)

  The Problems of Feminist Critique

  Program of Gynocritics

  Feminine, Feminist, and Female stages.

•Feminism can be divided into two distinct varieties:

ØThe first type is concerned with ‘woman as reader’.

ØWoman as reader (feminist Critique)

ØIn this concept woman is considered as the consumer of literature produced by male-writers.

ØShe calls it male-produced literature.

ØElaine argues that a female reading may change our idea of a given text. Elaine calls this kind of analysis the feminist critique.

 •Its subjects include the images and stereotypes of women in literature, the omissions and misconceptions about women in criticism.

•It also look into the fissures in male constructed literary history. For example, cleopatra, the queen of Egypt, at the time of Julius Caesar has been treated differently by shakespeare and Bernard Shaw.

•Bernard Shaw gives her role of caesar’s adopted daughter, whereas Shakespeare considers her Caesar’s concubine.

•Feminist critique also concerned with the exploitation and the manipulation of the female audience, especially in popular culture and film.

•We find advertisements in which women appear in different poses exhibiting part of their body to get more publicity to various consumer products.  

The second type of feminist criticsm is woman as writer (Gynocritics)

•In this concept woman is the producer of textual meaning.

•It looks into and discusses themes, genres and structures of literatures by woman. Woman as writer includes the following subjects: a) the psychodynamics of a female creativity, b) Linguistics and the problem of a female language, c) the collective female literary career, d) literary history, and e) studies of particular female writers and their works.

•As there is no particular term in English for such a branch, Elaine has adopted the French term la gynocritique and modified as Gynocritics.

•The feminist critique is essentially political and polemical. It is theoretically affiliated to marxist sociology and Aesthetics. Gynocritics is more self-contained and experimental.

The problems of Feminist critique

•One of the problems of the feminist critique is that it is male-oriented.

•We study stereotypes of women, the sexism of male critics and the limited role the women play in literary history, we are not learning what women have felt and experienced.

•We got only experience of what men have felt.

•In some fields of specialization apprenticeship to the male-theoretician is essential.

•The critics has a tendency to naturalize women’s victimization by making it the inevitable.

Program of Gynocritics

•The program of gynocritics is to construct a female frame work for the analysis of women’s literature.

•Another task is to develop new models based on the study of female experience. It doesn’t support idea of adopting male models and theories.

•Showalter remarks “gynocritics begins at the point when we free ourselves from the leaner absolutes of male literary theory, stop trying to fit women between the lines of the male tradition.

•Elaine hopes to establish a visible world of female culture. 

Feminine, Feminist and Female stages

•In her book “ A Literature  of Their Own” Showalter has divided the period of evolution into three stages. i) The Feminine ii) The Feminist iii) The Female

•The Feminine 1840-1880: During that period women wrote in an effort to equal the intellectual achievements of the male culture.

•The distinguishing sign of this period is the male pseudonym. This trend was introduced in England in the 1840s.

•It became a national characteristic of english women writers. During this phase the feminist content of feminine art is typically oblique, because of the inferiority complex experienced by female writers.

The Feminist- 1882 to 1920

•The new women movement gained strength – women won the right to vote.

•Women writers began to use literature to dramatize the ordeals of wrong womanhood.

The Female – 1920

•Here we find women rejecting both imitation and protest.

•Showalter considers that both are signs of dependency. Women show more independent attitudes.

•They realize the place of female experience in the process of art and literature.

•She considers that there is what she calls autonomous art that can come from women because their experiences are typical and individualistic.

•Women began to concentrate on the forms and techniques of art and literature.

•The representatives of the female phase such as Dorothy Richardson and Virgina Woolf even began to think of male and female sentences.

•They wrote about masculine journalism and feminine fiction. They redefined and sexualized external and internal experience.

Sociological Approach

•Sociological criticism is based on the fact that there is a vital relationship between the art and the society in which the artist lives.

The time and the space in which the artist is fixed shape his thinking and genius. Hence, the sociological critic pays attention to ‘the social milieu and the extent to which and the manner in which the artist responds to it’.

•Sociological criticism is not a twentieth-century development. It dates back to the eighteenth century when Vico came out with a perceptive study of the social conditions in Greece which went into the composition of Homer’s epics.

•The nineteenth century brought to light two eminent sociological critics, the German Herder and the Frenchman Taine.

•Taine stressed the importance of three forces- ‘the race, the milieu, and the moment’ acting on the artist.

• By ‘race’, Taine means the hereditary temperament and disposition of people. By ‘milieu’ he means the combined influence of surroundings, climate, physical environment, political institutions, social conditions, and the like. By ‘moment’, Taine means the spirit of the period, or the particular stage of national development which has been reached at a particular point of time.

•Taine’s sociological theory has two serious limitations. First, it ignores the factor of personality and regards the individual writer as little more than a product of his race and epoch. It is only the minor writers who reflect their age. But the man of genius – Shakespeare is such a genius – is not a mechanical reflector of his age but a man of all times.

•Second, the sociological theory ignores the fact that literature has a double-sided relation with society. The great writer is not only a creature of his time but also its creator. He not only receives but also gives.

•Marxist interpretation of literature is a subspecies of sociological criticism. The economic depression consequent on the world wars led to the Marxist interpretation of social forces. Poets like Auden, C.Day Lewis, Stephen Spender and Archibald MacLeish expressed their Marxist leanings in their writings.

Journals like The New Masses and The Left Review popularized Marxist criticism. Books by single authors also promoted the cause of communism. The books by V.F.Calverton (The Liberation of American Literature), John Strachey (The Coming Struggle for Power) and Ralph Fox (The Novel and the People) belong to this category.

•Like the sociological critic Taine, Marxist critics also began to overemphasize the importance of their tools. They inflated the significance of isms like Americanism, Proletarianism, Socialism, Capitalism, and so on.

•Mellowed Marxist critics took steps to curb the excesses of Marxist criticism. Christopher Caudwell, James Farrell (Author of A Note on Literary Criticism) and Edmund Wilson (Author of The Triple Thinkers) represent this changed trend. Critics like Van Wyck Brooks have started viewing the writer not only as a creature but also as a creator of his age. F.O. Matthiessen author of The American Renaissance and L.C.Knights, author of Drama and Society in the Age of Jonson, represent this welcome change.

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Archetypal Approach

Archetypal criticism, also called the totemic, mythological or ritualistic criticism, has the salient features of other critical methods also – it studies the text closely like the formalistic critic, concerns itself with humanistic values like the moral critic, analyses arts’ appeal to an audience as the psychological critic. I.A. Richards does the poem-reader relationship, probes basic cultural patterns like the sociological critic, and investigates a social past like the historical critic.

•Archetypal criticism was initiated by two men, Frazer, and Jung. Frazer was a  scottish anthropologist. His book The Golden Bough appeared in twelve volumes from 1890 to 1915.

•It is a monumental study of magic and religion, tracing numerous myths back to prehistoric times. Carl Gustav Jung, another prominent archetypal critic, propounded the theory of the collective unconsciousness. He believed that civilized man preserves, though unconsciously, prehistorical areas of knowledge and articulates them obliquely in myth.

•Another anthropologist of note is Jesse Weston from whose From Ritual to Romance T.S.Eliot drew comparisons and contrasts to the contemporary Wasteland. Twentieth century writers like James Joyce and W.B.Yeats have used the ancient myth of Psyche and Cupid to re-tell modern man’s struggle toward eternal love.

•Archetypal critics engage themselves in discovering the hidden mythological patterns in literary works. For these critics, the myth is a ‘protoplastic’ pattern of the race which the individual unconsciously repeats. A myth is, as Eric Fromm said, ‘a message from ourselves to ourselves’. The creative writer is a ‘shaman, a myth-maker, speaking out of his unconscious a primordial truth’.

•The archetypal critic functions in two ways. First, he discovers the mythological patterns which a writer has consciously or unconsciously used in his works.

•Many critics have traced ancient Eastern and Western myths in T.S.Eliot’s The Wasteland. Another way in which the archetypal critic works is to set up modern fictitious characters as new mythological figures representing the plights and problems of moderns.

•Thus, in his

Studies in Classic American Literature, D.H. Lawrence views characters in American fiction such as Natty Bumppo and Hester Prynne as mythological figures expressing modern American’s position.

 •Maud Bodkin’s Archetypal Patterns in poetry is another such study, investing the characters in modern poems with mythological dimensions. Kenneth Burke, in his essay Antony in Behalf of the Play, projects Antony as a mythological figure, representing the audience’s attitude towards ‘authority’, revolution and scapegoat. The modern American critic Leslie Fiedler views the boyhood gangs in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Moby Dick as mythological figures pointing to the upsurge of homosexuality in our age.

•Some objections have been raised against archetypal criticism. One basic objection is that archetypal criticism does not evaluate literature but merely explains the reason for the appeal of certain kinds of writings. The second charge is that the archetypal critics are known more for their ingenuity than for the validity of what they have to say. Anyhow, it must be accepted that archetypal criticism has rendered one important service. It has linked the modern man, despite his rationality and scientific bent, with his ancient roots.

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Psychological Approach

Literary influences on Freud:

•Freud was not the first to talk about the workings of the psyche. The romantics, both English and European, had earlier delved into the workings of th emind. Diderot’s Rameaus’ Nephew influenced Freud deeply. In this work, Rameaus’ nephew stands for the irrational element in human nature which Freud later called id.

•Diderot represents the reason that controls impulses. Freud calls this reasoning faculty the ego, and the super ego. Rousseu’s Confessions is another work that deeply influenced Freud, as it opened his eyes to the immortal self that lies hidden in the depths of even a good man.

•The concept of free love was aired by Shelley and Byron in England and by Schlegel, Schopenhauer and Stendhal in Europe.

This concept strengthened Freud’s concept of the libidinous id struggling against the rational ego and superego.
 Literary influences on Freud:

•Freud was not the first to talk about the workings of the psyche. The romantics, both English and European, had earlier delved into the workings of th emind. Diderot’s Rameaus’ Nephew influenced Freud deeply. In this work, Rameaus’ nephew stands for the irrational element in human nature which Freud later called id.

•Diderot represents the reason that controls impulses. Freud calls this reasoning faculty the ego, and the super ego. Rousseu’s Confessions is another work that deeply influenced Freud, as it opened his eyes to the immortal self that lies hidden in the depths of even a good man.

•The concept of free love was aired by Shelley and Byron in England and by Schlegel, Schopenhauer and Stendhal in Europe.

This concept strengthened Freud’s concept of the libidinous id struggling against the rational ego and superego.

 The Influence of Freud on Literary Criticism:

•Freud has affected literary criticism in three ways:

•First, psychological terms are being increasingly used in literary criticism. Conrad Aiken’s Skepticism: Notes on Contemporary Poetry and Herbert Read’s Reason and Romanticism, are marked by an excess of psychological terms. These early critics used psychologial tools indiscriminately and injudiciously.

•They tried to trace erotic motives and meanings in all literary works under the sun. As years passed by, this initial enthusiasm subsided and the light cast by psychology on literature began to appear more substantial.

•Based on psychology in general and Freudian findings in particular, many perceptive studies of the creative process began to appear.

•I.A. Richards’s Principles of Literary Criticism paved the way for such studies. I.A. Richards analysed the constituents of aesthetic experience. He said hat gret literature contributed to ‘synaesthetic equilibrium’ and evoked ‘a harmonious kind of response’ from the audience. Following him, Ogden and Wood published the Foundations of Aesthetics.  In his essay Antony in Behalf of the Play, Kenneth Burke examines the unconscious relation between the writer and the reader.

•The second contribution made by Freudian psychology is that psychoanalysts psychoanalyse creative authors in an effort to find out how the maladjustments of the authors colour their works. The following is a list of such psychological biographies – i) Sir Harold Nicolson’s Tennyson: Aspects of his life, Character and poetry.  ii) Joseph Wood Krutch’s Edgar Allan Poe: A Study in Genius, John Middleton Murry’s The Son of Woman: The Story of D.H.Lawrence, etc.,  

•The third contribution made by Freud is that psychology is being increasingly used to explain fictitious characters. The critic becomes a psychoanalyst, searching for subconscious forces which motivate a character. A classic example of such psychoanalysis is Ernest Jones’s study of Hamlet in which he attributes Hamlet’s delay in avenging his father’s death to his (Hamlet’s) mother-fixation or oedipal complex. Following this study, Ernest Kris wrote a psychological study of Prince Hal’s conflict, identifying Hotspur with super ego and Falstaff with Id.

•Following Freud, Adler with his concept of the inferiority complex and Jung, with his theory of the collective unconscious, enriched the psychoogist’s armoury. Yet, many charges were levelled against the psychological approach. One that is psychologists mistake poets for dreamers. The dreamer has no control over his dream but the poet has control over his product.

•The overenthusiasm of some Freudian critics who scent erotic motives behind every character is certainly questionable.

Formalistic Approach

•It is also known as textual/new criticism/modern/ontological/aesthetic criticism.

•The formalistic critic focus only on the work of art whereas Biographical approach insist critic to have a fair knowledge about the life of the author before criticizing his work of art because the life of the author becomes part of his work also; sociological approach makes a critic to trace out the culture and life of the people from the author’s view because literature devoid of the society seem to be incomplete.

•Modern critics are of the view that all these approaches are irrelevant to literary criticism because they are not oriented to literature at all.

Critics like T.S. Eliot, I.A. Richards, F.R. Leavis are the great exponents of Formalistic criticism.

•T.S. Eliot considered the moral, sociological, historical and biographical approaches to literature as extrinsic and unnecessary. He wanted critics to concentrate on the texts of the works themselves and not on the extrinsic, external factors.

•T.S.Eliot in his Tradition and Individual Talent says that “a true poem is that which presents the extinction of the poet and not exposition of the poet’s life”. The poem in his opinion must not become the mouth piece of the poet.

•The poetry of Eliot, with its complex symbols borrowed from French symbolists of the 19th century and the English metaphysicals of the 17th invited the closest possible examination of the texts of the poem.

When a poem is published, T.S.Eliot feels, the poet is dead. The umbilical cord between the author and his text is severed when the book is published. 

•I.A.Richards in his Practical Criticism says that formalistic approach is but intrinstic while all other approaches are irrelevent for modern critic.

•I.A. Richards authored four important critical works. They are Principles of Literary Criticism (1924), The Meaning of Meaning (1923), The Science of Poetry (1926), and Practicial Criticism (1929).

•Principles of Literary Criticism is an analysis of poem-audience relationship.

It gave an impetus to the psychological approach to literature.

•The Meaning of Meaning in collaboration with Ogden, discusses ‘the kinds of meaning that occur in the response to verbal stimuli’. This book paved the way for the semantic analysis of poetry.

•The Science of Poetry argues that poetry has come to be devalued in our age because of the ‘pseudo-statements’ that poets often make.

•Practical Criticism contains readers’ misinterpretations of thirteen poems. In this work, I.A. Richard’s classifies the different reasons that lead to the misunderstanding of poems.

•His most contribution was his examination of the hurdles that obstruct one’s understanding of poetry. He emphasized the need for a semantic study of words, of ‘signs’ in poems. The semantic approach to literature was practised with remarkable success by the later formalistic critics, Empson and Blackmur.

•The New Critics are a group of 20th century critics who have certain common beliefs, attitudes and practices. They are concerned with such matters of form as metre, image, diction, and such matters of content as tone, theme, etc.,

•They are of the opinion that theses elements work not separately but together.

•As Robert Penn Warren says, the effectiveness of poetry depends not on any one element but on their inter-releationships. A holistic approach to literature is what New Critics recommend.

•Brooks and Warren’s Understanding Poetry is a recollection of explicatons of poems along formalistic lines.

•James smith, a formalistic critic, analyses Shakespearean play As You Like It, Romantic comedy applying the tools of formalistic criticism.

•The play in general called a romantic comedy but in his opinion it is totally unromantic in nature.

•To begin with, he starts criticising the character melancholic Jaques. The melancholy of Jaques is not innate in nature.

•It is assumed he compares Jaques with Macbeth and Hamlet. The Melancholy of both Macbeth and Hamlet seems to be genuine while that of Jaques is unusual and artificial.

•Macbeth is rudely shaken when he is informed that Lady Macbeth is dead. He looses interest in the wordly life. He says,

  Life is a tale

    told by an idiot

    full of sound and fury

    signifying nothing.

•The pathetic cry of the villainous character elevates him to the level of a tragic hero.

•Hamlet is too young to commit the murder. He, therefore, procrastinates which snowballs into a great problem and results in his melancholy. He cries thus “to be or not to be” thus the melancholy of Jaques is forced to him through his wide travel. Even Rosalind finds out the nature of his grief. She therefore prefers a clown like Jaques.

•Touchstone, the clown is no difference melancholic Jaques. He is unromantic. Although, he falls in love in Audrey the sheperdess, his love for Audrey is neither sincere, nor genuine.

He wants to marry her with the help of a bogous priest and desert her later. His division of human life into seven stages is also unromantic. He seems to be more pessimistic than romantic.

•Rosalind the protagonist of the play also seems to be unromantic in nature. It is true that, she falls in love with Orlando. But the fact remains that she has not fallen headlong in love with him. She tries to cure the melady of her lover through her disguise.

•She even compares the lovers with wolves howling at the moon during night. Thus all the main characters of the romantic play.

•As You Like it are infact unromantic. It is therefore wrong to call As You Like it as romantic comedy. Thus, James Smith, one of the great exponents of formalistic criticism analyses Shakesperean play As You Like It. 

 Limitations of Formalistic Criticism:

•The first charge against formalistic critics is that they use terminology which can be understood only by the initiated members of the school. The uninitiated are liable to commit errors if they use this terminology without proper equipment and training.

•L.C.Knights and F.R. Leavis hold that many formalistic critics take into consideration only one aspect of a poem, forgetting the poem as a totality.

•For example, Brooks focuses on ‘paradox’, Ransom on ‘texture’, Tate on ‘tension’, and Empson on ‘ambiguity’ as the sole principle of poetry.

•Each of these critics is wilfully blind to the other equally important aspects of poetry.

T. S. Eliot the apostle of formalistic critiicism, is aware of its limitations. He practices formalistic techniques only when analysing particular pieces but shows a serious cocnern for philosophic values in his more general essays.

 •A group of literary critics called the Chicago critics have deviated from the formalists in certain respects. Both the schools dismiss social, moral, philosophical and biographical approraches as irrelevant. The distinction of the Chicago critics lies in their concern for the various literary genres.

•The Chicago critics do not reject the social, moral and historical aspects of a literary work outright. First, they analyse a piece of literature on generic grounds and then, if necessary, discuss the extrinsic influences such as social, psychological, and moral forces acting on the writer. This approach ensures that due weightage is given to both internal and external aspects.

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