Virginia Woolf: Who is she writing for? (Or, for whom is she writing?)
For you, for me, for herself, and for the grammar police
Starts Wednesday: Unblocked: Cultivating Secure Attachment with Your Creativity 10/23-12/11
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This morning, with tears in my eyes, I finished Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. The piece is a combination of two lectures she gave in 1928 at two women’s colleges within the University of Cambridge. In what she calls her peroration, she compels, begs, galvanizes the audience of exclusively women to write. To write for themselves, for her, for the future, and, I felt it so clearly: for me.
For me not just as a reader, as a woman-type-person (my gender identity only made possible and known [in the current day, white-washed West. Ancient Judaism as well as many Native American tribes recognize—once did, or still do—as many as eight genders] through the work of feminists before me, my mother included), but as a writer.
She spoke fictionally of Shakespeare’s sister who died as a child, a poet who never wrote a poem. As tears welled and my lower lip quivered, I wondered if Virginia had any sense that I, her reader in this moment nearly 100 years away (or later, depending on your conception of time), would be doing the work I do, writing what I write, in no small part because of her, because of these lectures. In this sense, her words ring with atemporal truth: “For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind every single voice.”
And yet, I was struck with a pang of sadness and confusion that even in an address specifically and only for women, Virginia was beholden to proper grammar and used the universal ‘he.’ She tells these women emphatically, “Write!” and then says, “The whole of the mind must lie wide open if we are to get the sense that the writer is communicating his experience with perfect fullness.” I flinched. Who is she talking about? And then I remember: this use of the universal ‘he’ was and still is grammatically correct.
Lady at Writing Desk, c. 1890s. Walter Gay, American, 1856–1937.
I struggled to find a painting of a woman at a writing desk by a woman. Lol.
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