Virginia Woolf focused on how gender affects morals and values. Through her feminist writings, she aimed to increase women's education, advocate for women in the professions, encourage the importance of motherhood, and prevent war.
Woolf underwent different traumatic experiences during her youth. First, her half-brother, Gerald Duckworth sexually abused her. In 'Sketch of the Past' (1939) she wrote: "I can remember the feel of his hands going under my clothes; going firmly and steadily lower and lower, I remember how I hoped that he would stop; how I stiffened and wriggled as his hand approached my private parts. But he did not stop." Virginia felt numb to this experience. She felt powerless, helpless, weak, and subservient among all things. This event was significant enough that it led her to think about gender roles and power in a society later in her life.
Soon after, Virginia experienced the sudden death of her mother in 1895, when she was 13, and her half-sister Stella's death two years later. These events also led to Virginia's emotional breakdowns. Moreover, her father died in 1904, and this fully exacerbated her mental illness and led to her brief institutionalization. At this point in time, she was experiencing severe depression, mood swings, headaches, physical ailments, and other symptoms.
Her writings reflected her inner conflicts so to speak. Woolf attemped to relay very important messages about women's experiences and men's domination in a patriarchal society. She believed that "as women entered the public sphere, they should not forget the lessons forged within the private home, where they had learned to fight patriarchy" (Freedman, p. 70). Another goal of hers was to work further to unsilence sexual abuse and the manipulation associated with it. She didn’t want to feel suffocated anymore by hiding from the reality of the abuse even though she knew that regardless of admitting her sexual abuse, she would be affected by it for the rest of her life (along with her other early childhood experiences). Unfortunately, Woolf committed suicide due to her unbearable internal pain. She loaded her pockets with many stones and drowned herself in the River Ouse on March 28, 1941.
Woolf's feminist ideas are most evident in A ROOM OF ONE'S OWN (1929). One of her most famous quotes exists in this book: "A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction." In her book, Woolf touched the on obstacles and prejudices that have women writers have faced and have struggled to overcome. For instance, most men wrote books for their own needs and their own uses. Women were usually the inferior objects in these books. In her book, she made a clear distinction between women as certain objects of representation and women as authors of representation and was adamant about a change that had to be made in literature to reflect this distinction. In the last chapter of her book, Woolf spoke of the possibility of an androgynous mind (The definition of androgygnous according to Merriam-Webster dictionary reads: 1 : having the characteristics or nature of both male and female, 2 a : neither specifically feminine nor masculine, b : suitable to or for either sex, 3 : having traditional male and female roles obscured or reversed). Woolf referred to a great mind as being androgynous and having reached its fullest potential.
Here are some of her most famous quotes. How do you think they relate to her personal experiences and her messages conveyed in her professional writing?
"For most of history, Anonymous was a woman."
"Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size."
"As a woman I have no country. As a woman my country is the whole world."
Virginia Woolf was so fantastic...but I was thinking the other day, how many of our female artist icons were suicides??
ReplyDeleteThat is a great point! Most icons express their emotions and internal conflicts through their work. Do you think there is a correlation between expression of emotions publicly and suicide?
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