My eye, on this occasion, strayed to W, to the one Wells and the two Woolfs. What was I in the mood for? Fiction or non-fiction? A history, a holiday, a room? My mind desired exercise and not escape which made A Room of One's Own, first read in April 2019, the natural, the perfect choice. Usually I wouldn't revisit so soon, but in a national emergency where a one bed, one bath flat was now my world it seemed apt.
I set to work, my door locked from within; there would be no interruptions, for even in normal times my rooms are closed to traffic, passing or invited, i.e. guests of any sort, on any business are unwelcome. The two rooms in which I work are my own; mine alone. And so it was in one of these, the sole use sitting room as against the common, that I started at the place where in my view you should always start, even if it is a second or an umpteenth reading: at the beginning.
Outside was all light and colour, quiet broken by sirens. A Good Friday, and there was nothing Good about it, except the profusion of thought that was soon to be released by Virginia Woolf's lecture on 'Women and Fiction'. With a notepad and pencil close to hand, just in case you understand I was taken by the urge to scribble I turned to the first page where Woolf describes how she sat down on the banks of the river to think about the subject matter and what she could say of them, a five and a seven letter word. I, however, cannot read of the banks of a river without thinking about Lewis Carroll's Alice, for there, although she was tired, all her adventures began.
Instead, however, of chasing a white rabbit down a hole and along a corridor, I chased a Woolf, in a grey t-shirt and black yoga pants, to the British Museum and the Elizabethan age, where like her I found myself disgruntled by the absence, on her say-so, of women in the history books. Indeed, anywhere. Where was she? The she that stood behind men. Countless men, of all descriptions. Oh, in Shakespeare, yes, but here I disagreed. For although his women 'do not seem wanting in personality and character', was he not when he was writing these parts thinking of the men who would play them? I do not doubt that Shakespeare knew women, but were they not in his plays merely representative of the sex, based on his deductions of them, from his relations with them as a man? Which is not to say that the man to woman relationship is unimportant, but can it really tell women anything of what it is to be a woman? Speak as a woman to a woman?
I don't know what Woolf would say to that; actually, yes, I do. She would opine that if men hadn't written women into their fiction – and painted them untrue - they would have been as insignificant on the page as they were in life. Instead of which, 'some of the most inspired words, some of the most profound thoughts in literature fall from her lips.' Does it matter then if in real life this was not how it was? My response to my own question would be that: men prefer women of the imagination, and so it presents, as it still does now, two problems: one, it feeds men expectations and asks women to fulfil or succeed these, and two, it gives men the notion they have encountered a flesh-and-blood woman, when the fact remains she is a fiction, written by a man, who has professed to understand when he does not, he cannot.
Here, I feel Woolf would disagree, with me this time, for she would in the case of Shakespeare say he was androgynous; that is, he 'used both sides of his mind equally.' I chose not to counter her statement, for she has put more thought (and more research) into this argument than I have, that I have in fact been able to, with no recourse to a physical library as opposed to the virtual, but it occurred to me I know of only two, possibly three (only one contemporary), who could speak, could write as male and female in equal measure.
Picture Credit: Green Room, 1997, Jacek Yerka (source: WikiArt).
Written April 2020.
