Virginia Woolf: A Room of Ones Own .....

One of the things I really enjoy about Virginia Woolf's writing is her ability to use language in the way that people actually think and act.  Not in the sense of dialectal realism like Welsh or to some extent even George Eliot but in the way the actual mind works.  So in this seminal essay which is actually an amalgamation of two lectures on women and fiction she goes for a walk in Cambridge, sees a cat, has lunch, goes to the British Library takes a few books of the shelf but in between (and indeed during) she dissects not only the history of women and literature but also more correctly the role of women in patriarchal society.

Written in 1929 the year after all women got equal voting status with men in Britain and hardly ancient history and the year after she wrote Orlando - another historical examination of the position of women but in a fantastical fiction form.  The title itself comes from the thought that for women to write they need a space (or room) and independent finance.  Both for huge swathes of human history would have been impossible for a woman even from the upper classes  - and still is for many if not most women across the world.

This exposition starts as she walks around Oxbridge the heart of the educational establishment in 20s England and considers the hundreds of years that women were not allowed to be part of it.  Indeed she even finds that as she attempts to get into a library she cannot get in because of her sex.  This beginning allows her to consider the nature of literature and she makes her famous discussion of Shakespeare's Sister - as lifted by old Moz in the Smiths and Siobhan Fahey post Bananarama!  This passage is really excellent as she outlines the historical impossibility of a woman being able to do this in the 16th and 17th Century - a point explored in her gender shifiting hero Orlando and his/her journey through history.
This is not only because women were literally chattels with no status (lower than an Athenian slave she says at one point)  but also the talent of an artist would be vilified and attacked - literally she quotes a fairly reactionary historian who spoke of the perpetual violence women faced in these times.  She speculates that witch hunts and women losing their minds or committing suicide could have been because of their skills being thwarted.  This would also be true of the poor man (a point she makes) but the entire female population even from a background like Shakespeares would have been excluded.

The other point she makes is  a more artistic one that a woman at that time would not have had the "unblemished" mind that Shakespeare had  - to view things in such a universal and poetic way - mainly because of the social stigma they would have to deal with in their mind by attempting to write which in one sense would paralyse her and dominate her work.  She explores the 17th Century poet and aristocrat Lady Winchelsea and explores how her poetry is "bursting out in indignation against the position of women" which means her poems are more limited in their scope and vision than Shakespeare's.

One of the historical ironies though which she points out and is never fully explained is that female characters totally dominate fiction in all historical periods - including in the slave state of classical civilisation.

She also considers the nineteenth century and the growth of the novel as a form of artistic expression and indeed female novelists.  Initially this was seen as an acceptable outlet as initially the novel was viewed as a lesser form compared to poetry.  Woolf speaks of how talented women were pushed at that time into that outlet rather than any other - science, history etc  But she speaks of Jane Austen and the Brontes  - whilst also pointing out that even at that time George Eliot and George Sand had to adopt a male persona and indeed (she argues) mimicked a male style of writing.

She believes Jane Austen to be the greater writer (I have never read her) because she transcended the gender issues that bedevilled all female artists with her fiction.  In fact she goes further and says that Charlotte Bronte "had more genius in her" than Austen but could never fully express this.  "She will write of herself where she should write of her characters".  Austen, interestingly, didn't write in a room of her own but in her living room in the midst of family hubbub. Austen then came closest to having the "unblemished" Shakesperean approach.

The artist should strive to be androgenous and above gender, again a point underlined in Orlando and in a way by Patti Smith!  Male artists have always been more able to do this because of patriarchal society.  In the most difficult passage when she reads a mythical modern novel she sees that this female writer is trying to do this (I think it is a critique of her own fiction ) "she wrote as a woman but as woman who has forgotten that she is a woman".

Ironically and in quite a funny way contemporary male writers in the 1920s had now the problem of being obsessed with their own gender but in this context of outlining their superiority - threatened by the impact of the suffrage movement and the strength of the women's campaign at this time.  Thus they now cannot have the unblemished mind of a Shakespeare or a Keats or a Coleridge.  In a brilliant passage she speaks of a shadow over the work of a male writer's work "the shadow of the letter I" .  Thus Shakespeare himself may not have existed if "the women's movement had begun in the sixteeenth century and not the nineteenth" because he would have the self doubt and problems with his ego that twentieth century male writers were having.

As a lecture/essay this is a very well structured and argued piece compared to the Myth of Sisyphus which I read earlier this year which had not developed its ideas fully.  A lot can be learned and a lot of views of life can be changed by these 100 pages.

Orlando - Fantastic Life.

An incredible piece of work. Quite unlike anything I have read before but in some ways one of the most significant.

Ostensibly a fantasy, Woolf herself apparently called it a writer's holiday, but don't worry it's not about goblins or medieval characters called things like Spatcock as that genre usually has. It covers the life of the aristocrat Orlando over a 500 year span during which she changes gender from male to female. It ends literally at the current day - 1928 - coinciding with the date of publication.

The historical sweep is massive and one part of the work is its overview of English history and literature. Yet part of its brilliance is the work's combination of this with its dissection of the intimate and the exploration of what it means to be human and how to live.

I particularly enjoyed the summaries of the 19th Century and its imposition of a moral code vis a vis marriage which attempts to declare itself as universal yet in Orlando's experience is in direct contrast to her previous 300 years of life! The chaotic baroque period of the 17th century is also done very well. And of course as a modernist the 20th Century scenes are remarkably observed - but by an outsider.

For Orlando is that, an outsider, not simply because of Gender but throughout history she is ancilliary to great events - from the Elizabethan period to the Civil War to World War 1 - these do not really figure in her life.

Literature and Biography are constant themes as well. On the face of it this is written as a biography of Orlando - who in many ways reflects Vita Sackville West - an adventurous aristocratic woman who Wolf had a love for and sometime relationship. Yet the limits of biography and indeed writing about the human experience are commented on by the writer throughout. The work opines that one individual has a thousand characters or more yet a biography has to distill that to one or two at most, outlining that writing can never really do that.

As a parallel there is a character who appears twice - a hack writer who rips off Orlando - in the Elizabethan times he attacks the current writers Shakespeare, Marlowe et al as a pale reflection of the Classical Roman and Greeks. Then he re-appears in the 19th and 20th Century to attack modern writers and praise the Shakespearean era. This reflects attack on Virginia Woolf's work which moves away from traditional narrative to try and be a closer reflection of human experience.

The last chapter set in the "modern day" does this to amazing effect - all of the character's 500 years of life bubble around her head as she walks around her estate and come out in different ways. Many writers Becket, Joyce, Flann OBrien etc do this but this is one of the more accessible examples of this I have read.

It is also experimental in other ways - it uses faux illustrations like a normal biography mostly of Vita S-West to represent Orlando. It also pre-figures magic realism by a few decades with its surreal elements, use of nature and animals and obviously the central scene of her sex conversion.

The change of gender is obviously crucial in the work yet I dont think it is a bold statement on transgenderism or transvestism - rather its an exploration of the flexibility of gender in some ways particularly over a long historical period. What it means to be a woman and a man is explored - the nature of attraction and love. All Orlando's partners are fairly ambiguous sexually - from a Russian princess to a sea captain.

In part I guess this is about Virginia Wolf expressing her love for Vita but it is more I think about a love of people or life and how gender only is only one part of it. The nature of sexual relationships is not really explored indeed she has quite a witty side swipe at DH Lawrence's work on that issue.

But gender aside the work explores life and what is important - the strength of nature, home comforts and friendship. One of my favourite chapters occurs when Orlando is in Turkey and has just become a woman - ends in a debate with gypsies over what is important - a 365 bed -roomed house versus wandering across the earth.

It is an aristocratic vision which Orlando has - the nature of work or labour which is so significant to most of us because of the nature of society is never an issue to him/her because she never has to do it. Even in the last scenes she visits a department store where goods are brought to her and taken from her car by her servants. This liberation from work, which I think intrigued Woolf who was from a more traditional bourgeois life, allows the experimentation of thought and gender. Orlando's house is more like a town than a normal house - similar to Vita's mansion which significantly due to property laws although an aristocrat was not allowed to inherit because of her gender.

There is so much more to the work though - the nature of mortality - interesting as the character is more or less immortal: the clock on the mantlepiece as Woolf says. The awkward conversations that men and women can have - there is one hilarious scene with an Archduke! Shakespeare is also commonly referred to - the master of English literature because I think the book also deals with the nature of English identity particularly around its ruling class.

A masterpiece, definitely, and not easy but if you dig around it I think some of the secrets of happiness and life are here.

Streams of time - Mrs Dalloway review

My first completed book of my 40s and an appropriately brilliant one. Originally inspired to delve into after watching the Hours earlier this year.
The movie (and novel) bases itself around the themes, structure and indeed the author of Mrs Dalloway. Death, suicide, trauma, marriage and the role of women are a number of the themes which were explored. I later then saw the movie adaptation of this book starring Vanessa Redgrave.

Those cinematic depictions of the book obviously had enough in them to make me want to read it but nothing really prepared me for the unique and groundbreaking nature of the fiction.

Essentially a novel bound by time - over the course of one day (a similar structure used by Joyce) it nominally covers an upper middle class woman preparing for an ornate party in the 1920s. Except it doesnt really - it is a stream of conciousness work of sorts but the consciousness is passed from one character to another like a baton.
One of the brilliant things this book does is write in the way that people actually think so events from long ago pop up alongside inappropriate feelings and banal conversation. It shows that humans are creatures of the present but their mind contains so much background and history. In a sense it reminds me of Becket's fiction which I enjoy but is very difficult as it burrows down to almost the very inner core of what it means to be human. Mrs Dalloway does not go as far as this which makes it easier though not easy to read.
It actually does much more though as it is a contemporary novel of the 20s - it explores women's roles through time. There are significant female characters at all age of life including Clarissa Dalloway in her mid 50s. It examines class, political stagnation and the insidious affect of the war (First World) which had ended a few years before but whose impact society could (and arguably never has) escape. This is personified in the character of Septimus suffering from severe mental illness/shell shock from the trenches whose tragic arc lies in parallel to Clarissa's "privileged" life.
But what I was really struck by was the sense that this is a novel about change and response to that. The late 19th century is constantly compared with the modern era and the endemic social changes - women for example were just about to get the vote. But also in personal life how mortality is a constant burden we must carry as Clarissa says "Oh...in the middle of my party, here's death she thought"!
In some ways similar to Mme Bovary as it depicts the essential shallowness of upper class life it actually is much more.
An amazing piece of work with so much in it and will definitely read more of Ms Woolf.