Virginia Woolf: Feminist destinations (Rereading literature)

Description

Virginia Woolf, as Rachel Bowlby points out in this study, is the only twentieth-century British woman writer to be taken seriously by critics of all casts. To celebrate her modernism while downplaying her feminism has been a familiar tactic of modern male critics, one which certain 'realist' feminists have ironically put into reverse. What Bowlby illuminatingly shows, however, is that none of these categories - modernist, feminist, realist - is at all stable within Woolfs own texts, which circulate them constantly in a whole set of alliances and antagonisms. If feminism is a far from unitary concept for feminist critics today, ranging as it does from affirmations of a natural but suppressed female difference to an insistence on the precariousness of all constructions of gender, from claims for an 'indigenous' female literary tradition to the question of a certain literary mode - then all of these positions, as Bowlby demonstrates, can already be found active in the works of a woman capable of writing in the very same essay that women writers should not think of their sex, and that they should 'think back through [their] mothers'. It is surely true also that the categories 'realism' and 'modernism' are perilous precisely because mutually complicit, as the latter ironically posits the former in the very act of transgressing it. Contents 1 'We're Getting There': Woolf, Trains and the Destinations of Feminist Criticism 2 The Trained MindI 3 Orlando's Vacillation 4 Getting to Q: Sexual Lines To the Lighthouse 5 Thinking Forward Through Mrs Dalloway's Daughter 6 Jacob's Type 7 Things 8 Orlando's Undoing 9 Partings 10 The Dotted Line Notes Index