Exiled In and Exiled From The Politics and Poetics of Burger’s Daughter

Abstract

Abstract In A Famous Pass Age In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf identifies the position of women as simultaneously inside and outside patriarchal cultural hegemony: “If one is a woman one is often surprised by a sudden splitting off of consciousness, say in walking down Whitehall, when from being the natural inheritor of that civilisation, she becomes, on the contrary, outside of it, alien and critical” (101). Woolf offers a way of conceiving the question of women and exile. To be exiled is to be “outside, ... alien and critical”: on one hand, to be displaced by that culture (“outside” or exiled from); on the other, to be engaged in transforming/displacing it (“alien and critical”). Paradoxically, the most disabling version of exile may be a consequence of women’s position as inheritors of a civilization, for a condition of their inheritance—their position “inside”-is acquiescence in a cultural or political set that subordinates them, displaces them, or exiles them to the outside. Woolf defines the stance of much recent feminist criticism and theory-a stance that Joan Kelly identifies as the “doubled vision of feminist theory” and Rachel Blau DuPlessis calls the “both/and” vision of female modernism and implicitly of feminist criticism (“For the Etruscans”). But in this passage, at least, Woolf’s privileging of gender occludes other crucial aspects of the social/cultural ensemble.