Locating Sites of Negations and Denegating “Negative Essentializing”: Rereading Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own

Manahari Adhikari

doi:10.7575/aiac.alls.v.5n.6p.105

Abstract

This essay examines how Virginia Woolf uses writing as a tool to locate sites of negations, such as women’s exclusion from places of power and knowledge, and to expose negative essentializing that permeates patriarchal structure in A Room of One’s Own . Whereas scholarship on the book has explored a wide range of issues including sex, gender, and history, Locating offers a new perspective to the book as an example of “dewriting,” where Woolf confronts the stereotypical images of women, challenges gender and sexual ideologies, and restores dignity to women, thereby constructing a counter-narrative to misogynist masculine aesthetics.

Highlights

Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own has received extensive critical attention
Restuccia Frances (1985) explains the book as a manifesto for female difference written under a cover of androgyny so that the differences between sexes as well as masculine and feminine discourses could be discussed (p. 255)
Woolf’s call for an androgynous union of the male and female is a mask worn to protect herself from patriarchy’s retaliation against her for being subversive. She does not advocate for a “delicate androgynous balancing of masculine and feminine tendencies but nudge[s] women to tap the feminine unconscious” (p. 261)

Summary

Introduction

Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own has received extensive critical attention. Scholars have made much of the book’s complex narrative strategy, which opens itself to new and diverse perspectives. Woolf’s call for an androgynous union of the male and female is a mask worn to protect herself from patriarchy’s retaliation against her for being subversive. She does not advocate for a “delicate androgynous balancing of masculine and feminine tendencies but nudge[s] women to tap the feminine unconscious” Ellen Rosenman (1989) situates A Room of One’s Own in the context of the era’s attitude toward homosexuals and argues that the book does not, as some critics have said, advocate lesbianism. In dread of patriarchal reprisal against her, Woolf, Rosenman writes, “excise[s] the lesbian portion of her draft of A Room of One’s Own” To do otherwise is to endorse existing notions about sex and gender (p. 640)

Interpretive Framework

Reading A Room’s of One’s Own

Conclusion