The Impersonal Strategy: Re-visiting Virginia Woolf's Position in The Common Reader Essays

Abstract

The concept of impersonality as a writer's strategy has been exposed to misinterpretations that either fail to exhaust its full meaning and deposit an unequal amount of attention on all components of the term or, in the worst case, tend to distort its true elements. In relation to Virginia Woolf's criticism, in particular, it is a critical commonplace that the author employed an impersonal position in order not to fully materialise her feminist vision, but to shy away from explicitly expressing her feminist convictions and openly supporting women's rights. Indicative of this is the criticism that suggests disapproval of Woolf's reluctance to side with her own gender and declare the power of female personality. The aim here is to challenge such critical views, separate the discussion of impersonality from its association with that of androgyny, and re-visit the issue of Woolf's employment of the impersonal strategy. I examine two of Woolf's essays on nineteenth-century women writers included in her first volume of The Common Reader and offer an analysis from both a gender-oriented and a genderless angle. Woolf's strong affinity with female conditions of oppression, her modernist convictions, her need to compromise with the male-dominated context of the time and her concurrent urge to co-operate with the common reader of an unspecified sex for the sake of artistic creation reveal more complex reasons behind her intentions than those examined by critics so far.