The Student Body in the Text

Abstract

The experience of academia from the perspective of the female student, according to modernist Virginia Woolf and contemporary critic Jane Gallop, is often modified by the body she inhabits. Despite the sixty years separating the work of these two writers, they both capture the dilemma of writing as a woman and working as a student in the male-dominated academy. Woolf, in A Room of One's Own and Professions for Women, and Gallop, in Writing Through the Body, discuss the inappropriate ways in which the female student's body has set her apart socially and academically from her male peers. The fictional students who come to life in Woolf's essays and the autobiographical figure who comes of age in Gallop's text exemplify the efforts of a generation of writers to present the body wholly and fairly. As part of a broader discussion, I will look at the textual female body as it appears in their prose, using also the work of philosophical critic Iris Marion Young, anthropologist Peggy Reeves Sanday, and novelist Marilyn French, all of whom treat the concept of how our educational experience is determined by the physical bodies we inhabit. The body-centered criticism of Gallop, Woolf, and a number of other writers addresses a constellation of concerns, all of which aim to acknowledge rather than censure the physical body as it affects both an author and the texts she creates.1 A comprehensive definition of the varied efforts to incorporate body and text would include raising the issue of sexual difference, suggesting that such difference is produced in language, refusing to accept the traditional Western separation of mind and body, attempting to refute the sense of writing as a strictly