Virginia Woolf's Revision of a Shavian Tradition

Abstract

As Virginia Woolf has assessed in Women and Fiction, men are arbiters of ... as they have established an order of values in life (145); therefore, women writers, particularly those who are tackling primarily male-dominated genres, necessarily have a context, a convention, to evaluate and, often, to re -vise according to each writer's own (female) agenda. Such a female literary tradition was at heart of Woolf 's own literary career, and, as can be seen in numerous examples of contemporary feminist literary theory, such a woman-centered canon is still sought, still in process of evolution. Although theorists such as Helene Cixous are prepared to disregard such strongholds of male influence and can see beyond such a revisionist period in women's writing, time when a woman can truly herself (Cixous 875) without any nod to a literary appears distant, if not entirely unrealistic. Cixous suggests that must no longer be determined by past (875), but often reevaluation can and does ultimately suggest a future radically different from it might echo. In her essay When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re -Vision, Adrienne Rich defines literary revision as the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction (18). As women writers forged ahead in search of their own literary traditions, each had, it seems, her revisionary task to accomplish. As Woolf set out to write Freshwater: A Comedy, only dramatic text she wrote, she certainly had a history of theater with which to contend. Though women had, of course, written plays prior to 1923, when Freshwater was first drafted, such plays were few and not often successful. A woman's connection to theater had long been tainted by her sex, and actresses and women within theater circles were often construed as no