Who's Afraid of Arnold Bennett?
by Barbara Payne

 

 “Some people take the heart out of you, and other people put it back.”


                                                                                          –  Elizabeth David

 

 

                 I sat dawdling in a chair in front of Fletcher recently looking out over the beautiful Sweet Briar College campus—its buildings, pastures, and forests aglow in the late autumn light.  I was musing on Virginia Woolf, women, and creativity—this was the topic I wanted to explore in my senior exercise. Women’s creativity—what stifled it, what encouraged it?  Or as Woolf said in  A Room of One’s Own, “What conditions are necessary for the creation of works of art”(25)?  She said “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction” (4).  A room of one’s own.  An irresistible notion to women who came of age in the 70's and earlier.  Margaret Drabble said, “I read it with mounting excitement and enthusiasm....A more militant, firm, concerted attack on women’s subjection would be hard to find” (Rosenman 10).  I read The Feminine Mystique, The Second Sex, and many other feminist works, but none of them held me like A Room of One’s Own.  For Woolf talked not about a room of her own, a room for a privileged, well-educated, fabulously talented woman like herself, but a room for me or you or any woman who wanted to write fiction or paint or compose music or do anything creative.

                  There I sat, some 75 years after the publication of her book, a woman student at a college founded by and for women, with money in my purse and the choice of any number of rooms where I could sit uninterrupted hour after hour, week upon week.  Did this mean that Woolf’s book was obsolete, her ideas dated, the struggles of women over?  Did it belong on a dusty shelf between a fossilized fern and a mastodon skull?  If so, then why, as I read it again, did the book still resonate?  Why did I still hear Woolf’s voice speaking to me down through the years?  Why did I feel, in spite of my money and my room, as if I were still struggling?  Why did I sometimes feel—angry? 

                 Woolf (or rather her adopted character in A Room of One’s Own) said, upon receiving a legacy that would make her financially independent, “it is remarkable...what a change of temper a fixed income will bring about...I need not hate any man; he cannot hurt me.  I need not flatter any man.  He has nothing to give me....I found myself adopting a new attitude towards the other half of the human race.  It was absurd to blame any class or any sex, as a whole...They are driven by instincts which are not within their control.  They, too, the patriarchs, the professors, had endless difficulties, terrible drawbacks to contend with”(38).  Why then, if she did not “hate any man,” did she go on to say that men were “harboring in their breasts... a vulture, for ever tearing the liver out and plucking at the lungs—the instinct for possession, the rage for acquisition which drives them to desire other people’s fields and goods perpetually; to make frontiers and flags; battleships and poison gas; to offer up their own lives and their children’s lives” (39).   These were contradictory ideas.  I wondered, were they somehow connected to my own feelings?  These questions were hanging in the air when I heard my name called and turned to see the dean striding by.  “You won’t have many more evenings like this,” he said.  I replied in some confusion, not because I had no ready answer, but because I didn’t know what to call him.  I was older than he was, but he was the dean, I a student.  How odd in this moment to be weighing status, privilege, and gender, I thought.  But what time was it!  I was invited to a special dinner, a sit-down dinner to honor members of the senior class, and I didn’t want to be late.

                 As I walked across the campus, I marveled at the genius of Woolf’s decision to cast herself as a fictional character within the pages of A Room of One’s Own, and thus join the ranks of women as a whole.   “Call me Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael or by any name you please—it is not a matter of any importance”(5), she said, as if to say ‘let me be one of you, one of all  women of all time’.  She was also referring to an English ballad called “Mary Hamilton” that I’d learned years before from The Joan Baez Songbook (53), about a lady at court who is awaiting her execution for bearing an illegitimate son by the king.   I remembered:

                  Last night there were four Marys,

                        Tonight there’ll be but three,

                                There was Mary Beaton, and Mary Seton,

                              And Mary Carmichael, and me.

                                           

                  Mary Beton was the fictional aunt who left Woolf a legacy;  Mary Seton, the friend with whom she confided about the poverty of women;  Mary Carmichael wrote the fictional novel that Woolf dips into.  Thus, Mary Hamilton was Woolf herself.  I wondered what insights looking at the ballad might give me .  Mary Hamilton gives birth to her baby and when asked of its whereabouts, she replies:

                      I put him in a tiny boat,

                       And cast him out to sea,

                            That he might sink or he might swim,

                      But he’d never come back to me.

 

                 It struck me that she might be referring to the many anonymous women who had cast their work—like this ballad, perhaps—upon the world to live or die—the “Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them” (51), and also to women such as the Brontë sisters and George Eliot who felt that it was necessary to use male pseudonyms in order to be published.   And what about the verses:

                                     Then bye and come the King himself,

                               Looked up with a pitiful eye,

                                   “Come down, come down, Mary Hamilton,

                                  Tonight, you’ll dine with me.”

 

“Ah, hold your tongue, my sovereign liege,

                               And let your folly be

                                      For if you’d a mind to save my life,

                                      You’d never have shamed me here.”

    

                 Was this Woolf’s blaming of men for women’s state of affairs?  Her covert statement that, though her remarks were addressed to women, they were also addressed to men?  Perhaps.  The main thing, though, was that Woolf,  in every respect positioned to be enormously creative—financially secure, talented, driven, married to a sympathetic man—and indeed—having written numerous novels, critical works, and essays—was enormously creative, felt herself to be part of the community of women.  The Marys.  She struggled as we struggled.  But here I was at the Farmhouse.  I was looking forward to comparing the dinner at Sweet Briar with the dinners at Oxbridge and Fernham.  I felt quite certain I would not be dining on stringy beef and prunes.

                 As I entered the house. a woman rose and walked to the front of the living room.  She was clutching a bunch of pamphlets.  She held them up, waved them about, and began speaking to us about money, educating us about the college’s need for money, asking us to donate money.  I looked around for the beef and prunes.  Instead I saw plates piled high with filet mignon, potatoes whipped into swirls, and lovely, slender green beans.  I spotted several bottles of wine.  They would feed us lavishly in return for our promise of money.  That seemed fair, for women’s colleges needed money to educate women.  I sat down and unfolded my napkin, looking forward to lively conversation.

                 I had read with interest several articles in the newspaper in the previous weeks about debates in Virginia’s legislature concerning reparation for the enslavement of blacks in pre-Civil War days.  Some argued for apologies, some for acknowledgment, some for remuneration.  I was anxious to hear opinions on the subject.  One young woman said, “Well, I didn’t enslave anyone.  I don’t see why I should apologize.”  I pressed on.  “To me,” another said, “acknowledgment is the same as apologizing.”  “There’s no way money should be given.”  “I would feel funny if I were a black person and a white person apologized to me.”  The subject was dropped as a black woman entered the room to ask if we needed anything.  After the door had closed behind her, I asked my fellow diners how they felt about the diversity debate taking place at the college.  “Personally, I don’t think it’s fair for someone to have an advantage just because she’s black,” someone said.  “I think if there’s only one spot and I’ve earned better grades than someone else, black or white, I should get the spot,” someone else said.  Then the conversation turned to video games.

                 Afterwards I brooded as I walked past the gatehouse, remembering what Woolf said: “I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse perhaps to be locked in” (24).  I had thought her comment was a reference to women such as Jane, confined to her room in The Yellow Wallpaper, Bertha locked in the attic of Thornfield, or Helen, languishing in a mad-house in Lady Audley’s Secret.  Or real women—“married against their will, kept in one room or to one occupation” (87), or involuntarily committed to insane asylums.  Perhaps I had misunderstood.  Maybe she was referring to the Oxbridge dons who “seemed creased and crushed into shapes so singular that one was reminded of those giant crabs and crayfish who heave with difficulty across the sand of an aquarium” (8).   Men who were so bent on maintaining the status quo, on keeping the riffraff out, that they had become twisted, monstrous.

                 I was reminded of the comment President Pannell had made in the 60's about keeping “off-campus oddities” out of Sweet Briar, and Woolf’s comment that “in a hundred years...women will have ceased to be the protected sex” (41).  I spotted a security officer and thought of the e-mail I’d received from the Department of Safety:

*An escort program is in place to and from parking lots, academic buildings and dorms on campus. 

*Do not walk alone or with another person at night to the lake, entrance gate, or in dark or secluded areas of campus.

*Stay on walks and established paths and avoid walking near shrubbery. 

 

                 Don’t walk alone or with another person at night to the lake.  In other words, don’t go to the lake at all.  So unlike the grounds at Fernham, where the garden “door was left open” and “somebody...raced across the grass” in the darkness (17).   I was getting carried away.  Plenty of people raced across the grass here.  The gatehouse was largely symbolic.  But wasn’t that significant? 

                  I walked into Cochran library and saw a student I knew seated at the desk.  I told her about the dinner, the feeling I got that the students I’d talked to were completely oblivious of the inequities that existed in this country. “No—worse than oblivious. Indifferent,” I said.  She said, “But a lot of girls are here on scholarship.  They wouldn’t be able to afford to come without one.” “But they are here,” I replied.  She said, “Remember in the movie, Office Space, when pieces of  birthday cake are being passed around and Milton reaches his hand out, but someone always says, ‘no, Milton, wait your turn,’ ‘let the other people have some cake, Milton,’ ‘don’t be greedy, Milton,’ and he ends up not getting any cake at all?  Well, maybe those students are tired of letting someone else go first, always deferring to the needs of others.”  Yes, I thought, people behave in similar ways for different reasons.  Male physicians like to be called “Doctor” because they feel entitled, female physicians because they don’t.

                 Woolf, herself, might be accused of discrimination, I thought.  She reflected, when she was eating her unsatisfactory dinner at Fernham, that “coal miners doubtless were sitting down to less” (18).  She hadn’t given the coal miners a thought when she had sat down to “soles sunk in a deep dish, partridges...with all their retinue of sauces and salads”at Oxbridge (10).  She was only reminded of others’ inferior status when she was reminded of her own, and the reminder did not give her a fellow feeling.  As she looked critically at her meal, she thought of “the rumps of cattle in a muddy market...and women with string bags on Monday morning” (17-18).  She had not offered these women a place at the table. Woolf was criticized for saying that “it is one of the great advantages of being a woman that one can pass even a very fine negress without wishing to make an Englishwoman of her” (52), giving the impression that she does not consider black women to be women at all (Goldman 102). Perhaps it could be said that those who are struggling for higher status sometimes forget their fellow strugglers.  But why would a woman as brilliant, as successful as Woolf feel inferior?  

                 As I was leaving the stacks with a bunch of critical works, a book title caught my eye: Psychology of Women.  My eyes roved over the titles on the shelf: In Defense of Women by H. L. Mencken, Our Women by Arnold Bennett.  Arnold Bennett.  Wasn’t he the man that Woolf had famously feuded with over gender issues?   I thought with astonishment: Woolf may have perused these very books in the British Museum when she was considering the “conditions necessary for the creation of works of art” (25).   I pulled In Defense of Women off the shelf and opened it to page 12 of a chapter called “The Feminine Mind” and read:

      

A man thinks he is more intelligent than his wife because he can add up a column of figures more accurately, and because he understands the imbecile jargon of the stock market, and because he is able to distinguish between the ideas of rival politicians....

 

This was a strange sort of defense!  I read on:

         

One could not think of Aristotle or Beethoven multiplying 3,472,701 by 99,999 without  making a mistake, nor could one think of him remembering the range of this or that railway share for two years, or the number of ten-penny nails in a hundredweight.... And by the same token one could not imagine him expert at billiards, or at grouse-shooting, or at golf, or at any other of the idiotic games at which what are called successful men commonly divert themselves.  In his great study of British genius, Havelock Ellis found that an incapacity for such petty expertness was visible in almost all first-rate men.  They are bad at tying cravats.  They do not understand the fashionable card games.  They are puzzled by book-keeping.  They know nothing of party politics. This lack of skill at manual and mental tricks of a trivial character...is a character that men of the first class share with women of the first, second and even third classes....Nothing, indeed, could be plainer than the fact that women, as a class, are sadly deficient in the small expertness of men as a class.  One seldom, if ever, hears of them succeeding in the occupations which bring out such expertness most lavishly—for example, tuning pianos, repairing clocks, practicing law, painting portraits, keeping books, or managing factories—despite the circumstance that the great majority of such occupations are well within their physical powers, and that few of them offer any very formidable social barriers to female entrance.  There is no external reason why women shouldn’t succeed as operative surgeons; the way is wide open, the rewards are large, and there is a special demand for them on grounds of modesty.  Nevertheless, not many women graduates in medicine undertake surgery and it is rare for one of them to make a success of it....The cause thereof...is not external, but internal.

 

           My head was reeling.  Women were geniuses but they couldn’t add or distinguish between politicians?  The way was clear for them in 1918 to become surgeons, but they didn’t because they had no manual dexterity?    I turned to Arnold Bennett’s Our Women, published in 1920, and opened to page 112 of the chapter “Are Men Superior to Women?” and read:

Nevertheless one must seize and proclaim the truth again.  And the truth is that intellectually and creatively man is the superior of woman, and that in the region of creative intellect there are things which men almost habitually do but which women have not done and give practically no sign of ever being able to do.... In creation, in synthesis, in criticism, in pure intellect women, even the most exceptional and the most favoured, have never approached the   accomplishment of men.  It is not a question of a slight difference, as for example the difference between the relative proportionate sizes of the male and the female brain — it is a question of an overwhelming and constitutional difference, a difference which stupendously remains after every allowance has been made for inequality of opportunity....The stereotyped reply to these regrettable platitudes is that only lately have women “had a chance,” and that when the fruits of education and liberty have ripened women will rival men in all branches of creative and intellectual activity.  Such a reply — I say it with trembling — is the reply of a partisan. For ages women have had every opportunity that education can furnish to shine creatively...conditions exactly similar to the conditions for males.

                                                                     

               All this would have been interesting, I thought, to Julia Morgan, whom I’d read about recently while browsing on the website of Women in Architecture.  In 1894, Morgan set off for Paris to attend l’Ecole des Beaux Arts.  The administration, however, had never conceived of admitting women so Morgan was rejected.  For the next two years, she participated in prestigious competitions in Paris and won most of them.  In 1898, l’Ecole des Beaux Arts finally admitted her and she became the first woman to be admitted to the Ecole’s architecture program.  So much for Bennett’s ages, I thought.

                And what of Woolf’s response?  When she recalled Professor von X’s “statement about the mental, moral, and physical inferiority of women,” she said, “My heart had leapt.  My cheeks had burnt.  I had flushed with anger” (32).  When she imagines Professor von X as “heavily built,” with a “great jowl” and “very small eyes,” and goes on to wonder if he’d “been laughed at...in his cradle by a pretty girl, the reader is asked to laugh at this comical picture, this ridiculous figure of fun.  Even though Woolf uses some form of the word “anger” twenty-nine times in the three pages following  (32-34), it is difficult to take her anger at Professor von X seriously, because of her comic treatment.  To read the actual words of Woolf’s male contemporaries was an entirely different experience.  These were not cranks speaking to a small audience of malcontents.  These were prominent, well thought of, widely read men—so widely read that a small women’s college an ocean away had purchased their books for its library.  Published in 1918, Mencken’s book went into three printings.  It was revised in 1922.  The revision was into its second printing when it was bought by the librarian of Sweet Briar and placed on the shelf.   There it had remained for 87 years.  I wondered how long it had been since anyone else had looked at it.   

     I could see very clearly now why Woolf had “flushed with anger.”  Yet she chose to put forth her arguments coolly and with composure.   She seems to be speaking directly to Arnold Bennett when she says, “when a subject is highly controversial—and any question about sex is that—one cannot hope to tell the truth.  One can only show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does hold.  One can only give one’s audience the chance of drawing their own conclusions as they observe the limitations, the prejudices, the idiosyncrasies of the speaker” (4).  Here was another reason, I thought, that Woolf had chosen to be a fictional character in A Room of One’s Own.  “Fiction here is likely to contain more truth than fact” (4), she says, cleverly throwing Bennett’s words back in his face, so to speak, and presenting a moving target against which he was helpless, like her fish who “darted and sank, and flashed hither and thither” (5).  She chose also to “laugh, without bitterness, at the vanities—say rather at the peculiarities, for it is a less offensive word—of the other sex” (94).  Everyone did not agree with Woolf’s method, I remembered.  I thumbed through a book in the pile beside me:  “Critics, most famously Elaine Showalter and Adrienne Rich in the late 1970's, have complained that the elaborate narrative apparatus and ‘strenuous charm’ of A Room of One’s Own deliberately evades confrontation.  Rather than inspire women, the essay perpetuates inhibitions against female self-expression, particularly against female anger.  In this view Woolf is guilty of maintaining a ladylike image in order to please men and protect herself when she should have expressed herself more directly and forcefully” (Rosenman, 20).  I thought of Sojourner Truth and went upstairs to look on the internet for her famous speech.  She spoke at the Women’s Convention in Akron, Ohio in 1851:

     Well, children, where there is so much racket there must be something out of kilter.  I think that ‘twixt the negroes of the South and the women at the North, all talking about rights, the white men will be in a fix pretty soon.  But what’s all this here talking about? That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere.   Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place!  And ain’t I a woman?  Look at me!  Look at my arm!  I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me!  And ain’t I a woman?  I could work as much and eat as much as a man — when I could get it — and bear the lash as well! 
     And ain’t I a woman? 
     I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me? 
     And ain’t I a woman?     Then they talk about this thing in the head; what’s this they call it? [Member of audience whispers, “intellect.”] That’s it, honey. 
     What’s that got to do with women’s rights or negroes’ rights?  If my cup won’t hold but a pint, and yours holds a quart, wouldn’t you be mean not to let me have my little half measure full? Then that little man in black there, he says women can’t have as much rights as men, ‘cause Christ wasn’t a woman! 
     Where did your Christ come from?  Where did your Christ come from?  From God and a woman!  Man had nothing to do with Him.     If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women together ought to be able to turn it back, and get it right side up again!  And now they is asking to do it, the men better let them.

          

    Truth’s anger is naked, undisguised, while Woolf seems to tiptoe around it at times.  She  is critical of Charlotte Brontë for Jane Eyre’s heated protestation that “‘women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do...It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex’” (72). Woolf says that “the woman who wrote those pages had more genius in her than Jane Austen...[but] her books will be deformed and twisted.  She will write in a rage where she should write calmly.  She will write foolishly where she should write wisely” (73). Wasn’t it interesting, though, I thought, that Woolf chose to include Jane’s entire speech and go on to quote Jane’s saying, ‘when thus alone I not unfrequently heard Grace Poole’s laugh...,’” cleverly juxtaposing the condemnation of women’s striving with madness (Rosenman 108). How to explain that?  No, I couldn’t completely agree with Showalter and Rich.  Perhaps in their own anger they were unable to imagine a different response.  Different times call for different methods, and I believed there was method in Woolf’s coolness.                                                           

    Woolf, Truth, and Brontë all employed fiction to express what they believed, each in her own way.  Truth was not the ignorant, downtrodden slave (though she had once been)  that she portrayed herself to be in 1851.  Woolf, though she “had no training in a university” (28), was not uneducated.  Brontë used Jane to express to the world what she couldn’t express herself.  Woolf chose exactly the right method and tone to use against men such as Bennett, whose response to a polemic about equality would certainly have been scornful.  

                 Walking back to the stacks, I reflected that one of Woolf’s fictions was that she was not angry or, rather, she confines her anger in the text in order to demonstrate its crippling effects.  She didn’t want to anger women. She wanted to inspire them—to write, to paint, to create in whatever way they wished.   Written in anger their work would be “deformed and twisted,” she thought,  like the work of the fictional Professor von X and the only too real Bennett and Mencken.  As Sojourner Truth had said, “I think that ‘twixt the negroes of the South and the women of the North, all talking about rights, the white men will be in a fix pretty soon.”  Or as Woolf said, “when one is challenged, even by a few women in black bonnets, one retaliates, if one has never been challenged before, rather excessively” (103).  Woolf didn’t want to anger men, either—to retaliate excessively, as they had done.  A Room of One’s Own was written in a sort of code, I thought.  “What strikes one most about the early reviews is how thoroughly the tone and design baffled its first reviewers.  Missing its anger and its trenchant irony, most reviewers praised its inoffensive charm”(Rosenman 15).  Woolf had cleverly hidden everything in plain view.

                  I had had enough of the “facts” and “truths” of early twentieth-century men for one evening, but I was curious to read a woman’s view. I took a book called  The Woman’s Side by Clemence Dane from the shelf.  When I looked inside I saw that it had been published in 1927.   Someone had helpfully written in pencil beside Clemence Dane, “pseudonym for Winifred Ashton.”  I turned hopefully to the chapter called “The Feminine of Genius” (164): 

To dispute over sex equality is...belated.... Arguments...all used up...but one—‘There has never been a woman Shakespeare!’  One always welcomed the argument...extraordinarily interesting...over the question of what genius is, of how it shows itself in man and how it shows itself in woman.     The anti-suffragist was, of course, perfectly correct as far as he went.  There never has been a woman Shakespeare...never...never....

But where was the feminine of genius?  Oh, here:

the feminine of genius—the sisters and equals—where are they?  Woman Homer?  No. A woman Beethoven? She has yet to appear among us.  A woman Shakespeare?  When will she come?

 

Yes, when will she, Ms. Ashton?  Oh, wait.  Here: 

the argument of the feminist has always been that women, potentially as capable of genius as men, have only not produced Hamlets and Parthenons because they have been in the past invariably deprived of education and opportunity.

 

Just what Woolf said!  Good for you, Winifred.

 

I don’t think it’s true.  I don’t believe in the ‘mute, inglorious Milton’ theory at all.

 

Really!

Women have shown exalted mental power in every department of life except the creative arts...no Shakespeare!  No Michael Angelo!  No Blake!

Must we go over this ground again? 

I do not believe that any work of genius...has been produced by one human creature without another human creature being concerned in the act of creation.

 

                  My ears perked up, remembering Woolf’s argument in this vein, how she’d said that “masterpieces are not single and solitary births....Jane Austen should have laid a wreath upon the grave of Fanny Burney,” etc.  Could Woolf have appropriated the idea for her own use,  I wondered.

A play, a poem...must have parents.... Actual relationship matters little.... It is at the light of some human creature’s eye that the unproved artist lights his torch.  And then—?  Why, it’s over the hills and as far away as his genius can run!  If he is a supreme genius he’ll want no help to keep it alight.  But to light it he has had to turn to another:  nine times out of ten that other is a woman.... And that power I call the feminine of genius, for it is the unique quality, the supreme something, out of which, when it meets and marries genius in a man, the work of art is born.

She did not believe, then, in Judith Shakespeare, the sister of William that Woolf had so lovingly drawn—a girl as talented, as brilliant, as passionate as her brother, but doomed for lack of opportunity—a girl drawn in response, evidently, to a much asked question: “Why, if women are as creative as men, was there no female Shakespeare?”  Nor did Ms. Ashton believe in the flesh and blood woman, Camille Claudel, whose life mirrored Judith’s so uncannily.  (Back upstairs to the computer I went.)  I’d seen her beautiful sculptures in the Museum for Women in the Arts.  In 1882 at the age of 18, I read on Wikipedia and the MWA website, Claudel, a Frenchwoman, barred from entrance to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, studied with sculptor Alfred Boucher.  Around 1884, she started working in Auguste Rodin’s workshop.  She became pregnant by Rodin, but he refused to end his relationship with another woman, and it was believed by many that she had an abortion, after which she sank into a deep depression  She began exhibiting her work in 1903 at the Salon des Artistes francais to rave reviews.  The famous art critic, Octave Mirbeau,  wrote that she was “A revolt against nature: a woman genius.”   But in 1905, she began accusing Rodin of stealing her ideas, and destroyed much of her work.  She was subsequently involuntarily committed to a psychiatric institution.  Some historians speculate that her brother, also an artist, felt overshadowed by her strength in art and wanted her out of the way.  Doctors tried to convince the family that she need not be in the institution, but still they kept her there.  Her mother forbade her to receive mail from anyone but her brother. She died in 1943, having spent the last 30 years of her life in a mental institution.

                 It was getting late, so I made my way to the parking lot to get my car and head back to Charlottesville.  As I drove I thought about Woolf’s saying that no work of art is the creation of one person, that “a woman writing thinks back through her mothers” (101).  I reflected, though, that women think back through Clemence Dane as well as Jane Austen.  Behind every great man there is a woman.  I thought of Woolf’s reading the book by the male author, how “the shadow of Alan obliterated Phoebe.”  I remembered T.S. Eliot’s review of Katherine Mansfield’s Bliss: “the story is limited...the material is limited...it is what I believe would be called feminine” (Mansfield 343).  And criticism of Woolf’s work: “Woolf is a ‘sterile...refined and persnickety’ writer who can’t figure out ‘what the devil to write about.’ Virginia publishes ‘bloodless’ novels ‘approaching mush’” (Simons 75).   It didn’t really matter, then, how much money a person had, or what a lovely quiet room, if Charles Tansley was always “whispering in one’s ear ‘Women can’t write, Women can’t paint” (75).  “Every man knows in his heart, and every woman knows in her heart” that women are inferior.  No.  Men knew in their heads and they put it in women’s heads.  Woolf was wrong, I thought, when she said that “a lock on the door [of the room] means the power to think for oneself”(110), for one could not lock out what was already in: the voices of generations of men, and women, saying, “You Can’t.” 

                 I pulled into my driveway and, loading my arms with books, got out of the car and went into the house.  My husband, whom I’d never heard make a sexist remark in the 30 years I’d known him, who’d done nothing but encourage me, asked how my day had been.  I replied curtly, “fine,” and went upstairs to my room.  I had no heart for working on my paper.  I remembered Woolf’s saying, “surely it is time that the effect of discouragement upon the mind of the artist should be measured” (54).  I gloomily turned to the table of contents of The Best American Short Stories of the Century, thinking to find a story to read.  I found myself counting the number of stories by men: 29, and the number by women: 25.  Not bad.  But these stories were chosen all at once, I reflected, and one of the editors was a woman.  How had women fared at literary prizes?  I googled the Pulitzer Prize for Literature.  Since 1918, 53 had been awarded to men, 27 to women.  The National Book Award for Fiction?  47 to men, 16 to women.  The Booker Prize?  25 men, 11women.  The Caldecott?  40, 24.   More than half of the women who had won The National Book Award were unmarried or divorced, only half had children.  “Making a fortune and bearing thirteen children—no human being could stand it” (22). Woolf had said.  I thought of my daughter, aged 26, who was expected to work, marry, have two or three children, do most of the housework, volunteer—how would she ever, “without enough of those desirable things, time, money and idleness”(98),  have time to write fiction or draw or play music?  I thought of Sylvia Plath on a cold, gray February day, abandoned by her husband, with two small children,  putting her head in the oven.  Enough, I thought.

                 I took Brenda Ueland’s, If You Want to Write, off the shelf.  Written in 1938, it still had the power to cheer and inspire.  I opened it at random to page x and read:

And then later in our splendid summer schools for writing at Yale and Colorado and everywhere, the procedure is for an abject pupil to timidly read his work aloud to all the others.  And then, pounce!  They riddle him with criticisms, fussy-mussy corrections.  “I’d put the second paragraph first.....I don’t like the word ‘expertise’....Those two adjectives are too close together.”

  And so on.

 

                 “Enough,” I said aloud, and went to bed.

 

 

                  The next morning I woke up feeling refreshed.  I apologized to my husband for the previous night’s rudeness and then recounted a dream: “A giant young woman—twice my height—was standing over me, pointing to a story I had written, saying, ‘I’m very disappointed with this effort!’”  I laughed and then asked, “do you ever get mad when critics say mean things about male authors?”  “Never,” he said.  No, I thought, only outsiders do that.  There’s no National Organization for the Advancement of White Men, no League of White Male Voters.  No need for them. 

                 I went upstairs with a cup of tea and sat in my comfy little chair, looking out the small, high window at the sky and the pine tree full of birds.  I turned to my book case, and ran my eyes over the titles.  My favorite children’s books were on the top shelf: The Witch of Blackbird Pond, The Secret Garden, An Episode of Sparrows, A Little Princess, Understood Betsy, Anne of Green Gables—all written by women.  Jane Eyre and Ellen Foster were underneath.  I’d read them countless times as a child and as an adult.  I thought, not for the first time, that all the heroines were orphans.  I had often wondered why.  I had a hunch now that it was because when one is an orphan, the transmission of conventional wisdom is interrupted, and a girl is allowed, or rather forced, to think for herself, to, as Woolf says, “see human beings not always in their relation to each other but in relation to reality; and the sky, too, and the trees or whatever it may be, in themselves”(118).  I remembered that Virginia Woolf had felt free after her parents’ deaths and that their voices had quieted when To the Lighthouse was finished.  I thought about Katherine Mansfield’s moving a world away from her birthplace, how it seemed necessary to move away and yet remember.   I took out Mansfield’s Selected Stories and read my favorite parts of “At the Bay” again: Alice’s visit to Mrs. Stubbs, the children’s card game, and then, “the day had faded; the gorgeous sunset had blazed and died.  And now the quick dark came racing over the sea, over the sand-hills, up the paddock.  You were frightened to look in the corners of the washhouse, and yet you had to look with all your might.  And somewhere, far away, grandma was lighting a lamp.  The blinds were being pulled down; the kitchen fire leapt in the tins on the mantelpiece” (271).

                 Woolf said, “Life for both sexes is arduous, difficult, a perpetual struggle.  It calls for gigantic courage and strength.  More than anything, it calls for confidence in oneself.  Without self-confidence we are as babes in the cradle” (35).  I took up Brenda Ueland again: “Everybody is original, if he tells the truth, if he speaks from himself.  So remember these two things: you are talented and you are original.  Be sure of that.  I say this because self-trust is one of the very most important things in writing” (5).

                     

For me, a long...walk helps.  And one must go alone and every day.... And how do these creative thoughts come?  They come in a slow way.  It is the little bomb of revelation bursting inside you.  I...never took a long, solitary walk without some of these silent, little inward bombs bursting  quietly: ‘I see.  I understand that now!’ and a feeling of happiness. (Ueland 45)

                 I went downstairs and put on my sweater and sneakers and walked out into the fall morning.  The trees had been late in turning and were all the more beautiful for it, putting on a brilliant show before retiring for the winter.  When I reached the bottom of the driveway, I headed down the rutted road beyond the “End of State Maintenance” sign.  I found myself humming a tune and realized it was “Jailhouse Blues”:

Thirty days in jail with my back turned to the wall, to the wall,

      Thirty days in jail with my back turned to the wall,

               Listen here, Mr. Jail-keeper, put another gal in my stall.

                        

Bessie Smith.  Anything would be endurable if another woman were there to share it.  Dormitories. Menstrual huts. The Tiv women of Nigeria weeding together in their gardens and extemporizing obscene songs about men.  No men allowed.  Restriction becomes liberation.  The Fernham women.  Chloe liked Olivia.  Woolf didn’t just take women out of the house; she showed them fleeing together, holding hands.  Why did Woolf doubt Mary Carmichael?  Why did she think it would be another hundred years before the “great” book came?  Because of the impediments?  They would be too “sex-conscious?”    Or because she really believed that most of women’s work was inferior?  It was puzzling.  What did she say?—“Are not reviews of current literature a perpetual illustration of difficulty of judgment?  ‘This great book,’ ‘this worthless book,’ the same is called by both names.  Praise and blame alike mean nothing” (110).  Who is qualified to say whether a work of art is great or whether something is a work of art, I wondered?  Much of women’s art—quilting, embroidery, knitting—had been denigrated, consigned to the category of “craft.”   

                 I picked up an acorn.  December book club was at my house.  We were reading To the Lighthouse.  I could make Boeuf en Daube!  And a Buche de Noel!  My sister, Susan, probably had our grandmother’s recipe.  Dried pineapple slices would make perfect lichens; marshmallows could be molded into tiny mushrooms.  I could use coffee beans for deer droppings.  Shaved chocolate for bark.  I could  put lines from the book on narrow pieces of paper, roll them, and put them inside carved-out acorns, then put the caps back on, and spread them around the platter for the women to choose at random and read aloud. 

                 The sky had turned gray and it was beginning to mist.  I turned around and hurried back home, flung off my sweater and shoes and rushed upstairs.  I must begin my paper, I thought, turning to the final page of A Room of One’s Own:    

I told you in the course of this paper that Shakespeare had a sister; but do not look for her in Sir Sidney Lee’s life of the poet.  She died young—alas, she never wrote a word.  She lies buried where the omnibuses now stop, opposite the Elephant and Castle.  Now my belief is that this poet who never wrote a word and was buried at the crossroads still lives.  She lives in you and in me, and in many other women who are not here tonight, for they are washing up the dishes and putting the children to bed.  But she lives; for great poets do not die; they are continuing presences; they need only the opportunity to walk among us in the flesh.  This opportunity, as I think, it is now coming within your power to give her.  For my belief is that...if we have the habit of freedom and courage to write exactly what we think; if we escape a little from the common sitting-room and see human beings not always in their relation to each other but in relation to reality; if we face the fact, for it is a fact, that there is no arm to cling to, but that we go alone...then the opportunity will come and the dead poet who was Shakespeare’s sister will put on the body which she has so often laid down.  Drawing her life from the lives of the unknown who were her forerunners, as her brother did before her, she will be born.  As for her coming without that preparation, without that effort on our part, without that determination that when she is born again she shall find it possible to live and write her poetry, that we cannot expect. For that would be impossible.  But I maintain that she would come if we worked for her, and that so to work, even in poverty and obscurity, is worth while.

                 Then I began to type: “I sat dawdling in a chair in front of Fletcher recently...”, thinking with great satisfaction, though not very kindly, that almost no one reads Arnold Bennett or H. L. Mencken any more, and who has ever heard of Clemence Dane? 

 

___________________________________________

 

Works Cited

 

 

Bennett, Arnold. Our Women. New York: George H. Doran, 1920. Bennett's book was a response to the social changes that were the result of the changes in legal status of British women in the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, heating up the "battle of the sexes." My intent was to show the thrust of this response and how it may have affected Virginia Woolf.

 

            Braddon, Mary Elizabeth. Lady Audley's Secret. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Braddon's book is the story of a woman who attempts to rise above her prescribed station in life and the consequences of her attempt. My intent was to show that women were often thrown in to "rooms" that were the antithesis of what Virginia Woolf had in mind when she wrote A Room of One's Own.

 

            Bronte, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973. Bronte uses the character of Jane Eyre to voice women's greater need for autonomy. My intent was to show that Virginia Woolf was conflicted about the use of anger in effecting greater freedome for women.

 

            "Camille Claudel." National Museum for Women in the Arts. 2007 http://www.nmwa..org/Collection/profile.asp?LinkID=147. Biographical data about a prodigiously talented woman sculptor. My intent was to show that real women suffered similar fates to that of Virginia Woolf's fictional Judith Shakespeare.

 

            "Camille Claudel." Wikipedia. Nov. 2007 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camille_Claudel. See "Camille Claudel" above.

 

            Dane, Clemence. The Women's Side. New York: George H. Doran, 1927. A woman's response to the changes wrought by women's new freedom in the early 20th century. My intent was to show that all women do not share the same responses, and that some women reflected men's views.

 

            Gilman, Dorothy Perkins. "The Yellow Wallpaper." Gilman's story is about a woman driven mad by restrictions imposed upon her by a "well-meaning" husband. Hers is another story of the perversion of the concept of Wolf's "room of one's own."

 

            Goldman, Jane. The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf.New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. General volume on everything from Woolf's personal life to criticism of her work. My intent was to show some of the unconscious classism/racism of Virginia Woolf.

 

            The Joan Baez Songbook.  Ed. Maynard Solomon. New York: Ryerson, 1971. Contains the ballad collected by Francis Child, "Mary Hamilton," which figures in A Room of One's Own. My intent was to show that this song was not chosen at random.

 

            "Julia Morgan." Women in Architecture. 14 May 204. http://www2.arch.uiuc.edu/organizations/wia/archtspot1/morganjulia.html. Biographical information on a prominent female architect in the late 19th century. My intent was to refute H.L. Meneken's assertion that women had historically enjoyed the same educational opportunities as men.

 

            Mansfield, Katherine. Katherine Mansfield's Selected Stories. Ed. Vincent O'Sullivan. New York: Norton, 2006. My intent was to illustrate some of the male criticism of women's work and its effect on women.

 

            Meneken, H.L. In Defense of Women. New York: Knopf, 1922. Meneken's book might be called a response to male response to advances made by women. My intent was to show how defense an be as damming as opposition and also to show, as with Bennett, what Virginia Woolf was up against.

 

            Rosenman, Ellen Bayuk. A Room of One's Own: Women Writers and the Politics of Creativity. New York: Twayne, 1995. Critical work that offers many important insights into all aspects of Woolf's A Room of One's Own. My intention was to show some conflicts within Woolf's book. I had the insights I used myself and Rosenman corroborated them.

 

            Simons, Ilana. A Life of One's Own. New York: Penguin, 2007. this is a light book on the life of Virginia Woolf that offers few insights to the serious Woolf reader. My intent was to give examples of male criticism of Woolf's work to demonstrate, again, what she was up against, and how it might provide a compelling reason for the writing of A Room of One's Own.

 

            Truth, Sojourner. "Ain't I a Woman." ed. Paul Halsell. Aug 1997. http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/sotruth-woman.html. This was a speech given by Truth to a women's convention in Akron in 1851. My intent was to show that anger can be an effective tool for creating change.

 

            Ueland, Brenda. If You Want to Write. St. Paul: Graywolf, 1987. This book, orginially published in 1938, was written to inspire people to be creative. My intent was to show how encouragement can affect creativity.

 

            Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One's Own. New York and Burlingame: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc. 1957. The compilation of two lectures given in Newnham and Girton collecges to inspire and encourage the women students to use their creativity, and to point out the obstacles that stand in their way.

 

            Woolf, Virginia. To The Lighthouse. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc 1955. This novel illustrates, among other things, the difficulties of the relations between men and women. My intent was to show how men undermine women's creativity.