Remembering Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)

Today, I gave a presentation on Virginia Woolf and Helene Cixous. The following is what I wrote in response to Woolf's essay "Professions of Women" and Chapter 5 from "A Room of One's Own". Hope you all like:

* * *

I would be lying if I said that there was no problem, on my behalf, in accepting Woolf as rhetor. After all, isn’t the academic training in literary studies all about categorizing according to time, gender/sex and genre? What does Woolf have to contribute to the rhetorical tradition and does she speak/write differently within a rhetorical context that she would a literary one? “Professions for Women” and “A Room of One’s Own”—in unison with “The Laugh of the Medusa” are important contributions to the rhetorical tradition because they demonstrate the way in which the line between rhetoric and poetics are blurred. Woolf exemplifies this idea in Chapter 5 of “A Room of One’s Own,” which presents Woolf’s deliberation about Mary Carmichael and the way in which Carmichael has the freedom to choose any situation based on creativity. However, as Woolf states, “she [Carmichael] must convince me that she believes it to be a situation; and then when she has made it she must face it. She must jump. And, determined to do my duty by her as reader as if she would do her duty by me as writer…” (1263). There is a relation here that can elicit Bakhtin’s examination of dialogue involving the “negotiation of meaning” between author and reader. However, I choose to see Woolf as blurring the line between author and reader in the way in which she is both reading and writing Carmichael, who in turn, has written herself through her text—whether it be novel, essay or political manifesto (Why should there be a difference?). Another important contribution by Woolf is her precise interrogation and examination of how women’s exclusion from certain experiences affected their writing (as in the case of Bronte and Eliot). Woolf’s “Women and Fiction,” much like Cixous’ “The Laugh of the Medusa” is specific in the way it proposes hope for women and writing to be strengthened and valued, especially as an art that persuades audiences to rethink, rewrite and transform.

* * *