Virginia Woolfs Vision Essay Research Paper Virginia — страница 2

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enhances audience identification with her narrator, and invites women to join her search for “the true nature of women and the true nature of fiction” (4). Woolf’s narrator, “Mary,” begins the quest for “the pure fluid, the essential oil of truth” (25) in the British Museum, the very bastions of male literary tradition. Rosenman suggests that Woolf is laying the foundation of a female tradition by allowing Mary to travel “through a series of alien rooms,” including the British Museum and ‘the common sitting room,’ “to a room of her own” (157). Mary’s “stupefaction, wonder and bewilderment” (Woolf 26) at the plethora of contradictory, inaccurate, oven trivial volumes about women by men whose only qualification is “that they are not wmen” (27)

awakens the reader to this travesty without directly revealing Woolf’s personal feelings of fury and humiliation. Alex Zwerdling notes that her “awareness of the possibly hostile audience strongly affects the tone of the essay,” and that she replaces “anger” with “irony” and “sarcasm” with “charm” (225). Woolf uses Mary’s voice to ruefully inform the reader that “one cannot find truth on the shelves of the British Museum or extract it from the biased opinions of others” (Jones 236). Woolf’s narrator concludes that in spite of their dominant position in society, men are angry and afraid of losing their positions of power. She remarks that women “have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic . . . power of reflecting the

figure of man at twice its natural size” (35). Woolf emphasizes that men have declared women inferior, not because women are lesser human beings, but because men lack the confidence to consider them as equals. Maggie Humm believes that both sexes are “misrepresented by this flawed reflection” (126), and that “the continuing tradition of literary culture . . . uses male norms to exclude or undervalue female writing and scholarship” (8). John Burt describes Woolf’s “theory of the origin of the subjection of women” as the “creation of weakness searching for succor, not of strength searching for a victim” (193). This flawed system is responsible for creating a society that not only has suffered the subjugation of half its citizens, but also the inestimable absence

of countless feminine literary masterpieces. Woolf underscores the loss of Britain’s female scholarship when she addresses the “perennial puzzle [of] why no woman wrote a word of that extraordinary literature” (41). She explains that fiction is “attached to life at all four cornersa (41), and is “the work of suffering human beings [who] are attached to grossly material things” (42). The women who inhabited Britain’s past lived in physical, mental, and social conditions that prohibited the writing of great literature. Woolf asserts that “like men, women need time, space, financial, security, education, support and validation from others, and stamina in order to write well” (Stimpson 2). While none of these amenities were even remotely available to the women in

British history, Woolf notes that the women portrayed in literature “did not seem wanting in personality and character” (43). She emphasizes this literary paradox: Imaginatively she is of the highest importance; practically she is completely insignificant. She pervades poetry from cover to cover; she is all but absent from history . . . . Some of the most inspired words, some of the most profound thoughts in literature fall from her lips; in real life she could hardly read, could scarcely spell, and was the property of her husband. (43-44) Woolf paints a clear portrait of society’s contradictory vision of women. By again using the word ‘insignificant,’ she recalls the image of ‘everywoman’ and reinforces reader identification with the plight of women, both past and

present. By reminding them that in many ways their society differs little from that of the historical woman, she encourages the women of her generation to avoid settling for a second-class education and the right to vote. In spite of the wealth of misinformation published about women, there is only a smattering of historical facts available to aid in building a feminine tradition. Peggy Kamuf calls this dilemma “the locked room of history” (9). Woolf is convinced that without a historical tradition, future generations of women will lack the foundation on which to build their literary culture. She writes that “masterpieces are . . . the outcome of many years of thinking in common . . . so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice” (65). Woolf’s solution