I wanted to go ahead and post once more on this, since we're moving on after Thursday; but his has become, quite simply, my favorite work that I've read by her, even above Orlando, which I had, up to that point, had claimed the Number 1 spot. But this is just so heartfelt, so passionate, so correct, even under her attempts to disguise it for the sake of reception and consideration, that you just can't help but get caught up in the pathos. There are several points that I want to get to here, on a variety of subjects, scattered throughout the chapters.
First, the idea expressed in the last paragraph of chapter 3, page .56: "All desire to protest, to preach, to proclaim an injury, to pay off a score, to make the world witness of some hardship or grievance was fired out of him [Shakespeare] and consumed. Therefore his poetry flows free and unimpeded. If ever a human being got his work expressed completely, it was Shakespeare." The context of this "main idea" quote is in the section regarding how people of genius mind most what was said of them, even though they shouldn't. I think Woolf is referring to many things in this quote/section, the first, most obvious of which is self-censorship. She's sort of taking a jab at herself in this manner--it's a bit of a despondent, dreary self-admission that despite the profundity, despite the pertinence, and despite the import of what she is saying, she ultimately cannot write it down (at this point, anyway) and hope to be taken seriously; she has to consider the current and future opinions held of her. She knows if she takes the gloves off here, then most people will disregard her, no matter what she says, in the future, especially in context of the controversiality of the subject matter. However, there's another layer to the quote, which is a motif of (and pardon the word choice, it's late and my I.Q. is plummeting by the second)--but I think the best word would be applicability--which in its iteration I am regarding was coined by JRR Tolkein. See, without Shakespeare having a clear goal in his mind of trying to get something accomplished with his writing--that is, a score to settle, a grievance, a hardship, etc...then his work contains a vaccum, exists, more a less, in a dimension unfettered by the grimy ropes of human concerns. We can't narrow the impact of Shakespeare's work, we can't dismiss it as a satire against this portion of society or a railing against that (as with Ben Jonson), we can't nail it down and make it meaningless. Rather, it can say anything and everything we want, and nothing we want. It cannot be disregarded, it cannot be ignored, it must always, always, be taken into consideration, because whatever we are arguing is of the universal, and Shakespeare, according to Woolf, is the true universal: applicable to any and everything because, due to both his craft and our lack of information about him, he has no apparent axe to grind. And that gives him a freedom rarely experienced by writers of any sort, much less female writers trying to advocate an impossible position.
Another portion that got me thinking was on or about pg. 70--she's talking about women being, like, sequestered pretty much, in their houses, unable to experience the world at large. This appealed to me because of the notion of what a writer is, and how it's difficult for a writer to exist in isolation. A writer must be detached, but interred, completely caught up in the workings of society, and yet, somehow, simultaneously, separate, if the writer ever hopes to transcribe something that could be labeled as truth. It's interesting to think, then, how hard it was for women to become writers simply due to this fact: that they couldn't experience anything. Even the greats like Austen and the Brontes, as Woolf says, were unable to really expand their writerly visions beyond the bounds of the gardens and the kitchen table. Maybe Charlotte would have written War and Peace first if she'd been allowed to tour the battlegrounds of the hundred year's war. It makes it an interesting prospect: if Emily had been allowed to fully experience life and train on it her sharp, keen writerly eye, how different would Wuthering Heights have been? How different Jane Eyre? Or Pride and Prejudice? Would they have existed at all? Would there have been more novels by them, on a veritable host of subjects, themes, and characterizations?
A little related is page 73: "This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing room." I couldn't help but remember Nick Greene, our old friend from Orlando (with his cameo here, of course), and his evaluations of what constitutes good lit and bad lit. What's REALLY crazy is that this idea has not entirely disappeared in literature today--it's been effaced quite a bit, and it's very hidden, but if you look hard enough, it's still there--just very subtle. One of my mother's favorite romance authors has a blog which has a quote I think pertains to this. There was a discussion of why romance is so vehemently marginalized as a genre in literature,and the author person said something like:
"If the guy stumbled in the door with a fifth of Jack, beats his wife to a pulp, then vomits his guts and and collapses among the puke, whiskey and broken glass shards, it's literature. But if a guy loves a woman, sleeps with her, brings her to climax and then holds her tightly afterwards, it's romance? WTF?" (WTF added by me). But you can still see the masculine/feminine dichotomy in this, unfortunately very real, trope: manly man subjugates woman, quaffs strong liquor, displays over-blown feats of power and strength, collapses because of the internal tortures ripping his soul. Wussy man shows respect to a woman and treats her as equal in bedroom--no person other than a woman would want wussy man. Must be romance.
Like I said, it's very subtle, very understated, but the opposition is, in fact, still a reality. And that really goes nuts when you talk about pathos...we had this...intense discussion in a class I won't name the other day about a book I won't name wherein the book was being criticized for being--beach-reading. Horrors. Why was the book beach reading? Because it was too much pathos, not enough logos, not enough reason and logic. It wasn't intellectual enough. It wasn't stuffy enough. It wasn't...dare I say it...masculine, enough. The problem here was not simply that the book was considered beach reading simply because it had a lot of emotion, but that it was considered beneath the intellectual auspices of the class because of it....now I'm going off a little here, so I think I need to elaborate, that in our society, classically, emotion=female, reason=male. Reason>emotion, thus establishing a facet of our beloved hierarchies. What made this so infuriating was the fact that, in the English major, which is supposed to be breaking down hierarchies, there is a male/female hierarchy that still exists that is so cut and dried and assumed that most people don't even realize it's there. And that is the marginaliztion of certain types of reading simply because they exhibit too much emotion. Most of the class bought into it, male, female, no matter (that in itself could compose a rather circumspective essay). The point, to bring it to a close, is that in our world the dichotomy Woolf mentions is still there, that Nick Greene is still very much alive, and that, perhaps most frightening of all, it's present in the very bastions where it is supposedly being broken down.
I earmarked pg. 80 because it's hilarious. There's really not much to say about it: it speaks for itself: "I turned the page and read...I am sorry to break off so abruptly. Are there no men present? Do you promise me that behind that red curtain over the the figure of Sir Chartres Biron is not concealed? We are all women, you assure me? Then I may tell you that the very next words I read were these--'Chloe liked Olivia...." Do not start. Do not brush. Let us admit in the privacy of our own society that these things sometimes happen. Sometimes women do like women."
lulz.
pg. 97 offers Woolf's idea of the perfect writer's mind, which I thought was interesting. I don't necessarily buy into the whole male/female mind thing, but I do understand what she is saying. And male/female notwithstanding, it doesn't do any writer good to deny a portion of himself, whether male/female or not. Writing is about truth, in its essence, which does not happen under a guise of self-denial. You have to be balanced within yourself, understand yourself, because otherwise how could you even attempt to comprehend the myriad facts of the human soul? So the idea of an androgynous mind is appealing here, not the least of which because such a mind would, as mentioned above, have more of a panoramic view than a mind cut in two and focused on one half.
Finally, to sum up this dissertation, I would like to focus on the last couple of pages. We discussed Woolf's anger last class, and how she had to tone it down for reasons elucidated above. But, my lord, it seeps through one these last two pages...less rage, though, more scolding. I do like how she ends with a "peroration" which, instead of being directed at how bad the men have been, chides the women on how negligent they have been. She's not buying their excuses. She's not coddling their whining. She's not accepting their protestations. And, what I like most of all, she's not oblivious to the reality of the situation. Far too often we see people be hypocrites and intentionally not see what has been done in order to harp on what's not been done. But here, Woolf puts the onus on the women. Sure, the system's still hard. Sure it's unfair. Sure, it's difficult. But there are colleges, there are means, there are doors--the reason they haven't gotten bigger, according to Woolf, is less that men are holding them shut than that women are being to lazy and derelict to go through them. They'd rather whine instead. I like how Woolf ends on a rallying cry, that the fight is their responsibility, and only they can wake Shakespeare's sister.
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