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382
I
VIRCINIA WOOLF
A ROOM OF ONE S OwN’, CH 3
ì
383
I
i
rii
il
1r
v
CHAPTER 3
back in the evening some important
because-this or
Women are poorer than men
statement, some authendc fact’
and receivtruth’
the
to givg up seeking for
that. Perhaps now it *o”i¿ ¡” better
dish-water’
as
ãpittio’-‘ hoiu’ l^ua’ãiscoloured
ing on one’s head an “*t;ä” ;f
light the
to
distractions;
out
t”- sh”t
It vvould be better to draw the cuitains;
not opinions
;d to u’k the historian’ who records
Iampr to narrow
lived’ not throughout the
‘h” “;;i’l
but facts, to describe “ä”i il;;””;;ìt’:”i;;”;
S”if”nd, say in the time of Elizabeth’8
It vvas disappointing not to have brought
“When I Consider Hon, My Lighr Is
I. F gTby.John
Spent”
A,lilton ( l608_t673):
“And
rhal one talenL which ís dearh
,” r,ia”,7i.jg”ä
r¡.ith me useless. ”
6. A triple arch in Trafalgar Square (London)
at the entrance to the Mall,
erecred in 1910.
staf ue of the second duke
1″ LamDndge
ln “qua.,r¡an
ur
(18I9_l9O4), cousin
Vicroria, in rhe full dress uniform oleueen
ãf ãïlìä
marshal.
ä”t,ï”i’t”
8. Queen of England from 1558 to 1603′
384
|
VtRCTNtA ¡’/OOLF
A ROOM OF ONE,S OWN, CH,3
For it is a perennial puzzle why no woman wrote a word of that extraordinarv
literature when every other man, it seemed, was capable of song o. ,or.”t.
What were the conditions in which women lived, I asked myself; for fiction,
imaginative work that is, is not dropped like a pebble upon the ground, as science may be; fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so lightþ perhaps, but
still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment ii i”urc.1y p”.ceptible; shakespeare’s plays, for instance, seem to hang there complétË ly
themselves. But when the web is pulled askew, hooked up at the edge, torn in
the middle, one remembers that these webs are not rpm in mid-air by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are aitu”hed- to
grossly material things, like health and rnoney and the houses we live in.
I went, therefore, to the shelf where the histories stand and took down one
of the latest, P¡ofessor Trevelyan’s History of Englønd.e Once more I looked up
women, found “position of,” and turned to the pages indicated. “wife-beating/,
I read, “was a recognised right of man, and was practised without tha-” Íy
high as well as low. . . . similarly,” the historian goes on, “the daughter whá
refused to marry the gentleman of her parents’ choice was liable to be locked
up, beaten and flung about the room, without any shock being inflicted on
public opinion. Marriage was not an affair of personal affection, but of family
avarice, particularly in the ‘chivalrous’ upper classes, . . . Betrothal often tool
place while one or both of the parties was in the cradle, and marriage when
they were scarcely out of the nurses’ charge.” That was about l47o, roo.r ufte.
Chaucer’sr time. The next reference to the position of women is some two hundred years later, in the time of the Stuarts.2 “It was still the exception for
women of the upper and middle class to choose their own husbands, and when
the husband had been assigned, he was lord and master, so far at least as law
and custom could maké’him. Yet even so,” professor Trevelyan concludes,
“neither Shakespeare’s women nor those of authentic seventeenth-century
memoirs, like the Verneys and the Hutchinsons,3 seem wanting in personality
and character.” certainly, if we consider it, cleopatra must have hud a
– y
with her; Lady Macbeth,a one would suppose, hadã wiil of her own; Rosalind
^’-ône might conclude, was an attractive girl. Professor Trevelyan is speaking no
…1¡’
more than the truth when he remarks that Shakespeare’s women dã not sãem
n ilt¡
L,” ¡ wanting in,personality and character. Not being a historian, one might go even
I further and say that women have burnt like beacons in all the worÈs of”all the
. t g9et9 frgm the_beginning of time-clyremnestra, Antigone, cleopatra, Lady
Macbeth, Phèdre, Cressida, Rosalind, Desdemona, the Duchess of Malfr,’
9. Published in London in 1926. References
are to pages 260-61 and, later, to pages
436-37.
l. Geoffrey Chaucer (1340?-1400), author
of The Canterbury Tøles (1 390-1400).
2. The British royal house from 1603 to l7l4
(except for the Commonwealth interregnum
of l ó49-60).
3. F. P. Verney compiledThe Meøoirs of the
Verney Famþ durìng the Set¡emteenth Century
( I 892-l 899), and Lucy Hutchinson recounted
her husband’s life in Memoirs of the Life of
Colonel Hutckinson (l 80 6).
4. Heroine of Shakespeare’s Macbetk. Cleopatra (69-30 n.c.r.), queen of Egypt and heroine
of Shakespeare’s Antony and. Cleopatra,
5. Doomed heroine of John Webster’s The
Duchessof MøIfi. (ca. 1613). Clytemnestrais the
heroine of Aeschylus’s Agømemnon (458 s,c,r,),
Antigone is the eponymous heroine ol a 442
n.c.a. play by Sophocles. Phèdre is the heroine ofJean Racine’s Phèdre (1677). Cressida,
Rosalind, and Desdemona are heroines of
Shakespeare’s Troilus anã Cressida, As You
Like lt, and Othello, respectively.
I
385
/1n
writers: Millamant, Clarissa, Becky
arnong the dramatists; then among the prose
de Guermantesc-the names
Madame
Sfr-n; Anna Karenina, Emma Bovary,
personality and character.”
in
women
recall
they
“lacking
no”L ro mind, nor do
written by men, one
frction
in
the
save
no
existence
had
woman
if
Indeed,
very
varioxs; heroic.and
importance;
utmost
the
person
of
her
a
imagine
would
in the extreme; as
hideous
and
beautiful
infinitely
sordid;
and
rplettdid
¡neurr;
‘oreat
In fact,
as- a mân, some think even greaterJ But this is woman in fiction.
flung
about
and
beaten
up,
locked
was
l, Profe*ro. Trevelyan points out, she
the room.
queer, composite being thus emerges. Imaginatively she is of the highA
es
importance;
She
in fact she was the slave of
conquerors in
upon
a
of the most
, some
life
she
in
real
lips;
her
from
fall
mos
husband.
her
of
property
the
and
was
spell,
scarcelY
could
read,
hardly
could
It was certainly an odd monster that one made up by reading the historians
first and the poets afterwards-a worm winged like an eagle; the spirit of life
and beauty in a kitchen choPPing uP suet. But these monsters’ however amuslng to the imagination, have no eristence in fact. What one must do to bring
her to life was to think poetically and prosaically at one and the same moment,
thus keeping in touch with fact-that she is Mrs. Martin, aged thirty-six,
dressed in blue, wearing a black hat and brown shoes; but not losing sight of
frction either-that she is a vessel in which all sorts of spirits and forces are
moment, however, that one tries this
coursing and flashing perpetually.
ts ln
method with the Elizabethan
up
one ls
one
nothing
to
scarcel
I found by looking
meant to
Trevelyan again to see
at his chapter headings that it meant,,The Manor Court and the Methods of Open-freld Agriculture . . . The Cistercians and Sheep-farming. . . The Crusades . . . The University. . . The
6. A character in Marcel Proust’s Reønetn’
ides. But the paradox of this world where in
brance of ‘Ihings Pøst (The Guermantes Way,
real life a respectable woman could hardly
show her face alone in the street, and yet on
liam Congreve’s satirical comedy The Wøy of
the stage u’oman e4uals or surpasses man, has
.reu”. b”en satisfactorily explained. In modern
tragedy the same predominance exists. At all
events, a very cursory survey of Shakespeare’s
work (similaily with Webster, though not with
Marlowe or Jonson) sufÊces to reveal horT’ this
dominance, this initiative of women, persists
lg2}-21). Millamant is the heroine of Wil-
the World. (1700). Cìarissa is the eponymous
heroine of Samuel Richardson’s seven-volume
epistolary novel (1747-48). Becky Sharp
appears in William Thackeray’s Vøøity Fair
(1847-48). Anna Karenina is the title character in a Leo Tolstoy novel (1875-77). Emma
Bovary is the heroine of Gustave Flaubert’s
Mød.ame Bovar1,Q856).
7. “It ¡emains â strange arìd almost inexplicable fact that in Athena’s city, where women
were kept in almost Oriental suppression as
odalisques or drudges, the stage should yet
have pìoduced figures like Clytemnestra and
Cassandra, Atossa and Antigone, Phèdre and
Medea, and all the other heroines who dominate play after play of the ‘misogynist’ Eurip-
from Rosalind to Lady Macbeth. So too in
Racine; six of his tragedies bear their heroines’
names; and what male characters of his shall
we set âgainst Hermione and Andromaque,
Bérénice and Roxane, Phèdre and Athaliel So
again with lbsen; what men shall we match
with Solveig and Nora, Hedda and Hilda Wangel and Rebecca West?”-F. L. Lucts, Trageãy, pp. ll4-15 fWoolf’s note].
l¡
386
I
A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN, Cll .3
VIRGINIA WOOLF
House of Commons . . . The HundredYears’War. . . TheWars ofthe Roses . . .
The Renaissance Scholars . . . The Dissolution of the Monasteries . . . Agrarian
and Religious Strife. . . The Origin of English Sea-power. . . The Armaáa. . .,,
and so on. Occasionally an individual woman is mentioned, an Elizabeth, or ¿
Mary; a queen or a great lady. But by no possible means could middle-class
women with nothing but brains and character at their command have taken
part in âny one of the great movements which, brought together, constitute the
historian’s view of the past. Nor shall we find her in any collection of anecdotes.
Aubref hardly mentions her. She never
ln
She left no
or
one.wants, I
or Girtone supply it?-is a mass of
information; at what age did she marry; how many children had she as a rule;
what was her house like; had she a room to herself; did she do the cooking;
would she be likely to have a servant? All these facts lie somewhere, presumr:j ably, in parish registers and account books; the life of the average Elizabethan
woman must be scattered about somewhere, could one collect it and make a
i-;
book of it. It would be ambitious beyond my daring, I thought, looking about
the shelves for books that r,r,ere not there, to suggest to the students of those
famous colleges that they should @-write history)though I own lhat it often
seems a little queer as it is, unreal, lop-sided; buí why should they not add a
supplement to history? calling it, of course, by some inconspicuous name so
that women might figure there without impropriety? For one often catches a
glimpse of them in the lives of the great, whisking away into the background,
¡,I
‘!.
that it was impossible for any woman, past, present, or to c ome, to
He rürote rÕ the’papers a-böütTt. He also tôlil ã Ia,Jy who
8, John Aubrey (t626-1697), author of Brìef
Lizes, which includes sketches of his famous
contemporaries.
9. Woolf delivered her lectures at Ne’rmham
and Girton Colleges for u.omen, part of
l. Joanna Baillie (17 62-185 I ) was a þoet and
dramatist whose Plals on the Passìons (1798l8 t 2) were famous in her day.
387
that cats do not as a matter of fact go to heaven,
“rnlied to him for information
iñå”gf, they have, he added, souls of a sort. How much thinking those old
o.ntlã-ett used to save one! How the borders of ignorance shrank back at their
‘Women cannot write the plays of Shakeãpproachl Cats do not go to heaven.
speare.’
‘Be that as it may, I could not help thinking, as I looked at the works_of Shake
have been ú
speare on rhe sheíf that the bishop was right at least in this; it would
iåporrible, completely and entirely, for any woman to have written the plays of
I
Shãkespeare in the age of Shakespeare. Let me imagine’ since facts are so hard
wonderfully
had
a
had
Shakespeare
to coml by, what wóuld have happened
gifted sistei, czilledJudith,2 let us say. Shakespeare himself went, very probablyñis mother was an heiress-to the grammar school, where he may have learnt
Latin-Ovid, Virgil and Horace3-and the elements of grammar and logic. He
was, it is well ktto*.r, a wild boy who poached rabbits, perhaps shot a deer, and
had, rather sooner than he should have done, to marry a woman in the neighbourhood, who bore him a child rather quicker than was right. That escapade
sent him to seek his fortune in London. He had, it seemed, a taste for the theatre; he began by holding horses at the stage door. Very soon he got work in the
theatre, b””ume u subceisful actor, and lived at the hub of the universe’ meeting everybody, knowing everybody, practising his art on the board^s, exercising
hiã wits in tire streets, and even getting access to the palace of the queen.
Meanwhile his extraordinarily gifted sister, let us suppose, remained at home.
She was as adventurous, as imaginative, as agog to see the world as he was. But
she was not sent to school. She had no chance of learning grammar and logic,
let alone of reading Horace and Virgil. She picked up a book now and then’ one
of her brother’s perhaps, and read a few pages. But then her parents came in
and told her to mend the stockings or mind the stew and not moon about with
books and papers. They would have spoken sharply but kindly, for they were
,,rbstuntial people who-knew the conditions of life for a woman and loved their
daughter-indeed, more likely than not she was the apple of her father’s eye.
P.rñap, she scribbled some pages up in an apple loft on the ¡ly, but was careful
to hide them or set fire to ìhem. Soon, however, before she was out of her
teens, she was to be betrothed to the son of a neighbouring wool-stapler.a She
cried out that marriage was hateful to her, and for that she was severely beaten
by her father. Then Èe ceased to scold her. He begged her instead_not to hurt
him, not to shame him in this matter of her marriage, He would give her a
chain of beads or a flne petticoat, he said; and there were tears in his eyes. How
could she disobey him? How could she break his heart? The force of her own
gift alone drore h”, to it. She made up a small parcel of her belongings, let herJelf down tiy a rope one summer’s night and took the road to London. She was
not seventeln. Tite birds that sang in the hedge were not more musical than
she was. She had the quickest fatrìy, a gift like her brother’s, for the tune of
words. Like him, she hãd a taste for the theatre. She stood at the stage door;
she wanted to act, she said. Men laughed in her face. The manager-â fatt
Cambridge University since 1880 and 1873,
respectively.
|
2. The name of Shakespeare’s younger daughter.
3. Roman authors; Publius Ovidius Naso
(43 n,c;n.-17 c.r.), author of the Metømorphoses. Publius Vergilius Maro (70-19 e.c.r.),
author of the Aeneid. Quintus Horatius Flaccus (65-8 r.c.r.), author of Od¿s and satires.
4. A dealer in woolen goods, which were a
“staple” or established tlpe of merchandise.
IT
388
I
VIRCINIA ^’/OOLF
A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN, CH.3
looseJipped man-guffawed. He bellowed something about poodles dancing and
women acting-no woman, he said, could possibly be an actress. He hintedyou can imagine what. she could get no training in her craft. could she even
seek her dinner in a tavern or roam the streets
-idnight? yet her genius was
“t the
for fiction and lusted to feed abundantly upon
hvãs of -“., uid women
and the study of their ways. At last-for she was very young, oddly like shakeroundéd brows-at
lpeare the poet in her face, with the same g”.y
Iast Nick Greene5 the actor-manager took piy o.r”yér-“.rd
her; sh” found herself with
child by that gentlernan and so-who shali measure the heat and violence of
the poet’s heart when_caught and tangled in a woman’s body?-killed herself
one winter’s night and lies buried.at some cross-roads where the omnibuses
now stop outside the Elephant and Castle.6
That, more or less, is how the story would run, I think, if a woman in Shakespeare’s dayhad had shakespeare’s genius. Butformypart, I agree with the deceased
b_ishgl, if such he was-it is unthinkable that uny
-o-un1n shakespeare,s day
should have had shakespeare’s genius. For genius like shakespeare,s is not born
1-olg labouring, uneducated, servile people. It was not born in England among
the saxons and the Britons. It is not bórn ioday among the working cïurser. How,
then, could it have been born among,women whose”work b”guí, according tá
Professor Trevelyan, almost before they were out of the nrisery, *ho ,ier”
to it by their parents and held to it by all the power of t”* árrd custom?
_forced
Yet genius of a sort must have existed among wo-e’ as it must have existed
3po”g the working classes. Now and again an Emily Brontë or a Robert BurnsT
b_lazes out and proves its presence. Buicertainly it never got itself
on to paper.
Wh9″, however, one reads_of a witch being ducked, of aïoma’ porr”ri”å by
devils’ of a wise woman selling herbs, or
of a very remarkuËI” -“r, -ho
“re. of a.losí novelist,.a..rupp.rcssed
had a mother, tþn l_lqhlak we are on rhe track
qo”j, 9t ,om”‘ñr.rt”ãi-,d i”gi”ñild ja,rå A,rst”n, some Emil¡r Brontë*ly.þq
dashed her brains out
91 rhe. moor of mopped and mowed abouí the h!gh-ay,
crazédwith thé-tòituiê that her gift had p”t t-t”r to. Indeed, i *o.,1á .r”rrtrr” to
qg-,e-¡s !hgt.{¡-qn, who wrglq so’- many poerns without signinf tñerr¡-was oftèñ a
woman. I[ was a woman Edward Fitzgerald,e T think, rugg”ited who made the
ballads and the folk-songs, crooning ä-,”- ío n”,
ning with them, or the length of the winter’s night.”tiaffib”g”iil;;;.-;ö
This may be true or it may be false-who can-say?-but what is true in it, so
it seemed to me, reviewing the story of shakespeaie’s sister as I had made it, is
that any woman born with a great gift in the sixteenth century would certainly
have gone crazed, shot herself, or ãnded her days in some loíely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at. Fár it
needs little skill in psychology ro be sure that a highly gifred girl who had ,ri”¿ ,o
“r”
her gift for poetry
ry9″1d have been so thwãrteiand hïndered by oth”. peopre,
so tortured and pulled asunder by her own contrary instincts, that shã
-.rsi
8. A reference to Thomas Gray’s line in Elegy
Wrìtten in ø Country Clmrchyald ( 175 I ): ,,Sol;;
mute inglorious Milton here may rest.,,
9. Brifish author ( I 809-1883), known for his
translation from the Persian of The Rubrütát
of Omør KhaTydm (1859).
389
have lost her health and sanity to a certainty. No girl could have walked to
London and stood at a stage door and forced her way into the presence of actornanagers without doing herself a violence and suffering an anguish which may
have been irrational-for chastity may be a fetish invented by certain societies
for unknown reasons-but were none the less inevitable. Chastiry had then, it
has even now, a religious importance in a woman’s life, and has so wrapped
ítself round with nerves and instincts that to cut it free and bring it to the light
of day demands courage of the rarest. To have lived a free life in London in the
sixteenth century would have meant for a woman who was poet and pla¡”,tttight
a nervous stress and dilemma which might well have killed her. Had she survived, whatever she had written would have been twisted and deformed, issu-
ing from a strained and morbid imagination. And undoubtedly, I thought,
Iooking at the shelf where there are no plays by women’ her work would have
gone unsigned. That refuge she would have sought certainly. It was the relic of
ih” r”nt” of chastity that dictated anonymity to women even so late as the
nineteenth century. Currer Bell, George Eliot, George Sand,r all the victims of
inner strife as their writings prove, sought ineffectively to veil themselves by
using the name of a man. Thus they did homage to the convention, which if
not implanted by the other sex was liberally encouraged by them (the chief
glory of a woman is not to be talked of, said Pericles,? himself a much-talked-of
man), that publicity in women is detestable. Anonymity runs in their blood,
The desire to be veiled still possesses them. They are not even now as concerned about the health of their fame as men are’ and, speaking generally, will
pass a tombstone or a signpost without feeling an irresistible desire to cut their
.t”-“r on it, as Alf, Bert or Chas. must do in obedience to their instinct, which
murmurs if it sees a frne woman go by, or even a dog, Ce chien bst à moi.3 And,
of course, it may not be a dog, I thought, remembering Parliament Square, the
Sièges Alléqa and other avenues; it may be a piece of land or a man with curly ‘,
black hairf[ is one oÊ the great advantages of being a woman that one can pass I
even a u”{Ên” negress without wishing to make an Englishwoman of her.) t
That woman, then, who was born with a gift of poetry in the sixteenth c”entury, was an unhappy woman, a woman at strife against herself. All the conditions of her life, all her own instincts, were hostile to.the state of mind which
is needed to set free whatever is in the brain. But what is the state of mind that
is most propitious to the act of creation, I asked. Can one come by any notion
of the state that furthers and makes possible that strange activity? Here I
opened the volume containing the Tragedies of Shakespeare. What was Shakespeare’s state of mind, for instance, when he wtote Leør and Aøtony ønd’
Cleopøtrø? It was certainly the state of mind most favourable to poetry that
theré has ever existed. But Shakespeare himself said nothing about it. We only
(1804-1876), author ofLéhø (1833), respec-
pher Blaise Pascal’s Thoughts (1657-58). He
uses an anecdote about poor children to illustrate what he considers a universal impulse to
tively.
assert property claims.
l. Pseudon)ryns of Charlotte Brontë, Mary Ann
5. A frctional character based on Shakespeare,s
contemporary Robert Greene ( I 5 58-l 592) and
appearing in Woolf’s Orlando.
6. A popular London pub. “Cross-roads,,: suicides were commonly buried at crossroads.
7. Scottish poet (1759-1796).
I
Evans (1819-1880), and Lucile-Aurore Dupin
2. From the Greek leader Pericles’ funeral
4. An ávenue in Berlin containing statues of
oration (431 n.c.r.) as reported in Thucydides’
history of the Peloponnesian War (2.35-46).
3. This dog is mine (French); fïom the philoso-
Westminster Abbey.
Hohenzollern rulers. Parliament Square is in
London next to the Houses of Parliament and
390
I
A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN, CH.3
VIRCINIA WOOLF
know casually and by chance that he .”never blotted a line.”t Nothing indeed
was ever said by the artist hirnself about his state of mind until the eighteenth
centuiy perhaps. Rousseau6 perhaps began it. At any rate’ by the nineteenth
century self-consciousness had developed so far that it was the habit for rnen
of letters to describe their minds in confessions and autobiographies. Their
lives also were written, and their’letters were printed after their deaths. Thus,
though we do not know what Shakespeare went through when he wrote Leør,
we do know what Carlyle went through when he wrote the French Rettolution;
what Flautiert went through when he wrote Madame Bovary; what KeatsT was
going through when he tried to wiite poetry against the coming of death and
the indifference of the world.
And one gathers flom this enormous modern literature of confession and selfanalysis that to write a work of genius is almost always a feat of prodigious difficulty. Everything is against the likelihood that it will come from the writer’s
mínd whole and entire. Generally material circumstances are against it. Dogs
will bark; people will interrupt; money must be made; health will break down.
Further, accentuating all these diffrculties and making them harder to bear is
the world’s notorious indifference. It does not ask people to write poems and
novels and histories; it does not need them, It does not care whether Flaubert
flnds the right word or whether Carlyle scrupulously verifies this or that fàct.
Naturally, it will not pay for what it does not vvant. And so the writer, Keats,
Flaubert, Carlyle, suffers, especially in the creative years of youth, every form of
distraction and discouragement. A curse, a cry of agony’ rises from those books
of analysis and confession. “Mighty poets in their misery dead”8-that is the
burden of their song. If anything comes through in spite of all this, it is a miracle, and probably no book is born entire and uncrippled as it was conceived’
But for women, I thought, looking at the empry shelves, these difficulties
wére infinitely more formidable. In the first place, to,have a room of her own,
let alone a quiet room or a sound-proof room, was out of the question’ unless
her parents were exceptionally rich or very noble, even up to the beginning of
the nineteenth century. Since her pin mone¡ which depended on the good will
her father, was only enough to keep her clothed, she was debarred from
alleviations as came even to Keats or Tennyson or Carlyle, all poor men’
from a walking tour, a little journey to France, from the separate lodging which,
even if it were miserable enough; sheltered them from the claims and ryrannies
of their families. Such matejlal-diff[cultres werç:fqrmidable,; þEç–tr-ì]t-çh,worse
the w-s¡ld y-htc_h Kçqts-anùElaqb-ert
and other men of genius have found so hard to bear was in her case not indifleience bui fosdîìit)’. Tl;ã *órld clidìbi say ro hër äs’il said to them, Write if
và-“.ho*älit *”ká .,o difference to me. The world said with a guffaw, Write?
What’s the good of your writing? Here the psychologists of Newnham and
Girton niight come to our help, I thought, looking again at the blank spaces on
the shelves. For surely it is time that the effect of discouragement trpon the
wqr,e- thejm.materiall’lþe indilÊferenee-of
5. Ben Jonson’s (1572-1637) description of
Shakespeare.
6.Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778),
French author of the Coøfessioøs ( I 78 I ).
7. John Keats (1795-1821), British poet.
Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), essayist and historian, translator of Goethe and author on The
Frenctrt. Reuolution (1 837 ).
8. From Wordsworth’g “Resolution and Independence” (I807).
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39r
mind of the artist should be measured, as I have seen a dairy company measure
the effect of ordinary milk and Grade A milk upon the body of the rat. They set
two rats in cages side by side, and of the two one was furtive, timid and small,
and the other was glossy, bold and big. Now what food do we feed women as
artists upon? I asked, remembering, I suppose, that dinner of prunes and cusþrd. To answer that question I had only to open the evening paper and to read
that Lord Birkenhead is of opinion-but really I am not going to trouble to
copy out Lord Birkenhead’s opinion upon the writing of women. What Dean
Inge says I will leave in peace. The Harley Street specialist may be allowed to
rouse the echoes of Harley Streete with his vociferations without raising a hair
on my head. I will quote, however, Mr. Oscar Browning, because Mr. Oscar
Browning was a great figure in Cambridge at one time, and used to examine
the students at Girton and Newnham. Mr, Oscar Browning was wont to declare
“that the impression left on his mind, after looking over any set of examination
papers, was that, irrespective of the marks he might give, the best woman was
intellectually the inferior of the worst man,” After saying that Mr. Browning
went back to his rooms-and it is this sequel that endears him and makes him
a human figure of some bulk and majesty-he went back to his rooms and
found a stable-boy lying on ¡þs 5sf¿-¡r¿ mere skeleton, his cheeks were cavernous and sallow, his teeth rvere black, and he did not appear to have the full
use of his limbs. . . .’That’s A¡thur’ [said Mr. Browning]. ‘He’s a dear boy really
and most high-minded.”‘The two pictures always seem to me to complete each
other. And happily in this age of biography the two pictures often do complete
each other, so that we are able to interpret the opinions of great men not only
by what they say, but by what they do.
But though this, is possible now, such opinions coming from the lips of
important people must have been formidable enough even fifty years ago. Let
us suppose that a father from the highest motives did not wish his daughter to
leave home and become writer, painter or scholar. “See what Mr. Oscar Browning says,” he would say; and there was not only Mr. Oscar Browning; there was
the Søturd.ay Reuiew; there was Mr. Gregr-the “essentials of a woman’s being,”
said Mr. Greg emphatically, “are that tlcey øie supported by, ønd’ tkey m’inister
to, nceø”-¡l1ere was an enormous body of masculine opinion to the effect that
nothing could be expected of women intellectually’ Even if her father did not
read out loud these opinions, any girl could read them for herself; and the
reading, even in the nineteenth century, must have lowered her vitality, and
told profoundly upon her work. There would always have been that assertionyou cannot do this, you are incapable of doing that-to protest against, to
overcome. Probably for a novelist this germ is no longer of much effect; for
there have been women novelists of merit. But for painters it must still have
some stipg in it; and for musicians, I imagine, is even now active and poisonous in the extreme. The woman composer stands where the actress stood in
the time of Shakespeare. Nick Greene, I thought, remembering the story I had
made about Shakespe4re’s sister, said that a womân acting put him in mind of
a dog dancing. Johnson repeated the phrase tr¡’o hundred years later of women
9. A London street known for its nrany prominent physicians’ offices.
1. William Rathbone Greg (1809-1891), cited
from a Saturdal, Retùeut essay entitled “WhyAre
Women Redundant?” ( I 873).
3s2
|
vIRGINIA WOOIF
¡,/ILLIAM FAULKNER I
prea,ching’ And here, I said, o^pening a book about music, we have the very
y_o1{s -lsed again in tlis-¡’egr of grace, 192g, of wom”.,
-ho try to write music.
393
think-but I need hardly multiply instances of the undeniable, if very unfortunate, fact that it is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said
“of Mlle. Germaine Tailleferre ãrr”
only repeat Dr. Johnsán’s dictum con”un into terms
cerning a wor-an preacher, transposed
of music. ‘sir, a woman,s
composing is like a dog’s walking on his hind legs. It is not done
well, but you
are surprised to find it done at all,”‘? so accuratãly does history
repeat itself.
Thus, I concluded, shutting Mr. oscar Browning’s life and pírhirg
away the
rest, it is fairly evident that even in the nineteentlh century u *o-u.,
was not
encouraged to be an artist. on the contrary, she was ,.r,rbb”d,
slapped,.lectured and exhorted. Her mind must have been strained and her,.it”liiy
lo-“.”d
by the need of opposing this, of disproving that. For here again
we come within
range of that very interesting and oLr”.rr*”rculine
which has had so
“o-pÏ””
much influe-nce,upon the woman’s movement; that deep’-ssated
desire, not so
much that ske shall be inferior as that he shair b” ,rrp”rior, which
prants him
whçrever one looks, not only in front of the arts, but barring ,lr”
*”y to politics
too’ even when the risk to himself seems infinitesimal
*.rppliurrt h.,-“rrdih”
ble and devoted. Even La?y Bessborough,3_I remembered,
with uitï”. passion
for politics, must humbly bow herself”and write to Lord Granville LevesonGower: “. . . notwithstanding all my violence in politics urrd talkir-rg
so much on
that s,bject, I perfectly agiee wifh you thar ,rì
ha, a.,i business to
-o-r.
meddle with that or âny other serioui business, farther trr”” giJ;g
her opinion
(if she is ask’d).” And so she goes on to spend her enthusiaå
;fi;r”
it meets
with no obstacle whatsoever upon that ìmmensely important subject,
Lord
Granville’s maiden speech in the House of commons. The ,p””tãçt”
is certainly a strange one, I thought. The history of men,s opporitfor, to
women,s
emancipation is more interesting perhap¡ than the story-of that
emancipation
itself. An amusing book might be made åf it if some yorig ,r”J””t
Girton or
Newnham would collect examples and deduce a tháoryi6ut she “ì
would
need
‘
thick gloves on her hands, and barsJo prorecr her of,.iia goia.
what is amusing now, I recollecied, shutting Lady fessborough, had
, But
to
t:-k”,” in_desperate e_arnest once. Opinions thai o.,”‘.,oi., boot
þ:
f*á,
labelled cock-a-doodle-dum and keeps ior.”ading ro serecL;.å;;;, ”
on summer nights once drew tears, I
urr,rr” yo.r, Añrorrg yorr. g.u.rd-oth.r, arrd
great-grandmothers there were”u.,
many that wept their ;Ér o”;. Frorence Nightingale shrieked aloud in,her ugo.ry.i Moreovår, it is aú very weil
for you, who
have got yourselves to college a”d e”ioy sitting-rooms-or is it
only bed-sittingrooms?-of your own to say that genius rho,rrd disregard ,rr”h opirriorrs;
that
genius should be above caring whãt is said of it, unfãrtunat”ry,
ii i, precisely
or women of genius who mind most what is said or trr”-. R”*”rrrb”,
11″ -“1
Keats. Remember the words he had cut on his tombstone.i rhink
of T..r.ryro.r;
about him. Literature is strew
