A Style of One’s Own
“That a famous library has been cursed by a woman is a matter of complete indifference to a famous library,” Virginia Woolf observes quite early in A Room of One’s Own. “Venerable and calm, with all its treasures safe locked within its breast, it sleeps complacently and will, so far as I am concerned, so sleep for ever.”
Woolf (in the person of the protagonist of this barbed and brilliant, fiction-kissed essay) has just attempted to follow a train of thought through the library doors at “Oxbridge,” intending to examine a Milton manuscript mentioned in a stray quote which, it seemed to her, might illustrate t
he fragile nature of just such trains of thought. She was stopped at the door by a kindly old verger, however, who explained that women were not allowed in the library unless accompanied by a fellow of the college or a letter of reference. For the second time in her story, a fragile, nurtured fancy has been injured by male privilege.
It’s one thing to observe that a Fellow, necessarily male, would enjoy a standing not given to a woman; it’s another thing to grant that same privilege to a written document, to grant it a kind of surrogate masculine standing.
It would be useful to explore the ways in which written things are granted such standing, but that’s not my purpose here. The relation of writing to gender deserves a chapter unto itself—or better, its presence demands acknowledgment in every chapter of a book about writing. From those clay-smudged scribes of the Fertile Crescent, to the Chinese elite and their calligraphy examinations, to the Grub Street Hacks who strove to colonize writing’s provinces with all the rough vigor of a commodified vernacular, writing has been an overwhelmingly male enterprise. But this doesn’t tell us anything important about writing itself—except that it is born as an intrumentality of power, and as such suffers the gendered cramps and tensions of all such instrumentalities.
What it does remind us is this: alongside writing’s career as an instrumentality of power, it has pursued a flickering existence as a modality of conciousness. It’s this career, I’d wager, that matters more to most of us in the end. And in this regard, writing has far to go in achieving anything like a full flowering. Writing’s achievements are woven through with a yellow thread of injustice and alienation; pull it, and the whole thing unravels into a tawdry tapestry.
Woolf’s contribution to the mode of literary invention called “stream of conciousness” is a staple of standardized tests. And yet it’s not often remarked how thoroughly Woolf demonstrated (in A Room as well as Three Guineas and much of her political writing) that the putative “stream” itself is already a material thing, subject to expropriation and alienation long before it’s bodied forth in writing. For Woolf (and, she shows, for all women of her time) this most ephemeral product finds its enemies long before it is committed to the page—in the sons and brothers who are chosen to receive the fine education, in the restrictions and proscriptions that guard the library door. Like other women writers before her, Woolf transformed those provinces of writing traditionally most open (or restricted) to women—the letter and the diary—into sumptuously productive sovereignties of invention. But she explored further countries by bringing the material power of writing to bear upon ever more intimate (and previously unassailable) regions. In bodying forth consciousness itself, she wins a kind of triumph over writing, a desegregation of writing’s gendered magisterium. Her achievement of style is in fact one of substance, irrevocably transforming and expanding the possibilities of writing itself. She turned her back on the library that Oxbridge morning—but she did not leave it to sleep complacently. In her wake, the library was altered in all its arrangements.
