Abstract
When Virginia Woolf gave the two talks at Cambridge that she later revised as A Room of One’s Own, she had in her mind the other literary event du jour: the trial of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness. The contiguity of these two events prompted Jane Marcus to construct a lesbian sub-text to the speeches, reading them as examples of ‘sap-phistry’ — the seduction of the woman reader by the woman writer.1 Woolf made an evident allusion to the obscenity trial then in progress when she teased her audience with the possibility of what two women, Chloe and Olivia, might have shared:
The words covered the bottom of the page; the pages had stuck. While fumbling to open them there flashed into my mind the inevitable policeman … the order to attend the Court … the verdict; this book is obscene …2
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Notes
Jane Marcus, ‘Sapphistory: The Woolf and the Well’, in Karla Jay and Joanne Glasgow, eds, Lesbian Texts and Contexts: Radical Revisions, London: Onlywomen Press 1992, p. 167.
Jane Marcus ‘“Taking the Bull by the Udders”: Sexual Difference in Virginia Woolf — a Conspiracy Theory’ in Jane Marcus, ed., Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury: A Centenary Celebration, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987 p. 166.
Michèle Barrett, Virginia Woolf: Women and Writing, London: The Women’s Press 1979.
Morag Shiach, Introduction to Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992, p. xvii.
Stephen Heath The Sexual Fix, London: Macmillan, 1982, p. 114
Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own, London: Virago, 1986, p. 288.
M.E. Kelsey, ‘Virginia Woolf and the She-Condition’, Sewanee Review, October–December 1931, in Virginia Woolf: The Critical Heritage, ed. Robin Majumdar and Allen McLaurin, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975, pp. 255–6 and 260–2.
Stella McNichol, Virginia Woolf and the Poetry of Fiction, London and New York: Routledge, 1990, p. 9.
Diane Filby Gillespie, ‘Virginia Woolf’s Miss La Trobe: the Artist’s Last Struggle Against Masculine Values’, Women and Literature, 5:1, 1977, pp. 38–9.
Linden Peach, Virginia Woolf, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000. p. 151
Laura Doan, Fashioning Sapphism: The Origins of a Modern English Lesbian Culture, New York: Columbia, 2001
Lisa Rado, The Modern Androgyne Imagination: A Failed Sublime, Charlottesville and London: Virginia University Press, 2000, p. 169.
Makiko Minow-Pinkney, Virginia Woolf and the Problem of the Subject: Feminine Writing in the Major Novels, Brighton: Harvester Press, 1987, p. 131
Catharine R. Stimpson also describes Vita Sackville-West as ‘a sequential rather than a simultaneous androgyne’, in ‘The Androgyne and the Homosexual’, Where the Meanings Are, New York and London: Methuen, 1988, p. 56.
Victoria Glendinning, Vita: The Life of V. Sackville-West, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984, p. 242.
D.H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious, New York: Thomas Selzer, 1922, p. 87.
Sarah Annes Brown, The Metamorphoses of Ovid: From Chaucer to Ted Hughes, London: Duckworth, 1999
Carl Jung, ‘Anima and Animus’, in Aspects of the Feminine, trans. R.F.C. Hull, London and New York: Ark, 1989, p. 99.
Isobel Armstrong, The Radical Aesthetic, Oxford: Blackwell, 2000, p. 239.
Maria di Battista, Virginia Woolfs Major Novels: The Fables of Anon, New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1980, p. 129.
Rachel Bowlby, ed., Orlando, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992, pp. lxiv–xlv.
Karen Lawrence: ‘The Freudian pre-Oedipal child is bisexual; the little girl a little man until she “falls” into sexual division, a trajectory comically revised in Orlando’s psycho-sexual development’, Modern Fiction Studies, 38:1, 1992, pp. 253–77, at p. 255.
Suzanne Young, ‘The Unnatural Object of Modernist Aesthetics: Artifice in Orlando’, in Unmanning Modernism: Gendered Re-Readings, ed. Elizabeth Jane Harrison and Shirley Peterson, Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1997, p. 172.
Virginia Woolf, Women and Fiction: The Manuscript Versions of A Room of One’s Own, ed. S.P. Rosenbaum, Oxford: Blackwell, 1992.
Nigel Nicolson, Portrait of a Marriage, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1973, p. 212.
Karen Lawrence, ‘Orlando’s Voyage Out’, Modern Fiction Studies, 38:1, 1992, p. 271.
Nancy L. Paxton, George Eliot and Herbert Spencer: Feminism, Evolutionism, and the Reconstruction of Gender, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991, p. 17.
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© 2005 Tracy Hargreaves
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Hargreaves, T. (2005). Virginia Woolf. In: Androgyny in Modern Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230510579_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230510579_4
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