Experiences as a Body: Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, and the Aesthetics of Trauma

Abstract

Some years ago, the poet Audre Lorde challenged women to examine the relationship between the erotic and female creativity. By “erotic” Lorde meant much more than genital sexuality; among other things, she defined it as a source of power, “a resource . . . firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling,” “a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings” (“Uses of the Erotic,” 53, 54). The erotic functioned variously, as the “yes within ourselves”; as a sensual “lifeforce” informing all levels of our experience; as a well of replenishment and empowerment; as a bridge that allows intersubjective communication (55); and as a lens through which “we scrutinize all aspects of our existence” and “evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our lives” (57). Lorde’s most compelling image of the erotic gestures to its power to pervade every aspect of female existence: she figures the erotic as akin to the tiny pellet of intense yellow food coloring that was used to color margarine during World War II: “I find the erotic such a kernel within myself. When released from its intense and constrained pellet, it flows through and colors my life with a kind of energy that heightens and sensitizes and strengthens all my experience”(57).¹

“[The adventure of] telling the truth about my own experiences as a body, I do not think I solved. I doubt that any woman has solved it yet.”

Virginia Woolf, “Professions for Women”

“These places of possibility within ourselves are dark because they are ancient and hidden; they have survived and grown strong through that darkness. Within these deep places, each one of us holds an incredible reserve of creativity and power, of unexamined and unrecorded emotion and feeling. The woman’s place of power within each of us is neither white nor surface; it is dark, it is ancient, and it is deep.”

Audre Lorde, “Poetry Is Not a Luxury”