Abstract
O’Hara tracks Woolf’s revelation of female genius beginning with the imagined narrator Mary Beton and Shakespeare’s fictional sister. A Nietzschean aphorism is used to establish a conception of sincere irony, which is further demonstrated in Wallace Stevens’s “Earthy Anecdote,” to show the sincere irony of the modernist period arises from the dialectic of imagination and reality. O’Hara explains that through her looking-glass theory, Woolf embraces and reverses the gender hierarchy by regrounding the proposition in the materiality of physical life. The incandescent imagination and the integrity of the author combined with the “inner light” of the reader enable the conditions for genius. O’Hara argues that Woolf expands Coleridge’s notion of the androgynous genius to a mutual and self-revising position of both sexes.
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Notes
I have made use of the recent reprint of the first American edition of Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (Mansfield, CT: Martino Publishing, 2012), p. 112. I have compared the passages used from it to
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, annotated and with an Introduction by Susan Gubar (New York and London: Harcourt, 2005). All the general contextual information used in this essay comes from this edition.
As cited and compared to the German text, see my The Art of Reading as a Way of Life: On Nietzsche’s Truth (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2009), pp. 3–27. See also Bernard Knox, ed. The Gay Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 190–191.
For my wrestling with the revisionism and deconstructions of Harold Bloom, Paul de Man, and Jacques Derrida, whose details may be of interest to some readers, see my Tragic Knowledge: Yeats’s Autobiography and Hermeneutics (Columbia: 1981); The Romance of Interpretation: Visionary Criticism from Pater to De Man (Columbia: 1985); Lionel Trilling: The Work of Liberation (Wisconsin: 1988); Radical Parody: Culture and Critical Agency After Foucault (Columbia: 1992); Empire Burlesque: The Fate of Critical Culture in Global America (Duke: 2003); Visions of Global America and the Future of Critical Reading (Ohio State: 2009); The Art of Reading as a Way of Life: On Nietzsche’s Truth (Northwestern: 2009); and Narrating Demons, Transformative Texts: Rereading Genius in Mid-Century Modern Fictional Memoir (Ohio State: 2012), as well as the five edited or co-edited volumes: including Why Nietzsche Now? (Indiana: 1985); and, with Gina Mackenzie, Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Barnes and Noble Classics: 2005); and, with
Geoffrey Hartman, The Geoffrey Hartman Reader (Fordham: 2004). Similarly, my use of “god-image” herein has a complicated derivation. Originally, I first used it in my 1976 dissertation, “Under the Watch-Mender’s Eye: The Simplifying Image of the Creator in Yeats’s Autobiography,” which became my first book, cited above. Coming to Yeats and Nietzsche at the same time, in 1966, I noted how Nietzsche’s discussion of “the aesthetic god” between the lines of his first book referenced here parallels Yeats’s discussion of his daimonic images of the creator-figure and how they impact his imagination. C. G. Jung also has a similar figure, as does Kenneth Burke, who calls a “god-term” that which a writer sees as his self or ego-ideal in the strongest possible manner. Since I am also a Blakean, all this for me is complicated by the notion of the Spectre of Urthona (or of Los, the human creator’s name), as well as by the presence in Blake’s mythic system of four personified mental faculties, with Urizen, representative of the diseased rational will. I now take the god-image of the creator figure as a representative expression of the most exalted, intense, and complexly coherent state of power a human being may undergo and the signature of imaginative formations.
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© 2015 Daniel T. O’Hara
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O’Hara, D.T. (2015). The Self-Revising Muse: On the Spirit of the Unborn Creator in A Room of One’s Own. In: Virginia Woolf and the Modern Sublime: The Invisible Tribunal. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137580061_7
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