I read this around when it was originally posted, then deliberately did not reply. Instead, I put a hold on A Room of One's Own and read it over the break.
Wow, that's a great book, essay, lecture. It got me to put my ideas on race discrimination into words for the first time (at least for this particular idea). And she does it without anger, and identifies the very same reason as why "feminist" is a more-than-faintly derogatory word, particularly on the masculine tongue. Feminism is taking Sides, sides that were created by the male for thousands of years in Western and other cultures, but taking sides nonetheless.
We are, undeniably, genetically different, and treated very differently by Western culture, nay, Western civilization. Yet I disagree with the fact that male and female authors are inherently divided in the types of stories they may successfully write. It is true that a man could almost certainly have not written Pride and Prejudice, simply because there was no man who had the necessary life experience to fill those pages with sufficient integrity.
I cannot put this into words so much, but it is certainly true that our society still considers Woman to be Other by default. Or is that just my impression as a male? There is no completely subjective viewpoint here. Still, Woolf's observation that much has been written about Women, particularly by Men but also by Women themselves, is a truth still within the foundations of our society, alongside the statement that neither Women nor Men have written much about Men. And that Women in literature, excepting main characters, are often defined in terms of the Men, and how strange it would be if Men were only described as lovers of Women! An exaggeration, to be sure, and a problem that has likely been assuaged somewhat over the past century, but a problem nonetheless.
I too will occasionally refer to an arbitrary second or third person as "she", with the small thrill of subversity (even though it ought not to be subversive) and the hope that the eventual reader will be tripped up—as I must admit I often am upon seeing an arbitrary third person referred to as "she"—and stop to wonder why she was tripped up in the first place. (It is true that there is an imbalance in the poetry of the words themselves: the word "he" generally blends in more subtly with the surrounding clause than the word "she", and sometimes changing one to the other has disastrous results. The song "Killing Me Softly", if sung from a male perspective about a female guitarist, is a travesty, simply because the poetry of "with his song" drains out of "with her song" completely.)
Are you concerned with the impact of your sex on writing? Perhaps, but that is a result of the world we live in. As in my discussion on race-blindness (titled "Diversity", which I should like you to read), it would be ideal that you were not, and it were not necessary for you to be. For my part, I am not conscious of the sex of the author of a modern book. Might Mercedes Lackey be considered a "masculine" author for her stories of sweat and battle atop dragons? Might Orson Scott Card's insight into character make him more "feminine"? And surely the Lady Murasaki's Genji-monogatari is not Western-feminine, despite being written to be a sort of instructionary book for a lady of the court in medieval Japan. Woolf's statement about androgynous writers may be true, but part of the success comes when society considers the class of "authors" without a particular sex associated therewith.
I take no offense with your penultimate conclusion, but I feel there is a clause left out: mustn't your children also be fortunate enough to be able to say as well that "men feel as women do"? For though there are Sides here decreed by Nature, turning the present wall into a simple and relatively trivial line requires deconstruction of, from, and for both sides.
no subject
I read this around when it was originally posted, then deliberately did not reply. Instead, I put a hold on A Room of One's Own and read it over the break.
Wow, that's a great book, essay, lecture. It got me to put my ideas on race discrimination into words for the first time (at least for this particular idea). And she does it without anger, and identifies the very same reason as why "feminist" is a more-than-faintly derogatory word, particularly on the masculine tongue. Feminism is taking Sides, sides that were created by the male for thousands of years in Western and other cultures, but taking sides nonetheless.
We are, undeniably, genetically different, and treated very differently by Western culture, nay, Western civilization. Yet I disagree with the fact that male and female authors are inherently divided in the types of stories they may successfully write. It is true that a man could almost certainly have not written Pride and Prejudice, simply because there was no man who had the necessary life experience to fill those pages with sufficient integrity.
I cannot put this into words so much, but it is certainly true that our society still considers Woman to be Other by default. Or is that just my impression as a male? There is no completely subjective viewpoint here. Still, Woolf's observation that much has been written about Women, particularly by Men but also by Women themselves, is a truth still within the foundations of our society, alongside the statement that neither Women nor Men have written much about Men. And that Women in literature, excepting main characters, are often defined in terms of the Men, and how strange it would be if Men were only described as lovers of Women! An exaggeration, to be sure, and a problem that has likely been assuaged somewhat over the past century, but a problem nonetheless.
I too will occasionally refer to an arbitrary second or third person as "she", with the small thrill of subversity (even though it ought not to be subversive) and the hope that the eventual reader will be tripped up—as I must admit I often am upon seeing an arbitrary third person referred to as "she"—and stop to wonder why she was tripped up in the first place. (It is true that there is an imbalance in the poetry of the words themselves: the word "he" generally blends in more subtly with the surrounding clause than the word "she", and sometimes changing one to the other has disastrous results. The song "Killing Me Softly", if sung from a male perspective about a female guitarist, is a travesty, simply because the poetry of "with his song" drains out of "with her song" completely.)
Are you concerned with the impact of your sex on writing? Perhaps, but that is a result of the world we live in. As in my discussion on race-blindness (titled "Diversity", which I should like you to read), it would be ideal that you were not, and it were not necessary for you to be. For my part, I am not conscious of the sex of the author of a modern book. Might Mercedes Lackey be considered a "masculine" author for her stories of sweat and battle atop dragons? Might Orson Scott Card's insight into character make him more "feminine"? And surely the Lady Murasaki's Genji-monogatari is not Western-feminine, despite being written to be a sort of instructionary book for a lady of the court in medieval Japan. Woolf's statement about androgynous writers may be true, but part of the success comes when society considers the class of "authors" without a particular sex associated therewith.
I take no offense with your penultimate conclusion, but I feel there is a clause left out: mustn't your children also be fortunate enough to be able to say as well that "men feel as women do"? For though there are Sides here decreed by Nature, turning the present wall into a simple and relatively trivial line requires deconstruction of, from, and for both sides.