Virginia Woolf and
Virginia Woolf undoubtedly stands as a titan in the early era of gender progress. She not only spoke of the virtues of a woman’s mind, independence, and the contribution women can make, but she wrote it into her characters. The irony lies in her inability to embrace her own ideas.
Virginia Woolf believed in women’s rights and surrounded herself with like-minded people. Even when she lived in a world that did not agree with her ideas about gender equality, she took it upon herself to be herself. She believed in her right to speak and be heard and have her voice count. She believed in the value women bring to a discussion and ensured that the world in which she lived would always accommodate her in that regard. With such progressive and unconventional writing, it would be difficult to become a published author. In 1917, to ensure she would be published, she and her husband bought a printing press of their own. Now she would not be silenced (Bennett & Royle 386).
Her feelings about gender equality were clear and her work opened the door for other artists not just in the idea of gender equality but in other ways as well. Her efforts to be herself encouraged others to do the same and as a result new ideas in art, literature and philosophy made its way into the culture of early 20th C Britain. Virginia Woolf along with her peer group of artists, philosophers and intellects were known as the Bloomsbury Group and were a part of a new movement in the fine arts which became knowns as the modernists who ushered in the progressive era and introduced a new kind of contemporary work (Heitman).
Still Virginia Woolf was not, in fact, the messiah for women of the day. She maintained the same elitism and social stratification privilege in which she was born. It was this higher social class which both oppressed her and allowed her to break out. Without the money and social status she already held, she would not have been able to surround herself with the social insulation necessary to live, speak, work and believe as she did. She railed against, in a way, the very thing that provided for her. And in her same breath of insisting on her rights to independence as a woman and all artists’ rights to independence in the manifestation of their art form, she simultaneously discriminated against other women (Heitman).
Virginia Woolf’s ideas of equality across genders did not address social class (Bennett & Royle 369). She remained elitist and her beliefs about equality would only apply to those women who were of equal caliber socially, intellectually, and financially. In short, she derided a society which she felt oppressed her while oppressing others she felt to be beneath her. She derided the society which took rights from women because they were women but defended the contempt with which that same society held women of a lower social class. She believed that women should be equal to men as long as those women were socially and intellectually equal to her. If they did not pass that particular litmus test she had no more regard for them than much of the British culture had historically had for women in general (Bennett & Royle 370).
Despite her disdain for other women of a lower social class, Virginia Stephen became Woolf when she married Leonard Woolf, a poor Jewish friend of her brother. She was initially dismissive of Woolf but eventually fell in love with him further cementing the portrait of a cognitive dissonant life in which beliefs constantly conflicted with behavior (Heitman).
Virginia Woolf’s experiences in her own life strongly affected her view of feminism and subsequently her writing. She was born into privilege based not on ancient British royal lines, but on the power of intellectualism (Heitman). As such she learned the value of intelligence. As an adult she surrounded herself with intellects as she had been surrounded in childhood. Her privilege provided her a degree of independence that those less socioeconomically advantaged could not understand. She intended to maintain that privilege as an adult but of her own volition and not due to the standings of a family but by her own rights. An inheritance in her adulthood ensured her ability to do so thus securing her sense of entitlement to independence (Heitman).
Both of these factors – intellectualism and independence – allowed her to be in the company of progressive people (Bennett & Royle 395). As such, she participated in an open marriage in which she pursued outside relationships and explored the ideas of gender identity without the rigid boundaries of the early 20th Century (Heitman). Such openness led Woolf to a long term relationship with another woman to whom Woolf remained close after their affair ended. And these were the factors which created the space in which Virginia Woolf could extoll the virtues of strong, intellectual women and insist on their equality. She argued that women had not been writers in the past because they were women and women were kept poor. Poor women lacked education and lack of education kept women from expressing themselves. As such she was an advocate for the education of women (in her social class). Woolf argued it is why she had insisted throughout her life on having her own means for living so she would never risk being hamstrung by poverty held over her by a patriarchal society (Bennett & Royle 393; Heitman).
Throughout her life Virginia Woolf battled with depression and ultimately, its weight too great to bear any longer, died under its cruel thumb (Heitman). Some would argue, however, that she did not succumb to it but, like she had done so many other times in her life, defied its oppression. In a suicide note found after her death and written to her husband, she explains that she is sinking again into a depression and does not know if she can stand to go through it again (Heitman). In the way she had done so many things in her life, Virginia Woolf took control of her own destiny, placed a firm hand on her situation, and chose the time and place of her death not allowing anything to make those choices for her.
Works Cited
Bennett, Andrew and Nicholas Royle. Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory (3rd ed.), 2004. Print. New York: Pearson Longman.
Heitman, Danny. “Virginia Woolf Was More Than Just a Women’s Writer: She was a Great Observer of Everyday Life.” Humanities, vol. 36, no. 3, 2015. (Web).
