Gender

What I find repeated and perhaps most disturbing throughout A Room of One’s Own and Marianne Dekoven’s chapter on Modernism and gender is the degree to which women in general were viewed as inferior to men or, even more troubling, were invisible altogether. Dekoven points out early in her essay that “Modernism had mothers as well as fathers” (175) and coincidentally, one of those named mothers, Virginia Woolf, explains the depressing attitudes of many at the time of her writing. Woolf’s inclusion of the line, “the best woman was intellectually the inferior of the worst man” is troubling at best. I feel that the most optimistic thing that can be said regarding her other sentiments is that despite the lyrical language and beauty which saturates her words, the very existence of Woolf’s book proves that women’s roles at the turn of the century were vexed.
While the general consensus regarding women was that they were less than men, still second to them with regard to intellect, ability, and social standing, “it was impossible for any woman, past, present, or to come, to have the genius of Shakespeare,” (46). For example, Woolf proves that these statements, one would presume made by ignorant men, men desperate to maintain some semblance of superiority, cannot be true. Included in A Room of One’s Own is the historical view of women in the past: “[s]he never writes her own life and scarcely keeps a diary; there are only a handful of her letters in existence” (45). This is not a blanket statement and it would be quite easy for one to make an intuitive leap which would marginalize women to the role of silent observer in a male dominated world, both in and out of any particular narrative. Curiously, and Woolf points to this as well, women occupy a precarious place within society, as they are in a social structure that at once situates them on a pedestal and in need of protection by men, yet also forbidden from obtaining the same rights as the men who protect them.
A second interesting commonality between these two texts is the level to which they discuss gender in modernism in several different ways. Each way allows for different problematic outcomes as well as varying ways of guarding against those said outcomes. First, Woolf refers to the ways in which one might approach the topic, “women and what they are like; or it might mean women and the fiction that they write; or it might mean women and the fiction that is written about them” (3). Despite the lack of Dekoven to address this issue overtly, the discussion of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness does lend itself to a discussion of male dominated narrative as the novella makes it nearly impossible for female readers to be initiated into the male story and further alienates them from the narrator, Marlow. Dekoven also addresses the misogyny which characterizes much of modernist literature, citing Eliot as a prime example. She explains that his “misogyny is often expressed as a sexual disgust conflated with both anti-Semitism and class hatred” (178). The class hatred or at least the presence of and discussion regarding class is nothing new. Many if not all texts thus far have approached the topic from “Prufrock” and The Wasteland to Howards End and, to a lesser extent, Mrs. Dalloway.
I find it interesting that the issue keeps coming up even when gender is the primary focus of discussion. I was unaware prior to this course how much class and modernist literature were intertwined, and similarly, was ignorant of the degree to which social standing and gender were linked, except of course that women would most often be considered lower than men. I find the greatest collision of this put most eloquently by Woolf when she says, “I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse perhaps to be locked in; and, thinking of the safety and prosperity of the one sex and of the poverty and insecurity of the other” (24). In reading these pieces, I realize how precarious a space women have occupied, as writers and as subjects, a space which I feel they will continue to be in until society can truly be as blind to gender and other forms of difference as they should be in a utopian, and highly unlikely, society.