Woolf, Walker and Reading while 'Woke' - By Na'Imah Laurent-Dixon
Before the feminist writing module I took at university, I had never read Virginia Woolf. But, as an avid reader and writer I was excited to finally meet her. I imagined that I would passionately agree with her point of view in A Room of One’s Own. Of course “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction” or to engage in any kind of creative work. Wasn’t it obvious that “fiction, [and other] imaginative work…is not dropped like a pebble upon the ground” but that creatives, and the works they produce, are “attached to life at all four corners”; that their creativity is either helped or hindered by socio-economic circumstances including “grossly material things, like health and money”. How could Woolf have been one of the first to notice that the economic disenfranchisement of women, and other consequences of the patriarchal society we (still) live in, thwarted their opportunities and abilities to write? As I thumbed through A Room of One’s Own, highlighting passages and tabbing pages, I found it difficult to get my head around the idea that her arguments were once radical. Now we know that writers need a reliable income, among other very practical things, in order to create. Uninterrupted time, clear mental space, adequate housing, food, and quiet are all necessary resources that financial stability affords. As are pens, paper, notebooks, laptops, typewriters, Wi-Fi connections, and hot tea or coffee. We also know that securing these things is an “infinitely more formidable” challenge for women in a male-dominated capitalist society.
Luckily, Woolf herself received a yearly inheritance from an aunt. She could write because she didn’t have to exchange her time, labour, or intellect for money to meet her basic needs. Her economic situation granted her the necessary conditions that allowed her the mental and physical room to hone her craft. I envy her.
During this strange pandemic I also envy her freedom of movement and ability to go outside without worry; the conceit of Woolf’s text is that she is wandering over an imaginary Oxbridge campus while composing, or at least mulling over the ideas for, A Room of One’s Own. As Woolf thinks about women, writing, and fiction her body is propelled across Oxbridge with the same energy and vigour her mind is using to spin her new ideas. I’m not sure Woolf would have been able to write, or maintain her sanity, in a lock-down like the one we are currently experiencing since her mental wondering, physical wandering, and stream-of-consciousness prose are so deeply linked. When the “male figures” of the Beadle and Librarian literally “intercept” Woolf, stopping her from walking on the lawn or entering the library because she is a woman, they interrupt Woolf’s movement. And, since the two are so closely interwoven, her mental composition of her book. As much as these interceptions by men seem like rude intrusions into the text, they are actually rhetorical devices that effectively dramatize Woolf’s argument. She uses her personal experiences to demonstrate how the patriarchal exclusion of women from institutions they would need to develop themselves as writers hinders their ability to produce their best work. It was also smart of Woolf to use her personal experiences at the beginning of her text to spark her recount of her investigation into how the histories of the patriarchy and of women’s writing are connected. Woolf truly starts her historical and imaginative research into how, when, and why women came to authorship after these sexist interceptions.
Virginia Woolf was my Beadle. She intercepted my path through A Room of One’s Own with this short sentence: “It is one of the great advantages of being a woman that one can pass even a very fine negress without wishing to make an Englishwoman of her.” I was the passing figure of a “fine negress.” Or I was a “fine negress” to be passed by. Either way, I was appraised, observed, racialised, excluded, and othered but not considered to be fully female or human, let alone capable of writing. So Woolf wasn’t talking about me. All of a sudden, I was expelled from the text. It was jarring. Like Jane Marcus points out in her essay ‘A Very Fine Negress’, which was the first to engage with Woolf’s use of the term, Woolf wrote “Englishwoman” rather than “English woman” like she was suggesting that you had to be English (and therefore white) to be considered a woman at all.
I had to re-think everything I had just read. I had to read everything to follow from a distance. She didn’t consider the works of black women part of the history of women’s writing because she didn’t see black women as women at all. She wasn’t curious about how black female writers came to exist despite both racist and patriarchal oppression. She wasn’t wondering what the lives of black women might have looked like centuries before her own and how this might have impacted their capacities to be writers and artists, or to even imagine those possibilities for themselves. I could no longer surrender myself to Woolf or accompany her through her feminist indignation. She made it clear that it wasn’t just the Beadle or the librarian that I had to worry about. I wasn’t just pitted against sexist exclusion and patriarchal disenfranchisement along with Woolf. I was pitted against Woolf herself since she had so suddenly excluded me.
I remembered feeling duped when I read Noah Berlatsky’s piece, ‘Both versions of The Handmaid’s Tale have a problem with racial erasure’ in The Verge and realised that the sexual abuse that enslaved black women suffered had been appropriated in Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel. The systematised sexual abuse that black women, and many other women of colour, have faced across history is an unthinkable and imaginary fantasy-future for Atwood. For them it was a lived reality. It brought me back to loving Jane Eyre until I came across the descriptions of Bertha and I was forced to confront questions about whether or not she was a racialised figure and to come to terms with how soured my reading of the novel would be if she was. In all of those texts, just like in A Room of One’s Own, black women were excluded even when we were there. Those jarring moments of sudden expulsion made it clear to me that reading anything from the canon of English Literature, or from the canon of (white) feminist texts, could be a painful experience. This sparked an inquisition of my own.
Phillis Wheatley was the first African-American woman to be published in America, with her collection of poetry ‘Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral’, in 1773. The first white woman to write and be published in America was Anna Bradstreet, with her collection of poetry ‘The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America’, in 1650. Bradstreet was published one-hundred and twenty-three years before Wheatley.
The first white woman to publish a book in England, that was written in English, was Kateryn Parr. She was the sixth wife to Henry the Eighth. Her novel Prayers or Meditations was published in 1545. Mary Prince, a formerly enslaved woman who became an abolitionist, was the first black woman to have a novel published in Britain, with The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave, in 1831. The History of Mary Prince was published two hundred and eighty-six-years after Parr’s work.
In 2004 Toni Morrison was the first African-American woman to win the Nobel prize for literature. I was five. The first white woman to win the Nobel prize for literature was Selma Lagerlöf in 1909. I wasn’t born yet. My mother hadn’t been born and neither had my grandmother. There is a ninety-five-year difference between the dates Lagerlöf and Morrison won.
In 1970 Bernice Rubens was the first white woman to ever win the Booker Prize. Last year, in 2019, Bernadice Evaristo was the first black woman ever to win the Booker Prize. Evaristo was also the first joint winner of the Booker Prize since 1993, when a change in the rules only allowed authors to win individually, she shares the 2019 Booker title with Margaret Atwood. Atwood was awarded for her sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale. Atwood had already won the same award in 2000 and been shortlisted four separate times since 1986. There is a forty-nine-year difference between Rubens and Evaristo, a nineteen-year difference between Evaristo’s and Atwood’s first wins, and a thirty-three-year difference between Evaristo’s first win and Atwood’s first nomination.
Virginia Woolf delivered A Room of One’s Own as an address in 1928 and it was published as a text a year later in 1929. Black women were writing. So why were we excluded from the tradition she was investigating? Didn’t she know? Why didn’t she wonder if the “negress” whose path she crossed had ever attempted to write anything? I can’t say that Woolf’s inquiry into the tradition of women’s writing excludes black women because exclusion is a deliberate act, you can’t exclude somebody if it never crosses your mind that they should have been included. If Woolf didn’t view black women as women (read women as human) then Woolf’s imagination could never have conceived of a black woman who could, did, or wanted to write.
As Alice Walker puts it in her seminal collection of Womanist prose In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens, where she also reacts to Woolf’s exclusion of black female authors: “Virginia Woolf […] wrote that in order for a woman to write fiction she must have two things, certainly: a room of her own (with key and lock) and enough money to support herself. What then are we to make of Phillis Wheatley, a slave, who owned not even herself?” and who still, somehow, managed to become an author. Let alone to learn the skills she needed to do so “when for most of the years black people [had] been in America it was a punishable crime for a black person to read or write?”. Whenever I am reminded of this history, of all the racial and gendered barriers that many black women endured and overcame in order to survive long enough to imagine worlds beyond their survival, and to live long enough to find a way to write them down, it becomes astonishing to me that there are black women writers at all. As I write this, I astonish myself.
The first time I read In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens I was transfixed. I flew through it. I found several of Alice Walker’s essays to be a revelation. The essay by the same title as her infamous collection was no different. I passionately agreed with points she made, although I also questioned some of her convictions, and I was introduced to many new and exciting ideas. Then I read the essay by Jane Marcus and came across this question: “why didn’t Alice Walker notice this passage?”, in reference to Woolf’s mention of the “negress”. I paused. Walker was already writing a direct response to Woolf, and tracing her own journey of discovering the artistic legacy of African-American (primarily southern) female artists and writers throughout her essay collection, so why didn’t Walker comment on the appearance of Woolf’s “negress”? It seems very likely that Alice Walker noticed her because she definitely noticed that black female writers were absent from Woolf’s treatment of the history of women’s writing. Why didn’t Walker beat Jane Marcus to commenting on the one black woman who did appear? I’ll never know for sure but I can imagine.
Maybe Walker thought that her interventions into Woolf’s text, like “[insert “eighteenth century,” insert “black woman,” insert “born or made a slave”]” (all her punctuation), were enough since they addressed race and therefore ‘corrected’ Woolf’s blindness. It might be possible that the “negress” didn’t fit into Walker’s argument about Woolf having ignored the subject who is black and female since the “negress”, as othered as she is and despite her exclusion from treatment as a woman or a writer, is still there. Walker might have assumed that her engagement with the “negress” went without saying; of course she noticed her and of course the essay responded to her appearance, without talking about the “negress” directly, by placing black female artists into A Room of One’s Own. Or, maybe, Walker felt especially slighted by Woolf’s sudden mention of the “negress”. Alice Walker is a black woman who grew up in the American South when segregation laws were still enforced. She is also a black woman who writes. I can imagine that the term “negress” might have hit especially close to home for her. Too close. Engaging with the “negress” indirectly might have been the best she could have done at the time when she was writing In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens.
And maybe, this essay isn’t really about Virginia Woolf, or A Room of One’s Own, or Alice Walker, or even about white feminism and literature. After all, Jane Marcus has already taken Woolf to task, Alice Walker has already investigated traditions of black (American) women who wrote along with trying to write black (American) female writers into A Room of One’s Own, and Gabe Wilson has already extended both of their work by literally re-arranging all 37,971 of the words in Woolf’s text into a work of fiction that engages with questions of gender, race, class, and literature in a way that would be intersectional by today’s standards. Nothing I have said up to this point is new in any ground-breaking way. So what is this essay about?
To get the obvious out of the way, this is an essay about my realising how exclusionary white feminist literature can be and how those moments of exclusion can make reading canonical literature an uncomfortable experience for me. It is also about my coming to understand just how much black women have been: erased, othered, excluded, appropriated, racialised, hyper-sexualised, masculinised, pathologized, stereotyped, and misrepresented across literature.
Fiction might never be truly escapist for me now that I have been formerly introduced to feminism, womanism, post-colonialism, and intersectionality. I am still learning, and I will never know everything about all of the ways that all of the people are oppressed across all of the world, but there are more and more things that I recognise as problematic and oppressive now. I doubt that I will ever be able to read anything problematic and not be emotionally impacted to some degree. And there are so many books with problematic things in them, especially the further back in time you read. So this essay might be a letter of mourning to my existence as a blissfully unaware reader who could pick up any book that looked interesting without seeing it politically or who was able to fully enjoy a text despite. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to read that way again.
I am still sure that I will always be a reader. I can’t give up reading. It has taught me so much about who I am and about what I believe in. Literature has been an oasis for me as an introvert. I have been able to travel to other worlds, through time, and to other countries without leaving my home. Toni Morrison, Bell Hooks, Alice Walker and Maya Angelou; Zadie Smith, Dominique Christina, Octavia E. Butler, Jasmine Mans and so many others have handed me parts of myself and helped me to think about what kind of woman and person I want to be. They have asked me what kind of world I would like to live in and how I will go about creating it. As a writer, books have offered me glimpses into the kinds of literary genius that keeps me writing although I know that I will never be able to pen a sentence anywhere near as wonderful as that. And, as somebody with dyslexia who struggled to learn to read, I refuse to give it up now that I (mostly) have the hang of it.
In a lot of ways, I would say that I’ve discovered myself through reading. I have also reconciled myself to the idea that as I continue to read, I’ll continue to come across sentences that expel me, intentionally or not, and that these moments will be jarring and uncomfortable. I also know that I won’t let that stop me from enjoying everything that reading has to offer or from experiencing literature written in less culturally aware times. So this essay is, truly, me coming to terms with the reality that books are written by people. By people who have their own views, that I might be offended by and may or may not agree with, and that those views will colour their prose. I either have to deal with this as I encounter it or stop reading all together. For me, that isn’t really a choice.
‘Phillis Wheatley’. National Women’s History Museum. www.womenshistory.org, https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/phillis-wheatley. Accessed 18 May 2020.
‘Mary Prince: The First Woman to Publish a Slavery Memoir in Britain’. The Independent, 1 Oct. 2018. www.independent.co.uk, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/mary-prince-who-british-slavery-memoir-author-abolition-history-google-doodle-a8562706.html.
Brilliant.
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