"Intellectual freedom depends on material things."
Virginia Woolf lived in the 20th century, and yet nearly 80 years after her death the author remains somewhat of an enigma; her personal diaries remain a key source from which our understanding of the brilliant-but-troubled writer stems, and amidst a stream of insights offered lies an analysis of sex and gender norms that perhaps even today seems radical.
Intellectual freedom was a frequent preoccupation of Woolf's. Despite being born into a storied family with a long literary tradition amongst the highest echelons of British society, she resented the limitations being a woman in such an environment presented. Like many of her female literary contemporaries, she would be denied the same formal education at the country's top institutions other family members received, and it would weigh heavily on Woolf even has her career later flourished.
Initially carving out a successful career as a journalist, Woolf's first book The Voyage Out would be published in 1915 following a protracted writing period of several years. While the book as published was well-received and debuted her innovative modernist prose, what's most interesting about the novel was what had been omitted.
In 1981 renowned Woolf scholar Louise DeSalvo would publish a version of the novel which restored the initial draft Woolf had completed in 1912. The original manuscript had been much more politically charged, including pointed critiques not just on the role of women, but colonialism and homosexuality as well. Written during a time of significant personal turmoil, it's believed that Woolf stripped much of the subtext during subsequent revisions upon being told that no publishing house would be willing to touch a novel so scathingly critical of British society. Using original manuscript pages DeSalvo was able to piece together the original, and the product was a novel that reads like classic Woolf; but now not just in terms of voice but essence as well.
“I told you in the course of this paper that Shakespeare had a sister; but do not look for her in Sir Sidney Lee’s life of the poet. She died young—alas, she never wrote a word. She lies buried where the omnibuses now stop, opposite the Elephant and Castle. Now my belief is that this poet who never wrote a word and was buried at the cross–roads still lives. She lives in you and in me, and in many other women who are not here to–night, for they are washing up the dishes and putting the children to bed. But she lives.."
- A Room of One's Own
That essence which imbued her work was a surprisingly spartan conception of gender relations. Much has been written (some salaciously) of Woolf's bisexuality, but her own account suggests it stemmed at least in part from the belief that notions of femininity and masculinity should not necessarily be tied to sex. For Woolf, only someone who had "reconciled" their femininity and masculinity was capable of producing truly creative works; perhaps a veiled shot at the late-Victorian poets and writers of her childhood like Coventry Patmore who penned drab peans like "She [his wife] was utterly unselfish. She excelled in the difficult arts of family life...—in short she was so constituted that she never had a mind or a wish of her own..".
For Woolf, this mutual symbiosis was not limited to the personal; much like her theory on creativity, advancement in society demanded gender parity. In 1928 she'd deliver a series of speeches at Cambridge on women and literature that would be published the following year as an essay titled A Room of One's Own. Supremely influential in shaping Woolf's legacy as an icon of modern feminism, the essay would employ literature as an avatar for a systemic deconstruction of contemporaneous arguments against women's suffrage.
At its core however, was the same desire for intellectual freedom which permeated Virginia Woolf's entire body of work. Poetry requires this freedom and in turn that freedom itself requires material things, she'd tell the assembled crowd. Even if women "had" that intellectual freedom, their potential was being stifled when they were denied university educations, the right to seek employment and earn an income, or independent lodgings; the material things that had allowed men to push the envelope of human understanding for more than a millennia. Woolf herself probably put it best:
“When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Bronte.."
This International Women's Day, let's celebrate the hard-fought progress we've made, and acknowledge that the past year has demonstrated how our work is far from finished.
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