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Abstract
The concept of impersonality as a writer's strategy has been exposed to misinterpretations that either fail to exhaust its full meaning and deposit an unequal amount of attention on all components of the term or, in the worst case, tend to distort its true elements. In relation to Virginia Woolf's criticism, in particular, it is a critical commonplace that the author employed an impersonal position in order not to fully materialise her feminist vision, but to shy away from explicitly expressing her feminist convictions and openly supporting women's rights. Indicative of this is the criticism that suggests disapproval of Woolf's reluctance to side with her own gender and declare the power of female personality.
The aim here is to challenge such critical views, separate the discussion of impersonality from its association with that of androgyny, and re-visit the issue of Woolf's employment of the impersonal strategy. I examine two of Woolf's essays on nineteenth-century women writers included in her first volume of The Common Reader and offer an analysis from both a gender-oriented and a genderless angle. Woolf's strong affinity with female conditions of oppression, her modernist convictions, her need to compromise with the male-dominated context of the time and her concurrent urge to co-operate with the common reader of an unspecified sex for the sake of artistic creation reveal more complex reasons behind her intentions than those examined by critics so far.
Notes
1 Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. 4, 1931–35, ed. Anne Olivier Bell, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1983, p. 186.
3 Dillon, ‘Impersonality and its Discontents’, p. 59.
2 George Dillon, ‘Impersonality and its Discontents’, Contending Rhetoric, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990, pp. 58–9.
4 Nicholas Rescher, Objectivity: The Obligations of Impersonal Reason, Notre Dame and London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997, pp. 3–4.
6 Jeanne Schulkind (ed.), ‘Introduction’, in Moments of Being, San Diego, New York and London: Harcourt, 1985, p. 14.
5 William Regh, Insight and Solidarity: A Study in the Discourse Ethics of Jürgen Habermas, Berkeley, LA and London: California University Press, 1994, pp. 70–87.
7 Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, Michael Holquist (ed.), Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981, p. 294.
8 Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, p. 359.
9 Mikhail Bakhtin and P. N. Medvedev, ‘The Formal Method on Literary Scholarship’, in Pam Morris (ed.), The Bakhtin Reader: Selected Writings of Bakhtin, Medvedev and Voloshinov, London: Edward Arnold, 1994, pp. 126–7.
10 Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, p. 419.
11 Michael Holquist, Dialogism: Bakhtin and His World, London and New York: Routledge, 1990, p. 57.
12 Bakhtin, ‘Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics’, in Pam Morris (ed.), The Bakhtin Reader: Selected Writings of Bakhtin, Medvedev and Voloshinov, London: Edward Arnold, 1994, p. 98.
13 Laura Marcus, Virginia Woolf, Plymouth: Northcote House, 1997, p. 2.
14 Herbert Marder, The Measure of Life: Virginia Woolf's Last Years, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2000, p. 102.
15 Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing, Princeton University Press, 1977, p. 286.
16 Showalter, A Literature of Their Own, p. 290.
17 Adrienne Rich, On Lies, Secrets, Silence: Selected Prose, 1966–1978, London: Virago, 1980, p. 37.
18 Quentin Bell, ‘A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas’, in Merry M. Pawlowski (ed.), Virginia Woolf and Fascism: Resisting the Dictators’ Seduction, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001, p. 13.
19 Showalter, A Literature of Their Own, p. 283.
20 Rich, On Lies, Secrets, Silence, p. 37.
21 Makiko Minow-Pinkney, Virginia Woolf and the Problem of the Subject, Brighton: Harvester Press, 1987, p. 5.
22 Judith Kegan Gardiner, ‘On Female Identity and Writing by Women’, in Elizabeth Abel (ed.), Writing and Sexual Difference, Sussex: Harvester Press, 1982, p. 189.
23 George Ella Lyon, ‘Virginia Woolf and the Problem of the Body’, in Elaine K. Ginsberg and Laura Moss Gottlieb (eds), Virginia Woolf: Centennial Essays, Troy, New York: Whitston, 1983, p. 123.
24 Julia Kristeva, ‘Word, Dialogue and Novel’, in Toril Moi (ed.), The Kristeva Reader, Oxford, UK and Cambridge, USA: Blackwell, 1986, p. 39.
25 Luce Irigaray, ‘Sexual Difference’, in Margaret Whitford (ed.), The Irigaray Reader, Oxford: Blackwell, 1991, p. 166.
26 Melba Cuddy-Keane, Virginia Woolf, the Intellectual, and the Public Sphere, Cambridge University Press, 2003, p. 133.
27 Lucio P. Ruotolo, The Interrupted Moment: A View of Virginia Woolf's Novels, Stanford University Press, 1986, p. 8.
28 Tuzyline Jita Allan, ‘A Voice of One's Own: Implications of Impersonality in the Essays of Virginia Woolf and Alice Walker’, in Ruth-Ellen Boetcher Joeres and Elizabeth Mittman (eds), The Politics of the Essay: Feminist Perspectives, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993, p. 136.
29 See Ken Hyland, ‘Authorit y and Invisibility: Authorial Identity in Academic Writing’, Journal of Pragmatics 3, 2002, p. 1104. Hyland has discussed the function of the impersonal strategy in the context of academic journal articles.
30 See Lisa Low, ‘Refusing to Hit Back: Virginia Woolf and the Impersonality Question’, in Beth Carole Rosenberg and Jeanne Dubino (eds), Virginia Woolf and the Essay, New York: St Martin's Press, 1997, pp. 261–5.
31 Bertrand Russell, Authority and the Individual: The Reith Lectures for 1948–9, London: George Allen and Unwin, 1949, p. 81.
33 Virginia Woolf, ‘Phases of Fiction’, Granite and Rainbow, [1958], New York and London: Harcourt Brace, 1975, p. 116.
34 Woolf, ‘Jane Austen’, p. 174.
32 Woolf, ‘Jane Austen’, The Common Reader: First Series, 1925, London: Hogarth Press, 1942, p. 171.
35 Wolfgang Iser, Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology, Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989, p. 34.
36 Virginia Woolf, ‘“Jane Eyre” and ‘Wuthering Heights”’, The Common Reader: First Series, 1925, London: Hogarth Press, 1942, p. 199.
37 Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own, ed. Michéle Barrett, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1993, p. 66.
38 Allan, ‘A Voice of One's Own’, p. 139.
39 Allan, ‘A Voice of One's Own’, p. 140.
40 Gabrielle Griffin, ‘Introduction’, in Gabrielle Griffin (ed.), Difference in View: Women and Modernism, London: Taylor & Francis, 1994, p. 1.
41 Diane Enns, ‘In the Name of Identity: Responsibility, Subjectivity and the Political’, International Studies in Philosophy 32:1, 2000, p. 49.
42 Hermione Lee, ‘Virginia Woolf's Essays’, in Sue Roe and Susan Sellers (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf, Cambridge University Press, 2000, p. 105.
43 Woolf, ‘“Jane Eyre” and “Wuthering Heights”’, p. 202.
44 Maria DiBattista, ‘Virginia Woolf and the Language of Authorship’, in Roe and Sellers (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf, Cambridge University Press, 2000, p. 133.
45 Katie Wales, Personal Pronouns in Present-day English, Cambridge University Press, 1996, p. 66.
46 James C. Raymond. ‘I-Dropping and Androgyny: The Authorial I in Scholarly Writing’, College Composition and Communication 44:4, 1993, p. 478.
47 Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. 5, 1936–41, ed. Anne Olivier Bell, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1985, p. 200.
48 T. S. Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, Selected Essays, 1917–1932, London: Faber and Faber, 1932, p. 15.
49 T. S. Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, p. 21
50 T. S. Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, p. 22.
51 Woolf, ‘Phases of Fiction’, Granite and Rainbow, p. 138.
52 Low, ‘Refusing to Hit Back’, p. 261.
53 Jane P. Tompkins, ‘The Reader in History: The Changing Shape of Literary Response’, in Jane P. Tompkins (ed.), Reader-response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-structuralism, Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980, p. 220.
54 David Goldie, A Critical Difference: T. S. Eliot and John Middleton Murry in English Literary Criticism, 1919–1928, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998, p. 43.
55 Matei Calinescu, Rereading, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993, p. 54.
56 Li-Min Yang, ‘Dialogism and Carnivalization in the Work of T. S. Eliot’, PhD thesis, University of Birmingham, 1994, p. 1, 46. Yang's thesis challenges critical assessments that emphasise monologism and monophony in Eliot's art, and argue in favour of manifest multi-formity in style and multi-centredness in his speech and voice.
57 Allan, ‘A Voice of One's Own’, p. 133.
58 Carole Rosenberg, Virginia Woolf and Samuel Johnson: Common Readers, New York: St Martin's Press, 1995, p. 71.
59 André Gide, ‘Montaigne’, The Yale Review 89:1, 2001, p. 63.
60 Rosenberg, Virginia Woolf and Samuel Johnson, p. 119.
61 Julia Briggs, Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life, Orlando: Harvest, 2006, p. 231.
62 Winifred Holtby, Virginia Woolf, London: Wishart, 1932, p. 40.
63 Jean Tobin, ‘On Creativity: Woolf's The Waves and Lessing's The Golden Notebook’, in Ruth Saxton and Jean Tobin (eds), Woolf and Lessing: Breaking the Mould, New York: St Martin's Press, 1994, p. 176.
64 Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. 3, 1925–1930, ed. Anne Olivier Bell, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1982, p. 169.
65 Steven Matthews, Modernism, London: Arnold, 2004, p. 125.
66 Naomi Black, Virginia Woolf as Feminist, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2004, p. 2.
67 Bronwyn Davies, ‘Women's Subjectivity and Feminist Stories’, in Carolyn Ellis and Michael G. Flaherty (eds), Investigating Subjectivity: Research on Lived Experience, Newbury Park, London and New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1992, p. 62.
68 Rescher, Objectivity, p. 38.
69 Rita Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social Change, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1989, p. 59.
70 Per Linell, Approaching Dialogue: Talk, Interaction and Contexts in Dialogical Perspectives, Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1998, p. 270.
71 Regenia Gagnier, Subjectivities: A History of Self-representation in Britain, 1832–1920, Oxford University Press, 1991, p. 11.
72 Natania Rosenfeld, Outsiders Together: Virginia Woolf and Leonard Woolf, Princeton University Press, 2000, p. 15.