I will be discussing
A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf and
Surfaces of Sense by Nicole Brossard as arguments about the possibility for women to be free through the act of writing. Nicole Brossard’s
Surfaces of Sense approaches the argument through its abstracts use of spiral imagery. This imagery is a metaphor for the argument which I consider as being coexistent with
A Room of One’s Own and Brossard’s other predecessors.
A Room of One’s Own uses a more materialist approach to freedom than
Surfaces of Sense, though Virginia Woolf’s argumentative strategy is often satirical, multiple and self reflexive as she resists or plays with the idea of arriving at any concrete conclusion or synthesis: “I should never be able to come to a conclusion [...]I have shirked the duty of coming to a conclusion” (Woolf 3). In this sense, Woolf can be said to also be employing a spiral, that is non-linear, coexistent strategy in her essay.
In the opening pages of
A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf states that the thesis of her essay will be “a woman must have money and a room of one’s own if she is to write fiction” (Woolf 3). She continues through the rest of her book length essay to meditate on the topic of women and fiction. In the opening pages, she tells us what her approach to the argument will be a blatant blend and blur of history, fact and fiction because “fiction here may have more truth then fact” (Woolf 4). She suggests that history and how women have been represented in it by men, is insufficient: “women and the fiction that is written about them” (Woolf 3). Therefore history alone will not be a reliable source of truth and the female writer’s imagination will need to be employed in order to arrive at some kind of truth.
The chapter in which Woolf invents the book
Life’s Adventure by Mary Carmichael is a practical application of how her writer’s imagination can effect a real change. Woolf makes a statement through the imaginative work of Mary Carmichael about what is missing from literature and what is possible. She does this a times with a sense of humour:
“We are all women you assure me? Then I may tell you the very next words I read are these-‘Choloe liked Olivia...’ Do not start. Do not blush. Let us admit in the privacy of our own society that these things sometimes happen. Sometimes women do like women” (74).
Woolf uses a humble tone as a satire of what is means to be a lady in educated society. She is a lone voice making a rallying cry to a room full of women at a women’s college ruled over by coterie of monks. It is as though she is being polite because she knows that she is being watched. Like a rebellious student she talks loud and clear enough that her friends may hear her message but polite enough that she will not be asked to leave before she is done. There is a trace of sly resentment to her tone which suggests that there is something much angrier and unsettling at the core of the issue which she can only allude to through a metaphor:
“Thought – to call it a prouder name than it deserved – had let its line down into the stream[...]the cautious hauling of it in[...]alas, laid on the grass how small, how insignificant this thought of mine looked [...]the only charge I could bring against the Fellows and Scholars [...]they had sent my little fish into hiding” (5).
Woolf uses the image of a fish to suggest the slippery nature of ideas and freedom. She continually alludes to this paradoxical synthesis of fiction and reality in
A Room of One’s Own, an approach that is in agreement with Georges Bataille’s statement that sovereignty is “the object which eludes us all, which nobody has seized and which nobody can seize for this reason: we cannot possess it, like an object, but we are doomed to seek it” (Bataille 165). Woolf depicts freedom as an intangible object which by its nature eludes us: “I went on to sketch a plan of the soul so that in each of us two powers preside, one male, one female[...]a great mind is androgynous” (88-89). At other times Woolf is hopeful and pragmatic in the way she sets out a material strategy to end women’s servitude so that they can have the freedom to choose their labours. Amidst the uncertainty and poetic flights of fancy, Woolf unleashes her anger in concrete demands, stating her need for freedom and those of the women around her:
“Intellectual freedom depends on material things. Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom. And women have always been poor[...]women then have not had a dog’s chance of writing poetry”
Woolf also uses examples from history to support her argument in
A Room of One’s Own and goes to great pains to sketch the circumstances by which women have not been free to write about their own lives. She suggests issues such as the human need to feel superior; hence men’s need to feel superior to women and the material and spiritual poverty that this imposes on women. It is important to note that Woolf’s writing lost some credibility and suffered from lack of exposure after her suicide in 1941 and it wasn’t until the 1970’s that her work was put into new light by the women’s movement.
This suggests to me the importance of continual renewal and participation in this argument. It takes writers such as Nicole Brossard to restate and reimagine what Woolf was arguing for. It is in this way that it seems as though Woolf and Brossard’s books coexist and suggest the path of a spiral which continues to expand around its central point:
“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 tonight, for they are washing up the dishes and putting their children to bed. But she lives; for great poets do not die; they are continuing presences; they need only the opportunity to walk among us in the flesh” (102).
Surfaces of Sense by Nicole Brossard was first published in French in 1980 and in an English translation in 1989. Nicole Brossard’s unique approach to poetry, formatted as prose typically occupies the top third of a page and is cohesive in theme, characters and style.
Surfaces of Sense reads at times like a journal about a fictional work in progress that is being translated into a free form poetic syntax. Other times Brossard is writing a practical manifesto for the liberation of women. It is also poetry in its use of rhythm, line breaks and enjambment. She uses the imagery and themes of spirals, fiction, reality and the cut up account of fictional lesbian lovers, crossed with her fictional representation of herself and her lover:
“From this moment there were double meanings and everything was in the present. A few characters, all women living in reality, in the middle of a tender and difficult fiction which painfully kept them alive[...]Madly, I had thought up a great love story for I wanted to write a book, no matter what[...]
Solve one problem at a time. From prose to anecdotes, entertaining, amusing, but not, however, enough to make me forget the fictional fire in our breasts. Several versions.
“How did Gertrude come into the world?-so real in the ultraviolet light of appearances.”
Brossard’s subversion of typical genres is reminiscent of Woolf’s mash ups of traditional literary forms. It displays a similar distrust for either history or fiction as lies. Without Woolf’s practical demands, the reader is free to interpret what Brossard means in
Surfaces of Sense. I focussed on her repeated imagery of the spiral as being symbolic of the coexistent argument which includes
A Room of One’s Own:
“For books continue each other, in spite of our habit of judging them separately” (Woolf 72) and the work of other female literary figures. Brossard uses the spiral as a symbol of collective consciousness and a communal empathy for women struggling for their voice in literature:
“Attentive to the movements which unwind in a spiral pattern in books written by women [...]the spiral pattern opens out onto the unwritten. And the unwritten circulates, round and round, producing emanations like those at the door to an initiatory pathway” (14).
Brossard, as Woolf did, meditates from multiple perspectives of the argument. She evokes the past, enacts the present argument in her own act of writing and calls attention to the unwritten future for women writers. The spiral becomes important as a symbol for an argument and discussion which is participatory. The spiral is a shape that expands and gains in circumference as it circulates around a central point. It suggests an argumentative approach whose goal is not conquering or appropriating but adding, embracing its predecessors. The spiral as symbol of argument is also a postmodern critique of the patriarchal tendency for linear and logical rhetorical structures: “once the line has deviated from its normal path (the course of reason), anything can happen; and it can take any sort of turn (lively or slow) with each new beginning” (22). In the section titled “Traces of a Manifesto” Brossard, as Woolf before her, is struggling with issues of sovereignty. Brossard’s struggle includes a resistance to gender categories implied by the male gaze that dominates literature. The spiral form is “charged with disseminating the patriarchal plague” (44) and to get our from under the “contemptuous gaze of others” (41). I read
Surfaces of Sense as though Brossard was writing an updated version of Mary Carmichael’s
Life’s Adventure. Brossard
writes about women as lovers of other women. She is aware of the limitations of fiction, poetry and language to resist definition and thus be absolutely free. There is the sense that Brossard is avoiding logic and naming as a statement of freedom. Like Woolf, in order for Brossard to write about freedom, she must also dwell in some agitation and paradox.
She creates the fictional world of Gertrude and Adrienne (I read this as an intertextual nod to pioneers of women’s writing Gertrude Stein and Adrienne Rich). These characters are sometimes confused or combined with Brossard and her real life lover Yolande: “Adrienne’s words overlapped with Yolande’s” (20). Also like Woolf, Brossard is not working in any clear genre but draws from many sources, she is creating a manifesto out of the collision of facts, fictions, histories and forms:
“At Adrienne’s side; convinced as I was that each image in my words, in my life, could become so patently obvious that the bodies of our women marching slowly through the streets suddenly acquired the status of a manifesto. For when Adrienne and I went further and further back into History, we were always confused in an absurd way with fiction, as though we had never really existed” (41).
It’s important to note the historical lineage that links Virginia Woolf and Nicole Brossard. There is a theory which Slavoj Zizek discusses that the modern world is a post-ideological one, as though the work of the feminism or other “–ism’s” are somehow done. It strikes me for this reason that feminism is more important than ever. To note the link between Woolf and Brossard goes to show that the argument is never over and needs continual renewal and re-evaluation for each generation or else the work of our predecessors may be lost. This is a case in point for the necessity of writing and expression in the struggle for freedom and sovereignty. In
The Puppet and the Dwarf Slavoj Zizek’s writes that: “freedom is not a blissfully neutral state of harmony and balance, but the very violent act which disturbs this balance” (36).
This supports my belief that the participatory nature of the spiral and the necessity of an argument is that it not arrive at a synthesis or conclusion. That the freedom to argue, to express conflicting points of view that expand and reiterate on past arguments is paradoxically a statement of freedom and a desire for sovereignty.
Bibliography
Bataille, Georges.
Literature and Evil. Surrey: Calder and Boyars, 1973.
Brossard, Nicole.
Surfaces of Sense. Trans. Fiona Strachan.Toronto: Coach House Press, 1989.
Woolf, Virginia
. A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas. London: Penguin Books, 2000.
Zizek, Slavoj.
The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity. Boston: The MIT
by Mat Laporte
