I love this gorgeous, generous, perfect book and want to have 6 different conversations about it all at once. The acknowledgment section trails into aI love this gorgeous, generous, perfect book and want to have 6 different conversations about it all at once. The acknowledgment section trails into a note that ambushes me with even more love and gratitude: “Reader, your attention—a measure of time, your most non-replenishable resource—is a profound gift, one I have done my best to honor.”
The Age of Innocence is one of those books that have been teetering on my to-read pile for months while I attended to life’s copious demands. Once I sThe Age of Innocence is one of those books that have been teetering on my to-read pile for months while I attended to life’s copious demands. Once I started it, however, there seemed to be nothing else in the world worth reading—or doing. I was utterly absorbed.
The novel centers on the microcosm of 1870s New York’s elite society and uses it as a lens to scrutinize not only the nuanced spectacle of the leisured class, but also that of the human soul. In The Age of Innocence, Wharton casts a visceral spotlight on the messy and volatile instabilities permeating the seemingly stable narratives of privileged polite society. More specifically, the novel portrays the subtle choreography of mannered social etiquette as, in large part, a masquerade.
From childhood on, Newland Archer was taught the pantomimic language of this social performance, indoctrinated into Old New York’s cult of silence, which finds strength in legacy and reputation and uses its substantial power to impose a false, all-encompassing “all rightness” in untenable circumstances in order to protect itself. As such, Newland is expected to marry the innocent, naïve, and “artless” May Welland who, unencumbered by dreams of subversion, would make a “blameless” wife incapable of surprising him. Yet, Newland cannot bear thoughts of that future, stretching away in safe, dull years on the other side of the gulf separating him from the object of his truest desires: the untouchable Countess Oleska. May’s disgraced cousin.
I loved this book. Wharton explores, with both ingenuity and a poisonous bite, the angst of agency and individuality and its unsettling struggle for power in the act of attempting to escape the societal structures in which we are embedded. The novel’s subject, after all, is the journey of repositioning one’s self in relation to the tradition and culture we grew up in, and the difficulty of continuing to live in the complexity and clarity of that learned wisdom. Newland, for much of the novel, luxuriates in the seductive premise of living an unmoored life, outside the narrow parameters of his privileged slice of New York, which formed him but which he feels he has now completely outgrown. He is eager to go, to cast off the dreadful moorage that is his engagement to May Welland and seize what he can of the world for himself.
Newland, above all, wants Ellen. Seeing Ellen again, for so many years, has brought his world to a proper perspective, and their shared resistance to being taxonomized by the stale societal scripts they were born into brought them closer together. Newland throws himself at Ellen with the sort of carelessness and abandon that befits his youth and station. Despite the powerful tides tugging them apart, he is determined to weather the risks that love and desire necessitate. Yet, of course, the central irony here is that no matter how far Newland’s fall from grace would be, Ellen’s would still be from greater a height. Their clannish society’s customs dictate that such dissent (and descent) from the universal script of propriety must be severely punished. And as these scripts usually go, Ellen (who’s still reeling from her own marital scandal) is set to bear the cost.
While reading this book, the question of who is in the luxurious position of being able to transgress lied like a needle in the back of my mind. Newland’s battle for coherence and self-agency is predicated on the interdependent working of class, race, and gender. Newland flirts with the idea of surpassing the limitations of his social reality, but his desire struck me as yet another masquerade. It is subversive, certainly, but it cannot genuinely harm him—like a defanged serpent. The potential loss and fracture of Newland’s bachelor dreams lead him to disillusionment, but not to any real rebuilding. At the end, Newland cannot truly escape the world that formed him because he is incapable of seeing it clearly in the first place. Newland therefore becomes the prisoner and eventually the victim—if he is a victim at all—of his own misperceptions.
Ultimately, what comes forcefully in The Age of Innocence is the cost of negating the reality of the world we live in and the people we love and are responsible for to uphold the incomplete fictions of our illusions. The ending twisted my heart into sadness and pity, but I can’t conceive of a more apt conclusion for this novel....more
My Ántonia took hold of me in ways I did not anticipate and could not fully understand. It made me weep, it made me laugh, and it made me care more deMy Ántonia took hold of me in ways I did not anticipate and could not fully understand. It made me weep, it made me laugh, and it made me care more deeply again about people and things I haven’t thought of in years. I love this story in a way that still nearly overwhelms me with gratitude. To read this book is to fill your whole life with it, if only briefly, if only for the space of a few hundred pages. When I finished it, I felt more alive. That is no small thing.
This is my first novel by Willa Cather, which I happened upon in a dusty pile in a second-hand bookshop in Paris and decided to read on a whim. I was immediately pulled away by the quiet sureness of Cather’s voice and vision, the stunning lightness of her touch, and the beautifully evocative undertow of her language, which rings true, clear, and unsentimental. This marriage, between richness of language and a determined view of facts, created indelible images that burned in my mind’s eye as bright as gold under a lamp. In Cather’s hands, the open and windswept Nebraska plains seemed to me to be a place of more beauty and more tragedy than I could ever have imagined it to be. Cather evokes this landscape so intensely you can taste the earth and drying grass and smell the melted butter and gingerbread. Yet, the fullness of Cather’s achievement emerges most vividly in the voices she gives her characters, and her fierce commitment to render even the most minor of them whole and palpable and glorious.
My Ántonia constellates around encounters rather than plot, capturing the lasting beauty of the quiet, private scenes of intimacy that find people at home or at work, caught in the middle of all the tiny, daily tasks required to build a decent life in an otherwise hostile environment. There is a deep sense, in this novel, of mission and pride in ordinary folks traveling from faraway places and connecting from their various (dis)locations. After all, My Ántonia is, at its heart, an immigrant story about the fraught hyphenated realities of the American milieu, and the doubts and anxieties that emerge when one wrenches one’s self away from all that is familiar and comforting and sane and seeks to recall the lost stability of homeland in the turbulent landscape of the other. It’s a story about the magic trick that is to live through that kind of displacement and estrangement, or rather, to live more thoroughly within it: the joy and beauty enlivened by shared grief and exile.
My Ántonia most resonated with me in this language: the fierce and expanded sense of among-ness, the force of proximity and what it might make possible, the call of the crossings of the diaspora. It filled up the parts of me that longed for and still believed in a world that so earnestly offered love, support, and a place to hold our shared abject terror and sorrow. At the same time, it brought home to me the pain and difficulty of memory, of trying to reproduce stories of the past in the present, to remember the people we failed or who failed us, all the intimacies and contradictions that come with the territory.
The story of Ántonia is delivered to us second-hand, told from the perspective of Jim Burden, whose youth Ántonia marked and left a stamp on this book. Through Jim’s gaze, and then beyond it, Cather illuminates the gulf between our assumptions of how women should be defined in society and the processes by which these women understand themselves and their experiences. The novel is so deliberate in clearing intellectual and affective space for the working women of the prairie, who fight (in ways often unrecognized) to escape the limitations of their social realities and shape their own sense of self. Cather, in fact, insists on it, claiming the female characters’ incessant daily negotiations of the people around them and the spaces they inhabit as definitional for communities. The sheer vitality and energy of this portrayal is what ultimately allows Ántonia to elide Jim’s possessive gaze and undermine the inevitable limits of his interpretation.
As I said—I love this book. Yet, while there is so much more I want to celebrate in this novel, there are moments when celebrations need to give way to critical engagement. That Cather can attend so clearly and thoroughly to the capaciousness of her white characters’ lives and experiences, and yet, in the same book, render the very few Black characters in a language so insultingly insufficient, so totally devoid of imagination, is a contradiction that slashes its way through the pages of My Ántonia. This is so complete a failure that the novel, in these moments, collapses into stilted metaphors of savagery and wildness and racial oversimplifications that add up to characters whose depths are limited to the color of their skin. I’m not interested in redeeming the novel from this failure of language, therefore exonerating myself from having to contend with loving this book. I am much more interested in the limits of a racial imagination that succumbs to anxiety, timidity, and insecurity at the very site with its encounter with the “other.” Reading “classics” often comes, at least in my experience, with this strange, twisted knot of love. I would wish it away, had it not often enlivened and enriched my reading of these texts....more
This is a great book to read if you want to feel really fucked up about some things.
Never Let Me Go is a book that itches beneath the skin. It left mThis is a great book to read if you want to feel really fucked up about some things.
Never Let Me Go is a book that itches beneath the skin. It left me uneasy, and on a less acknowledged level, deathly afraid. I didn’t so much finish reading it as emerge from it, gasping like I was breaking the surface of a deep sea. I've been going back and forth about what to say about this story, and I think that to divulge more than a handful of details would be a disservice to the reader. Therefore, this review gestures to some of the themes and plot beats, but seeks to avoid spoilers as much as possible.
Standing years from the page, our narrator Kathy, who is now thirty-one, returns to the scene of her childhood, back to Hailsham School, where she grew up, and where the inconclusive tides of memory, which would not stop, were always going to carry her.
Never Let Me Go’s form mirrors the difficult process of remembering. Kathy is determined to tie the loose cords in her mind, to weave something coherent out of the lost and recovered spaces of her childhood. In the story, the past is closely, obsessively observed; its pieces arranged and rearranged. Kathy is methodical, and she seems to cultivate a certain studied ambivalence and a strong sense of remove. She is careful not to let the past overtake her, to remain always in control. Yet, at points in the narrative, an errant memory might flood her, interrupt her; at which point Kathy’s story abandons its linear progression, becoming vulnerable to detours, digressions, and displacements. Kathy goes back over events to try to make sense of them again, re-examines her own claims, tries to find a clearer angle of approach, to engage every contradictory and countervailing perspective. The resulting narrative is porous and self-conscious, pointing to a sense of glassy fragility. From time to time, the private correspondence of an unspecified second-person “you” also crops up, adding a disconcerting level of intimacy. Exactly who is the “you” being summoned and addressed here? The answer is unclear. One rather feels slightly disarranged by the whole thing, scoured from these intimations of vulnerability. Like watching a solitary ghost host a vigil for forgotten things.
Memory is thus a central theme in the novel. Never Let Me Go offers a searing look at the vexed relationship between the past and the present, and the difficulty of recovering innocent lives from the annihilating forces of stigma and oppression. There are so many silences in this book. Some things are never referred to, never recalled for the reader. How did everything become so apocalyptically wrong? How is no one trying to stop it? How is any of this allowed? The enormity of the answers exists in its own absence of expression.
In Never Let Me Go, silence is the refusal of violence as violence. Kathy’s story, in other words, exists within and against the overwhelming superstructures that demand she unsees the violence that has become normative. In the repeated staging of Kathy’s encounters with the past, one senses a mind too numbed by terror, to accustomed to rupture. Kathy’s voice brings to the surface a conspiracy of silence that is already there, that has travelled with her into the present. At Hailsham, Kathy learned that there are things better left untouched by words: she was “told and not told,” but she knew, nonetheless, that to speak the unspeakable is to stray across a line that is invisible but inviolate. With time and effort, she learned too to move through the silence until it became native to her, a language on its own. It is the method everyone at Hailsham, one way or another, eventually evolves for their survival.
This is not to say that Kathy’s childhood world was entirely circumscribed by silence and its violences. In the midst of so much unfreedom, in this place where hope is so tenuous you want to dig your nails into it just to hold it tighter, Never Let Me Go imagines love and friendship as a fledgling and fugitive enterprise. Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy made a collectivity out of their motley crew. Joined together in a kinship of fear and uncertainty, they helped each other endure. But our attachments to each other are never uncomplicated in times of great rupture. Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy are shaped then ruined by dispossession, by their banishment from the category of “human,” and later, by their belief in belonging to a world where their destinies are always already circumscribed by predetermined social scripts. It is brutally hard to see them repeatedly reach out to one another across space and time and an abundance of history and such a weight of responsibility and perpetual loss—and never quite grasp one another. Only a gorge remains, stretching on and on between them, gaping open like a slash in fabric.
What I’m saying is—Don’t expect this book to light up your insides with hope. Never Let Me Go does not end with lightness, resistance, or even the spectral possibility of healing. By the end, Kathy’s access to a story of resilience and agency is irretrievable. This is not the story of the heroic individual or individuals on a mission against the perverse, rotten world, of justice prevailing in a saga of survival. Instead, at the close of the novel, Kathy simply “drive[s] off to wherever it was [she] was supposed to be.” The finality, the absoluteness of this last line—“supposed to be”—is haunting.
The silences, gaps, and absences—the sheer irresolution of the narrative—make Never Let Me Go a difficult novel, and a demanding one. What it demands of the reader is that we think: about our positions of distance, of non-implication, vis-à-vis the senseless and seemingly unstoppable atrocities in the world, and about the power of silence itself. The moral contrast between the horror of what it is being done to Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy and the absence of urgency to prevent it does a great deal of work in this book. Ishiguro raises a host of questions about how complicity gestates and develops, how unexamined fear leads to non-recognition, and worse, to hatred of the other, and how habit and memory can keep our bodies moving in the right directions, playing pretend, desperate to slip back into some version of normality. In that sense, Never Let Me Go is a powerful, cognitive mapping of our time. It holds a mirror to the face of our own society, and demands we let ourselves be upended by the inhumanity and rottenness of our social systems, by the institutionalized dystopia of the everyday, where survival is never valiant, only crude and hideous, and where hope too often dies without a whimper. I can’t imagine anyone reading the news and reading this book and not feeling deeply, horrifically implicated.
But I suspect that is the point. Never Let Me Go demands we let ourselves be hit by the violence and sadism of inaction, so it might dare us to hope, to manifest the otherwise worlds the novel's ultimately bleak ending could not imagine....more
thank you, Jane Austen, for affirming that you can find genuine, long-lasting love after being subjected to the most soul-harrowing, mind-crushing, hethank you, Jane Austen, for affirming that you can find genuine, long-lasting love after being subjected to the most soul-harrowing, mind-crushing, heart-pulverizing situationship of your life...more
This is, without hyperbole or exaggeration, one of the best romance novels that I’ve ever read. One of those books you buy in paperback and reach, reaThis is, without hyperbole or exaggeration, one of the best romance novels that I’ve ever read. One of those books you buy in paperback and reach, reach, and reach for until they are tattered and yellowed and full of scribbled notes, which is to say, until they are well-loved.
If you had told me that a romance novel about a baseball player and the reporter begrudgingly covering his story would so thoroughly change the landscape of my life in less than two days, I would have said... yep, actually, that sounds about right. More seriously, I loved this book. Set in 1960s New York, You Should Be So Lucky speaks with insistence and quiet intensity to the beautiful density of queer existence, caught up in a world that refuses to accommodate it. Amidst so much unfreedom, the characters in this book build beautiful capacious lives and affirm the tenacity of queer love and the sustaining power of queer community against the routine brutalities of state-sanctioned homophobia and the scripted histories of death, violence, and uprooting. You might be forced to endure subjugation, the novel says, but that does not mean only living life as a subjugated person. And that—well, that hit home.
You Should Be So Lucky is also a deeply moving depiction of grief that refuses to relegate its dead characters to a numb aside, asking us instead to sit with the vast helplessness of mourning someone you're not allowed to love and thus not allowed to grieve. How do you build yourself out of such mourning? How do you begin to heal? This is a novel that is just so utterly kind and generous to its queer characters that I was left feeling nothing so much as grateful for it.
I cheered so hard for the characters’ happiness. I believed in their belonging to one another and wanted so desperately for them to believe it too. I cried a lot, but I screamed joyfully even more. Please read it for yourself....more
This was an intensely emotional ride. Reading romantic queer stories set in the past (the 1950s in tCat Sebastian, I was not familiar with your game.
This was an intensely emotional ride. Reading romantic queer stories set in the past (the 1950s in this case) always gets to me. I’m reminded that queer people have loved and grieved and fought and survived through a world that never ceased to want us dead. I wanted to reach into the page and give both Rick and Andy a hug. ...more
Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone is a gorgeous book, as is everything Baldwin writes. Baldwin’s language is of terrifying tenderness and relentlTell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone is a gorgeous book, as is everything Baldwin writes. Baldwin’s language is of terrifying tenderness and relentless intimacy, and always steals my breath. His writing has a way of eviscerating you before you can notice what has been said. There are sections in this book that dazzled and moved me, others I remember with an almost physical pain. Reading Tell Me, it is impossible to reconcile the novel with its early reception, where it has been largely dismissed and considered as emblematic of Baldwin’s artistic decline. On the contrary, I think Baldwin has produced in this book one of his sharpest and most clear-eyed critiques of patriarchy, sexuality, and oppressive forms of masculinity.
Leo Proudhammer, a successful stage actor, has had a heart attack in San Francisco. In the aftermath, Leo meditates on what he has been and what he has become. The novel toggles beautifully between the past and the present, to capture Leo’s struggle for alternative ways of being in the world, capable of carrying the weight of his desperate longing not only to escape the social enclosures that deny him life, but to thrive and not merely survive.
Leo’s quest for selfhood represents the possibilities of Black male subjectivity as a delicate and continuous negotiation between the inward-self and the story constructed and produced of Blackness everywhere in the US and elsewhere. Leo is desperate to rescript his life away from the entangled biographies of violence and annihilation that the judgments, both racist and homophobic, of the culture around him confines him into, and to put together, and shore up, the narrative of his own life. Throughout the novel, one gets a sense of a man glancing at us out of the corner of his eye, very much anxious about the impression his words are making. Leo, an intensely private public man, knows that his body is marked out wherever he goes, its boundaries and limits located and under constant surveillance. For our lonely thespian narrator, the whole world is a stage, and he’s learned to wear an ever-changing mask over his true self as a crucial strategy of survival—and it is in the distance between Leo the actor and Leo the person that Leo’s identity emerges.
Baldwin works the processes of self-definition and self-creation from a place that is deeply knowing about the tyrannies of anti-Blackness and social ascription. In this novel, he grapples at close quarters with what it means to be borne on the sharp currents of a world that allows you so little, what it means to live with the constant oppression of terror. The white world is never far from Leo’s consciousness: in his life, at work, with his intimates, he is constantly forced into subservient roles.
Leo’s relationship with his older brother, which is life’s codex, is ripped open by violence and social injustice, and a young Leo was forced to live on the far side of the gulf stretching between them, which neither he nor his brother can cross. The loss of his brother ran Leo into adulthood before he was ready. It was the rip that opened so many endless chasms, the moment of breakdown. It is these pages, in which Baldwin conjures the pure strength of the tenderness and grief that exists between the two brothers, that filled me with the most special anguish—and which I reread the most. Leo’s subsequent affair with his white lover Barbara, however deeply loving and genuine, was no palliative for such oppression. Barbara’s whiteness is a threat to Leo, a fact that keeps tugging them apart. Even his later involvement with Christopher, a young Black radical, cannot placate the internal disarray Leo feels, a dislocation that stems from Leo’s abiding struggle between his artistic role, his celebrity, and his social obligations as a racial spokesman. Underlying this chapter of Leo’s life is Baldwin’s own struggle to reconcile his fame as a race spokesperson of Black people—for white America.
In conjoining the intensity of desire and disillusionment, Baldwin reveals the truths of power, uncorrupted by sentiment and feints at innocence, and illuminates both the utter difficulty and utter necessity of imagining our relationships to each other, our entanglements and obligations of care, as crucial sites for forming resistant identities. Ultimately, Baldwin’s novel is motivated by a deep urge to inhabit, act out, and circulate new meanings of radicalism and protest, meanings that engage critically with institutions of heterosexuality, whiteness, religion, and family, and strive to expand the horizon of possibility for new and better worlds....more
I can officially attest that Interpreter of Maladies more than merits the rave, rapturous reviews printed on the back–this is a stunning success from I can officially attest that Interpreter of Maladies more than merits the rave, rapturous reviews printed on the back–this is a stunning success from Jhumpa Lahiri.
In Lahiri’s rich, delicate, precise voice, the miniature stories in this collection tingle on the skin. They are moving, disquieting, and, in some cases, brutally devastating. How Lahiri manages to atomize these incredibly full, dense lives into short form, moving her characters around Boston and Bengal with the ease of a fish through waves—I don’t know. What I do know is that one does not so much read this collection as live in it.
Lahiri writes in language that is alive and unexpected. My initial guesses at what was coming continuously went through some rather severe adjustments. Lahiri was, I quickly learned, always just one step ahead. Yet, at the same time, each unexpected outcome somehow also felt inevitable: the characters in these stories seem to carve out their own patterns, impervious to the shape of the narrative. I never knew where each story was going, and that too felt like life.
There are nine disparate stories in this collection. Together, they form a complete, cohesive, emotionally legible whole. They are stories about loss, exile, and dispersion, and, in any such stories, they are also about love. In tragic, lyrical strains, Lahiri expresses the transient, exilic intimacy that emerges from shared uprootedness and promises to dull the habitual estrangement of everyday life. Against the background of a foreign, sometimes less than caring world, the characters in these stories stretch themselves to reach for one another and hope for understanding. But the attachments they form are not always easy or uncomplicated. This kind of diasporic intimacy is fragile, fraught, and haunted by dreams of home and homeland. It cannot retrieve the past, nor can it anesthetize against the pain of displacement, and in most cases, it cannot last forever. Yet, as Lahiri shows us, the transient, imperfect quality of these pockets of intimacy does not diminish the power of the characters’ encounters and collisions with one another: in the intricacy that transforms stories into histories, we are, in some impossible-to-measure way, always already intertwined.
Perhaps that is why “When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine,” “Mrs. Sen’s,” and “The Third and Final Continent” are the stories I return to the most. They are stories about the people who pass through our lives like a vision, but nevertheless leave indelible traces. People whose presence makes it easier to not only endure but inhabit our experiences of exile. Each story trails off into afterimages of a closeness that can no longer exist, an intimacy that was always already forfeit—and each ending stole my breath.
I loved Interpreter of Maladies, and I am convinced that an encounter with one of these stories will not leave you unchanged....more
What a beautiful gay fiasco, the proportions of which only Shakespeare can pull off. A hilariously irreverent play that is also a precise staging of dWhat a beautiful gay fiasco, the proportions of which only Shakespeare can pull off. A hilariously irreverent play that is also a precise staging of desire and gender that thwarts all kinds of convention. Shakespeare was simply, certifiably, That Bitch™️....more
Me, on my death bed: “Say how I loved you, speak me fair in death; / And, when the tale is told, bid her be judge / Whether Bassanio had not once a loMe, on my death bed: “Say how I loved you, speak me fair in death; / And, when the tale is told, bid her be judge / Whether Bassanio had not once a love.”
(I also highly recommend watching the 2004 film adaptation starring Al Pacino, Jeremy Irons, and Lynn Collins. It's SO good!)...more
Locating its origins in a series of lectures delivered in 1928 at Newnham College and Girton College (at the time the only two women's colleges at CamLocating its origins in a series of lectures delivered in 1928 at Newnham College and Girton College (at the time the only two women's colleges at Cambridge), A Room of One’s Own is at once a deeply personal and searching account of one woman's writing life, and an urgent critical intervention into women’s history. Woolf's essay, which makes a definitive claim that financial security is an imperative requirement for female intellectual independence, both came at a moment and helped produce a moment in which new cultural roles were being envisioned for women.
The basic premise of A Room of One’s Own is succinctly summed up by its author: “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” The second longing is of the domestic variety, a desire for an interior space untouched by the exigencies of the male gaze. Woolf is using “a room of one’s own” metonymically to represent her desire for an intellectual existence entirely independent of men. A room of her own will provide Woolf with the financial security and the space necessary to pursue the work that fulfills her. The room, in other words, is the grounds upon which Woolf locates an agency of empowerment: she envisions this room of her own—her space of study—as a profound act to reaffirm the importance of a female intellect so unsettling to the social order its value demanded its constant disavowal. The first longing—money—is paramount for the realization of the second—a room of one’s own. Recognizing how poverty binds women to awful material and psychic configurations, Woolf conceives of her newly found financial independence as a panacea against feeling poised on the verge of drowning: “my aunt's legacy unveiled the sky to me.”
A Room of One’s Own also illuminates the difficulty of recovering women lives from the annihilating force of historical neglect. Woolf’s text is distinctly preoccupied with the absence of an established female literary tradition. I found it interesting how Woolf, in speaking to an overarching project to wrest back control of women’s stories from their historic (and continued) abuses, traces narratives of women’s inherent inferiority to intricate processes of male projection. To put it differently, Woolf contends that the patriarchal myth of inherent male superiority necessitated female disempowerment precisely to reaffirm itself. “Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses,” she writes, “possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.” Women’s intellectual and economic independence, according to Woolf, embodied the threat of male decline and made it palpable. Fearing the collapse of the dominant male order, men projected both their fears about female independence from male control by deeming women unfit for history.
Woolf’s great achievement in A Room of One’s Own is to reckon with both history and interiority, and to collapse the boundary between public and private. For much of Western history, women writers have not been recognized, and their work has been largely relegated to history’s ill-lit margins. How can a woman, therefore, write in a textual and historical space largely defined by an overwhelmingly male canon? How can she articulate an experience that has scarcely been touched by words? These questions have clearly occupied Woolf, who, in A Room of One’s Own, chooses a rogue approach to writing. Resisting coherence and proscriptive forms of agency typical of critical texts, Woolf opts instead to meet the reader in the concrete realities of her lived experience. Woolf speaks in a language that is never still, combining memoir, literary criticism, political and cultural critique in order to imagine a new model for how to produce productive and lasting knowledge about women’s lives. She insists on holding space for the detours, interruptions, and digressions, which imbues her essay with the impression of spontaneous improvisation. The rigorously thought-out vignettes, however, point to a text closely observed, its pieces clearly arranged and rearranged. This is one of the primary strengths of A Room of One’s Own: how her consistent willingness to examine her own claims and her continuing insistence on her own positionality as a woman writer offer spaces and modes of recording history as a part of an alternative feminist project.
That said, A Room of One’s Own does not always escape its author’s blind spots. Woolf’s 500-pound allowance and the room of her own that it afforded her are defining achievements, epitomizing the attainment of financial independence and the enjoyment of freedom from social convention. They are certainly significant when compared to what was possible for women in Britain at the time, particularly working-class women, whose position is one of legal (and oftentimes physical) powerlessness. Women who were single and without family were particularly vulnerable to economic destitution, as they were not expected to be financially self-sufficient. Where Woolf’s inheritance allowed her a liberating alternative to the marriage plot, most women at the time could not afford to forsake the security and convenience of marriage in favor of independence and intellectual freedom. At one point in A Room of One’s Own, Woolf confesses that her newfound fortune loomed larger in her mind than the women’s vote of 1918: “Of the two—the vote and the money—,” Woolf writes, “the money, I own, seemed infinitely the more important.” While Woolf’s comment can be dismissed as simply insensitive, the moment does evince how individualistic thinking can easily reproduce our relationship to patriarchal forms of power. For a moment, Woolf becomes complicit with the very system she disavows, having claimed a position of power within it.
Whether Woolf’s ambivalence simplifies her argument or not, it is undeniable that Woolf has produced an important inquiry into what a literature that decenters the male gaze as sovereign can and should look like. Woolf’s concluding call for women to reconstitute themselves as dominant by reviving the “dead poet who was Shakespeare's sister” is guided by a fierce and expanded sense of what might be possible if women allowed themselves to wrest their voices from a dominant order intent on denying them their sound. Woolf’s clarity of vision when she writes about the torturous vagaries of being a woman in a world that cannot fully saturate her crosses almost a hundred years to address each of us intimately. As we think of recent grim setbacks in women’s rights, it is imperative to keep listening for resonances in A Room of One’s Own.
(Note: This review was reworked from a longer essay I wrote for class.)...more
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