VIRGINIA WOOLF: MOMENTS OF BEING
Ana Clara Birrento2007, Virginia Woolf: Three Centenary Celebrations
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Abstract
Put before the labyrinth and proliferation of critical perspectives, studies and readings on Virginia Woolf, entangled in articulations of teleologies and epistemologies, the critic faces a question: from where should she/he start writing, on what and from which critical perspective? These were the circumstances that dictated my choice of writing on "A Sketch of the Past", published in Moments of Being-A Collection of Autobiographical Writing, (1976, 1985) and of analysing the narrative strategies used by the author to tell herself, to construct her identity and power, giving voice and authority to herself as a discursive formation. In 1929, in A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf explained the non-existence of authoritative female figures, metaphorically represented by Shakespeare's sister: when wondering about the reasons why women had not written as much as men, her conclusion was that historically women had been deprived of education, money, status and a room of their own in which to write. Were women given the intellectual and material conditions-"[if we] have five hundred a year each of us and rooms of our own; if we have the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think; if we escape a little from the common sitting-room […] If we face the fact that there is no arm to cling to" (AROO 148-149)-, then Shakespeare's sister would be born. The repression of the feminine discourse condemned it to silence and Shakespeare's neglected sister was only born when women were given the power of the word and of representation, when women projected in history an identity which does not fit into the androcentric paradigm of inflexible egos; she was born when women revealed their identity by acknowledging the presence of the other, an identity that is both unique and relational-a flexible ego in a world characterized by relationships. While the masculine tradition of autobiographical writing has taken as a premise the capacity of the writer to create a mirror effect and has made use of a stable and fixed perspective to constitute the self as the unifying element
Key takeaways
- At the moment of writing, a moment which has already determined the beginning and the end of the story, as well as the mode how the self is represented and has developed throughout the times, Virginia Woolf finds the strategy to represent memories of the past, and knows that to represent a past experience means to reflect on it in the present: "I write the date, because I think that I have discovered a possible form for these notes.
- (MB 65) Woolf claims that "[i]t would be interesting to make the two people, I now; I then, come out in contrast" (MB 75).
- For Virginia Woolf, to write these autobiographical fragments is an act of interpretation, where the lived experience is shaped, constrained and transformed by representation to which the self owes its existence and in which it evolves and finds expression:
- Accepting that the self represented in "A Sketch of the Past" is a fluctuating one, a self that represents itself in several layers of meaning, the text constitutes a discursive arrangement that brings together, in tension, the different lines of meaning of the self and raises a fundamental question: how does Virginia Woolf organize the experience and the knowledge of the self?
- Her father was also an obsession to Virginia Woolf; he keeps alive in her memory as the writer, rather than as the father; "I call him a strange character" (MB 107), "a little Victorian early Victorian boy, brought up in the intense narrow, evangelical yet political, highly intellectual yet completely unaesthetic, Stephen family, that had one step in Clapham, the other in Downing Street" (MB 108).
