ABSTRACT
My title is ‘Virginia Woolf and the appropriation of the masculine’. It is, however, far from self-evident what is actually meant by either the term ‘masculine’ or for that matter ‘appropriation’. Like the word ‘feminine’, now recognized-at least by feminists-to be a vehicle for constricting social and
psychological constructions of identity, the signifier ‘masculine’ is problematic. What are its connotations and ramifications? To turn to a standard reference work such as The Oxford English Dictionary is to expose the dilemma. ‘Masculine’ can mean, it says, ‘pertaining to the male sex, peculiar to or assigned to males’. But in order to understand what is meant by ‘peculiar to or assigned to males’, it would seem to me that we are thrown back not on knowledge, but on the clichés or presuppositions of our own culture whereby masculinity, as Hélène Cixous has reminded us, is signified by means of a set of hierarchical binary oppositions with the male representing Culture rather than Nature, Activity rather than Passivity, Head rather than Heart, Logos rather than Pathos and so on (Cixous 1975). The dictionary’s attempt at greater specificity underlines the trend. ‘Masculine’ also means, it says, ‘the appropriate excellences of the male sex, manly, virile, vigorous, powerful’.1 The last three words represent definable, if predictable, attributions whereas ‘manly’ throws us back tautologically upon the word ‘masculine’ (what is manly is masculine and what is masculine is manly) and is, needless to say, equally open to stereotypical preconceptions. What is appropriately manly, the configurations of the masculine, remains a function of the particular conceptual construction of male identity in any place at any one time-for us now, for Woolf in her time.
