ABSTRACT
In Virginia Woolf’s novel Night and Day, the heroine Katherine Hilbery indulges a secret passion for mathematics, retreating from the emotional complexities and responsibilities of female life into a furtive contemplation of abstract symbols and geometrical figures. For Katherine, this unfeminine activity represents clarity, impersonality and necessity, as against the engulfing confusion and contingency of domestic life. The familiar female longing which Virginia Woolf here describes goes beyond a desire for escape from the frequently crushing boredom and claustrophobia of a life spent entirely in the private domain. It is a longing also for release from a certain style of thought, from intellectual confinement to a realm of the particular, the merely contingent; a longing, in brief, for access to Reason. For Reason is the prerequisite for, and point of access to, not just the public domain of political life, but a realm of thought-of universal principles and necessary orderings of ideas. We saw that for Descartes right reasoning involved a struggle away from the sensuous and-at its limits-a complete detachment from the complexities and particularities of ordinary living. The goal of this arduous exercise remained in some ways continuous with the old Greek
ideal of an ordered realm of thought, although the promised land was no longer the Platonic realm of universal forms, but rather the necessary principles of thought, supposedly the same for all minds.
