ABSTRACT
Woolf’s two major essays extend her fiction’s themes. A Room of One’s Own argues that we know little of the history and lives of women because, financially dependent and hampered by cultural assumptions about female intellectual inferiority and moral weakness, women have, for the most part, left no written record, dissembled in order to produce socially acceptable accounts, or marred their writings out of overwhelming rage. Remedying this situation requires changes in the material relationship between women and society. An independent intellect is the product of an independent income; women’s writing, therefore, must rest on an economic base-£500 a year and a room of one’s own. Three Guineas is Woolf s most explicitly and well researched account analogizing the systems of fascism, militarism and patriarchy as hierarchies resting on institutionalized violence legitimized by public rituals, reverencing rage represented as a hypertrophied masculinity, subordinating what is seen as feminine to masculine authority, and effacing the individual in a group identity. Those who make war, Woolf observes, have historically not been women. The maintenance of peace, she thus contends, mandates a new polity, one that might be generated if women-educated, self-supporting and active in the world’s affairs-none the less preserve the ethos of selflessness and nurturance traditionally associated with femininity. Conjuring up what she calls a Society of
Outsiders, open not just to women but to men as well, Woolf envisages an Archimedean point where those who refuse to sell themselves for money or for status, who refuse both guns and anger and reject official honours and the state’s authority as unreal abstractions, could move a lever that might change the world.
