5. Androgen
By the end of the XIX century, after Jane Austin, George Elliot and the sisters Brontл, the heroic period of the women writers is already past. The narrator however, menages to establish new cultural relations by reading the novel “The adventure and the life” from Marie Carmichael. These relations are, between the woman as a writer and the woman as a subject, and within the frames of the fiction, among the women as friends4F. Even though Marie Carmichael, as the narrator will conclude after reading the novel, had some literal problems, she will, on condition to finally get her room and the 500 pounds per year, accomplish after100 years, what her mothers or the early lost Judith Shakespeare never have: the social, the sexual and the textual autonomy.
However, the constitutive power of the sexes in a text, based upon the example of the literature created by man, influences negatively. In the last chapter, while the narrator is reading the novel of Mr. A (using decapitalization again), the first thing that she notices, is the imposed presence of the letter “I”: this phallic tower of the “I” shadows the reality completely and it bothers the narrator. This is the same shadow that covers the patriarchal Gulliver, the shadow that falls upon Milton, and on to the choleric university clerk, all the way up to the homosexual professor Oscar Browning. The latest has been given a name, only because he will be the victim in the Woolf’s text. The pictures of the professor who has been symbolically released from the aggressive, phallic “I” by the narrator, are actually isomorphic to the picture of the cat (without tale!) from the island Man, seen in Oxbridge. Woolf clearly places the traditional monolithic “phallic” discourses, opposite of the polymorphic and polyphonic woman’s collective narration realized in the text, by creating a composite woman’s figure that possesses multilateral linguistic weapons. There is a danger of course, that the author could fall into sexual prejudices by taking away the voice of the “male’s text”. This kind of potential danger has been avoided though, with only one amazing move: the male reader enters the text that must not be contaminated with “myzogeny” (pathologically hating women) only in one way: through William Shakespeare, that is. Shakespeare as Woolf says, as any other genius mind, is androgen, because he has integrated in his spirit, both sexes.
The textual strategies of A Room of One’s Own are motivated with the need for subversion of the patriarchal languages of culture. Thus, they outline a plan for one esthetic theory that the author uses, to go behind the deathly game of the binary sex oppositions. Therefore, enjoying in the constitutive role of the sex within the textuality, Woolf also deconstructs the idea of the fixed sexual identity, which is one of the key paradoxes in the essay. If this can not be seen from the logic of the argumentation that Woolf presents, than the textual practice itself that A Room of One’s Own possesses, illustrates the infinite possibilities, that the androgen pluralism may reach.
Finally, the brilliancy of this essay can not be found only in its subversively – feminist (in relation to the patriarchal symbolic systems) dimension, nor in its establishing (in relation to the textualised woman’s imagination) dimension. It can actually be found in the seductive game of the dialogue/”three-logue”? /”poly-logue”?, among the woman – writer, the narrator, the audience and the reader himself – all together, present in the perfect density of the text.
Translated by: Maja Muhić
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4. C. R. Stimpson, 135.