Americans love lists. We love things neat and ordered and want to know who’s the smartest, who’s the richest, and who’s the most talented. Lists help us put information in a hierarchy; they help us understand grades of excellence so we can match up those grades with actual people.
Recent list-toppers:
Highest-paid actress: Angelina Jolie (People)
Sexiest woman alive: Cheryl Cole (FHM)
Highest-paid female athlete: Maria Sharapova (Forbes)
Richest woman alive: Christy Walton of Wal-Mart (Forbes)
Ordered lists of intangibles like talent and influence are much more difficult to defend, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t attempt to make them. In fact, I’m willing to go so far as to say:
Best and most influential female writer (ever): Virginia Woolf.
Mrs. Woolf wrote during the Modernism heyday, when Joyce was penning his brilliant but cryptic Ulysses, and when Eliot was trying to shock and awe us with Prufrock and The Wasteland.
In declaring Mrs. Woolf the recipient of most amazing female ever to string a sentence along and influence not only a genre but future generations of little girls with pens, I do not mean any disrespect to Madames and Misses Austen, Bronte, Eliot, Angelou, Atwood, or Morrison. I’m simply saying: That Ginny, she didn’t just contribute to genres – she defined them.
The first genre she defined was the aforementioned Modernism. As I stated in an earlier blog, writers abandoned form and played with language. Modernists explored the inner angst of the human condition while purposefully trying to confuse you with stream of consciousness writing. The world no longer made sense to the Modernist writer. How could it, after the devastation of the first world war?
In lists of greatest novels of all time, Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925) almost always falls in the top 100. If you read the book or saw the movie The Hours (1998, 2002) with Julianne Moore, Meryl Streep, and Nicole Kidman, then you have experienced Woolf. It’s a look at the lives of three women – all living in different eras – and their personal demons. In fact, in Mrs. Dalloway and The Hours, almost all of the action takes place inside the characters’ heads.
But one book, even one great book, is not enough to earn the title of Greatest. Female. Writer. Ever. Woolf also wrote the clever Orlando (1928), which traces the time travel of the eponymous androgynous protagonist (also made into a film starring Tilda Swinton). My favorite Woolf novel, however, is To the Lighthouse.
Lighthouse is divided into three parts, and the second part, perhaps the most elusive, is also the best. It’s entitled “Times Passes,” and the major plot events are brief and set off by [brackets]. As in, oh, by the way, [so-and-so died] and [so-and-so got married]. Even though the so-and-so folks are major characters, their deaths and marriages were not nearly as important as their inner struggles.
In “Times Passes,” the housekeeper, seventy year-old Mrs. McNab, goes about cleaning the cottage that the main characters summered at in the Hebrides, a less than tropical collection of islands off the west coast of Scotland. She’s cleaning alright, but her mind is racing:
Rubbing the glass of the long looking-glass and leering sideways at her swinging figure a sound issued from her lips – something that had been gay twenty years before on the stage perhaps, had been hummed and danced to, but now, coming from the toothless bonneted, care-taking woman, was robbed of meaning, was like the voice of witlessness, humour, persistency itself, trodden down but springing up again, so that as she lurched, dusting, wiping, she seemed to say how it was one long sorrow and trouble, how it was getting up and going to bed again, and bringing things out and putting them away again.
Woolf was fond of sentences that ran on for days, but run-ons create memorable scenes. Now, maybe you’ve still got your teeth and maybe your bonnet only makes special-occasion appearances, but how many of us have cleaned a mirror, gotten a good look at ourselves, and had a bout of melancholia only to be interrupted by Gloria Gaynor’s mantra, “I will survive and I will dust behind the furniture!”
Which brings me to the second genre that Mrs. Woolf not only shaped, but darn-near invented: the feminist essay. Feminism for Woolf had nothing to do with the conflagration of undergarments. For Woolf, it was giving present and future female writers hope and inspiration that the female voice was unique and worth reading. She’s the woman behind that argument that the lack of female writers was not for a lack of talent but for a lack of opportunity. She brilliantly illustrates this point in her famous non-fiction treatise, A Room of One’s Own. In Room, we meet Shakespeare’s fictional and not-nearly as successful sister, Judith.
Paraphrasing Woolf is akin to serving dry toast when buttery croissants are cooling off in the next room, so the crux of the argument is below. The paragraph is long, but it’s got rhythm, baby:
It would have been impossible, completely and entirely, for any woman to have written the plays of Shakespeare in the age of Shakespeare. Let me imagine, since the facts are so hard to come by, what would have happened had Shakespeare had a wonderfully gifted sister, called Judith, let us say. Shakespeare himself went, very probably – his mother was an heiress – to the grammar school, where he may have learnt Latin – Ovid, Virgin and Horace – and the elements of grammar and logic. He was, it is well known, a wild boy who poached rabbits, perhaps shot a deer, and had, rather sooner than he should have done, to marry a woman in the neighborhood, who bore him a child rather quicker than was right. That escapade sent him to seek his fortune in London. He had, it seemed, a taste for the theatre; he began by holding horses at the stage door. Very soon he got work in the theatre, became a successful actor, and lived at the hub of the universe, meeting everybody, knowing everybody, practicing his art on the boards, exercising his wits in the streets, and even getting access to the palace of the queen. Meanwhile his extraordinarily gifted sister, let us suppose, remained at home. She was as adventurous, as imaginative, as agog to see the world as he was. But she was not sent to school. She had no chance of learning grammar and logic, let alone of reading Horace and Virgil. She picked up a book now and then, one of her brother’s perhaps, and read a few pages. But then her parents came in and told her to mend the stockings or mind the stew and not moon about with books and papers. They would have spoken sharply but kindly, for they were substantial people who knew the conditions of life for a woman and loved their daughter – indeed, more likely than not she was the apple of her father’s eye. Perhaps she scribbled some pages up in an apple loft on the sly, but was careful to hide them or set fire to them. Soon, however, before she was out of her teens, she was to be betrothed to the son of a neighboring wool-stapler. She cried out that marriage was hateful to her, and for that she was severely beaten by her father. Then he ceased to scold her. He begged her instead not to hurt him, not to shame him in this matter of her marriage. He would give her a chain of beads or a fine petticoat, he said; and there were tears in his eyes. How could she disobey him? How could she break his heart? The force of her own gift alone drove her to it. She made up a small parcel of her belongings, let herself down by a rope one summer’s night and took the road to London. She was not seventeen. The birds that sang in the hedge were not more musical than she was. She had the quickest fancy, a gift like her brother’s, for the tune of words. Like him, she had a taste for the theatre. She stood at the stage door; she wanted to act, she said. Men laughed in her face. The manager – a fat, loose-lipped man – guffawed. He bellowed something about poodles dancing and women acting – no woman, he said, could possibly be an actress. He hinted – you can imagine what. She could get no training in her craft. Could she even seek her dinner in a tavern or roam the streets at midnight? Yet her genius was for fiction and lusted to feed abundantly upon the lives of men and women and the study of their ways. At last – for she was very young, oddly like Shakespeare the poet in her face, with the same grey eyes and rounded brows – at last Nick Greene the actor-manager took pity on her; she found herself with child by that gentleman and so – who shall measure the heat and violence of the poet’s heart when caught and tangled in a woman’s body? – killed herself one winter’s night and lies buried at some crossroads where the omnibuses now stop outside the Elephant and Castle.
The sad epilogue: our beloved Ginny also killed herself. But she gave us a big fat rock and told us to aim at the ceiling.
The glass one.
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October 2nd, 2009 at 11:08 am