Androgyny in A Room of One's Own

Alison Hennegan, Lecture on Androgyny in A Room of One's Own (1929), 6 March 2021

Blog by Lisa Hutchins

8 March 2021 

It seems very appropriate, on International Women's Day, to be writing about Virginia Woolf's extended essay A Room of One's Own (Hogarth Press, 1929), following a session for Literature Cambridge given by Alison Hennegan. This essay famously states that a woman must have an income and a room of her own if she is to write and this characterisation of the work, and the story of its genesis, are likely to be familiar to most readers of Woolf.

This blog post inevitably captures only a tiny flavour of Alison's extraordinarily wide-ranging, scholarly and comprehensive talk, which ranged well beyond Woolf and into a literary survey of how androgyny was represented in art and literature from classical times to the nineteenth century, and how it was understood through the innovative (if now superseded) science of sexology (see works referred to at the end). She also covered at some length the interpretations of homosexuality prevalent in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, when many homosexual people were firmly convinced that they had some physical characteristics of the opposite sex (as demonstrated, for instance, throughout The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall). It is always such a pleasure to hear her lecture, and this session was no exception.

Newnham College, Summer 2019. Photo by Stephanie Taiber

Alison reminded us that A Room of One's Own was based on two talks to students at Girton and Newnham, the first women's colleges of the University of Cambridge, in October 1929. Both had been founded within the last 60 years and their fellows and students would continue to struggle for acceptance within the university and in wider society for decades to come. Alison also told us that the lectures were given as Woolf's most famous examination of androgyny, the biographical novel Orlando, neared publication and we learned that its subject, her friend and lover Vita Sackville-West, accompanied her to one of them. Vita, as we may recall from Karina Jakubowicz's recent lecture, was skilled in manifesting different lives and gender identities, and often dressed in masculine clothes. 

Alison characterised the world of the late 1920s as in the midst of radical social change with the professions reluctantly opening to women and with access to other areas of society still strongly, even violently contested. Speaking to the theme of androgyny in the work, she pointed out that in the 1920s sexual difference was a strongly-contested subject, indeed that Woolf says in part six of the essay that ‘no age can ever have been as stridently sex-conscious as our own’. Alison said that the notion of immutable sexual difference was, however, somewhat rejected by Woolf, and she considered how this influenced the author's reactions to work by Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë:

…the woman [Charlotte Brontë] who wrote those pages had more genius in her than Jane Austen; but if one reads them over and marks that jerk in them, that indignation, one sees that she will never get her genius expressed whole and entire. Her books will be deformed and twisted. She will write in a rage where she should write calmly. She will write foolishly where she should write wisely. She will write of herself where she should write of her characters. She is at war with her lot. How could she help but die young, cramped and thwarted?

(A Room of One's Own, chapter 4)

Woolf believed Austen ranked next to Shakespeare in the power of her genius. We heard how Woolf reasoned that the two writers had achieved such consummate greatness by achieving a level of self-acceptance that dispensed entirely with the friction of defensiveness or bitterness about sex and gender roles, attaining in the process a form of androgyny. Woolf believed Emily Brontë may have possibly achieved this feat, had she lived, even as her sister did not. Twice in the work she visits the notion of Shakespeare's sister, another element that is familiar even to people who don't read much Woolf. Here is an extract from Judith's first appearance in the text:

…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 cross-roads where the omnibuses now stop outside the Elephant and Castle.

(Room, chapter 3)

Alison noted that, as demonstrated here by Judith, Woolf's conception of the struggles endured by women is often physical or embodied, including fertility and reproduction, access to money and decent living conditions, the physical labour of housework and the consequences of the sexual double standard. She also sometimes characterises creativity in bodily and gendered terms, suggesting it may take different forms in men and women and using the language of physical desire and reproduction to describe it. At the very end of the text, we return to Judith and Woolf says of her:

we go alone and that our relation is to the world of reality and not only to the world of men and women, then the opportunity will come and the dead poet who was Shakespeare's sister will put on the body which she has so often laid down. Drawing her life from the lives of the unknown who were her forerunners, as her brother did before her, she will be born."

(Room, chapter 6)

Alison pointed out that the final words of the essay leave us with an enigma, with Woolf's meaning not entirely clear. Perhaps we are no further forward than we were at the start of her writing – how could we be? But the struggle is still worth the trouble.

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Vesta Tilley as the Man About Town

Some of the works referred to in Alison’s lecture

Balzac, Honoré de (1799-1850). Sarrasine

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett (1806-1861). To George Sand: A Desire

Ellis, Henry Havelock (1859-1939). Sexual Inversion

Hall, Radclyffe (1880-1943). The Well of Loneliness (1928)

Marchand, Suzanne. and Kinderfield, David (eds.) Germany at the Fin de Siecle: Culture, politics and ideas. Essay by Robert R. Norton on Stefan George and Androgyny. See p. 174.

Plato (c. 428-347 BC). Symposium, specifically Aristophanes' speech on love, sections 189d to 191e.

Quiller-Couch, Arthur (1863-1944). On the Art of Writing, specifically p. 81.

Ruskin, John (1819-1900). Of Kings' Treasuries and Of Queen's Gardens. Published together in Sesame and Lillies.

Shakespeare, William (1564-1616). Sonnet XX: A woman's face with nature's own hand painted

Sleeping Hermaphroditos Statue (Hellenistic art, c. 3rd – 1st centuries BC), The Louvre, Paris, France.

Swinburne, Algernon Charles (1837-1909). Hermaphroditus, written in 1863.

Weininger, Otto (1880-1903) Sex and Character

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Literature Cambridge will study women in A Room of One's Own with Trudi Tate on Saturday 13 March and Sunday 14 March 2021.

Update: Alison Hennegan’s wonderful lecture on Androgyny in A Room of One’s Own will be repeated in our Second Woolf Season on 10 April 2022. Bookings.