Virginia Woolf
English Writer
1882-1941 A selection from
A ROOM OF ONE'S OWN
Narrated by Kate Reading
This file is 5 MB;
running time is 10 minutes
alternate download link
This audio program is copyrighted by Redwood Audiobooks.
Permission is granted to download for personal use only;
not for distribution or commercial use.
The light of the October morning was falling in dusty shafts
through the uncurtained windows, and the hum of traffic rose from the
street. London then was winding itself up again; the factory was astir;
the machines were beginning. It was tempting, after all this reading, to
look out of the window and see what London was doing on the morning of
the 26th of October 1928. And what was London doing? Nobody, it seemed,
was reading Antony and Cleopatra. London was wholly indifferent, it
appeared, to Shakespeare's plays. Nobody cared a straw—and I do not
blame them—for the future of fiction, the death of poetry or the
development by the average woman of a prose style completely expressive
of her mind. If opinions upon any of these matters had been chalked on
the pavement, nobody would have stooped to read them. The nonchalance of
the hurrying feet would have rubbed them out in half an hour. Here came
an errand-boy; here a woman with a dog on a lead. The fascination of the
London street is that no two people are ever alike; each seems bound on
some private affair of his own. There were the business-like, with their
little bags; there were the drifters rattling sticks upon area railings;
there were affable characters to whom the streets serve for clubroom,
hailing men in carts and giving information without being asked for it.
Also there were funerals to which men, thus suddenly reminded of the
passing of their own bodies, lifted their hats. And then a very
distinguished gentleman came slowly down a doorstep and paused to avoid
collision with a bustling lady who had, by some means or other, acquired
a splendid fur coat and a bunch of Parma violets. They all seemed
separate, self-absorbed, on business of their own.
At this moment, as so often happens in London, there was a complete lull
and suspension of traffic. Nothing came down the street; nobody passed.
A single leaf detached itself from the plane tree at the end of the
street, and in that pause and suspension fell. Somehow it was like a
signal falling, a signal pointing to a force in things which one had
overlooked. It seemed to point to a river, which flowed past, invisibly,
round the corner, down the street, and took people and eddied them
along, as the stream at Oxbridge had taken the undergraduate in his boat
and the dead leaves. Now it was bringing from one side of the street to
the other diagonally a girl in patent leather boots, and then a young
man in a maroon overcoat; it was also bringing a taxi-cab; and it
brought all three together at a point directly beneath my window; where
the taxi stopped; and the girl and the young man stopped; and they got
into the taxi; and then the cab glided off as if it were swept on by the
current elsewhere.
The sight was ordinary enough; what was strange was the rhythmical order
with which my imagination had invested it; and the fact that the
ordinary sight of two people getting into a cab had the power to
communicate something of their own seeming satisfaction. The sight of
two people coming down the street and meeting at the corner seems to
ease the mind of some strain, I thought, watching the taxi turn and make
off. Perhaps to think, as I had been thinking these two days, of one sex
as distinct from the other is an effort. It interferes with the unity of
the mind. Now that effort had ceased and that unity had been restored by
seeing two people come together and get into a taxicab. The mind is
certainly a very mysterious organ, I reflected, drawing my head in from
the window, about which nothing whatever is known, though we depend upon
it so completely. Why do I feel that there are severances and
oppositions in the mind, as there are strains from obvious causes on the
body? What does one mean by 'the unity of the mind'? I pondered, for
clearly the mind has so great a power of concentrating at any point at
any moment that it seems to have no single state of being. It can
separate itself from the people in the street, for example, and think of
itself as apart from them, at an upper window looking down on them. Or
it can think with other people spontaneously, as, for instance, in a
crowd waiting to hear some piece of news read out. it can think back
through its fathers or through its mothers, as I have said that a woman
writing thinks back through her mothers. Again if one is a woman one is
often surprised by a sudden splitting off of consciousness, say in
walking down Whitehall, when from being the natural inheritor of that
civilization, she becomes, on the contrary, outside of it, alien and
critical. Clearly the mind is always altering its focus, and bringing
the world into different perspectives. But some of these states of mind
seem, even if adopted spontaneously, to be less comfortable than others.
In order to keep oneself continuing in them one is unconsciously holding
something back, and gradually the repression becomes an effort. But
there may be some state of mind in which one could continue without
effort because nothing is required to be held back. And this perhaps, I
thought, coming in from the window, is one of them. For certainly when I
saw the couple get into the taxicab the mind felt as if, after being
divided, it had come together again in a natural fusion. The obvious
reason would be that it is natural for the sexes to co-operate. One has
a profound, if irrational, instinct in favour of the theory that the
union of man and woman makes for the greatest satisfaction, the most
complete happiness. But the sight of the two people getting into the
taxi and the satisfaction it gave me made me also ask whether there are
two sexes in the mind corresponding to the two sexes in the body, and
whether they also require to be united in order to get complete
satisfaction and happiness? And I went on amateurishly to sketch a plan
of the soul so that in each of us two powers preside, one male, one
female; and in the man's brain the man predominates over the woman, and
in the woman's brain the woman predominates over the man. The normal and
comfortable state of being is that when the two live in harmony
together, spiritually co-operating. If one is a man, still the woman
part of his brain must have effect; and a woman also must have
intercourse with the man in her. Coleridge perhaps meant this when he
said that a great mind is androgynous. It is when this fusion takes
place that the mind is fully fertilized and uses all its faculties.
Perhaps a mind that is purely masculine cannot create, any more than a
mind that is purely feminine, I thought. But it would he well to test
what one meant by man-womanly, and conversely by woman-manly, by pausing
and looking at a book or two.
Coleridge certainly did not mean, when he said that a great mind is
androgynous, that it is a mind that has any special sympathy with women;
a mind that takes up their cause or devotes itself to their
interpretation. Perhaps the androgynous mind is less apt to make these
distinctions than the single-sexed mind. He meant, perhaps, that the
androgynous mind is resonant and porous; that it transmits emotion
without impediment; that it is naturally creative, incandescent and
undivided. In fact one goes back to Shakespeare's mind as the type of
the androgynous, of the man-womanly mind, though it would be impossible
to say what Shakespeare thought of women. And if it be true that it is
one of the tokens of the fully developed mind that it does not think
specially or separately of sex, how much harder it is to attain that
condition now than ever before.
What, then, it amounts to, if this theory of the two sides of the mind
holds good, is that virility has now become self-conscious—men, that is
to say, are now writing only with the male side of their brains. It is a
mistake for a woman to read them, for she will inevitably look for
something that she will not find. It is the power of suggestion that one
most misses, I thought, taking Mr B the critic in my hand and reading,
very carefully and very dutifully, his remarks upon the art of poetry.
Very able they were, acute and full of learning; but the trouble was
that his feelings no longer communicated; his mind seemed separated into
different chambers; not a sound carried from one to the other. Thus,
when one takes a sentence of Mr B into the mind it falls plump to the
ground—dead; but when one takes a sentence of Coleridge into the mind,
it explodes and gives birth to all kinds of other ideas, and that is
the only sort of writing of which one can say that it has the secret of
perpetual life. More information about Virginia Woolf from Wikipedia Another selection from Virginia Woolf:
More selections from English Writers:
More selections (38) in this category: Aesthetics More selections (163) in the iTunes category: Arts/Literature
|
