Blurbs from Ginny Woolf

This probably doesn’t have much to do with Woolf’s rhetoric, but I found it important to comment on:

“My dear you are a young woman. You are writing about a book that has been written by man. Be sympathetic; be tender; flatter; deceive; use all the arts and wiles of our sex. Never let anybody guess that you have a mind of your own. Above all, be pure.”
--The Angel in the House

Wow, this angel is still hanging out in my house. Well, I’ve got her caged, but she still squawks at me all the time. I’m a person who’s inclined to be blunt, but that sort of honesty isn’t expected of women, so it’s necessary for us to sugarcoat things. I’m under the impression that if I didn’t, I’d be called a “bitch,” whereas if a man acted the same way he’d be regarded as “hard to please,” and yes please read all the sexual innuendo into that phrase that you wish. At this point, I’m at the angry feminist stage of grappling with my demonic angel. I haven’t killed her yet, I suspect because I want to torture her first. Anyway, back to rhetoric.

On language and writing:

“[Sentence], a woman must make for herself, altering and adapting the current sentence until she writes one that takes the natural shape of her thought without crushing or distorting it.”

These remarks remind me of Cheris Kramerae’s view on the inadequacy of language for women. Woolf expounds upon this later when she discusses Mary Carmichael’s novel in which the author introduces a lesbian romance (at least as I understand it). Woolf claims that Carmichael’s language is not the best, but it is as good as it can be now. So, Woolf sees language appropriation as a process, one that must be carried out by future generations of women writers. But it’s not just language Woolf is talking about here, like Nietzsche, she’s using language as a metaphor for self expression. Just as women must kill the Angel in the House to be fully productive, fully self-aware, women must break apart the language system and rebuild it anew.

But that’s still using the master’s tools, so I’m not sure it will work, I’m not sure that it has worked.