A thesis submitted by
LUIZA TESTA
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
Master of Arts in
Critical Theory and the Arts
School of Visual Arts
AUGUST 11th, 2017.
Advisor: Antonio Y. Vázquez-Arroyo
PROMPT
Historically, the idea of citizenship and public participation has required a modicum of independence from material needs. This enabling condition for participation has been theorized in terms of the separation between the public and the private, with the private becoming a socially invisible scaffold of the public. Second-wave feminist writers called into question this separation with the slogan, “the personal is the political,” which called for a politicization of the private sphere. Yet, as you rightly noticed over the course of your reading, one of the most radical aspects of Virginia Woolf’s proto-feminist work, A Room of One’s Own, consists of a defense of privacy in ways that both de-politicize and de-socialize the private domain. Taking Woolf’s book as your point of departure, please reflect on the relationship between freedom and creation, the public and the private.
The De-Socialization of Private Sphere in A Room of One’s Own
There is a fair amount of irony in the fact that the woman who gave a lecture on the invisibility of female writers is also one of the most celebrated and admired writers in modern literature. The irony is easily dissolved though when one realizes that Virginia Woolf was one of the very few women that could, in the year of 1929, speak from the standpoint of a celebrated and admired writer. Hitherto, there is hardly another woman as important and pivotal in 20th century literature as Woolf is, although many other women are extremely important and some have conquered true recognition in this area, whether previously, simultaneously or after Woolf.
In 1928 Woolf gave a series of talks named Women and Fiction at two women’s colleges (Newnham College and Girton College) in Cambridge, to a group of women studying to become writers and that was published as a book under the title of A Room of One’s Own the following year. The author seems conscious of the forwardness presented in the book when she writes in her diaries that “the press will be kind and talk of its charm and sprightliness; also I shall be attacked for a feminist and hinted at for a Sapphist;”1 Her essay is so current that I am convinced that Woolf would still be “attacked for a feminist” and “hinted at for a Sapphist” in the present days.
A Room of One’s Own is almost 90 years old and in some senses it is more relevant than ever. In this essay I would like to address some of the important topics raised by Woolf that I find to remain pertinent in the 21st century, mostly those centered around the unresolved involvement of women’s struggle and the private and public spheres especially in relation to the Arts.
Woolf’s central claim in the mentioned book is an old acquaintance of the discussions on both topics of the mastering of art and of political participation. She claims that in order for a writer to become a great writer, two things were needed: financial independence and privacy. Money will enable free time, and privacy will ensure space for she sustains that “even allowing margin for symbolism, that five hundred a year stands for the power to contemplate, that a lock on the door means the power to think for oneself.”2
That one must have a certain amount of financial independence prevents one from struggling to attain humans basic needs, such as nourishing and dwelling, being thus left with time to concentrate on the task of contemplation so required to create something. Time for contemplation was highly regarded by ancient Greeks too, and not just for art sake. As for the political participation issue, the Greeks defended that in the polis the guarantee of basic needs was necessary so that freemen could participate in political life. Interestingly enough, in order to reassure these basic needs, that by their turn enabled political participation, action (here, violence) was accepted and enforced in the domestic milieu, the oikos. The polis, on the other hand, was a place in which conflicts were resolved not through action, but through speech.
Having basic needs taken care of is thus considered the first step to assuring greatness in both art and political participation.
The second point raised by Woolf is that in order to achieve greatness in writing, one would also need privacy. Along with time for contemplation, one would also need space.
Isolation is preponderant in making art, so the artist or writer needs privacy from the public sphere. As Hannah Arendt shows us in Human Condition, in ancient Greece the private sphere was where citizens met their “necessities of life, of individual survival as well as of continuity of the species”3, which translates into man living “not as a truly human being but only as a specimen of the animal species man-kind.”4 This is not by far the privacy imagined by Woolf. To Arendt, this new layer of privacy – detached from the social – that Woolf calls into question only emerges after the discovery of the intimate, with Rousseau and the romantics. Prior to that, individuality, on the contrary, was exercised only in the political realm, “where each one could show their peers through deeds that he was the best”5. In fact, while social used to coequal private in antiquity (because social was family, hence the household environment), in modernity they became opposed to each other: now the private is where the social is not. In other words, a major shift occurred between the Greek oikos, where private equaled family that by its turn equaled social and the modern individualistic notion of private that pushed social to the public sphere. Clearly, in modern society both spheres interact and present numerous intersections. Although Arendt explores the process that produced this shift, this won’t be necessarily relevant to this essay.
Woolf is addressing privacy in the modern sense, where there is in fact a reasonable invasion of the public sphere, or the twilight, “which illuminates our private and intimate
lives [and] is ultimately derived from the much harsher light of the public realm.”6 Arendt accuses the Romans (and especially Thomas Aquinas) of distorting the Greeks’ distinction between private and public by equating the chief of household to the king – or action to speech – when actually these two powers were incomparable, for the king had far less power over his citizens than the chief of a household’s undisputed and unlimited authority over his wife, children and slaves, justified by the insurance of his basic needs, as stated before. This comparison, to Arendt, couldn’t be drawn.
Nowadays, in democratic rules, there is a fair amount of the private sphere that has been politicized, or illuminated by the public twilight. Furthermore, in these cultures, politics have been extended to all – clearly this statement is highly questionable, since empirically we don’t see democracy as a beacon for representativeness or participation, yet, this is way beyond the scope of this essay. Therefore, with the pervasion of private by public and with the – theoretically – expansion of political participation, we can see how private has lost its etymological sense, that of which those who weren’t allowed to take part in politics were relegated to the private sphere, being therefore deprived of the public sphere. Hence, this notion differs a lot from Woolf’s modern calling for a necessity of privacy. Indeed, Woolf is not alone in this claim for the need of privacy, to the extent that in modern society virtually everyone sees privacy as a necessity, if not a right.
However, what I would like to argue in this essay is that Woolf’s claim for privacy (or for a room) goes beyond the de-politization of the private sphere. She is not simply saying that politics should be shut out from one’s house. In this regard, let me also point out that the fact per se would seem a bit contradictory; if one bears in mind women’s movement and its claims for inclusion, especially later during second-wave feminism, one will recall the demand for a politization of the personal, precisely with the intent to avoid the violence suffered by women when public sphere couldn’t reach the private environment and when action overruled speech. It might seem at first that Woolf is advocating for the opposite, and indeed, feminists might even have criticized another woman relevant to us here, Arendt, for her apparent negligence towards women when she defended the separation of the private and the public spheres – hence the reinforcement of the violence behind the curtains of the oikos. Though, I might add that what Woolf is claiming here is something different, of another layer, which is the core subject of this essay. I shall talk about it soon.
Women’s seclusion to the private sphere was not something given, as some might think. In Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, Friedrich Engels narrates a matrilineal society prior to the polis, in which the task of childbearing and childrearing was considered to be a public one, for it was “a socially necessary industry as the providing of food by the men”7. Women ruled the communistic houses, a setting that also presupposed their supremacy, since in a pre-monogamous society a mother was the only certainty in a child’s life. With the increasing of wealth’s importance, a vital shift happened: so children could receive their father’s wealth, the linearity became patriarchal, or in Engels words “the overthrow of mother right was the world-historic defeat of the female sex”.8 The following step in the attempt to prevent an illegitimate child to receiving a man’s heirloom was to institute monogamy and marriage, which wasn’t regulated by specific laws, and likewise in ancient Greece, “what [happened] behind the legal curtains, where real life is enacted, how this voluntary agreement is arrived at – is no concern of the law and the jurist.”9 When monogamous marriage still wasn’t enough to guarantee the certainty of heritage, women had to be held inside their houses. Engels articulates the claim that in the old communistic household, when women’s role still belonged to the public realm, the advent of patriarchal family and monogamy was responsible for the loss of the public character of the household administration task and its further transformation into a private service. Deprived from public life, women became nothing more than the chief of slaves. The basis of the modern individual family is thus the enslavement of women, be it open or disguised. In an analogy to class society, Engels proceeds to leveling men to the bourgeois and women to the proletariat, for the former being in the dominating position, likewise the capitalist, doesn’t require legal privileges. If emancipation in a class society means abolishing the paths that lead to this structure, women’s emancipation would be ensued only by the abolition of the individual family as a molecule in the mass that it society, which would finally enable women’s introduction in the public industry, hence, in the public sphere. All in all, the reason why women were relegated to the private sphere in first place was family and according to Engels, the only way to break these chains would be abolishing family so women could finally overcome the gulf between private and public and have their work recognized on a social level.
With this brief introduction to women’s relegation to the private sphere, we can see the beginning of the long-lasting relationship of women with the interior of a house. As
Virginia Woolf puts it “women have sat indoors all these millions of years, so that by this time the very walls are permeated by their creative force, which has, indeed so overcharged the capacity of bricks and mortar that it must needs harness itself to pens and brushes and business and politics.”10 This is central to the critique that Woolf draws in A Room of One’s Own. To her, women’s uninterrupted presence in the interior of the house – which implies at the same time an absence from the outer world – represents a double bind: on one hand, women lack the experience men have, that of living unrestrictedly, that of overcoming the gulf between private and public worlds with ease. As a result, women are left with anger and frustration, feelings that function as a fog, hindering artistic production. On the other hand, in being secluded, a woman learns to accurately observe the dynamics of the world that surrounds her; hence a capacity of looking around or outside herself emerges. After spending some time reading only women’s novels in order to prepare for the lecture, Woolf noticed that their sentences were often truncated and infested with resentment and that only in her times, and not before that, women “may be beginning to use writing as an art, not as a method of self expression”. When she finally reads again a book written by a man (and we can assume she is talking about canons, very likely an European or North American writer), she feels relieved, for the sentences were straightforward and she appreciated the writer’s confidence, his unfettered existence… but then she sees the “shadow of an I” 11that is, the habitude that men have of always positing themselves as the standard, as the center, and this bothers her. After that, she proceeds to concluding that perhaps we all have both a male and a female side (or souls, as she refers to it) and that great artists must conciliate these two sides in an equalized amount.
Nevertheless, Woolf’s conciliatory conclusion is not by far the most interesting part of A Room of One’s Own. The most relevant and innovative issue that Woolf raises is the one I intend to bring to attention here, that is, women’s necessity for a private space in becoming great artists despite the fact that women have been living in private spaces “all these millions of years”.
Recapitulating, Arendt claims that among ancient Greeks social equaled family, hence private, and the public sphere was the political one. In modern societies, private is not the social anymore, but in fact is its opposition. Therefore, social is public. Let me digress for a short while.
A man comes home from work in 1929 and he finds his home, his private sphere, where he could finally hide from the “much harsher light of the public realm”. He has a room of his own – an office perhaps, or something of the sort. We picture him smoking a cigar or having a glass of bourbon; he might be reading a book or listening to some music. In case his children knocked on the door, he might as well tell them that he is busy trying to rest from his long and tiring day at work. Now, his wife had spent the whole day inscribed in the private sphere, she might even have gone to the market or to the butcher shop, where she met a friend whom she briefly talked about life – husband and children – and she eventually returned to her house, where she had to clean, cook and take care of children. When her husband came home from work and locked himself in his office, she was bathing the kids and preparing dinner; serving dinner. After that, dishes had to be washed and kids had to be tucked into bed. This scene is not a rule, but it’s rather further from being an exception and Virginia Woolf acknowledges it. Mrs. Ramsay measures the stockings while she thinks about the doors and windows; Clarissa Dalloway is preparing a party, inscribed in such a social routine that in Simone de Beauvoir’s words it “quickly changes the potlatch into an institution, the gift into an obligation, and the party hardens into a rite”12 So, “entertaining is not just welcoming others into one’s own home; it is changing one’s home into as enchanted domain; the social event is both festivity and potlatch”13 This is true for women across the globe, from First to Third World countries, pre and post women’s settlement in the marketplace and who accumulate – or not – the shifts of working outside and inside the house.
Arendt is right indeed when she states that the private sphere is separated from the social life, but this is only true as a general rule for men. For a woman, the private sphere is many times where labor happens, and it can be pretty much where her life is subsumed. It is hardly so for men. If the house is where men go to get some rest from the pressures of society, for women the house is in a large part where the social happens. Thus, the most revolutionary point of A Room of One’s Own – and the one that I am especially focusing on here – is Woolf’s advocating for the de-socialization of the private sphere for women as part of their emancipation, or for them to become great artists.
However precious and real Engel’s account on the necessity of women entering public sphere in order to achieve emancipation, I see Woolf claim being of another sort. She is arguing that we must find privacy within private sphere, something that is not granted at all. Woolf in fact answered Linda Nochlin’s question even before it was formulated. Why Have There No Been Great Women Artists? is an essay from 1971, in which Nochlin posits the question homonymous to the title. Instead of simply trying to answer it, she questions our
very conception of genius in which there’s a thread of endowed people who have known exactly the point to which something of the past should be profited and what needed to be surpassed. If in this timeline there were only men is because supposedly, men were the only ones with that capacity. In sum, Nochlin will argue that such capacity is not a gift, but actually something constructed and that the exceling of the so-called masters (from Giotto to Picasso) was rather a byproduct of the opportunities they had, especially those granted by living the public life, while women “sat indoors”. To Nochlin, this analysis is rather a task for Sociology, not for Aesthetics. Men were granted the possibility of traveling, of learning directly from the masters that came before them. Nochlin follows the thread of Woolf’s exercise in A Room of One’s Own, in which she constructs the hypothetical life of an imaginary sister of Shakespeare’s – someone who would have been raised in the some environment, with initially the same opportunities as the old poet, except she was a woman.
The same doors that were open to Shakespeare and that made feasible his talent and position as the play writer par excellence in the world would be closed to her. How is one supposed to achieve mastery with such obstacles? Thus, Woolf and Nochlin’s claims are clearly consonant and dialogue with Engel’s description of the confining of women as something unnatural and negative. Engels and Nochlin both indicate the need of conquering the public sphere in order for women to achieve emancipation – be it under a historical materialist approach or not – but Woolf sees it as a twofold movement, as something that shouldn’t permeate only the exterior world, but also the interior one.
Virginia Woolf is writing in the context of a newly conquered women’s suffrage in England. The Equal Franchise Act passed in July 1928, right in between the two talks Woolf gave at the women’s Colleges; that is, the book was published subsequently to women’s conquering the right to vote in the same terms as men in England. This represented a huge accomplishment in the long endeavor of women achieving the quintessential public space: political participation. Woolf was certainly affected by this change. I would like to argue that only a victory as important as this on the public level would enable someone to look at privacy in the way she did. So, when she speaks: “when I ask you to earn money and have a room of your own, I am asking you to live in the presence of reality, as invigorating life, it would appear, whether one can impart it I or not”14, Woolf is claiming something of the utmost importance, and not just for female artists, but rather to all: that women must conquer their way in privacy in as much as they need it in public.
If what Woolf says about women being confined to the domestic realm is true and if this has indeed affected women exceling in arts, would there be any difference between a writer and a visual artist? Has confinement impacted them in different ways? Nochlin seems to think that women’s restriction has been harder on painters then on writers, for, “while art making traditionally has demanded the learning of specific techniques and skills, in a certain sequence, in an institutional setting outside the home, as well as becoming familiar with a specific vocabulary of iconography and motifs, the same is by no means true for the poet or novelist. Anyone, even a woman, has to learn the language, can learn to read and write, and can commit to personal experiences to paper in the privacy of one’s room”15 I’ve attempted to show here that the “privacy of one’s room” – a clear nod to Woolf – is not a mere space that allows an individual moment, but it represents rather a modicum of emancipation, a de- socialization of the private sphere. It would be difficult to measure this impact by simply putting the body of work of painters – or visual artists of any sort – and that of writers on a scale. Nochlin names several women writers that obtained the same level of recognition as men did while claiming that very fewer painters have achieved the same.
Almost forty years after writing Why Have There No Been Great Women Artists?, Nochlin wrote the short foreword chapter for a book called After the Revolution: Women Who Transformed Contemporary Art, a collection of essays about twelve women whom, according to the authors and editors of the book, were crucial on the processes that transformed art lately. In the last paragraph of the foreword, one reads about these twelve women: “whether they are ‘great’ or not is beside the point today; there is something stodgy and fixed about the very word ‘great’, something that smells of the past and tradition (…) For the women considered in this book, it is vitality, originality, malleability, an incisive relationship to the present and all it implies, and ability to deal with darkness and negativity and ambiguity that is as stake, not some mythic status that would confine them to fixed, eternal truth.”16
Although this foreword feels very much like Nochlin is making amends for her famous essay of the past, I believe that there’s some truth in this passage. Greatness may not be what’s at stake anymore; at least it’s somehow a concept subject to much more scrutiny than it once was. But if the “ability to deal with darkness and negativity and ambiguity” is in fact central in contemporary art now, I believe that the intense and complicated relationship of women with the domestic environment lies beneath the surface of many – if not all – art produced by women.
A brief scan into one’s memory when it comes to preeminent female contemporary artists will reveal a number of home-related pieces. Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party, Marina Abramović’s House with Ocean View, Martha Rosler’s Semiotics of the Kitchen, Tracy Emin’s My Bed and so on an so forth. But perhaps no other artist dealt with the ambivalence of the house being at the same time a shelter and a prison like Louise Bourgeois did. Her series Femme Maison (1946-47) epitomizes this relation in a very straightforward way. In the paintings – which later developed into sculptures – the viewer doesn’t know whether the woman’s head is present inside the house or if it was replaced by a house. In either cases, her naked body is standing or seating fragile, open and exposed while her identity is engulfed or equaled to that of a house. Interpretations on this series of paintings and sculpture might range from the circumscription of women to the domestic milieu, as I claim here, to the objectification of a woman’s body and prostitution. None of them however will swerve effectively from the fact that the private sphere is a feminine sphere. The Quartered One (1964-65), from the Lairs series is again a direct allusion to the ambiguity of the house, which can be a trap inasmuch as a refuge. Etymologically, Lares were the roman gods that guarded the houses, so each home had its own Lar. However, their power could be used to protect as well as to harm the family living in the house. Bourgeois, who was born in 1911, couldn’t think that the de-socialization of the privacy was something granted to women and this issue is in fact ubiquitous in her works. More recently, between 1990 and 1993, Cell was a series of architectural installations made of a gathering of personal and found objects, reminiscences of a house, and sculpted body parts in claustrophobic and isolated atmospheres (cells). In the late 1990s, Bourgeois used some technology provided by a company in her Hologram series, in which she depicts the interior of a house in blood red color as a dark place, with a haunting atmosphere, in which common objects such as a chair, a bed, or a mirror look terrifying. Bourgeois’ career was long, she explored a myriad of media; but dealing with darkness and ambiguity was omnipresent.
Women have been finding their own privacy within the private sphere, like Woolf advocated for. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be dealing with this ambiguity in such a free and frank way as Bourgeois did and so many other artists do. Virginia Woolf lecturing women on how to become great artists or to simply become artists who afford questioning their own dark and ambiguous assigned places, I repeat, is an extremely relevant and current endeavor. Art too is a form of bridging the private and the public spheres and, as for artists of my generation, just like Woolf hoped, “by hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the
world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream”17
Louise Bourgeois Femme Maison Series, 1946-47. Oil and ink on linen, 36 x 14 inches.
Endnotes
1 Woolf, Virginia. Writers Diary: Being Extracts from the Diary of Virginia Woolf.
2 Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1989.
3 Arendt, Hannah. “The Public and the Private Realm.” In The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012.
4 Idem.
5 Idem.
6 Idem.
7 Engels, Friedrich. “Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State.” In The Marx-Engels Reader, by Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Robert C. Tucker. New York: Norton, 1978.
8 Engels, Friedrich. “Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State.” In The Marx-Engels Reader, by Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Robert C. Tucker. New York: Norton, 1978.
9 Engels, Friedrich. “Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State.” In The Marx-Engels Reader, by Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Robert C. Tucker. New York: Norton, 1978.
10 Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1989.
11 Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1989.
12 Beauvoir, Simone De. “Social Life.” In The Second Sex. New York: Vintage Books, 2011.
13 Idem.
14 Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1989.
15 Nochlin, Linda. “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” ARTnews. Jan. 1971.
16 Nochlin, Linda. “Foreword.” In After the Revolution: Women Who Transformed Contemporary Art, by Eleanor Heartney, Hekaine Posner, Nancy Princenthal and Sue Scott. Munich: Prester, 2007.
17 Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1989.