Art and Anger: Reading Like a Woman
Jane Marcus
Language: English
Pages: 320
ISBN: 0814204600
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Book by Marcus, Jane
language is naturally exuberant, and the English character full of humours and eccentricities. Meredith's flamboyancy has a great ancestry behind it; we cannot avoid all memory of Shakespeare."9 Woolf, we can see now, armed herself with the same sword as Meredith and his heroines. Their blows were aimed at patriarchal institutions, as much in the cause of freedom for artists as for women. I often think how much Woolf's poet Carmichael in To The Light house is Meredith. He is the only character
seemingly unconscious on Meredith's part, reveals a "woman of two natures," as Diana recognizes herself to be. The outer struggle to be free from personal and legal assault, the arrows of scandal and gossip, financial need, and social constraints on her artistic and political desires is matched by a fiercer inner struggle to become a whole woman. Diana is no case history, but a work of art. We know Diana by her actions, which neither she nor Meredith can explain in rational terms. The psychic
emotionally charged scene in the novel Here Diana, having lost "The Crossways," is at the real crossroads of her psychic develop ment, and the chapter is called "A Giddy Turn at the Spectral Cross ways/' The passage in which the "unmasked actress" imagines a fantasy of power after being numbed into a realization of her female ness and her powerlessness is worth quoting in full, for in terms of feeling, it is the strongest in the novel: The visionary figure of Mr. Tonans, petrified by the great
published, an attempt to "change the subject" in Woolf studies from the study of madness and suicide to a concentration on her pacifism, feminism, and socialism. My repeated insistence on these points throughout these essays is testimony to how stubborn the resistance is and to the fact that in many places the subject remains firmly unchanged. In 1985, after a decade of practice, I began to "theorize" socialist INTRODUCTION feminist criticism in "Still Practice." The theory grew out of the
Octavia Wilberforce, and,finally,with her radical mysticism. It will not be easy. The publication of the Diary8 provides a major tool, and one is grateful to Anne Olivier Bell for the patience and effort of providing it. But here the Bloomsbury view again prevails, and we never get a naked Virginia Woolf; she is always dressed in a jacket designed in the Omega Workshop. With the Diary the problem grows more serious, with Bells ringing all over the page to drown out the voice of Virginia Woolf.