Ambivalencein Woolf’s Androgyny

Woolf is deemed as the forerunner of feminism because in many of her works she describes the pathetic situation of women and criticizes the patriarchal system which is the root of inequalities between men and women. Especially in her founding feminist essay, A Room of One’s Own, she explores the historical condition which is so unfavorable for women to write. In this essay, Woolf encourages women writers to write their uniqueness and establish their own literary tradition. However, in the latter part of this essay, the sight of a woman and a man getting into a taxicab makes her construct the theory of androgyny. Woolf feels that the natural fusion between men and women makes her split mind unite again while thinking about the distinctions between women and men makes her mind strained. As a result, she shifts her attention from discussing uniqueness of women writers to constructing the concept of androgyny. From Woolf’s understanding of Coleridge’s androgyny, androgynous mind is the source of creation. In order to attain such an ideal state, writers must forget their sex and concentrate on the thing they write. It is very contradictory that on one hand, Woolf encourages women writers to form their gendered sentence and feminine syntax which bear characteristics of their own while on the other hand, she advises writers to forget their sex when they are writing.In A Room of One s Own, androgyny is the source of creation and is a solution to ease the tension between men and women. While in Orlando, androgyny makes the protagonist Orlando experience the identity crisis and finally falls prey to madness. After sex transformation, Orlando feels frustrated and confined in her age. She is still conscious of her sex and acts according to the cultural expectation. She is constantly struggling with the spirit of the time. In the end, she yields to the convention. She gets married and gives birth to a child. Her androgynous status makes her uncertain about her identity and unable to separate fact from fantasy.This thesis aims to make an exploration of the ambivalence in Woolf’s androgyny by discussing A Room of One’s Own and Orlando. My thesis is divided into five parts. In introduction. I examine the differences of androgyny in A Room of One s Own and Orlando and the critical responses to Woolf’s androgyny.Chapter one concerns itself with the relationship between Woolf’s life experiences and her theory of androgyny. Born in a traditional family, she receives the traditional family education. Dominance of her father and obedience of her mother deepen her understanding of the patriarchal society. The sexual harassments from her two brothers make her afraid of men’s passion. Her poor health condition and her several breakdowns make her renounce the role of being a mother and also deprive her husband of the chance to be a father. The guilt for her husband and the pain she suffers are so overwhelming that she can only find relief in death. Her death shows her powerlessness to fight against her suffering. In the face of the Suffrage Movement, Woolf partly enthusiastically participated in it by writing revolutionary works such as A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas. But she also partly showed disapproval towards the suffragists and their excessive feminism. Her relationship with Vita provides large amounts of materials for her creation of Orlando. Their intimate relationship also prompts heated discussion about the relationship between the theory of androgyny and lesbianism.Chapter two mainly concerns itself with the analysis of androgyny in A Room of One’s Own. This chapter first introduces the prevailing definition of androgyny in western world and points out that Woolf actually favors the traditional definition of androgyny in which men transforms women. Her understanding of androgyny reveals her fear of the judgments from her male peers and her submission to the patriarchal society. Then, I attempt to point out the correlation between Woolf’s androgyny and Eliot’s impersonality. The final conclusion this chapter may draw is that Woolf’s androgyny shows her compromise between the need to be revolutionary in ending the rigid patriarchal system and her need to be accepted by the male critics. Her compromise results in her contradiction between her emphasis on women’s uniqueness and her emphasis on the importance of impersonality of writers.Chapter three mainly deals with the actualization of androgyny in Orlando. After sex-transformation, the male and female traits of Orlando remain separate and are not synthesized completely as the androgyny mentioned in A Room of One’s Own. The failure of androgyny in Orlando lies in Woolf’s embrace of stereotypical differences that distinguish men and women while, in the end, such differences inhibit the mental and spiritual androgyny she exalts.In sum, Woolf’s androgyny is just an ideal fantasy which cannot be actualized in practice. Androgyny helps Woolf to escape the confrontation between femaleness and maleness and it is void of theoretical or pragmatic relevance.