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Please, if you copy any FWQ poems for posting elsewhere or blogging, link back to this site and provide proper attribution. Her pretty friend Ruth Webb played a white woman who persuades a golden-haired Creole, Mimi Daquin, disillusioned with her own people, to flee from them and find lasting happiness with others. Roxborough, a romantic, believed in the pursuit of happiness, but hers, she felt, would lie among whites. There would always be a low ceiling above her if she tried to rise in the black world - as the writers of the Harlem Renaissance had discovered when white critics patronized and ghettoized even their finest work.
Nor could she think of marriage and children, for children might turn out colored, and impede her progress in the dream world her talent seemed to make accessible. In the same season Roxborough crafted her first play, fall of , Langston Hughes's play Mulatto opened at the Vanderbilt Theatre on Broadway. It dramatized the agony of a loyal son when he sees all the privileges of American citizenship open to one parent and denied to the other.
Mulatto did not provide a solution to the racial dilemma. It claimed that blacks try to give love and tenderness to whites, who receive such affection covertly but deny it overtly. Unlike Roxborough's plays it offered blacks no hope for social mobility across the color line. Because no scripts are extant and it was not reviewed in surviving papers, its content is unknown.
She ran the Roxane Players, wrote for the campus newspaper, and kept her studies up. She got her dramatic group off the ground, according to Nimrod Carney, because "she was Elsie Roxborough! Other groups had more direction than Elsie's. Hers operated on the force of her personality and went out of existence until she came back to town. She had soirees upstairs at the Frogs Club, and she used that as a rehearsal place. She was a little older than I. I hadn't anything and was unsophisticated. I was abusing myself in those plays: But I didn't mind because those plays showed me the way to the trough and I was happy to reach the trough.
Elsie was a charming It was unusual for anybody to get such a group together, but it was extraordinary that people would follow the lead of a black female in the thirties.
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It was much harder for the female then than now to reach out and grab a piece of the world that she wanted. Following her theatrical debacle in Chicago, on New Year's day the Defender printed a new, two-column photo of Roxborough on its society pages. The caption said she was spending the holiday in Cleveland visiting Evelyn Jackson. Langston Hughes was also in Cleveland then, visiting his mother. The two playwrights probably discussed their work, for in March Hughes was in Detroit viewing rehearsals of his Drums of Haiti that the Roxane Players were preparing for presentation on 15, 16, and 17 April.
It was a historical play about Jean-Jacques Dessalines, a rebellious slave who freed his people to become black emperor of Haiti. Roxborough had heard about Langston Hughes ever since she was a child. He was a leading figure in the Harlem Renaissance and a member of the radical group of Negro "actors" invited to the Soviet Union in to make a movie about racism in America. Roxborough must have assumed that the black flowering. On the personal level, rumors abounded. This time the play is by Langston Hughes. He's the fellow who wrote the book for Mulatto.
With so much in common between the two, the play should be a success. Hughes allowed equally dashing Elsa Roxboro [sic] to change to Drums of Haiti. The quidnuncs would have you swoon in your best Melanie fashion over the Hughes-Roxboro duo because I am a professional poet and while poetry is so frequently associated with romance, there seems to be little compatibility between poetry and marriage, especially where one must depend upon it to support a wife.
But she had always lived among the upper-crust; Hughes identified with the street black. She was tall- 5"7" -and he was short-5'5" -and twelve years older. She lived in style; he shared his mother's basement flat where his stepfather was building custodian. Although Hughes seemed close to Roxborough as an artist, he was still, like Joe Louis, a lower-class figure.
In Joe Louis became heavyweight boxing champion, and black America exploded in jubilation. The eyes of the Roxborough family were on Uncle John's prote6g to whom experiences would come that had never before been known by an American Negro. Was this triumph connected to Elsie Roxborough's decision the same year to leave her race? Her rationale was the lack of opportunities in the theatre, a problem she had discussed with Langston Hughes: Elsie was often mistaken for white in public places so it would be no trouble at all for her to pass as white.
The rejection of her plays by critics and judges contrasted with the nearly incredible success of Uncle John's golden boy. If making it as a black in America demanded masculine brute strength, she would flee to the genteel white world in which a woman's arts would be appreciated. Roxborough changed her hair color from raven black to auburn, eliciting a pun from columnist Boykin, "She's just dye-ing to get away. Roxborough illustrated what you could do if you were lightskinned and had enough money.
From the autumn of on, most black reporters were never sure whether she was in Hollywood or New York, and her family wasn't saying. Though none of the metropolitan lads who pound typewriters for a living know it, Elsie Roxborough whom Detroit affectionately dubbed the colored Connie Bennett, has been living in Gotham for the past few months as Nordic-much to her family's undisguised disgust.
You can imagine poor La Roxborough shuddering each time she slips into an uptown subway train. Others couldn't "pass" but she could, and if passing was her only option, she would take it. Furthermore, passing was an adventure. It was exciting to play out the historic black American folk trick of "fooling ole massa" - to slip through to the white world and witness that no one could tell the difference. In her case the trick worked extra well: She took the name Pat Rico, and for a while flourished as a model and owner of a modeling studio.
After less than a year in California, she moved to New York and. On 13 July , when Langston Hughes sailed for Europe to attend a peace congress sponsored by the International Association of Writers for the Defense of Culture, his friends recognized the woman who reached the dock too late to say goodbye as the person in the picture in Hughes' Harlem apartment. In that story the heroine is a model torn between her attraction to a sensuous top-fashion photographer who uses her, and a more homespun photographer who helps her get established with good pictures of herself and introductions at the right studios.
The theme of this wish-fulfillment fantasy is that the too-successful man does not understand the feelings of 'the woman whose emotions he exploits. A racial analogy would be that the white American does not understand the feelings of the mulatto who lives beside him. By the time World War II started, Roxborough had assumed a third new name, "Mona Manet," and moved to a final residence, across the street from the future site of the United Nations Buildings.
And she had opened her modeling salon, Mona Manet, Inc. The high point of her ethnic deception is her description of a reception in Atlanta: Your beauty editor had the thrill of her lifetime when she was commissioned as Beauty Stylist to do the make-up and hair-styling for Atlanta's overwhelming "Fashionata of " With us on the trip to Atlanta were 12 of New York's most versatile models, selected because they had grace and acting ability as well as beauty We enjoyed plenty of good old Southern hospitality in that magnificent town of fabulous homes and exquisite gardens and clothes.
Arnall turned out for the very elegant opening night They say no one has been received as royally as our company since Clark Gable was down there for the Gone With the Wind premiere. With whom could she laugh about her supreme ruse, however? Concealing her identity, living with a white roommate, she could not rationalize bringing Ebony magazine into her apartment when it unostentatiously appeared in November She could not invite her Uncle John or her friends Joe Louis, or Langston Hughes, or even Arthur Miller- who had known her only as Negro- to her apartment, or even mention to anyone that she knew them.
She would feel uncomfortable discussing the headlines about President Truman's attempts to establish a Fair Employment Practices Commission-the precursor of Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action. Novelist and screenwriter Ernest Lehman- the script for North by Northwest is one of his credits - was a fellow writer for Fascination. He used to gossip with editor Herczeg about the mysterious Mona who year-round was wrapped in mink, as if the ultimate in furs provided protection against the psychological chill.
From Lehman's account it is obvious that she went through a metamorphosis of personality in making her race change. No longer was she aggressive, dynamic, "wild. I had no idea that Mona was "passing. I had the impression that Geza was doing whatever he could to help her survive. He definitely gave her her job with the magazine.
He was certainly her protector, perhaps a father-confessor. There were no men in her life that year []. She never seemed to come onto men in a noticeably sexy way,. Ernest Lehman has black-rimmed glasses, to the right of his wife Jacqueline who wears a leopard-skin hat. Photo courtesy Ernest Lehman. We were always happy to see each other when our paths crossed. She told me one reason she liked me: I reminded her of Arthur Miller, the playwright Mona moved in the magazine world, the world of fashion, restaurants, and nightclubs.
She enhanced any gathering she was in. She was sweet, self-effacing, low in self-esteem, tinged with sadness. I doubt whether there was anyone who didn't like her. As far as I know, she never connected in New York with any truly important magazine. Fascination was not first-rate, and soon folded.
If in "passing" she seemed to have lost some of her drive and intelligence, it probably was due to the pernicious effects of the thousand ploys one would have to indulge in In those times, it was a hopeless adventure leading nowhere. I think she remained in my memory To me she was like a character out of a novel or a play, such as Edna Ferber's "Julie" in Showboat.
She called Mona's sister in Detroit, who went with Uncle John's wife "Cutie"-they both looked white-to claim the body and bring it back to Detroit for burial. They told Mona's New York friends that the funeral would be private, trying to conceal her racial identity. HAUKE even in death.
There was no obituary in the New York papers under her name or either of her pseudonyms. The death certificate lists "Mona Manet, writer, white, First Avenue, Manhattan, age 35," as having died of "congestion of the viscera. Louella Parsons was extolling the movie Pinky for "attacking a daring subject in a daring way.
Jeanne Crain is superb as a Negro girl who realizes the folly of trying to pass as white. Roxborough's former rival for the Hopwood drama prize, Arthur Miller, had a box office and critical success with Death of a Salesman. The drama section of the New York Times, which she may have read on her last morning, featured University of Michigan professor Valentine Windt for directing a Shakespeare festival in New York.
Windt had been Roxborough's teacher in Ann Arbor and she had interviewed him for the Michigan Daily -but she would not have dared to approach him as "Mona Manet. Elsie Roxborough's final passing hit the front pages in Detroit's black press. Whether she actually committed suicide will never be known. Her stockings were soaking in the wash bowl, a sign of her probable intention to go out the next day. She had telephoned family the previous week for money. Nevertheless, she may have desired to end her existence for a long time, like the unsuccessful writer-heroine Russell Terrill in her Hopwood entry, A World of Difference.
Terrill has a speech on her wish for death: When I go to bed at night, I don't care whether I live until morning or not - most times I fall asleep praying for death. I feel all lost in a great vastness, and beaten I go through the usual automatic rituals, eating tasteless food, talking meaningless talk, laughing soulless laughter. I'm too much of a coward to really die - I've only prayed to sneak out in my sleep If I were only of some use to the world! The expectations she had for herself may have been even greater. Detroit had told her: So Roxborough maneuvered and schemed, wriggling through all the possibilities she could devise.
Ambivalent about how to express herself racially, she may have wanted to communicate a message to both her white and black peers: People of both colors are talented and beautiful. We have hidden riches. Elsie Roxborough had felt unique when she set off for Ann Arbor in , as if all she had to do was play her cards right and the game was hers. But being Negro, she was programmed for failure. Barbara Christian has said of Jean Toomer, a light-skinned Negro fiction writer, that "as a result of the touching of two cultures [his] women's lives are painfully truncated, their spirits abused and repressed.
It is ironic that both her suitors, Joe Louis and Langston Hughes, "made it" in the white world by pursuing their talents as Negroes, whereas Roxborough, aping whites, did not. Having lost the finest elements of her personality by choosing to pass, she could find no place out from under the long white shadow; there was "no such house at all.
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Kermit Bailer, George H. Huggins, Rowena Jelliffe, Robert J. Hauke, and the Katy Hauke Research Fund. For discussion of the issues raised in this article, I am indebted to John C. Dancy, Sand Against the Wind Detroit: Saunders, Black Society Chicago: University of Michigan Press, Hill and Wang, ; rpt. State Digest, 19 Feb. Senator," Chicago Defender, 14 March , p. My Story New York: Berkley Books, , pp. Collier Books, , p. Boykin, telephone interview, Detroit, Mich. Isaacs, and Alexander Dean. Vintage Books, , pp. In it a "passing" son passes his darkskinned mother on the street and doesn't greet her, then writes her a note of.
I'm glad there's nothing to stop letters from crossing the color-line," he says; also, "Who Passing for Who? Hill and Wang, , pp. Boykin, Detroit Tribune, 10 July , p. Before and Beyond Harlem Westport, Conn.: Lawrence Hill and Co. The Development of a Tradition, Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, , p. Over and over we examined what was said of us. Over and over we testify. The conspiracy of appearances. There are cracks in the surface. Yet they have every convenience and comfort. You have only to press a button or light a little lamp.
Their papers are beautifully There are no children or animals, save half a dozen stray cats and one aged bullfinch - a cock. Remembering "Oxbridge," she is helplessly reminded of "an Aunt of mine who lived at Dulwich and kept cactuses It never occurred to me that they could possibly produce anything. As Leonard Woolf reminds us, after all, she herself decided to omit the piece in which Castalia makes this statement from A Haunted House, the volume in which most of the other Monday or Tuesday stories are reprinted.
Yet I want to suggest here that in its. In fact, as I want briefly to observe, it is arguable that Woolf's two longest and most famous feminist treatises-A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas- are not so much about the rights and wrongs of women as they are about the rights and wrongs of higher education, and specifically about that branch of higher education we call "the humanities. Especially significant, because both poignant and symbolic, are Woolf's visions of academic processions, lineups of learned men which express her increasingly angry sense of dispossession from the masculinist march of time that until recently was or was thought to be.
As early as Jacob's Room, a disembodied narrator watches with wistful irony as the men of Cambridge ceremonially enter King's College Chapel. Look, as they pass into service, how airily the gowns blow out, as though nothing dense and corporeal were within. What sculptured faces, what certainty, authority controlled by piety, although great boots march under the gowns. Many were in cap and gown; some had tufts of fur on their shoulders; others were wheeled in bath-chairs; others, though not past middleage, seemed creased and crushed into shapes so singular that one was reminded of those giant crabs and crayfish who heave with difficulty across the sand of an aquarium.
As I leant against the wall the University indeed seemed a sanctuary in which are preserved rare types which would soon be obsolete if left to fight for existence on the pavement of the Strand. The words of Arthur's song in Pendennis rise to our lips I will not enter there, To sully your pure prayer With thoughts unruly Specifically, throughout a brilliant series of commentaries on the humanities, Woolf addressed herself to three issues that continue to concern us today. First, she implicitly and explicitly considered the question of authority. Second, she thought long and hard about the issue of canonization.
Third, she meditated perhaps most intensely upon the possibility of sociocultural transformation. Considering her increasingly powerful self-definition as both a feminist and an outsider - her sense, indeed, that because she was a feminist she was an outsider -these were crucial and inevitable issues to study. For when examined from the perspective of "the daughters of educated men," these three issues go directly to the heart of the relationship between intellectual power and sexual politics, illuminating a set of assumptions about humanistic culture that until the nineteenth century were questioned by only a few exceptional women and men.
To turn to the question of authority, for instance: An education in the humanities, therefore, was for centuries a process that empowered the student by authorizing or legitimizing him as a member of the march of humanistic history, a point supported by Walter Ong's contention that the learning of Latin in. GILBERT particular used to function as a sort of initiation ritual for upperclass male citizens, an agon that implicitly authorized the transformation of boy to man.
John Hirst in The Voyage Out exults that "I'm going to be one of the people who really matter"6 and insultingly wonders if his female listener will be able to "appreciate" the classical historian, whose works are "the test of course" p. Later, as if to reinforce this point, Rachel's classicist uncle asks "What's the use of reading if you don't read Greek? Similarly, Jacob's Room meditates on a hero who reads and romanticizes Greek, a hero who not only looks like a Greek statue but actually falls in love in and with Greece, a hero who is therefore a "masterly In relation to him, indeed, not only the novel's female characters but even its invisible female narrator are inexorably alienated from both language and the culture language reproduces and represents.
From Jacob's semi-literate mother Betty Flanders, scribbling gossippy letters "in pale profusion" by her fireside p. Thus, as the Woolfian narrator lurks outside "the courts of Trinity," "she" imagines "herself" hearing "the stroke of the clock Even if he echoes only himself, one young man makes a procession.
Simultaneously, and not coincidentally, "she" has a vision of "the bare hills of Turkey For if it is no wonder that young men as authoritative as Woolf's Cambridge-educated brothers and their friends - Lytton Strachey, Leonard Woolf, Clive Bell, Saxon Sydney-Turner- march like culture's princes through her early fictions, it is no wonder either that she half-consciously projected herself into a subversive vision of the domesticated women, bare-legged and foreign, who have been so thoroughly excluded from history that neither their bodies nor the "stream" in which they stand can "show clearly through the swaddlings and blanketings of the Cambridge night" p.
Deprived of both the authority and the authorization provided by "humanistic" studies, as most young women were until at least the middle of the nineteenth century, daughters and sisters like Woolf felt themselves to be not only unauthorized but illegitimate, intellectually powerless. Inevitably, then, "thoughts unruly," along with unruly visions, rose in them as they watched the great processions of humanistic history pass them by.
Often, indeed, their only strategy for artistic or intellectual expression consisted in deliberate repudiations or revisions of such solemnly self-perpetuating male structures. Rachel Vinrace in The Voyage Out, for instance, accompanies a freely flowing, improvisational dance by impudently playing "hymn tunes Hilbery, the "great poet's" daughter who enlivens Night and Day, perversely decides that "Anne Hathaway had a way, among other things, of writing Shakespeare's sonnets,"7 and her daughter, Katharine, rejects traditional aesthetic forms altogether, articulating her joy in life and love through enigmatic visions of "algebraic symbols, pages all speckled with dots and dashes and twisted bars" p.
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Despite what sometimes seems like the frivolity of their response to patriarchal history and culture, however, such female characters quite accurately understand the exact origin of their plight. For, denied the authority of learning and kept off the grass of the university, the "daughters of educated men" had long been able to define the difficulties of their female situation.
GILBERT the Augustan poet Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, summarized the essence of the problem that the patrilineal succession implicit in the traditional humanities posed for generations of intelligent women: How are we fal'n, fal'n by mistaken rules? And Education's, more than Nature's fools, Debarr'd from all improve'ments of the mind, And to be dull, expected and designed?
The primordial battle of the books, after all-joined as early as the Renaissance struggle into the vernacular and most famously memorialized in Swift's treatise of that name-was a war between the "Ancients" and the "Moderns," a war whose very articulation suggests a questioning of the received idea of the humanistic canon.
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Yet even this battle has often been shadowed by both sexual politics and sexual poetics. Swift's "Moderns," for instance, are defended by a loathsome female monster named Criticism, while his "Ancients" are championed by noble patriarchs who range from Homer "on a furious horse" and Virgil "in shining armor" to none other than the magisterial Apollo himself.
Not surprisingly, therefore, Swift's sometime friend Anne Finch, addressing "Melancholy," imagined herself a captive of this "Tyrant Pow'r"; her poems and fancies were "useless arms," she wrote: At the same time, though, just as the very existence of Swift's battle of the books implied that there could be a combat between the authorized official canon of the classics and the new unofficial work of the moderns, Anne Finch's melancholy sense of her "Fall" was linked to a dream of an alternative humanistic canon which would empower and authorize women.
A Woman here, leads fainting Israel on, She fights, she wins, she tryumphs with a song,. Sword and bayonet, Horse, foot, artillery, - cannons rolling on, Like blind slow storm-clouds gestant with the head Of undeveloped lightnings, each bestrode By a single man, dust-white from head to heel, Indifferent as the dreadful thing he rode, Like a sculptured Fate serene and terrible. The desire of both these women writers to reconstitute themselves by constituting the authority of a matrilineal past leads directly to the wishes and dreams of many of their real and fictional female descendants or contemporaries.
Tennyson's Princess Ida, for example, a more serious and influential educator than she has sometimes been thought, founds an all-female college in which women can study authorizing heroines - she That taught the Sabine how to rule, and she The foundress of the Babylonian wall, The Carian Artemisia strong in war, The Rhodope that built the pyramid, Clelia, Cornelia, with the Palmyrene.
Vivien, for instancea turn-of-the-century English-American poet who wrote in French, at least in part to signify her sense of alienation from the male tradition that would leave her "sobbing out of sight"- envisions landing with her woman lover at Mytilene, the "woman-city" as James Joyce might have called it in a very different context, on the isle of Lesbos where Sappho ruled and wrote. When the women of this country march in procession, moreover, unlike Woolf's tufted and contorted academics or Barrett Browning's dreadful and deathly Austrians, they appear to the book's male narrator "calm, grave, wise, wholly unafraid In yet another vein, but again just as passionately, Monique Wittig creates in Les Guerrilleres a community of women warriors who.
For of course, as Woolf herself points out in A Room of One's Own, not only female regality but female reality has been almost entirely omitted from the humanistic canon. Speaking of the "ordinary" women whose present has become our past, she observes with the same bemused irony which marks her visions of academic processions, that "It was certainly an odd monster that one made up by reading the historians' [views of women] first, and the poets' afterwards-a worm winged like an eagle; the spirit of life and beauty in a kitchen chopping up suet" p.
To remedy the situation, she suggests that the students of Newnham or Girton "should re-write history," for, as she notes in a sardonic understatement, "it often seems a little queer as it is, unreal, lop-sided" p. Recalling the alienation of Jane Austen's Catherine Morland, who complains. The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences, in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all -it is very tiresome" ch. Perhaps a more official and authoritative humanist, and certainly a more traditional academician than either Austen or Woolf, Schlesinger offered an observation about American history that can be broadened to apply to humanistic studies generally.
If the silence of historians is taken to mean anything, [he wrote in "The Role of Women in American History"] it would appear that one half of our population have been negligible factors in our country's history. Before accepting the truth of this assumption, the facts of our history need to be raked over from a new point of view. It should not be forgotten Thus the naked-legged Turkish women who stand beating linen in the "stream" of women's alternative history do not "show clearly through the swaddlings and blanketings of the Cambridge night," and thus Anne Finch's "dull mannage of a servile house" is not thought even by the poet herself an activity worth considering or recording.
Thus, too, because, as Carolyn Kizer points out, they are "merely" the "custodians of the world's best-kept secret As Woolf, and a number of her predecessors as well as most of her descendants saw, the way out of this vicious circle was through a. In order to effect such transformation, however- or so Woolf argued-women and their brothers would have to question the very nature of humanistic authority as well as the process of canonization through which such authority has traditionally manifested itself.
This Woolf did from early in her career. If we go back yet again to "A Society," for instance, we can see that such a radical interrogation is implicit even in the seemingly innocuous question asked by Castalia's friends: In later works, and often quite movingly, Woolf like Vivien, Gilman, and Russ elaborated this redefinition through revisions of the human community and, interestingly, of the patriarchal march of time itself, revisions which emphasize both fluid self-creation and fluent self-transformation rather than academic stasis and hypostasis.
For instance, to consider the second of these redefinitions first, in Orlando , Woolf transcribes a history of the transformed and transforming self which critiques the standard "Lives of Great Men" at the same time that it proposes the possibility of an alternative life. Not surprisingly, the daughter of Leslie Stephen, that eminent editor of The Dictionary of National Biography, had been preoccupied with the personal but often "official" genre of biography and its relationship to "official" public historiography from early in her career.
Indeed, no doubt influenced by the family history familiarly known as "The Mausoleum Book" in which her father expressed his grief over her mother's death by recording her life as his wife , some of Virginia Stephen's first writings took shape as mock biographies: Moreover, from The Voyage Out, in which as we saw the arro.
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John Hirst finds it impossible to imagine that Rachel Vinrace has "reached the age of twentyfour without reading Gibbon," to Jacob's Room, in which the form of biography encloses an absent subject-a mysterious young man "over whom" we "hang vibrating" - to The Years, in which the prophetic foreigner Nicholas Pomjarovsky speculates on "the psychology of great men"20 and drinks to the hope that "the human race By the time she came to compose Orlando, therefore, she was ready not only for what she herself called and what has often been seen as "an escapade; the spirit Significantly, according to Edel, it was Strachey himself who gave Woolf the first idea for Orlando.
Dalloway, perhaps, said this real-life prototype of The Voyage Out's scholarly but snobbish St. Just as significantly, what Woolf did "take" as both structure and subject was subversive beyond the sardonic Strachey's wildest dreams. For while, in volumes like Eminent Victorians and Queen Victoria, Strachey did debunk the pomposities of the late nineteenth century, he nevertheless preserved the contours of traditional history and biography. Setting himself against the patriotic proprieties of the Victorian Establishment, he nevertheless preserved the subtler pieties of the masculinist Oxbridge processionals in which he himself had always marched.
Woolf, however, produced a new kind of record - a revisionary, "truthful but fantastic" account of a life which, though lived liberatingly far from the march of patriarchal history, nevertheless illuminates, appropriates, and finally transforms that history. Certainly, in the free-flying sweep and scope with which it wings over the gravities of history, this life goes beyond even the fantastic, Shandyan parameters Strachey prescribed.
Yet at the same time, it is, as Woolf insisted, "truthful"truthful because true to its author's developing dream of an alternative to the processions of patriarchal history, and truthful because true to her sense of the secret psychological realities that shape even the most liberated woman's life. Born a nobleman, he has "a liking for low company, especially for that of lettered people,"23 and even when he is more or less adopted by the great Queen Elizabeth, he has little enthusiasm for the doings of the court.
During the timeless time of the Great Frost, when London seems to hang suspended on the ice of an eternal moment, he falls in love with the androgynous Sasha, a Russian Princess for whom he "want[s] another landscape and another tongue," a place and a language outside the patriarchal history that is forming all around him. When Sasha sails away in the flood of time that suddenly breaks up the ice, he retreats to his country estate to become a writer, but even in the world of letters he is still an "outsider.
In the first case, he alarms the English by making a disreputable marriage to one "Rosina Pepita," and in the second, she alarms the gypsies by writing poems, admiring sunsets, and longing for her English manor house. Finally, when she returns. In the eighteenth century, she dresses as a man so that she can visit - and hear the tales told by - the communities of fallen women who walk the London pavements in a female processional that counterpoints and contradicts the righteous male processions of Oxbridge. In the nineteenth century, she marries an eccentric sea captain and produces "lachrymose blot[s]" p.
Within sight of shore, she is yet, always, offshore, at sea in the wilder waters of history. And yet- and yet: Orlando, as Woolf shows, is history, if only because the light of her mind is the lamp that lights up time for us, and her stately mansion, with its symbolic bedrooms and 52 staircases, is the house whose endurance-through-change is the metaphor that Woolf gives us for human duration. Whether offshore or on the edge of a procession, Woolf suggests, Orlando's supposedly marginal perspective, a perspective both Strachey and his Oxbridge companions would have excluded or ignored, becomes the central point of view from which we must view the world as we try to come to terms with the terms of history.
In fact, as Woolf ranges over them - obliquely envisioning them, slyly appropriating them, subversively revising them-the terms of history become Orlando's terms, and finally even history itself becomes Orlando's story, the tale of a body now male, now female, which embodies that thread of alternative truth Woolf called in A Room "the common life which is the real life" as opposed to "the little separate lives Thus, simultaneously redefining and questioning conventional periodization, the so-called Elizabethan period recapitulates Orlando's childhood and pre-adolescence, with its timeless pre-Oedipal frost and its Oedipal flood; the seventeenth century, with its sexchange, reflects Orlando's adolescence, embodying a moment of.
In other words, what we have always considered the permutations and processions of patriarchal history appear, as Wallace Stevens would put it, "more truly and more strange" in Woolf's revisionary romance.
And specifically, what we have always thought of as man's history here becomes woman's "hystery," just as Orlando, returning from Turkey at last to appropriate England becomes England's figurative landlady, the Lady Or-land-o. Therefore, just as many of the illustrations scattered throughout the book are pictures of Vita herself or of her Sackville ancestors, many details of the plot reflect significant details of Vita's actual biography: More important, however, Woolf's fantastic transformations of these details almost always function to empower Vita, for, as many critics have observed, Orlando was a tribute from Virginia to Vita in just the way the much earlier "Friendships Gallery" was a tribute.
Thus, too, because Vita had grown up feeling like a boy, even, during the height of her affair with Violet Trefusis, posing as a boy -a wounded soldier named "Julian"-and haunted by anxiety about her "dual" sexuality, Woolf assures her that, yes, if she felt like a boy she was a boy. In fact, as if responding to the hope Vita expressed in her then unpublished autobiography that "as centuries go on In some sense, that is, Woolf is remarking that Orlando was a self-authoring book about a selfauthoring heroine - for, indeed, the visionary Orlando who never goes to school and is never seen in the company of parents, teachers or guardians does author and authorize herself in much the same way that her revisionary history asserted-"unwilled"-its revolutionary claim upon Woolf's consciousness.
Thus, if we go back yet once more to the conflicting definitions of authority and authorization with which this discussion began, we can see that the very act of transcribing Orlando's transformative history helped Woolf to imagine a way in which women might enter history on their own revisionary terms, even while her realization that it is possible drastically to revise history helped her understand that it might also be possible to revise the teaching and transmission of history.
GILBERT could change, could be fluid and fluent, then the rigidity of patriarchal processions could be changed, revised, reimagined. At around the time she was writing Orlando, therefore, and quite consistently afterward, Woolf undertook to outline a series of redefinitions of the human community itself, and specifically of colleges and curricula, even of campus landscapes, which focus on selfauthorizing learning, learning that is in process rather than static, and on a humanistic canon that is generative and regenerative rather than conservative or regressive.
At a crucial moment in Orlando's companion work A Room of One's Own, for instance, the autumnal, ancient, self-enclosed, unblooming cactuses of "A Society," emblematic of the old patriarchal college, are transformed into the untamed and untrammeled spring blooms of a mythical women's college: The gardens of Fernham lay before me in the spring twilight, wild and open, and in the long grass, sprinkled and carelessly flung, were daffodils and bluebells, not orderly perhaps at the best of times, and now wind-blown and waving as they tugged at their roots.
The windows of the building, curved like ships' windows among generous waves of red brick, changed from lemon to silver under the flight of the quick spring clouds p. Significantly, just as she is about to associate this mobile and windblown setting with "the flash of some terrible reality leaping In another essay, entitled "A Woman's College from the Outside," Woolf has an even more transformed and transformative that is, an even more utopian vision of Newnham, a vision of women's "laughter of mind and body floating away rules, hours, discipline: It is young and poor; let it therefore take advantage of those qualities and be founded on poverty and youth Let it be built on lines of its own Let the pictures and books be new and always changing Next, what should be taught in the new college, the poor college?
Not the arts of dominating other people; not the arts of ruling, of killing, of acquiring land and capital. They require too many overhead expenses; salaries and uniforms and ceremonies. The poor college must teach only the arts that can be taught cheaply and practiced by poor people It should teach the arts of human intercourse; the art of understanding other people's lives and minds, and the little arts of talk, of dress, of cookery that are allied with them.
The aim of the new college, the cheap college, should be Looking at this prescription for a humanist utopia, we can see that in it Woolf has managed to reject the rigid and rigidifying processions of the past without rejecting the past itself. Creating a fertile garden for the great scholar in her shabby gown or in his threadbare suit , she has also celebrated the unofficial arts of living process-of talk, of dress, of cookery, even of "the dull mannage of a servile house"-that had always before been exorcized from the humanistic canon because they were unauthorized.
Like Alice Walker, moreover, who notes in her brilliant account of going "In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens," that the "signature" of her black foremothers is inscribed in the paradoxical anonymity of bed quilts and flowerbeds, in oral tales of endurance and in the endurance of oral tales, Woolf has proposed that the arts of poverty are at least as significant as the arts of wealth- that, indeed, without them all art is impoverished.
GILBERT woven together not by a procession of tufted academics but by "a long line of villagers in sacking" who chant of "Digging and delving, ploughing and sowing,"28 Woolf has revised the canon of the humanities to incorporate the "other history," that record of more than "one-half of humanity" which patriarchal tradition has hitherto authoritatively repressed.
In doing so, moreover, Woolf, who suggested in Three Guineas that the Dictionary of National Biography would be improved if the "lives of maids" were included, has proposed that we study the history not just of the forgotten "daughters of educated men" but also of the arduous "lives of the obscure" - the lives of charwomen like Mrs. Bast in To The Lighthouse, for instance, who "groan" and "creak" as they bring the disintegrating summer home of the Ramsays back to a "rusty laborious birth," or the "Life of Ma Parker" in Katherine Mansfield's story of that name who longs to weep for the deaths that haunt her days but cannot because she must labor for a "literary gentleman," no doubt a cousin of one of Woolf's academics-on-the-march, a man whose system of housekeeping is based on the assumption that "You simply dirty everything you've got, get a hag in once a week to clean up, and the thing's done.
What can we learn from such a radical and ecstatic vision of learning? A great deal, I think, especially if we remember that Woolf's feminist revaluation of humanistic education is only the latest stage in an ongoing battle of the books that has raged at least since the Renaissance. For at a time when the demand for "General Education" in "Great Books" often seems to have become synonymous with an anxious urge to go "Back to Basics" we have to ask ourselves what "basics" are and what "going back" really means. Does it mean a return to authorization - to what is official, canonical, legitimated by usage and tradition?
Or does it mean a return to authority-that is, to creativity, to generativity, to the originary moment which surely as Woolf's and Walker's and Orlando's selfcreation suggest exists always and everywhere? Such a revisionary definition of authority would enliven and transform our study of humanistic history without obliterating or transmogrifying our memory of the past. Better still, it would help us to re-member-that is, to repopulate-the past with those who have, intentionally or not, been left out of the grave processions of academia.
It would help us, for example, to remember and reimagine often forgotten female precursors as diverse as the sixteenth-century French humanist Christine de Pisan and the twentieth-century black American writer Zora Neale Hurston. Woolf, I am sure, would have taught the works of these women in her "new college," her "cheap college," for each in her way dreamed of a garden of letters as utopian as the one Woolf imagined.
Yet both-like Finch, H. Though Christine de Pisan's comparatively dutiful Petrarchan verses have been studied and translated, her radical feminist classic The City of Ladies La Cite des Dames , A Room's major feminist-humanist precursor, has only recently been published in a modern English translation,30 a fact which, as Susan Groag Bell observes, constitutes "an interesting comment on the priorities of scholarship.
For, as Winifred Holtby reminds us, Virginia Woolf represented a feminist Renaissance directly comparable to the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century movement that defined both Woolf's visionary Orlando and the humanities we now think of as "basic. As for Diotima, she was of course honored in the utopian educational community that the early feminist humanist Christine de Pisan called "the City of Ladies.
Christine tells us in her dream-vision account of its founding that this new society of humanists was unauthorized yet self-authoring because impelled by "Reason," who said to the poet: There the City of Ladies will be founded on a flat and fertile plain, where all fruits and freshwater rivers are found and where the earth abounds in all good things p.
Jane Austen, "On the Universities," in R. The Works of Jane Austen, Vol. Oxford University Press, , p. Yale University Press, , p. Harcourt, , p. Further citations will be included in the text. For an interesting discussion of this early work from a slightly different perspective, see Jane Marcus, "Liberty, Sorority, Misogyny," in Carolyn G. Heilbrun and Margaret R. Selected Papers from the English Institute, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, , pp. Yale University Press, , pp. Cornell University Press, , passim. Ungar, , p. For Woolf's comments on this passage, see A Room, pp. The Browning Institute, , p.
A Medley," in Jerome H. Houghton Mifflin, , pp. The Women's Press, , p. Macmillan, , I, Random House, ; 1st pub. Naiad Press, , pp. Pantheon, , p. David Le Vay New York: Avon, , p.
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