FEMINIST AESTHETICS AND THE POLITICS OF MODERNISM

“Every Great Book Has Been an Act of Revolution”

The contradictions between revolutionary and melancholic modernism I explored in the first two chapters of this book is central to Woolf’s reflections on the possibility and impossibility of women’s literature. To explore this contradiction in Woolf’s writings, I would like to turn to her literary essays, her best-known aesthetic manifestos on the stakes of modernism and gender politics. Of these essays, recently collected and published in a four-volume set but still only a fraction of the enormous corpus of Woolf’s essay writing, the best known is A Room of One’s Own. An instant best seller since its first publication on October 24, 1929, it has been reclaimed as a hallmark or, in Susan Gubar’s words, “a classic—if not the touchstone text—in the history” of Western metropolitan feminism.¹ However it has not yet achieved a similar status as a landmark in Western aesthetics or feminist aesthetics, even though the importance of Woolf’s reflections on art has been frequently acknowledged and analyzed in Woolf studies.

The form of Woolf essays is itself experimental and iconoclastic, blurring the boundaries between fiction, aesthetic reflection, political polemics, critique, biography, autobiography, and review. According to Hermione Lee, “essays turn into fictions, fictions into essays; … readings of modern fictions may be commentaries on her own processes.”² Yet despite Woolf’s contestation of the divide between experimental literature and gender politics, and despite the fact that at least since the eighties feminist critics have attempted to break down, in Diane Filby Gillespie’s words, “the customary distinction between art and politics,” these divisions persist in Woolf’s scholarship.³ As Laura Marcus and Hermione Lee point out, critics interested primarily in modernist aesthetics focus on Woolf’s aesthetic manifestos, such as “Modern Fiction” or “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” while more politically oriented feminist and socialist critics tend to favor A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas. According to Marcus, these tensions between feminist politics and aesthetics in Woolf scholarship reproduce the divide between modernist and realist aesthetics and in a certain way replay “the debates between Brecht and Lukács in the 1930s, which had been newly translated and represented for the 1970s, with Moi on the side of Woolf’s modernism and avant-gardism and Showalter standing for a realist aesthetic opposed to textual innovation.”⁴ Indeed, in 1985 Toril Moi reworks Brecht/Lukács polemics in order to argue for the importance of Woolf’s experimental aesthetics for the feminist politics of sexual difference.⁵ We hear the echoes of the divide between experimental aesthetics and politics in Naomi Black’s reconstruction of Woolf’s “radical and political feminism,” which focuses on Woolf’s involvement in the women’s movement of her time, but excludes Woolf’s aesthetic practice as “unrelated to politics or to feminism in the normal senses of the words.”⁶ By contrast, Jane Goldman stresses Woolf’s aesthetic innovations and their relation to suffrage art in the streets and postimpressionist art on gallery walls.⁷

The tension between feminist politics and aesthetics in Woolf studies is not entirely surprising given the fact that the question of fiction and its relation to life, freedom, labor, and gender politics is a central preoccupation of Woolf’s work. As if anticipating Adorno’s sentiment that “every authentic artwork is internally revolutionary” (AT, 228), Woolf similarly claims that “every great book has been an act of revolution”⁸—a claim frequently noted by feminist scholars, who, like Jane Marcus, see it as an expression of Woolf’s feminism and socialism.⁹ And, as she puts it in her 1919 essay, “Modern Novels,” at stake in this artistic revolution, just as is the case in gender politics, is the question of freedom: “The problem before the novelist at present, as we suppose it to have been in the past, is to contrive a means of being free” (MN, 34–35). Yet, the “act of revolution” in modern fiction does not mean that novels either illustrate gender struggle or inspire their readers to participate in political struggle; rather such revolution has to be created within the structure of the work of art itself. In Woolf’s essays and literary works, that aesthetic manifestation of revolution is reflected in her contestation and transformation of aesthetic categories, genius, originality, death of art, and, finally, literary conventions of the novel. Her choice of these categories is neither arbitrary nor dictated solely by the exclusion of women artists from the history of art, since all of them are associated with the question of aesthetic freedom.¹⁰

Woolf’s first claim that “every great book has been an act of revolution” might be read as a complacent modernist cliché if it were not for her second claim that the aesthetic freedom manifesting itself immanently in the composition of literary texts refers nonetheless to the political struggles of women. Not only an aesthetic negation of political domination, the very possibility of women’s artistic revolutionary praxis depends, according to Woolf, on the collective “habit of freedom” (RO, 113) in political life. “When human relations change,” Woolf argues, “there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics and literature.”¹¹ In the concluding passage of A Room of One’s Own—a text that Jane Marcus reads as a literary feminist response to suffrage political tactics¹²—Woolf argues that women’s collective struggle and practice of freedom in political, economic, and intellectual life are the precondition of a revolutionary literary act: “For my belief is that if we live another century or so—I am talking of the common life which is the real life and not of the little separate lives which we live as individuals—and we have five hundred a year each of us and rooms of our own; if we have the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think … then the opportunity will come … without that effort on our part … that would be impossible” (RO, 113–114). If the possibility of women’s writing depends on the ongoing practice of freedom in women’s collective lives, such practice requires women’s access to political, economic, and intellectual forms of participation—their right to vote, to education, and to the practice of professions. Without such collective preparation, without the creation of new conditions for women’s collective lives, women’s artistic practice would be impossible.

Consequently, we need to ask about the relation between two seemingly contradictory, yet inseparable, tasks: the task of the female writer to “contrive means of being free” and the collective task of women’s struggle for freedom, which in turn assures the future possibility of female art. How can women’s fiction be at once autonomous and at the same time depend for its possibility on revolutionary praxis? If, following Adorno, we can describe this paradoxical status of women’s literary practice in terms of the heteronomous autonomy of modern art, then we have to stress significant differences in the way Woolf allows us to reformulate this concept. In the context of Woolf’s work, the heteronomous aspect of the autonomy of modern art—its relation to the political—has to be thought beyond art’s negation of gender oppression in political and social life. Woolf shows that the struggle between freedom and gender domination characterizes not only art but also politics. That is why Woolf situates the transformative capacity of literature—its ability to contest gender domination, imperialism, and the gendered division of labor on the level of form—in relation to women’s political aspirations for freedom. And, conversely, she also shows that class, gender, and racist domination threaten the very possibility of art: in fact, the history of women’s literary production begins with the utter destruction of women’s art and their bodies—a destruction internalized as madness, melancholia, and resentment. Consequently, the main question Woolf poses for feminists aesthetics is how the promise of a better praxis in women’s writings can emerge from the contradiction between revolutionary and melancholic modernism and how this emergence is intertwined with an inaugural, intersubjective freedom in the political.

As I have argued in chapter 1, women’s struggle for political and economic freedom creates the inaugural possibility of a new beginning despite persisting gender domination. In the context of the gendered history of art, however, this contradiction between freedom and domination means that art’s promise of a better praxis is haunted by melancholia, by the destruction of the very possibility of women’s writing. In other words, the “disaster” not only afflicts political life but destroys the possibilities of art itself. The Hegelian thesis of the death of art, which proclaims the loss of art’s social relevance in modernity, reveals therefore not merely the threatening end of art but the impossible beginning of women’s writing. In this context the paradoxical status of women’s art means not only that art negates structures of domination, not only that it finds aesthetic means to both express invisible social contradictions, including labor, gender, and race contradictions, and offer alternative models of liberating political praxis. The crucial aspect of heteronomous autonomy, ignored by Adorno, is that the inaugural force of women’s political revolt enables the transformation of the historical impossibility of women’s art into its future possibility.

Haunted by melancholia, Woolf’s deployment of the rhetoric of revolution is neither gratuitous nor limited to aesthetic experimentation for it’s own sake. Rather such rhetoric implies that the main intersection between gender politics and gender aesthetics rests precisely on the impossibility and possibility of female freedom. Thus, even if women’s revolutionary struggle for freedom is not always reflected in the themes of Woolf writing, it is this struggle that turns the melancholic “impossibility” of women’s art into the possibility of its arrival. Revolutionary struggle, therefore, carries with it the possibility of at least two new beginnings. One of them is women’s creation of new freedoms in the political realm; the other one is artistic freedom manifesting itself in women’s artistic practice.

On Genius, Anger, and the Future of Female Writing

Woolf explores the paradoxical dependence of women’s writing on the political struggle for freedom by focusing on the destruction of women’s art and its effects: madness, melancholia, and resentment. The destruction of women’s artistic practice by gender and class exploitation is at stake in Woolf’s philosophical/fictional parable of the tragic fate of Shakespeare’s talented sister, who, deprived of education, beaten by her father, raped and impregnated by the theater manager, killed herself in the pursuit of her artistic career. Her corpse was buried anonymously at the crossroads to prevent her future reappearance. In A Room of One’s Own, Shakespeare’s dead sister is a shattering reminder of the monstrous destruction of the possibility of female art by gender, colonial, and class exploitation. By contrast, Shakespeare is evoked as a figure of unsurpassed originality and “incandescent mind.” How should we read this stark contradiction between the destruction of the female poet and the unsurpassed freedom of Shakespeare? Woolf claims that “If ever a mind was incandescent, unimpeded … it was Shakespeare’s mind” (RO, 57). The hypothetical form of this sentence creates in fact some doubt as to whether such an incandescent mind ever existed and whether its creations were unconditional. That doubt is further reinforced by the contrast between the completeness of Shakespeare’s mind and the missing books (RO, 45) about women’s lives. Furthermore, Woolf speculates that if Shakespeare’s artistic freedom was confronted with his sister’s political demand for women’s liberation, his awareness of women’s political struggle would not have enhanced his artistic practice because he too would have succumbed to the self-conscious resentment so symptomatic of the masculine protest against suffragettes’ demand of political freedom in twentieth-century England: “Doubtless Elizabethan literature would have been very different … if the woman’s movement had begun in the sixteenth century” (RO, 101). We should not be surprised, therefore, that in Moments of Being, Woolf, in a feigned moment of shock, claims that the overcoming of genius aesthetics is parallel to the “death” of God: “But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.”¹³

To expose the gendering of the foundational concepts in the history of aesthetics, Woolf’s parable about the tragic death of Shakespeare’s sister interprets the relation between genius and femininity as a destructive master/slave dialectic. Like Marx and suffragettes before her, in A Room of One’s Own Woolf refers to Greek slavery as the paradigmatic negation of both political and aesthetic freedom by economic and class exploitation. She equates the devastation of poverty, imperialism, and sex inequality in modern England with ancient Athenian slavery: “We may prate of democracy, but actually, a poor child in England has little more hope than had the son of an Athenian slave to be emancipated into that intellectual freedom of which great writings are born” (RO, 107–108).

Woolf’s critique of the aesthetics of genius in the context of the master/slave dialectic can be said to anticipate subsequent Frankfurt school and feminist contestations of the notion of artistic freedom at stake in the concept of genius. As Adorno points out, the concept of genius obfuscates the fact that artistic praxis both depends on and intervenes into social conditions, and, in so doing, it denies the persisting unfreedom in the world: “Privileged genius becomes the proxy to whom reality promises what it denies humanity as a whole” (AT, 171). Yet Woolf’s association of femininity and slavery contests Adorno’s abstract expression of “humanity as a whole,” which glosses over the specific differences of exploitation within that whole. By examining the relation between literature, gender, poverty, and slavery, Woolf exposes femininity as the unacknowledged antithesis of genius, which, thanks to this opposition, can become the embodiment of artistic freedom. In other words, the freedom of genius disavows gender oppression, the unjust division of labor, and the destruction of women’s writing by projecting political domination as the inferiority of the feminine. It is not only in politics but also in aesthetics that the feminine functions as a magic “looking-glass” reflecting the masculine figure “at twice its natural size” (RO, 35). As her parody of Nick Greene in Orlando suggests, the aesthetic concept of genius, implicated with the glory of the past, the fame of empire, and the cult of the artist, far from overcoming exploitation, is in fact one of its aesthetic manifestations. Both in Orlando and in A Room of One’s Own the artistic freedom of Shakespeare is juxtaposed with racism, colonialism, and imperialist conquest.

Nonetheless, Woolf’s critique of genius is also marked by her own disavowal of racial divisions and inequalities among women, despite the fact that the inscription of racial and Oriental differences between them occurs again and again in her texts, for example, in A Room of One’s Own, Orlando, or To the Lighthouse (for instance, Lily’s Chinese eyes). Referring to her white female audience, Woolf observes sardonically that the only benefit of women’s exclusion from the artistic tradition is their “exclusion” from the barbarism of British imperialism: “You have never shaken an empire or led an army into battle. The plays of Shakespeare are not by you, and you have never introduced a barbarous race to the blessings of civilization” (RO, 112). A parody of the antisuffrage argument that women cannot vote because they do not bear arms, this quote suggests that Woolf is critical of the violence of the British imperialism and shows a correlation between the subjugation of women at home and colonial domination abroad. Nonetheless, she fails to imagine solidarity between Shakespeare’s white sister and the colonized women. In fact the “other woman” is never the “addressee” or interlocutor of Woolf’s writings, never a part of her “community of the outsiders.” Thus the master/slave dialectic between Shakespeare and his white sister is complicated by the objectification of black and Oriental women in Woolf’s texts. The white female poet fails to address or listen to the black woman, to imagine an interracial solidarity between women based on different but interrelated patterns of exclusion from aesthetics and history. And this failure to contest the racialized concepts of aesthetics repeats the objectification of other women. Although Woolf fails to analyze this objectification, the figures of femininity and race are a shattering reminder of the monstrous destruction of the potential of art by gender, colonial, and class exploitation. As Woolf suggests, art’s promise of freedom cannot be separated from the history of political and economic domination that threatens art’s own possibility: just as it is impossible to find poets among the exploited working class, so too “it would have been impossible, completely and entirely, for any woman to have written the plays of Shakespeare in the age of Shakespeare” (RO, 48, emphasis added).

One way the contradiction between revolutionary and melancholic modernisms manifests itself in Woolf’s texts is through the antithesis of aesthetic freedom and its destruction. Another way this contradiction is mobilized is through the erasure of gender domination from history, aesthetics, and politics. Rather than being an object of critical analysis, the exclusion of women is reproduced in normative accounts of history: “the life of the average Elizabethan woman must be scattered about somewhere, could one collect it and make a book of it. … I thought, looking about the shelves for books that were not there, to suggest to the students of those famous colleges that they should re-write history” (RO, 45). The same can be said about the scattered, unrecorded lives of colonized women abroad. Such absence from history implies that the destruction of female creativity has the status of nonevent, of something that has never happened yet haunts and interrupts historical time. In a predictable fetishistic fashion, male poets compensate for the exclusion of white women by creating fascinating female characters, such as Shakespeare’s Cleopatra or Lady Macbeth. Woolf links this fetishistic denial to the monstrous contradiction between the absence of ordinary women in historical narratives and the fantasmatic presence of female characters in male poetry: “She pervades poetry from cover to cover; she is all but absent from history…. It was certainly an odd monster that one made up by reading the historians first and the poets afterwards” (RO, 43–44).

In A Room of One’s Own, the monstrous antithesis between the fetishistic work of poetry and the obliterating work of history is a symptom of another contradiction between spiritual freedom and enslaving materiality. As Woolf points out, these contradictions are projected as the monstrosity of female beauty, which appears as “a worm winged like an eagle; the spirit of life and beauty in a kitchen chopping up suet” (RO, 44). This displacement of the unreconciled, monstrous contradiction between the work of art’s materiality and freedom onto white femininity is reenforced by the mocking associations of the female artist with animality in both theology and literature: “Cats do not go to heaven. Women cannot write the plays of Shakespeare” (RO, 46). Woolf imagines an angry misogynist writing about the inferiority of women “as if he were killing some noxious insect … but even when he had killed it that did not satisfy him; he must go on killing it” (RO, 31). At the basis of this violent analogy between femininity and animality is the absence of soul or the spirit. The spirit of freedom, let us recall, is one of the characteristic features of art. Since woman, associated with enslaving materiality, is deprived of this spirit, we should not be surprised that Dr. Johnson’s remark about women preachers is repeated in 1928 about women musicians: “‘Sir, a woman’s composing is like a dog’s walking on his hind legs. It is not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all’” (RO, 54).

Erased from historical and literary language, and projected instead as the “inferior” female gender, the violent contradictions between freedom and domination, spirit and materiality, writing and destruction are incorporated as the suicidal internal struggle of female melancholia: “Who shall measure the heat and violence of the poet’s heart when caught and tangled in a woman’s body?” (RO, 48). Unacknowledged as political domination, gender oppression manifests itself as the private suffering of isolated women and their inferior “character.” What Woolf diagnoses, therefore, is not only the destruction inflicted on women by patriarchal culture but also the violent substitution of gender antagonisms by the internal suffering of subjugated groups. In the absence of the collective struggle for women’s political, economic, and educational rights, the female poet is destroyed not only by the external conditions of gender and class oppression but also by internalized feelings of pain, inferiority, and resentment. Political domination is in fact intensified by the internal self-destructive struggle of the female poet “caught and tangled in a woman’s body”: by madness, torture, scattering, and the violent tearing and “pulling asunder” of both the artwork and the female poet (RO, 49). The female poet would have been “crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to … a highly gifted girl who had tried to use her gift for poetry would have been so thwarted and hindered by other people, so tortured and pulled asunder by her own contrary instincts” (RO, 49). The freedom that art calls for would have presented for the female poet “dilemma which might well have killed her,” and if she survived it would have killed or “twisted and deformed” her work and her body. In contrast to a reconciliation signified by aesthetic harmony, the melancholia of the female poet, excluded from history and humanity itself, embodies a dangerous state of war between art and body, matter, and sociopolitical conditions: “[A] woman [is] at strife against herself” (RO, 51). Woolf suggests that the effect of these contradictions associated with feminine melancholia is the invisible, untimely feminized death of art—the invisible destruction of literary practice prior to the conceptualization “the end of art” in modernity.

The destruction of the female writing leaves, nonetheless, dispersed traces in displaced figures of animality, the witch, the madwoman, the mothers of accomplished men, and in the collective anonymous creations.¹⁴ By collecting these traces, Woolf explores the impossible possibility of transforming the violent legacy of destruction into “free” women’s writing. Yet she emphatically argues such transformation is not synonymous with the unmediated subjective expression of women’s rage. The most controversial part of Woolf’s argument for feminist critics is her claim that the literary expression of justifiable female anger is neither a liberation from melancholia nor a manifestation of artistic freedom but rather a crippling and reactive resentment. Under the weight of resentment women betray, compromise, or even abandon their work because they focus on their individual feelings of suffering and anger rather than on the aesthetic mediation of affective, linguistic, and political relations in the process of writing itself: “Her books,” Woolf argues, “will be deformed and twisted. She will write in a rage where she should write calmly…. She will write of herself where she should write of her characters” (RO, 69–70). Unlike the collective practice of freedom, which teaches women the joy of revolt and of creating new forms of life, solitary anger thwarts the potential of artistic freedom: “It is clear that anger was tampering with the integrity of Charlotte Brontë the novelist. She left her story, to which her entire devotion was due, to attend to some personal grievance” (RO, 73).

Although many critics have read these passages as the suppression of Woolf’s own anger,¹⁵ I propose to reinterpret them as Woolf’s feminist revision of the Nietzschean critique of melancholic resentment.¹⁶ This might be a counterintuitive claim, since the outward-directed expression of female rage, discouraged through centuries, seems at first glance to be a reversal of the violent self-accusations of the melancholic. Yet, as Nietzsche suggests in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, resentment, though more commonly associated with rage, anger, guilt, and revenge, might be one of the most “secret” names for melancholy, springing from the powerlessness of the will to change the past.¹⁷ As Giorgio Agamben points out, for Nietzsche the impossibility of changing the past “is what torments the will, transforming it into resentment.”¹⁸ As a reactive rather than creative affect, resentment is therefore a frustrated and powerless will riveted to past injuries rather than engaged in the creation of new political or artistic forms of life. As such, resentment might be interpreted as a symptom of a failed mourning and a failure to participate in the struggle to end the oppression of women. Indeed, as Woolf argues in A Room of One’s Own, female writers’ rage and defensive protests against imputed inferiority perpetuate women’s subjugation by riveting them to their injuries, keeping them dependent on the opinions of others, and, especially, blocking the possibility of political and aesthetic transformation. Consequently, it is not only oppressive material conditions, the madness of melancholia, and women’s exclusion from the literary tradition—for instance, the absence of “the common sentence ready for” women’s use—but also the culture of resentment that impedes women’s creativity.

According to Woolf, the unmediated expression of female anger in literature remains a reactive force of resentment as long as its violence is not transformed either into a political action or artistic practice but interrupts and deforms the conception of the work of art from outside, as it were. This opposition between the reactive force of anger and the creative force of artistic freedom does not imply that women should simply repress their anger (and that is how Woolf has been more frequently interpreted), but, on the contrary, it means that they should transform rage into either an artistic practice or a collective struggle for freedom. For Woolf, the unmediated expression of female anger is the negative counterpart of an unmediated expression of masculine freedom; whether it is the spontaneity of originality or the spontaneity of female rage, both deny the mediation of subjective expression through the materiality of the work of art and the social process of making. At stake in Woolf’s feminists aesthetics is, therefore, not only the critique of the false spontaneity of originality but also the transformation of the crippling, reactive forces of melancholia and anger into the iconoclastic and innovative force of art’s immanent “revolution,” into an element of artistic composition. In “Professions for Women” Woolf argues that one of the phantoms a woman writer has to kill in order to write is the Angel in the House—the phantom of self-sacrifice and chastity; in A Room of One’s Own she argues for the necessity of slaying the opposite demon, what might be called the Anger in the House. As she writes in “Professions for Women,” “indeed it will be a long time still, I think, before a woman can sit down to write a book without finding a phantom to be slain.”¹⁹

For Woolf the overcoming of the culture of resentment is a necessary precondition of women’s artistic practice. Yet this overcoming of the crippling effects of anger is not an isolated subjective act since it depends on women’s collective struggle for and practice of freedom, which teaches them the joy of the battle and the joy of creating new forms of life. It is this joy that allows art to bear witness to the history of destruction without turning that testimony into a subjective expression of anger or resentment. Furthermore, intersubjective relations with other women transform anger into conditions of critique—they enable female writers “to discuss and define” the ideological phantoms impeding literary work: “for thus only can the labor be shared, the difficulties be solved. But besides this, it is necessary also to discuss the ends and the aims for which we are fighting, for which we are doing battle with these formidable obstacles. Those aims cannot be taken for granted; they must be perpetually questioned and examined.”²⁰ Political revolt and a collective culture of freedom are necessary therefore to overcome both melancholia and resentment and to transform them into artistic creation.

This unprecedented possibility of women’s art is presented in the concluding pages of A Room of One’s Own as the parable of the second coming of Shakespeare’s dead sister. This future resurrection of the female poet requires, however, a double preparation: women’s ongoing struggle for the political and economic culture of freedom, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the continuous literary struggle against ossified conventions and ideological phantoms on the level of literary composition. Such literary struggle and invention are at stake in the fictional figure of a modern writer, Mary Carmichael. Supported by women’s collective political/economic struggle and yet already practicing aesthetic freedom in her art, Mary is a transitional and fictional figure in an otherwise seemingly historical chronology of British women writers. She appears in the hiatus between what is no longer—the anonymous traces of destroyed female bodies and languages—and what is yet to come—the future possibility of female art. At the beginning of A Room of One’s Own Mary Carmichael is one of three possible pen names the narrator borrows from an anonymous folk ballad about three Marys, one of whom will be sentenced to death for sexual transgression. Marked by the shadow of death and anonymity, Mary Carmichael becomes toward the end of the text an innovative writer who, almost liberated from hatred and fear, has a remarkable and free sensibility. This freedom allows her to laugh at the peculiarities of the other sex, to ignore the admonitions and criticisms of the bishops and the deans, and to focus instead on the process of writing itself. She stretches language to its limit in order to find a way of expressing “unrecorded gestures” of femininity, to uncover “almost unknown or unrecorded things,” and to bring to light that which had been buried: destroyed bodies of women, women’s unrecorded lives, sexual and professional relations among women, and female political communities (RO, 92). By providing an alternative to the destructive freedom of masculine genius, to the madness of melancholia, and to female resentment, Mary transforms the destruction of female art into the contestation of literary conventions. She inscribes on the level of form the historical contradiction between Shakespeare and his imaginary sister, between the aesthetic ideal of freedom and gendered and imperialist violence. To be sure, she writes under an almost suffocating burden of unrecorded lives; yet, because her writing is enabled by relations with other women, she can record that burden without resentment and transform it, as the title of her work suggests, into the joy of Life’s Adventure.

Mary Carmichael’s iconoclastic and transformative practice is one of the preconditions for the future appearance of the female poet. The second precondition, on which I want to focus in greater detail, is the community of women and their struggle for a political culture of freedom. The role of the community of women, so often stressed in Woolf’s texts, is especially emphasized in the concluding fable of the second coming of Judith Shakespeare. At the end of A Room of One’s Own, this fable reenacts the rebirth of the dead female poet, who was buried at a crossroads to prevent her emergence from the invisible underground of social and poetic transactions. Yet for Woolf the future coming of the female poet is intertwined with the possibility of art as such. As a preamble to her vision, Woolf comments on the ingrained indifference of the modern public to “the future of fiction” (RO, 95). Against thousands of instructions of what women should be writing and admonitions of what they should not, Woolf offers “a little fantastic” vision of what does not yet exist—of the possibility of female artistic freedom, which so far has been consistently destroyed, thwarted, or blocked in history: “Now my belief is that this poet who never wrote a word and was buried at the crossroads still lives. She lives in you and in me, and in many other women who are not here tonight, for they are washing up the dishes and putting the children to bed. But she lives; for great poets … need only the opportunity to walk among us in flesh. This opportunity, as I think, it is now coming within your power to give her” (RO, 113). As the rhetoric of the second coming in this passage suggests, the relation between female art and the political practice of the female communities both evokes and displaces male messianism. Julia Briggs finds this messianic rhetoric to be one of “the most subversive” parodies in the text, which began with “a woman breaking patriarchal taboos in an Edenic garden,” and ends with the promise of the second coming of the female writer, standing “in the place of the savior of the scriptures.”²¹ Yet at stake in this feminist displacement of messianic rhetoric is not only irony but also a contestation of historical chronology and causality. Because of its incompletion and interruption of historical sequence, messianic time has been frequently evoked by poststructuralist critics to critique historical necessity and to underscore the possibility of a retrospective revision of history. As Agamben, for instance, explains, messianic time signifies a disruption of the linear by “the paradoxical tension between an already and a not yet…. The messianic event has already happened … but, nevertheless, in order to truly be fulfilled, this implies an additional time.”²² The paradox of messianic time reenacts therefore an interminable deferral of the fulfillment of history, which, although it has already happened, has to be repeated again in the unreachable future. By making the meaning of the past dependent on the future completion, the messianic event contests the irreversibility of the past and, in so doing, restores the possibility of change to the past itself.

The possibility of changing the past is one of the conditions of overcoming resentment—which as we recall represents the crippling enslavement of the will by past injury. Yet Woolf’s overcoming of resentment depends on a different temporal structure and ultimately calls for a replacement of the messianic event by the transformative practice of female communities. In place of the messianic event, Woolf presents a paradoxical tension between the traces of the worldly event—the destruction of the female poet—radically excluded from history and the restoration of its future possibility through artistic and political practice. The past event—the first coming of the female poet—has never taken place in language and recorded history, but occurred only as the monstrous destruction of the half-female/half-animal body. This displacement from collective historical narrative to the anonymous bodies of women creates the crippling effects of melancholia and resentment, both of which represents powerlessness vis-à-vis past destruction. The second, yet nonetheless unprecedented, arrival of the female poet will be an event of transformative poetic practice. By undermining historical continuity and determination, this temporal disjunction between what has never been (a female Shakespeare) and its future possibility marks the radical contingency of history and in so doing restores the possibility of transformation not only to the present but to the past itself. If women’s artistic and political practice replaces a messianic event, then such practice not only reclaims the past but, to paraphrase Agamben, saves what has never been (PCE, 270). As a precondition of overcoming resentment, the historical recovery in Woolf’s text is intertwined with a strange temporality of the inaugural “second” time, which was not given a chance to occur as a linguistic, historical event for the first time. Because the arrival of Judith Shakespeare signifies both repetition and the unprecedented occurrence, this new beginning nonetheless bears witness to the past destruction and transforms the destroyed flesh of history into future possibilities of poetic language.

As Woolf’s references to the bodies of women suggest, what is at stake in the parable of Judith Shakespeare is the replacement of both the individual “incandescent” mind of genius and the transcendent messianic redemption by the inaugural temporality of the worldly, embodied, and relational practice of women in politics and art. Woolf figures the future of art as the rebirth of the anonymously buried female body: “the dead poet … will put on the body which she has so often laid down” (RO, 114). Unlike the spontaneity of individual originality or the messianic transcendence of history, the future possibility of poetry is sustained by the anonymous communities of women whose unrecorded lives and bodies transmit the traces of the past destruction and whose practice opens the possibility of inscribing these traces in language. The aesthetic freedom symbolized by the female poet is, therefore, not the fetishized spontaneity of the isolated poet because its possibility emerges from the transpersonal, relational, and embodied practice of women: “I maintain that she would come if we worked for her” (RO, 113–114).

Intertwined with women’s continued struggle for freedom in the political and private spheres, freedom manifesting itself in artistic practice is therefore distinguished from the oedipal battle between fathers and the sons, which, for instance, opens To the Lighthouse and continues as a distant accompaniment of Lily’s painting. By gathering isolated women, by inventing supportive relations among them that are not mediated by male signature, this collective work transforms privatized and paralyzing resentment into the possibility of artistic or political praxis. In so doing, it also enables a transformation of destroyed female authorship into the possibility of art. Thus, in contrast to Adorno’s aesthetic theory, Woolf argues that the work of art, which negates domination and provides a model for a better political praxis in its own right, is itself intertwined with political struggle and the practice of freedom by subjugated groups. We could say that this paradox represents Woolf’s feminist reformulation of the status of literary practice. For Adorno, we recall, the heteronomous autonomy of art is both implicated in and free from political domination. For Woolf, however, such heteronomous autonomy in women’s art also implies a mutual interrelation between the possibility of art and the possibility of freedom in women’s lives.

What is helpful for understanding Woolf’s appeal to the community of women giving “birth” to the female poet is Hannah Arendt’s emphasis on the interdependence between political community and relational creative freedom (OR, 175). By bringing together dispersed women, Woolf’s female community of outsiders “gathers together the isolated strength of the allied partners” (OR, 170), increases their capacities, and creates new possibilities for speech and action. These new possibilities emerging from the formation of political communities constitute for Arendt “the world building capacity of man” (OR, 175). Despite a certain homosocial rhetoric in her work, “the world building capacity” is also called the birth of a new world. Ultimately what is at stake in Woolf’s numerous figurations of women’s “communities of their own” is a shift from procreation to the world-building capacity of women. As Woolf puts it, the creative power of women, which “differs greatly” from the power of men, must “harness itself to pens and brushes and business and politics” (RO, 87). The world-building capacities of women shed a new light on Woolf’s suggestion that the work of art, which might provide a model of a better political praxis without domination, itself depends on the political practice of freedom. The unheard-of creation of the communities of outsiders among women not only augments their capacities but also enact a “birth” of a different world, a world in which a female poet could exist in flesh and in language: “As for her coming without that preparation, without that effort on our part, without that determination that when she is born again she shall find it possible to live and write her poetry, that we cannot expect, for that would be impossible” (RO, 114, emphasis added).

By displacing male messianic redemption and the artistic originality by the inaugural temporality of intersubjective, embodied practice, Woolf suggests a mutual interrelation between the political struggle for freedom and poetic practice. Ultimately, it is this interaction that transforms the “impossible” into the birth of a new world. The task of a poet, whose life and praxis is made possible by the community of the outsiders, is to create new possibilities of language in order to express the unheard-of relation among women themselves. She has to invent a new “grammar” of female speech and action. As Woolf observes, relations between women—political, erotic, or the relations of friendship “unlit by the capricious and colored light of the other sex” (RO, 84)—require a transformation of all the resources of patriarchal language unsuited to these purposes. Thus the relation between the female poet and female collectivity, like the relationship between word and deed, is sustained by a mutual gift: on the one hand, the world-building capacities of female community transform the historical legacy of destruction, melancholia, and resentment into a possibility of creative practice. On the other hand, women’s relations among themselves cannot take shape without a transformation of language. The formation of female community calls for art, since “the resources of the English language would be much put to the stretch, and the whole flights of words need to wing their way illegitimately into the existence” (RO, 87) before one could extract the “creative force” sedimented in unrecorded lives, and the bricks of private rooms, and express the relations among women in language. Thus female community is formed in relation to the activity of the poet who draws her life from the lives of the dead, from “the unknown” lives of “her forerunners” (RO, 114) and who, in turn, gives the gift of language.

Ultimately, the relation between melancholic and revolutionary modernism and Woolf’s own “aesthetic theory” enables a redefinition of practice in modernism. Such a practice implies a chiasmatic and non-chronological relation between women’s political struggle and aesthetic possibilities. The militant struggle for the vote, economic opportunities, and women’s rights is one of the preconditions of women’s political and intellectual freedom, which transforms the impossibility and the destruction of female art into its future possibility. Yet, as an act of revolution in its own right, women’s experimental literature in turn presupposes and creates new possibilities of freedom and signification.²³ This chiasmatic juxtaposition of the destruction of female art with the revolutionary struggle for a new beginning suggests that relations between women’s art and politics escape simple causality or chronology and call instead for a rethinking of the art/politics divide in the context of what no longer exists or does not yet exist: the impossibility and possibility of female freedom.

On Production, Female Potentiality, and the Wild Experiment

To approach the relation between art and politics in terms of the fragile possibilities of female freedom is to redefine the stakes of modernism. In this context the familiar divide between realism and experimental writing can be more appropriately defined as the opposition between the aesthetics of actuality (realism) and the aesthetics of possibility (modernism). Woolf’s experimental writing is on the side of the “feminine” aesthetics of possibility emerging out of destruction and not on the side of the politically determined “reality,” which excludes, disciplines, or damages women’s abilities. As she suggests at the beginning of A Room of One’s Own, women’s experimental writing shifts the emphasis from the representation of ideological “facts” to the exploration of what is excluded from history and the creation of new possibilities in “fiction.” The possibility of change reveals the indeterminacy of historical reference, the plurality of events, and the ideological struggles over interpretations of history. By subverting historical causality, “feminine” experimental writing shows that history itself has to be interpreted in terms of possibilities rather than facts, that there is no one specific event that could exemplify a change in human character.

Prior to A Room of One’s Own, the aesthetic of feminine potentiality is explored in Woolf’s famous essays and aesthetic manifestos, such as “Modern Novels” (1919) and its later version “Modern Fiction” (1925), “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown”(1923) and the 1924 “Character in Fiction” (a revised version of “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown”).²⁴ These aesthetic manifestos are part of Woolf’s larger critique of realism and her ideological battle with the “character” of femininity and experimental literature. In fact, the first version of the “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” essay was written in response to Arnold Bennett’s negative and condescending review of Woolf’s Jacob’s Room, a review which dismissed Woolf’s formal experimentation as “cleverness … the lowest of all artistic qualities.”²⁵ Symptomatic of the “decay” of the modern novel, such cleverness fails to create “real” characters. By 1920 Bennett, in his Our Women: Chapters on the Sex-Discord, shifts the target of his attack from the literary character to gender politics and makes a sweeping judgment about the “reality” of women’s inferior intellectual and artistic abilities. Consequently, when Woolf declares her “war” on Mr. Bennett, the conflict between reality/potentiality in aesthetics (the dispute over the literary character) and in gender politics (the “abilities” of women) is equally at stake. In her response in the New Statesman, Woolf strongly argues for women’s unlimited potential for change: “I must repeat that the fact that women have improved … shows that they might still improve; for I cannot see why a limit should to be set to their improvement in the nineteenth century rather than in the one hundred and nineteenth (emphasis added).”²⁶

Woolf defends the unlimited potential of literary experimentation and female capacities in her controversial claim in “Character in Fiction” that “on or about December 1910” human character changed and that this change had been missed by realist writers like Arnold Bennett (CF, 421).²⁷ The change in human character is intertwined with the political shift in power relations “between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children” (CF, 422) and thus with a veritable reversal of the gendered master/slave dialectic. There are three important aspects of Woolf’s analysis of the human potential to change: first of all, Woolf explores this capacity through fictional feminine figures like Mrs. Brown or the ancient militant Clytemnestra. For instance, Woolf writes: “Do you ask for more solemn instances of the power of the human race to change? Read Agamemnon, and see whether, in process of time, your sympathies are not almost entirely with Clytemnestra” (CF, 422). Modern audience’s sympathetic identification with subversive femininity, with the mother avenging the murderous sacrifice of her daughter for political ends, rather than with the murderous father/king, is for Woolf a manifestation not only of a change in gender relations but of the human capacity to change as such. Is such a change a recovery of the “maternal” genealogy for experimental women’s writing?

The second point Woolf makes is that the aesthetics of female potentiality calls for a critique of the paradigm of production and its increasing commodification of literature. As I have discussed in chapter 2, the widespread critiques of praxis in capitalism, advanced, in the wake of Marx, by Adorno, Kristeva, and Agamben, among others, point out that in Western modernity different kinds of human activity, including art and politics, have become subordinated to commodity production. By colonizing art, labor, and political action, production not only perverts self-realization into alienation but culminates in the worldwide domination of nature and exploitation of other peoples. By subordinating all forms of making, speaking, acting, and work itself to alienated labor, Western political and economic praxis obliterates the otherness of the world and the alterity of others by transforming them into the “materials” of the self-production of the hegemonic subject, which, in the last instance, is capital itself. Although Woolf disagrees with this diagnosis of the total colonization of literary and political praxis because she believes in the liberating possibilities of writing and action sustained by the communities of women/outsiders, she is nonetheless very critical of imperial and economic domination. The unjust gendered division of labor, which enables artistic activity, is thematically and formally inscribed in most of her texts, whether it is her claim that the economic exploitation of the working class destroys the very possibility of art in A Room of One’s Own, her emphasis on the invisible labor of cleaning women in To the Lighthouse, or the shame of property in Orlando. Woolf is equally critical of the fact that innovation in modernity is all too often synonymous with the production of new commodities and technological progress.

The critique of commodity, property, and production is what is at stake in Woolf’s famous but misleading distinction between “materialist” and “spiritual” writers (MN, 32). Given the materialism of the body she advocates in A Room of One’s Own, it might be surprising that in “Character in Fiction” she criticizes the “materialism” of Edwardian novelists—a materialism of will and commodities. Since, as Woolf argues in A Room of One’s Own, the work of art depends on material conditions and on embodied relations to others, “spiritual writers” do not deny these conditions but struggle for the invention/recovery of new potentialities rather than reproducing unjust power relations. By contrast, “materialist” writers represent life either through instrumental social reforms or the accumulation and circulation of new commodities. As Woolf sardonically observes, the characters of Mr. Bennett, one of the materialist writers, “spend their time in some softly padded first-class railway carriage … and the destiny to which they travel so luxuriously becomes more and more unquestionably an eternity of bliss spent in the very best hotel in Brighton” (MN, 32).

The most original aspect of Woolf’s critique of commodity production is her diagnosis of the specular role of femininity that compensates for alienation in capitalism. Prior to Irigaray’s famous critique of the specular function of femininity, Woolf argues that femininity has been forced to serve as the unacknowledged, reflective “mirror” supporting patriarchal narcissistic self-production: “women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size. Without that power probably the Earth would still be swamp and jungle. The glories of all our wars would be unknown” (RO, 35–36). In Woolf’s diagnosis of gender and racist domination, the alienating praxis can be associated with the self-production of the hegemonic subject because of the supplementary compensating role of white femininity, which functions as a mirror concealing alienation and magnifying the narcissistic effects of the patriarchal will to power. By shattering this specular support of the dominant subject, Woolf stresses nonappropriative, passionate relations to others and to the world, relations that are irreducible to will and domination and yet are a source of creativity. Woolf rejects realism in the name of the feminist struggles for the new possibilities.

What motivates Woolf’s critique of realism, historical determination, and production is a feminist aesthetic of potentiality. Yet how should we understand such potentiality? The relation between the feminine, possibility, and experimental aesthetics transforms the very meaning of femininity so that it is no longer is associated with enslaving materiality, melancholia, or resentment but becomes instead the exemplary figure of the human capacity to change. And, conversely, the meaning of possibility changes as well, once it is associated with women’s struggle against the destruction of their capacities rather than with agency or will. Furthermore, potentiality also allows us to rethink Woolf’s literary “wild experiments,” such as stream of consciousness, interior monologue, shifts in gender identity, and the perspectival play of multiple narrative points of view in To the Lighthouse, Orlando, or The Waves. The main question that I want to consider is the relation between “feminine” potentiality and experimental writing.

What is original in Woolf’s analysis of feminine potentiality is the contradiction between women’s unlimited ability to change and their experience of powerlessness and subjugation. At stake in this contradiction is not only a redefinition of revolutionary/melancholic modernism but also of potentiality itself. How does the significance of possibility change once it is analyzed in the context of subjugation and destruction rather than in the context of agency or empowerment? In the essays “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” and “Character in Fiction” the contradiction between powerlessness and possibility is famously embodied in the figure of Mrs. Brown, a “very small, very tenacious; at once very frail and very heroic” old lady (CF, 425). On the one hand, an abused old woman subjected to the “bullying, menacing” power of her male companions and, on the other hand, an impish phantom of “infinite possibilities,” Mrs. Brown is Woolf’s paradigmatic figure of the unlimited potential of literature and the unprecedented “power of the human race” to change. As a figure of potentiality, Mrs. Brown exhibits a fundamental aporia between political powerlessness, produced and reenforced by the recurrent aesthetic/political judgment of “you cannot” addressed to women—“can’t paint, can’t write,” experienced for instance by Lily Briscoe in To the Lighthouse (TTL, 159)—and the possibility of “we can,” presupposed by the human capacity to change. Like Judith Shakespeare in the sixteenth century, Orlando in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Rhonda in The Waves, or the daughters of educated men in the twentieth century, Mrs. Brown is subjected to male economic, legal, and aesthetic power. This power is signified in Woolf’s essay by men of letters and a man of business who has “some power over her which he was exerting disagreeably” (CF, 424). Such subjection of feminine potentiality to political and aesthetic power produces “waste” and “futility,” evident for instance in “the horrible domestic tradition which made it seemly for a woman of genius to spend her time … scouring saucepans, instead of writing books” (CF, 422). Evoking censorship and political and imperialist domination in Orlando, class and gender exclusion in A Room of One’s Own and To the Lighthouse, “waste” and “futility” signify a destruction of female potentiality not only by imperialist, class, and gender politics but also by literary institutions. Nonetheless, Mrs. Brown is also a figure of “infinite possibilities, [assuring] us that there is no bound to the horizon” (MN, 36) either to literature or to the human capacity of change. She embodies the possibility of revolutionary change manifesting itself in the “insurrection” against empire, gender norms, and literary conventions.²⁸

Through these contradictions, Woolf explores hitherto completely uncharted territory in modern aesthetics, namely, a feminine modality of possibility that emerges out of “waste” and “futility.” To diagnose the originality of Woolf’s aporetic formulations of feminine aesthetic potential, I juxtapose her writing with Agamben’s philosophical reflection on potentiality. For Agamben, the exemplary instance of potentiality is another literary figure, namely, Herman Melville’s Bartleby and his famous formula “I prefer not to.” Agamben makes the powerful argument that possibility exceeds its historical realization. As he puts it, “contrary to the traditional idea of potentiality that is annulled in actuality, here we are confronted with a potentiality that conserves itself and saves itself in actuality. Here potentiality, so to speak, survives actuality” (PCE, 184.) Potentiality exceeds historical realization because it is distinguished from the will to power, moral law, and individual agency. Historically, philosophers have attempted to restrict the ambiguities of potentiality “by reducing it to the terms of will and necessity. Not what you can do, but what you want to do or must do is its dominant theme…. To believe that will has power over potentiality, that the passage to actuality is the result of a decision that puts an end to the ambiguity of potentiality … this is the perpetual illusion of morality” (PCE, 254). Woolf proposes a similar critique of the ideology of will, which is most visible in her contestation of the imperialist politics of the British Empire. As if in parody of Lewis’s “hailing” in Blast, the narrator in Orlando hails “anything that interrupts and compounds the tapping of the typewriters and filing of letters and forging of links and chains, binding the Empire together” (O, 216). One of the most significant links “binding the Empire together” is the political and aesthetic concept of the “real” character in the novel—the “Captain self, the Key self, which amalgamates … controls” and imprisons the plurality of being (O, 227). Evocative of the aridity of the letter I discussed in A Room of One’s Own, the Captain self is a counterpart of genius—both of them are haunted by the destruction of feminine and colonized bodies.

According to Agamben, what distinguishes potentiality from agency and will is its relation to privation. As Bartleby’s formula suggests, the original meaning of the capacity to do something includes the capacity not to act. For instance, the architect’s ability to build a house, or the novelist’s ability to write, persist even when they do not work; therefore, their abilities include their capacity not to act: “It is a potentiality that is not simply the potential to do this or that thing but potential to not-do, potential not to pass into actuality” (PCE, 179–180). Since the potential includes the potential not to act, it can never be fully actualized because what exceeds its realization is the ambiguous capacity of “not-to.” It is this excessive potentiality that questions the historical determination of power, marks the contingency of historical reality, and opens a possibility of freedom. Yet, although Agamben’s redefinition distinguishes potentiality from agency and will, it nonetheless raises three questions that are crucial to Woolf’s conception of experimental writing and femininity. The first question pertains to the relational aspect of potentiality—how is potential related to the capacities/incapacities of others, say, to Woolf’s female communities of outsiders and to what Woolf calls “life?” Because Agamben implicitly interrogates potentiality in the context of the isolated subject, the only way he can liberate it from individual will is by relating possibility “to its own privation” rather than to the potentialities of others. The second question is about the relation between potentiality, materiality, and passion. I refer here to materiality in the double sense of the body of the female artist and of the work of art, for instance, the materiality of the house in Agamben’s example of the architect or the materiality of the paint, shapes, and colors in Lily’s painting or the materiality of literary language in Orlando. Ultimately, the most important question for Woolf and feminism is how to liberate potentiality from the most extreme effects of political domination—from destitution and powerlessness, and impossibility—signified in Agamben’s own work by “bare life,” in Woolf’s texts by the destroyed body of Judith Shakespeare, and in Nella Larsen’s novels by the death of the black female figures of writing, beauty, and taste (Helga in Quicksand and Clare in Passing).

Although Bartleby’s “I prefer not to” suspends the distinction between possibility and its privation and challenges individual will (PCE, 257), it neither suggests how potentiality can survive its systematic destruction by subjugation, which literature is summoned to witness and contest, nor shows how impotentiality can be a source of a creative praxis. Thus, although Woolf also distinguishes the human “capacity for change” from the masculine will to power, she is nonetheless concerned with a fundamentally different problem, namely, with the liberation of potentiality from the impossibility and destruction of human abilities. What is at stake in Woolf’s aesthetics is the survival of women’s unrealized capacities despite their destruction, despite the perennial oppositions of “you cannot”—“can’t paint, can’t write” (TTL, 48, 159)—masquerading as impersonal aesthetic judgments. In the case of femininity, the politically critical distinctions between the enabling privation (the ability not to act) and destroyed capacities have been systematically erased and equated with powerlessness. Although Agamben begins his essay “On Potentiality” with a reference to the female Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, who, standing outside a prison to hear the news of her imprisoned son, utters “I can” in response to another woman, he does not pursue this feminine, relational possibility in the face of political destruction. By contrast, Woolf’s multiple references to female communities in A Room of One’s Own, Orlando or Three Guineas suggest that only the relational mode of potentiality can enable its survival in history. Such survival of feminine possibility cannot be explained by its privation, but rather by its relation to intersubjective capacities of “I/we can.” Indeed, as Agamben himself reminds us, human beings exist in the mode of potentiality only “insofar as they know and produce” (PCE, 182, emphasis added). Only if my capacity to write, paint, or act politically is protected and enhanced in my relations with others can I preserve my abilities when I do not act and especially when I’m told that I cannot do so. Because the feminine experience of impotentiality—“I can not-to”—has been so often confused with powerlessness and disqualified as inferiority—as “you cannot”—the liberating impotentiality of women and other subjugated groups has to preserve its relation to “I/we can.” Only then the inferiority projected onto the feminine can be deprived of its necessity and transformed into a capacity for not acting, which is inseparable from the capacity for acting with others.

Finally, what enables the distinction between impotentiality—the capacity not to act—and the brunt of failure or impossibility is the existence of the potential associated with what Woolf calls “life itself” (CF, 436). This relation between experimental writing and life emphasizes the excess of possibility beyond the opposition between existence and nonexistence. Woolf’s frequent references to “life itself” resonate with what Agamben calls the ontological dimension of potentiality. Because it exceeds both its destruction and its accomplishment, potentiality, Agamben argues, emancipates “itself from Being and non-Being alike” and “creates its own ontology” (or existence; PCE, 259). Woolf interprets such an ontological dimension as the transsubjective potential of life, which is beyond human capacities. Paradoxically, the relational character of potentiality includes not only intersubjective capacities but also the transpersonal potentiality of life, which exceeds human abilities but nonetheless manifests itself through feminine figures. Mrs. Brown “is an old lady of unlimited capacity and infinite variety; capable of appearing in any place … saying anything and doing heaven knows what. But the things she says and the things she does … have an overwhelming fascination, for she is, of course, the spirit we live by, life itself” (CF, 436). These figures of the “unlimited capacity and infinite variety” of “life itself” anticipate Woolf’s emphasis in A Room of One’s Own on the relation between writing and life and not just “the world of men and women” (RO, 114). In the long list of Woolf’s conditions, one of the crucial prerequisites for the reappearance of the female poet is the capacity to “see human beings not always in their relation to each other but in relation to reality; and the sky, too, and the trees or whatever it may be in themselves” (RO, 114). This is perhaps the most exquisite description of the relational aspect of the potential, which includes not only human communities but also historical world, trees, and sky and “whatever” beings might be in themselves.

When interpreted in terms of potentiality, these numerous references to the “phantom” of “life itself” are far removed from any association with biological process.²⁹ On the contrary, the potential of life contests any natural or political determinism and, in so doing, enables new political action, poetry, and writing. In “Modern Novels” Woolf famously describes this transsubjective dimension of life’s potential as “the semi-transparent envelope, or luminous halo, surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end” (MN, 33). This spectral aura of life, as the figure of the “envelope” suggests, is not far removed from writing. In fact, in the same passage Woolf describes the impressions of ordinary life on the surface of the mind as an “engraving” made “with the sharpness of steel” (MN, 33). Like the “life” of the dead female poet sustained by the collectivity of women, life’s engravings in “Modern Novels” anticipate the title of Mary Carmichael’s novel, Life’s Adventure, while the “envelope” of potentiality recalls the “envelopes” of political letters Woolf was addressing during her work for “People’s Suffrage” in 1910.³⁰ As writing and engraving, the spectral potential of life, exemplified by Mrs. Brown and sustained by the communities of women, is inseparable from the potentiality of language and experimental literature.

The relational potentiality associated with femininity and freedom enables Woolf to redefine experimental writing. As she puts it, in the work of art “nothing—no ‘method,’ no experiment, even of the wildest—is forbidden, but only falsity and pretense.”³¹ Although the word experiment might be associated with the worn-out clichés of modernism, for Woolf the stakes of experimental writing are intertwined with the status of praxis, femininity, and potentiality. In contrast to commodity production or historical determination, Woolf’s literary experiment rescues from stultifying literary conventions potentiality exemplified by Mrs. Brown. It is not by accident, therefore, that the essay “Character in Fiction” begins with the relation between potentiality and experimental writing: “It seems to be possible, perhaps desirable, that I may be the only person in this room who has committed the folly of writing … a novel. And when I asked myself, as your invitation to speak to you about modern fiction made me ask myself, what demon whispered in my ear and urged me to my doom, a little figure rose before me … who said, ‘My name is Brown. Catch me if you can’” (CF, 420, emphasis added). The proliferation of terms like possible, perhaps, apparition, or if you can, suggests that experimental writing both emerges from and rescues the phantom of possibility.

The aporia of female potentiality—the contradiction between powerlessness and unlimited capacity—is reflected in the two aspects of women’s experimental writing: the iconoclastic and innovative. Woolf fundamentally redefines the familiar iconoclastic impulse of modernism as “the rescue” of female possibility from waste and destruction: “At whatever cost of life, limb, and damage to valuable property Mrs. Brown must be rescued, expressed, and set in her high relations to the world before … she disappeared for ever. And so the smashing and the crashing began” (CF, 433). The task of iconoclastic writing is to transform waste and impossibility, associated with the feminine, into an enabling capacity to negate destructive power relations and literary conventions. As Kevin Bell argues, Woolf”s “smashing and the crashing” is “the most shattering evidence of the text’s principle of non-identity.”³² Like the iconoclastic aspect of the escalating suffrage militancy, the negativity of experimental art, which Woolf expresses in terms of a revolutionary rhetoric of “toppling down” the house of fiction (MBMB, 387), destroys ideologically discredited literary conventions, including linear plots, syntactic unity, and the coherence of literary genres: “if one were free … there would be no plot, little probability, and … the clear cut features of the tragic, the comic, the passionate, and the lyrical were dissolved beyond the possibility of separate recognition?” (MN, 33). Yet, since it is intertwined with the experimental artistic process, Woolf’s iconoclasm ultimately moves beyond the negative aspect of modernism and leads to explorations of the unpredictable relations between female potentiality, passion, writing, and life. Indeed, as Gayatri Spivak suggests, “unmaking” is as important in Woolf’s novels as the invention of a new paradigm of aesthetic/erotic making.³³

As we have seen, this contestation of aesthetic conventions is what is at work is Woolf’s figures of modern artists, from Lily in To the Lighthouse to Mary Carmichael in A Room of One’s Own. Turning negation into an aesthetic principle, Mary Carmichael destroys the continuity of the sentence and narrative coherence in order to inscribe on the level of form the destruction of women’s capacities in history: “First she broke the sentence; now she has broken the sequence. Very well, she has every right to do both these things if she does them not for the sake of breaking, but for the sake of creating” (RO, 81). Reminiscent of Orlando’s own mode of writing poetry through unwriting, Woolf’s tearing apart of Shakespeare’s name (“Or was it Sh—p—re?” [O, 229]), experimental writing performs the destruction of the literary universe announced in “Modern Fiction.” More fundamentally, the breakdown of conventions of the realist fiction is associated with the inaugural temporality of the new beginning in the work of art. In “Modern Fiction” Woolf tells her audience to be patient with the sounds of destruction in the literary universe, even if the excessive noise of literary “axes” disturbs our desire to sleep; she pleads for her reader to tolerate “the spasmodic, the obscure, the fragmentary” because such destruction will inaugurate a new era in literature. As this emphasis on the new and unpredictable implies, the practice of freedom in literature is not only a negative struggle against sterile conventions but also an experimental disclosure of unprecedented and unimaginable potentialities—the emergence of a “different outline of form … difficult for us to grasp, incomprehensible to our predecessors” (MF, 632).³⁴

Such an inauguration of a new beginning in literature cannot be accomplished by the iconoclastic destruction of “the very foundations and rules of literary society” (CF, 434) alone, since it requires the creation of a new “habitable dwelling place” for feminine potential in literature. Paradoxically, Woolf defines such innovation as the movement of “following” potentiality—the “new age” in literature can be brought about only by the poet’s determination “never, never to desert Mrs. Brown” (CF, 436). Following potentiality is neither an original nor a derivative process, it is neither the actualization of the writer’s capacities nor their abandonment. Rather, it means that writing engages in multiple and unpredictable transactions: with potentiality (or its destruction) in the historical world, with “life itself”—variously figured as phantom, “a will-o’-the-wisp,” or “the gleams and flashes of this flying spirit” (MBMB, 387–88)—as well as with literary process.

The first implication of this strange fidelity to feminine relational potential is that the creation of new possibilities in experimental literature emerges from the exigency of literary form. Woolf’s emphasis on “following” the possibilities of form resonates with Adorno’s argument that experimental innovation emerges not from the intention of the artist, but from the artist’s encounter with the unpredictable potentiality of form inherent in the materials of art: “The new is not a subjective category, rather it is a compulsion of the object itself…. By exigency, the new must be something willed; as what is other, however, it could not be what was willed…. The violence of the new, for which the name ‘experimental’ was adopted, is not to be attributed to subjective convictions or the psychological character of the artist…. productive artists are objectively compelled to experiment” (AT, 22–23). Because potential exceeds subjective capacities and emerges from the “objective” possibilities of literary form, which in turn embodies the traces of social relations, the effects of experimental writing are unpredictable and unforeseeable (AT, 24). And, conversely, this excess of potentiality in literature manifests itself not only as negativity or privation but as the creation of unprecedented novelty. Experimental writing is neither a “magnificent apparatus for catching life” (MF, 630) nor a production of characters or bicycles nor a heroic act of original making (as in Pound’s famous slogan “make it new”). Rather the experimental “following” of ever shifting accents and deviations of literary form attempts, through literary making, to convey potential itself. As Woolf asks: “Is it not possible that the accent falls a little differently, that the moment of importance came before or after[?]…. Is it not perhaps the chief task of the novelist to convey this incessantly varying spirit with whatever stress or sudden deviation it may display …?” (MN, 33). As the unpredictable feminine figure of literary form, Mrs. Brown “changes the shape, shifts the accent, of every scene in which she plays her part” (MBMB, 387–388). What following this movement reveals is “something hitherto ignored or unstressed … a feeling, a point of view suggesting a different and obscure outline of form. … The emphasis is laid upon such unexpected places that at first it seems as if there were no emphasis at all” (MN, 35). The shifting accents of the form create, as Lily in To the Lighthouse discovers, a “dancing rhythmical movement, as if the pauses where one part of the rhythm and the strokes another, and all were related; and so, lightly and swiftly pausing, striking, she scored her canvas with brown running nervous lines” (TTL, 158). In the exchange of “the fluidity of life” for the movement of form, Lily creates and in turn is carried by the rhythm, itself “quiver[ing] with a life,” “strong enough to bear her along with it on its current” (TTL, 159).

Following “feminine” but nonetheless transpersonal potentiality in the process of writing is what allows for the transformation of female burning rage, melancholia, and loss into art’s own “incandescence” (RO, 59). Incandescence is a striking metaphor for the metamorphosis of subjective feelings into the aesthetic glow of art’s potential—indeed, in the draft version of A Room of One’s Own, bearing the title “Women and Fiction,” Woolf compares the role of the artist to “the lightning conductor,” which, as Susan Gubar points out, “has the capacity to feel the shock of electricity and convey it without being consumed by it.”³⁵ Since in its literal meaning incandescence refers to the change of the physical properties of the object, which starts to glow under conditions of extreme heat, this figure underscores first of all the transformation of the material structure of the work of art. But the word incandescence also conserves two additional and antithetical meanings: as the OED tells us, figuratively, it still refers to the psychological state of being inflamed with anger, while in its generalized sense it means brilliance, glow, or “luminous hallo.” Because of its antithetical meanings, incandescence can be read as an aesthetic transformation of loss into art’s own shining possibilities. It is through such a transformation of the intensity of anger into the sensibility of form that literature can “resurrect,” if you will, lost possibilities and give them a second life. Evocative of the “luminous halo” of life, incandescence is a brilliant figure of art’s own possibilities, its luminosity and its intensity.

Following the “feminine” but nonetheless transpersonal potentiality through the experimental practice undermines the classical oppositions between intentionality and sensibility, destruction and innovation, originality and derivation, making and receiving, as well as the gender hierarchy on which these distinctions are based. The aesthetic work of “following” inverts the writer’s desire to “capture” life into receptivity and passion. Exceeding subjective initiative, such a passionate determination at the heart of literary experiment undermines the will to power not through its privation, as Agamben suggests, but through receptivity to different passions. Indeed, Woolf suggests that following potentiality through experimental form is like a dance of passion, which, in contrast to the consumption of commodities, reveals an ecstatic relation to the world, language, and others. In its sexual connotations it refers to the transformation of the intensity of female jouissance into the sensible intensity of the work of art. Woolf describes this transformation as writing “as a woman, but as a woman who has forgotten that she is a woman, so that her pages were full of that curious sexual quality which comes only when sex is unconscious of itself” (RO, 93).

For theorists as diverse as Kristeva, Irigaray, and Adorno, it is ultimately the relation between passion and aesthetics that reveals a strange potentiality capable not only of its own incapacity but also of revealing the otherness of the world. After all, Agamben himself begins his discussion of potentiality with the Aristotelian discussion of sensibility and sensation that gives the name to aesthetics (“The very word ‘aisthesis’ … means sensation” [PCE, 178]). However, he does not follow through these relations between sensibility, passion, and creation, still resonating in the Greek words aisthesis and poesis. By contrast, in Woolf’s writing the relation between art, potentiality, and passion signifies a welcoming receptivity of novelty and otherness. Understood as passion, potentiality is distinguished from the privation of will suggested by Agamben, since it is intertwined with exstasis, a movement outside oneself into relations with others, language, life, and the world. As Makiko Minow-Pinkney and Julia Briggs suggest in different ways,³⁶ this passionate dimension of writing is similar to “the self-surrender of sexual consummation.”³⁷ Indeed, as the narrator of Orlando reminds us, one of its written manifestations is female “Ecstasy!” (O, 240). Thus the dance of passion in and through writing, the capacity for affecting and of being affected, making and following, is a fundamentally heteronomous and relational movement, transcending the oppositions of potentiality and privation, will and passivity, subjectivity and materiality.

Such an ecstatic, relational possibility disclosed in experimental writing is signified in Woolf’s work explicitly or implicitly through lesbian relationships. For Woolf, the lesbian relationship is not merely a subversive/parodic reiteration of heterosexuality, as Judith Butler suggests, but, on the contrary, a passionate movement of female ex-stasis, exceeding the mediation of the male signature and will and, ultimately, exceeding interpersonal relations. At least since the eighties and nineties, Woolf’s feminist critics have analyzed the diverse rhetorical strategies, such as allusion, ellipsis, parody, and carnivalesque camp aesthetics, of the different modalities of her encoding of lesbian desire in literary language as well as the ambiguous political stakes of Woolf’s “Sapphic” modernism.³⁸ As Elizabeth Meese points out, “Woolf’s texts explored the relation between [the] life, writing, and libidinal energy” of lesbian letters.³⁹ However, what has not yet been analyzed is the transpersonal, or ontological, dimension of Woolf’s erotic passions between women and its contribution to the analysis of the aesthetics of potentiality. Following the trail of Woolf’s speculations, we can say that Mrs. Brown—the ontological, or transpersonal, potentiality of freedom—awaits a new generation of women writers and political activists, the arrival of Shakespeare’s sisters, who can rescue this “feminine” potentiality from destructive political and literary power arrangements and follow it passionately through the process of political action and artistic creation. In Woolf’s essays and novels, experimental writing requires a new relationship between potentiality, the work of art, and femininity—a new alliance between Mrs. Brown and Judith Shakespeare. Reminiscent of Lilly Briscoe and Mrs. Ramsay, or Olivia and Chloe, or Orlando and his/her partners, Mrs. Brown and Judith Shakespeare form a passionate “lesbian” configuration of potentiality rescued and disclosed through female poetic practice. And, considering the long history of the figure of the white, heterosexual couple of the poet and his muse in the history of Western aesthetics, it is hardly surprising that such a configuration of female potentiality in the female work of art would exceed all “the resources of the English language” in order to bring this novelty “illegitimately into existence” (RO, 87).

In Woolf’s “wild” experiment the invention of a new form of writing is fundamentally intertwined with relational potentiality, which includes and exceeds communities of outsiders and passionate relations between women. One aspect of such a relation is the invitation from the female audience, another a passionate response to the unpredictable appearance of phantoms of the past, yet another is ecstatic passion for life, which, as the brilliant play on life and Vita (both the Latin term for life and the name of Woolf’s lover, Vita Sackville-West, the inspiration for Orlando) suggests, simultaneously includes and transcends female erotic passions. The interpersonal and transpersonal potentiality disclosed in the work of art is therefore an unpredictable and passionate encounter with the delight and the pain of the body, the intensity of luminous moments of being, the otherness of life, the historical contradictions, and language. As Orlando’s narrator reflects, literary experimental practice is neither a solitary nor an impersonal act, but a passionate transaction between lovers, the world, life, and language: “Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice? … What could have been more secret, she thought, more slow, and like the intercourse of lovers, than the stammering answer she had made all these years to the old crooning song of the woods, and the farms and the brown horses … the kitchen and the fields, so laboriously bearing wheat, turnips, grass, and the gardens blowing irises and fritillaries?” (O, 238, emphasis added). Such experimental writing not only questions the fixed boundaries of the historical world but also discloses through the process of making what is not a result of making: the unpredictable, almost demonic possibility and otherness suggested through Brown’s teasing: “Catch me if you can.”

Poetic work is therefore a “secret transaction” (O, 238, emphasis added). As the word “secret” suggests, experimental writing also intimates what cannot appear either in art, work, or politics. Secrecy has often been interpreted in Woolf’s scholarship as the witty evasion of power and sanction, particularly intense during the obscenity trial of the first explicit lesbian novel, Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, in October 1928.⁴⁰ Woolf’s witty evasions of intolerant censorship in Orlando, certainly plays the part of this “secret transaction.” Yet there is another dimension of the secrecy of writing. It reveals a kind of demonic excess of potentiality which cannot appear, a dancing phantom of possibility. As the narrator of Orlando describes it, writing attempts to follow “something which … is always absent from the present—whence its terror, its nondescript character—something one trembles to pin through the body with a name and call beauty, for it has no body, is as a shadow without substance of quality of its own, yet has the power to change whatever it adds itself to” (O, 236).

As we have seen, Woolf frequently refers to iconoclastic struggles against the destructive aesthetic conventions, economic production, and political power; yet, in her refection on feminine potentiality and experimental writing, she also imagines a possibility of reconciliation—the end of war—between poetic language, feminized nature, and the destroyed body of the female poet. In order to imagine such reconciliation, Woolf in Orlando explores a correlation between two ancient struggles: one between poetry and the polis and the other between writing and nature. If the first struggle dates back to the expulsion of the poets from the polis in Plato’s Republic, the second one is made explicit by Woolf’s retelling of the myth of Daphne being transformed into a laurel bush in order to avoid Apollo’s rape (O, 14, 11, 171, 317). Evoking the rape of Shakespeare’s sister, Apollo’s attempted rape of Daphne—the suppressed background of the struggle between nature and letters (O, 17), body and writing—draws a correlation between masculine military rivalry (represented by Apollo’s killing of Python) and the erotic conquest of the female body expelled from culture into nature. Woolf’s parodic retelling of this myth questions the classical reconciliation between power, poetry, and nature represented by the laurel wreaths made from the Daphne’s “renaturalized” body. In the mythical heterosexual version, the female body/nature is a trophy decorating victorious emperors and male poets, who are the inheritors of Apollo’s lyre. For Woolf, however, if there is any chance of reconciliation between poetry and damaged materiality, destroyed by military, erotic, and artistic conquests, it will have to come from a female poet walking “among us in flesh.” By exposing the “unrecorded” gendered contradictions between materiality and spirit, the body and the mind, things in themselves and art objects, by bearing witness to the damaged remnants of “feminized” nature and violently “naturalized” female bodies, Woolf’s wild experimental writing restores a future possibility for a nonviolent mediation between nature and politics, or what Luce Irigaray calls the mediation between flesh and the spirit of freedom. And since the destruction is intertwined with a heterosexual erotic/imperialist conquest, the possibility of a nonviolent mediation is figured in Woolf’s text as passionate relations between women.

Woolf famously argues that artistic experimentation is intertwined with “contriv[ing] a means of being free” (MN, 35). Yet, as the tension between melancholic modernism, bearing witness to the destruction of women’s artistic capacities, and the invention of new possibilities suggests, this is by no means an easy task. On the contrary, as Woolf reminds us with a great deal of sobriety, class, gender, and race domination threaten the very possibility of art: in fact, the history of women’s literary production begins with the utter destruction of women’s art and their bodies—a destruction internalized by modern writers as madness, melancholia, and resentment. If the collective practice of freedom in the political sphere creates the possibility of overcoming melancholia and the future renaissance of the female poet, experimental writing, based on passionate and multiple transactions, inaugurates a new feminine aesthetics of potentiality. The very opposite of the traffic in women, intercourse—or transaction—between women, the world, history, and the most unpredictable phantom of all—life itself—manifests relational freedom in the work of art. Exceeding agency and subjective initiative, such passionate freedom implies not only a negative capacity of literary practice but also an innovation going beyond the limits of the possible. As the prophetic aspect of Woolf’s pronouncements about the new age in literature suggests, literature, despite its destruction and its tenuous status in modernity, can inaugurate a new beginning: “the next chapter in the history of literature … let us prophesize again … will be one of the most important, the most illustrious, the most epoch making of them all” (MBMB, 388). The temporality of this prophecy, or promise, is not the linear causality of history but a fragile relationship between a poet who is yet to come and the potential that might disappear from literary practice.