U N C O V E R I N G V I R G I N I A W O O L F ’ S

É C R I T U R E F É M I N I N E M É C A N I Q U E

MANUFACTURING A WOMAN’S SENTENCE:

PIECES OF ÉCRITURE FÉMININE

• “Write! Writing is for you, you are for you; your body is yours, take it . . . write yourself. Your body must be heard.” –Cixous

• We must “introduce ruptures, blank spaces, and holes in language.” –Kristeva

• After making a statement, women will be “already elsewhere in that discursive machinery where you expected to surprise them.” – Irigaray

• “This language which has not yet reached verbal expression, but is held within the confines of the body, which signifies the body on all sides but does not transmit it in the form of a thought-content remains convulsive.”-Clément

MARY JACOBUS’STRANSLATION OF ÉCRITURE FÉMININE

“In its claim that women must write the body, that only the eruption of female jouissance can revolutionize discourse and challenge the Law of the Father, écriture féminine seems – however metaphorically – to be reaching not so much for essentialism (as its often accused of doing) as for the conditions of representability. The theoretical abstraction of a “marked” writing that can't be observed at the level of the sentence but only glimpsed as an alternative libidinal economy almost invariably gives rise to gender-specific images of voice, touch, anatomy to biologistic images of milk andjouissance.”

JULIA KRISTEVA

“Virginia Woolf describes suspended states, subtle sensations, and above all, colors – green, blue – but she does not dissect language as Joyce does.”

- “Oscillation Between Power and Denial”

HÉLÈNE CIXOUS

“I don't like the name Virginia . . . for you soon feel . . . an echo of Virginia Woolf, a woman doomed to drown.”

-Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing

AN ÉCRITURE OF ONE’S OWN

“The sentence that was current at the beginning of the nineteenth century ran something like this perhaps: ‘The grandeur of their works was an argument with them, not to stop short, but to proceed. They could have no higher excitement or satisfaction than in the exercise of their art and endless generations of truth and beauty. Success prompts to exertion; and habit facilitates success.’ That is a man’s sentence; behind it one can see Johnson, Gibbon and the rest. It was a sentence that was unsuited for a woman’s use.”

- A Room of One’s Own

VIRGINIA AND LEONARD VIRGINIA AND VITA

VIRGINIA’S BODY

“… But these are difficult questions which lie in the twilight of the future. I must leave them, if only because they stimulate me to wander from my subject into trackless forests where I shall be lost and, very likely, devoured by wild beasts”

- A Room of One’s Own

“ON BEING ILL”

“Literature does its best to maintain that its concern is with the mind; that the body is a sheet of plain glass through which the soul looks straight and clear, and save for one or two passions such as desire and greed, is null, and negligible and non-existent. On the contrary, the very opposite is true. All day, all night the body intervenes; blunts or sharpens, colours or discolours . . . the creature within can only gaze through the pane –smudged or rosy; it cannot separate off from the body like the sheath of a knife or the pod of a pea for a single instant. “

– “On Being Ill”

WOOLF’S ÉCRITURE FÉMININE MÉCANIQUE

Woolf’s writing features an inherent preoccupation with modernization expressed through repetition, precision, and subtle reference to the machine as a mode of production. Hers was more of an écritureféminine mécanique, a style of writing which like écriture feminine is characterized as feminine bodily writing, but unlike the former style, demonstrates a syntactic mechanization and a conscious anxiety about the machine usurping the body common to the modernist era, preventing the naturalistic and progressive writing of the female body expected of écriturefeminine.

ÉCRITURE FÉMININE MÉCANIQUE

Characteristics of écriture féminine mécanique:

• Mechanical ruptures

• Simulated machinery in syntax

• Eagerness to equate the female form with the machine

• Effort to compete with or trump the power of the machine-mediated arts

• A visible anxiety over the rise of the machine

TO THE LIGHTHOUSE

“It was a miserable machine, an inefficient machine, she thought, the human apparatus for painting or for feeling; it always broke down at the critical moment; heroically, one must force it on.”

-Lily Briscoe

MECHANICAL RUPTURES

“It was the other thing too – not being able to tell him the truth, being afraid, for instance, about

the greenhouse roof and the expense it would be, fifty

pounds perhaps, and then about his books.”

MECHANICAL RUPTURES

“To eight people she had said relentlessly that (and

the bill for the greenhouse would be

fifty pounds).”

MECHANICAL RUPTURES

“Was she not forgetting again how strongly she influenced people?

Marriage needed – oh all sorts of qualities (the bill for the

greenhouse would be fifty pounds); one – she need not name

it – that was essential”

THE BODY’S MECHANICAL POWER

Painting of Virginia knitting

by her sister Vanessa Bell

“She knitted with firm composure, slightly pursing her lips and, without being aware of it, so stiffened and composed the lines of her face in a habit of sternness.”

CONTACT

Feel free to contact me with any comments, questions, or suggestions:

courtneyelizabethking@gmail.com

http://bit.ly/courtneyking