An Exploration Into Androgyny——A Critical Study Of Virginia Woolf's Novels

Virginia Woolf's feminism does not quite fit into the picture that most readers have of her. She is known, primarily, as an experimental novelist who perfected a form of stream of consciousness. Her name is frequently associated with some sort of esoteric cult: aestheticism, the Bloomsbury group. It is easy to see why many people assume, almost as a matter of course, that her novels must be devoid of social significance. The critics have done very little to challenge this assumption, in spite of E.M. Forster's reminder that "there are spots of [feminism]' all over her work and it was constantly in her mind". This tendency to isolate the fiction from the work as a whole has to some degree prevented a full understanding of Virginia Woolf as an artist. She was certainly committed to an aesthetic that stressed the purity of the work of art She was also deeply interested in social problems. She combined these characteristics in her own highly individual way.In the year immediately preceding V'rginia Woolf's birth, the legal status of English women was essentially the same as it had been in the Middle Ages. Their rights as individuals were severely limited. But by the beginning of last century, when Virginia Woolf was eighteen, British women were, ih the main, free, both in their persons and their properties and the Women's Movement was nearing its height. The generation to which Virginia Stephen belonged was the first to enjoy on a large scale the freedoms for which the feminists had been fighting. Her youth coincided with a turning point in the history of the feminist movement. She had been born early enough to know Victorian England from personal experience, as well as from contact with her elders. Her memories of that patriarchal society, ruled by a queen who was implacably hostile to the feminist movement, were vivid and disturbing. In their home life～the Stephens, like most middle-class Victorian families, composed a patriarchal society in miniature.Her attitude toward the question of women's rights was never simple and straight...