8. Androgyny

Androgyny is a term used to describe a person who has the characteristics of both masculinity and femininity, that is, hermaphrodite. This term has been used in feminism, too. Virginia Woolf defended androgyny as a strategy to end the inequality between men and women. Androgyny appears in her longest essay A Room of One’ s Own.

One has a profound, if irrational, instinct in favour of the theory that the union of man and woman makes fot the greatedt satisfaction, the most complete happiness. But the sight of the two people getting into the taxi and the satisfaction it gave me made me also ask whether there are two sexes in the mind coresponding to the two sexes in the body, and whether they also require to be united in order to get complete satisfaction and happiness? And I went on amateurishly to sketch a plan of the soul so that in each of us two powers preside, one male, one female; and in the man’ s brain the man predominates over the woman, and in the woman’ s brain the woman predominates over the man. The normal and comfortable state of being is that when the two live in harmony together, spiritually co-ooperating. If one is a man, still the woman part of the brain must have effect; and a woman also must have intercourse with the man in her. Coleridge perhaps meant this when he said that a great mins is androgynous.¹

According to Elizabeth Wright, «Androgyny, for Virginia Woolf, was a theory that aimed to offer men and women the chance to write without consciousness of their sex – the result of which would ideally result in uninhibited creativity.»²

In biological terms, Arduin, quoted by Sigmund Freud, states that “there are masculine and feminine elements in every human being; but one set of these – according to the sex of the person in question – is incomparably more strongly developed than the other, so far as heterosexual individuals are concerned.»³

Elaine Showalter agrees with Virginia regarding androgynous term. Showalter writes in her work  A Literature of Their Own that Woolf’s androgyny «represents an escape from the confrontation with femaleness or maleness».

Other critics support feminism as the main and unique idea in Woolf’ s essay. Therefore, Showater critics them.

Emphasizing the idea, I will highlight another paragraph of A Room of One’ s Own which is: “It is fatal to be a man or a woman pure and simple; one must be a woman-manly or a man-womanly. It is fatal for a woman to lay the least stress on any grievance; to plead even with justice nay cause; in any way to speak consiously as a woman. And fatal figure of speech; for anything written with that conscious bias is doomed death.”⁴

To sum up, the main topic in A Room of One’ s Own by Virginia Woolf is androgyny. So, there is a dualism in the essay: feminism versus androgyny.

1. Virginia Woolf. A Room of One’s Own ; Three Guineas. London: Penguin Books, 1993. Print, pg. 88.
2. Elizabeth Writh. Re-evaluating Woolf’ s Androgynious Mind. University os St. Adrews. Web. http://www.dur.ac.uk/postgraduate.english/ElizabethWrightArticleIssue14.htm#_edn1
3. Sigmund Freud. On Sexuality. London: Penguin, 1991. Print, pg. 54.
4. Virginia Woolf. A Room of One’s Own ; Three Guineas. London: Penguin Books, 1993. Print, pg. 94.