Virginia Woolf has invaded me

I know, that is a weird thing to say, right? I mean, people are willing to say things like “who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf” but not acknowledge how completely her work can take one over. Well, it’s true and it’s wonderful. Having now been completely infected by “A Room of One’s Own,” I can confess to what the pleasure of it.

It happened so quietly, as fits her character. I was at work on Scags at 18, enjoying the work, enjoying being able to incorporate into the story some of the more important writers from that era (the 1960s) that I thought should be included and who don’t often get mentioned–Robert Lowell, Noam Chomsky, Adrienne Rich and Virginia Woolf. For those of us who grew up and gained our intellectual bearings in the 1960s and 1970s, Woolf played a huge role. Yes, we read Doris Lessing and many more but the real star of that time (as she should be in all times) was Woolf.

So as I wrote about Scags reading Woolf and that famous essay for the first time, I couldn’t pull myself out of the book. It was like being caught in some glue pot of words that found a way to liquefy and enter into my bloodstream and in that way wrap themselves around the muscles, tissues and organs inside me. She invaded me.

I couldn’t read a newspaper, hear some politician bloviate or watch a film without being reminded with such incredible precision of what Woolf had said about things like: men writing about women’s sexuality, the predominance of male voices in the discussion of what women should do about most things in their lives, the representation of women on the screen as projections of wish fulfillments rather than as real characters caught up in the things that women care about daily.

When I read the sentence “Chloe likes Olivia” in her essay and couldn’t at first feel the revolutionary thrill she felt, I knew the speed bump I had just encountered needed my attention. If I wasn’t going to run right over what had caused such a stir in her, then I was going to miss much of what she was admonishing women to do and why. That element of surprise that I couldn’t appreciate wasn’t due to Woolf’s writing but to our coming a bit further along in what women now write about. But with some careful thought, I began to unearth inside me all the various prejudices that hadn’t made me appreciate the weight of that statement of affection.

Not unlike the way we of the LGBT community have been trained to accept the homophobes dislike of us, women too, suffer from this sense of turning the misogyny inward. Woolf writes about this, and it is painful to read. But let her take you on this journey with her as she explores what it means to be a woman writer. As she turns her gaze backwards, as she peers into her own life and as she predicts with great accuracy what we women need to do to write well. She offers us a rich platter of comestibles. If you eat one, you won’t be able to resist the rest.

You, too, will then be invaded by her. My wife, Suzanne, rightly said that she is our Shakespeare. That then made me relive inside myself her stories about Shakespeare’s sister in which she fantasizes what her life would have been like if she too wanted to write.

If you read Woolf’s essay and it affects you as it has me, you too will live with Woolf’s words visibly enmeshed inside you. You will be able to read her deep within your own being.

In addition to needing “A Room of One’s Own,” we also needed a Virginia Woolf.