“A work of greatness is usually always extraordinarily difficult to write. Everything works against the likelihood that it originated entirely in the writer’s imagination.”
Another woman of amazing intellectual acuity and deep language turned the issue over in the wash of her own lovely mind half a century before Ursula K. Le Guin’s brilliant meditation on “becoming a man”—the finest, sharpest thing ever written on the matter of gender in creative culture.
Virginia Woolf (January 25, 1882–March 28, 1941) offers a thought experiment that causes a pause in this chapter from her 1929 novel A Room of One’s Own. What if Shakespeare had a sister—a female sibling with a comparable aptitude and a comparable family background—instead of a brother? Galileo’s sister would have fared no differently than Shakespeare, making it applicable to both women in the arts and humanities and women in science. Despite half a millennium of tremendous progress, the question still touches on some of the most fundamental forces driving modern society and influencing our lives today.
Woolf claims: “In the sixteenth century, any woman born with a tremendous talent would have gone insane, killed herself, or spent the rest of her days in a solitary house outside the village, where she would have been derided and dreaded as a half-witch and half-wizard. Because it only takes a basic understanding of psychology to know that a highly talented girl who sought to use her ability for poetry would have been so tortured and torn apart by her own conflicting instincts, that she must have lost her health and sanity with certainty. No female could have traveled to London, stood at a stage door, and forced her way into the company of actor managers without inflicting violence on herself and going through unavoidable agony, even if it was irrational because chastity may be a fetish developed by some societies for inexplicable reasons. Chastity had religious significance then, as it does now, in a woman’s life. It has become so entwined with nerves and instincts that it takes the rarest kind of courage to cut it free and bring it into the open. A woman who was a playwright and poet in the sixteenth century would have faced anxiety and a moral quandary from leading a free life in London, which very possibly may have led to her death. Whatever she had written, if she had lived, would have been contorted and distorted, coming from a strained and morbid imagination.”
Woolf argues that even if such a rare woman had somehow managed to bulldoze through the era’s barriers to female self-actualization, she would have likely gone anonymous or written under a male pseudonym in a culture where “publicity in women is detestable.” Woolf then points to the bookshelf empty of works by women from that era and turns an eye toward George Eliot and George Sand. (In many respects, we continue to believe the same stifling beliefs now.)
According to Woolf, these social structures have the following effects on the creative spirit:
So that woman, who was born in the sixteenth century with the gift of poetry, was unhappy and at odds with herself. Every aspect of her life, including her instincts, was hostile to the mental state required to liberate the contents of her brain. But I questioned, “What is the mental state that is most conducive to the act of creation?” Can one get a sense of the state that supports and allows for that peculiar activity?
The vast modern literature on confession and self-analysis leads one to the conclusion that producing a work of genius is almost always an enormously difficult task. The likelihood that it was entirely conceived by the author is extremely unlikely. Material circumstances are typically against it. People will interrupt, dogs will bark, money must be made, and health will deteriorate. Furthermore, the world’s well-known indifference highlights all these challenges and makes them more difficult to bear. It doesn’t ask people to write poetry, novels, or histories because those things are not necessary. It doesn’t matter if Flaubert uses the proper word or if Carlyle meticulously checks this or that fact.
Of course, it won’t pay for anything it doesn’t want. Thus, the writer—Keats, Flaubert, Carlyle—suffers from every kind of deterrent and discouragement, especially during the formative years of youth. Those confessional and analytical books emit a curse and an agonized scream. The theme of their song is “mighty poets in their misery dead.” No book is likely to be born complete and undamaged as it was conceived, so if anything makes it through despite all of this, it is likely a miracle. However, as I observed the empty shelves, I reasoned that these challenges were significantly more difficult for women. First of all, even at the start of the nineteenth century, it was impossible for a woman to have her own room, much less one that was quiet or soundproof unless her parents were extraordinarily wealthy or noble.
These materials challenges were formidable, but the immaterial ones were even worse. She experienced hostility instead of the world’s indifference that Keats, Flaubert, and other geniuses have found so difficult to bear. The world did not tell her, as it did to them, “Write whatever you want; I couldn’t care less.” The world laughed and said, “Write?” What benefit does your writing provide? Looking once more at the empty spaces on the shelves, I reasoned that [psychologists] might be able to assist us in this situation. Since I’ve seen a dairy company measure the effects of regular milk and Grade A milk on the body of the rat, it is unquestionably time to measure the effect of discouragement upon the mind of the artist. Two rats were placed side by side in cages; one was small, shy, and furtive, and the other was glossy, bold, and large. What do we now feed women artists in terms of food?
