Androgyny

While I find Virginia Woolf's conjectures about the androgyny of the mind and creativity to be very fascinating, I am not quite so sure that I buy into them. It seems strange to think of the mind as purely masculine or purely feminine, considering the mind is rarely looked at as gender specific. What is even more fascinating though, is how Woolf asserts that perhaps the wholly masculine mind cannot create, and so likewise the wholly feminine mind cannot create. It is only with a fusion of the two that creation can occur.

Lately in Romantic Literature we have been discussing the concept of thesis, antithesis and synthesis. All of which ultimately unite to form a new thesis and the process begins anew. In the case of Woolf I can see that the masculine mind is the thesis, the feminine mind the antithesis and the androgynous mind is the synthesis of the two. Through the androgynous mind the dichotomy of the thesis and antithesis is resolved.

When Woolf begins her discussion of her delight at reading Mr. A's reading I began to have more questions immediately. Is a man's writing truly more direct and straightforward than the writing of women? This started me thinking about everything I had ever read, wracking my brain trying to disprove her point. There are two male author's in particular who come to mind in this case. Oscar Wilde and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Both men, but neither one very direct and straightforward. Hawthorne uses superfluous language that borders on tiresome, and Wilde's exquisite attention to detail is a marked quality of his authorship. These are male authors who thrive on details, on extras, on beauty. There are certainly elements of direct and straightforwardness in both author's work, but I highly doubt that any reader, when asked to come up with direct and straightforward writers, would come up with Wilde and Hawthorne. Likewise, on the opposite end of the spectrum, George Eliot, though the pseudonym may be slightly misleading, is a woman writer with a knack for the straightforward and direct. Her prose often nears the realm of biting and trite. Her social commentary in Middlemarch could not be more clear or direct. The only problem with this argument resides in norms. By this I simply mean that these three authors lie somewhat on the outskirts. They are absolutely individuals, and so perhaps it is not fair to judge them in comparison to other authors. Perhaps these three authors are simply deviants rather than a part of the norm. We can never really know though, so Woolf's question remains alive and well.