Re-evaluating Woolf’s Androgynous Mind

Elizabeth Wright

University of St Andrews

Woolf introduced her theory of the androgynous mind 1 in A Room of One’s Own

(1929) and the concept has caused contention among critics ever since. Often worried

by the word and its binary baggage, critics have either loved or hated Woolf’s ideal

state for a creative mind which alternates between male/masculine and

female/feminine. Lovers of the theory, including Carolyn Heilbrun and Nancy

Topping Bazin, read androgyny as a balance and union between opposites (“the

evanescent masculine and the eternal feminine”2 ) which gives a satisfying pattern to

life. However, others have read Woolf’s vision of androgyny as variously: an escape

from the body (Elaine Showalter and Lisa Rado), an avoidance of key feminist issues

(Elaine Showalter), a “sexist myth in disguise” perpetuating the phallogocentrism it

seeks to deconstruct (Daniel Harris, Barabara Charlesworth Gelpi), a vision of self-

destructive narcissism (Julia Kristeva, Francette Pacteau) or merely as an insipid form

of homogeneity that “lacks zest and energy.”3 However, Woolf distilled a purer

essence from the concept than contemporary critics tend to do. Androgyny, for

Virginia Woolf, was a theory that aimed to offer men and wome n the chance to write

without consciousness of their sex – the result of which would ideally result in

uninhibited creativity. Whether she succeeded in this aim will be the study of the

following essay.

The foundations of Woolf’s androgyny and Bloomsbury’s sexual liberalism can be

found in nineteenth and early twentieth century science. Figures such as Richard von

1
Krafft-Ebing, Edward Carpenter, Havelock Ellis, Otto Weininger, and Sigmund Freud

all put forward to some degree or other the theory of a third sex in which masculine

and feminine characteristics (drawn of course along the lines of biological essentialist

binary thought) came together in a single body. 4 Havelock Ellis wrote that “each sex

… is latently hermaphrodite”5 , while Dr Anduin, as quoted by Freud, asserts that

“there are masculine and feminine elements in every human being (cf. Hirschfeld,

1899); 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 …”6 . This theory was developed further by Carl Jung

whose concept of the anima, (the female within the male) and animus, (the male

within the female), was interpreted as the healthy balance for the human psyche. The

scientific recognition of the ability for men and women to contain the characteristics

of each other, not only bodily as hermaphrodites, but mentally, (whether homosexual,

bisexual or heterosexual), was a step forward even though this concept reinforced

patriarchal binaries. The application of this thinking to androgyny begs the question

of whether “we [can] move beyond androgyny as a mere merging of gender roles in a

polarisation of traditional oppositions (passive/active, emotional/rational)?” 7

For these men of science the correct preponderance of one set of characteristics over

the other led to heterosexuality while the incorrect preponderence led to

homosexuality. To be an “invert” (Freud’s term for homosexual), whether “absolute”

or “amphigenic” (Freud’s version of homo- and bi-sexual), was still to be degenerate

in the eyes of the majority; and yet, it was generally believed to be a factor in

creativity and there were concerted efforts at the time to demonstrate that a large

number of great artists, musicians and writers were “inverts” including the Romantics,

2
Michael Angelo and Shakespeare. 8 Some psychologists such as Edward Carpenter

even envisaged Uranians as “the advance guard of that great movement which will

one day transform the common life by substituting the bond of personal affection and

compassion for the monetary, legal and other external ties which now control and

confine society. ”9 Barbara Fassler points out that Ellis and Carpenter were read by

members of the Bloomsbury group and most within tha t circle shared “the common

belief that to be artistic one must have the unique combination of masculine and

feminine elements found in hermaphrodites and homosexuals.”10 This view of the

positive creative element in the “sexual aberrations ” was taken up by the sexually

liberal milieu of Bloomsbury and clearly influenced Woolf’s concept of the

androgynous mind. 11 In A Room of One’s Own Woolf seems to be reiterating her

scientist cousins:

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 toge ther, spiritually co-operating. 12

For modern thinkers the definition of androgyny has proven to be more of a problem

than for the scientists of Victorian patriarchy. Despite its problematic origins which

have led such critics as Mary Daly to pronounce it as a “semantic abomination, ”

androgyny was for Woolf and many feminist critics, a way of liberating women from

the negative forces placed by patriarchy on their sex. Carolyn Heilbrun, who started

her critique in Towards a Recognition of Androgyny with its roots in the Greek andros

(male) and gune (female), stated that the term “did not mean hermaphrodite, nor …

bisexual or homosexual” it meant, for Woolf, to be “fully human. ”13 As a

3
consequence, “instead of referring to androgynous individuals, we [should] call them

simply ‘fully human men and women’ ” thus ridding ourselves of connections with sex

and gender and the conceptual baggage attendant on them. 14 The function of

androgyny would ideally be to provide “a third term that neutralises the gendered way

in which the subject is constructed.”15

One of the oddities of the concept of androgyny, and one which was arguably a part

of Woolf’s thinking, was its assignation to sex. Androgyny all too often escapes out of

the grasp of critics and settles back down into the sexual polarisation it is designed to

avoid. Thus we find ourselves mired once again in theories of binary opposition

through male and female centred androgyny. Beginning with the latter which places

the emphasis on women as the embodiment of androgyny, we can read the concept as

either liberation for women, 16 as a bisexuality to which women are closer than men17

or the result of the split that continually takes place in female consciousness due to

women’s position in society. 18 Pinkney suggests that Woolf saw women as having a

closer connection with androgyny, because the woman inherits no tradition, she is an

outsider and her mind is already divided into halves similar (though not exactly akin)

to the androgynous ideal. Woolf writes, the woman “is often surprised by a sudden

splitting off of consciousness… when from being the natural inheritor of that

civilisation, she becomes, on the contrary, outside of it, alien and critical. ”19 In this

view Pinkney is backed up by Hélène Cixous who writes, “in a certain way woman is

bisexual – man having trained to aim for glorious phallic monosexuality. ”20 In other

words, the precepts of phallogocentrism keep man homogenous, leaving women, as

“outsid[er]… alien and critical, ” to develop heterogeneously. Jane Marcus clearly

states her view that Woolf has leant on the heterogeneity of the female in her

4
theorising, calling women a “collective sublime” while men, who are “trained to aim

for glorious phallic monosexuality,” are trapped in an “egotistical sublime.”21 Marcus

writes, “While the poet is still for [Woolf] the legislator of morality, his authority is

derived not from an individual talent but from the expression of collective

consciousness. The ‘egotistical sublime’ of the patriarchy, ” she argues, “has been

replaced by a democratic feminist ‘collective sublime’.”22 Elizabeth Abel claims that

the “weighting of androgyny toward the maternal is in fact implicit throughout

Woolf’s discussion” of androgyny in A Room of One’s Own 23 while Ellen Carol Jones

argues that Orlando is more woman than man because “woman is defined by the

absence of a stable position. In this sense, Orlando is ‘woman’ precisely because she

changes sex. ”24 Reading along these lines one would come to the conclusion that

Woolf, by centring it in the female, offers a stilted version of androgyny which does

not achieve the unconsciousness of sex that creates great literature. However, despite

giving space to the development of a specifically female style of writing, Woolf does

not forget that the mind must contain elements of both sexes in order to be truly

productive. After all, she states, “It is fatal to be a man or a woman pure and simple;

one must be a woman-manly or a man-womanly.”25 And that “to think, as [she] had

been thinking … of one sex as distinct from the other is an effort. It interferes with the

unity of the mind.”26

Recent Woolf scholarship has stretched the female centred version of androgyny by

exploring the lesbian subtext of Woolf’s concept of the term and thus jettisoning the

male altogether. An interesting exploration of the subject is made by Jane Marcus in

her essay “Sapphistry: Narration as Lesbian Seduction in A Room of One’s Own”. In

this essay Marcus argues that Woolf has “seduced us into sisterhood” by asking her

5
female audience to collude in the exclusion of men from the lecture. 27 Marcus sets her

discussion of Woolf’s paper, given in a lecture at Girton and Newnham, in the context

of Woolf’s sapphisim, the publication of Orlando and the trail of Radclyffe Hall’s

lesbian novel then on trial for indecency. As a consequence, Marcus argues, the

“literary women gathered in the room to discuss women and writing are, at least

symbolically lesbians, and the Law is the enemy. ”28 Instead of an androgyny in which

both sexes play an equal part, Marcus suggests that “Woolf’s feeling for sexual

difference privileges the female” and continues “When [Woolf] says ‘the book has

somehow to be adapted to the body,’ she means the female body. ”29 Marcus therefore

suggests, to some extent, that Woolf’s androgyny is not only biased towards the

female, its conceptual space is essentially lesbian.

In opposition to the female-centred type of androgyny which, although positive, is

still not really the balance and unity that Woolf craves, we have the male centred

form. A number of critics have argued that androgyny is a conceptual red herring for

Woolf because it offers a design for the mind which subsumes the female into the

male. Thus, the androgyny which appears as liberation actually achieves the opposite

result. Carroll Smith- Rosenberg asserts that the “New Women” of the 1920s saw

androgyny as a concept which offered the chance to see themselves as “social and

sexual hermaphrodites, as an ‘intermediate sex’ that existed between and thus outside

of the biological social order.”30 However, as Jones points out this strategy failed

because “its rhetoric entailed only the inversion of dominant metaphors rather than

their deconstruction. ”31 Androgyny could only have served these women if they had

first rid themselves of the binary schools of thought on which the “dominant

metaphors” were based. For Fayad androgyny is the epitome of patriarchal

6
domination, the fusion of the female other within the male subject. Fayad argues that

it is a characteristic of the “patriarchal need for assimilation and sameness.” 32 As a

consequence of this need for phallic unity the “splitting off of consciousness” which

seemed to place women closer to androgyny than men has conversely be read by Luce

Irigaray as a means to keep women as a negative other: “Do women remain divided

and assigned to their lot so that men can remain one [un(s)]?” she asks:

Are women the site of an irreparable wound… torn between the yes
and the no: the wound of all the “I want – I don’t want, I love – I hate,
I take – I reject” which lie below, covered by the Good, the True and
the Beautiful men? When you assert that “Man is and remains, as man
– and assuming that he exists as man who would not be woman as
well, - one” (Lemione-Luccioni, 1976, p.9: 1987, p.3), the “knowledge
does not divide him’ (ibid.) aren’t you making women a support for
what you call the “splitting of the subject”? 33

The power of patriarchy is such that even in androgyny its force, these critics suggest,

would cause the woman to either sacrifice her personality or remain as a negative

“other” existing within the male. Androgyny can therefore be read as a patriarchal

construct which has earned the tile of “sexist myth in disguise.”34

In her deconstructive reading of androgyny Gelpi enlists the help of history tracing

the concept’s long heritage of patriarchal service and implying that its meaning is so

deeply inscribed by patriarchy that its re-appropriation to the post-structuralist cause

is more problematic than one might think. Gelpi argues, “Gnostics, alchemists,

cabbalists of the remote past, as well as social visionaries from the Renaissance to the

present, found in androgyny a male ideal of wholeness that, by subsuming the

feminine, obviated the need for interaction with actual women. ” 35 Thus androgyny, as

Irigaray, Harris, Fayad and Gelpi would agree, can offer the chance to avoid

confrontation with the female and its attendant femininity and all of the negative

otherness that she embodies. In its ultimate negative incarnation male centred

7
androgyny is read as self-destructive male narcissism. The psycholinguistic critic

Julia Kristeva, argues that, “The androgyne does not love, he admires himself in

another androgyne and sees only himself, rounded, faultless, otherless. Coalescing in

himself, he cannot even coalesce: he is fascinated with his own image.”36 Narcissim

as its mythic origins tell us is self-destructive and therefore cannot create or self-

fertilise as Woolf would desire it. Certainly, Woolf would never have employed the

term had she suspected it to be read as so antithetical to her cause.

Although critics have suggested Woolf’s vision of androgyny to be female centred,

the concept as a whole to be secretly in the service of patriarchy and therefore

counter-productive to her cause, it is important to establish what Woolf aimed to do

with the theory rather than what the word means to others. Ultimately, the term

implied, in her usage, the forgetfulness of sex. A way of thinking that would enable

women and by implication men to write as themselves, still in a sexed body, but

without the attendant prejudices and discriminations that are connected to the body by

society. To write without consciousness of sex is to see the piece of work for itself not

as its author. When reading the angry writing of men about women, Woolf finds

herself thinking “not of what he was saying, but of himself.”37 The result of this sex

conscious anger is to make the reader aware of who is writing not what is written and

this consciousness therefore undermines the argument. To be successful the mind

must possess an ignorance of sex, Woolf writes in A Room of One’s Own, “the mind

of an artist, in order to achieve the prodigious effort of freeing whole and entire the

work that is in him, must be incandescent, like Shakespeare’s mind,” Coleridge’s

poetry and her sister’s painting. 38 In the “Foreword” to Vanessa Bell’s 1930

exhibition catalogue Woolf writes: “One says, ‘Anyhow Mrs Bell is a woman’; and

8
then half way round the room one says, ‘But she may be a man’.”39 Woolf is arguing

here that sex should enter the mind and, through the medium of its androgynous

thinking patterns, re-emerge incandescent and unconscious of itself on the other side.

For Woolf, the enemy of androgynous thinking was summed up in the Victorian age

which forced writers into a consciousness of their sex and led to the production of

abortive works deformed by sexual self- awareness. Thus we find Orlando’s hand

gripped by the spirit of the age and forced to dash off insipid floral verse: “The pen

began to curve and caracole with the smoothest possible fluency. Her page was

written in the neatest sloping Italian hand with the most insipid verse she had ever

read in her life.”40 In order to avoid this abortive sexualisation of language Woolf

proposes that “poetry ought to have a mother as well as a father.”41 Just as the

Victorian period ruined poetry by “feminising” verse, Woolf sees the rise of fascism,

the ultimate motherless machismo in Europe, as the death of poetry: “The Fascist

poem, one may fear, will be a horrid little abortion such as one sees in a glass jar in

the museum of some country town. ”42 Fascism as the antithesis of androgynous

thought leads directly to the deformation and death of language. As a consequence of

the rise of fascism, Pinkney notices that the positive image of the couple getting into

the taxi at the end of The Years is an “ideal of androgyny [which] seems further than

ever away” in her subsequent pre-war novel Between the Acts.43 Shaking off current

and ancient patriarchy is the only way to ensure that the mind and therefore language

and literature are androgynously free.

Woolf leaves the reader in no doubt that the androgynous mind is the creative ideal,

but what marks a text as the production of an androgynous mind? How do women

9
avoid writing as women constructed by patriarchy, or avoid writing like men in the

service of patriarchy? How do men prevent themselves from writing angrily about

women and pompously or egotistically about themselves? In A Room of One’s Own

Woolf demonstrates the turgidity of the male sentence:

The sentence that was current at the beginning of the

nineteenth century ran something like this perhaps: “The
grandeur of their works was an argument with them, not to
stop short, but to proceed. They could have no higher
excitement or satisfaction than in the exercise of their art
and endless generations of truth and beauty. Success
prompts to exertion; and habit facilitates success.” That is a
man’s sentence; behind it one can see Johnson, Gibbon and
the rest. 44

She goes on to reinforce her point through the imaginary character of the poetry critic

“Mr B. ” whose sentence, due to his “purely masculine mind,” “falls plump to the

ground – dead.”45 The presence of the male ego in literature which lies like a “straight

dark bar, a shadow shaped something like the letter “I”’ over their work, is also a sign

of a mind which is single-sexed and therefore uncreative.”46 But to think only as a

woman is no better. In Orlando, as we have seen, writing as a women involves

sentimentality and floral imagery, however, adopting a patriarchal style does not

provide the answer. Woolf argues that many female novelists have fallen prey to the

man’s sentence: “Charlotte Brontë, with all her splendid gift for prose, stumbled and

fell with that clumsy weapon in her hands. George Eliot committed atrocities with it

that beggar description. ”47 However, Austen managed to form her own sentence and

therefore, Woolf argues, succeeded where the Brontës and Eliot did not. However,

despite this ability on the part of Austen her style is still too “feminine” for Woolf to

list her among the great androgynous minds. To write androgynously ignoring “the

persistent voice” of patriarchy is the only way to save the literature of both sexes from

stasis, corruption or deformity.

10
For Pinkney, Woolf’s writing is a working demonstration of her thinking, “an

androgynous alternation, an impossible dialectic which aims to be ‘integrated’ at the

moment of maximum dispersal. ” 48 In other words, Woolf’s writing matches the “ebb

and flow” of the human mind, it moves like the rhythm of the waves or the pulsation

of Kristeva’s semiotic chora. Pinkney states that “this dangerous, impossible dialectic

is the existential reality of androgyny. The rhythm of the sea as a metaphor of the

semiotic chora – its patterns and pulses of one/two, in/out, rise/fall – cuts across the

syntax of sentences and plot throughout the text, yet without dissolving them

completely. ”49 This androgynous rhythm in her writing is most evident in sections of

Mrs Dalloway, To The Lighthouse and The Waves in which Woolf uses free indirect

discourse. Nancy Topping Bazin actually draws a diagram of the pattern of Mrs

Dalloway which forms the image of waves alternating between different minds and

different locations. 50 The constant flow of the text is a characteristic of the

androgynous mind and one which Woolf demonstrates in her own writing as well as

in the writing of others such as Shakespeare and the Romantics.

The strength of language and form as a means of realising Woolf’s androgynous

vision lies in the fact that “masculine and feminine can be exchanged, or travestied,

because words can be.”51 Language can alter its meaning and as sex and gender are

arguably realised through language they too can be changed and exc hanged. Jones

argues that “gender is a symbolic construct, not an essence that has meaning outside

or beyond discursive structures, and is as heterogeneous (and as empty) as writing

itself.”52 Therefore, language offers the ideal medium through which to cha llenge,

11
deconstruct and then reconstruct gender into a more positive androgynous creative

form.

It is important to remember that for Woolf androgyny did not mean, as some modern

critics would prefer it to mean, sexless writing. Preserving the differences between the

sexes is an important part of the creative process and Woolf does not seem to be

advocating the death of that. Rather that the differences should be played out within

the mind of the individual not between two individuals who are sexed as male and

female. This is where Nancy Topping Bazin’s book falls down in its attempt to see

characters as a realisation of Woolf’s androgynous vision. Mr and Mrs Ramsay, for

example, do not make an androgynous whole simply because they are the

embodiment of patriarchal binary thought and are conveniently married. Topping

Bazin goes on to suggest that by linking disparate notions such as depression and

mania, personal and impersonal, life and death, Woolf creates a sense of homogenous

androgynous unity. But Woolf does not merely want to effect a “resolution of

opposites.” As Pinkney points out, “Orlando lives alternation not resolution”53 and

Woolf herself asks, “if two sexes are quite inadequate, considering the vastness and

variety of the world, how should we ma nage with only one? Ought not education to

bring out and fortify the differences rather than the similarities? For we have too

much likeness as it is.” 54 Difference is to be celebrated, but should exist within the

individual androgynous self- fertilising mind. As an example of this, Woolf describes

the effect of reading Coleridge, “when one takes a sentence of Coleridge into the

mind, it explodes and gives birth to all kinds of other ideas, and that is the only sort of

writing which one can say that it has the secret of perpetual life.”55 The androgynous

mind is united, but heterogeneous and creatively self-perpetuating. Woolf highlights

12
this point by asking: “What does one mean by ‘the unity of the mind’? … for clearly

the mind has so great a power of concentrating at any point at any moment that it

seems to have no single state of being. It can separate itself from the people in the

street… Or it can think with other people spontaneously.”56 The power of the

androgynous mind lies in its ability to alternate simultaneously between a million

different subject positions preserving heterogeneity at the same time as giving the

impression of unity. In the final chapter of Orlando we see this premise in practice as

Orlando ties to call her many selves into one key or captain self.

However, Woolf’s heterogeneous version of androgyny has its ideological pitfalls.

The multiplication of gender and self within the individual leads, Moi would argue,

back to biological determinism: “the belief that if we can just turn sex into a more

‘multiple’ or ‘diverse’ category than it has been so far, then social norms will be

relaxed. This is nothing but biological determinism with a liberal face.”57 Woolf, on

the other hand, argues that multiplication of the self and the celebration of difference

within the self leads to creativity and liberation from sexual prejudice in literature. To

think androgynously offers not liberal biological determinism, but freedom to think

creatively, with heterogeneity and difference playing a key role in this creative

process.

Yet another attack on Woolf’s concept of the androgynous mind has emanated from

the theory of narcissism. Kristeva has stated her vision of androgyny as destructive

male-centred self-obsession, but other critics have argued that even in perfect sexual

balance, “The fantasy of the androgyne is exorbitant… It is a logical impossibility,

outside systems of signification and their necessary foundation in difference. The

13
androgyne transgresses the very existence of difference.” Thus Pacteau sees

androgynous fantasy as a “narcissistic ‘caress’ in which the subject annihilates

itself.”58 For Kristeva and Pacteau androgyny is not the solution to Woolf’s problem

because its love of self inscribed in its seemingly homogenous unity does not make

for glorious difference or internalised heterogeneity, but for a narcissism which

cannot create and can only self-destruct. However, androgyny in Woolf’s usage did

not imply homogeneity or nihilistic self- love. Woolf enjoyed difference and promoted

androgyny as a way to express the self not as a self-obsession in which the subject

looks back at itself until it expires. Reading androgyny as a form of narcissism would

uphold the presence of the ego in literature which is something that Woolf very

clearly wishes to dispose of.

Rado translates this self-destructive element detected by Jones, Pacteau and Kristeva

in androgyny, not as narcissism or love of the self, but rather as fear of the body and

argues that its success as an idea is “predicated on the repression of [Woolf’s] own

female identity, her own female body. ”59 Elaine Showalter would agree and calls

androgyny a “myth that helped her evade confrontation with her own painful

femaleness and enabled her to cloak and repress her anger and ambition. ”60 For Rado

and Showalter the body is something that Woolf fears and androgyny offers the

chance to get rid of it, but by getting rid of it, Showalter argues, she is reduced to the

“sphere of the exile and the eunuch. ”61 Rado uses the comparison between the

characters Orlando and Rhoda to illustrate how androgyny, without a strong sense of

the body, actually causes insanity and death:

Rhoda – like Orlando – becomes so alienated from her

physical self that she can only be made aware of it by
slamming herself against a door – or a tree. By suggesting
that this self-alienation is the source of Rhoda’s (and

14
 Orlando’s) madness and suicide, Woolf exposes their
“androgyny” as a kind of female castration, a forced lack, a
requisite sublimation that precipitates a terrifying void of
sexless absence. 62

Androgyny, to these critics, is an untenable position because it “denies the importance

of the body, of sexual desires… of any material markings of sexual difference.”63

However, Woolf does not suggest that the body should be suppressed, rather that

being a woman or a man is still an important factor – just not the only factor and not

the conscious factor. Woolf keeps an awareness of the body in her writing, otherwise

why advocate the development of the women’s sentence and state that “Poetry ought

to have a mother as well as a father?”64 Yet at the same time Woolf reminds the

reader and writer not to judge or create the work on that basis alone. Ultimately, it is

an unconsciousness of sex, not a “void of sexless absence” that Woolf calls for. In A

Room of One’s Own, Woolf holds the author, Mary Carmichael, in high esteem for

her writing because she has “mastered the first great lesson: she wrote as a woman,

but as a woman who has forgotten that she is a woman, so that her pages [are] full of

that curious sexual quality which comes only when sex is unconscious of itself.”65

Notice that there is still a “sexual quality” in Mary’s work which suggests that the

body is not to be thrown away.

Perhaps Woolf would have created less critical contention if she had written in A

Room of One’s Own, rather than in a letter to Ethyl Smyth: “I believe

unconsciousness, and complete anonymity to be the only conditions … in which I can

write. Not to be aware of oneself.”66 By getting rid of the troublesome word,

androgyny, Woolf would not have to content with critics arguing that it “underscores

and reifies the binary it is attempting to transcend.”67 Despite all of the drawbacks

15
associated with the word androgyny and the many negative interpretations of Woolf’s

use of the term, Woolf’s concept of the androgynous mind should not be read

negatively or as counter-productive to her cause. Woolf’s intention by introducing the

concept was to promote a positive creative force that gets rid of gender stereotype,

prejudice and discrimination in literature. It is not symbolic of a fear of the body,

colourless homogeneity, self-dissolution or narcissistic death. That it is a concept

based on feminine and masculine and all of the traits connected to them by patriarchal

binary thought should not prevent the reader from seeing the concept as offering the

possibility of creative transcendence. For Woolf, as for Cynthia Secor, “androgyny is

the capacity of a single person of either sex to embody the full range of human

character traits, despite cultural attempts to render some exclusively feminine and

some exclusively masculine.” 68 The ability to access this “full range of character

traits” and subject positions so that we read and write as “fully human men and

women” is the ideal that Woolf is chasing.

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Irigaray, Luce. The Irigaray Reader. Ed. Margaret Whitford. Oxford: Basil
Blackwell, 1991.

Jones, Ellen Carol. “The Flight of a Word: Narcissism and the Masquerade of Writing
in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando,” Women’s Studies 23 (April 1994).
http://infotrac.galegroup.com

Karabdrikas, Carol Anne Costabile-Heming Vasiliki. “Experimenting with

Androgyny: Malina and Ingeborg Bachmann’s Jungian Search for Utopia,”
Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 30, (Sept
1997), http://lion.chadwyck.co.uk

Marcus, Jane (ed.). New Feminist Essays in Virginia Woolf. London: Macmillan,
1981.

---. Virginia Woolf and the Languages of Patriarchy. Bloomington: Indiana

University Press, 1987.

Minow-Pinkney, Makiko. Virginia Woolf and the Problem of the Subject . Brighton:
Harvester Press, 1987.

Moi, Toril. What is a Woman? And Other Essays. Oxford: Oxford UP,
1999.

Plato. Symposium, Benjamin Jowett (trans.), http:classics.mit.edu.plato/

symposium.html

Piggford, George. “‘Who’s That Girl? ’: Annie Lennox, Woolf’s Orlando, and Female
Camp Androgyny, ” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of
Literature 30, (Sept 1997), http://lion.chadwyck.co.uk

Rado, Lisa. “Would the Real Virginia Woolf Please Stand Up? Feminist Criticism,
the Androgyny Debates and Orlando”, Women’s Studies 26 (April 1997),
http://infotrac.galegroup.com

17
Showalter, Elaine. A Literature of Their Own. London: Virago Press, 1982.

Topping Bazin, Nancy. Virginia Woolf and the Androgynous Vision. New York:
Rutger’s University Press, 1973.

Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own, Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998.

---- Orlando, London: Penguin, 1993.

---- The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 5, Nicholson, Nigel (ed.), London: Hogarth
Press, 1975.

1
Woolf takes the term from The Table Talk and Omniana of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
2
Topping Bazin, Nancy, Virginia Woolf and the Androgynous Vision, (New York: Rutger’s UP, 1973)
201.
3
Showalter, Elaine, A Literature of Their Own (London: Virago Press, 1982) 263.
4
This concept of a third sex can be traced back to Plato, who, in his Symposium through the voice of
Aristophanes writes, ‘the original human nature was not like the present, but different. The sexes were
not as they are now, but originally three in number; there was man, woman and the union of the two,
having a name corresponding to this double nature, which has once a real existence, but now is lost…
the word “androgynous”.’ Plato. Symposium. Trans. Jowett, Benjamin.
http:classics.mit.edu.plato/symposium.html
5
Ellis, Havelock, Studies in the Psychology of Sex. Vol.II. Sexual Inversion, (Philadelphia: F.A. Davis,
1915).
6
Arduin, Dr., Die Frauenfrage und die sexuellen Zwischenstufen’, Jb. Sex. Zwischenstufen, 2, 211.
(54), quoted in Freud, Sigmund, On Sexuality, (London: Penguin, 1991) 54.
7
Fayad, Mona, “Aliens, Androgynes, and anthropology: Le Guin’s critique of Representation in The
Left Hand of Darkness,” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 30, (Sept
1997), http://lion.chadwyck.co.uk
8
For example, Christina Dokou provides an interesting insight on androgyny in Byron’s “Don Juan.”
Dokou, Christina, “Androgyny’s Challenge to the ‘Law of the Father’: Don Juan as Epic in Reverse,”
Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 30, (Sept 1997),
http://lion.chadwyck.co.uk
9
Carpenter, Edward, The Intermediate Sex. Homosexuality: A Cross-Cultural Approach, Daniel
Webster Cory (ed.), (NT: Julian OP, 1956) 139-204.
10
Fassler, Barbara, “Theories of Homosexuality as Sources of Bloomsbury’s Androgyny,” Signs, 5(2)
Winter 1979, 237-50.
11
Freud, Sigmund, “The Sexual Aberrations,” in On Sexuality. (London: Penguin, 1991).
12
Woolf, Virginia, A Room of One’s Own (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998) 128.
13
Heilbrun, Carolyn. “Further Notes Towards a Recognition of Androgyny,” Women’s Studies: An
Interdisciplinary Journal, 2 (Winter, 1974), (London: Gordon and Breach Science Publishers Ltd.,)
144.
14
Ibid. 146.
15
Fayad, Mona. “Aliens, Androgynes, and Anthropology: Le Guin’s critique of Representation in The
Left Hand of Darkness,” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 30, (Sept
1997), http://lion.chadwyck.co.uk
16
Heilbrun, Carolyn. Towards a Recognition of Androgyny (New York: Knopf, 1973).
17
Cixous, Hélène. The Newly Born Woman. Trans. Wing, Betsy. (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1986). Quoted in Fayad, Mona. “Aliens, Androgynes, and anthropology: Le Guin’s

18
critique of Representation in The Left Hand of Darkness.” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary
Study of Literature 30, (Sept 1997), http://lion.chadwyck.co.uk
18
Minow-Pinkney, Makiko. Virginia Woolf and the Problem of the Subject. (Brighton: Harvester Press,
1987) 10.
19
Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. Quoted in Minow-Pinkney, Makiko. Virginia Woolf and the
Problem of the Subject (Brighton: The Harvester Press, 1987) 10.
20
Cixous, Hélène. The Newly Born Woman, trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1986). Quoted in Fayad, Mona. “Aliens, Androgynes, and Anthropology: Le Guin’s critique of
Representation in The Left Hand of Darkness” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of
Literature 30, (Sept 1997), http://lion.chadwyck.co.uk
21
Jane Marcus, “Thinking Back Through Our Mothers” in Marcus, Jane (ed.) New Feminist Essays in
Virginia Woolf (London: Macmillan, 1981) 10.
22
Ibid., 10.
23
Elizabeth Abel, Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis. (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1989) Quoted in Piggford, George. ‘”Who’s That Girl?”: Annie Lennox, Woolf’s Orlando, and
Female Camp Androgyny’, Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 30, (Sept
1997), http://lion.chadwyck.co.uk
24
Ellen Carol Jones, “The Flight of a Word: Narcissism and the masquerade of Writing in Virginia
Woolf’s Orlando” Women’s Studies 23 (April 1994), http://infotrac.galegroup.com
25
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own. 136.
26
Ibid., 126.
27
Jane Marcus, “Sapphistry: Narration as Lesbian Seduction in A Room of One’s Own” in Virginia
Woolf and the Languages of Patriarchy, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987) 176.
28
Ibid., 166.
29
Ibid., 170, 174.
30
Carroll Smith-Rosenberg quoted in Ellen Carol Jones, ‘The Flight of a Word: Narcissism and the
masquerade of Writing in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando’, Women’s Studies 23 (April 1994),
http://infotrac.galegroup.com
31
Ellen Carol Jones, ‘The Flight of a Word: Narcissism and the masquerade of Writing in Virginia
Woolf’s Orlando’, Women’s Studies 23 (April 1994), http://infotrac.galegroup.com
32
Mona Fayad ‘Aliens, Androgynes, and Anthropology: Le Guin’s Critique of Representation in The
Left Hand of Darkness’ Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 30, (Sept 1997),
http://lion.chadwyck.co.uk
33
Luce Irigaray, ‘The Poverty of Psychoanalysis’ The Irigaray Reader. Whitford, Margaret (ed.),
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991) 88-89.
34
Daniel Harris, ‘Androgyny: The Sexist Myth in Disguise.’ Women’s Studies 2 (1974), 171-184.
35
Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi, ‘Sex as Performance with All the World as Stage’, Mosaic: A Journal
for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 30, (Sept 1997), http://lion.chadwyck.co.uk
36
Julia Kristeva, Tales of Love. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987. Quoted in Fayad, Mona.
‘Aliens, Androgynes, and Anthropology: Le Guin’s Critique of Representation in The Left Hand of
Darkness’ Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 30, (Sept 1997),
http://lion.chadwyck.co.uk
37
A Room of One’s Own 43
38
A Room of One’s Own 73: ‘That the romantic poets were intrigued by androgyny is not particularly
surprising, given their interest in an organically whole and transcendent state of being, and given their
preoccupation with vision and realising that vision creatively. The androgyne symbolically
encompasses all these… a quest for wholeness… and sexual union imaged and longed for as an
ultimate oneness – in short, androgyny.’ Baer Cynthia p.25 quoted in Dokou, Christina. ‘Androgyny’s
Challenge to the “Law of the Father”: Don Juan as Epic in Reverse’ Mosaic: A Journal for the
Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 30, (Sept 1997), http://lion.chadwyck.co.uk
39
Virginia Woolf, ‘Foreword’, Exhibition Catalogue, 1930. Quoted in Goldman, Jane. The Feminine
Aesthetics of Virginia Woolf. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, p. 158.
40
Virginia Woolf, Orlando (London: Penguin, 1993) 164.
41
A Room of One’s Own. 134
42
Ibid.
43
The couple getting into the taxi was an image which Woolf previously used to spark off the
reflection that to think ‘of one sex as distinct from the other is an effort. It interferes with the unity of
the mind.’ A Room of One’s Own 126. Minow-Pinkney, Makiko. Virginia Woolf and the Problem of
the Subject. Brighton: The Harvester Press, 1987, p.189.

19
44
A Room of One’s Own 100.
45
Ibid., 128, 132.
46
Ibid., 130.
47
A Room of One’s Own 100.
48
Makiko Minow-Pinkney, Virginia Woolf and the Problem of the Subject. (Brighton: The Harvester
Press, 1987) 159.
49
Ibid., p.186.
50
Bazin Nancy Topping, Virginia Woolf and the Androgynous Vision. (New York: Rutger’s
University Press, 1973) 115
51
Shoshana Felman, ‘Rereading Femininity.’ Yale French Studies 62, 1981: 19-44. Quoted in Jones,
Ellen Carol. ‘The Flight of a Word: Narcissism and the masquerade of Writing in Virginia Woolf’s
Orlando’, Women’s Studies 23 (April 1994), http://infotrac.galegroup.com
52
Ellen Carol Jones. ‘The Flight of a Word: Narcissism and the masquerade of Writing in Virginia
Woolf’s Orlando’, Women’s Studies 23 (April 1994), http://infotrac.galegroup.com
53
Makiko M inow-Pinkney, Virginia Woolf and the Problem of the Subject. Brighton: The Harvester
Press, 1987, 131.
54
A Room of One’s Own 1.
55
Ibid., 132
56
Ibid., 26
57
Toril Moi, What is a Woman? And Other Essays. (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999) 38.
58
Ellen Carol Jones, ‘The Flight of a Word: Narcissism and the masquerade of Writing in Virginia
Woolf’s Orlando’, Women’s Studies 23 (April 1994), http://infotrac.galegroup.com
59
Lisa Rado, ‘Would the Real Virginia Woolf Please Stand Up? Feminist Criticism, the Androgyny
Debates and Orlando’, Women’s Studies 26 (April 1997), http://infotrac.galegroup.com
60
Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own. (London: Virago, 1982) 264.
61
Ibid., 285
62
Lisa Rado, ‘Would the Real Virginia Woolf Please Stand Up? Feminist Criticism, the Androgyny
Debates and Orlando’, Women’s Studies 26 (April 1997), http://infotrac.galegroup.com
63
Kari Weil, Androgyny and the Denial of Difference. Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 1992,
quoted in Karabdrikas, Carol Anne Costabile-Heming Vasiliki. ‘Experimenting with Androgyny:
Malina and Ingeborg Bachmann’s Jungian Search for Utopia’ Mosaic: A Journal for the
Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 30, (Sept 1997), http://lion.chadwyck.co.uk
64
A Room of One’s Own 134
65
A Room of One’s Own 121
66
Virginia Woolf, The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 5. Ed. Nicholson, Nigel (London: Hogarth Press,
1975) 239.
67
Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi, ‘Sex as Performance with All the World as Stage’, Mosaic: A Journal
for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 30, (Sept 1997), http://lion.chadwyck.co.uk
68
Cynthia Secor, ‘The Androgyny Papers.’ Women’s Studies 2 (1974). Quoted in Karabdrikas, Carol
Anne Costabile-Heming Vasiliki. ‘Experimenting with Androgyny: Malina and Ingeborg Bachmann’s
Jungian Search for Utopia’ Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 30, (Sept
1997), http://lion.chadwyck.co.uk

20
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