by Jane Madera

Created on: June 13, 2009   Last Updated: June 15, 2009

Considered a feminist, Virginia Woolf believed that the ideal writer was mentally androgynous. She claimed that the written word, if too informed by its writers sex, would fall to the ground dead. However, if written by someone with an androgynous mind, the writing would explode and give birth to all kinds of ideas. That this, was the kind of writing that has the secret to perpetual life. Woolf first stated her theory of the androgynous mind in the essay A Room of One's Own. In this essay she cited Samuel Taylor Coleridge as saying that a great mind is androgynous, and it was from him that her theory began to develop.

In literature, it is the masculine values that prevail, while fashion and shopping are considered trivial. So says Virginia in A Room of One's Own. This bias can be seen in fiction; a battlefield scene is more important to the public than a scene in a shop. In the books of her time, and undoubtedly some still today, women are shown in their relationship to men.

In Woolf's novel To the Lighthouse, her feminist views are evident. It can be said that Lily Briscoe is Virginia, she refuses to get married and tries to express her sense of reality in 'terms of color and form'. When Lily looks at Paul Rayley in the heat of his conquest, love seems to her the stupidest, the most barbaric of human passions, she flinches at the newly engaged Minta Doyle and is thankful that she has her work and that she was saved from that dilution.

Going back to androgyny in writing, she says that perhaps a mind that is purely masculine cannot create, any more than a mind that is purely feminine, that a fully developed mind does not think specially or separately of sex. She asked whether there are two sexes in the mind, just like in the body, and that maybe they require to be united in order to get complete satisfaction and happiness. That it is when this fusion takes place that the mind is fully fertilized and uses all of it's faculties.

Some of writers that Virginia mentions in the essay as having achieved the state of mental androgyny are Jane Austen and William Shakespeare. She described Austen as a woman writing without hate, without bitterness, without fear, without protest, and without preaching, despite her circumstances and the fact that in Austen's time, a woman writer was almost unthinkable.

Virginia's thoughts on Shakespeare written here go past his own accomplishments and to a sister he may have had. Woolf gifts this sister with just as much talent and

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