adaequatio intellectus nostri cum re

I’m rather knee deep in Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury group due to my graduate school courses right now and it has been an eye opening experience.  As much as I loved Woolf before, I have never truly analyzed her writings.  If you ever have the opportunity to read A Room of One’s Own, do!  I won’t dwell overlong on it here other than to mention her story of Shakespeare’s (fictional) sister, Judith.  It’s so easy to assume or presume that a woman of his talent would have been just as accepted and famous as Shakespeare himself.  But we forget that, in the Elizabethan age and even for decades after, women were nothing more than slaves and property and it was well and truly rare for a woman to write or speak openly under her own name (witness Jane Austen’s nom de plume of “An Unknown Lady”).  What *would* things have been like had women had the freedom to write, to create openly?  What roads would have been paved?  Woolf wanted to be seen as a writer, not a woman-writer.  Have we achieved that in today’s world, or are we still keeping our voices anonymous and dividing into camps based on gender in our writing?

~ by meredithholmes on September 10, 2007.