'A Room of One's Own,' personal criticism, and the essay

Twentieth Century Literature, Summer, 1994 by Anne Fernald

Feminists would be wise to embrace the essay, for it is a form well suited to making arguments for social change, in spite of many dismissals of it as too polite, too conciliatory, too willing to play the feminine role of "hostess" to contradictory or even offensive ideas. The essay's meandering, baggy form embodies the values so often espoused by feminist critics, especially the willingness to accept indeterminacy, the "both/and" vision celebrated by DuPlessis and others. The essay's particular power lies in its ability to lead a reader to a new perspective. It speaks to the unconverted. Consider, for example, Virginia Woolf's success in convincing non-feminists that the lack of a female Shakespeare is due not to female weakness but to social pressures and restrictions. Woolf chose to address the enemies of her feminist ideas and has been criticized by feminists ever since. Those preferring arguments that announce their purpose and politics should beware that polemic can turn away the sympathetic as quickly as an essay, in its willingness to hear and even articulate an opposing view, may turn away the ardently committed.(2) It is nothing against the essay that it is not polemic, just as it is nothing against polemic that it is not an essay.

My chief dispute with "personal criticism" is not with the expression of "passionate engagement ... in the commentary"--how could it be?--but with the manner in which that involvement has been expressed. The current conviction seems to be that by telling you quite literally where I am sitting as I write, I will make you understand my critical position. But many different conclusions have been reached at these long, low tables in the main reading room, and giving you a map to my seat will not explain how I reached mine. In "The Critic as Artist" Oscar Wilde wrote: "It [criticism] is the only civilized form of autobiography, as it deals not with the events, but with the thoughts of one's life; not with life's physical accidents of deed and circumstance, but with the spiritual moods and imaginative passions of the mind" (154). The principle that we are free to choose our ideas has always been a liberating one. Accidents of circumstance are not, or, to the imaginative writer, are not yet liberating in the same way.

On 3 March, 1926, Woolf wrote in her diary: "He is not, & now never will be, a personage: which is the one thing needful in criticism, or writing of any sort, I think; for we're all as wrong as wrong can be. But character is the thing" (3:65). In "The Modern Essay," written four years earlier, she praises essays with a personal tone and the presence of personality, while cautioning against a too liberal use of the self in writing:

[Max Beerbohm] has brought personality into literature, not unconsciously and impurely, but so consciously and purely that we do not know whether there is any relation between Max the essayist and Mr. Beerbohm the man. We only know that the spirit of personality permeates every word that he writes.... For it is only by knowing how to write that you can make use in literature of your self; that self which, while it is essential to literature, is also its most dangerous antagonist. Never to be yourself and yet always--that is the problem. Some of the essayists in Mr. [Ernest] Rhys' collection, to be frank, have not altogether succeeded in solving it. We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print. As talk, no doubt it was charming, and certainly the writer is a good fellow to meet over a bottle of beer. (Common 217)