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

Twentieth Century Literature, Summer, 1994 by Anne Fernald

These cautions go against the welcoming tone of contemporary American personal criticism. Woolf has no patience for any but the best personal criticism. The distinction she makes is subtle but important: Beerbohm's success relies on "the spirit of personality," which may or may not be distinct from the author. In fact, as Woolf's own intense interest in biography attests, readers are deeply interested in the lives of authors, and in comparing the facts of biography with the work of art. Still, such correspondences are never simple, nor does art's meaning begin and end with the autobiographical. Furthermore, not every life story is interesting, and strangers must work to make themselves interesting to us. Wendy Lesser makes a similar point in her introduction to an outstanding collection of autobiographical essays:

The crucial art of the essay lies in its perpetrator's masterful control over his own self-exposure. We may at times be embarrassed by him, but we should never feel embarrassed for him. He must be the ringmaster of his self-display. He may choose to bare more than he can bear (that is where the terror comes in), but he must do the choosing, and we must feel that he is doing it. (ix-x)

It is remarkable that these premises of essay writers--that some lives are more interesting than others, that some occasions are more appropriate to confession and anecdote than others--have been so overlooked that they bear repeating.

To suit our sense of the personal, several categories of experience seem eligible: the experience of having a body; emotions; the events of life; and thought. Feminism has seized notably on the first three, sometimes at the expense of the fourth. The result is that, in quarters where the personal remains opposed to the professional, feminists run the risk of allowing thought to remain defined as professional, impersonal, male, and better. There is no reason why this should be the case. Without discounting other aspects of the personal, or reinscribing the division of thought from bodies, my discussion of the personal in Virginia Woolf emphasizes thought. This stance has the added advantage of offering an answer to the question with which I began: How have such various readers come to take Woolf so personally?

Woolf makes thinking seem personal in part by creating an argument passionately committed to securing "the greatest release of all ... which is freedom to think of things in themselves" (Room 39). More important, she focuses on perfecting the details of her argument, hoping to uncover small truths; she does not pretend to present a theory, but offers a collection of persuasive observations. As Susan Sontag writes, "This is quintessentially the essayist's point of view: to convert the world and everything in it to a species of thinking" (xviii). Writing that treats thought as personal displays its conclusions not as the unassailable results of research but as the idiosyncratic perceptions of an individual. Personal writing makes smaller claims to truth because it is skeptical of grand theories. It is contingent, ironic, and self-conscious. The personal dimension to these thoughts can propel a reader through an otherwise difficult or unfamiliar argument. Those who ignore the possibilities of taking thought personally miss an important opportunity to write essays that are lucid and accessible without compromising intelligence.