Making of a New Virginia Woolf Icon, The

College Literature, Summer 2005 by Clewell, Tammy

When Humm turns her attention to modernist women's cinema writings, she reads these texts as a celebration of the democratic, popular, and everyday experience of film and women's film-going. While attempting to forestall charges of essentialism in her account, Humm nevertheless charts clear-cut gender differences in cinema writing: male contributors to Close Up and other journals privilege avant-garde cinema against commercial films and the feminization of popular culture, whereas female writers "refuse to engage in patronising dismissals of popular audiences" (2003, 158). Colette's writings in France describe cinema as a women's public space and employ a female style by creating dialogues between female film-goers. H.D.'s cinema writing emphasizes autobiographical viewing experiences, presents everyday audiences as knowledgeable, and upholds cinema as a popular form. Other writers, including Janet Planner, Adrienne Monnier, Annie Ellerman Bryher, Dorothy Richardson, Gertrude Stein, and Woolf, variously "write the feminine by analysing cinema through a gendered lens" (2003, 185). Humm's analysis of women's cinema writing, along with her discussion ofWoolf's and Bell's photography, challenges a purist conception of modernist aesthetics by detailing how modernist women raise domestic and gender concerns when participating in commercial forms of visual culture.

Black's Virginia Woolf as Feminist also contributes in important ways to understanding the social contexts in which Woolf worked. The figure of Woolf that her book on Three Guineas reveals is of a "radical" and "political" feminist committed to provoking an awareness of the structures of patriarchy that oppress women and foment war. Black is particularly adept at handling the vexed issue ofWoolf's hostility to the term "feminism," suggesting that the text's narrator advocates burning the publicly stigmatized word not because she rejects feminist goals but because she seeks to expand the aims of feminism and include a wholesale restructuring of society along nonpatriarchal, non-hierarchal, and non-nationalistic lines. Black also insightfully discusses the significance of the text's title, reminding us that the guinea, equivalent to a pound plus one shilling, had long been associated with the upper classes who used the term when billing and paying for a variety of professional services and items. Black cautions against viewing the text's references to guineas as a reflection ofWoolf's failure to acknowledge her own privileged social status. Rather, she argues that Woolf s writing calls attention to the "usually submerged gender dimension" involved in discussions of class (2004, 175), showing how women from both the working and upper classes had far less power than men to control the use of family resources. Woolf 's text highlights, then, the importance of women's financial support of political organizations committed to gender reform, at the same time it critiques the gender discrimination that makes such support difficult.