MICHAEL ROSENTHAL
559
The feminist claim on Woolf has lately been joined by the androgynist,
which sees Woolf s novels as endorsing the splendors of the androgynous
mind as a palliative
to
all our ills. Taking as a seminal passage Woolfs dis–
cussion in
A Room
0/
One 's Own
of the healthy adult mind being able
to
transcend any narrow sexual role , the hunters of androgyny doggedly chase
the metaphor through all of Woolfs fiction, hacking out new patterns of
meaning as they go. But metaphors are better left in peace to illuminate the
specific contexts in which they appear. The illustrative use of androgyny to
represent the kind of wide-ranging, nondogmatic, resonant intelligence
Woolf finds admirable cannot be generalized into establishing Woolf s
" androgynous vision." To discover that Woolf believes that men and
women should share a complex view of reality, one as free as possible from
the parochialisms of any single sex, is not
to
discover anything very new
about her work.
If Woolf is to survive as other than a precious oddity of the modernist
movement, it will be neither as a member of a coterie , a radical feminist , nor
a prophetic androgynist. Sexual ideologies and exotic ambiences aside ,
Woolf s fiction must be able to meet the reservation still shared by many
and most recently expressed by Elizabeth Hardwick in
Seduction and Be–
trayal:
acknowledging the richness of Woolf s language and the glow of her
genius, Hardwick goes on to say, " yet in a sense , her novels aren 't inter–
esting." Whatever else novels are, they should at least be interesting, and
it is a fact that hers have not always been thought so . Woolf was herself
aware that her work posed more than the usual difficulties for readers. Her
diary notes with sympathy (and some irritation) the puzzled efforts of critics
to comprehend what she is doing. The problems are real, and a passage from
Between the Acts ,
her last novel, suggests what they are: "Did the plot
matter? She shifted and looked over her right shoulder. The plot was only
there
to
beget emotion. ... Don' t bother about the plot: the plot's noth–
ing." Isa's reflection on the meaning of Miss
La
Trobe's pageant at once
describes Woolfs own art and points out the greatest obstacle
to
its appre–
ciation. For plot is indeed nothing in Woolfs fiction and character, Isa
might have gone on to say-or at least character as traditionally conceived–
not much more . Novelists who dispense with both of these staples are going
to have difficult times, and Woolf has received her share of critical abuse
for writing novels in which, it is argued, nothing happens.
Not, of course, that she is the sole practitioner of the twentieth-century
novel
to
have abandoned established notions of plot and character; the
modern novel clearly developed through precisely such liberties , but in
many ways her work is the most radical. For despite the formal break–
throughs made by Contad, Ford, Lawrence , Joyce , and others, their work
