Rethinking Equality: Toward an Ethics of Vulnerable Subjectivity in Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own

Abstract

In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf implicitly exposes the limit of the Suffragette movement’s narrowly defined cause to fight for political equality between men and women. For Woolf, reality is not confined to the relations between them; nor does she believe that gender equality is achieved simply by the enactment of laws. She deploys literature to explore the complexities of life and proposes the androgynous mind as the most favorable perspective for writing that can respond to all the “infinitely obscure lives” of women. Instead of highlighting female agency, this paper contends that Woolf’s conception of subjectivity resonates with but goes beyond Judith Butler’s theoretical conceptualization of a new mode of vulnerable subjectivity characterized by constitutive openness and ethical relations with the world. Drawing from Butler’s notion of vulnerability, this paper also examines Woolf’s reconsideration of gender assignment, her concern with the infinitely obscure lives that vanish without any record, and her ethical and aesthetical engagement with the “things in themselves” to reimagine the possibility of political equality based upon ontological equality.