“What a Difference a Tail Makes”: Woolf, Modernism, Feminist Posthumanism
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In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf’s narrator, luncheoning with university fellows, spies a Manx cat and registers a lack in the conversation around her, a difference in the sound of voices, and speculates on the different kinds of poetry men and women might have hummed at parties prior to World War I. Finding the thought “ludicrous,” she explains her laughter by pointing to the tailless cat, thinking: “It is a queer animal, quaint rather than beautiful. It is strange what a difference a tail makes.” The “strangeness” of this “difference,” I argue, reflects the deep, intricate entanglement of human and nonhuman in Woolf’s feminist thinking, which decenters patriarchal, humanist epistemologies and de-essentializes gender and other identity categories. Woolf’s complex notion of androgyny, then, may be productively revisited from a posthumanist perspective, for her modernist anthropomorphisms subvert the will to dominate, universalize and hierarchize, inherent in anthropocentric thinking. Ultimately, her staging of new, less anthropocentric relations between human and nonhuman, “thinking of things in themselves,” generates a form of critique that denaturalizes hierarchy, affirms difference, and invites collaboration to create a world where the woman writer “shall find it possible to live and write her poetry.”
Abstract
In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf’s narrator, luncheoning with university fellows, spies a Manx cat and registers a lack in the conversation around her, a difference in the sound of voices, and speculates on the different kinds of poetry men and women might have hummed at parties prior to World War I. Finding the thought “ludicrous,” she explains her laughter by pointing to the tailless cat, thinking: “It is a queer animal, quaint rather than beautiful. It is strange what a difference a tail makes.” The “strangeness” of this “difference,” I argue, reflects the deep, intricate entanglement of human and nonhuman in Woolf’s feminist thinking, which decenters patriarchal, humanist epistemologies and de-essentializes gender and other identity categories. Woolf’s complex notion of androgyny, then, may be productively revisited from a posthumanist perspective, for her modernist anthropomorphisms subvert the will to dominate, universalize and hierarchize, inherent in anthropocentric thinking. Ultimately, her staging of new, less anthropocentric relations between human and nonhuman, “thinking of things in themselves,” generates a form of critique that denaturalizes hierarchy, affirms difference, and invites collaboration to create a world where the woman writer “shall find it possible to live and write her poetry.”
참고문헌 (24)
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