Dual voice and submerged authorial intention in Virginia Woolf 's A Room of One's Own

Abstract

There has been still a controversy about the conflicts between radical feminism and feminism of androgyny, so called the duel between stage two and stage three feminism if we use Julia Kristeva (209), although this kind of dichotomy is almost losing its ground when she says the latter one does not necessarily negate the former because all three feminisms are required and needed for the liberation of women. But the issue here lies at the fact that the harmonious androgyny is still precociously utopian even today when practical feminist issues including abortion and genital mutilation have not been yet remarkably resolved so far. Theories of radical feminism and the debate between stage two and three are still paradoxically needed to lay a foundation on to solve those practical problems of the society. Virginia Woolf’s famous feminist manifesto, A Room of One's Own (1929) is, therefore, still a good literary work to deal with this issue of which is a good or “the” best feminist position. Woolf could formulate and contain her idea of radical feminism in the age of Victorian-Edwardian England in which potently surveillant patriarchy prevailed, while hiding and camouflaging her feminist anger enveloped within the surface of androgyny. Again, however, despite risking the fallacy of authorial intention, which one is Woolf's real voice out of these two? Femininity or Androgyny? The expressed one or the suppressed one behind this narrative? Both or neither? My argument is that Woolf could reveal her anger and rage while pretending to conceal her radical notion of femininity under utopian androgyny. In spite of her fear of being calleda radical or sometimes a sappy feminist, she could praise femininity by using multiple personae and evasive narrative technique.