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Where does female consciousness exist in modernist literature? The idea of “space” as a metaphysical concept manifests itself in many ways. The concept of space can be contrasted with the concept of “place”. A “space” transcends the boundaries of the physical location. While a physical place can be a space, space encompasses more than just a place. It is socio-culturally and consciously constructed by the inhabitants of the space. It can be examined in terms of who occupies it, how, where and when, and these aspects of space are closely linked to societal ideas of gender, class and hegemony. How do the external or physical and internal or psychological affective spaces interact with each other? How are they changed by the way they exist within and outside of an individual’s gender, sexuality, and class?
This essay seeks to examine the interspatial existence of female consciousness as shaped by society and the ways in which it subtly undermines the oppression of such shaping. To this end, this essay analyzes two modernist works, A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf and Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys. Both novels accompany female protagonists on their journey through male-dominated, hegemonic, patriarchal spaces and places. Their thoughts and actions are directly influenced by the physical locations in which they find themselves and socially constructed by norms of class, gender, and sexuality.
Virginia Woolf, born Virginia Stephen, was a British author known for her non-linear narrative approaches in her novels. The most famous of these are Mrs Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927). She also wrote groundbreaking essays on art theory, literary history, women’s literature and power politics. A room for yourself is one such essay by Virginia Woolf, published in 1929. The work was based on two lectures the author gave in 1928 at Newnham College and Girton College, the first two colleges for women at the University of Cambridge. In this essay, considered a seminal work of feminist literature, Woolf argues that a woman must have money and a room of her own to write.
Jean Rhys was a West Indian writer who spent her childhood in Dominica and then moved to London at the age of 16, where she worked as an actress before moving to Paris. There she was encouraged to write by the English writer Ford Madox Ford. Her most famous work is Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), a novel that reconstructs the early life of Antoinette Cosway, Edward Rochester’s madcap first wife in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Good Morning, Midnight was published in 1939 and was her fourth novel. It explores Sasha Jansen’s feelings of depression, loneliness, vulnerability and despair as a middle-aged woman using modernist techniques of fragmentation and stream of consciousness.
In A Room of One’s Own the narrator encounters repeated encounters Restrictions in the rooms Since she is female, she is allowed entry. She attempts to gain access to the library at Oxbridge University, but is denied access due to her gender by a “kind gentleman” who regretfully informs her that “ladies are only permitted entry to the library if accompanied by a Fellow of the College or with a letter of recommendation” (Woolf 12). She goes on to reflect on how “it makes no difference to a famous library to be cursed by a woman” (Woolf 12). This shows that the physical location of the inanimate library is not discriminatory, but rather that the gendered restrictions socially and politically imposed on access to the library construct it as a discriminatory space. This denial of entry impacts the inner, affective space of the narrator’s psyche, as she vows in helpless frustration to “never ask for this hospitality again,” which further impacts her navigation of other physical spaces, as she hears the sound of a church organ, has no desire to enter the chapel even if she had the right, out of self-righteous indignation at the dry thought that the church usher might stop her from doing hers to demand a baptism certificate (Woolf 13). This is just one of many cases of interaction between indoor and outdoor spaces.
Patriarchal hegemony over the female consciousness
In an example of overt patriarchal hegemony over women’s intellectual lives, the narrator’s train of thought is interrupted as she steps onto the lawn, only to be stymied by her identity as a woman and the attendant socially sanctioned restrictions on the spaces in which she can and cannot move. Spurred on by the intellectual power that comes with developing a new idea, she begins to walk briskly across a lawn when a man stops her. In a brief moment of hesitation, she instinctively realizes what is wrong: “He was a church servant; I was a woman. This was the lawn; there was the path. Only the Fellows and Scholars are allowed here; the gravel is the place for me (Woolf 9).” The resigned tone of her inner monologue shows that she accepts the futility of rebellion, and the interruption interrupted her train of thought. By forbidding her from entering the physical space of the lawn, the beadle, as a key representative of the patriarchal system, encroaches on a woman’s freedom of thought and intellectual expression, raising questions about the nature of inner space and the extent to which it is truly one’s own free space, and about who has the freedom to lead an uninterrupted train of thought.
Unlike the narrator in A Room of One’s Own, who walked around lost in thought and unaware of her surroundings, we are dealing with the protagonist of Good Morning, Midnight, Sasha, who is hyperaware of her surroundings. If the narrator’s train of thought in “A Room of One’s Own” is interrupted by male authority, then Sasha’s train of thought is entirely shaped by it. She is always aware of how she perceives others and how she is perceived in different spaces. Her internal affective space does not exist on its own, independent of the external spaces in which she finds herself, but is a direct product of physical locations and the presence of others in those spaces. Her psychological space is fragmented into two versions of herself or inner voice: “The active voice of desire and the passive voice of her social role (Gardiner 249).”
Fragmentation of female consciousness
In an unpleasant interaction with her employer, Mr. Blank, who humiliates her to the point of tears, she leads an inner monologue. Here she delivers soliloquies about how he represents the patriarchal society and that he has the right to alienate her socially, mentally and physically through inadequate opportunities for recreation and fulfillment, but he does not have the right to ridicule her because of the consequences this has on her behavior. But on the outside she remains calm. This type of review shows how the gendered external space shapes their internal affective and cognitive space and how it becomes a reprieve, a consolation from the oppressive, patriarchal external space.
There is a dynamic fluidity between the fragments of Sasha’s self: one flows into the external spaces around her, while the other sits within her, embarking on fictional paths to cope with a reality from which she is alienated.
In Good Morning, Midnight, Sasha often inhabits temporary liminal spaces that are distinct from physical locations. For example, in a dream she finds herself in the passageway of a subway station in London, where people appear to be going to an exhibition. A man screams “murder, murder,” and she also screams for help and wakes up to hear a man singing a waltz (Rhys 4). The liminal space of the tube passage represents an external place in her subconscious. She is suddenly awakened by the increasing intensity of the screams in her dream and the shrill singing of a man. The male presence both indoors and outdoors is uncomfortable and jarring to the female mind, and the reader is not unconscious of this.
The dynamics between inner and outer spaces have been explored in this article through the female narrators of A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf and Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys as they navigate an oppressive, patriarchal society. Interspatial dynamics result from the intersection of multiple social constructs such as gender, sexuality and class. Nevertheless, the boundaries become blurred as the characters’ consciousness fluidly navigates between the two and is repressed in different ways by the patriarchy. In both works, the narrators find different ways to challenge the systems that oppress them. For Virginia Woolf it is a space unto itself, while for Jean Rhys it is Sasha’s strong acceptance and conflict with the alienation and futility of social achievement.
