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  Later still I found the statue again and put it in my children’s bedroom. I don’t know why I did: again, I only felt that I should. It looked anomalous and out of place, next to the little glass dolphin from Venice, the shell collection, the glass dome that you shook to make the snow whirl over the miniature Manhattan skyline. But one day I was in their room and I knocked it over by accident and broke it. I put the broken pieces in a shoebox, and hid them at the back of a cupboard.

  Shakespeare’s Sisters

  Can we, in the twenty-first century, identify something that could be called ‘women’s writing’? To be sure, women are sometimes to be found receiving the winner’s cheque for the Man Booker or Costa prizes, just as they are sometimes to be found piloting your flight home from New York. It may be that in both cases certain sectors of society do not feel entirely secure. But it seems to me that ‘women’s writing’ by nature would not seek equivalence in the male world. It would be a writing that sought to express a distinction, not deny it.

  When a woman in the twenty-first century sits down to write, she perhaps feels rather sexless. She is inclined neither to express nor deny: she’d rather be left alone to get on with it. She might even nurture a certain hostility towards the concept of ‘women’s writing’. Why should she be politicised when she doesn’t feel politicised? It may even, with her, be a point of honour to keep those politics as far from her prose as it is possible to get them. What compromises women – babies, domesticity, mediocrity – compromises writing even more. She is on the right side of that compromise – just. Her own life is one of freedom and entitlement, though her mother’s was probably not. Yet she herself is not a man. She is a woman: it is history that has brought about this difference between herself and her mother. She can look around her and see that while women’s lives have altered in some respects, in others they have remained much the same. She can look at her own body: if a woman’s body signifies anything, it is that repetition is more powerful than change. But change is more wondrous, more enjoyable. It is pleasanter to write the book of change than the book of repetition. In the book of change one is free to consider absolutely anything, except that which is eternal and unvarying. ‘Women’s writing’ might be another name for the book of repetition.

  Two books – Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex and Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own – bring these thoughts to mind. Between them they shaped the discourse of twentieth-century women’s writing, a shape that is still recognisable today; both, famously, are formulated around the concept of property. De Beauvoir’s thesis of the great displacement of woman in history by the male initiative of ownership is the magnification of Woolf’s more literary synthesis of actual and expressive female poverty. A woman needs a room of her own to be able to write; thus her silence has been the silence of dispossession. Yet there is something still deeper and more mysterious in her silence, the mystery of her actual identity. Woolf and De Beauvoir agree that a woman – even a woman with her own room – could never have written Moby-Dick or War and Peace, for ‘civilisation as a whole elaborates this intermediary product between the male and the eunuch that is called feminine’; and as well as lacking a room, woman has lacked a literature of her own. Half silence, half enigma: the words ‘women’s writing’ connote not simply a literature made by women but one that arises out of, and is shaped by, a set of specifically female conditions. A book is not an example of ‘women’s writing’ simply because it is written by a woman. Writing may become ‘women’s writing’ when it could not have been written by a man.

  De Beauvoir’s woman is a beggar – she becomes one, to paraphrase, rather than is born one – comprehensively debased in her slavery, debasing herself, fawning for scraps from the male table. Woolf’s woman is more in the way of a victim, a prisoner. She is actively disbarred; if her nature is warped, it is by fault of circumstance. ‘Art, literature and philosophy are attempts to found the world anew on a human freedom,’ writes De Beauvoir, ‘that of the creator. To foster such an aim, one must first unequivocally posit oneself as a freedom.’ A woman can be given freedom, certainly, but she can never have always had it: ‘one must first emerge within [the world] in sovereign solitude if one wants to try to grasp it anew.’ The temptation for the woman writer, De Beauvoir says, is to use writing as an escape. The woman writer wishes to avoid confrontation, for ‘her great concern is to please; and as a woman she is already afraid of displeasing just because she writes … The writer who is original … is always scandalous; what is new disturbs and antagonises; [but] women are still astonished and flattered to be accepted in the world of thinking and art, a masculine world. The woman watches her manners; she does not dare to irritate, explore, explode.’

  A woman writer, then, loses her integrity – and her chance of greatness – in the attempt to join male literary culture. For, as De Beauvoir says, ‘man is a sexed human being: woman is a complete individual, and equal to the male, only if she too is a sexed human being. Renouncing her femininity means renouncing part of her humanity.’ Thus equality can only be arrived at by the route of difference: but what does this mean for the woman writer? Must she experience kinship with silence and enigma, as the male writer feels kinship for Moby-Dick? Twenty-first-century female culture barely acknowledges its debt to feminism: why should it? And perhaps consequently, today’s woman writer is careful not to show any special interest in today’s woman. Yet if black writers cease to write about what it is to be black, we do not conclude that blackness no longer has any special features, or that racism no longer exists. Oppression, being a type of relationship, can never be resolved, only reconfigured; in its ever-alternating phases of shame and receptivity, the possibility of its return must always remain. Sometimes society is receptive to the language of oppression; at other times it is not, and oppression becomes a cause of shame. Women, then, might cease to produce ‘women’s writing’ not because they are freer but because they are more ashamed, less certain of a general receptiveness, and even, perhaps, because they suspect they might be vilified.

  It is easier to be a historian than a prophet, and when Virginia Woolf said that a woman needed a room of her own and money of her own to write fiction she appeared to be alluding to a female future where possession – property – equalled words as inevitably as dispossession, in the past, had equalled silence. A woman with a room and money will be free to write – but to write what? In A Room of One’s Own Woolf asserts two things: first, that the world – and hence its representations in art – is demonstrably male; and second, that a woman cannot create art out of a male reality. Literature, for most of its history, was a male reality. The form and structure of the novel, the perceptual framework, the very size and character of the literary sentence: these were tools shaped by men for their own uses. The woman of the future, Woolf says, will devise her own kind of sentence, her own form, and she’ll use it to write about her own reality. What’s more, that reality will have its own values: ‘And since a novel has this correspondence to real life, its values are to some extent those of real life. But it is obvious that the values of women differ very often from the values which have been made by the other sex; naturally, this is so. Yet it is the masculine values that prevail … This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room. A scene in a battle-field is more important than a scene in a shop – everywhere and much more subtly the difference of value persists.’

  The independent woman writer, Woolf believed, would in overturning those values write what had not yet been written. The story of woman would ‘light a torch in that vast chamber where nobody has yet been. It is all half lights and profound shadows like those serpentine caves where one goes with a candle peering up and down, not knowing where one is stepping.’

  The future, of course, never comes: it is merely a projection from the present of the present’s frustrations. In the eighty years since Woolf pu
blished A Room of One’s Own, aspects of female experience have been elaborated on with commendable candour, as often as not by male writers. A book about war is still judged more important than a book about ‘the feelings of women’. Most significantly, when a woman writes a book about war she is lauded: she has eschewed the vast unlit chamber and the serpentine caves; there is the sense that she has made proper use of her room and her money, her new rights of property. The woman writer who confines herself to her female ‘reality’ is by the same token often criticised. She appears to have squandered her room, her money. It is as though she has been swindled, or swindled herself; she is the victim of her own exploitation. And as for ‘female values’, who could say what they are? If, as Woolf claims, the values of literature are at any given moment the reflection of the values of life, then we are living in an era in which the female is once more devalued and the male pre-eminent.

  Recently, reading Chekhov’s Three Sisters, it struck me that the question of female self-expression – let’s call it ‘women’s writing’ – becomes confused precisely where the attempt is made to concretise it. Chekhov’s play is based on aspects of the lives of the Brontë sisters; the three women, Olga, Irina and Masha, suffer not only from the confinement and tedium of provincial life but from something antithetical in their relationship to reality. What they feel is not embodied by what they are. They look back to childhood as a time of Edenic simplicity and happiness – as children they did not recognise gender as destiny and limitation – but now all their hopes for accomplishment, for ‘becoming’, have transferred themselves to their brother Andrey. The sisters ponder marriage, love, motherhood, paid work, and yet can find no answer in any of them. It isn’t just female powerlessness that causes the difficulty: it is something more, a force that bears a special hostility to the actual. There is nothing they can be or become that will discharge it. This force might be called creativity; what is interesting is Chekhov’s decision to omit writing from his representation of the situation, and indeed he is careful to maintain only the lightest connection in the play with the extremity of the Brontës’ world. Both the suffering and the writing are transposed into something less tangible and more generalised, something that touches on the nature of woman herself.

  Woman is filled with visions and yearnings that are never matched by reality; she has a power of visualisation, of imagination, that her lack of worldly power forever frustrates. Yes, she might produce literature out of this conflict in her being. But she is more likely to produce silence. And in Chekhov’s version, the conflict between being and becoming grows more severe as life advances, because the space for intangibility shrinks. Irina and Olga are made to share a room because their sister-in-law wants Irina’s room for her new baby. Thus the woman who has embraced what Woolf calls the ‘masculine values’, who agrees to exist as woman on male terms, gains a territorial advantage over the woman who has not. Moreover, the two types of woman have become mutually hostile. The woman who has her being in marriage and motherhood has become part of antithetical reality, revoking property from the woman who remains in a condition of intangible femininity.

  It may be, then, that the room of one’s own does not have quite the straightforward relationship to female creativity that Woolf imagined. She, after all, had by dint of circumstance always had a room and money of her own, and perhaps being the eternal conditions of her own writing they seemed to her indispensable. Yet she admits that the two female writers she unequivocally admired – Jane Austen and Emily Brontë – wrote in shared domestic space. The room, or the lack of it, doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with writing at all. It could be said that every woman should have a room of her own. But it may equally be the case that a room of her own enables the woman writer to shed her links with femininity and commit herself to the reiteration of ‘masculine values’. The room itself may be the embodiment of those values, a conception of ‘property’ that is at base unrelated to female nature.

  Woolf confesses that she does not know what women are: they have left so little trace behind them, she says, have observed such a profound silence over the centuries that they are virtually unhistoried. The woman artist must grasp the scanty threads of her forebears – Austen, George Eliot, the Brontës. She must cling on to what representation there is. Yet Chekhov is perhaps the more perceptive on this point. The representation inspired him to consider the silence, not the other way around. It is the silence itself which interests him, and it interests him not as an absence but as a presence. Woolf, in A Room of One’s Own, sees that presence in terms of Shakespeare’s imaginary sister Judith: a person she describes as being like her brother William in every respect except that of sex, who is frustrated and silenced and abused at every turn where he is recognised and advanced and congratulated. But Chekhov does not consider the female in terms of the male. He sees her as thwarted in her own being, as fundamentally unknown even to herself. In Three Sisters, Irina expresses this concept of silence as arising from a lack of connection between emotion and actuality: ‘Oh, I used to think so much of love,’ she says. ‘I have been thinking about it for so long by day and by night, but my soul is like a costly piano which is locked and the key lost.’ She does not say who locked the piano, nor who lost the key; just that it was costly, and is silent.

  Doris Lessing enlarges on these themes in her story ‘To Room Nineteen’, where a conventionally – if not happily – married mother of four children begins to experience the desire to have a room of her own. The desire is a kind of plague: she doesn’t know why she wants the room, nor what she will use it for. But she has to have it. She does feel a strong urge to free herself from the impingement of other people: this is the only explanation she can offer, that she wants to be where no one can get at her. First she designates an unused room in the family home as ‘hers’, but this doesn’t satisfy her. People can still find her there; the children come in and leave their toys on the floor. But more than that, she doesn’t actually want to be in this room. It becomes clear that what she wants is to sever her ties with existence itself. She rents a room in a seedy hotel in an unpleasant part of town, and every afternoon she goes there and lies on the bed. This room, room number 19, she identifies as ‘hers’: she is upset when she arrives one afternoon to discover that it isn’t free (it’s a hotel, after all). To explain her disappearances, she tells her husband she is having an affair. He is pleased: he himself has affairs, and now he feels exonerated. One afternoon, in room 19, she kills herself.

  In Lessing’s story, as in Three Sisters, writing is ‘silent’. We know that Lessing, a woman, wrote it, as we know that the Brontës wrote. But in both cases, the self-expressive space of the actual drama remains unfilled: Lessing’s character does not go to room 19 to write bestselling novels, any more than Olga and Irina channel their frustrations into the production of literary works. Writing, ‘women’s writing’, thus comes to mean something else, something new: it describes what it is not, it defines its opposite, silence; it puts itself at the service of what negates it. In Lessing’s story the room – the room of one’s own – is death, death of female reality, death as an alternative to compromise. The author acknowledges that her writing is the kin of death and silence, that her ‘room’ is a place menaced by compromise. And better death than the furtherance of ‘masculine values’.

  Woolf concedes that the woman writer might have to break everything – the sentence, the sequence, the novel form itself – to create her own literature. And she wonders, too, whether a situational link between women’s lives and their work, far from impeding their writing, might actually be necessary to it; whether, in other words, it was because Austen wrote behind the door in the shared sitting room that Pride and Prejudice is the flawless novel it is. It is a requirement of art that the artist be unified with his or her own material. Stumblingly, Woolf hazards the guess that a ‘female’ literature will be shorter, more fragmentary, interrupted, ‘for interruptions there will always be’. And her own Mrs
Dalloway might be read as a novel about its author’s fear of her own ordinariness and triviality, her dread sexual ancestry with its silence and compromise and mediocrity, the awful frailty of her expressive gift, without which, as she wrote in her diary, she believed she would be nothing at all.

  It may be that today’s woman writer doesn’t have much to do with the concept of ‘women’s writing’. Feminism as a cultural and political crisis comes and goes. Marriage, motherhood and domesticity are regarded as so many choices, about which there is a limited entitlement to complain. If a woman feels suffocated and grounded and bewildered by her womanhood, she feels these things alone, as an individual: there is currently no public unity among women, because since the peak of feminism the task of woman has been to assimilate herself with man. She is, therefore, occluded, scattered, disguised. Were a woman writer to address her sex, she would not know who or what she was addressing. Superficially this situation resembles equality, except that it occurs within the domination of ‘masculine values’. What today’s woman has gained in personal freedom she has lost in political caste. Hers is still the second sex, but she has earned the right to dissociate herself from it.

  In this context Simone de Beauvoir’s assertion that one is not born a woman but becomes one gains a new kind of potency. If modern woman has no identity, her ‘becoming’ is both more random and more mysterious. The danger, surely, is that she will ‘become’ – violently – in those parts of life where her sex can be experienced as unitary. In other words, if the difference of gender goes unexamined – is made to seem as though it doesn’t exist – the girl will be more, not less, magnetised and fascinated by that difference. And she will look around her and see that the politicians, the captains of industry, the bankers and the power brokers and the commentators are mostly men. This may be the reason – if there can be a reason – for the woman writer to risk taking femaleness and female values as her subject. ‘The fact is that the traditional woman is a mystified consciousness and an instrument of mystification,’ De Beauvoir writes. ‘She tries to conceal her dependence from herself, which is a way of consenting to it.’ Some of the most passionate writing in The Second Sex concerns the ways in which women seek to protect their privileges and property under patriarchy by condemning or ridiculing the honesty of other women. This remains true today: woman continues to act as an ‘instrument of mystification’ precisely where she fears and denies her own dependence. For the woman writer this is a scarifying prospect. She can find herself disowned in the very act of invoking the deepest roots of shared experience. Having taken the trouble to write honestly, she can find herself being read dishonestly. And in my own experience as a writer, it is in the places where honesty is most required – because it is here that compromise and false consciousness and ‘mystification’ continue to endanger the integrity of a woman’s life – that it is most vehemently rejected. I am talking, of course, about the book of repetition, about fiction that concerns itself with what is eternal and unvarying, with domesticity and motherhood and family life. The sheer intolerance, in the twenty-first century, for these subjects is the unarguable proof that woman is on the verge of surrendering important aspects of her modern identity.