‘Psychoanalytic Receptions of Woolf’s Vision of Androgyny: Feminist Uses of Ambivalence?’

Abstract

When it comes to the ambivalence of Woolf’s androgyny—is it or is not a ‘feminist’ vision?—the crux of the problem generally lies in definitional problems. What discourse does it hold with respects to the relation between what is called ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’? While some critics have argued that Woolfian androgyny engulfs the woman’s perspective within a pretence of universality/ neutrality/ objectivity which only hardly hides a hegemonic masculine vision, others side for a productive undecidability which acknowledges the generative aspect of Woolf’s oxymoronic writing. Psychoanalytic critics tend to view Woolf’s androgyny not as a simultaneous combination of the ‘feminine’ and the ‘masculine’, but as a dialectic, a constant play between roles that are themselves highly contextual and never immanent. The irreducibility of Woolf’s writing reads as protective against master discourses. Woolf’s writing displays a form of Lacanianism avant la lettre, her practise of the not-all disrupting all systematic frameworks.

Keywords

• Woolf (Virginia)
• androgyny
• psychoanalytic literary criticism
• fusion
• balance
• dialectics