Staying True to Androgyny: Towards a Rhizome Consciousness

Abbreviations

GMB - Girl Meets Boy

The advent of gender studies brought about numerous literary approaches centred on identity politics. Two of the dominant schools of literary criticism to arise with any defined presence were feminist and psychoanalytic literary theories. The literature of Virginia Woolf is not only bound with modernist aesthetics; it also carries connotations of difficulty in its apprehension. Critical evaluation of the above strands of criticism fall short of Woolf’s radical vision of gender — articulated via her theory of androgyny.

Her 1929 publication, A Room of One’s Own, is a testament to this. Whereas female-based studies emphasise the feminist credentials of her manifesto, psychoanalytic scholarship applies Freud’s father-dominated, Oedipal schema as an interpretative model. For example, in Androgyny: The Sexist Myth in Disguise, critic Daniel Harris overlooks the element of sexual neutralisation in the androgyny. Rather, he asserts that Woolf’s inclusion of the male subject in the union reinforces the phallogocentric code it seeks to eliminate.

A plausible explanation for Harris' misinterpretation of androgyny is the historical treatment of modern subjectivity. In the Seventies, a re-visitation to the notion of the human affirmed that that the

‘constant or standard [had been] the average adult-white-heterosexual-European-male.’ [1]

In other words, Western hegemony reproduces patriarchal dynamics through a binary oppositional system which rests on the stereotypical pairs of male/female. Instead of the symbiosis of sexes, these dualisms encourage the repressive structures of the Oedipal family. In so doing, they strengthen the male supremacy — namely the "One" — and relegate women to the subordinated status of the "Other". The poststructuralist paradigm shall enable our revisionary aims against the constraints critics tend to place.

To this end, we approach Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poem Aurora Leigh conceptually, driven by the philosophical underpinnings of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (hereafter referred to as D&G) alongside other poststructuralist and new materialist feminist critics.

The concept of ‘becoming-androgynous’ reveals the mixture of the Deleuzo-Guattarian figuration of ‘becoming’ and Woolf’s ‘androgyny.’ The latter suggests a differently gendered being, in whom masculine and feminine coexist, thereby reflecting a shift on strategies of interpretation. Similarly, D&G’s thesis inscribes sexual difference in a new framework where the psychoanalytic “One-versus-the-Other” pattern of subjectivity is replaced with a multiple, nomadic process of individuation.

Woolf’s androgynous mode of thinking – pre-empted by EBB in Aurora Leigh – fosters a re-imagining of the subject beyond sexual divisiveness. It incorporates masculinity and femininity in a wider continuum of gender performance options, which anticipates recent debates on feminist and queer theory. It has paved the way for writers, such as Ali Smith and Maggie Nelson, to experiment with form and establish new kinship arrangements.

Consequently, this paper is directed toward a twofold aim: to break from archetypal readings of Woolf and Browning in order to shed new light to their writings and chart the developments in twenty-first century feminist and queer literature.

Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1929)

Gilles Deleuze’s philosophical methodology works towards three aims: 1. to correct an error on the subject at issue; 2. to repair an oversight; 3. to create a new concept. Taking on his method, this entry addresses the paradox that Woolf raises in A Room of One’s Own, which considers male and female as extreme poles of the same phenomenon — literary production in this case.

Woolf’s essay does not simply act as a prism whereby one can explore feminist perspectives; she situates her text in a wide-ranging discourse on sexuality, gendered values, and education allowing critics to elicit a varied network of meanings related to it. Novelist Arnold Bennett interprets Woolf by means of ascribing a hierarchical reasoning to her work. Focusing on her discussion of women and fiction, he asserts that the feminist politics resulting from it cannot resolve the difference between the sexes.

However, critic Derek Ryan repairs a major oversight in Bennett’s analysis by acclaiming the figure of androgyny, arguing that it

‘multiplies difference to create [a more complicated subject] that [transcends any] oppositional relation.’ [1]

Bennet’s interpretative shortcoming stems from his view of the woman writer as, in Deleuzo-Guattarian terminology, a molar entity—assigned as a subject and defined by her form. To Bennett’s misreading, Ryan valorises Woolf’s imaginative androgyny, for he believes it enables

‘‘the creation of ‘molecular’, multiplicitous, non-hierarchal attachments’’. [2]

In the spirit of Deleuze’s third criteria, our entry develops the becoming-androgynous term to account for Woolf’s affirmation of sexual difference. In Deleuzo-Guattarian terms, ‘becoming’ signifies an on-going process of change. Therefore, the becoming-androgynous theorises a move beyond binary oppositions and the patriarchal representation of women.

Woolf’s proposal of the androgynous mind redraws the asymmetrical lines of a literary tradition in which the portrayal of womanhood comes

‘illegitimately into existence [by men] before a woman could say what happens when she goes into a room.’ [3]

Given that the ‘rooms’ Woolf illustrates 'differ so completely,’ [4] the androgynous ideal rejects sameness — that is the imitation of a ‘masculine’ prose — to cultivate difference on an individual level. With their access into a ‘room’ and a ‘language’ owned by men, women will assume a distinct artistic voice and overcome the ‘stridently sex-conscious’[5] literary canon.

Indeed, it is the ‘marriage of opposites’ [6] that which brings out the multiplicity within the singular ‘without restricting one by the other or excluding the other from the one.’ [7]

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh (1856)

Elizabeth Barrett Browning has laid the groundwork for this cross-dwelling subjectivity, aligning feminine with masculine principles, to emerge and inspire Woolf. In her hybrid novel-poem, Aurora Leigh, EBB does not only rework the Victorian gender paradigm by granting her eponymous heroine a public existence outside the domestic sphere. Her poetics also trespass traditionally male literary terrain so that to revise the compositional map of epic poetry.

From a poststructuralist viewpoint, Aurora Leigh’s form and thematic concerns exhibit an anarchic structure, reminiscent of the Deleuzo-Guattarian metaphor of the "rhizome". Contrary to a normal root system that epitomises the binary logic, a rhizome is an underground stem which, while presenting a complex root structure, involves multiple pathways and understands multiplicities.

In her depictions of Aurora, Browning refuses to prescribe fixed roles of ideal femininity based on the reductive set of subjectivities: woman / domestic / sentimental. Rather, she sets Aurora in discursive practices of gender inversions that challenge the status quo of her time.

In Book IX, 163, Lady Waldemar points out the nuptial arrangements of feminine and masculine in Aurora, stressing that the latter shares a physical resemblance with Romney along with the same last name: ‘Your droop of eyelid is the same as his.’ [8]

However, where Woolf uses the androgyny to ensure equal agency in the literary canon, Browning goes further with her fusions of opposing forces. The collaborative work of D&G, A Thousand Plateaus, proves instrumental in the analysis that follows. In their book, D&G maintain that each multiplicity is symbiotic:

‘[It] ties together animals, plants, microorganisms, […] a whole galaxy.’ [9]

At Book I, 1071-1073, in an attempt to break the mould of a gender-specific experience and her conventional lifestyle as an English lady, Aurora likens herself to an animal; a deer — but a stag, not a doe:

'I threw my hunters off and plunged myself/ Among the deep hills, as a hunted stag/ Will take the waters.' [10]

By looking at this aspect of her work from a poststructuralist angle, we offer new insights on a polymorphous mode of being that resists the rigid Victorian regime of identity shaping.

Ali Smith, Girl Meets Boy (2007)

This entry foregrounds Ali Smith’s Girl Meets Boy so as to illuminate its radical agenda. Engaging with the arguments made by D&G and Rosi Braidotti, it sets out to locate the concepts of androgyny and rhizome consciousness within the novella. Despite being a transposition of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Smith presents a fluid take on the myth. GMB is formally modernist. The five chapters that comprise it are being alternatively narrated by the perspectives of two sisters, Anthea and Imogen, which suggests fluidity and movement.

Additionally, the opening line is exemplary of gender mixing:

‘Let me tell you about when I was a girl, our grandfather says.’ [11]

Here, Smith unsettles the conventional pattern of storytelling with subversive potential, for gender is rendered malleable. Central to Smith’s invocation of Braidotti’s notion of "nomadism" — sharing features with Woolf’s "androgyny" — is her heroine Robin Goodman. Rather than the unity of identities, her gender ambiguous name advocates their merging as a response to

‘the nonfixity of boundaries [and the need] to go on trespassing.’ [12]

Aside from being the girl who is a “good man”, her name is also an intertextual reference to Robin Goodfellow — a figure in Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream of analogous gender indeterminacy.

GMB replicates the archetypal text insofar as it revives certain treatments of sexuality to stage a dialogue between past and present. This moving, stretching out across place and time — from Greece to England, from the ancient to contemporary — signals the dismissal of borders, while it is also pivotal to rhizome thinking and nomadic embodiments. Iphis’ sex change as prerequisite of a happy ending in the Ovidian account is not compatible with Smith’s version.

Unlike Metamorphoses and its trope of homosexual impossibility, in GMB the characters remain intact. Anthea re-enacts the concept of metamorphosis, when falling for a girl, but for a mode of becoming that echoes Deleuzo-Guattarian sentiments of non-binary identity formations.

Smith’s alternative vision of subjectivity destabilises Ovid’s perception of normality. By featuring a romance of equal female partners, she overturns the genitally-centred active/passive registers and celebrates otherness. Her textual nomadic subjects communicate a strong political statement: transformations require social acceptance rather than divine interventions to make them happen.

Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts (2015)

By employing the diffractive reading methodology that theorist Karen Barad propounds, including the claims of new materialist Luce Irigaray, this entry examines Nelson’s radical take on genre and gender. Recognising the permeable boundaries of genre and identity categories, Nelson adopts a rhizomatic sensibility to explore difference and unthinkable connections. In her “auto-theory”, she reconciles “autobiography” with “theory” in order to chronicle her relationship with her gender-fluid partner, Harry, and her experience of motherhood.

Given that the diffractive approach

‘through multiple theoretical insights’ eschews institutionalised reading habits, the book ‘spreads thought in unpredictable patterns’ [13]

and on alternative displays of selfhood. The Argonauts reads as a philosophical memoir, for Nelson elaborates accounts of gendered lives at the integration of personal history and critical theory. Particularly, alongside her reflections stand thinkers from diverse disciplines. This interplay of conjoined voices disrupts the dominance of one perspective and the divide it poses between academia and texts on parenting.

From a queer perspective, her project’s interdisciplinary character is a genre-resistance strategy which embodies the failures of heteronormativity, that is

‘the Aristotelian […] need to put everything into categories.’ It calls for a renewal of contacts, providing occasions for extensive reflections on ‘the transitive, […] the great soup of being in which we actually live.’ [14]

Nelson’s re-conceptualisation of the nuclear family unit demonstrates how transgressive identity performances arise and with what political resonances. Harry is Woolf’s androgyny incarnate who problematises contemporary identity politics, being the representative of Nelson’s novel genderqueer kinships and a self-identified slippery-pronoun individual.

This entry also wishes to outline Nelson’s developments in current feminist considerations on sexual difference with her new version of “mothering”. The renewed interest of New Materialism in the materiality of the body, as outlined in Luce Irigaray’s The Bodily Encounter with the Mother, informs Nelson’s proposal of ‘sodomitical maternity’.

Whereas an early feminist critic, such as Karen Horney, might prompt that one privileges a female’s intellect over her body, a new materialist feminist, like Irigaray, moves a step forward. She recognises women’s imprisonment in bodily associations but goes on to reclaim that very body from past representations. Nelson’s figure of the ‘sodomitical mother’ provides new materialist framings of the body.

She is a mother but also a discrete individual—one that engages in non-procreative sexual activity while sustaining control over her pleasure and reproduction. In remapping the maternal ideal to sexuality, the text generates demarcated zones and powerfully autonomous models of maternal finitude.

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[1]Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London: The Continuum, 2003), p. 105.

[2] Derek Ryan, Virginia Woolf and the Materiality of Theory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), p. 68.

[3] Ryan, Virginia Woolf and the Materiality of Theory, p. 53.

[4] Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (London: Penguin Books, 2000), p. 113.

[5] Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, p. 114.

[6] Ibid., p. 129.

[7] Ibid., p. 87.

[8] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London: The Continuum, 2003), p. 76.

[9] Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh: A Poem (Illinois: Academy Chicago Publishes, 1992), p. 326, IX. 163. p. 326.

[10] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London: The Continuum, 2003), p. 250.

[11] Browning, Poems by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, p. 35, I. 1071 – 1073.

[12] Ali Smith, Girl Meets Boy (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2007), p. 1.

[13] Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiments and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory (New York: Columbia UP, 1994), p. 66.

[14] Lisa A. Mazzei, ‘Beyond an Easy Sense: A Diffractive Analysis’, Qualitative Inquiry 2014, Vol. 20(6) 742–746.

[15] Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts (London: Melville House: 2016), p. 66.

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Bibliography

Barrett, Browning Elizabeth, Aurora Leigh: A Poem (Illinois: Academy Chicago Publishes, 1992)

Braidotti, Rosi, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiments and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory (New York: Columbia UP, 1994)

Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London: The Continuum, 2003)

_____, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London: The Continuum, 2003)

Mazzei, Lisa A., ‘Beyond an Easy Sense: A Diffractive Analysis’, Qualitative Inquiry 2014, Vol. 20(6)

Nelson, Maggie, The Argonauts (London: Melville House: 2016)

Ryan, Derek, Virginia Woolf and the Materiality of Theory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013)

Smith, Ali, Girl Meets Boy (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2007)

Woolf, Virginia, A Room of One’s Own (London: Penguin Books, 2000)

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Becoming-Androgynous: Towards a Rhizome Consciousness last modified: 18 December 2020

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