Chapter 6

我母静恒

Content Interpretation
Chapter 6 opens with Woolf looking out her window at London on the morning of October 26, 1928, observing the city’s indifference to literature and the private preoccupations of its inhabitants. This moment of observation becomes transformative when she witnesses a girl and young man meeting at a corner and getting into a taxi together—a sight that triggers a crucial insight about the mind’s unity. Woolf realizes that thinking constantly of one sex as distinct from the other creates strain, and that seeing the two sexes come together restores a natural equilibrium. This leads her to articulate her theory of androgyny: that the mind contains both masculine and feminine elements that must cooperate harmoniously for creative work to flourish. She invokes Coleridge’s assertion that “a great mind is androgynous,” interpreting this to mean a mind that is “resonant and porous,” that “transmits emotion without impediment” and is “naturally creative, incandescent and undivided.” Shakespeare’s mind becomes her exemplar of this androgynous creativity.

However, Woolf immediately complicates this ideal by examining contemporary male writers who, she argues, have become stridently “sex-conscious” in response to the women’s suffrage movement. She reads a novel by “Mr A” and finds it dominated by an oppressive “I”—the author’s masculine ego casting a shadow over everything, turning female characters into shapeless figures and reducing scenes to assertions of male superiority. This self-conscious virility, she argues, blocks creative energy and produces sterile protest rather than genuine art. She extends this critique to established writers like Galsworthy and Kipling, whose celebration of exclusively male virtues and values makes their work inaccessible to women readers, lacking the “suggestive power” that allows literature to penetrate deeply into consciousness. Woolf warns against an age of “pure, self-assertive virility” and concludes that “it is fatal for anyone who writes to think of their sex.”

The chapter concludes with Woolf, speaking as Mary Beton, summarizing her argument that women need five hundred pounds a year and a room with a lock to write, while acknowledging the limitations and potential objections to her thesis. She refuses to engage in comparative judgments about male and female writers, insisting such measurements are futile and servile. She defends her emphasis on material conditions by quoting Professor Quiller-Couch, who demonstrates that great poets have historically required economic security and education. Finally, she ends with her vision of Shakespeare’s sister, who “never wrote a word and was buried at the cross-roads,” but who “still lives” in contemporary women and will be reborn if women gain the freedom, resources, and courage to write exactly what they think and see reality directly rather than only through their relations to men.

Personal Insight
What arrests me most in this chapter is the profound contradiction at the heart of Woolf’s androgyny theory—she prescribes gender-transcendence as the condition for great art while her entire book demonstrates that gender is an inescapable material reality that shapes consciousness and creativity. This tension reveals something Woolf seems reluctant to fully articulate: that androgyny might be less a universal aesthetic ideal than a privilege available only to those whose gender has never been weaponized against them. Shakespeare’s androgynous mind achieved incandescence precisely because his masculinity was socially invisible, unmarked, requiring no defense. But when Woolf declares it “fatal” for anyone to write consciously as a man or woman, she creates an impossible double bind for women writers: they must transcend gender consciousness while facing obstacles that exist precisely because of their gender.

The asymmetry becomes unmistakable when we examine what androgyny demands from each sex. For male writers to become androgynous, they need only relax their defensive masculinity and return to the unmarked universalism they previously enjoyed. But for women writers, androgyny requires incorporating the masculine perspective—learning to see from a position of privilege they have never occupied, achieving synthesis between their experience of subordination and an imagined experience of dominance. When Woolf insists women must not “plead even with justice any cause” or “speak consciously as a woman,” she is requiring women to perform a kind of self-erasure, suppressing awareness of the very conditions that necessitated her book. Having documented five chapters of systematic oppression, she now demands that women write as if none of it matters, as if they can transcend gendered experience through pure will.

The deepest irony is that A Room of One’s Own itself violates Woolf’s prescription for androgyny. This book is consciously written as a woman speaking to women about women’s condition—it is precisely the engaged, occasionally angry, politically conscious writing she declares “fatal” to art. If Woolf had achieved the androgynous transcendence she prescribes, we would not have this text. Her theory of androgyny thus functions as strategic retreat: having made her political argument as forcefully as possible, she ends by suggesting that truly great writing must transcend such concerns, as if to reassure her audience that real art would never be so partisan. This does not invalidate her argument but reveals its historical specificity—androgyny as an ideal encodes the anxiety of a moment when women first gained literary voice but were immediately told that voice must not sound too feminine, too angry, too marked by gender. The universal aesthetic principle turns out to be a very particular response to the conditions of 1928, when political consciousness in women’s writing was dismissed as shrillness, when the price of being heard was pretending one had nothing particular to say.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​