Woolfian Boundaries - Clemson University

102 WOOLFIAN BOUNDARIES
a statement by Sir Arthur Quiller Couch: “Intellectual freedom depends upon material
things. Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom. And women have always been poor….
Women have had less intellectual freedom than the sons of Athenian slaves. Women, then,
have not had a dog’s chance of writing poetry” (162-63).
Th e troika slave-woman-dog is rooted in the legacy of counter-enlightenment discourse
that links slaves and dogs, as well as an equally entrenched patriarchal discourse
that links women and dogs. Th e signifi cance of dogs in the history of slavery is powerful
and complicated, not least because of the way certain dogs were bred to discipline and
hunt down fugitive slaves. But there is also a connected discourse that fi gures slaves themselves
as dogs. Canine slave metaphors are simultaneously engaged and refi gured when
Woolf interferes with the patriarchal legacy of misogynist canine troping, which, I have
shown elsewhere, she sources in Johnson and Carlyle. 3 Woolf’s narrator, then, embodies
her own predicament: to speak of Women and Fiction, she represents herself as already
collared by the fi ction “woman” and its implicit synonyms “dog” and “slave.”
Marcus’s thoroughgoing examination of the “fi ne negress” passage notes parenthetically
the association “of the Negress with the dog [as wild creatures to be tamed and domesticated],”
linked to Woolf’s earlier citation of Johnson’s canine analogy for a woman
preaching (Marcus 49), but she does not address the more complicated canine troping at
play in this passage (indeed, in the same sentence), nor the complexities of its racial marking.
She does, however, judge Woolf’s conjunction of “Negress” with “woman” and “Englishwoman”
that the embedded citation of Johnson’s dog makes available as “unfortunate”
(Marcus 50). Can Woolf’s text, and Woolf herself, slip the collar of “racist” that Marcus’s
persuasive argument seems inevitably to secure? She fi nds Woolf “has robbed her ‘very
fi ne negress’ of subjectivity in much the same way as men appropriated hers”(52). She is
persuasive on the alarming sense of appropriation in Woolf’s text. After all, ownership is
overtly in the tract’s title. “Is she not saying,” Marcus asks, “we have rooms of our own because
they don’t—our sisters in the former colonies on whose labor the ‘fi rst’ world largely
functions?” (42). A “room” of one’s own discloses in mirror form the “moor” of one’s own,
then, standing for the black dispossessed who make white freedom possible.
Marcus’s concern for the subjectivity of the “fi ne negress” is reasonable especially
considering the slippery metaphoric, and free indirect discourse of the sentence and the
larger tract that she inhabits. In such a multi-vocal text, one that is at pains to explore the
connected politics of voice and subjectivity, why, we must ask, is there no clear and direct
citation of a black woman’s words? A more diffi cult, and radical, concern to voice would
be over the subjectivity of the dog. Is it possible that the mutable speaker of this book,
who famously acknowledges a destabilised subjectivity by declaring “‘I’ is only a convenient
term for somebody who has no real being…(call me Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary
Carmichael or by any name you please)” (7), does herself inhabit a canine morphology?
In one version of the cited “Four Maries” Ballad, Mary Hamilton, whom Woolf pointedly
elides and leaves unnamed, sings from the gallows of “Th is dog’s death I’m to die.” 4
In the controversial “fi ne negress” passage, women are distinguished from men by
their historical, inured, “anonymity”:
Th ey are not even now as concerned about the health of their fame as men are,
and, speaking generally, will pass a tombstone or a signpost without feeling an