Woolfian Boundaries - Clemson University

78 WOOLFIAN BOUNDARIES
advantages of marking women’s bodies as the property of one man and hence prohibited
to others, still persist.
Th ree Guineas’s second letter, asking for the second guinea, comes as a request for
cast-off garments for “women whose professions require that they should have presentable
day and evening dresses which they can ill aff ord to buy” (TG 179). Debating with herself
whether to contribute her guinea to dressing women for the professions, with the prospect
of one day being allowed to wear a judge’s wig, an ermine cape, a military uniform, the
essayist refl ects that opening the professions to women is in eff ect to substitute one system
of exchange value (work) for another (sex). Moreover, this new exchange system comes
with a set of ties—dog collars, ribbons, and badges inscribed with the duties of God and
Empire—which chastity did not have. With a choice between the veil and the dog collar,
and the recognition of a degree of freedom behind the veil—the freedom of “derision”
as well as freedom from “unreal loyalties” (TG 90)—chastity is a real option. In the end,
the essayist’s guinea comes with the condition that bodily chastity is translated, not into
Flügel’s narcissism and nudity, but into mental chastity: the state of dressing for the professions
without marrying them, of remaining sceptical of patriarchy’s symbolic systems
and their enunciative force, retaining the defamiliarizing gaze from behind the veil.
In some sense Virginia’s “mental chastity” would seem to coincide with Leonard’s
recommended tactic of setting sceptical reason against the susceptibility to symbols—the
piece of cloth around the arm or the intuition conveyed as trope or analogy. In light of
Virginia’s thinking on language, however, the impossibility of such coincidence becomes
apparent. It is hardly surprising that Virginia has a diff erent conception of the traffi cs of
language than Leonard. She knows that words are “out and about” and that they consummate
their own “swift marriages,” as she puts it in “Craftsmanship”(DM 129, 132). It is a
marriage of this kind—brought about by the rhythmic, intertextual, syntagmatic fl ux of
the unselfconscious mind, freed from the grip of vanity—that she sets against the fascist
“abortion” and the capitalised Symbol in A Room of One’s Own: “a girl in patent leather
boots” and “a young man in a maroon overcoat” swept together by the current of traffi c
to “celebrate their nuptials in darkness” (98, 92, 99). In Leonard’s thinking, naked language,
the vehicle of transparent reasoning, is what redeems civilisation from the inspired
bodies of metaphysical and ideological quackery, and from the useful bodies of the fascist
machinery of war. Virginia’s understanding of linguistic mediacy and writerly texere allows
her to see that Symbols will not be dispelled by decree of reason, civilisation, or the
ego, nor in the name of a rhetoric of transparency in which the relations between symbol
and referent are unequivocally clear. Boundaries between Symbol and symbol, naked and
dressed language, the speaking subject and the symbolic order, will not let themselves be
upheld. What this amounts to, as we know, is that the artist’s understanding of language
and the feminist’s commitment to an analysis of power make Virginia an unusually sophisticated
reader of signifying fabrics and discursive webs. Th us, where Flügel and other
progressives assume a relatively simple boundary between, on the one hand, disciplined
bodies and primitive minds in the service of the Vaterland, and on the other, modernised
bodies and civilised minds as agents in the Mother country, Virginia reveals transnational
tangles of dressed bodies under the sign of the phallus.
Th e question remains, then, what type of symbolic practice is involved in the strategy
of “mental chastity.” Partly, this practice is suggested by the rhetoric of Th ree Guineas itself—