Talking About “words that are hardly syllabled yet”: A Convergence of the Personal and the

Communal While Teaching Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own

Author(s): Shanti Elliott
Source: Schools: Studies in Education, Vol. 1, No. 1 (March 2004), pp. 52-62
Published by: The University of Chicago Press in association with the Francis W. Parker School
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Talking About “words that are
hardly syllabled yet”:
A Convergence of the Personal and the
Communal While Teaching Virginia Woolf’s
A Room of One’s Own
SHANTI ELLIOTT

The spectre that haunted Virginia Woolf ’s life and work, of a throng of critics
contemptuously scoffing at her, was incarnated in my Political Literature class as
they read A Room of One’s Own. These second semester seniors, who had already
slogged through such texts as Crime and Punishment and The Communist
Manifesto, had no patience for Woolf ’s drifting thoughts and circuitous declara-
tions. Even the students who had defended Dostoevsky and Neruda from com-
plaints of overdensity lined up against Woolf, the last author covered in the class.
I had chosen to teach Woolf in this class to focus on the relationship between
the personal and the political, not only in feminist thought but in thinking about
class, race and sexual orientation. Woolf offered interesting ways to explore—and
possibly overcome—mental limitations that seemed very difficult to articulate,
and I was curious to see if we could make use of her argument in class. In
students’ responses to the issues Woolf raises, complex intertwining layers of
communication and empathy in the classroom were revealed to me. A Room of
One’s Own created an unusually palpable experience of intersecting self-awareness
and sensitivity to communal dynamics on the part of students.
In contrast to contemporary emphasis on values of family, school, and emo-
tional connectedness in an individual’s education, Woolf argues that the surface
details of an individual’s physical environment play a crucial role in the develop-
ment of intellectual and artistic ability. “The lamp [of inspiration] does not light
on beef and prunes.”1 Without such privileges as a room of her own and an inde-
pendent income, a woman hasn’t “a dog’s chance of writing poetry.”2 Out of
such subtleties Woolf weaves together a scathing critique of gender inequality
throughout Western civilization. Because Woolf examines forces of injustice that
are not widely acknowledged, and not even empirically provable, appreciating
her argument requires patience and good will.
The sharpness of students’ criticism of Woolf disappointed me not so much
for its effect on our reading of A Room of One’s Own as for its consistency with
1. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (New York: Harvest/HJB, 1957), 18.
2. Woolf, 112.

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their criticisms of each other. In this class, as in others, I sought to foster com-
passion by exposing students to radically different experiences. I hoped that such
encounters would also free students to recognize and voice their own unique per-
spectives. Woolf ’s was the only voice they had read during the semester that
spoke directly of her disenfranchisement. It disturbed me that students were so
quick to judge and condemn what they didn’t (couldn’t?) understand. I felt that
the intolerance with which students greeted this woman who struggled to write
absolutely from herself, no matter how awkward or revealing she appeared,
undermined the commitment to individual freedom and quest for authenticity
that they all repeatedly expressed.
I had thought Woolf ’s efforts to rescue the voice of the individual from the
clutch of authoritative logic would send the seniors off into their new lives with
a resounding affirmation of their own imaginative potential. To this end, I had
emphasized Woolf ’s image of “incandescence.” Woolf asserts that the great writ-
ers of the world, such as William Shakespeare and Jane Austen, are those whose
minds have “consumed all impediments and become incandescent.” I asked
students to consider each of the works we had read during the semester as exam-
inations of the forces that keep people—as individuals, as groups, and as the
whole of humanity—from reaching their potential as “incandescent” beings.
The seniors responded well to the image of incandescence; it resonated with
their excitement and grand sense of possibility. It was the idea of a mind that has
consumed all impediments that made them balk. As a matter of fact, the stu-
dents’ (around forty in two sections) almost-unanimous objection to this point
represented perhaps the only time they reached such a consensus all semester.
Yet their reservations took widely differing forms. The multiple directions of
thought and discussion spurred by Woolf ’s idea of “consuming impediments”
made me aware that the very things that hold students apart are feelings they all
have in common.
I think students shared my frustration with the barriers that keep people
apart from each other when minds yearn for connection. These barriers are in
large part convention: social expectations of normality dull both individual
authenticity and interaction with others. But students know that it is when
societal standards are internalized that they have power. I didn’t realize until I
read their final papers that the question that plagued many students while
reading A Room of One’s Own was: When the impediments are on the inside
already, how does one consume them?
Students’ responses to the image of a mind that had consumed impediments
shifted my focus from the internal dimensions of political awareness to the rela-
tionship between internal and communal experience. How can we create ways
for students to explore and stretch themselves without fear of others’ opinions?

VOLUME ONE • ISSUE ONE • MARCH 2004 53

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Ideas and interactions that emerged in my understanding of this relationship will
become clear as I situate this electric phrase within Woolf ’s book.
Woolf discusses “consuming impediments” in a drawn-out and fragmentary
way (such writing, according to her ideas, would be well-suited to the female
experience, which, constantly interrupted, does not proceed in the linear and
ever-swelling form that corresponds to male experience). Woolf maintains that
Shakespeare and Austen attained incandescence because their writing was free of
personal gripes: “all desire to protest, to preach, to proclaim an injury, to pay off
a score, to make the world the witness of some hardship or grievance was fired
out of [them] and consumed.”3 Because they had consumed all impediments,
“we do not know Jane Austen and we do not know Shakespeare, and for that rea-
son Jane Austen pervades every word, and so does Shakespeare.”4 Riddles such as
this one do not seem calculated to please but more to irritate; indeed, it will
require further clarification—yet it is precisely in such oblique ways that Woolf
stays truest to the philosophical point that she is trying to make about women’s
quest for their own literature.
Woolf urges writers to ignore the pressure of what is deemed good writing—
but to do so requires not loud defiance but a venture into silence. To avoid break-
ing the utterly fragile moment of originality, the writer must, Woolf guesses, “talk
of something else, looking steadily out of the window, and thus note, not with a
pencil in a notebook, but in the shortest of shorthand, in words that are hardly
syllabled yet, what happens.”5 Woolf ’s advice affirms a complex idea that Emily
Dickinson expresses pithily: “Tell all the truth but tell it slant/Success in circuit
lies.” Truth will not be tackled head-on. Austen and Shakespeare speak them-
selves by not speaking of themselves, and the voice of emerging originality must
constantly whisper asides and riddles to maintain its own focus. My approach
in the classroom is certainly shaped by my sense that the connectedness literature
can create among people is fragile and unwieldy. The heart-to-heart connection
I yearn for my students to develop with each other must be fostered not through
direct appeals but through generating feelings—in individual reflection and
writing, in dramatic scenes and other activities that engage us in unself-
conscious ways.
Obtuse as Woolf ’s reflections seem, they have had a revolutionary impact on
my thinking. I am frightened by the idea that if language and thought have been
shaped to male experience, I cannot trust the words—or even the train of
thought—that I have always felt will lead to truth. And I am baffled: What are
“words that are hardly syllabled yet”? The void that Woolf describes also excites
me: Is there really a new language, a new way of thinking, which can break
3. Woolf, 58.
4. Woolf, 71.
5. Woolf, 88.

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through the limitations that we have absorbed into our minds? Woolf ’s advice to
the writer articulates just what I aim to have my students do in their writing:
“illuminate your own soul with its profundities and its shallows, and its vanities
and its generosities, and say what your beauty means to you or your paleness, and
what is your relation to the everchanging and turning world.”6 Woolf reminds
me that reading and writing literature help people step out of the current of ordi-
nary life and its expectations and temptations and reflect on how the world feels
to them in the small quiet moments that normally do not get noticed. The liter-
ary experience offers “a room of one’s own” as few other experiences of life can,
and I am anxious that students find and value such mental space.
Woolf tries to alert people to the ways in which their perception is distorted
by the internalization of societal and traditional pressures, and to free it.
Literature offers clarity and liberation:

The reading of [great literature] seems to perform a curious couching operation

on the senses; one sees more intensely afterwards; the world seems bared of its
covering and given an intenser life. Those are the enviable people who live at
enmity with unreality, and those are the pitiable who are knocked on the head by
the thing without knowing or caring. So that when I ask you to earn money and
have a room of your own, I am asking you to live in the presence of reality, an
invigorating life, it would appear, whether one can impart it or not.”7

Independence of mind and body corresponds directly to the sense of awareness

and purpose that makes one know one is alive. Incandescence seems to require
a resistance to the chains imposed by both the banalities and the tribulations
of survival.
One of Woolf ’s most controversial points here is that the “invigorating life”
of the writer depends on material things like money and physical space. My stu-
dents were repelled by this form of materialism (as were Woolf ’s contemporaries).
Yet it continued a line of inquiry they had been pursuing throughout the course:
What are the forms mental oppression can take in our enlightened and rational
society? Throughout the semester I emphasized the impact of subtle forms of
prejudice. I asked students to reflect on questions such as: What do you see when
you walk out your front door? Do you see a world shaped to please you, or do
you see a world to which you don’t matter? What difference might such seem-
ingly superficial features of reality make in an individual’s life?
Trying to recognize political power in its less blatant and more insidious
forms tended to lead our discussions toward the internal dimension of the

6. Woolf, 93-4.
7. Woolf, 114.

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relationship between the individual and society. If we take the search for hidden
structures of control far enough, we’re turning the mind inside out and
questioning the standards and goals of what we call sanity. In the works I asked
students to read in Political Literature, political questions are fraught with
psychology; I was particularly concerned with the idea that the unconscious can
be a powerful agent for political purposes, even more so than the conscious mind.
Thus we worked with stories and films that dealt with politics and percep-
tion: What is true? How do we know? In the film Death and the Maiden, for
instance, an unbalanced woman who had been tortured as a political prisoner
claims to have found her tormenter years later, and her husband (and the
audience) needs to decide whether to believe her or the accused, a seemingly
decent and cultured man. We also observed frightening projections of the poten-
tial to control thought and action through unconscious manipulation (such as
in the film The Manchurian Candidate, which connects submissive behavior
with brainwashing).
Through poetry of labor and Chaplin’s Modern Times, the class explored how
consciousness can be bound by the invisible chains of the profit motive and
mechanization. We examined Marx’s challenge to the bourgeois mindset: “Your
very ideas are but the outgrowth of the conditions of your bourgeois production
and bourgeois property, just as your jurisprudence is but the will of your class
made into a law for all, a will whose essential character and direction are deter-
mined by the economic conditions of existence of your class.”8 Students who
have faith in the existence and practice of intellectual freedom wrestled with the
implications of Marx’s argument that economic factors determine the individual’s
and the group’s way of thinking.
Questions about internalized forms of control are potent questions for me
personally—do I really know my own mind? Or is my thinking a product of the
influences I have received far more than conscious deliberation and choice? How
much of racial, social, and personal friction in society oozes out of minds under
pressure to shut out others? It is difficult to find a language for these questions,
but for me it was poetry of labor that articulated them most clearly. The follow-
ing poem by Tom Wayman expresses the impact of external forces on the
unconscious specifically in the realm of labor.9

8. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, trans. by Martin Milligan (Amherst, NY: Prometheus
Books, 1988), 226.
9. Huge thanks to my colleague George Drury for providing me with a great body of labor poetry, including this
one. Students each chose a labor poem from George’s collections to read at the Haymarket Monument in
Waldheim Cemetery on May Day.

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 Days: Construction
Days when the work does not end.
When the bath at home is like
Cleaning another tool of the owner’s.
A tool which functions better with the dust gone from its pores.
So that tomorrow the beads of sweat
Can break out again along trouser-legs and sleeves.

And then bed. Night. The framing continues

Inside the head: hammers pound on
Through the resting brain. With each blow
The nails sink in, inch by blasted inch.
Now one bends, breaking the rhythm.
Creaks as it’s tugged free. A new spike
Is pounded in.

The ears Ring with it. In the dark

This is the room where construction is.
Blow by blow, the studding goes up.
The joints are levered into place.
The hammers rise.

This poem expresses how repetitive and impersonal labor can have the effect of
reversing the subject-object relationship such that the person becomes an object
and the work becomes the active subject. The individual feels subordinate to the
labor, which dulls her sense of dignity and makes her feel like a slave. Unlike tra-
ditional forms of oppression, however, this picture of labor presents not a specific
external force of oppression but one that is vague and internalized. While stu-
dents usually have not experienced this form of mental numbing, they recognize
the idea from the effect of school life and its various pressures, which can make
even the strongest students feel small and vulnerable.
Like Wayman and the other authors we had read together, Woolf ’s focus was
not on external forms of oppression, but on internal ones. Like our other authors,
she argued that it is through the little, mundane details of daily life that the mind
is beaten into submission—without even recognizing that it is under siege, let
alone fighting back. In urging women to claim the pragmatic essentials for writ-
ing—their own space, minds, and pens—Woolf seeks to help women throw off
the invisible chains of male domination. (As language has been owned through-
out history by male thinkers, language too needs to be reclaimed hence Woolf ’s
enigmatic phrase “in words that are hardly syllabled yet.”)

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 While external forces will always challenge genius, a few minds have enough
confidence and material support to burn through the dross and soar unimpeded.
Woolf was the only author we read to go further than exposing and dramatizing
the problem of hidden coercion, to suggest ways of overcoming it. It was at
this juncture that students grew wary. They were able to recognize political and
psychological factors that block individuals and social groups from becoming
incandescent, such as prejudice and stereotyping. But the space Woolf sought to
create for the independent mind frightened them. Woolf ’s call to “illuminate
your own soul” left students uneasy; one said, “I almost find myself wishing I
hadn’t managed to delve into myself so deeply.” The illumination Woolf demands
is painful and confusing; introspection helps one feel more keenly but also can
lead through chaotic tangles before any kind of clarity emerges.
I think students at my independent school sensed that the impediments they
face are not the same as those of students at other schools or people in the world
in general. Perhaps they wish they were, for the set of impediments they face is
more frightening: It is something within, which Woolf doesn’t really mention, yet
they know that she too quails at its presence. Our students, like Woolf, mostly
do have rooms of their own in the figurative as well as material sense, yet they do
not seem to feel that this guarantees their mental freedom. As one student said,
“I think I reacted so negatively to Woolf ’s assertion that true genius and incan-
descence can only be achieved by those who consume their obstacles not because
I disagree, but rather because I harbor the fear that my obstacles are slowly eat-
ing me and whatever potential I may hold from the inside out.” Woolf ’s odd
phrase “consuming impediments” would seem to mean not that one avoids
obstacles, but that one takes them and digests them. But how does one digest that
which is already within? What if internal obstacles are deep and powerful enough
to digest our safer outer selves?
Many students described feeling pinioned by lack of confidence and excessive
concern for others’ judgments and expectations. Woolf notes, “literature is strewn
with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of
others.”10 I think Woolf ’s veiled internal struggles made students nervous because
they felt too familiar. A student remarked, “When I am constantly concerned
with the opinions and criticisms of others and how I will be perceived, I have a
tendency to censor my thinking…My natural thought process and creative
energy are impeded by pressures to conform to societal standards.” Still another
pointed out, “My impediment is that the world expects the same achievements
out of me [as of my parents], and I am one of the few that know that by becom-
ing wealthy or famous, I have achieved nothing at all.”

10. Woolf, 80-1.

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 The political focus of seeking out and discussing internal impediments that
have been imposed from outside forces was like a game to most of the students,
who don’t really feel significantly impeded. But Woolf ’s political focus was com-
plicated by the psychological dimension that seeped in, perhaps more than she
wanted. In her hypothetical sketch of the life Shakespeare’s sister would have
lived, Woolf writes:

Any woman born with a great gift in the sixteenth century would certainly
have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside
the village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at. For it needs little skill
in psychology to be sure that a highly gifted girl who had tried to use her gift for
poetry would be pulled asunder by her own contrary instincts, that she must have
lost her health and sanity to a certainty.11

Woolf ’s image of incandescence is not warm and fuzzy, though she certainly
sounds like a literary fairy godmother at times. She does not shy away from the
terror that often accompanies genius. This feeling infuses a charge throughout
her work that I wanted students to encounter, for stylistic as well as philosophi-
cal purposes.
Like the students, I instinctively fear that alluring abyss of creative potential
that Woolf writes from. Yet I feel that until I go to that space, I won’t really be
alive. So, in urging students to heed Woolf ’s call to illuminate their own souls, I
expose students to the danger of grappling with the miasma of internal conflict
and confusion. This is a solitary experience, which they all engaged in when they
wrote their final papers about what impediments they face in becoming incan-
descent. I groaned when I read their writing, for so many of them are consumed
with fear of what others think of them, and I wish I could take that knowledge
and use it to prove to them that their fears are mirages. (But that’s the direct line
to truth, which I think, as Dickinson suggested, paradoxically leads away from
truth.) Instead, in class we discussed Woolf ’s points, and I left it to the students
to make the connections with their own experience. One day, though, our dis-
cussion led much closer to the implications of A Room of One’s Own for their
individual and collective reality. A reflection on that day follows.

A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN DISCUSSION 5/23:

We have been talking about Woolf ’s point that women have never had the
opportunity or the encouragement to be writers. Students have been struggling
with the text: Woolf is trying out a new way of speaking, thinking, reasoning,
which takes patience and concentration to read. So they’re quick to criticize her.

11. Woolf, 51.

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C period has been criticizing her idea that one must consume impediments to be
incandescent, and, relatedly, that incandescence cannot come out of anger or bit-
terness (Woolf ’s own writing, of course, is markedly bitter). Minority students—
who I thought would understand Woolf best of all—were particularly upset
about this crimp Woolf imposes. They write their best, they feel, in the “heat” of
anger, and the writing (Toni Morrison’s, for instance) that moved them most was
written in anger. Woolf was challenging their view that anger is an effective
response to oppression and prejudice.
F period focused more on Woolf ’s tone: She wants us to think for ourselves,
they said, but she’s got a definite slant—she wants us to think along the lines of her
slant. They felt that her denunciation of coercion is a deceptive front. Woolf writes:

So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters…but to
sacrifice a hair of the head of your vision, a shade of its colour, in deference
to some Headmaster with a silver pot in his hand or to some professor with a
measuring-rod up his sleeve, is the most abject treachery, and the sacrifice of
wealth and chastity which used to be said to be the greatest of human disasters,
a mere flea-bite in comparison.12

Students felt that Woolf ’s injunction to “write what you wish to write” was
undermined by her insistence that good writing cannot come out of anger, or out
of a gendered self, both of which were suspect anyhow because Woolf ’s writing
seemed both angry and gendered. I wondered whether students’ criticism was a
dismissal of Woolf ’s right to write, a crushing of the risk she was taking.
Then Mara (who tended to phase out during discussion, then shoot out
sharp questions from time to time) asked, “Is it true that Virginia Woolf killed
herself?” I had decided earlier not to bring up this matter, but to tackle it head-
on if a student asked about it. We were all feeling raw from the suicide of a for-
mer classmate of the seniors the week before—Mara most of all: She was Evelyn’s
best friend and had spent many hours last week talking with me about her feel-
ings. When she had expressed to me both her own feelings of guilt for not having
done enough to prevent the suicide and her fury with and hatred for Evelyn for
doing this to her friends and family, I had emphasized the possibility that her sui-
cide was the result of a sickness that neither Mara, nor even Evelyn herself, could
control. I held the same emphasis in class discussion of Woolf ’s suicide: She was
ill, and there was so little understanding of mental illness at the time that she
couldn’t be treated for it. She heard voices, she was severely depressed, and so on.
I felt that I had to juggle a number of factors in this discussion: 1) students’
disinclination to absorb the ideas of someone so mentally unstable; 2) students,

12. Woolf, 106.

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already reeling from the event of someone their age taking her life, fearing that
reading Woolf ’s work would infect them somehow with her instability; 3) main-
taining the coherence of Woolf ’s ideas in relation to her own life: She argues that
the fate of women with artistic genius throughout history has been to kill them-
selves in despair.
Here arose another issue. I explained that psychiatrists and literary scholars
alike have observed a connection between artistic genius and mental illness—
probably, I guessed (and admitted to oversimplifying), because both stand apart
from what is considered normal in experience and values. (Here I touched on a
hidden agenda of mine: for students to sympathize with and gain strength from
such standing apart. I think, though, that there can be at times a fine line
between healthy independence of mind and madness.) Evelyn, everyone tells me,
was brilliant, so the discussion continued to edge around her life and death. Mara
had privately expressed to me her rage at her classmates’ shallowness and
hypocrisy: They had never accepted Evelyn because she didn’t try to fit in with
conventional expectations.
To add further complication to this stew, I saw that Matthew was sitting
directly facing me with wide-open eyes. Matthew’s head is usually on his desk; he
is depressed and he, too, apparently, hears voices. He too writes in an intense and
fragmented way; he’s an artist. He knew, the whole class knew, that I was talking
to him, and to them about him, as I went on about Woolf, trying to elicit under-
standing and compassion on a matter that none of us could really comprehend.
Matthew’s earnest look made me wonder at what level he was taking in this
discussion: Was he picturing himself in that lineup of mentally ill geniuses? If so,
was he exhilarated by the image or terrified? Was he thinking about what the class
was thinking about him? Was he, like me, thinking about the grave risk one runs
in pushing against the sweeping current of conformity?
And I seemed to be pushing too hard myself in this class: I felt that we were
in a whirlpool. This was one of those rare classes when the kids were very quiet
and very attentive, and I never know if such moments mean that they are
shocked or offended or just thinking hard.
I ended up shifting the discussion away from the internal realm and back to
the social by relating Woolf ’s ideas to race, class, sexual orientation. I wanted to
know of the students, and I think they wanted to know: Is this your experience,
too? Do you think the details that make up your everyday reality make you feel
impeded in a way that other students don’t seem to experience? I voiced my frus-
trations with the class’s harshness toward Woolf by throwing out a challenge: If
you don’t know what it’s like to be disadvantaged, you have no right to
criticize Woolf ’s position.

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 I finished the class with the questions I had tried to ask when class started. I
wanted the focus of the class to remain on the issues of injustice that Woolf
raised. I still wanted them to try to understand how limitations that certain social
groups face can take undramatic and innocuous-looking forms, which are the
more harmful for their invisibility.
The political programme that I re-articulated at the end of class did not,
however, reflect or make sense of the sore and searching energy swirling around
the class that day. I suppose I am left wondering whether the introspection that
Woolf calls up needs to be left to do its work without getting squeezed into a
political agenda. The personal and the political are inextricable in Woolf ’s text,
and my students made me realize that this is the case for them, too, yet in a dif-
ferent way: These students, by and large, seemed to feel crippled by their advan-
tages. My students forced me to acknowledge what the personal means to them
before jumping into the political. I had tried to present—in the abstract—the
feminist idea that the personal is the political, and to have our discussion—in
general—center around the personal. This oxymoron seems ridiculous, but I don’t
know if it’s possible in a classroom setting to eliminate this tension altogether.
For me, when Woolf speaks of “words that are hardly syllabled yet,” she is
talking about one’s own sense of things before others’ assessments have been taken
into account. Because deep questions about the self and its relation to others had
been stirred up without becoming voiced, it felt to me that the tense silence of
that day had unusual potential for allowing each individual to think for himself
or herself.

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