Is it ok for me to like Virginia Woolf?

A little while ago I decided that I wanted to "read Virginia Woolf." I put this in quotations because I did not define for myself or anyone else what exactly "reading Virginia Woolf" would mean, but at this point I have worked out that it just means reading large swaths of her cannon, ignoring a book or two here and there. At this point, I have read Orlando, A Room of One's Own, and part of Mrs. Dalloway.

It occurs to me at this point that I should tell you if you don't already know, who exactly Virginia Woolf is. If you are unaware, Virginia Woolf was one of the most important 20th-century modernist authors. She was one of the pioneers of "stream of consciousness" writing and is very much a queer icon, specifically because of her representation of queer women in her books. I think this is also a good time to note that she has been accused of antisemitism for her stereotypical depictions of Jewish characters, Orlando does contain more than one instance of the n-word, she was egregiously classist, and there are many publications accusing her of racism and general offensiveness, such as Hermione Lee in "Virginia Woolf and Offence." It's important to acknowledge that she is very much a problematic figure, as well as that she lived from 1882-1941, just for context, not as an excuse. 

Is it a privilege for me to even discuss the ability to overlook these problematic elements in her work? Almost definitely. However, reading sentences like "as all Orlando's loves had been women, now...though she herself was a woman, it was still a woman she loved; and if the consciousness of being of the same sex had any effect at all, it was to quicken and deepen those feelings which she had had as a man" (Woolf Orlando 161). And "The strange thing, on looking back, was the purity, the integrity, of her feeling for Sally. It was not like one's feeling for a man...it had a quality which could only exist between women" in books from 1928 and 1925 respectively, meant more to me than I am prepared to admit (Woolf Mrs. Dalloway 50). When Clarissa Dalloway describes her relationship with Sally Seton I feel represented in a realm of literature that I had always viewed as not for me, as alienating. The language is beautiful, the emotions intense, and the picture she paints feels very, very real. 

It also feels important to mention that her books are very good. Beyond the way that I personally feel represented, her stream of consciousness writing, the way that characters connect over events in Mrs. Dalloway, her musings about her place and status as a woman in her essays, and Orlando's long journey through four centuries of literature and culture are genuinely smart, enjoyable, and layered to read, and that's just the parts of her work that I have read. 

Initially, this was going to be all be about explaining why Virginia Woolf is a queer icon because that was one of the Blog Post prompts, but I don't feel like I can do that. Can she be one with her problematic sides? Is it fair to hold those things against her--and furthermore what historical queer people can we look to if we choose to hold them to contemporary standards? I don't think that these qualities "ruin" her or her work, but they certainly make it harder, for me at least, to enjoy. But nevertheless, I enjoy it. We can talk forever about separating the art from the artist, or Death of the Author, but aspects of who Virginia Woolf is--like her queerness and being a woman in her field, are part of what makes her work so attractive to me, in addition to its quality. And it feels wrong and surface-level for me to say "she lived a long time ago" because that does not change the fact that being this way is wrong. 

So is it ok for me to like Virginia Woolf? Well, I don't know what the answer to that question would even be or who has the authority to decide but what I can say is, once we stop asking we reject the responsibility of representing the problems with our faves, and that, at least, seems like a bad call to me. 

Works Cited: 

Lee, Hermione. "Virginia Woolf and Offence." The Art of Literacy Biography: Oxford University Press,         October 3, 2001. Oxford Scholarship Online. Date Accessed 30 Oct. 2020.                     https://https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198182894.001.000/    acprof-9780198182894-chapter-10

Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One's Own. Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1957.

Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985. 

Woolf, Virginia. Orlando: a Biography. Harcourt Brace and Co, 1993.