1In the first two sections of A Room of One’s Own (1929), Virginia Woolf sets her meditation on new feminine modes of writing within two male-dominated institutions where patrilineal intellectual traditions are kept: Oxbridge, ‘where they are so adept at putting people into classes and fixing caps on their heads and letters after their names’ (105), and the British Museum Reading Room, ‘the vast dome … which is so splendidly encircled by a band of famous names’ (26). The sense of belonging to both institutions is literally and figuratively spelled out by the few letters added by educated men after their names (B. A., M. A.), and by the band of famous names (Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Carlyle, Tennyson, Browning…) written in golden letters around the dome of the British Museum Reading Room. As the repositories of collective memory, the university and the library partake of an incremental vision of literary history as a genealogy of great works: Oxbridge as the Alma Mater of great writers, and the British Museum as the mausoleum of dead heroes, the theatre of Thomas Carlyle’s historiographic epic in his introduction to Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches (1845) and of Leslie Stephen’s commemorative project, the Dictionary of National Biography, in ‘Biography’ (1893), ‘National Biography’ (1896) and ‘Dryasdust’ (1900).

2In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf’s persona—‘call me Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael or by any name you please’ (5)—, one of the many faces of ‘Anon’, deliberately disrupts these masculine lines of descent (‘the name escapes me…’ ‘I forget [the] name…’), by re-appropriating Oxbridge as a textual mindscape, a place of free associations, stray memories, textual fragments and surfaces, in a relation of synchronicity. Although she positions herself as an outsider, baffled by the codes of conduct of educated men, Woolf’s persona secures an ambivalent position within both institutions by brilliantly reworking masculine subtexts into her own meditations, thus proving that the process of defining alternative, feminine modes of writing is closely connected with the dis-location, re-interpretation and re-writing of masculine traditions in a process of ‘productivité contestative’ and ‘genèse destructrice’ (Kristeva 91, 98).

We have a lawn of velvet turf, hitherto devoted to the orthodox game of bowls, but threatened by an invasion of croquet, for female influence is slowly but surely invading our cloisters. Whether, like the ivy that gathers upon our ancient walls, it may ultimately be fatal to their stability, remains yet to be seen. It has not, however, penetrated to the rooms in which I now snatch a few moments from my meditated edition of a certain ancient classical author. . . . This occupation allows me leisure to contemplate the busy life around me; I lounge at my window to hear ‘in college fanes the storm their high-built organs make’. I see the surpliced congregation gathering to form the picture which suggested to Tennyson his ‘six hundred maidens clad in purest white’ (I can’t say that that is precisely what they suggest to me), and I listen daily to ‘the thunder of the halls’, and the fainter murmur that proceeds from the lecture-rooms. (5–6)

6As one of ‘the initiated’ (4), Stephen’s don also draws on literary traditions associated with societies, fraternities, coteries, clubs and cliques. In the introduction of Sketches, pride of place is given to the first of these networks of literary allusions, through a reference to Tom Brown at Oxford (1861) by Thomas Hughes: ‘Tom Brown has given us a glimpse of Oxford as seen from the undergraduate’s point of view’ (2). The sequel to Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857), the Victorian bestseller set in the public school of Rugby during the headmastership of Dr. Arnold, Tom Brown at Oxford describes the young hero’s university days at the fictional Oxford College of Saint Ambrose. Thomas Hughes’ novels epitomize what Woolf would later call ‘the private-school stage of human existence’, ‘where there are “sides”, and it is necessary for one side to beat another side, and of the utmost importance to walk up to a platform and receive from the hands of the Headmaster himself a highly ornamental pot’ (Woolf 1929, 106). Both at Rugby and Oxford, Tom Brown proves his moral strength and physical vigour on the field of honour, during cricket games, football matches or boat races, and is rewarded with the ‘labels of merit’ derided by Woolf in A Room of One’s Own (106).

The best of all possible or actual descriptions [of the boat races], however, was given in Tom Brown at Oxford; it is the one passage in the book which is really inimitable, and to it I must refer my readers if they would understand the thrill which causes every nerve in an old oarsman’s body to vibrate again when he hears ‘the pulse of racing-oars among the willows’. (13)

9The lines from Tennyson’s elegy, In Memoriam (1850), ‘the pulse of racing-oars among the willows’, which conjure up Stephen’s lost youth as an athlete and a leader of men, are part of another network of literary recollections, harking back to Tennyson’s poetry.

So waste not thou; but come; for all the vales
Await thee; azure pillars of the hearth
Arise to thee; the children call, and I
Thy shepherd pipe, and sweet is every sound,
Sweeter thy voice, but every sound is sweet;
Myriads of rivulets hurrying through the lawn,
The moan of doves in immemorial elms,
And murmuring of innumerable bees.
(VII, l.200–207)

12As Ida turns her university into a hospital and renounces her vows, Tennyson reassigns ‘the Princess’ to her proper, domestic sphere and to her role as the ‘angel in the house’ caring for wounded men.

I past beside the reverend walls
In which of old I wore the gown;
I roved at random through the town,
And saw the tumult of the halls;

And heard once more in college fanes
The storm their high-built organs make,
And thunder-music, rolling, shake
The prophet blazoned on the panes;
And caught once more the distant shout,
The measured pulse of racing oars
Among the willows; paced the shores
And many a bridge, and all about

The same gray flats again, and felt
The same, but not the same; and last
Up that long walk of limes I past
To see the rooms in which he dwelt.

Another name was on the door:
I lingered; all within was noise
Of songs, and clapping hands, and boys
That crashed the glass and beat the floor;

Where once we held debate, a band
Of youthful friends, on mind and art,
And labour, and the changing mart,
And all the framework of the land…
(LXXXVII, l.1–24)

14Although Leslie Stephen was never elected as a member of the Apostles (Maitland 47), he seems to make up for this lack of intellectual recognition by appropriating the stance of the initiated from Tennyson’s lines and his nostalgia for Cambridge fraternities, ‘the knot of youthful philosophers who met on Saturday evenings to discuss all problems in heaven or earth’ (73), thus furthering this masculine line of literary descent.

15While Stephen’s don explicitly posits himself as the heir to Milton, Lamb, Thackeray and Tennyson, Woolf’s persona in A Room of One’s Own finds herself in the awkward position of having no tradition to relate to: ‘if one is a woman one is often surprised by a sudden splitting off of consciousness, say in walking down Whitehall, when from being the natural inheritor of that civilisation, she becomes, on the contrary, outside of it, alien and critical’ (97). This ‘splitting off of consciouness’ is playfully epitomised by the fragmented identity of the persona, as Woolf substitutes a paradoxical form of first-person plural (‘Call me Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael…’) for Stephen’s first-person singular, the anonymous don, caricatured as ‘Professor von X’ (31), whose egotism, symbolized by the phallic letter ‘I’, casts a dark shadow across the page (99). Disowned by her forebears, and seemingly unable to summon literary recollections, Mary Beton replaces patrilineal descent by matrilineal legacy: she receives five hundred pounds a year for ever from her aunt—also called Mary Beton—, ‘for no other reason than that I share her name’ (37). She also substitutes the point of view of the outsider, trespassing on forbidden ground, for that of the University man, ‘from whom no part of the university is alien’. Following in the exact footsteps of Stephen’s don, ‘the trained mind’ from Sketches, on the banks of the river, on the lawn, in the library, the chapel and the hall of Oxbridge colleges, Mary Beton is thus successively driven away by a beadle and a librarian. However, although she is physically excluded from the seat of learning, ‘outside of it, alien and critical’, she retraces the exact same literary topography as Stephen’s don, thus appropriating Oxbridge on an intertextual level and securing an ambivalent position within this masculine stronghold.

16Famously, Woolf’s meditation on the lack of a truly feminine literary tradition opens on ‘the banks of a river’ where Mary Beton is fishing for thoughts, a river which could either be the Cam or the Isis, but which is first and foremost Woolf’s favourite medium to describe half-formed processes of thought, impressions, reflections and recollections: ‘When you asked me to speak about women and fiction I sat down on the banks of a river and began to wonder what the words meant’ (3), ‘On the further bank the willows wept in perpetual lamentation, their hair about their shoulders. The river reflected whatever it chose of sky and bridge and burning tree, and when the undergraduate had oared his boat through the reflections they closed again, completely, as if he had never been’ (5). As Woolf sets the scene for her musings on women and fiction, the lines from Leslie Stephen, Thomas Hughes and Tennyson’s In Memoriam, ‘the measured pulse of racing oars among the willows’, whose iambic rhythm and alliterations are woven into Woolf’s sentence, seem to glide just beneath the surface of the text not as explicit quotations but as passing thoughts or passing recollections in the private mind, disappearing just as they are summoned from the depths of collective memory.

17In the last section of A Room, this undercurrent borrowed from Victorian literature, this stream of free associations, becomes a metaphor for the porous, resonant, undivided quality of the androgynous mind, its ability to cross the boundaries of genre and gender:

A single leaf detached itself from the plane tree at the end of the street, and in that pause and suspension fell. Somehow it was like a signal falling, a signal pointing to a force in things which one had overlooked. It seemed to point to a river, which flowed past, invisibly, round the corner, down the street, and took people and eddied them along, as the stream at Oxbridge had taken the undergraduate in his boat and the dead leaves. (96)

18Woolf’s reinterpretation of this image from Tennyson, Hughes and Stephen, is but one example of her ability to dis-locate or ‘deterritorialise’ key motifs from Victorian prose and poetry to serve her own purposes and adapt them to new writing experiments.

21Following in the footsteps of her father, Woolf also appropriates and subverts the stance of Tennysonian personae. Although she does not openly quote from The Princess, the subtext is implicitly, but very subtly, woven into the whole opening section of A Room of One’s Own, in which the indictment of male privileges is underpinned by the ironic reversal of Tennyson’s poem: instead of having a man in woman’s clothes break into ‘the University for Maidens’, Woolf has a woman trespassing on forbidden, masculine ground. Like the hero of Tennyson’s poem, who, being a man, is forbidden access to Ida’s college, Mary Beton, being a woman, cannot tread on the lawn or enter the library—the only, but very significant, difference being of course that, though physically excluded from the seat of learning, the female persona demonstrates her intimate knowledge of Tennyson’s poems by weaving them into her own meditations.

22After walking past the chapel, where she does not see ‘six hundred maidens clad in purest white’ but middle-aged dons ‘creased and crushed into [singular] shapes’ (8), Mary Beton has luncheon at a richly-endowed men’s college, where she finds the need to ‘think [herself . . .] back into the past, before the war indeed’ (12), and to conjure up the world of Tennysonian romance:

23A book lay beside me and, opening it, I turned casually enough to Tennyson. And here I found Tennyson was singing:

There has fallen a splendid tear
From the passion-flower at the gate.
She is coming, my dove, my dear;
She is coming, my life, my fate;
The red rose cries, ‘She is near, she is near’;
And the white rose weeps, ‘She is late’;
The larkspur listens, ‘I hear, I hear’;
And the lily whispers, ‘I wait’. (12)

24In this excerpt from section XXII of Maud (1855), the young woman is attending a dinner at her father’s house, while the poet, who was not invited to the celebration, has come unseen to her garden and is waiting for her, looking at the lighted windows of the Hall from a distance and calling her name: ‘Come into the garden, Maud, / I am here at the gate alone’ (XXII, l.852-3).

25After leaving the men’s college, and as she ponders the relevance of Maud to her own times, Mary Beton also feels the doors to opulence and privilege slowly closing behind her: ‘The beautiful October day was fading and the leaves were falling from the trees in the avenue as I walked through it. Gate after gate seemed to close with gentle finality behind me. Innumerable beadles were fitting innumerable keys into well-oiled locks; the treasure-house was being made secure for another night’ (13). As Mary bewails women’s lack of access to university education, Tennyson’s lines from The Princess celebrating the bliss of matrimony—‘The moan of doves in immemorial elms, / And murmuring of innumerable bees’—are endowed with new subversive meaning. As ‘innumerable bees’ turn into ‘innumerable beadles’ securing the stronghold of culture for the night, Victorian romance gives way to harsh socio-economic reality, and the posture of exclusion, built into The Princess and Maud as a masculine stance, now applies to the female persona.

26As she makes her way towards a much more obscure and less richly-endowed women’s college (‘After the avenue one comes out upon a road—I forget its name—which leads you, if you take the right turning, along to Fernham’ 13), Tennyson’s lines echo in her mind:

It is strange how a scrap of poetry works in the mind and makes the legs move in time to it along the road. Those words—
        There has fallen a splendid tear
        From the passion-flower at the gate.
        She is coming, my dove, my dear—
sang in my blood as I stepped quickly along towards Headingley. (13–4)

27As her protagonist walks through Cambridge in step with Tennyson’s poetry, Woolf implicitly conflates her awkward position, walking in the dusk and watching lighted windows from the outside, ‘dim and festive [houses] with their red windows in the dusk’ (15), with the situation of the poet in Maud, the outsider uninvited to the party. Here, Woolf does not merely indict ‘hegemonic masculinity’, but more interestingly succeeds in turning the locus of contention—Victorian views on women’s education—into an instrument of emancipation by reworking Tennyson’s lines into her own meditations on feminine writing through explicit quotation (Maud) or implicit allusion (The Princess).

28It is indeed by dis-locating patrilineal literary memory, from Tennyson’s romance to Stephen’s Sketches, that Virginia Woolf succeeds in securing a position in Oxbridge and in developing ‘a prose style completely expressive of her mind’ (95). By challenging the vision of the university as a stronghold of culture, mapped out as literary ground by prestigious forebears, she re-appropriates Oxbridge as a textual mindscape, a place of random memories, implicit allusions, stray quotations (‘mosaïque de citations’, Kristeva 85) and textual fragments. In the last section of her essay, Woolf writes that ‘it is useless to go to the great men writers for help, however much one may go to them for pleasure’, that ‘Lamb, Browne, Thackeray, Newman, Sterne, Dickens, De Quincey—whoever it may be—never helped a woman yet, though she may have learnt a few tricks of them and adapted them to her use’, since ‘the weight, the pace, the stride of a man’s mind are too unlike her own for her to lift anything substantial from him successfully’ (76). Although they cannot go to great men for help, and cannot relate to men’s traditions, women writers can still write from the outside in, by subverting masculine subtexts into intruments of emancipation. One of the best examples of Woolf’s dis-location or ‘deterritorialisation’ of a masculine subtext is her reinterpretation of Leslie Stephen’s ‘solvitur ambulando’, of his vigorous stride, into a gentle stroll. Mary Beton’s walk through Oxbridge in step with Victorian poetry undermines the hierarchical conception of literature as a genealogy of great works by conveying a sense of synchronicity with the past, a vision of reading and writing as non-linear processes. By adapting masculine subtexts to her own feminist agenda and by weaving them into the fabric of modernity, Woolf proves that the definition of alternative, feminine modes of writing is closely connected with the re-interpretation of this patrilineal literary tradition by an androgynous mind.