1The epitome of late Renaissance pastoral elegy, “Lycidas” haunts many a Modernist novel or poem, from Ulysses to The Waste Land, as a contested subtext, the expression of a poetics of grief that could no longer hold after the First World War, and yet whose grip on the Modernist imagination remained strong (Ramazani 1994, 26). A Room of One’s Own is no exception: Virginia Woolf’s allusion to Milton’s poem in the liminal section of her essay, when she introduces the issue of women’s denied access to education, unfulfilled aspirations and unexpressed talent, is all but gratuitous. The fact that “Lycidas” was one of Woolf’s favourite poems, central to her reflection on genre and gender, is now well established (Kopley 2021, 36; 110-111). In “Hours in a Library” (1916), Woolf lists “Lycidas” and Comus among the masterpieces which give her “that absolute certainty of delight,” whose meaning cannot be exhausted, so that, on reading them, “some consecration descends upon us from their hands which we return to life, feeling it more keenly and understanding it more deeply than before” (Woolf 1987, 60). In a review of Roger Fry’s Vision and Design, published in 1921, Woolf refers to “Lycidas” as one of the poems from which she gets “the greatest pleasure,” and she pays Milton’s elegy the highest compliment, by praising its impersonality: “But consider ‘Lycidas’. Here, it seems to me, we are conscious of purpose; and yet Milton neither reveals himself, nor reveals us to ourselves […] As I read ‘Lycidas’ I have no vision of Milton, old or young, blind or beautiful, irritable or tender. The words might have been written by Anon. Nor do they wake in me any consciousness of personal experience” (Woolf 2011, 388-389). In 1930, when discussing with W.B. Yeats and Walter de la Mare what poems she could come back to “unsated,” Woolf named “Lycidas” (Woolf 1980, 330).
- 1 On these debates, see Low 1995.
- 2 In Feminist Milton, Joseph Wittreich argues that, until the 19th century, a significant number of w (...)
2For a long time, the study of Woolf’s relation to Milton’s poetry was deeply enmeshed in passionate debates between feminist critics (Sandra Gilbert, Susan Gubar, Christine Froula, Jane Marcus), and Milton scholars (Joan Webber, Diane McColley, William Shullenberger, Joseph Wittreich), debates which were sparked by Woolf’s closing address in A Room of One’s Own, when she famously asks women to look past “Milton’s bogey” towards the future, “for no human being should shut out the view” (Woolf 2015, 86).1 In “Patriarchal Poetry and Women Readers: Reflections on Milton’s Bogey,” Sandra Gilbert argued that the mysterious bogeyman mentioned by Woolf at the end of her essay could stand for Milton himself, the “patriarchal specter” (Gilbert 1978, 368), the “frightening Inhibitor,” who, by founding the myth of “woman’s secondness” at the heart of Western literary imagination (ibid., 370), forcibly shut out women’s prospects and blinded them to their own creative potential. In “When Eve Reads Milton: Undoing the Canonical Economy,” Christine Froula propounded a “feminist critique” of the “traditional model of cultural authority” embodied by Milton’s Paradise Lost (Froula 1983, 322). Targeting the patriarchal constructs of Milton prevailing in academia, she asked women to undo the “canonical economy” (ibid., 323) instrumental in their own oppression, by reading Milton’s epic not as a “sacred icon” but as “a cultural artifact situated in history” (ibid., 336). In Virginia Woolf and the Languages of Patriarchy, Jane Marcus contended that Woolf’s invention of a new feminist elegy in A Room of One’s Own, “an elegy written in a college courtyard for the lost traditions of women’s culture,” required the symbolic slaying of Milton’s ghost and the rejection of “Lycidas” as a model (Marcus 1987, 78; 86). Milton scholars such as Joseph Wittreich strongly reacted by “critiquing the feminist critique” (Wittreich 1987, 1) and what they saw as an “ideological capture” of Milton (ibid., x), foregrounding the role of Milton as an ally in women’s cause and as the founder of the very rhetoric of rebellion that women writers would later build upon.2
- 3 “One of the great myths of contemporary literary criticism is that Woolf disliked Milton. But Woolf (...)
- 4 Among these recent reappraisals that highlight the centrality of “Lycidas” as a subtext in Woolf’s (...)
- 5 This paper is particularly indebted to Jane Marcus’s reading of A Room of One’s Own as an elegy for (...)
3In the wake of third-wave feminism and its deconstruction of binary oppositions, critics such as Catherine Gimelli Martin, in Milton and Gender, went on to explore alternatives to these confrontational views of Milton, by reassessing “Milton’s treatment of gendered subjects and subjectivity” (Gimelli Martin 2004, 5), qualifying his supposedly misogynistic representation of male dominance in his work, and highlighting his praise of some of his female contemporaries. As part of this movement of reassessment, Lisa Low offered new perspectives on Woolf’s active reinterpretations of Milton’s views on chastity, marriage and death in The Voyage Out, To the Lighthouse and The Waves,3 which she reads as a feminist elegy, both “a tribute to and correction of ‘Lycidas’” (Low 2003, 221).4 Taking into account the early contributions of feminist critics, but also recent reappraisals by Milton and Woolf scholars, I would like to suggest that, in A Room of One’s Own, Woolf invents a new form of elegy for the unfulfilled lives of women writers, not by rejecting Milton’s poem as a model, but by reviving and revising some of its central imagery.5 “Return[ing] to life” the sense of consecration she received from Milton’s hands, as she claimed to do in “Hours in a Library,” Woolf revisits Milton’s poem, its pastoral metaphors, its criticism of corrupt institutions, its meditation on anonymity, its polyphonic complexity, the movement from premature death to poetic rebirth, while critically revising the canonical, “androcentric” structure of funeral elegy (Derrida 2005, 13). Such a revision of Milton’s elegy allows her to define new modes of expression to mourn unborn female poets, whose existences never materialised, to uncover a hidden genealogy of women writers, which was suppressed from literary history, and finally to “bring to life” “poetically and prosaically” a new generation of female artists (Woolf 2015, 34), concluding with what Anna Snaith has described as “a utopian, even messianic, final image of resurrection” (Snaith 2015, xxiii).
- 6 See for instance Lerner (2017): “Critics […] have often located in Milton’s early poetry, and espec (...)
- 7 In a letter dated 23 November 1637, Milton famously wrote to his friend Charles Diodati: “Listen, D (...)
- 8 See Warley 2014, 129–148 and Lerner 2017, 111–134.
4While “Lycidas” is often considered as the early expression of Milton’s divinely appointed calling,6 marking the emergence and assertion of a poetic ego, working to achieve his own “immortality of fame”,7 Woolf’s comments on Milton’s elegy, and more generally on Milton’s poetry, in several of her essays and diary entries, repeatedly, and very significantly, depart from this interpretation. In her journal for 10 September 1918, Woolf writes about Paradise Lost: “I am struck by the extreme difference between this poem & any other. It lies, I think, in the sublime aloofness & impersonality of the emotions. […] I can conceive that this is the essence, of which almost all other poetry is the dilution” (Woolf 1977, 192-193). In “Indiscretions,” an essay published in 1924, she describes Milton as the leader of a class of writers whose work remains impervious to the influence of their sex: “Feminists or anti-feminists, passionate or cold – whatever the romances or adventures of their private lives not a whiff of that mist attaches itself to their writing. It is pure, uncontaminated, sexless as the angels are said to be sexless” (Woolf 1988, 462). Similarly, Woolf’s views on “Lycidas,” particularly in the 1921 review of Vision and Design quoted above, seem to complicate traditional interpretations and to anticipate later developments in Milton criticism,8 which tend to read Milton’s poem not as “a dramatic lyric,” “the expression of a unified consciousness,” “an integrated and consistent first-person voice” (Fish 2001, 258), but as a poem reflecting “a tension between anonymity and personality” (ibid., 259), and conflicting aspirations for fame and self-effacement (Warley 2014, 139).
- 9 See Tillyard 1930, 79-80; Martin Evans 1999, 40; Lewalski 2000, 71; McDowell 2009, 121.
5As Milton scholars almost unanimously agree,9 “Lycidas,” which was written in 1637, when Milton was about to turn twenty-nine, is not so much an expression of grief for the loss of an aspiring fellow poet, Edward King, a young don from Christ’s College, Cambridge, who died at sea on his way to Ireland, as it is an expression of Milton’s deep concerns about his budding vocation as a poet and his fear of dying before he could make a name for himself:
[…] Milton’s focus is not on King but on his own anxieties about vocation, poetic and religious. King’s death affected Milton so strongly because King’s situation so nearly resembles Milton’s own: they had shared youthful pleasures and poetic beginnings at Cambridge and had had common vocational goals. Three years Milton’s junior, King was also a poet of sorts; he served the church as an ordained minister, and he had continued a scholarly life as a fellow of Christ’s. The fact that he (like Milton) had not yet fulfilled his youthful promise and now would never do so forced Milton to confront the terror of mortality in relation to the issue of vocation. (Lewalski 2000, 71)
- 10 See Döring 2011, 25 and Lerner 2017, 122.
6These anxieties are conveyed in the opening lines of “Lycidas,” which, as Ellen Zetzel Lambert and other critics have observed,10 contain “contrary impulses,” combining as they do a sense of belatedness, the sense of coming at the end of a long literary tradition, with “an equally strong sense of precocity” (Lambert 1976, 154), a fiction of unreadiness, embodied by the “rude” fingers of the elegist, already questioning his ability to perform the conventional rites of mourning and bring the cathartic process of consolation to its end.
- 11 l. 1-9. All quotations from Milton are henceforth from The Complete Poems, ed. John Leonard (Milton (...)
Yet once more, O ye laurels, and once more
Ye myrtles brown, with ivy never sere,
I come to pluck your berries harsh and crude,
And with forced fingers rude,
Shatter your leaves before the mellowing year.
Bitter constraint, and sad occasion dear,
Compels me to disturb your season due:
For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime,
Young Lycidas, and hath not left his peer.11
- 12 For Peter Sacks, the myth of Apollo and Daphne, as it is told in Book I of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, ex (...)
7According to Lambert, these lines suggest at once “a repetition of a familiar, ritual act” since the untimely death of Edward King forces the poet to renew an antique gesture, to gather the leaves of laurels, myrtles and ivy, in order to weave a crown in memory of his friend, and “a precipitous violation of decorum,” “a shattering of the conventional form itself,” so that “the act of participation in the convention is at the same time a violation of its order” (Lambert 1976, 155). From the start, the persona seems to violently question the traditional “rituals that sanctify bereavement” (Lerner 2017, 122) and “the substitutive turn or act of troping,” which, according to Peter Sacks, the successful mourner must perform to convert loss into a poetic artifact, “a consoling sign” embodied by the laurel wreath, standing for the cathartic powers of poetry (Sacks 1985, 5).12
- 13 This self-same configuration is illustrated in stanza 2 of the poem: “So may some gentle Muse / Wit (...)
8In its very emergence, the elegist’s poetic voice is disrupted by a form of temporal instability, an “untimely collapse of temporalities” (Lerner 2017, 123), which threatens the process of aesthetic compensation underlying the whole poem. As evidenced in these lines, “Lycidas” partakes of the aporetic temporality of male funeral elegy analysed by Jacques Derrida in The Politics of Friendship, “this strange temporality opened by the anticipated citation of some funeral oration” (Derrida 2005, 5), whereby the poet, by identifying with the dead friend as his own ideal image, in a “selfsame configuration” (ibid., 7),13 mourns his own death in advance, ensures his renown beyond death and works at his own immortality:
It [Exemplary friendship] gives rise to a project, the anticipation, the perspective, the pro-vidence of a hope that illuminates in advance the future, thereby transporting the name’s renown beyond death. A narcissistic projection of the ideal image, of its own ideal image, already inscribes the legend. It engraves the renown in a ray of light, and prints the citation of the friend in a convertibility of life and death, of presence and absence, and promises it to the testamental revenance of more life, of a surviving that will remain, here, one of our themes. (ibid., 3)
9According to Derrida, the celebration of friendship in male funeral elegy is aporetic in nature, because it conjoins two heterogeneous temporalities: the experience of duration – steadfastness, dedication, the ability to stand the test of time, in the case of Milton, to master a long literary tradition – and the desire to “dominate time and defeat duration,” to effect “a becoming-intemporal of time” (ibid., 16). These two temporalities are incompatible, but inextricably bound together: only by submitting himself to time, through self-denial and laborious study, can the poet hope to submit time itself, to redeem the death of his friend and gain everlasting glory. In “Lycidas,” the persona repeatedly exposes the precarious nature of this “economy of sacrifice and reward” (Sacks 1985, 105) – the sacrifice of time required to achieve immortality – , particularly in stanza 6 (“Alas! What boots it with uncessant care / To tend the homely slighted shepherd’s trade, / And strictly meditate the thankless Muse?” l. 64-66), and emphasizes the futility of earthly fame (“That last infirmity of noble mind” l. 71), in the face of untimely death at the hands of Atropos: “But the fair guerdon when we hope to find, / And think to burst out into sudden blaze, / Comes the blind Fury with th’ abhorrèd shears, / And slits the thin-spun life” (l. 73-76).
10In “Uncouth Milton,” Christopher Warley focuses on another aspect of this central aporia, by pointing out that, in “Lycidas,” the poet’s bid for fame – based on the success or nobility of his craft – , paradoxically depends upon his ability to convey a radical equality before death, to make “Lycidas” known but only in his essential “unknowability” (Warley 2014, 134), so that what remains “very poignant about ‘Lycidas’ […] is tied to anonymity” (ibid., 130). The deliberate obliteration of Lycidas’s features, his disfigurement by the sea, as “the remorseless deep / Closed o’er [his] head” (l. 50-51), epitomizes this “anonymous equality” (ibid., 141) before death. In some of the most moving lines of the poem, Lycidas is compared to Orpheus, whose body was torn apart by the Bacchantes, while the melodious sounds of his lyre were drowned by their “hideous roar” (l. 61), whose “gory visage down the stream was sent” (l. 62). According to Ross Lerner, the fact that Lycidas’s corpse cannot be retrieved and is “to our moist vows denied” (l. 159) “dramatizes the productive failure of consolation, the weak tribute of poetic figuration itself,” “its inability to substitute for the dismembered body” (Lerner 2017, 126). Unable to perform the proper ritual, the poet consequently expresses some “deep disillusionment” with the consolations traditionally offered by pastoral elegy (Lambert 1976, 173), such as the covering of the hearse with flowers, in stanza 9 (l. 132-151), and rejects as a “false surmise” (l. 153) the euphemising of death, the process of compensatory figuration, troping loss into a consoling sign, a garland or a crown: “What he sees is that there is no laureate hearse […], and what he knows is that there is neither justice nor meaning in the world” (Fish 2001, 275). As Woolf intuited in her review from 1921, the collapse of this process of compensatory figuration, the fundamental anonymity of Lycidas, gives the poem its universal scope and impersonality.
11This drift towards anonymity also affects the voice of the elegist, since, according to Stanley Fish, contrary aspirations for self-assertion and self-effacement run through Milton’s works: “Milton wants two contradictory things: he wants […] to dissolve his ego, and he wants to be the one (the ego) that announces and performs the dissolving; he at once seeks and resists dissolution – or rather, in seeking it, he is also (and necessarily) resisting it” (ibid., 253). Many critics have noted that, while “Lycidas” purports to be “a monody,” it contains a complex interplay of voices – Apollo, Triton, Camus, Saint Peter… – culminating in the last stanza, spoken by an “unidentified,” “firmly impersonal” “third-person voice” (ibid., 279), who reveals the poem to have been sung by an unnamed “uncouth swain” (l. 186). In the course of the poem, the first speaker is repeatedly “dislodged or overwhelmed or absorbed” by these other voices (Fish 2001, 276), until he finally “[fades] from the scene” (ibid., 271). The elegy does conclude with some form of resolution or consolation, when Lycidas is finally resurrected and attends the marriage of the Lamb in heaven (Martin Evans 1999, 49), but, at this point, the private dirge has been entirely superseded by a communal song (Fish 2001, 277). The voice announcing to “woeful shepherds” that “Lycidas your sorrow is not dead” (l. 165-166), and celebrating his final apotheosis in heaven, is no longer the voice of the original persona, but a combination of choral voices singing an “unexpressive nuptial song” (l. 176). As the elegist’s voice eventually merges with these impersonal voices, the poem, to quote Fish, becomes “finally, and triumphantly, anonymous” (Fish 2001, 279), so that Woolf’s sense that “[its] words might have been written by Anon” becomes self-evident (Woolf 2011, 389).
- 14 “The manuscript of Lycidas comes to stand for all of English poetry and its surrounding culture; th (...)
12As her comments about “Lycidas” in her essays and diary tend to suggest, Woolf seems to have been particularly attuned to these ambiguities within Milton’s poem, the drift towards impersonality, the insistence on the anonymity of death, on what cannot be recovered as much as on what can be immortalized. Hence, I would suggest that, in A Room of One’s Own, she does not merely reject “Lycidas” as a model, but transposes its elegiac resonance to serve her own meditation on women’s unfulfilled creative aspirations. In the opening section of her essay, Woolf’s persona trespasses upon an implicitly Miltonic pastoral setting, reminiscent of the Cambridge idyll conjured up in stanza 3 of “Lycidas,” where the poet and his friend, both represented as shepherds, “nursed upon the self-same hill,” “[feeding] the same flock, by fountain, shade, and rill” (l. 23-24), perform “rural ditties” (l. 32) harking back to Theocritus and Virgil. On the further bank of the river, “the willows [weeping] in perpetual lamentation, their hair about their shoulders” (Woolf 2015, 4), seem to echo the lament of the river Cam, personified as Camus, in stanza 8 of “Lycidas,” with “[h]is mantle hairy, and his bonnet sedge, / Inwrought with figures dim, and on the edge / Like to that sanguine flower inscribed with woe” (l. 104-106). As she becomes immersed in her meditation upon women and fiction, the persona’s reflection is tinged with these subtly elegiac undertones, the suggestion of something already lost or unable to fully come into being, as if her own thoughts, repeatedly suspended, partook of the same elegiac mood: “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” (Woolf 2015, 4). In this mock-Miltonic setting, “Lycidas” no longer figures the missing corpse, lost at sea, but the missing corpus, kept in the Trinity library, whose inaccessibility bars women from joining in the male poetic tradition,14 but also opens up a space for reinvention. Unable to access the manuscript, whose emendations she tries to recollect or imagine, amusing herself with “guessing which word it could have been that Milton had altered, and why” (ibid., 6), Woolf’s persona turns to “Lycidas” not as an immutable model of literary authority, not as “a sacred icon,” but as “an artifact situated in History” (Froula 1983, 336), as a work in progress, which she takes it upon herself to continue. Throughout her essay, she revisits Milton’s satire of corrupt institutions to indict the economy of sacrifice without reward, which, for centuries, has stood in the way of women’s creativity. While, in his poem, Milton exposes the corruption of the Church, the abuses of unworthy clergymen who neglect their pastoral duties, “the faithful herdsman’s art” (l. 121), so that “[t]he hungry sheep look up, and are not fed” (l. 125), Woolf revisits his pastoral metaphors to attack the power structures that exclude women from formal education and intellectual fulfilment. Unlike the student trained in research at Oxbridge who “has no doubt some method of shepherding his question past all distractions till it runs into his answer as a sheep runs into its pen,” Woolf’s persona, who has received no such training, cannot properly “shepherd” her reflection to its pen, and watches in frustration as her thoughts fly “hither and thither” like “a frightened flock” “pursued by a whole pack of hounds” (Woolf 2015, 22).
13While, in “Lycidas,” Milton mourns a young aspiring poet who died before his time, whose body, lost at sea, cannot be troped into a compensatory substitute, Woolf’s persona addresses a more deeply disturbing paradox and finds herself in the unlikely position of mourning female poets who never came to existence, because “they had no tradition behind them” (ibid., 57), a loss for which there can be no aesthetic compensation. Pushing Milton’s fantasies of premature death, obliterated life and violent disfigurement to their limits, Woolf elegizes the literary genius who could never come to existence among women in the 16th century: “Let me imagine, since facts are so hard to come by, what would have happened had Shakespeare had a wonderfully gifted sister, called Judith, let us say” (ibid., 36). The poet she mourns is a young woman who was never born – for “it is unthinkable that any woman in Shakespeare’s day should have had Shakespeare’s genius” (ibid., 37) – and who “never wrote a word” (ibid., 85), who, in Woolf’s fictional narrative, finding herself with child, “killed herself one winter’s night and lies buried at some cross-roads where the omnibuses now stop outside the Elephant and Castle” (ibid., 37). Like Lycidas, she is a figure of Anon, but unlike him, she cannot be memorialized, because she never existed; her body cannot be laid to rest in a proper ritual, not because it was lost at sea, but because she never had the opportunity to put it on, but had again and again to lay it down (ibid., 86).
14However, as Woolf contends, although it never actually materialised, her body, pregnant with the possibilities of the future, can be “brought to life” “both poetically and prosaically” in what Walter Benjamin called “a historical apocatastasis” (Benjamin 2002, Convolute N1a, 3, 459). Woolf’s elegy to Judith Shakespeare is reminiscent of Benjamin’s attempts to vindicate the lives of the oppressed, by means of historical remembrance, to redeem the “unfulfilled or lost potentialities of the past” by bringing them in dialectical constellation with the present (Spiropoulou 2010, 6). For Woolf, the future of women’s fiction depends upon this excavation of what lies unrealised in the past. Hence, her insistence on Judith Shakespeare’s pregnant body as “a seed,” “a configuration pregnant with tensions” (Benjamin 1969, 262-263), which must be brought to fruition to open up new possibilities for the future. In A Room of One’s Own, Woolf replaces Milton’s quest for the missing body of the dead with a meditation on the physicality of communal feminine experience and the material conditions necessary to produce works of art: like Milton, Woolf strives to retrieve an absent body, not an individual body, but a communal body, in a materialist historiography. In chapter IV of A Room, Woolf thus asks her readers to redeem from oblivion the lives and works of the unknown forerunners of Jane Austen, Emily and Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, “a lost Atlantis of female writers” (Low 2003, 231), who were almost entirely suppressed from literary History, so that they can emerge in “the now of [their] recognizability” (Benjamin 2002, Convolute N9, 7, 473):
For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice. Jane Austen should have laid a wreath upon the grave of Fanny Burney, and George Eliot done homage to the robust shade of Eliza Carter – the valiant old woman who tied a bell to her bedstead in order that she might wake early and learn Greek. All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, which is, most scandalously but rather appropriately, in Westminster Abbey, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds. It is she – shady and amorous as she was – who makes it not quite fantastic for me to say to you tonight: Earn five hundred a year by your wits. (Woolf 2015, 49-50)
- 15 In Book IX of Paradise Lost, despite Adam’s plea that they remain together, Eve decides to leave hi (...)
15By asking women to write a supplement to literary History, in order to bring the obscure into visibility, Woolf symbolically reassigns the spoils of the victors (Benjamin 1969, 254), the crown consecrating the male canon, to lesser-known female artists. This gesture of commemoration is doubly irreverent, since Woolf deliberately offers her female forebears – particularly the figure of Aphra Behn – “fallen” flowers, flowers associated, in Milton’s Paradise Lost, with transgression, self-knowledge and mortality.15 In her novels, Woolf frequently consecrates her female artists with these “fallen” flowers, and she often destabilizes the symbolic gravitas of the laurel crown by returning the image to its original, metamorphic quality, epitomized by the flight of Daphne. In To the Lighthouse, Lily Briscoe imagines laurels being “tossed to her” and, presumably, falling to the ground (Woolf 2006, 43). As she completes her picture, she receives some form of consecration from the hands of Mr Carmichael, “as if she had seen him let fall from his great height a wreath of violets and asphodels which, fluttering slowly, lay at length upon the earth” (ibid., 169-170). In Orlando, the hero(ine)’s endless literary pursuit is embodied by the flight of Daphne, embroidered on the arras in her country house: “Gently opening a door, she stood on the threshold so that (as she fancied) the room could not see her and watched the tapestry rising and falling on the eternal faint breeze which never failed to move it. Still the hunter rode; still Daphne flew” (Woolf 1993, 218). In The Waves, Rhoda, the doomed artist, weaves together flowers of poetry, drawn from Shelley’s “The Question,” but finds that she has no one to offer them to: “I will pick flowers; I will bind flowers in one garland and clasp them and present them – Oh! to whom?” (Woolf 1998, 44).
16As Woolf suggests in the last two sections of A Room, the future of women’s fiction, “the development by the average woman of a prose style completely expressive of her mind” (Woolf 2015, 72), requires that the unexplored potentialities of the past open onto the yet-to-explore potentialities of the future. As both an inheritor and an originator, as “the descendant of all those other women,” “continuing all those other books” (ibid., 60), Mary Carmichael, Woolf’s fictitious novelist, has to invent new, generically hybrid forms of connection between the past and the present, new relations between women, providing a radical alternative to the androcentric configuration of friendship present in funeral elegy. The relation between Chloe and Olivia, the two female protagonists of her first novel – “Chloe liked Olivia” (ibid., 62) – , is an exploration of such new relations, breaking away with past models of friendship, what Derrida, commenting on one of Nietzsche’s aphorisms in Human, All Too Human, calls a “friendship for the future” (Derrida 2005, 29):
Now, the thought of the “perhaps” perhaps engages the only possible thought of the event – of friendship to come and friendship for the future. For to love friendship, it is not enough to know how to bear the other in mourning; one must love the future. And there is no more just category for the future than that of the “perhaps.” (ibid., 29)
17Mary Carmichael is entrusted with a double responsibility – towards the past and towards the future – to try what has never been attempted before, to catch “those unrecorded gestures, those unsaid or half-said words, which form themselves […] when women are alone,” “to absorb the new into the old” (Woolf 2015, 64), to fully embrace the instability necessary to explore new generic forms, “the unheard-of, totally new experience of the perhaps” (Derrida 2005, 29), and legitimize women’s decision to turn to poetry as a genre: “She will be a poet, I said, […] in another hundred years’ time” (Woolf 2015, 71):
This is a double but infinite responsibility, infinitely redoubled, split in two, shared and parcelled out; an infinitely divided responsibility, disseminated, if you will, for one person, for only one – all alone (this is the condition of responsibility) – and a bottomless double responsibility that implicitly describes an intertwining of temporal ekstases: a friendship to come of time with itself where we meet again the interlacing of the same and the altogether other which orientates us in this labyrinth. (Derrida 2005, 37)
18Woolf’s neophilia could be characterized by a similar attempt to transform unexplored possibilities or missed opportunities into the material of future innovation, to explore “the already of the perhaps” (ibid., 42) – “perhaps” being one of the most frequent words in A Room of One’s Own – , when she turns to “Lycidas, perhaps” (Woolf 2015, 6), imagines that “perhaps [Judith Shakespeare] scribbled some pages up in an apple loft on the sly” (ibid., 36), conjectures that “Chloe liked Olivia perhaps for the first time in literature” (ibid., 62), or experiments with generic hybridity, merging as she does two radically different forms of writing, the essay and the elegy, prose and poetry.
19In the last chapter of A Room, when Woolf does effect this messianic redemption of the past by announcing the (re-)incarnation of Judith Shakespeare, she turns yet again to Milton’s imagery, the celebration of Lycidas’s apotheosis as nuptials in heaven. She transposes this image of blissful union with the divine, associated with the tradition of the male epithalamium (Schenck 1988, 91-106; Boehrer 2002, 222-236), into a meditation on the creative fertility of the androgynous mind, its ability to produce sentences that “give birth to all kinds of other ideas” and are endowed with “the secret of perpetual life” (Woolf 2015, 77). Rejecting the abortive births of stridently sex-conscious writers, she calls for the “natural fusion” of the two sexes in the mind (ibid., 74), their spiritual cooperation, since, for her, the consummation of “some marriage of opposites,” the celebration of the mind’s “nuptials in darkness” (ibid., 79), is the only source of lasting creation. If, like Milton, Woolf concludes with a messianic image of resurrection (Snaith 2015, xxiii), she rejects Lycidas’s final apotheosis, and foregrounds the primacy of material conditions, the physicality of communal feminine experience, calling instead for a (re-)incarnation of Judith Shakespeare “in the flesh”:
Now my belief is that this poet who never wrote a word and was buried at the cross-roads still lives. She lives in you and in me, and in many other women who are not here tonight, for they are washing up the dishes and putting the children to bed. But she lives; for great poets do not die; they are continuing presences; they need only the opportunity to walk among us in the flesh. (Woolf 2015, 85-86)
20In Woolf’s closing address, Judith Shakespeare becomes this continuing presence, her “unlived” existence no longer trapped in a chronological past, but coming to fruition in a process of historical becoming, the embodiment of “this unlived element in everything that is lived,” “just as the embryo continues to be active in the tissues of the mature organism, and the child in the psychic life of the adult” (Agamben 2009, 50-51):
For my belief is that if we live another century or so – I am talking of the common life which is the real life and not of the little separate lives which we live as individuals – and have five hundred a year each of us and rooms of our own; if we have the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think; if we escape a little from the common sitting-room and see human beings not always in their relation to each other but in relation to reality; and the sky, too, and the trees or whatever it may be in themselves; if we look past Milton’s bogey, for no human being should shut out the view; if we face the fact, for it is a fact, that there is no arm to cling to, but that we go alone and that our relation is to the world of reality and not only to the world of men and women, then the opportunity will come and the dead poet who was Shakespeare’s sister will put on the body which she has so often laid down. Drawing her life from the lives of the unknown who were her forerunners, as her brother did before her, she will be born. (Woolf 2015, 86)
21Woolf’s call for women to “look past Milton’s bogey,” in order to bring Judith Shakespeare into being, can be interpreted in different ways: it might mean looking past the male canon, embodied by Milton’s poetry, but it might also mean looking past the canonical, patriarchal constructs of Milton, so as to reinterpret his work critically and open up new creative prospects. Reviving/revising Milton’s “Lycidas,” his meditation on premature death, unfulfilled potential and anonymity, which questions the conventional economy of aesthetic compensation, enables Woolf to express and address the central paradox of women writers’ condition. Faced with this paradox herself, from her own position in literary History, and writing out of a foundational absence – there is, so to speak, no female tradition of pastoral elegy to properly mourn the death of Judith Shakespeare – Woolf is made to perform what she calls for in her final address: bringing to life what was never attempted before, a polyphonic, utterly impersonal, generically hybrid pastoral elegy, written in prose. In A Room of One’s Own, the female artist finally coming to existence, the heiress to so many continuing, yet unacknowledged presences, does receive some consecration from Milton’s hands, which she “returns to life.” By symbolically untwining the metonymic wreath of artistic glory woven in the opening lines of “Lycidas,” she returns the image of the laurel crown to its metamorphic instability: the flight of Daphne as unlimited creative potential and endless pursuit.
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