Anger, Anxiety, Abstraction: Virginia Woolf's "Submerged Truth"

Abstract

This article argues that anger is a politically powerful emotion not only in Virginia Woolf's writing but also in feminist discourse. I begin by tracing two profound insights Woolf communicates in A Room of One's Own: that as a tool of gender ideology, anger yields great power, and that the only way to use anger effectively is to analyze its source and channel it properly. In the first section, I explore Woolf's analysis of the legitimacy of masculine anger, which generates assurance and definition, and the illegitimacy of feminine anger, which conjures anxiety and abstraction. More specifically, both Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse suggest that while masculine rage seems socially inherited and justified, feminine fury is latent, repressed, and punished. In the second section, I outline one of Woolf's methods of using anger: analytic objectification. She creates both Professor Von X and the Angel as malevolent personifications of her anger, only to distance herself from her emotion. Both Woolf's expressions of anger and her analyses of it enhance our understanding of the way women writers negotiate between their desire to express anger, and their frustration with a society that disciplines women to be docile. I conclude by linking Woolf's suggestions about the power of anger to contemporary feminist discourse, showing how some feminists now recognize that to express anger through writing is not only to overcome anxiety and reduce abstraction, but also to perform power, to become visible, to define an identity, and to redraw boundaries.