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Three Guineas, Fascism, and the Construction of Gender
Abstract
Virginia Woolf’s essay Three Guineas is a comprehensive attempt to theorize the significance of gender for fascism. Woolf’s analysis of fascism focuses on the patriarchal relationship between men and women, and she argues that the unequal distribution of power between the genders is a key element for producing fascism. In Three Guineas fascism is not treated as some kind of extreme aberration but as the consequence of the patriarchal sex-gender system. Instead of turning towards those countries that were experiencing fascist rule in the 1930s, Woolf examines England, a democratic country, and shows that women are systematically excluded from all public positions of prestige and power, excluded from all positions that would enable them to have real political agency, making that country far from democratic for women. Woolf traces women’s lack of power and influence in the public affairs of England back to the nineteenth-century tradition of the separate spheres, which relegates women to the home and family. The relegation of women to the family, Woolf argues, not only causes women’s lack of power in the public affairs, but also their lack of power within the family.
In the last endnote of her pacifist plea in Three Guineas, Virginia Woolf illustrates her vision about the Outsiders’ Society by referencing three nineteenth-century authors: S.T. Coleridge, Walt Whitman, and George Sand. The first and longest quotation is from Coleridge’s The Friend. However, oddly enough, Woolf seems to misunderstand Coleridge’s intention and/ or creatively misuse his words. Taking this understudied detail as its pivot, this article explores Woolf’s conception about war and community as it relates to Romantic political thought, particularly Coleridge’s.
Drawing on Woolf scholarship (Beer, Black, Lounsberry, Saint-Amour, Snaith, Wood, etc.), as well as diaries and correspondence, the first section of the article constructs a genealogy of the concept of the “Outsiders’ Society”, thus situating Three Guineas in the evolution of Woolf’s reflections about war as they come through both in her novels and in her non-fiction. The second section analyzes Woolf’s framing of the notion of romance in A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas, paying attention especially to the use of words like “illusion” and “fact”. Zooming in on the connection with Coleridge, the last section contextualizes the quotation from him used by Woolf in the endnote by re-embedding it in the conceptual framework of The Friend, but also offers a broader overview of Coleridge’s own changing opinions on community and conflict, from “Fears in Solitude” to Letters on the Spaniards and On the Constitution of Church and State. By employing this array of sources, the article points out some strong discrepancies between Woolf’s and Coleridge’s convictions, which render her recourse to his political writings counterintuitive. However, the paper also reveals a strong affinity between the two writers regarding the topic of education and its role in community-building. These converging opinions on education as an antidote to addictive tendencies like greed, vanity, and pugnacity offer a key to Woolf’s gesture of returning to the Romantics in the final pages of her argument against war.
Nationality is gendered concept and only some can embody national subjects, become full citizens. Nationality is, just like the last name (its telltale sign), traditionally inherited by paternal lineage. I am interested in history of otherness in anti-war essays by Virginia Woolf and Dubravka Ugresic whereby I analyze the outsider and the witch as paradigmatic figures of dissidents.
Virginia Woolf writes of femininity as of planetary exile. In "Three Guineas" fascism is not treated as extreme aberration but as consequence of patriarchal sex-gender system. Woolf recognized totalitarian patterns among domestic, British tyrants. She invites women to refuse participation, to metaphorically step out of the procession of sons of the educated men and stop supporting war efforts. Antiwar societies, personal donations and feminism are just not enough - women need to become pacifist outsiders. Published in prewar 1938, essay was widely criticized. The most controversial was definition of the war as “man's game”.
Dubravka Ugresic in "The Culture of Lies: Antipolitical Essays" writes about the regional context. Her essays are written between 1988 and 1995, and most of them were published in international magazines. Untranslated essays were read by few. Nevertheless, the author faced great persecutions. The attack on five Croatian intellectuals who have publicly criticized war-related sexual violence is known as the "Witches of Rio" case. Dubravka Ugresic accepts the label of a witch describing her as a stereotype destroyer and a dangerous woman.
I tried to show that essays by these two authors share more than thematic similarity. They can be observed within the same theoretical paradigm in which feminine is existential outsiderness (Mayer) or innate nomadism (Braidotti).
Key words: antiwar essays, outsider, pacifism, witch, feminism, postcolonial criticism
The theme of this and the previous special issue has been a flashpoint in the interdisciplinary field of queer studies since Lee Edelman's influential No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004). Edelman argues that to be queer is to oppose futurity, coining the term “reproductive futurism” to describe the tendency to define political value in terms of a future “for the children” and insisting that the power of queer critique inheres in its opposition to this narrative and therefore to politics as we know it. This assertion inspired extensive debate on relationships between queer artistic and political movements and discourses of futurity. This article argues that the conversation changes when feminist writings on the politics of reproduction and the genre of speculative fiction are taken into account, as they have not been so far. Drawing on Katharine Burdekin's dystopia Swastika Night (1937), the article suggests that the history of feminist speculative fiction offers a counter to twenty-first-century queer scholarship's sometimes reductive approaches to gender and reproduction. Burdekin's book is best known for its prescience in imagining the horrifying prospect of a Nazi victory before Britain's entry into World War II. It prefigures many concerns of queer studies in its disturbing depictions of homoerotic love among Nazi soldiers and women reduced to mindlessly reproductive bodies. Focusing on the significance of the women in her narrative, the article argues that Burdekin's speculative critique of fascist futurity turns saying no to the future into an effective form of feminist resistance — one that does not require a refusal of politics itself.
This article seeks to deepen understanding of the complex and unique position of women vis-à -vis fascist ideology by examining Virginia Woolf’s ideas on resistance from Three Guineas (1938) in relation to Leni Riefenstahl’s The Blue Light (1932) and Triumph of the Will (1935) and Leontine Sagan’s Maedchen in Uniform (1931). In Three Guineas, Woolf outlines two important ideas about women’s resistance in the political arena: an outsider’s indifference to patriarchal structures and an expansive identification that accepts and transforms otherness. Woolf favors indifference as the more realistic option, but in this article I argue otherwise. Examination of Riefenstahl’s films and her interpretation of herself as an indifferent outsider demonstrates that women’s indifference leads to further absence and even retributive violence. On the other hand, a reading of Maedchen in Uniform in relation to Woolf’s theories reveals that an outsider’s indifference only becomes meaningful if it is accepted and allowed to alter uniformity in a process of transformation that disrupts the tyrant’s power of fascination and his hierarchical reproduction of sameness. I conclude, therefore, that the process of expansive identification taking place in Maedchen in Uniform allows the private to reorganize the public, creates a space for the recognition of women’s resistance in the political world, and demonstrates that Woolf’s theory of identification is a potentially effective form of antifascist resistance.
Although indebted to scholars whose work has illuminated the distinctiveness of 1930s Britain, "National History and the Novel in 1930s Britain" argues that rather than seeking distinction, writers of the period were more concerned with the task of contextualizing their decade and their own position within a national historiography from which they felt the Great War and military masculinities had excluded them. Focusing on the novelists Christopher Isherwood, Evelyn Waugh, and Virginia Woolf, and the philosopher of history, R. G. Collingwood, I describe how the 1930s inheritors of British cultural privilege found themselves symbolically disenfranchised from a national identity inextricably linked to war, imagining alternative national stories outside the prevailing imperial and military mythologies.
Focusing on the intersecting of gender and fascism, and on the problem of feminist historiography, this text draws on recent work of feminist theoretics who work within the framework of semiotics. Writers such as Virginia Woolf, Ruth Rehmann and Christa Wolf are included in the discussion.
Klink in an interview with Claudia Koonz in Claudia Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland. Women, the Family and Nazi Politics
- Gertrud Scholtz
From the Diary of a German Storm-Troop Officer on the Western Front
- Ernst Junger
- Storm
- Steel
- E Junger
Die Fröste der Freiheit: Aufbruchsphantasien
- Wysocki Gisela Von
- G Wysocki
Weiblichkeit und Modernitôt: liber Virginia Woolf (Frankfurt/Main: Quumran, 1982) p. 97
- Von Wysocki
and Renate Wiggershaus
- See Koonz
- R Wiggershaus
Fascism as Gendered History
- See Marie-Luise Gättens
- M-L Gättens