Rooms of Our Own (review)

In 1979, Susan Gubar and Sandra Gilbert's coauthored study of nineteenth-century literature, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, radically transformed feminist criticism in America. The subsequent publication of No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century: The War of the Words (1987), Sexchanges (1989), and Letters from the Front (1994) pioneered a feminist reevaluation of modernist studies. A coauthored melodrama, Masterpiece Theatre: An Academic Melodrama (1995), offered a sardonic, amusing response to late-century culture wars. In addition to these collaborative texts, Gubar's Racechanges: White Skin, Black Face in American Culture (1997), her edited collection entitled Critical Condition: Feminism at the Turn of the Century (2000), and Poetry After Auschwitz: Remembering What One Never Knew (2003) have all contributed to a significant body of work, recently expanded by the release of Rooms of Our Own.

Had Virginia Woolf been born fifty years later and lived into the twenty-first century, she would have undoubtedly composed a brilliant, scintillating, and marvelously tantalizing polemical piece similar to Gubar's compelling critical meditation. Taking Woolf's A Room of One's Own as her model, but relying more generally on the "mystic capacity of [Woolf's] sentences to float within consciousness and between or among centers of sentient being" (p. 218), Gubar weaves a provocative tapestry of fact and fancy, feminist theory and semiautobiographical fiction, to trace one year in the intellectual life of a middle-aged female faculty member caught in labyrinthine arguments of pedagogy and politics at an unnamed Midwestern university in the heart of twenty-first-century America. The academic institution is a thinly veiled version of Indiana University, where Gubar teaches as a Distinguished Professor of English and Women's Studies. However, like Woolf, her mentor, the author dons a fictive persona under the name of Mary Beton to liberate her contemporary meditation from biographical constraints. Gubar's narrator, unlike the author herself, has remained single and childless, the better to contemplate woman's unshielded subject position in the maelstrom of modern-day academic politics.

Gubar's first chapter, devoted to the "Once and Future History of Sex and Gender," follows Woolf's paradigmatic A Room of One's Own most closely and sets out, with an air of deliberate naivety, to investigate twenty-first-century enigmas of a longstanding feminist project devoted to "the disentangling of gender from sex, of social roles from biological genitalia, of masculinity from males and femininity from females" (p. 2). "What advances," she asks, "have women made and what still needs to be done?" (p. 3). The implicit answer to this conundrum is that everything has changed about woman's material and economic situation in the modern world, and not enough has altered in terms of the power structures and hegemonies that continue to dominate and colonize her consciousness. If women in corporations are constantly breaking through the glass ceilings that impede their progress in companies and in global politics, every contemporary female subject is nonetheless plagued by a continuing sense of vulnerability and impotence in relation to the ongoing battle of the sexes daily recorded in newspapers and magazines, on television broadcasts and internet websites. Rape and assault, sexual violence and incest, as well as mental brutality and professional repression continue to disturb the sensibilities and contort the personalities of women making their way through an often hostile environment. Add to this the enigmas of warfare and poverty, disease and suffering, bride burning and child molestation, and women everywhere continue to feel beleaguered.

Mimicking Woolf's playful, witty tone, Gubar as Beton eagerly surfs the internet to discover a staggering number of late twentieth-century volumes devoted to men and masculinity studies, including Professor de M's "monumental work entitled The Indeterminacy of 'Sexual' Difference" wherein he argues that "'identity' and 'women' and 'men' should be defined as 'regulatory fictions,' illusory effects produced by the malignant laws and alluring lores of knowledge...