Shakespeare's Sister

It's time to vote!

Last week, we discussed the inevitably political nature of literature and how it manifests in the work of Germaine de Staël, Hilary Mantel, and William Wordsworth. Meanwhile,

A. Jay Adler

did the same with the poetry of Walt Whitman. Today, on the eve of the election, we turn to Virginia Woolf—specifically the famous episode on "Shakespeare's Sister" from her great feminist book A Room of One's Own.

First though, I would like to look at a political ad that dropped last week, which was created by the PAC Vote Common Good and is narrated by Julia Roberts, and the unhinged rightwing reaction to it. Here is the ad:

The ad is clearly playing up the expected gender gap in this election and imagining a scenario in which a woman secretly votes differently from her presumably Republican husband. This accomplishes a number of things: it reminds us of our autonomy in the voting booth, that regardless of gender, race, or religion, our vote counts the same as that of the person's next to us; it also reminds us that our vote is private and that we are not obligated to disclose it to anyone; finally, it reminds us that in this particular election, women might have greater motivation to vote than in others.

The rightwing response to this ad was predictably tone deaf and misogynistic. Various Fox News personalities weighed in: one claimed that if his wife voted secretly for Harris, it would be a betrayal tantamount to having an affair. Newt Gingrich, who infamously had an affair and served his wife with divorce papers while she was in the hospital being treated for cancer, decried the ad as immoral.

Of course, what bothers them about the ad is the very idea of feminine autonomy—that a woman might have an opinion that differs from that of her husband and that she might act on this difference in the voting booth. This happened the same week that Trump, the serial sexual assaulter and rapist, vowed that he would "protect" women "whether they like it or not."

A hundred years ago, Virginia Woolf spoke on the issue of female autonomy to a group of women students, and she went on to publish an expanded version of the lecture in her book A Room of One's Own. In the lecture, she powerfully (and with a great deal of her characteristic wit) argues that women need a measure of autonomy in order to be able to write, that they need a room of their own, because the culture is aligned against their voices to such a great extent.

In one of the most famous passages, in response to the scarcity of women writers in earlier centuries, she imagines what would have happened if Shakespeare would have had an equally talented sister who wanted a career like her brother's. I quote her at length:

Perhaps she scribbled some pages up in an apple loft on the sly, but was careful to hide them or set fire to them. Soon, however, before she was out of her teens, she was to be betrothed to the son of a neighboring wool-stapler. She cried out that marriage was hateful to her, and for that she was severely beaten by her father. Then he ceased to scold her. He begged her instead not to hurt him, not to shame him in this matter of her marriage. He would give her a chain of beads or a fine petticoat, he said; and there were tears in his eyes. How could she disobey him? How could she break his heart? The force of her own gift alone drove her to it. She made up a small parcel of her belongings, let herself down by a rope one summer's night and took the road to London. She was not seventeen. The birds that sang in the hedge were not more musical than she was.

And, of course, like those birds, her music is ephemeral because of that lack of autonomy—because of that inability to get her work published or to have her talents taken seriously. The fate of this fictional sister of Shakespeare is not happy, because "who shall measure the heat and violence of the poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body?—[she] killed herself one winter's night and lies buried at some cross-roads where the omnibuses now stop outside the Elephant and Castle."

This resonates tragically with us now, as a number of women have died recently because their bodily autonomy has been taken away from them. But it is familiar also because the cultural forces that regarded women as purely domestic creatures in Shakespeare's time (and Woolf's) are still with us today, and they have a champion in the Republican nominee for president.

The difference these days is that women can vote; they can make their voices heard; they can run for president. Kamala Harris is on the right side of history. Whatever your gender, please join her. Vote. It’s up to you whom you would like to tell about it, if anyone. You have that power.

Thanks for reading, from my fancy internet room of my own to yours.

Photo by Aravinda on Unsplash