"It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple..."

In "A Room of One's Own", Virginia Woolf witnesses both a man and a female sharing a cab and realizes that men and women were meant to cooperate. She then begins to consider Coleridge's claim that "a great mind is androgynous;" that there are two sides to a brain, one male and one female. She picks up a book written by a current male author and has to put it down, as the letter "I" dominates the text.

Woolf concludes that it was the Suffrage campaign that was the cause of all this. Men must reassert themselves, and thus have put an emphasis upon themselves in their writing. None of this is present in the works of Keats of Shakespeare, which is why she can read Keats and Shakespeare.

To Woolf, the solution is for authors to write not with merely a man's mind or a woman's mind, but to be "woman-manly or man-womanly." There must be a "marriage of opposites," she says. However, upon reading the text, she doesn't clarify what it is to be one of these. She speaks in vague terms of "the curtains [being] close drawn" and the author "[plucking] the petals from a rose," but I don't know what that is.

Obviously it is more than just writing about yourself (as a man does!). Is it that Woolf truly has no idea what it takes to write a novel with both sides of a brain? Does she only know what it is that's being done wrong, or knows of no true solution, or is it something else?

"A Passage to India" and the Plot Point That Nobody Really Wanted

On the trip to the caves:

"[Ronny] was not enthusiastic about the picnic, but then no more were the ladies - no one was enthusiastic, yet it took place." p. 119

As someone who is sometimes obsessed with plot mechanics, I am extremely impressed about how the Caves segment of "A Passage To India" begins. Screenwriters are told to constantly remind themselves about what their characters want. Their desires should drive the action. Forster has quite cleverly taken the dynamics already set up between Aziz, Mr. Fielding, Mrs. Moore, and Miss Quested to set the journey to the caves in motion. None of the characters wants to go to the caves, but no one wants to let anyone down, either. It's a situation completely built on the assumed desires of other characters!

The first part of the novel reads so well that I truly did not even notice the groundwork that Forster was laying. It's always impressive when a writer can create plot developments through characters and not outside forces. It's astounding when he can do it without calling attention to it happening.