Woolf and Walker

I was interested in on of the questions which Virginia Woolf's essay addresses: Does thwarted creativity result in madness and/or self-destruction in women? Woolf clearly thinks so. Her imagined outcome to her character Judith Shakespeare's life is a suicidal end. She writes: "Any woman born with a great gift in the sixteenth century would certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at" (1023). It certainly seems true that women existed in the past who had great artistic potential which was suppressed by their retrictive gender roles.

This idea reminds me of Alice Walker's "In Search of our Mothers' Gardens," which she writes in regard to the restricted creativity that must have existed in black women who lived in the South during slavery.She describes the period of waiting that they went through--waiting for a time when the creative potential in them would be recognized and embraced:

They dreamed dreams that no one knew-not even themselves, in any coherent fashion-and saw visions no one could understand. They wandered or sat about the countryside crooning lullabies to ghosts, and drawing the mother of Christ in charcoal on courthouse walls.

They forced their minds to desert their bodies and their striving spirits sought to rise, like frail whirlwinds from the hard red clay. And when those frail whirlwinds fell, in scattered particles, upon the ground, no one mourned. Instead, men lit candies to celebrate the emptiness that remained, as people do who enter a beautiful but vacant space to resurrect a God.

This isn't exactly the suicide of Judith Shakespeare, but it is self-destruction in the sense that the woman was forced to empty herself and become an object to be used by men. Walker further describes the mental breakdown of "our mothers and grandmothers" who were artists in their natural state but were restricted from becomming artists of society because of their gender roles. She writes that they were "driven to a numb and bleeding madness by the springs of creativity in them for which there was no release." Walker even references Woolf in her article as accurately capturing the essence of what a woman goes through when she must suppress her artistic tendencies. It seems that this idea of thwarted creativity resulting in some kind of self-destruction proves true in both contexts among very different groups of women. Walker argues in her essay that we should accordingly alter our view of literature; we should look "low" where we've previously looked "high." We should notice the ways that women have expressed their artistic abilities through their chores and daily work because, although suppressed, women managed to maintain a creative spark that they passed through generations.

It seems that thwarted creativity leads to negative results. At first, I wondered if someone like the Judith Shakespeare character would have only been driven to suicide because she had the example of her brother to show her the potential for what creative outlet could look like. Would the drive to suicide or insanity be a result of the comparisons to men and their freedom? Or is creativity something that needs a natural outlet regardless of the example of men?