The womanwriter wishes to avoid confrontation, for ''her great concern is toplease; and as a woman she is already afraid of displeasing justbecause she writes The writer who is original isalways scandalous; what is new disturbs and antagonises; [but]women are still astonished and flattered to be accepted in theworld of thinking and art, a masculine world. The woman watches hermanners; she does not dare to irritate, explore, explode.'' A woman writer, then, loses her integrity - and her chance ofgreatness - in the attempt to join male literary culture. For, asde Beauvoir says, ''man is a sexed human being: woman is a completeindividual, and equal to the male, only if she too is a sexed humanbeing. Renouncing her femininity means renouncing part of herhumanity.'' Thus equality can only be arrived at by the route ofdifference: but what does this mean for the woman writer? Must sheexperience kinship with silence and enigma, as the male writerfeels kinship for Moby-Dick? Twenty-first-century female culturebarely acknowledges its debt to feminism: why should it? Andperhaps consequently, today's woman writer is careful not to showany special interest in today's woman. Yet if black writers cease to write about what it is to be black, we do not conclude thatblackness no longer has any special features, or that racism nolonger exists. Oppression, being a type of relationship, can neverbe resolved, only reconfigured; in its ever-alternating phases of shame and receptivity, the possibility of its return must alwaysremain. Sometimes society is receptive to the language of oppression; at other times it is not, and oppression becomes acause of shame. Women, then, might cease to produce ''women's writing'' not because they are freer but because they are moreashamed, less certain of a general receptiveness, and even,perhaps, because they suspect they might be vilified. It is easier to be a historian than a prophet, and when Virginia Woolf said that a woman needed a room of her own and money of herown to write fiction she appeared to be alluding to a female future where possession - property - equalled words as inevitably asdispossession, in the past, had equalled silence. A woman with aroom and money will be free to write - but to write what? In ARoom of One's Rosetta Stone Spain Spanish Own Woolf asserts two things: first, that the world - and hence its representations in art - is demonstrablymale; and second, that a woman cannot create art out of a malereality. Literature, for most of its history, was a male reality.The form and structure of the novel, the perceptual framework, thevery size and character of the literary sentence: these were toolsshaped by men for their own uses. The woman of the future, Woolfsays, will devise her own kind of sentence, her own form, and she'll use it to write about her own reality. What's more, thatreality will have its own values: ''And since a novel has thiscorrespondence to real life, its values are to some extent those of real life. But it is obvious that the values of women differ veryoften from the values which have been made by the other sex;naturally, this is so. Yet it is the masculine values that prevail This is an important book, the critic assumes, because itdeals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room. A scene in a battlefieldis more important than a scene in a shop - everywhere and much moresubtly the difference of value persists.'' The independent woman writer, Woolf believed, would inoverturning those values write what had not yet been written. The story of woman would ''light a torch in that vast chamber wherenobody has yet been. It is all half lights and profound shadows like those serpentine caves where one goes with a candle peering upand down, not knowing where one is stepping.'' The future, of course, never comes: it is merely a projection from the present of the present's frustrations.
