Teach the torches to burn bright (100 words) by lotesse
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Orlando - Virginia Woolf
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Orlando/Sasha Romanovitch
Characters: Orlando (Orlando), Sasha Romanovitch
Additional Tags: Drabble, Reflection, Gender or Sex Swap, identification or desire?
Summary:

When Orlando was a woman she would reflect again on Sasha. Her conclusions were similar – and yet so changed.

bfp's first post in a week-long series at Feministe on Detroit has some wonderful comments appended to it; all sound so familiar to me. Childhood in Michigan, adult life currently divided between Illinois and Indiana, an extended family rooted on both sides in Chicagoland - these places are my home turf, and I love 'em in all their messy brokedownness.

rachelmanija and Sherwood Smith are resisting editorial pressure to straighten out a YA novel and speaking truth to power, right on

The Decade of Magical Thinking, on the 9/11 anniversary and toxic narrative centrality

I had to reread A Room of One's Own this weekend - I know, right? terrible! - and the thing that struck me hardest this time through was how lowered my expectations were. My edition's preface, written in the mid-90s, suggests that the current US equivalent to Woolf's "five hundred a year" would be $37,000. And I believe her, I do, when she says one cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well. The lamp in the spine does not light on beef and prunes. We are all PROBABLY going to heaven, and Vandyck is, we HOPE, to meet us round the next corner — that is the dubious and qualifying state of mind that beef and prunes at the end of the day’s work breed between them - but it's also so terribly true in my life right now that obviously we cannot have wine and partridges and servants carrying tin dishes on their heads, she said. We cannot have sofas and separate rooms. ‘The amenities,’ she said, quoting from some book or other, ‘will have to wait.'

Thank you for writing a story for me!

I'm a happy-ending kind of girl. I like stories about people in love, sexual or otherwise - stories where people care for and help one another. It satisfies my idealistic streak. I do love angst, oh do I ever, but I kind of need happy endings afterward. h/c is probably my biggest kink. I'm also really into family-of-choice tropes and stories about strong or passionate emotional intimacy.

I like female characters really a lot. Not all of my requests center directly on women, but it's important to me that narrative spaces reflect gender parity/equity, or specifically condemn the lack thereof in more realistically patriarchal 'verses. I like non-standard sexualities and imaginative modes of sexual engagement. Similarly, cultural diversity that opens up the imaginative space of the canon makes me seriously happy. There's no reason why kyriarchal western values, images, mores, or cultural practices need to rule speculative stories that are fairytales or take place in outer space!

( Battlestar Galactica (1978) )


( Limberlost books )


( Tamora Pierce, Tortall )


( Orlando )

I had a jonah week of it this last - too many readings that made me feel angry, attacked, policed, chastised for my politics and for the way I want my politics to interact with my scholarship. (One of my classes is stuck on surface vs. symptomatic reading, and neither camp seems to speak for me, or in any way that I find useful. it's been very irritating.)

But - blessedly! - I get to read Virginia Woolf for next week. It's been so soothing, so comforting. Reading her makes me cry - I weep with her, but I also weep because it feels so good to have her state, with her own inimitable grace, the truths that I hold most dear. She gives me solid ground to stand on, and as grad school thus far has been an exercise in painful attempted destabilization, I felt pathetically grateful to come back to her.

Three Guineas has new resonance for me this time around, now that I've moved up a layer in the academic establishment. And this long passage in particular made me weep and sigh and cheer, rather embarrassingly as I was reading in the grad student work room:

*

'But it is also plain that outsiders who find you thus occupied must ask themselves, when they receive a request for a contribution towards rebuilding your college, Shall I send it or shan’t I? If I send it, what shall I ask them to do with it? Shall I ask them to rebuild the college on the old lines? Or shall I ask them to rebuild it, but differently? Or shall I ask them to buy rags and petrol and Bryant & May’s matches and burn the college to the ground?

‘These are the questions, Madam, that have kept your letter so long unanswered. They are questions of great difficulty and perhaps they are useless questions. But can we leave them unasked in view of this gentleman’s questions? He is asking how can we help him to prevent war? He is asking us how we can help him to defend liberty; to defend culture? Also consider these photographs: they are pictures of dead bodies and ruined houses. Surely in view of these questions and pictures you must consider very carefully before you begin to rebuild your college what is the aim of education, what kind of society, what kind of human being it should seek to produce. At any rate I will only send you a guinea with which to rebuild your college if you can satisfy me that you will use it to produce the kind of society, the kind of people that will help to prevent war.

( Read more... )

From the first book of To the Lighthouse:

With stars in her eyes and veils in her hair, with cyclamen and wild violets—what nonsense was he thinking? She was fifty at least; she had eight children. Stepping through fields of flowers and taking to her breast buds that had broken and lambs that had fallen; with the stars in her eyes and the wind in her hair—He had hold of her bag.

“Good-bye, Elsie,” she said, and they walked up the street, she holding her parasol erect and walking as if she expected to meet some one round the corner, while for the first time in his life Charles Tansley felt an extraordinary pride; a man digging in a drain stopped digging and looked at her, let his arm fall down and looked at her; for the first time in his life Charles Tansley felt an extraordinary pride; felt the wind and the cyclamen and the violets for he was walking with a beautiful woman. He had hold of her bag.


and then also this one, from the same:


that it was real; the house was full; the garden blowing. If he put implicit faith in her, nothing should hurt him; however deep he buried himself or climbed high, not for a second should he find himself without her. So boasting of her capacity to surround and protect, there was scarcely a shell of herself left for her to know herself by; all was so lavished and spent; and James, as he stood stiff between her knees, felt her rise in a rosy-flowered fruit tree laid with leaves and dancing boughs into which the beak of brass, the arid scimitar of his father, the egotistical man, plunged and smote, demanding sympathy.

Gaaaack I'm never going to be able to write on Virginia Woolf! I have no critical brain for her at all, I'm just all happy sighs and perfect contentment and I don't even really have to understand what's going on cause it still makes me swoony. Is hard to write on objects of fangirlish passion.

I need to buy some goddamn pants. The top rivet on my jeans popped off, and for like a day I was squeezing it back together every time I went to the bathroom. Problem was eventually solved with superglue, but still. I think it might sort of be a sign. But then again, it's almost summer, so maybe I can get away without buying jeans until next fall. I hate pants so frelling much. I think I will go to the Salvation Army this weekend and buy a million tops to salve my wounded soul.

... I can totally tell that Supernatural is on hiatus right now, because my fanbrain is empty, and that makes me sad. I think I need to find a new shiny thing. Maybe we'll start watching Farscape. I want to keep streaming first season Xena from Netflix, but the Boy can't seem to get beyond the camp of it all. Eh. Am watching the BBC Pride and Prejudice in the background to take the edge off.

Last night I finally--finally!--read How's Moving Castle, which I've been trying to do all summer, ever since I first saw the movie. Which, oddly enough, is better than the book. All the pasts that made me gasp and hurt and cry were Miyazaki's additions. Not that the book isn't lovely, because it is. But the moment when Howl pulls back the curtain and sees that Sophie is the girl he met in Market Chipping under a curse, and then just lets the curtain fall again...I love Miyazaki so much. So much. And Howl is the best thing he's ever done. He makes small beautiful quiet things that break my heart with too much feeling.

The market at Chippingford is the place where Puzzle and Shift go in The Last Battle. There was a book that I read as a little girl that explained how "chipping" is an elision of "cheaping," and refers to haggling.

The names that Virginia Woolf uses in Room of One's Own--"Here then was I (call me Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael or by any name you please—it is not a matter of any importance"--come from and old Scottish ballad about Mary Hamilton, who was hanged for bearing and then killing the King of Scotland's baby. And it makes me terribly, terribly happy that Virginia Woolf quotes old ballads, because I love them so, and her as well, and the two really do go together perfectly. "The Four Marys" is one of the songs that Joan Baez sang.

I've been trying to understand why feminist critique, both in fandom and outside of it, has such potential to cause me pain. Because I know that it's necessary, god above I do, and I wouldn't banish it for the world. But I do get that sinking, painful, want-to-look-away-now feeling, and I'm not usre that I like it.

This semester has been one of major feminist conflict for me. I have an instinctive attraction to the feminism of women like Virginia Woolf, Emma Goldman, Carol Gilligan, and Ursula LeGuin--the idea that women should not have to turn to the yang side of things to be good feminists, the idea that there is another way of doing things that has traditionally been alotted to women that's worth hanging on to.

Gilligan is a perfect example of this: she points out that men and women tend to view moral dilemmas differently, men focussing on rights and women on responsibilities. Only men's way of thinking has been regarded as correct and/or mature by the psychological establishment. Gilligan argues that the other way, the one that has traditionally been sociallized to the female role, is just as valid. LeGuin does this, too. She talks about writing with the female voice, tellling the yin-ish stories. And I like this idea. This feels like somewhere where I belong. Because I do, as a person, value caretaking above individual achievment. Heck, I'm a socialist. Something Le Guin mentions: the story has been definied (by men) as a thing with a conflict, something that moves the way a thrown spear does. She rejects this, talks about the novel as a vessel, as a carrier bag, something to tuck bits of things into.

Okay, all well and good. but a lot of these ideas are criticized as being part of feminist backlash, trying to tie women to the domestic role again. And I want to say, "no, really they aren't. All women don't have to be like this, it's just that I am, and I don't want to be devalued for it." But I can see their point. And it makes me oh so anxious.

Perhaps it's that I vehemently don't want to be part of the problem. I see the reality of sexism, and I want to make it better. I want to help. And I hate feeling like I'm supporting the misogynists by being the way I am.

Or maybe it goes even deeper, to a desire to not be controlled. I hate the idea that all these things that I think and feel, that I think are me, are really the result of my brainwashing at the hands of those who I would oppose. I want my thoughts to belong to me, not to someone else. And yet I know that there are women who have stuck their heads in the sand and refused to recognized the reality of sexism, and I know that they impede the progress of feminism. It happens. but I don't want it to happen.

I don't want my pleasures to turn out to be guilty ones. When LeGuin or C.S. Lewis or even my own darling Tolkien makes me happy, I don't want to think that it si only so because my thoughts and feelings are not my own. Re-reading Anne, I realized that Anne's life made me happy, and wasn't that horrible, because she goes to college and all but then goes back home to raise six kids and Gilbert gets to have a career. I felt this pang of anger towards myself for enjoying this portrait of the feminine mystique. And then I thought that LeGuin would talk about writing motherhood, writing the yin story, that Gilligan would talk about the fact that Anne chose to help individulas rather than fight the system, and that it maybe wasn't so horrible after all.

The end of the matter is that the things that make me happy, the images and dreams that I most cherish, are not going to be acceptable to a certain brand of feminism. And that makes me very, very afraid, because the success of the feminist movement is something very dear to my heart. And when the things that I love are accused of sexism, it's going to freak me out, because it will plunge me into re-evaluating myself. Someone over on miriam_heddy's journal brought up shaving, but for me the equivalence isn't there. I know that, when I do shave, I'm caving to social pressure. I don't do it often, but I recognize that it makes me far less likely to wear skirts. I know my motivations in that scenario. I'm not acting with complete courage, perhaps, but I'm certainly not deluding myself. And it's that delusion that I worry about, that I will do anything to end.

If the things that I love are sexist, if I love them for the wrong reasons, then I regard that as something I must change. Because I am determined to lead the self-examined life.