WomenS Shad&s Inl. Forum, Vol. 16, No. 4, pp.

393-403,
Printed in the USA.

1993
Copyrisht

02l7-5395193
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0 1993 Pqamon PressLtd.

FEMINIST GENEALOGIES
A Personal Itinerary
TERESA DE LAURETIS
Amsterdam, the Netherlands

SynopaIs-Feminist Genealogies is a glimpse at womens intellectual accomplishments from the

17th century to the present, seen from the perspective of a contemporary feminist critic. The question that runs through the lecture concerns womens desire for intellectual creation. The lecture
outlines some of the conditions of knowledge that shape feminist thought today.

For Audre Lorde, in memoriam.

From A Room of Ones Own to The Womens Room, from the Renaissance nunnery
to the Victorian sitting room and the modern
days private sphere, to the contemporary
department of Womens Studies, womens intellectual and creative activity has been
marked by a recurrent connection between
knowledge and confinement, writing and silence. Even the current glossy image of the
liberated woman, both wife and corporation executive, mother and media star or, for
that matter, literary theoretician, has not obscured the other, more seductive figuration
of a desire, a knowledge, or a power vested in
silence, madness, meaninglessness, mystical
ineffability or absolute narcissism. The limitations and boundaries socially imposed on
woman, at once real and imaginary, are topographically represented in the four walls of a
room, homemakers kitchen or madwomans
attic, the convent and the brothel, the four
sides of the screen, the cyborgs computer
casing. These are historical and fictional
forms of a constraint in and against which
womens thought and creativity, fantasy and
imagination have had to, and still must, define themselves. For the freedom to pose
questions in her own terms, the freedom not
The author wishes to thank Professor van Ginkel,
Rector Magnificus of the University of Utrecht; the
members of the university Board; Professor Wels. Dean
of the Arts Faculty; Professor Rosi Braidotti, Dr.
Maaike Meijer. and the members of the Womens Studies Department.
393

to accept definitions and objective or subjective goals formulated

in the terms of
patriarchal culture, is still denied woman today, and must be won and won again by
women with strategies, political and textual,
that both play with and refer back to the
older forms of symbolic enclosure.
Allow me, therefore, to tell you a story.
In the year 1678, a Venetian noblewoman
named Elena Lucrezia Comaro Piscopia received the first doctorate in Philosophy ever
to be conferred upon a woman. She was the
daughter of the Procurator of San Marco,
who traced his lineage back to the Roman
family of the Cornelii, whence the name
Comaro, the very Cornaro family that gave
four doges to the Venetian Republic, three
popes and eight cardinals to the Catholic
Church, and one queen to the Island of
Cyprus - Caterina Cornaro - who is less
famous for her political rule than for having
been portrayed by Titian, Tintoretto, and
Veronese.
The figure of Elena Lucrexia is conjured
up for me today by these august surroundings
and by the symbolic presence of two women
to whom I owe my presence among you-two
women under whose aegis and literally in
whose name I now speak to you. One is AMa
Maria van Schuurman, the first woman who
was allowed to study at this very university,
provided she remained hidden in a wooden
room inside the lecture hall, screened off by
a board with holes in it, as states the brochure of the Anna Maria van Schuurman
Center for Advanced Research in Womens
Studies, where I have the honor and the plea-

394

TERESA DE LAIJRETIS

sure to spend the 4 months of my visit in

Utrecht. She was a contemporary of Elena
Lucrezia, and their stories are rather similar,
though Elena Lucrezia did get her doctorate
in philosophy in 1678, the year of Anna
Marias death.
The other woman is Belle van Zuylen, or
Isabelle de Char&e,
who lived in the eighteenth century, and after whom is named the
professorship under which I now teach Belle van Zuylen, who from her castle overlooking the lovely Utrecht countryside, wrote
in French, not in her native language, just as
I write and speak to you neither in Dutch nor
in my native language, Italian, which was
also Elena Lucrezias native language, even
though she had to prove her knowledge in
Latin.
My feminist genealogy begins, then, with
these women whose especial talent for languages went hand in hand with a very difficult relationship to language, with the necessity of silence or linguistic exile. As a further
token of such linguistic exile, Elena Lucrezias story is told in English by the American
scholar and bibliophile Monsignor Nicola
Fusco, pastor of St. Peters Church in New
Kensington, Pennsylvania. This is how the
story goes.
Since she was a child, Elena Lucrezias
prodigious scholastic achievements were encouraged by her father. She was tutored in
grammar, languages, mathematics, and music. By the time she was 26, she sang, played
and composed music, spoke or translated
from four modern languages and five classical languages, including Hebrew, Arabic,
and Chaldean, and participated in academic
disputationes which gathered scholars and
men of science from many countries to the
Cornaro Palace in Venice. By the time she
was 26, then, her father consented to let her
move to Padua (where he owned another
Cornaro Palace) so that she could continue
her studies of philosophy, dialectics, astronomy, and especially theology, near the University (though not, of course, in it). At that
time, the University of Padua, which had
been founded in 1222, was among the most
famous in Europe: Galileo Galilei had taught
there, and Cardinal Bembo, Sperone Speroni, Scaliger, and Torquato Tasso all had deserved statues among which Elena Lucrexias
own statue still stands today.2

Wanting public recognition of her learning, her father petitioned the Rector that she
be allowed to defend a thesis for the doctorate in theology. The reply of the Ecclesiastical Authority, in the person of Cardinal
Barbarigo, Bishop of Padua and Chancellor
of the Theological Faculty of the University
(now Saint Gregorio Barbarigo), was a flat
NO-at first. What? A female doctor and
teacher of Theology? Never! . . . Woman is
made for motherhood, not for leaming.3
However, academic policy being as it was
(way back then) tied to Real Politik, Saint
Barbarigo saw the advantages of complying
with what today would be called affirmative
action, and allowed the Procurators daughter to try for a doctorate in Philosophy. She
did, and got her degree on June 25, 1678.
She was 32 years old. Here is an account of
the event written by her biographer, Mons.
Fusco:
Anticipation of the forthcoming convocation filled Elena Lucrezia with dread. She
abhorred the whole idea. Her native modesty shrank from so public a display of her
amazing learning and cultural understanding. In preparation for the ordeal she
prayed incessantly, and received the sacraments as if she were preparing for death.
A half hour before the solemn program
began, it was necessary for her confessor
to appeal to her humility and urge her to
submit. Finally she obeyed. . . . At the
last moment, the multitude of guests and
spectators was so large that the convocation was transferred from Padua University Hall to the Cathedral of the Blessed
Virgin. The most distinguished personalities of Italy together with a great number
of scholars from various European umversities filled the vast auditorium beyond capacity - all eager to see and hear this first
female aspirant to the highest academic
honor.
The examiners showed no leniency because of the applicants age, sex, or family
standing. They allowed no superficial inquiry. The,powerful prestige of the University was to be augmented here, not diminished. As question after question of
the most difficult nature was answered by
Elena Lucrexia, with a simple ease and
dignity which won all hearts, cheer and ap-

GCIlealOgiCS

plause burst forth repeatedly from the

great audience gathered to hear her.
The examination being satisfactorily
concluded, Elena Lucrexia Comaro Piscopia was invested with the TeachersErmine Cape, received the Doctors Ring on
her fwer, was crowned with the Poets
Laurel Crown, and was elevated to the
high dignity of Magi&a et Doctrix Philosophiae-Master
and Doctor of Philosophy. The whole assembly then stood and
chanted a glorious Te Deum. (Fusco,
1978, pp. 37-38)
One may remark, parenthetically, that the
entire event as described bears an uncanny resemblance, in tone and in discursive and narrative strategies, to the accounts of witches
trials that were also taking place during that
same time, at the peak of the Counterreformation, throughout the Catholic world. But
at any rate, after such an ordeal, it is not surprising to hear that Elena Lucrezia died 6
years later, at the age of 38. And, her biographer assures us, she died in sanctity, while everywhere in Padua and Venice the people
cried The Saint is dead! The Saint is dead!
Under her usual clothes, he tells us, she wore
the long scapular of the oblates [of the Benedictine Order]. . . . She had refused three or
four advantageous marriages and secretly
observed the monastic rule in all its austerity
(Fusco, 1978, p. 34).
This, of course, is no longer surprising.
Recent research on women writers in the Renaissance has indicated that, at least in Italy,
the great majority were either courtesans or
nuns, of noble birth and highly educated
families. But the question elicited by Elena
Lucrezias both typical and atypical story is why? Why this recurrent connection between
intellectual activity and the nunnery (in its
Elizabethan double meaning of cloister and
brothel, the utterly spiritual and the basely
sexual), between writing and silence, knowledge and confinement?
Which madness
most discreet did Elena Lucrezia cultivate in
the sheltered garden of her nunnery? Could
it have been simply the love of writing or, in
the words of a postmodem critic, the pleasure of intellectual order and beauty, the surprise of mind in struggle with itself, the delight in language as it breaks and plays
continuously on the edge of silence? Yet,

395

wonders the same critic, woman is hostile to

the imagination (Hassan, 1983, p. 207). Indeed, even as late as the 19709, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar note, readers of Emily
Dickinson were brooding upon the incompatibility of poetry and femininity. If there
was a connection between them, and one was
certainly there in Dickinson, it had to be
somewhere in her inner life, her biographer, John Cody, surmises:
Had Mrs. Dickinson been warm and affectionate, more intelligent, effective and
admirable, Emily Dickinson early in life
would probably have identified with her,
become domestic, and adopted the conventional womans role. She would then
have become a church member, been active in community affairs, married, and
had children. The creative potentiality
would of course still have been there, but
would she have discovered it? (Cody,
1971, in Gilbert & Gubar, 1979, p. xix).
While her biographer thus discusses the
tormenting absence of romance in Dickinsons life, another critic speaks of its presence
and the fulfillment it finally afforded her:
Most probably [Dickinsons] poems would
not have amounted to much if the author had
not finally had her own romance, enabling
her to fulfill herself like any other woman.
Neither critic, remark Gilbert and Gubar,
imagines that poetry itself could possibly
constitute a womans fulfillment (Gilbert &
Gubar, 1979, p. xix).
But why, then, did so many others, like
Elena Lucrexia, nurture their love of writing
under their usual clothes? How did they
live out the madness of their imagination
born of fantasy between the boudoir and the
altar? Were they, too, like the Saints of
Jean Toomer described by Alice Walkerblack women whose spirituality was so intense . . . that they stumbled blindly through
their lives . . . creatures so abused and mutilated in body [that they] stared out at the
world, wildly, like lunatics . . . or quietly,
like suicides; women who entered loveless
marriages, without joy, who became prostitutes, without resistance, who became mothers of children, without fulfillment-were
they, too, driven to a numb and bleeding
madness by the springs of creativity in them

3%

TERESADELAURETIS

for which there was no release? Or were they,

as Walker suggests, moving to music not yet
written, dreaming dreams that no one
knew-not even themselves, in any coherent
fashion (Walker, 1983, pp. 232-233)?
That women did not have other career
opportunities may be a fact of history and
sociology, but it does not explain the desire
for a knowledge not useful, not exchangeable
on the market, not even admitted (and in this
sense Elena Lucrezias story was atypical).
When we, feminist scholars of today, try to
answer this question-which
is the question
of female creativity, of womens desire for intellectual creation, for formal or abstract
knowledge, for poetry or theory- we find no
answers in the past. For women, as for those
societies Levi-Strauss designated as cold,
there is no self-recorded history; there is only
lore, mythical and anthropocentric representations, literary and artistic figurations. And
there we do find, not an explanation but
rather a repetition of the enigma: the Sphinx,
whose liminal position between language and
silence, between human and nonhuman, is
the source of its knowledge and power. That
enigma is then reinscribed in the sibylline
words of Cassandra and in the speechless
smile of Mona Lisa, in Ophelias song and in
the nothing of Cordelia; frozen in the quiet
stare of Toomers saints or in the silent
gestures of Charcots hysteric patients photographed at La Salpetriere, and again signalled by the no of Dora to Freuds therapeutic explanation.
These are representations, to be sure, images fashioned or constructed by men. They
are nevertheless powerful images that focalize desire and identification for women
as well as men. Like the femmes fafales,
doomed heroines of the film noir genre, they
are figures of power; a power we have come
to associate with sexuality as uncontrollable,
defiant of the Law, of the social institutions
that seek to bind it, such as the family, and in
excess of the textual strategies that are intended to contain it. But those representations also inscribe another, more subtly seductive figuration: the possibility of a desire,
a vision that is conveyed in a gaze mute as a
great stone, a knowledge that shrouds itself
in silence or (which is the same) in a private
and self-directed language, in neurosis, madness, narcissism, symptomatic behavior. And

are these not contemporary places of confinement, analogues of the nunnery?

The association of women with madness
and silence, the identification of femininity
with a power that culture has been at pains to
exorcise or neutralize, and language to elide,
has been a recurrent topos of feminist literary
criticism. Whether it writes of woman and
her representation in the literary writings of
men, or whether it writes as woman, proposing a notion of language in which womans
radical otherness, her difference, is expressed, contemporary criticism defines femininity as the other side of masculinity, its repressed or radical other, and so, at best,
unrepresentable: hence, the idea of femininity as the limit, even the horizon of Western
logocentrism.
The network of semantic complicities and
conceptual incompatibilities in which the
terms woman and madness both attract and
repel one another in a tangle of metaphor and
paradox is outlined by Shoshana Felman
(1975) in a review of two texts of the 1970s
that are paradigmatic, and in a way exemplary, of a discourse of women spanning the
Atlantic Ocean: feminist sociological research in the United States, represented by
Phyllis Cheslers Women and Madness
(1972), and feminist philosophical critique
in Europe, represented by Lute Irigarays
Speculum of the Other Woman (1985
[1974]). In response to Chesler, who argues
that madness is imposed on women by an
all-powerful social conditioning which makes
them culturally impotent, dependent, and
helpless, and hence that womens mental illness is a request for help, Felman replies
with a question both arrogant and necessary:
to whom is this request addressed if not to
men? and, were it heeded, wouldnt the very
cure reinforce the symptom, the dependency it signifies? As for Irigaray, she argues,
if woman is barred access to the theoretical
locus of speech, from where can the statement of her otherness be uttered? Who is
speaking here, and who is asserting the otherness of woman? Felman asks. Is [Irigaray]
speaking the language of men, or the silence
of women? (Felman, 1975, p. 3).
This strikes me as a most appropriate way
to put the question of feminist theory, as well
as womens writing: Is it speaking the language of men or the silence of women? The

Genealogies

answer I would give is: both. For the contradiction specific to, and even constitutive of,
feminist theory is precisely one that elementary logic would identify as internal contradiction. Felman is not quite so bold, and
chooses to avoid confronting the contradiction that she so lucidly points out in the feminist texts. She concludes:
If, in our culture, the woman is by definition associated with madness, her problem
is how to break out of this (cultural) imposition of madness without taking up the
critical and therapeutic positions of reason: how to avoid speaking both as mud
and as not mad. The challenge facing the
woman today is nothing less than to reinvent language, to t-e-learn how to
speak: to speak not only against, but outside of the specular phallogocentric structure. (Felman, 1975, p. 10)
But, I will ask, can one ever, really, speak
outside of language-neither
as mad nor
as not mad, neither as woman nor as
man-if
language itself is what constitutes
those very terms as well as the ground and the
play of difference between them? Precisely
this paradox is at the heart of what Felman
calls the phallacy of masculine meaning
and what defines the status of discourses.
Women are both defined by patriarchal discourse and yet subjects of it. How can we,
then, challenge that phallacy without confronting or engaging that paradox? For
women to avoid that paradox, to avoid
speaking as both mad and not mad, is simply
to avoid speaking at all, and so to fall back
into a silence which is not merely the unspoken, that is to say, the historical silence of
women, but also the unspeakable, that is, the
theoretical silence of woman, her nonexistence as a discursive subject. Hence the necessity to speak at once the language of men
and the silence of women, or better, to pursue strategies of discourse that will speak the
silence of women in, through, against, over,
under, and across the language of men. And
hence, too, the necessity to pursue, develop,
or invent practices of language where gender
is neither elided nor abstracted into pure discursivity, but at the same time claimed and
denied, posed and displaced, deconstructed
and reconstructed.

397

The question of gender, traditionally

elided in the study of literary language as well
as in male criticism of womens writing, was
first raised and subsequently established as a
pertinent literary issue by feminist critics in
the late 1960s. That critique is now familiar:
By ignoring the question of gender, the critic
simply reenacts once more the symbolic
murder of the woman, the devaluation, repression, containment, confinement, silencing of her speech that have been accomplished again and again by Western literature, art, science, and other discursive formations. The edifying story of Elena Lucrezia
may serve here as but a small example of how
the silence of women has been traditionally
constructed. Her two namesakes-Helen
the
beautiful, the face that launched a thousand ships/and burnt the topless towers of
Ilium (as Marlowe wrote) and Lucrezia,
the advocate of mans honor on whose dispossessed and violated body was built the republican state-inscribe
between them, as an
absence, the woman who would be scholar
and strive, like Faust, after knowledge. A
larger sample of the ways in which her silence
has been reinforced and standardized in
modern times is given by Joanna Russ in her
book How to Suppress Womens Writing
(1983). And I will also refer you to the work
of another woman, present in this room, to
whom I also owe a debt of gratitude for
the privilege of speaking to you today, I
mean Professor Rosi Braidotti, whose book
Patterns of Dissonance (1991, in Dutch,
Beelden van de leegte) brilliantly analyzes
the suppression of womens voices in the contemporary philosophical discourse of femininity.
But we must ask further: Is that silence of
women nothing more than the effect of a single cause or intentionality? Whether we think
of it as historical, theoretical, or both - as the
repressive devaluation of womens speech
imposed by a history of cultural and political domination, or as the impossibility for
women to speak as subject of a discourse
founded on the a priori exclusion of woman
from the polis and the linguistic koir&is the silence of women nothing more than
the effect of logos, the patriarchal symbolic
order, the language and the culture of man?
And again, is the contradiction inscribed in
that silence to be thought of solely as the re-

398

TERESADELAURETIS

sult of cultural marginality, a by-product of

oppression and domination, or can that silence be thought of in terms of a specificity
of womens material and semiotic existence,
which I call gender?
To answer these questions, let me consider
a text written by a woman, a text of fiction
and not a hagiography in the manner of
Elena Lucrezias story, but a kind of critical
fiction, which is another name for what I also
call theory.
Some 60 years ago, asked to give a public
lecture on women and fiction, Virginia
Woolf entitled it A Room of Ones Own,
and so began:
But, you may say, we asked you to speak
about women and fiction-what
has that
got to do with a room of ones own? I will
try to explain. When you asked me to
speak about women and fiction I sat down
on the banks of a river and began to wonder what the words meant. (Woolf, 1929,
P- 3)
They might mean, she speculates, simply a
few remarks about Jane Austen, Fanny Burney, the Bront&, George Eliot, Mrs. Gaskell
(in short, the few female novelists then accepted in the canon); or they might mean
women and what they are like, or women
and the fiction they write, or women and
the fiction that is written about them; or all
of these together. This last possibility is of
course the most interesting, but has a fatal
drawback, for in that case
I should never be able to come to a conclusion. I should never be able to fulfil what
is, I understand, the first duty of a lecturer- to hand you after an hours discourse a nugget of pure truth to wrap up
between the pages of your notebooks and
keep on the mantelpiece for ever. All I
could do was to offer you an opinion upon
one minor point -a woman must have
money and a room of her own if she is to
write fiction; and that, as you will see,
leaves the great problem of the true nature
of woman and the true nature of fiction
unsolved. (Woolf, 1929, pp. 3-4)
Combined with subtle irony and rampant
understatement, Woolf s rhetorical strategy

of direct address (But, you may say . . . wthe but anticipating the question(ing) of
her title, setting up a dialogue, a divergence,
an immediate objection to her speech by her
audience) re-marks both the theme and the
strategic gesture of her title, and like an echo
chamber causes them to resonate and to expand. It thus becomes quite clear that the
self-effacement
and de-negation conveyed
by such disclaimers as I should never be able
to . . . , or all I could do was . . . offer an
opinion upon one minor point, are not mere
formulas of scholarly propriety or womanly
modesty. Less obviously but more adroitly
than Elena Lucrezias shrinking, they serve
to redefine the space of Woolfs inquiry, to
mark a boundary within which she can focus
on what she wants and likes to write and
speak about (being paid for it!); a boundary
which at the same time keeps out the things
she does not want to deal with, the questions
defined for her by others, in their terms,
questions that might be inappropriate or simply uninteresting to her (such as the literary
canon and the true nature of women or of
fiction).
Those disclaimers are obviously a strategy
of discourse; I believe they are precisely a
manner of speaking the silence of women
in the language of men. Like the four walls
of a room, like the convent and the brothel,
they allow the speaker to be with and for herself; they demarcate a space of unhampered
movement of thought, perhaps desire, which
may be nothing more and nothing less than
the freedom to pose a question in her own
terms. A freedom that paradoxically is paid
for by surrendering the very thing one needs
it for: by surrendering ones body to the cloister in order for it not to be owned by others,
surrendering ones body to all men so as not
to belong to one, or ones intelligence to matters of no interest in order to pursue ones interests. In other words, surrendering part of
oneself, indeed the greatest part: give up the
house, for instance, in order to retain a
room, the world for a cell, the vast public domain for a small private enclosure; give up
the forest for an oak tree, as Woolfs Orlando
does, or, like Boccaccios heroine, for a pot
of basil on the windowsill; or, like Alice
Walkers Meridian, give up sexual pleasure
for Usanctuary.5 Often, however, even this
does not work, and the woman ends up not

Genealogies

writing at all. She is then, Virginia Woolf

imagines, Shakespeares sister, the Judith
Shakespeare who died with child and never
wrote a word.
This other paradoxical connection, for
woman, of death and birth continually
joined at the very core of her material existence, is explored by Woolf across the spectrum of British literary history and social
landscape. It evokes the image of an empty
center, a space of contradiction where opposites seem to converge and cancel each other
out: Birth and death, existence and nonexistence, like writing and silence, occupy and
preempt that space. Yet it is only from there,
from that space, that womens speech can
come. However she may approach it, her
subject, Women and Fiction, keeps eluding
her until the heading on her notebook reads,
WOMEN AND POVERTY.
What had our mothers been doing then
that they had no wealth to leave us? Powdering their noses? Looking in at shop
windows? Flaunting in the sun at Monte
Carlo? . . . . If only Mrs. Seton and her
mother and her mother before her had
learnt the great art of making money and
had left their money, like their fathers and
their grandfathers before them, to found
fellowships and lectureships and prizes
and scholarships appropriated to the use
of their own sex . . . we might have been
exploring or writing; mooning about the
venerable places of the earth; sitting contemplative on the steps of the Parthenon,
or going at ten to an office and coming
home comfortably at half-past four to
write a little poetry. Only, if Mrs. Seton
and her like had gone into business at the
age of fifteen, there would have beenthat is the snag in the argument -no
Mary. (Woolf, 1929, p. 22)
The snag in the argument. Not only are death
and birth the contradictory
recurrence of
each womans physical existence; but they define her social, historical existence as well.
The depth of Woolfs insight comes from her
posing the economic question not in terms of
class but of gender. She does so quite simply
(and astonishingly) by assuming that womens heritage, our cultural and financial inheritance, must come from our mothers, who

399

could not earn or possess money whatever

their class (let alone endow colleges as fathers
did for their sons and would not for their
daughters) - our mothers who bore thirteen
children to ministers of religion at St. Andrews (p. 24), she remarks. And had they
not done so, Mary Beton says to Mary Seton,
you would never have come into existence at
all . . )) (p. 23). Making a fortune and bearing thirteen children - no human being could
stand it (p. 22).
Well before its beginning, then, womens
existence is marked by gender, by a difference at once sexual and social which simply
cannot be understood by recourse to categories such as class or poverty or fiction, which
are not gender-specific. The assumption may
have seemed naive, but is instead radical. It
locates gender specificity precisely in that
snag, that empty space of contradiction
which inhabits women as both mothers and
mothers daughters. In this sense, the death
of the historical Judith Shakespeare and the
birth of her utopian counterpart are not terminal points of a linear trajectory in an objective history, but exist concurrently in the
here and now of historical process; they exist
subjectively as well as socially, and as contradictorily as do writing and silence, knowledge
and confinement.
This is finally the value of the organizing
metaphor of Woolf% text: A Room of Ones
Own is the representation of a textual space
at once public and private-a
public lecture
hall which her rhetorical strategy construes as
a silent room and a space of writing; a published text in which the inscription of the subjects voice bears in itself the trace of a silence
at the core of its (and its writers) material existence. In other words, the text actually produces the representation of its contradiction,
and it is the contradiction
of a femalegendered subject: the inscription of writing in
silence and the inscription of silence in one
speaking and writing as a woman. For, on the
one hand, womans specificity and the specificity of womens writing-which
is the real
issue of Woolfs lecture- cannot be approached frontally, as it were, but only indirectly, negatively, tangentially or circuitously
(women and fiction remain, so far as I am
concerned, unsolved problems [p. 41, she
states). On the other hand, the possibility, the
very condition of speaking as a woman de-

400

TERESADELAIJRETIS

pends on the recognition of the contradiction

which her speech must rapresent. Thus, too,
the need for the initial disclaimers, the appeal
to all the liberties and licences of a novelist,
the appeal to fiction as poetic licence (Fiction here is likely to contain more truth than
fact), and the primary disclaimer of all:
I need not say that what I am about to describe has no existence: Oxbridge is an invention; so is Fernham; I is only a convenient term for somebody who has no
real being . . . Call me Mary Beton, Mary
Seton, Mary Carmichael or by any name
you please- it is not a matter of any importance. (pp. 4-5)
The I of the speaker, a womans speech itself, is possible only as fiction, Woolf is saying (already in 1929). And this first indirect
statement on the topic of women and fiction
already bears the full weight of the subsequent paradoxes the text will produce as it
moves toward the construction of its real
topic: the terms in which womans specificity
may be articulated in language and in history.
And that, of course, will be Woolfs statement about women and fiction.
Nowhere in the text, however, do the
terms I, woman, and women appear as objective, as facts: Women, including the
speaker and her audience, appear throughout
as a representation
produced, held, and
shifted by the tension between enunciation
and address. At first enunciation and$address
diverge: from the non-being of the speaking
I (call me Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary
Carmichael . . . it is not a matter of any importance), addressing a nonspecified you
who will or will not recognize itself in the
speaker (Lies will flow from my lips, but
there may perhaps be some truth mixed up
with them; it is for you to seek out this truth
and to decide whether any part of it is worth
keeping, p. 4), the enunciation shifts to
Mary Beton and then to Woolf: Here, then,
Mary Beton ceases to speak. . . . And I will
end now in my own person (p. 109), making
a peroration addressed to women (p. 114).
The audience so addressed is itself a representation inscribed in the text, another voice
that speaks what has now become a paper
read by a woman to women (p. 115), and
that voice now speaks as we, signalling the

beginning of a movement whereby enunciation and address will converge.

Young women, I would say, and please attend, for the peroration is beginning, you
are, in my opinion, disgracefully ignorant.
You have never made a discovery of any
sort of importance.
You have never
shaken an empire or led an army into battle. The plays of Shakespeare are not by
you, and you have never introduced a barbarous race to the blessings of civilisation.
What is your excuse? It is all very well for
you to say, pointing to the streets and
squares and forests of the globe swarming
with black and white and coffee-coloured
inhabitants, all busily engaged in traffic
and enterprise and love-making, we have
had other work on our hands. Without
our doing, those seas should be unsailed
and those fertile lands a desert. We have
borne and bred and washed and taught,
perhaps to the age of six or seven years,
the one thousand six hundred and twentythree million human beings who are, according to statistics, at present in existence, and that, allowing that some had
help, takes time. (p. 116)
In this dialogue of I, you, and we, the text
foregrounds its activity. It shows the working
of the function of address as, precisely, a
function; that is to say, the audience becomes
a fictional character as well, speaking back as
we. No immediate or natural bond is presumed between the (female) speaker/writer
and the (female) audience, between woman
and women. Both the one and the others are
fictional representations. Their bonding is
not presumed but, on the contrary, constructed and established by the discourse of
the text, even and especially as its reference is
a common bond of women in their lifes
work.
Last, from this dialogue of I and we
emerges yet another representation of woman, the poet who was Shakespeares sister,
who died young and in silence but could be
born again, to live and write her poetry in
you and in me, and in many other women
who are not here tonight, for they are washing up the dishes and putting the children to
bed (p. 117). This further representation is
also put in the form of fiction, deliberately

GendOgitZS

framed as a faure of address, or rather a

figure in which the functions of enunciation
and address converge to delineate a common
ground (a common life) and a shared purpose (I maintain that she would come if we
worked for her).
Weaving together the story of Mary Beaton and the story of Judith Shakespeare in
differently colored threads, the text constructs a dialogic space of contradiction:
Womens emergence to language and history
is based on the non-meaning of language (I
sat down on the banks of a river and began to
wonder what the words meant) and on the
non-recognition of official history (for even
with money and rooms of our own, she observes, we are to work in poverty and obscurity). The distance from language and the
kinship with silence remain inscribed in the
text, in the conversation among women, be it
in the lecture hall or in the room of their own.
Yet in that text, that space of writing, a subject does speak, in its particular division, its
engendered difference, its effort of representation and self-representation.
It is a space
built on an empty center, a core of silence, a
stillness, something that evokes the image of
that bell jar that Sylvia Plath made into the
objective correlative of her own madness.
Yet that stillness, much like the eye of the tornado in Plaths novel, is an effect rather than
an absence of movement: It is the meeting
place of opposing drives, ego and death instincts perhaps, the snag in the argument of
any logic or logocentric discourse-the
contradiction, in Alice Walkers words, cruel
enough to stop the blood. (Walker, 1976,
p. 233)
But from that very contradiction, somehow, self-definition has become possible and
a history of women can begin. For this text
speaks of and to women, and constitutes
them/us as members of an historically coherent group, which it defines both extrinsically
and intrinsically; extrinsically, socially, by
their effective exclusion from the polis, the
city of knowledge, the library of Oxbridge,
the university, the sacred turf of logos; and
intrinsically, by a continuity of affective
space, a kinship of mothers and daughters, a
tradition of shared practices from one Judith
Shakespeare to the other.
If A Room of Ones Own constructs a discursive space in which not woman but women

401

are represented as a social and affective instance, as subjects possessed of a specificity

and a history, with a common bond and purpose, it is precisely insofar as the text works
toward constituting a community of readers
and writers and speakers as women, and thus
produces the terms of a critical discourse of
women; in other words, it produces the conditions of feminist thought. For what the
possibility of womens speaking to and about
women inaugurates is not only the possibility of rewriting history, as Woolf herself
suggests (p. 47). What actually begins, for
women, is history itself-though
not a Hegelian history, continually folding back over
the past to totalize meaning and reaffm
a
universal truth as its ultimate signified, but
rather a history always in process, here and
now, and based in practice, contradiction,
heterogeneity.
Since Woolf delivered her lecture, many
women have taken up the kind of questions,
historical and theoretical, she was asking,
and in the very terms that she outlined. And
while in 1929 the library shelves contained
books written by men about women, today it
is mostly women, in the Western world, who
write about ourselves, often for other
women, though not always. A very large
body of work already exists, not only in fiction, poetry, and the arts, in criticism, history, and the human sciences, but in theory
as well: literary theory, film theory, psychoanalysis, cultural theory. But, you may ask,
why theory? Why that most abstract of discourses, direct descendant of philosophy,
from which woman has always kept at a distance, as if to underscore the nonrelationship
in language that suggested to Nietzsche the
conceit of their identity?
Philosophy, as Braidotti argues (1991),
has until very recently been in the business of
system building, fully subsuming the real in
the symbolic, ordering it in conceptual categories, constructing walls of meaning, then
cities and empires; making History (with a
capital H). If we only think of the great men
in the University of Padua at the tail end of
the Renaissance - Galileo writing his Dialog0
dei massimisistemi, Tasso composing the last
heroic epic of Christian deliverance, Bembo
shaping the Italian language for the centuries
to come in Prose della volgar lingua - we cannot but wonder: What indeed was Elena Lu-

402

TERESADELAURETIS

crezia doing there? Well, of course, she was

not there. Whether in her fathers palace or
in the nearby convent, she was outside the
University, outside philosophy. What pleasure or power or knowledge she might have
derived from her studies, what desire, what
madness most discreet did keep her wondering near the gates, we can only speculate on
the basis of our own desire, our own knowingly ek-centric relation to language and history. And of our own effort nevertheless to
question them, engage them, re-examine
them-in
short, our own desire for theory,
which is no building of systems but rather an
excavation or an undermining of their foundations and an intellectual passion, as
Braidotti puts it.
[This] desire for forms of investigation,
expression and transmission of knowledge
responds ( . . . ) to an ethical and political
drive which is constitutive of feminist
thought and which characterizes it above
and beyond any of its thematics. It involves both the relation to the institution
of knowledge, and also a different relation
to theorization, production and writing.
(Braidotti, 1991, p. 150).
I, too, believe that the fascination with
language and theory, for feminist scholars, is
the direct counterpart of that silence that
has long marked, and continues to mark,
womens material and intellectual existence.
For us as for Elena Lucrezia, Anna Maria
van Schuurman, Belle van Zuylen, Virginia
Woolf, Alice Walker and others, critical
writing, as well as all other practices of writing and other expressive media, are ways of
both escaping and resisting the confines and
constraints imposed upon our sex. In this
sense it is not a coincidence that so many
women writers of science fiction create characters like cyborgs, not machines celibataires
but rather spinster machines, who join the
ranks of other mythical figures reclaimed
by contemporary
popular culture such as
witches and monsters, amazons and vampires - figures at once of transgression and of
new forms of community.
What we call feminist theory, in its various
genres and styles of writing, combines the desire for abstract and formal knowledge with
the narcissistic drive of a female-sexed body
to self-affirmation; it joins the emerging pos-

sibility of political subjecthood to the creation of new flgures of our destiny, figures of
social subjects who are both female-sexed
and desiring. A few years ago, before a reading of her poetry at Stanford University, addressing her audience in a manner both like
and unlike Virginia Woolfs, Audre Lorde
said: I am a Black feminist lesbian warrior
poet mother doing my work, And then she
asked: who are you and how are you doing
yours?
My own itinerary as a woman scholar in
the university has been guided by the words
of such women as by Ariadnes thread; a scattered, fragmented and yet historically embodied lineage of female thought and writing
which my sometime compatriots, the Italian
feminist philosophers of the Milan Womens
Bookstore, have called a genealogy of women, and others call by the name of feminism.
That is neither a tradition nor a kinship of
dispossessed mothers and daughters, but
rather the trace of a discontinuous, elusive,
and daily reconstructed feminist genealogy.
Under these conditions, the journey is not
easy and its destination not quite clear. There
are times, indeed, when the past seems more
hospitable than the future, or when old stories are more comforting than new ones. Nevertheless, I will conclude my feminist genealogy for today with the words of another
woman who was never granted a doctorate in
philosophy because she was in prison at the
time when she should have completed her dissertation, but whose work has inspired two
generations of women and men the world
over, and whom I have the honor and the
pleasure of counting among my colleagues
and co-workers at the University of California in Santa Cruz, Angela Davis:
The most difficult challenge facing the activist [she wrote, and I believe the same is
true for the feminist theorist and teacher]
is to respond fully to the needs of the moment and to do so in such a way that the
light one attempts to shine on the present
will simultaneously illuminate the future.
(Davis, 1990, p. 9).
ENDNOTES
1. The F&Alevan Zuylen chair is the official visiting
professorship at the University of Utrecht. named after

Genealogies

the famed eighteenth century writer and scholar who,

born in Utrecht, spent most of her life abroad. The purpose of the visiting professorship, which was set up in the
early 1980s. is to attract to Utrecht outstanding scholars
whose international reputation and innovative approach
are of inspiration to the academic community. Gver the
years, the Womens Studies programmes in Utrecht have
managed to attract feminists to this chair. One of the few
obligations of a Belle van Zuylen professor is to deliver
a public lecture as a sort of inaugural address, which is
meant to introduce to a broad audience the scholars
field of research. What follows is the text of the inaugural address delivered by Teresa de Laumtis in Utrecht,
on November 13.1991.
2. Mons. Nicola Fusco, P.A. (1978). Elena Lucre&
Cornaro Piscopia. @. 22) Pittsburgh. This is a commemorative volume under the auspic& of the Hunt foundation, the University of Pittsburah. and the United States
Committee for tie Elena L&&a
Comaro Piscopia
Tercentenary.
3. Or so reports her biographer, Mons. Fusco (pp.
35-36): In the second half of the twentieth century, the
Roman Catholic Church abolished its sweeping veto.
Today, in Europe, there are many female Doctors of
Theology. In Elena Piscopias day, the Conventual Father Felice Rotondo, a teaching theologian at the University of Padua. remarked: If the women are permitted
to study Theology, why must they be denied the doctorate in that subject? As his supporters, he cited Duns
Scotus (12661308), the Jesuit Aifonso &hneron (151515%), and Cornelius a Lanide (1567-1637). Church luminaries. But Cardinal &barigi
compron&ed with Father Rotondos view, reluctantly. Woman, he said. is
made for motherhood, not for learning. However if the
Procurator of San Marco insists. I am willing to modify
the point and let his daughter become a Doctor of Philosophy. No textual reference is given for these words
by Cardinal Barbarigo. In a letter, Mons. Fusco states
that he is not writing a critical monograph but -a Profile,
that is, a short story (cf. appendix, p. 95).
4. Polis = the public space where (male, white, property-owning) citizens are entitled to the exercise of political and social rights; koine = communal language.
5. Beingwithhim(.
. . ) saved her from the strain
of responding to other boys or even noting the whole category of men ( . . . ) This, then, was probably what sex

403

meant to her; not pleasure, but a sanctuary in which her

mind was freed of any consideration for all other males
in the universe who might want anything of her. It was
resting from pursuit (Walker, 1976, pp. 61-62).

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Braidotti, Rosi. (1991). Patterns of dissonance: A study
of women in contemporaryphilosophy. Cambridge:
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Chesler. Phyllis. (1972). Women and madness. New
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Cody, John. (1971). /ifrer greatpain: The inner life of
Emily Dickimon. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press.
Davis, Angela. (1990). Women, culture and politicr.
New York: Random House.
French, Marilyn. (1978). The womens room. London:
Sphere Books.
Irigaray, Lute. (1985). Speculum of the other woman.
(Gillian Gill, Trans.) Ithaca: Cornell University
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Fehnan, Shoshana. (1975). Women and madness: The
critical phallacy. Diacritcs, 34). 2-5.
Fusco, Mons.Nicola. (1978). Elena Lucrezia Cornaro
Piscopia. Pittsburgh: The Hunt Foundation, the
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Gilbert, Sandra, t Gubar, Susan. (1979). Shakespea&
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Hassan, Ihab. (1983). Passage from Egypt: Excerpt
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Walker, Alice. (1983). In search of our mothem gardens. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
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