12 April 2024. Stories | Woolf
Finding stories of progressive change // ‘Women have always been poor’. (A Room of One’s Own, Part 2). [#560]
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1: Finding stories of progressive change
Geoff Mulgan—now an academic after a career spent mostly as an institutional innovator—posted to his blog a talk he gave recently on the role of stories in making change. It was given as part of an event at the Storytelling Institute at the University of the Arts London.
The piece identifies the role of stories in the progressive social and political imagination, and teases out an interesting idea about the most effective progressive stories: that they often combine paradoxes.
And since the progressive imagination seems to be outflanked far too often by the stories told by the forces of reaction, and since, almost everywhere we see politicians who are supposed to be progressive parroting those reactionary stories (“the credit card is maxed out”, for example), when they should know better, this seems to me to be an important bit of thinking.
Mulgan puts his idea about the most effective stories right upfront in his piece, and I’ll follow his lead here:
These use what I call 'generative opposites'. They combine a promise of both return (to an idealised past) and advance (to an idealised future). And they promise both short-term retreat, struggle and setbacks, and long-term triumph. Their emotional power comes from these tensions, which echo aspects of the human condition.
He argues that change often comes through changes in language: shifts in the metaphors that people use, shifts in their analogies, shifts in stories. Most people find stories an easier way to understand the world than theory or data. So it follows that anyone trying to make change needs to use stories.
And of course, we are, in the present age, swimming on more stories than ever before:
(W)e are surrounded by millions, even billions of stories, where even a few centuries ago most had access only to a few stories from their family, village, tribe or religion. This explosion of stories has been both positive... and negative... It has also been an ambiguous gain in another sense. We have lost much of our confidence in stories that connect past and present to a better future.
The rest of the post is a run through the ways that stories and their elements can be used in service of change. With analogies, they can change the way we see the world, or point us to anomalies. Society might be like a family or a village instead of a pyramid. 70% of paper is recycled in Europe, but only 1% of textiles. But analogies can also mislead.
Metaphors, similarly, have impact and also have weaknesses. All the same:
metaphors can be useful tools for thinking that stretch analogies. Do we see government as a machine or a brain? How do we imagine a community’s immune system? We can’t help but think in metaphors.
And stories are often metaphors, but writ large. As Mulgan gets to stories, we get a little canter through some of the literature, for Vladimir Propp’s analysis of the repeating structures of many folk tales, or Joseph Campbell’s reduction of that to a single ‘Hero’s Journey’, borrowed as a structure by Star Wars. And he notes that “The most compelling narrative arcs involve struggle and barriers, enemies and demons.” (Which is also one of the reasons that reactionary stories are easy to tell).
Although social sciences are not good at using stories (and sometimes for good reasons) but the writers who remember found ways to tell stories: Adam Smith’s pin factory, for example. And politics has stories threaded through it, as politicians in turn use stories to create positions and communicate them.
The political scientist Albert Hirschman, best known for his work on Voice and Exit, analysed the stories told by Reagan and Thatcher in the 1980s:
He showed that their theories and arguments tended towards three common patterns, presenting all attempts at social progress as liable to futility (they simply won’t work), to jeopardy (if they have any effect at all it will be to destroy something we value) and to perversity (the claim that if any attempts at improvement had effects these would not be the ones intended).
The ‘rhetorics of reaction’ described by Hirschman are mirrored by a ‘rhetorics of progress’, says Mulgan, which include
arguments for righting wrongs and meeting needs, whether these are for pensions or affordable housing, which draw on fundamental moral senses of fairness. They draw on claims that change is cumulative and dynamic and that new reforms are needed to reinforce old ones.
In this analysis, Mulgan has noted that “the most compelling stories combine opposites”, and this is especially true for progressive stories:
They combine a promise of both return (to an idealised past) and advance (to an idealised future). And they promise both short-term retreat, struggle and setbacks and long-term triumph.
(Source: Geoff Mulgan)
These tensions, he suggests , reflect familiar aspects of being human, which might be why they work. He gives an example from the English radicals of the 17th century, who used the story of ‘The Norman Yoke’ to talk about change:
The campaigners advocating radical, and very modern ideas of rights and democracy, presented them as a return to a halcyon past before the arrival of the Normans, with their oppressive laws, castles and hierarchies. In this way the radicals could present themselves as more authentically patriotic, and more truly grounded in tradition, than the monarchs and Lords.
The stories that the Greens tell often combine these attributes: a world in which we are closer to nature and to each other, but also one in which we have new industries emerging in the carbon transition.
It’s only a sketch at the moment, but there is definitely something in there. It also reminded me of the more creative tension in the famous strike slogan ‘Bread and Roses’, of money and dignity. I probably need to talk to some narratologists about this.
(Poster: Ricardo Levins Morales, ‘What She Wants’. Fine Art America)
Mulgan reminds us that there are also other stories out there that are less positive. There are reactionary stories, of course, but worse; there are stories that poison the discourse, as Salman Rushdie reminded us in a fine short novel.
That’s why we need positive stories:
we will continue to be creatures of stories: and if we lack stories of hope, pathways to a better future, this space will be filled with darker, more atavist ones.
2: ‘Women have always been poor’. (A Room of One’s Own, Part 2)
In Part 1, last week, I discussed the persona that Virginia Woolf adopts for the narrator of her essay, A Room of One’s Own, of a poorly-educated woman struggling to understand how it has been that so few women were able to make a living through writing. In Part 2 (of 2), I discuss her analysis of the reasons.
The core of the argument in ‘A Room of One’s Own’ is about the effect that living in a patriarchy has had on women writers — and on women who might, had they been men, have become writers.
The first is in the subjects they are able to address. Woolf reminds us that Jane Austen wrote all of her novels in the parlour, with people passing through the room, while going to some lengths to cover her tracks:
'How she was able to effect all this', her nephew writes in his Memoir, is surprising, for she had no separate study to repair to, and most of the work must have been done in the general sitting-room, subject to all kinds of casual interruptions. She was careful that her occupation should not be suspected by servants or visitors or any persons beyond her own family party!"
Woolf surmises that it would be easier for Austen to write fiction than a play or poetry, because it would take less concentration.
Opportunity also matters. Woolf constructs a vignette about an imagined ‘Shakespeare’s sister’ who tries to make her way in London’s Elizabethan world, but comes to a grim end. Aphra Behn made money from writing in the 17th century, but she is both a pioneer and an exception.
But generally, the constrained circumstances in which women live leads to constraint in their writing. There’s an interesting critical reading here that contrasts Pride and Prejudice with Jane Eyre:
One might say, I continued, laying the book down beside Pride and Prejudice, that the woman who wrote those pages had more genius in her than Jane Austen; but... one sees that she will never get her genius expressed whole and entire. Her books will be deformed and twisted. She will write in a rage where she should write calmly. She will write foolishly where she should write wisely. She will write of herself where she should write of her characters. She is at war with her lot. How could she help but die young, cramped and thwarted?
Had Tolstoy, she muses, lived in domestic seclusion, he probably would never have written War and Peace.
George Eliot gets referenced around here, since she managed to make money from her books, and also to write about the world outside of her parlour. But in many ways she makes Woolf’s point perfectly, because Eliot more or less hid from 19th century society because she lived with a man to whom she was not married:
George Eliot escaped after much tribulation, but only to a secluded villa in St John's Wood. And there she settled down in the shadow of the world's disapproval. I wish it to be understood', she wrote, 'that I should never invite anyone to come and see me who did not ask for the invitation'; for was she not living in sin with a married man and might not the sight of her damage the chastity of Mrs Smith.
We’re getting the point by now: because the room and the money are about two things. The first is the seclusion of somewhere quiet to work and think, and the second is about the freedom to see the world, in the kinds of material conditions that prevailed for women in the rich part of the world in the first part of the 20th century. The room, by the way, should have a lock on the door.
(Merengo, by Szentgyörgyi Kornél)
She observes, in fact, that her listeners and readers may find that her focus on the room and the money is too material:
Even allowing a generous margin for symbolism, that five hundred a year stands for the power to contemplate, that a lock on the door means the power to think for oneself, still you may say that the mind should rise above such things; and that great poets have often been poor men.
In her support she enrols here the then influential critic Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, who connected the success of a long series of poets, from Coleridge to Swinburne, to their relative levels of prosperity. In contrast, “women have always been poor”:
Intellectual freedom depends upon material things. Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom. And women have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from the beginning of time. Women have had less intellectual freedom than the sons of Athenian slaves. Women, then, have not had a dog's chance of writing poetry.
And at this point she pokes fun at herself. Why is she making all this fuss about women writing books,
when, according to you, it requires so much effort, leads perhaps to the murder of one's aunts, will make one almost certainly late for luncheon, and may bring one into very grave disputes with certain very good fellows?
Her interest, she pretends, is completely selfish, in that she wants to read a wider variety of books, and she hopes that the young women in the audience will write them:
Like most uneducated English-women, I like reading—I like reading books in the bulk. Lately my diet has become a trifle monotonous;... Therefore I would ask you to write all kinds of books, hesitating at no subject however trivial or however vast. By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream.
And this is, of course, an argument about voice and representation, in an age before those concepts had currency. Certainly she expects that things will be different by 2029:
In a century's time very possibly [values] will have changed completely. Moreover, in a hundred years, I thought, reaching my own doorstep, women will have ceased to be the protected sex. Logically they will take part in all the activities and exertions that were once denied them.
Because it is worth remembering that 1929 is still quite close to several important milestones for women in England. It was only in 1880 that a married woman was legally permitted to own her own property. Women (some women) got the vote only in 1919–ten years before the essay was published—and then only after causing considerable bother to the government. The Equal Franchise Act, which finally gave the vote to all men and women over the age of 21 was passed in 1928, when she gave the lectures.
‘A Room of One’s Own’ needs to be seen in that moment. Woolf’s essay, for all of its rhetorical strategies, is making the cultural claim for women that goes with those legal and political victories.
Post script
After I published Part 1 last week the futurist Adam Gordon got in touch. He had also read ‘A Room of One’s Own’ after hearing David Runciman talk about it, and sent a mini-review of his own:
What struck me—in addition to the skewering mind deftly unpicking gender and class positions, which I expected, and how everything yet nothing has changed in 100 years, which I expected, and how materiality underpins all discourse, of course—was how utterly brilliant it is as writing. As literature. Each of the scenes, the fat dinner, the thin dinner, the college library, the British Museum etc. are so totally seen, so vividly evoked, with language taut as a bow string and a warm bath of indulgence.
j2t#560
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