Discussion: The Feminine Self

These three excellent papers depict the struggle of three outstanding female literary figures to achieve a cohesive self and to give it expression creatively in a characteristically feminine way. These studies of Woolf, Nin, and Bronte make clear the relationship between the structuring of self as a general process of individuation and the development of a specifically female self. They also throw light on the relationship between creativity and the process of self-structuring, for as Otto Rank said, the first creative act of the artist is the appointment of himself or herself as artist. These women sought this appointment for themselves as writers, but especially as women writers.

One might well ask the question, Why, if one has succeeded in consolidating an expressive self, is it necessary to strive for a specifically feminine self? Why does this not evolve automatically, as the natural expression of a self that is at the very core of a female being? The answer, it seems to me, lies in the influence of culture and the imprint of cultural values on the psychology of individuals. For millennia we have lived in a male-oriented, male-dominated culture in which the role and image of woman was defined by males and was incorporated into female psychological structure. It is a well-known sociopsychological phenomenon. Anthropologists have shown that in the meeting of two diverse cultures—one dominant, the other subordinate—the subordinate culture takes over the values of the more dominant one. Gender, too, functions as do cultures, and women in their subordinate position have until recently taken over male values. Therefore, for the three literary figures under discussion the struggle was not only one to create, assert, and express a self but to do so in a way that would be characteristically feminine.

They did not all succeed equally; in fact, one of them, Virginia Woolf, failed; not in her literary productions to be sure but by virtue of the fact that she ended her own li