Selon Theodore Dalrymple, le livre aurait dû s’intituler How to Be Privileged and Yet Feel Extremely Aggrieved.

“Had Mrs. Woolf survived to our time, however, she would at least have had the satisfaction of observing that her cast of mind—shallow, dishonest, resentful, envious, snobbish, self-absorbed, trivial, philistine, and ultimately brutal—had triumphed among the elites of the Western world.”

 
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Les filles de la grève

Par Martine Delvaux, prof Département d’études littéraires Université du Québec à Montréal

Les filles d’hommes cultivés ont toujours pensé au jour le jour, elles n’ont pas exercé leur réflexion devant des tables de travail, dans le cloître d’un collège réservé à l’élite. Elles ont pensé tout en remuant des casseroles, tout en balançant des berceaux… Pensons dans les bureaux, pensons dans les autobus, pensons tandis que, debout dans la foule, nous regardons les couronnements ou les défilés…, pensons en passant devant le cénotaphe, et devant White Hall, dans la galerie du Parlement, dans les chambres de justice, pensons au cours des baptêmes, des mariages et des funérailles. Ne nous arrêtons jamais de penser – quelle est cette civilisation où nous nous trouvons?

Virginia Woolf, Trois guinées

En me penchant sur ce qu’on pourrait appeler la figure des filles de la grève, pour réfléchir à la place qu’occupent les étudiantes et la pensée féministe dans le contexte de la lutte, j’ai réentendu le cri de Virginia Woolf dans Trois guinées, son Think we must adressé aux filles d’hommes cultivés et qui les encourageait à interroger cette société « qui engloutit le frère que beaucoup d’entre nous ont des raisons de respecter dans la vie privée, et qui impose à sa place un mâle monstrueux, à la voix tonitruante, au poing dur, qui d’une façon puérile inscrit sur le sol des signes à la craie, ces lignes de démarcation mystiques entre lesquelles sont fixés, rigides, séparés, artificiels, les êtres humains ».

 

Ou encore

Virginia Woolf, une étoile dans la Pléiade

Par André Clavel (L’Express), publié le 08/08/2012 à 09:30

Reste la Virginia combattante, qui, au moment où les nazis envahissaient l’Autriche, signa un pamphlet réédité par Blackjack Editions, Trois Guinées. Dans ces pages, une femme s’adresse à un correspondant qui lui a demandé son avis sur la guerre. Sa réponse ? Une critique virulente de la société britannique et du patriarcat, source d’instincts belliqueux auxquels Virginia Woolf oppose la dissidence féminine.”

 
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Quelques remarques du décapant Theodore Dalrymple sur Virginia Woolf

The Rage of Virginia Woolf

Theodore Dalrymple, sur City Journal

In 1938, Virginia Woolf published a book entitled Three Guineas. It was about how women could prevent war.

Virginia Woolf’s name is not normally associated with great affairs of state, of course. Quite the reverse. She regarded them with a fastidious disgust, as a vulgar distraction from the true business of life: attendance to the finer nuances of one’s own emotional state.

(…)

No: it is a locus classicus of self-pity and victimhood as a genre in itself. In this, it was certainly ahead of its time, and it deserves to be on the syllabus of every department of women’s studies at every third-rate establishment of higher education. Never were the personal and the political worse confounded.

The book is important because it is a naked statement of the worldview that is unstated and implicit in all of Virginia Woolf’s novels, most of which have achieved an iconic status in the republic of letters and in the humanities departments of the English-speaking world, where they have influenced countless young people. The book, therefore, is truly a seminal text. In Three Guineas, Virginia Woolf lets us know without disguise what she really thinks: and what she thinks is by turns grandiose and trivial, resentful and fatuous. The book might be better titled: How to Be Privileged and Yet Feel Extremely Aggrieved.

(…)

Virginia Woolf writes of three requests made of her for donations of one guinea each: the first by an eminent lawyer for his society for the protection of intellectual freedom and the promotion of peace; the second by the head of a Cambridge University women’s college to help rebuild and enlarge the college; and the third by the treasurer of a society for the aid of professional women, to enable them to buy the evening clothes necessary to their status in life.

(…)

Mrs. Woolf belonged by birth not merely to the upper middle classes but to the elite of the intellectual elite. She was a Stephen, her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, being an eminent essayist, editor, and critic, the founding editor of the monumental and magnificent Dictionary of National Biography and at one time the publisher of Thomas Hardy. He knew everyone who was anyone in the literary and intellectual world. Mrs. Woolf’s uncle, Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, was an eminent legal scholar and historian, jurist, judge, and political philosopher, who wrote a brilliant and still-classical riposte to John Stuart Mill’s essay on liberty. She grew up in a rarefied intellectual atmosphere in which it would clearly be difficult to equal, let alone surpass, the achievements of her elders. One way to surpass her father and her uncle in achievement was, of course, to disparage and destroy all they had erected.

(…)

Her reply to the philanthropist who requested a donation to buy evening clothes for professional women vibrates with outrage that the daughters of educated men should find themselves in financial difficulties (which, in her view, should properly belong only to social inferiors). “Not only are we incomparably weaker than the men of our own class,” she writes to the eminent lawyer; “we are weaker than the women of the working class.” “Economically, the educated man’s daughter is much on a level with the farm labourer.” “Society has been so kind to you [the educated men, one of whom is her interlocutor], so harsh to us [the daughters of educated men, of whom she is one]: it is an ill-fitting form that distorts the truth; deforms the mind; fetters the will.” It must therefore be destroyed—presumably by those whose will has been fettered and whose minds have been deformed.

For those who actually know anything about the hardships endured by the British working class, male and female, during the years of the Depression, statements that insinuate an equality, or even a superiority, of suffering on the part of the daughters of educated men are little short of nauseating: but they would clearly appeal to the pampered resentful, a class that was to grow exponentially in the postwar years of sustained prosperity.

(…)

(Mrs. Woolf suggested as a solution that the daughters of educated women should be paid a government subsidy, so that they might create works of art—or do nothing at all—free of all sordid monetary conditions.) Her desire to have it all ways at once—to be utterly independent because unconditionally supported by the tax-payers—illustrates her kind of querulous and irresponsible sense of entitlement.

(…)

Not that one could entirely blame Mrs. Woolf for her lack of dialectical rigor, for, as she writes, “The daughters of educated men have always done their thinking from hand to mouth. . . . They have thought while they stirred the pot, while they rocked the cradle.” This piece of self-pity drew the memorable riposte from the literary critic Q. D. Leavis, herself no unqualified admirer of the common man, that Mrs. Woolf wouldn’t know which end of the cradle to stir.

(…)

So what, in Mrs. Woolf’s opinion, should women actually do if war with Germany came? Since it was evidently a matter of indifference if the Nazis won (every British male being already a virtual Nazi), the answer was obvious to Mrs. Woolf: they should do nothing.

“Their first duty . . . would be not to fight with arms. . . . Next they would refuse . . . to make munitions or nurse the wounded [because the prospect of being nursed if wounded would give men a perverse incentive to fight]. . . . [T]he next duty to which they would pledge themselves [would be] not to incite their brothers to fight, or to dissuade them, but to maintain an attitude of complete indifference.” And she commended as wise and courageous the mayoress of the London suburb of Woolwich, who made a speech in December 1937, in which she said that she “would not even so much as darn a sock to help in a war.”

(…)

Had Mrs. Woolf survived to our time, however, she would at least have had the satisfaction of observing that her cast of mind—shallow, dishonest, resentful, envious, snobbish, self-absorbed, trivial, philistine, and ultimately brutal—had triumphed among the elites of the Western world.