- Title Pages
- Frontispiece
- Preface
- Introduction
- Acknowledgments
- Virginia Woolf Standard Abbreviations
- “But…I had said ‘but’ too often.” Why “but”?
- Woolf, Context, and Contradiction
- “Did I not banish the soul?” Thinking Otherwise, Woolf-wise
- “The Play’s The Thing BUT We Are The Thing Itself.” Prologue, Performance and Painting. A multimedia Exploration of Woolf’s Work in the Late 1930s and Her Vision of Prehistory.
- Report to the Memoir Club
- “But somebody you wouldn’t forget in a hurry”
- Contradictions in Autobiography
- “But something betwixt and between”
- “Can ‘I’ Become ‘We’?”
- Woolf’s Un/Folding(s)
- Woolf’s Contradictory Thinking
- The Feeling of Knowing in <i>Mrs Dalloway</i>
- “When the lights of health go down”
- Kinetic Tropes, Comedic Turns
- But Woolf was a Sophisticated Observer of Fashion…
- Bi-sexing the Unmentionable Mary Hamiltons in <i>A Room of One’s Own</i>
- Lacanian <i>Orlando</i>
- The Bispecies Environment, Coevolution, and <i>Flush</i>
- From Spaniel Club to An<i>i</i>Malous Society
- Ecology, Identity and Eschatology
- “Please Help Me!” Virginia Woolf, Viola Tree, and the Hogarth Press<sup>1</sup>
- “Am I a Snob?” Well, sort of
- “Come buy, come buy”
- Virginia Woolf and December 1910
- Virginia Woolf on Mathematics
- “A Brief Note in the Margin”
- “Observe, Observe Perpetually,” Montaigne, Virginia Woolf and the “<i>Patron au Dedans</i>.”
- Who’s Behind the Curtain? Virginia Woolf, “Nurse Lugton’s Golden Thimble,” and the Anxiety of Authorship
- Virginia Woolf and the Russian Oxymoron
- “A Dialogue…about this Beauty and Truth”
- “As I spin along the roads I remodel my life”
- Travesty in Woolf and Proust
- Woolf, Yeats, and the Making of “Spilt Milk”
- Figures of Contradiction
- Do Not Feed the birds
- Approaches to War and Peace in Woolf
- Duncan Grant
- Notes on Contributors
- Conference Program
Bi-sexing the Unmentionable Mary Hamiltons in A Room of One’s Own
Bi-sexing the Unmentionable Mary Hamiltons in A Room of One’s Own
The Truth and Consequences of Unintended Pregnancies and Calculated Cross-Dressing
- Chapter:
- (p.134) Bi-sexing the Unmentionable Mary Hamiltons in A Room of One’s Own
- Source:
- Contradictory Woolf
- Author(s):
Vara S. Neverow
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
This chapter offers a reading of Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own, focusing on the four Marys in the novel. In the second paragraph of A Room, the nameless narrator mentions three Marys: Mary Beton, Mary Seton, and Mary Carmichael. The narrator also hints that we may also call Mary “George,” as in Hamilton. The chapter then cites the historical Dr. George Hamilton, born Mary Hamilton, as one of the unmentioned Mary Hamiltons who haunt Woolf's text. While scholars tend to focus on the old Scottish Ballad narrated by Mary Hamilton, the chapter here raises the possibility that Woolf may have also been influenced by Henry Fielding's fictionalized 1746 pamphlet, The Female Husband: Or The Surprising History of Mrs Mary, Alias Mr George Hamilton, Taken from Her Own Mouth Since Her Confinement, with lesbian cross-dressing Mary Hamilton as the protagonist. It also suggests that Woolf counters Fielding's patriarchal views by endorsing her own Sapphism and the expression of female sexual desire.
Keywords: cross-dressing, A Room of One's Own, George Hamilton, Mary Hamilton, Henry Fielding, The Female Husband, sexual desire
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- Title Pages
- Frontispiece
- Preface
- Introduction
- Acknowledgments
- Virginia Woolf Standard Abbreviations
- “But…I had said ‘but’ too often.” Why “but”?
- Woolf, Context, and Contradiction
- “Did I not banish the soul?” Thinking Otherwise, Woolf-wise
- “The Play’s The Thing BUT We Are The Thing Itself.” Prologue, Performance and Painting. A multimedia Exploration of Woolf’s Work in the Late 1930s and Her Vision of Prehistory.
- Report to the Memoir Club
- “But somebody you wouldn’t forget in a hurry”
- Contradictions in Autobiography
- “But something betwixt and between”
- “Can ‘I’ Become ‘We’?”
- Woolf’s Un/Folding(s)
- Woolf’s Contradictory Thinking
- The Feeling of Knowing in <i>Mrs Dalloway</i>
- “When the lights of health go down”
- Kinetic Tropes, Comedic Turns
- But Woolf was a Sophisticated Observer of Fashion…
- Bi-sexing the Unmentionable Mary Hamiltons in <i>A Room of One’s Own</i>
- Lacanian <i>Orlando</i>
- The Bispecies Environment, Coevolution, and <i>Flush</i>
- From Spaniel Club to An<i>i</i>Malous Society
- Ecology, Identity and Eschatology
- “Please Help Me!” Virginia Woolf, Viola Tree, and the Hogarth Press<sup>1</sup>
- “Am I a Snob?” Well, sort of
- “Come buy, come buy”
- Virginia Woolf and December 1910
- Virginia Woolf on Mathematics
- “A Brief Note in the Margin”
- “Observe, Observe Perpetually,” Montaigne, Virginia Woolf and the “<i>Patron au Dedans</i>.”
- Who’s Behind the Curtain? Virginia Woolf, “Nurse Lugton’s Golden Thimble,” and the Anxiety of Authorship
- Virginia Woolf and the Russian Oxymoron
- “A Dialogue…about this Beauty and Truth”
- “As I spin along the roads I remodel my life”
- Travesty in Woolf and Proust
- Woolf, Yeats, and the Making of “Spilt Milk”
- Figures of Contradiction
- Do Not Feed the birds
- Approaches to War and Peace in Woolf
- Duncan Grant
- Notes on Contributors
- Conference Program
