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Chapter 3 - Body and biology in A Room of One's Own

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 September 2009

Donald J. Childs
Affiliation:
University of Ottawa
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Summary

Perhaps the most interesting and productive outcome of Woolf's engagement with eugenics is the eugenical logic of inheritance that enables important aspects of her conception of the woman-centered literary tradition outlined in A Room of One's Own (1928). In figuring the origin and development of such a tradition, Woolf adopts a thoroughly biological model of inheritance. The model is broadly evolutionary – sometimes drawing on Darwin, sometimes drawing on Lamarck, particularly in depicting a woman writer's literary inheritance of her forbears' acquired characteristics. Furthermore, Woolf focuses literally upon the question of biological inheritance by examining the relationship between the woman writer and genius – the question of the heritability of genius enduring into Woolf's time as an issue bequeathed to eugenists by Galton's ground-breaking study, Hereditary Genius (1869). Finally, Woolf's essay concludes by enjoining women writers to engage in eugenically responsible literary breeding: the proliferation of the literary germ plasm depends on it.

Type
Chapter
Information
Modernism and Eugenics
Woolf, Eliot, Yeats, and the Culture of Degeneration
, pp. 58 - 74
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2001

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