Compulsory Happy Endings. Virgina Woolfs Ett eget rum i feministisk teori

Abstract

Ever since the 1960's Virginia Woolf's essay A Room ofOne's Own has functioned as a meeting place for feminist literary scholars. Departing from this text streams of new theories have emerged through the years. In this article Lisbeth Larsson analyses the consistency and changes within this duster of academic analyses. Larsson shows how different parts of Woolfs essay have been used for specific aims, which all have one important goal in common: the ambition to try to establish what a female text is, and also how it should be constituted. Through Woolfs text, Larsson argues, feminists and literary theorists have tried to formulate not only a feminist poetics, but a utopia and an emacipatory strategy. And although the emancipating norm has changed during this period of time, Larsson concludes that there is still an urge for utopian solutions in feminist literary studies, and that this constraint ultimately prevents these contributions from functioning in a genuinely liberating way. In spite of their self-announced tolerance, by always anticipating an "compulsory happy ending", they become normative, repressive, and blind to the complexities and dynamics of fiction.