Chapter Five Analysis

Woolf creates Mary Carmichael as a descendent of the generation of writers she talked about in Chapter Four, and she represents a change toward an average woman able to write without rage and an acute awareness of her gender. A fictitious novelist, current with the narrator of Woolf's essay, Carmichael in her first novel, has "broken the sentence, broken the sequence" and forever metamorphosed women's writing. The narrator initially questions Carmichael’s writing style and thinks it’s inconsistent and too “flowery,” but then reconsiders it to be purposeful in order match her style shifts with her unexpected mood shifts. She writes simplistically about a friendship between Chloe and Olivia, and surprisingly, the idea of a woman-to-woman friendship without relation in the text to men is groundbreaking for its time.

As the narrator continues to read Carmichael’s genius and hopes for further details of the inner-workings of the female mind, she realizes she has betrayed her original goal to not praise her own sex. She notes that neither men nor women know much about the opposite sex, but the genders compliment each other while each works for a greater understanding of the other and of their own gender.

[This picture reminds me of what Woolf is talking about with her connection between light and genius. It's as if the photo actually shows how this flower's growth is dependent on the light]

Woolf continues the metaphor of light as brilliance when talks about “Striking a match that will not light”; but possibly adds a sexual innuendo when the narrator wonders if she will “Light a torch in that vast chamber where nobody has yet been.” This perhaps insinuates an unexplored (private) physical region of the female character that she then parallels to “serpentine caves.”