stanza my stone

"The word ‘feminist’ appears three times in Woolf’s draft of the dinner party scene where Lily and Mr. Ramsay’s student, Charles Tansley, try to make small talk. The word has been edited out of the final version, which is kind of funny given Lily’s own anxiety about it. Lily ‘could not bear to be called, as she might have been called had she come out with her views, a feminist.’ Lily is struggling to hang on to herself in the face of Mr. Tansley’s statement that women can’t paint or write. ‘Down she went; horror and despair; annihilation; nonentity…’ And she succeeds. She remembers the problem she’s engaged with in her painting and feels ‘joyous in her freedom.’ In contrast to Mrs. Ramsay’s apparent selflessness, Lily is trying to become a self, a subject. A subject in the sense of one who does, not in the sense of one who is done to, the way Mrs. Ramsay is Mr. Ramsay’s object."

— Alison Bechdel, Are You My Mother?