2 Androgyny and Woolf’ s Androgynous Vision

2.1 History of Androgyny

The theory of androgyny is of a very long history in the western literature. Many scholars and critics have different understandings on androgyny. Androgyny among humans—physical, psychological, and cultural—are attested to from earliest history and across world cultures. The ancient Greek myth of Hermaphroditus and Salmacis, two pinities who fused into a single immortal—provided a frame of reference used in Western culture for centuries.

Androgyny and homosexuality are seen in Plato’s Symposium in a myth that Aristophanes tells the audience. People used to be spherical creatures, with two bodies attached back to back who cartwheeled around. There were three sexes: the male-male people who descended from the sun, the female-female people who descended from the earth, and the male-female people who came from the moon. This last pairing represented the androgynous couple. These sphere people tried to take over the gods and failed. Zeus then decided to cut them in half and had Apollo stitch them back together leaving the navel as a reminder to not defy the gods again. If they did, he would cleave them in two again to hop around on one leg. Plato states in this work that homosexuality is not shameful. This is one of the earlier written references to androgyny. Other early references to androgyny include astronomy, where androgyny was a name given to planets that were sometimes warm and sometimes cold.文献综述

Philosophers such as Alexandria and early Christian leaders such as Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, continued to promote the idea of androgyny as human’s original and perfect state during late antiquity. In medieval Europe, the concept of androgyny played an important role in both Christian theological debate and Alchemical theory. Influential Theologians such as John of Damascus and John Scottus Eriugena continued to promote the pre-fall androgyny proposed by the early church fathers, while other clergy expounded and debated the proper view and treatment of contemporary “hermaphrodites”.

Western Esotericism’s embrace of androgyny continued into the modern period. The symbolism and meaning of androgyny was a central preoccupation of the German mystic Jakob Böhme and the Swedish philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg. The philosophical concept of the “Universal Androgyne” or “Universal Hermaphrodite”—a perfect merging of the sexes that predated the current corrupted world, also played a central role in Rosicrucian doctrine and in philosophical traditions according to Lv Hongling’s work Emotion & Reaction: A Study of Virginia Woolf’s conception of Women’s Writing (Lv, 2007).