Some people suggest that Woolf’s characters, in Flush and other novels, were quite androgynous, indicating that Flush’s character was not meant to represent women at all. “Androgyny was the myth that helped Woolf evade confrontation with her own painful femaleness and enabled her to choke and repress her anger and ambition.” According to ‘A Literature of Their Own’ by Elaine Showalter, Woolf placed androgynous characteristics on to her characters as a sort of defense mechanism...
Some people suggest that Woolf’s characters, in Flush and other novels, were quite androgynous, indicating that Flush’s character was not meant to represent women at all.
“Androgyny was the myth that helped Woolf evade confrontation with her own painful femaleness and enabled her to choke and repress her anger and ambition.”
According to ‘A Literature of Their Own’ by Elaine Showalter, Woolf placed androgynous characteristics on to her characters as a sort of defense mechanism against her own personal feelings. This indicates that Flush is not a feminist novel, as Woolf purposefully intended
In conclusion, Flush (the book) reads as if it has multiple literary angles, and so it is surprising that it has been disregarded by many scholars for its sentimentality and supposed lack of intellectuality. Woolf has explored both feminism and ecofeminism by using Flush’s perspective, and yet using a dog’s perspective was arguably the very thing that discarded Flush from the Literary Cannon. Flush, the dog, plays the role of what is an essentially looked upon as an inferior being, and Woolf relates this to the issues of feminism such as the oppression of women, and the limitations they have because of it (particularly Victorian women). Consequently, while it is certainly not the sole purpose of the book, Flush does operate as a stand-in for the woman writer.
