General First Post

One of the things I liked best about the Virginia Woolf story "The Mark on the Wall" was the play on the world "generalizations" on page 41. She quickly puns this with "general" to recall the military, first-page articles in newspapers of note, and government officials (all masculine-valued things) before launching into a discussion of how generalities are the real thing when we first learn to call things by name (e.g., this is a Dog, the name Dog somehow holding more power than all the particularities of the canine itself). Generalizations morph in this diatribe to social rules, customs, and ideologies (what one perceives as normal without being aware that this is uncertain), and then become connected somehow to a masculine authority that was eroded -- alongside the truth(fulness) of those "generalizations" -- "since the war...". So, this connection of ideologies or truths exposed as hollow and wanting to "Whitaker's Table of Precedency" and "the masculine point of view" performs an explicit and crucial role in the broader feminist critique that the class read from this work last time. Still, what replaces "those real standard things" exposed as phantoms, is, for women, "Men perhaps...". I like to think that this relates to DHL's character Birkin, for whom we can already see, a special (unique, even) relationship between a man and a woman is a burning goal. I open the floor, out of ideas, go.