Horney took the line that ‘there is no such thing as a universal normal psychology.’10 What is regarded as neurotic in one culture may be normal elsewhere, and vice versa. For her, however, two traits invariably characterised all neurotics. The first was ‘rigidity in reaction,’ and the second was ‘a discrepancy between potentiality and achievement.’ For example, a normal person by definition becomes suspicious of someone else only after that person has behaved badly toward them; the neurotic ‘brings his or her suspicion with them at all times.’ Horney didn’t believe in the Oedipus complex either. She preferred the notion of ‘basic anxiety,’ which she attributed not to biology but to the conflicting forces of society, conflicts that act on an individual from childhood. Basic anxiety she characterised as a feeling of ‘being small, insignificant, helpless, endangered, in a world that is out to abuse, cheat, attack, humiliate, betray, envy.’11 Such anxiety is worse, she said, when parents fail to give their children warmth and affection. This usually occurs in families where the parents have their own unresolved neuroses, initiating a vicious circle. By definition, the neurotic personality has lost, or never had, ‘the blissful certainty of being wanted.’12 Such a child grows up with one of four rigid ways of approaching life, which interfere with achievement: the neurotic striving for affection; the neurotic striving for power; neurotic withdrawal; and neurotic submissiveness.13
The most contentious part of Horney’s theory, for nonpsychoanalysts, was her blaming neurosis on the contradictions of, in particular, contemporary American life. She insisted that in America more than anywhere else there existed an inherent contradiction between competition and success on the one hand (‘never give a sucker an even break’) and good neighborliness on the other (‘love your neighbour as yourself); between the promotion of ambition by advertising (‘keeping up with the Joneses’) and the inability of the individual to satisfy these ambitions; between the creed of unfettered individualism and the ever more common curbs brought about by environmental concerns and more laws.14 This modern world, despite its material advantages, foments the feeling in many individuals that they are ‘isolated and helpless.’15 Many would agree that they feel isolated and helpless, and maybe even neurotically so. But Horney’s theory never explains why some neurotics need affection, and others power, and why some become submissive. She herself denied that biology was responsible but never clarified what else might account for such large differences in behaviour.
Horney’s feminism was new but not unique. The campaign to gain women the vote had exercised politicians in several countries prior to World War I, not least in Austria and Great Britain. Immediately after the war other matters had taken priority, both economically and psychologically, but as the 1920s passed, the status of women again became an issue.
One of the minor themes in Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room is the easy effortlessness of the men who led Britain into war, and their casual treatment of women. Whereas all the men in the book have comfortable sets of rooms from which to embark on their fulfilling lives, the women always have to share, or are condemned to cold and draughty houses. This was a discrepancy Woolf was to take up in her most famous piece of nonfiction, A Room of One’s Own, published in 1929. It appears that being turned away from an Oxbridge college library because she was a woman propelled her to write her feminist polemic. And it is certainly arguable that the greatest psychological revolution of the century has been in the female sensibility.16
By 1929 Virginia Woolf had published six novels. These included Jacob’s Room, in the miracle year of 1922, Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and Orlando in 1928. Her success, however, only seems to have made her more unsettled about the situation most female writers found themselves in. Her central argument in the 100-page essay was that ‘a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.’17 Her view, which was to be echoed by others in different ways later in the century, was that a writer ‘is the product of his or her historical circumstances and that material conditions are crucially important’ – not just to whether the books get written but to the psychological status of the writer, male or female. But women were the main focus of her attention, and she went on to show how, in Britain at least, until the Married Women’s Property Acts of 1870 and 1882, a married woman’s income legally belonged to her husband. There could be no freedom of the mind, she felt, without freedom of circumstance. This meant that prior to the end of the seventeenth century there were very few women writers, and those who did write often only dabbled in it. Woolf herself suffered, in that the boys in her own family went to boarding school and then to university, whereas she and the other girls were educated at home.18 This brought several consequences. Female experience was underreported in fiction, and what experience was reported was inevitably distorted and/or restricted to certain kinds. For example, she felt that Jane Austen was not given access to the wider world that her talent demanded, with similar restrictions applying also to Elizabeth Barrett Browning: ‘It cannot be doubted that the long years of seclusion had done her [Browning] irreparable damage as an artist.’19
Though she felt feminist anger, Woolf was very clear that such anger had no place in fiction, which should have larger ambitions for itself, and she criticised earlier writers, like Browning and Charlotte Brönte, for giving way to that anger. She then moved on to consider the ways in which the female mind might complement the male mind, in an effort to show what literature has lost by the barriers erected against women. For example, she considers Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s notion of the androgynous mind, with male and female qualities coexisting in harmony, to be open to all possibilities. She makes no case for the superiority of either sex, but rather for the mind that allows both sympathies equal access. She actually wrote that it is ‘fatal for anyone who writes to think of their sex.’20 She herself described A Room as a trifle, but she also said she wrote it with ardour, and it has certainly been a huge success. One reason is the style. When the book was published, in October 1929, it was reviewed in the Sunday Times of London by Desmond MacCarthy, who described it as ‘feminist propaganda’ but added ‘yet it resembles an almond-tree in blossom.’21 Woolf’s style is conversational, intimate. She manages to be both angry and above anger at the wrongs done to women writers, and would-be women writers, in the past. She devotes pages to the lunches she has eaten at Oxbridge colleges – where she says the food is much better in the women’s colleges than the men’s. And she makes it matter. Of course, Virginia Woolf’s fiction should be read alongside A Room of One’s Own. She did help emancipate women not only by her polemic but also by her example.