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The Autobiography of Christopher Kirkland by Eliza Lynn Linton
The Autobiography of Christopher Kirkland by Eliza Lynn Linton











Habermas uses the term "public sphere" both descriptively and normatively: to describe an eighteenth-century historical phenomenon and to define a not-yet-realized ideal of open and universal access to critical discussion and consensus making. The British Museum Reading Room, where journalists and political activists did the research that would allow them to take public stands, where they met and talked about books and ideas and wrote their articles, was thus a point of convergence between literary and political public spheres: a perfect image for Woolf to choose. Museums and reading rooms are listed by Habermas among the venues where this hammering takes place, in part because they are places where the absorption and exchange of ideas occurs, but also because they contribute to a specifically literary public sphere, in which "the subjectivity originating in the interiority of the conjugal family, by communicating with itself, attained clarity about itself." (2) For men, at least, this literary public sphere then fed directly into a political public sphere, where these clarifi ed subjectivities could engage in debate about issues of shared concern. The term "public sphere," of course, comes from the work of Jurgen Habermas, who has traced the development, during the eighteenth century, of the "bourgeois public sphere"-a "sphere of private people come together as a public"- that is, of rational, civic-minded individuals who hammer out among them, via written and spoken discourse, a body of opinion independent of the state.

The Autobiography of Christopher Kirkland by Eliza Lynn Linton The Autobiography of Christopher Kirkland by Eliza Lynn Linton The Autobiography of Christopher Kirkland by Eliza Lynn Linton

The reading room thus serves Woolf as a conveniently vivid representation of women's exclusion from the public sphere. In a wonderful if familiar passage from her 1929 A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf describes herself entering the British Museum Reading Room: "The swing doors swung open, and there one stood under the vast dome, as if one were a thought in the huge bald forehead which is so splendidly encircled by a band of famous names." (1) Because the famous names included no women and because a "bald forehead" is by implication male, the description suggests two things: that as a woman she exists only as perceived by the male mind and that the very shape of the room itself, as well as the books it contains, conflates knowledge with masculinity.













The Autobiography of Christopher Kirkland by Eliza Lynn Linton