Critical Article

Lavine, Ann. "Virginia Woolf's The Legacy." The English Journal 75.2 (1986): 74-78. Print.

Ann Lavine explores the complexities behind Virginia Woolf’s writing in her article about one of her short stories called The Legacy. Lavine’s article, Virginia Woolf’s “The Legacy”, was inspired from teaching one of her high school classes where she found a way to introduce Woolf’s writing to the classroom. Lavine believes that to approach Woolf’s writing, one must accept that there are multiple themes and that reality is not meant to be presented as absolute. Lavine claims that Woolf believed that reality is interpreted through every person’s subjective personality, and therefore, there is never one precise answer or solution to anything. Lavine represented this subjective reality by splitting her classroom into two groups: each group choosing one of the two main characters and siding with one or the other as the protagonist. In the case of The Legacy, Lavine had her students pick whether they believed Gilbert had been wronged or Angela gave him what he desired. Lavine proposes a third way of interpreting the text, and claims that Woolf intended to have the multiple interpretations and that without it the text would not be the same. She notes that not much has been previously written about The Legacy. What had been written usually determined that the story represents the misunderstandings that each person has of one another, and even though we try in vain to have knowledge of other people we will always fail in ignorance and loneliness. Lavine disagrees with this conclusion, and says that it is more likely a representation of Woolf’s hatred of the patriarchy. She says that because we are only given the male perspective through Gilbert as the narrator our perception of Angela is skewed. Lavine believes that Woolf intended for this skewed reality, because it is a representation of the male reality that encompassed Woolf’s time period.