Men Explain Things To Me

Essay 6 introduces another key theme: exploring or embracing the unknown. This is often examined through the symbol of darkness, first introduced in a quote from Woolf that observes: “The future is dark, which is the best thing the future can be, I think” (85). In many respects, the darkness and the unknown serve as counterpoints to the obscuring power of the white sheet from the previous essay. That which is obscured and unknown is seen as a site of liberation and potential rather than a place of eradication. It is in this sense that Solnit praises Woolf’s statement as a “celebration of darkness,” observing “the night in which distinctions and definitions cannot be readily made is the same night in which love is made, in which things merge, change, become enchanted, aroused, impregnated, possessed, released, renewed” (86).

Solnit suggests that while many choose only to see the obvious, that which supports their preconceived ideas, it is “the job of writers and explorers to see more, to travel light when it comes to preconception, to go into the dark with their eyes open” (87). The writers Solnit lauds, then, recognize that “the past, like the future, is dark” and “engage repeatedly with those patches of darkness, those nights of history, those places of unknowing” (87). However, this is not simply a case of trying to make the darkness light or the unknown known. Rather than attempting to pin down a fixed meaning or assert absolute knowledge, writers should explore the unknown carefully with the “the language of nuance and ambiguity and speculation” (88-89). Solnit sees Woolf as an exemplar of this, “unparalleled at that latter language” and serving, for Solnit herself, as “a Virgil guiding me through the uses of wandering, getting lost, anonymity, immersion, uncertainty, and the unknown” (89). Susan Sontag also employs quotes by Woolf to call on readers to “embrace the darkness, the unknown, the unknowability” (91). However, Sontag and Solnit have argued about some details of how we should relate to this “darkness.” While Sontag believes “we should resist on principle, even though it might be futile,” Solnit finds hope in the unknown, suggesting that “you don’t know if your actions are futile […] that the future is indeed dark, which is the best thing it could be; and that, in the end, we always act in the dark” (93). Indeed, in another brief allusion to feminist progress, she observes that “grounds for hope are simply that we don’t know what will happen next […] And that the unofficial history of the world shows that dedicated individuals and popular movements can shape history and have” (94).

Solnit’s hope here comes “from what the Romantic poet John Keats called Negative Capability” (95) or the ability to sit with uncertainty and mystery “without any irritable reaching after fact and reason” (96). Returning to Woolf, she suggests that this ability to explore the unknown without reaching for solid conclusions is a “portion of Woolf’s genius” (96), something that manifests in her explorations of the self which “do not compel the unity of identity that is a limitation or even a repression” (99) and in her essays which Solnit presents as “models of counter-criticism” (100). The idea of “counter-criticism” exemplifies the embracing of the unknown. That is to say, essays such as Woolf’s do not seek to make the unknown known or the darkness light but rather see that value in darkness, obscurity, and intangibility. Instead of attempting to control “the slipperiness of the work and the ambiguities of the artist’s intent and meaning” (100) or “have the last word and leave the rest of us in silence” (101), counter-criticism “seeks to expand the work of art, by connecting it, opening up its meanings, inviting in the possibilities” (100-101).

This inviting in of possibilities plays out in Woolf’s demands for women’s liberation too, focusing not simply on fixed, measurable freedoms but on “full freedom to roam, geographically and imaginatively” (102) or the “freedom to continue becoming, exploring, wandering, going beyond” (103). That is, her work “is always celebrating a liberation that is not official, institutional, rational, but a matter of going beyond the familiar, the safe, the known into the broader world” (101-102). Following Woolf, Solnit also embraces that unknown, recognizing the value of the intangible and striving to “find or make a language to describe the subtleties, the incalculables, the pleasures and meaning—impossible to categorize—at the heart of things” (104). This is part of an effort to combat “the way what can be measured almost always takes precedence over what cannot” (104). As such, she takes on the “the task of naming and describing” things that are hard to name and describe, which she suggests is “an essential [task] in any revolt against the status quo under capitalism and consumerism” (105).

The final essay explores the theme of feminism’s progress in more detail than the previous essays. Solnit notes that critics sometimes suggest that feminism should have achieved more or that it is somehow failing in its efforts. However, she counters that feminism is “an endeavor to change something very old, widespread, and deeply rooted” and that, accordingly, the fact “that everything has not permanently, definitively, irrevocably changed is not a sign of failure” (110). Indeed, she believes that feminism has already made “irrevocable change” (111). She introduces a new motif to explore this: “Pandora’s box, or if you like, the genies (or djinnis) in bottles in Arabian Nights” (111). In both cases, “the genies […] [and] the powerful forces Pandora lets out don’t go back into the bottle” (111), and Solnit asserts that this is the case for the ideas and beliefs spread by feminist activism. Now that they are widely accepted, they will not “go back in the jar or box” (112). As an example, she suggests that while conservative forces may “abolish the reproductive rights women gained in 1973, with Roe v. Wade […] you can’t so easily abolish the idea that women have certain inalienable rights” (111). Similarly, while domestic violence is still both widespread and badly policed, “the ideas that a husband has the right to beat his wife and that it’s a private matter are not returning anytime soon. The genies are not going back into their bottles” (114). In both cases, the real progress is the fact that attitudes, if not institutions, have irrevocably changed.

Although Solnit celebrates the progress and changes feminism has made, she is far from blind to the amount of work still required or the backlash currently at play, often coming from a “volunteer police force” (117) of misogynists who use insults, threats, violence, and abuse to try and control and limit women. She acknowledges that there still “so many forces trying to push us back or at least stop us” and how “there’s still been a huge effort to put women back in their place. Or the place misogynists think we belong in, a place of silence and powerlessness” (116). However, again, while these are real concerns, the ideas that feminism has disseminated are not going “back in the bottle” and “[c]onservatives are now largely fighting rearguard actions” (119). Likewise, while we still require more of “an inquiry into the men perpetrating most of the violence, the threats, the hatred—the riot squad of the volunteer police force—and the culture that encourages them” (121), Solnit also acknowledge that “perhaps this inquiry has begun” (121), pointing to the widespread understanding of “rape culture” and the ways “new feminism is making the problems visible in new ways” (122).

Solnit also notes that the feminist struggle intersects with wider liberal politics including anti-capitalist activism. Quite explicitly, she argues that there is still “more we need to be liberated from,” including “a system that prizes competition and ruthlessness and short-term thinking and rugged individualism, a system that serves environmental destruction and limitless consumption so well—that arrangement you can call capitalism” (123). She points to the Zapatistas are an example of how such interest may intersect within a popular movement, highlighting its “broad ideology that includes feminist as well as environmental, economic, indigenous, and other perspectives” and noting that this may not only be “the future of feminism” but also “the present of feminism” (124). Whether this is the present role of feminism, its future path, or neither, what is clear, Solnit suggests, is that feminist struggle is not going backwards and its progress can be measured in both more precarious institutional changes and irrevocable cultural shifts. Returning to the motif, she argues that the “box that Pandora held and the bottles the genies were released from […] look like prisons and coffins now” and while people “die in this war […] the ideas cannot be erased” (124).