incandescence

According to Woolf, being independent--owing nothing to anybody--is essential to achieve the state of mind necessary to produce great art. With material and financial independence, "no force in the world can take from me my five hundred pounds. Food, house and clothing are mine for ever. I need not hate any man; he can not hurt me. I need not flatter any man; he has nothing to give me" (A Room 38). Material independence grants its owner an emotional independence, it allows one to be free of "grudges and spites and antipathies," (A Room 56) to have one's mind unclouded by "alien emotions like fear and hatred" (A Room 58-9). Woolf calls this state of mind "incandescence" (A Room 56).

Perhaps what is most important about the idea of incandescence is its requirement that one be free of emotions rooted in dependent relationships. The "alien emotions" that Woolf names such as "grudges, spites and antipathies" are emotions based in relationships, in communities and in dependencies; they are emotions that exist as reactions to other people--they are reactive, not creative. The idea of incandescence recalls that early memory of being alone, when Woolf's emotional experience was independent of others. As well, it reflects the connection Woolf makes between relationships and dependence when writing about her father and her early life.

In Woolf's view part of the danger of community is that it forces people into dependence, and that dependency locks a person into a limited and rigid world. In A Room of One's Own, this connection is made clear in Woolf's discussion of women's crippling material dependence, which leaves them incapable of producing work with "integrity" (73). This discussion is similar to Woolf's recollection of her father's emotional dependence, which locked him into a limited and dependent state of grief from which he often had "no possibility of communication" (Moments 126). Dependence, whether material or emotional, binds a person to a community, forcing them to live a partial life that is reactive, rather than creative. Independence, on the other hand, frees one to be incandescent, or "disinterested," to be unbound by relationships and communities in which one doesn't believe (Three Guineas 17, 38).