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Back in the early days of postcolonial studies, critics of Eurocentrism would sometimes deplore the West's devaluation of "alternative epistemologies" elsewhere in the world. Anyone aware of the polemics among German idealists, French rationalists, and British empiricists might doubt the existence of any such "central" European doctrine of knowledge, but what these postcolonialists usually meant had little to do with the philosophy practiced by philosophers. They were concerned, instead, with Foucauldian regimes of gathering and interpreting information that fed the institutions involved in Europe's empires. There was little attention to whether some alternative mode of actual

There are two varieties of Virginia Woolf studies. One variety, which includes the studies of Auerbach, Naremore, Leaska, and others, describes Woolf's technical experiments.' The other, represented by Marder, Heilbrun, Showalter, and Bazin, describes her ideology.2 The two varieties do not, however, represent opposing schools of opinion, for the authors of each type, rejecting the distinction between form and content, generously tend to derive the other type's conclusions from their own premises. Woolf herself lends authority to this procedure, for she equates the modernist novel with the androgynous sensibility she advocates, and argues that the Edwardian realist novel's dogmatism and concern with purely external detail is symptomatic of the moral and artistic decrepitude of the patriarchy.3 The equation of feminist content and modernist form is misleading, for it connects certain political ideas with formal principles within which those ideas cannot be argued with integrity. If the modernist novel, as Woolf insists, must not be tendentious, but must instead record the impressions that fall upon the mind like an "incessant shower of innumerable atoms," then advocacy, even of those values necessary for writing such a work, can have no place within its "semi-transparent envelope."4 Were Woolf to preach in To the Lighthouse, she would, apparently, flaw that novel no less than the narrator's outbursts, according to Woolf, flaw Jane Eyre. How is it, then, that To the Lighthouse can be, as it is, at the same time an example of a form that has renounced overt persuasion, and a powerful presentation of certain moral and political ideas that its author expects the reader to adopt? Form and content, it seems, are not only to be distinguished, they are to be opposed. Perhaps our mistake is to assume that form and content must be consonant with each other, when in fact their dissonance may reflect those contradictions that artists, like everybody else, must, and yet cannot ever, resolve. Phyllis Rose has lucidly argued that the androgyny Woolf advocates in A Room of One's Own is, essentially