What Woolf has Archer do unto Jacob in the opening pages of Jacob's Room— “Ja—cob! Ja—cob!”—I propose doing unto that most unWoolfian word: “Her—it—age!” Now we have three words that truly do open up Woolfian portals, obsessed as her writing is by gendered pronouns and the passing of time. Is this trisyllabic utterance now a form of urgent shorthand, telegraphing the message: “She has become an object over time”? I can certainly see that message as fundamental to the concept of “heritage.” For “Heritage” speaks the sustained historical period of eugenically entitled patriarchal subjectivity that we still endure. Heritage is a toxic political and social convention— reifying, commodifying, subordinating, gendering and ranking all that it encounters.

Syllabling “Her—it—age!” also opens up the word's fantastic capacity for mondegreen, which did tempt me to write a paper on “Woolf 's Hairy Stage,” an argument predicated on the aesthetics of coiffure in the works written in that era of Woolf 's conventional long, loose locks and her badly bundled chignon— before she got herself that smart shingled bob in 1927! Or predicated on the gender and canine stakes at that formative moment when the hirsute family pet mongrel Shag (male), and Gurth the equally hairy (and male) sheepdog whom she shared with her sister Vanessa, were superseded in her affections in 1906 by the intermediary shorthaired and misnamed bitch Hans, the epicene boxer dog (the end of another Woolfian hairy stage).