The Moral of the Story: A Story with No Moral

Virginia Woolf, in A Room of One's Own, discusses what she believes to be the ideal writer, one who is "incandescent". For her, literature that deals with specific political issues is somehow less valuable than literature that seeks after universal truths. The question then arises: is there such a thing? Similarly, a Tweet came up on our class Twitter feed: "Does every story have a moral?" Woolf repeatedly uses Shakespeare as an example of this type of writer, but even his work has political objectives and biases. The idea that literature can exist entirely within a vacuum, divorced from everyday affairs seems ridiculous. Literature inherently has some sort of "moral", even if it isn't intentionally constructed by the author simply because of the unique perspective that every author brings. Woolf's ideal of "incandescence" is a myth that has never existed and never will. In fact, idealizing such a literature is inherently problematic because it belittles literature that has a strong political objective. Woolf belittles Jane Eyre because of its strong feminist themes but those themes are precisely what makes the book so powerful. Why should literature with a strong political objective be somehow worse than literature that only deals with universals?