1.A Room of One's Own (1929)- for TSPSC JL/DL
Biography of Virginia Woolf
She was born at 22 Hyde Park Gate,
London to Leslie Stephen and Julia Jackson Duckworth (second marriage for both).
Virginia was the third of four children. Her father. Leslie Stephen edited the
huge Dictionary of National Biography. He began his career as a
clergyman but soon became agnostic and took up journalism. He and Julia
provided their children with a home of wealth and comfort.
Though denied the
formal education allowed to males, Virginia was able to take advantage of her
father's abundant library and observe his writing talent, and she was
surrounded by intellectual conversation.
Her admiration
for strong women was coupled with a growing dislike for male domination in
society. Virginia's feelings were likely affected by her relationship to her
stepbrother, George Duckworth, who fondled her at the age of Six. Similar
incidents recurred throughout her childhood until Virginia was in her early
twenties.
Virginia suffered through three major
mental breakdowns during her lifetime, and she died during a fourth. Her first breakdown occurred shortly following
the death of her mother in 1895. Two years later, Virginia's stepsister Stella
Duckworth died. Virginia fell sick soon after Stella's death.
After recovering
from the second mental breakdown, combined
with scarlet fever and an attempted suicide (due to her father's death in 1904), Virginia and her sister (the
painter Vanessa Bell), left Kensington with her three siblings and moved to
Bloomsbury, where they fell into association with a circle of intellectuals
that included such figures as Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell (Virginia's sister
married Clive Bell), Roger Fry, and later E.M. Forster.
In 1909, she accepted a marriage
proposal from Strachey, who later broke off the engagement. In 1909, she
received a legacy of 2,500 pounds, which would allow her to live independently.
In 1912, Virginia married Leonard Woolf, with whom she ran a small but
influential printing press (Hogarth
Press) to publish their own books in 2017. The highly experimental
character of her novels, and their brilliant formal innovations, established
Woolf as a major figure of British modernism. Her novels, which include To the
Lighthouse, Mrs. Dalloway, and The Waves, are particularly concerned with the
lives and experiences of women.
She had been advised by doctors not to
become pregnant after her third serious breakdown in 1913. Virginia was
fond of children, however, and spent much time with her brother's and sister's
children.
Before her death, Virginia published
an extraordinary amount of groundbreaking material. She was a renowned member
of the Bloomsbury Group and a leading writer of the modernist movement with her
use of innovative literary techniques. In contrast to the majority of
literature written before the early 1900s, which emphasized plot and detailed
descriptions of characters and settings, Woolf's writing thoroughly explores
the concepts of time, memory, and consciousness. The plot is generated by the
characters' inner lives, not by the external world.
In March 1941, Woolf left suicide
notes for her husband and sister. She committed suicide by filling her
pockets with rocks and jumping off a bridge into the river. She feared her
madness was returning and that she would not be able to continue writing, and
she wished to spare her loved ones.
She wrote five volumes of collected
essays and reviews, two biographies (Flush and Roger Fry), two libertarian
books, a volume of selections from her diary, nine novels, and a volume of
short stories.
Mrs. Dalloway
Mrs Dalloway
appears in Virginia Woolf's first novel, The Voyage Out 1915 and Mrs.
Dalloway 1925, as well as five of her short stories, in which the
character hosts dinner parties to which the main subject of the narrative is
invited:
1. "The New Dress": a
self-conscious guest has a new dress made for the event
2. "The Introduction": whose
main character is Lily Everit
3. "Together and Apart": Mrs
Dalloway introduces the main protagonists
4. "The Man Who Loved His Kind":
Mrs Dalloway's husband, Richard, invites a school friend, who finds the evening
uncomfortable in the extreme
5. "A Summing Up": a couple meet
in her garden
Novels:
1. The Voyage out 1915- first novel- Describes the voyage to South America of a young English woman, Racheal
Vinrace and her engagement to Terence Hewet and her subsequent fever and
Rapid death. Original title is Melynbrosia. This novel introduced Clarissa Dolloway, central character of Woolf’s
later novel Mrs Dollway.
2. Night and Day 1919- second novel- set in London, centers on Katherine Hilbery, daughter of a famous literary family (modelled on Vanessa).
3.
Jacob’s Room
1922- 3rd novel- It is her first experimental novel. Jacob's Room begins
Woolf's reputation as "difficult" or "highbrow."
Critics compare her to James Joyce and Dorothy Richardson. It is
about the life and death of Jacob Flanders. Jacob’s character is based on
Woolf's older brother Thoby Stephen, who died of a fever in 1906, when he was
in his mid-twenties. It is the first novel Virginia Woolf published herself
through Hogarth Press, the publishing house she co-founded.
4. Mrs. Dalloway 1925: 4th novel - example of stream of consciousness storytelling. Mrs Dalloway is
commonly thought to be a response to James Joyce's Ulysses. It covers one day (in “the middle of June" of 1923) from morning to night in life of Clarissa
Dalloway, 52-year old, an upper-class housewife (wife
of an MP). Septimus Warren Smith, a First World
War veteran suffering from deferred traumatic stress, who at the end of the day
committed suicide by jumping out of a window, and this news intrudes upon
Clarissa's party by Dr. Bradshaw.
Sanity and Communityà Clarissa
Dalloway
Insanity and isolation à Septimus W. Smith
The working title of Mrs. Dalloway was
The Hours. The novel originated from two short stories, "Mrs. Dalloway in
Bond Street" and the unfinished "The Prime Minister". She
expanded the same themes of Jacob’s Room(1922) and added the new theme of
insanity in Mrs. Dalloway.
5. To the Light House 1927: 5th novel-
Woolf's most famous and most autobiographical novel. It is divided into
3 sections: The Window, Time
passes and The Light house. Each section is by a various narrator. Story of Mr and Mrs Ramsay and their 8 children in a summer house in a the Hebrides Island (Isle of Skye) to spend summer. Mrs Ramsay promises the the youngest child, James (6-year
old), to visit the light house nextday. Mr Ramsay denies saying them that the
weather will not be clear. This opinion forces a certain tension between Mr.
and Mrs. Ramsay, and also between Mr. Ramsay and James. Due to bad weather,
they can't go there. In the next part, Mrs. Ramsay and two children dies. 10
years passed. In the last part, Mr. Ramsay finally plans on taking the
long-delayed trip to the lighthouse with daughter Cam(illa) and son James, although
they don't want to go there.
6. Orlando: A Biography (1928)- 6th novel- It is a Roman-a-clef (a novel with a key). Orlando is a history of English literature in
satiric form. Her most successful novel in terms of sales. It is inspired by Vita Sackville-West's life (poet and novelist & her
close friend). It traces the adventurous story of a poet born in reign of
Elizabeth-I, Changes sex from man to woman at 30 and lives for more than 300
years, meeting the key figures of English literary history. (From Elizabethan
to 1928)
7. The Waves 1931 – 7th novel- experimental novel, generally considered Woolf's masterpiece (some say
most difficult work). It has six soliloquies (interior monologues), which are
ambiguous and cryptic spoken mainly by six characters; Bernard, Susan, Rhoda,
Neville, Jinny and Louis. Percival, a seventh character, appears in the
soliloquies, though readers never hear him speak in his own voice.
8. The Years 1937- last published novel in her lifetime. It traces the history of the
Pargiter family from the 1880s to the "present day" of the mid-1930s.
9. Between
The Acts (1941)- It
is the final novel by Virginia Woolf. It was published shortly after her death
in 1941. It has been discussed as theatre-fiction. The setting is June 1939 in
the English countryside at a house called Pointz Hall (the working title
of the book), home of the Bartholomew Oliver (a widower and retired Indian Army
officer), and in the nearby village, where Miss LaTrobe is in charge of the
pageant. The story takes place in a country house somewhere in England, just
before the Second World War, over the course of a single day. Since the play is
inside the story, much of the novel is written in verse.
Non-fiction:
10.
Mr. Bennett and
Mrs. Brown 1924- essay, originally published as 'Character in Fiction' in ‘The Criterion’ in 1924. She reacted against the style and attitude of much Victorian fiction,
attacked the realistic writers, express the differences in how writers develop
a character in a story. Arnold Bennett’s
review of Woolf's Jacob's Room (1922) provoked Woolf to rebut it. Bennett is the ‘Mr Bennett’ referred to in Woolf’s title. Mrs. Brown is the name she gives to a woman,
whom she met in train. This essay is about the arrival of modernism, making the
now-famous observation: ‘On or
about December 1910 human character changed’
11.
On Being Ill- written in 1925, first appeared in T. S. Eliot's The Criterion in
January, 1926 the isolation, loneliness, and vulnerability that disease may
bring and how it can make even the maturest of adults feel like children again
12.
The Modern
Fiction 1925- essay- was originally published under the title ‘Modern
Novels’ in 1919. It is a guide for writers of modern fiction to write what
they feel, not what society or publishers want them to write. She rubbished the idea of character and criticizes H.G. Wells, Arnold
Bennett, John Galsworthy of writing about unimportant things and
called them materialists. She praises Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, William Henry Hudson, James
Joyce and Anton Chekhov and called them spirutualists.
13.
A Room of one’s
own 1929 -essay- on her lectures on woman and fiction. Describes the
educational, social and financial underpinning of woman by using hypothetical
fate of Judith Shakespeare (Imaginative sister of Shakespeare). Famous quote: “A woman must have money (500
pounds) and a room of her own if she is to write fiction”. She used the concept of Coleridge’s Androgyny =harmony of male and female.
14.
The London Scene is the name given to a series of six essays that Virginia Woolf wrote
for Good Housekeeping magazine in 1931 and 1932. Originally the essays were
referred to as 'Six Articles on London Life'.
15. Three Gunieas (1938)- sequel to A Room of One’s Own.
16. A Letter to a Young Poet 1932 -epistolary novel, about her views on modern poetry. It is a response to
a letter from the writer, John Lehmann, about her novel The Waves (1931),
17.
Moments of Being 1985
is a collection of posthumously-published five autobiographical essays.
Short story
collections:
18.
Two Stories (1917)
19. ‘Monday
or Tuesday 1921’- collection of 8 short stories, published by The Hogarth
Press, London.
20. A Haunted House and Other Stories (1944)
21. Mrs Dalloway’s Party (1973)
22. The Complete Shorter Fiction (1985)
Biographies:
23.
Flush (1933)-Written from the point of view of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's cocker
spaniel Flush(dog).
24.
Roger Fry (1940)- A biography of Woolf's friend, the art critic and painter (1866-1934),
who had introduced post-impressionism (Picasso, Cezanne) to England in the
years before World War I.
Plays
25.
Fresh water: A
comedy (1935)- Absurdist drama, based on the life of her great-aunt Julia Margaret
Cameron. Freshwater is a short three act comedy satirising the Victorian era,
only performed once in Woolf's lifetime.
Virginia and
her husband Leonard Woolf started – Hogarth Press in 1917
|
Bloomsbury Group: (known as Ivory Tower
Aesthetics)- 1905-06- groups
of friends, relatives, writers studied at Bloomsbury. Derived many of its
attitudes from G.E. Moore's "Principia Ethica" They are Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Toby Stephen (sisters &
Brother), EM Foster,
Lytton Strachey (Biographer), J.M Keys (economist), Clive bell & Roger Fry (art critics), Molly
and Desmond McCarthy (Literary Journalists), Leonard Woolf (writer), Duncan Grant (painter) etc. |
A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN
Context:
"A Room of One's Own" is a carefully
structured essay that is a true "train of thought," ( similar
to the new Modernist technique of "stream of consciousness.") and attention should be paid to Woolf's
rhetorical skill as an essayist.
In late October, 1928, Virginia Woolf
delivered a lecture on "Women and
Fiction" at Newnham and Girton,
the two women's college at Cambridge, England. Woolf had written the
lecture in May.
The essay was based on two papers
Woolf read on 20 and 26 October 1928 to two Cambridge student societies, the Newnham
Arts Society at Newnham College and the ODTAA Society ("One
Damn Thing After Another") at Girton College, respectively. Woolf stayed
at Newnham at the invitation of Pernel Strachey, the college principal,
whose family were key members of the Bloomsbury Group. At Girton she was
accompanied by Vita Sackville-West.
In 1929, she expanded it into what is
now "A Room of One's Own," and the fictionalized narrative
essay was published in book form on Oct. 24, 1929.
She advances the thesis that "a
woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."
"A Room of One's Own" is
considered the first major work in feminist criticism. Woolf deploys a number
of methodologies--historical and sociological analysis, fictional hypothesis,
abd philosophy, notably-to answer her initial question of why there have been
so few female writers.
Three Gunieas (1938) is a sequel to
it. Patricia Lamkin's play Balancing the Moon (2011) was inspired by the essay.
Short summary:
"A Room of One's Own" begins
with the word "But," an
unconventional starting point. She gave a lecture on “women and fiction”, on one minor point: "a woman must have money and a room of her
own if she is to write fiction."
The essay is divided
into 6 chapters:
|
Chapter |
About |
|
1 |
Stream of consciousness
at Oxbridge’s lawn, library and chapel |
|
2 |
Looking
glass metaphor (Men are angry) |
|
3 |
Fate of
Female writers-Judith Shakespeare |
|
4 |
Four Ancient and Four Modern writers: “LMDA-EGJC” |
|
5 |
Chole
liked Olivia- Theme of Lesbianism?- Mary Carmichael’s The Life’s Adventure |
|
6 |
Coleridge’s
Androgynus Mind |
In the opening chapter, she says she
will use a fictional narrator whom she calls Mary Beton as her alter
ego. The narrator describes the gender discrimination she faced in a lawn,
library at the fictional Oxbridge
University (Oxford+Cambridge), She compares the luxurious lunch for males
at Oxbridge and mediocre dinner for females at Fernham. She later talks with a
friend of hers, Mary Seton, about
how men's colleges were funded by kings and independently wealthy men, and how
funds were raised with difficulty for the women's college. She and Mary Seton
denounce their mothers, for the poor financial conditions and leaving their
daughters so little. The narrator thinks about the effects of wealth and
poverty on the mind, and about the effects of tradition on the writer.
In chapter-II, Searching for answers,
the narrator explores the British Museum
in London. She finds there are countless books written about women by men,
while there are hardly any books by women on men. She selects a dozen books to
try and come up with an answer for why women are poor. One male writer,
professor Von X, who writes about the inferiority of women angers her. She
finds that almost all books were written by men and all of which has been
written in anger. After her anger dissipates, she wonders why men are so angry
if England is a patriarchal society in which they have all the power and money.
Perhaps holding power produces anger out of fear that others will take one's
power. She posits that when men pronounce the inferiority of women, they are
really claiming their own superiority (looking glass metaphor). The
narrator is grateful for the inheritance left her by her aunt. Prior to that
she had gotten by on loathsome, slavish odd jobs available to women before
1918.. She now feels free to "think of things in themselves"
she can judge art, for instance, with greater objectivity.
In chapter-III, The narrator
investigates women in Elizabethan England, puzzled why there were no women
writers in that fertile literary period. She believes there is a deep
connection between living conditions and creative works. She imagines what
would have happened had Shakespeare had an equally gifted sister named Judith Shakespeare. She outlines the
possible course of Shakespeare's sister who committed suicide. The narrator
believes that no women of the time would have had such genius, "For genius like
Shakespeare's is not born among labouring, uneducated, servile people." She
says the mind of the artist must be "incandescent" like
Shakespeare's, without any obstacles.
In Chapter-IV, The narrator reviews
the poetry of Lady Winchelsia, Margaret of Newcastle (Elizabethan
aristocratic ladies) and finds that anger toward men and insecurity spoiled
their writing. The other writer Dorothy Osborne wrote only letters. The
writer Aphra Behn marks a turning point: a middle-class woman whose
husband's death forced her to earn her own living, The four famous and
divergent 19th-century female novelists: George Eliot, Emily Brontë,
Charlotte Brontë, and Jane Austen- all wrote novels; as they were trained
in the art of social observation, and the novel was a natural fit for her
talents. The narrator argues that traditionally masculine values and topics in
novels such as war are valued more than feminine ones, such as drawing-room
character studies. Female writers, then, were often forced to adjust their
writing to meet the inevitable criticism that their work was insubstantial.
Even if they did so without anger, they deviated from their original visions
and their books suffered. The early 19th-century female novelist also had no
real tradition from which to work; they lacked even a prose style fit for a
woman. The narrator argues that the novel was the chosen form for these women
since it was a relatively new and pliable medium.
In chapter-V, The narrator takes down
a recent debut novel called Life's
Adventure by Mary Carmichael. She finds the prose style uneven, perhaps as
a rebellion against the "flowery" reputation of women's writing. She
reads on and finds the simple sentence "Chloe liked Olivia." She
believes the idea of friendship between two women is groundbreaking in
literature, as women have historically been viewed in literature only in
relation to men. Still, she believes that the great men in history often
depended on women for providing them with "some stimulus, some renewal of
creative power" that other men could not. She argues that the creativity
of men and women is different, and that their writing should reflect their
differences. The narrator believes Carmichael has much work to do in recording
the lives of women, and Carmichael will have to write without anger against
men. However, the narrator feels Carmichael is "no more than a clever
girl," even though she bears no traces of anger or fear. In a hundred
years, the narrator believes, and with money and a room of her own, Carmichael
will be a better writer.
In the last chapter, The pleasing
sight of a man and woman getting into a taxi provokes an idea for the narrator:
the mind contains both a male and female part, and for "complete
satisfaction and happiness," the two must live in harmony. This fusion,
she believes, is what poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge described when he
said a great mind is "androgynous": "the androgynous mind transmits
emotion without impediment it is naturally creative, incandescent and
undivided." Shakespeare is a fine model of this androgynous mind, though
it is harder to find current examples in this "stridently
sex-conscious" age. The narrator blames both sexes for bringing about this
self-consciousness of gender. Woolf responds to two anticipated criticisms
against the narrator. First, she
says she purposely did not express an opinion on the relative merits of the two
genders--especially as writers--since she does not believe such a judgment is
possible or desirable. Second, her
audience may believe the narrator laid too much emphasis on material things,
and that the mind should be able to overcome poverty and lack of privacy. Without
material things, she repeats, one cannot have intellectual freedom, and without
intellectual freedom, one cannot write great poetry. She also responds to the
question of why she insists women's writing is important. As an avid reader,
the overly masculine writing in all genres has disappointed her lately. She
encourages her audience to be themselves and "Think of things in
themselves." She says that Judith Shakespeare still lives within all women, and that
if women are given money and privacy in the next century, she will be reborn.
Chapter wise- Summary and Analysis
Chapter1
The essay begins with the word "But"
which hints us about the unconventional nature of the essay.
Virginia Woolf, asked to give a
lecture on women and fiction, tells her audience what she thought that title
might mean: what women are like; the fiction women write; the fiction
written about women; or a combination of the three. Finally,
she has come up with one minor point “a woman
must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."
She wants to use devices of fiction
and says, “Fiction here is likely to contain
more truth than fact…….. Oxbridge is an invention; so is Fernham…… Lies will flow from my
lips, but there may perhaps be some truth mixed up with them.” She
says, art should have a kind of “incandescence” in which everything that
is purely personal burns away, leaving something like the “nugget of pure truth.” She uses a fictional
narrator whom she calls Mary Beton as her alter ego (call me Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael or by any
name you please—it is not a matter of any importance).
Note: A
Room of One’s Own is written in the voice of at least one of these
Mary figures, who are to be found in the Scottish ballad ‘The Four Marys’. [Mary
Hamilton is the narrator of the ballad]
A week or two ago, while sitting by a
river, the narrator compares the
production of a thought of hers on women and fiction to fishing (a metaphorically,
waiting for idea). When she gets the idea, she hurries across a lawn at the
fictional Oxbridge, a Beadle (a security
guard) intercepts her saying, “only Fellows and Scholars, not women, are allowed on the
lawn.” The interruption makes her to lost the “little fish” of idea.
Narrator recalls the essay of Charles
Lamb about revisiting ‘Oxbridge.’ She remembered the genius of literary
figures, such as Milton and Thackeray, and goes to the library. An elderly man
there informs her that “ladies are only
admitted to the library if accompanied by a Fellow of the College or furnished
with a letter of introduction." She angrily vows to herself
“never to ask for that hospitality again" of entering the
library. She passes the chapel, listening to the organ music (distracts her
thought) and watching the people assembled inside she thinks that university is
a kind of laboratory or museum, but does not want to enter, as she would be
denied permission again. She reflects on the royal wealth that had gone into
building the university; the wealth now comes from independent men. The clock
strikes interrupting the thought.
She goes to lunch and describes the
gourmet food on display: soles, partridges, a delicious dessert, and excellent wine.
Her thought were interrupted by a Manx
cat without a tail (which reminds the pre-war days, symbolically castrated
England) and feels that something is "lacking." She thinks back on a
pre-war days in which people said the same things as now but sounded more
musical. The romatic views of Tennyson and Rosetti no longer seem possible in
the post-war era.
She walks through the late October
afternoon to Fernham, the women's
college where she is staying as a guest. She has a dinner of plain soup,
mediocre beef, vegetables, and potatoes, and bad custard, prunes, biscuits and
cheese, along with water. She feels " One cannot think well, love
well, sleep well, if one has not dined well. The lamp in the spine does not
light on beef and prunes." A
friend of hers, Mary Seton, has a bottle of a good drink, and they drink and
talk by the fire. The narrator thinks more about the kings in the past and
financial magnates of their time who have built the colleges with their gold.
Mary Seton summarizes how funds were raised with difficulty for the women colleges,
and therefore why they cannot afford expensive meals.
The narrator and Mary Seton denounce
their mothers, and their sex, for being so impoverished and leaving their
daughters so little. However, the narrator realizes that how different things
would have been “If only Mrs Seton and her
mother and her mother before her had learnt the great art of making money and
had left their money” for education of women (If women were
independently wealthy, perhaps they could have spent for education of women). Moreover,
only for the last forty-eight years have women been allowed to
keep money they earned; before that, it belonged to their husbands (Married
Women’s Property Acts in 1882). Walking back to her inn, the narrator
thinks about the effects of wealth and poverty on the mind, about the
prosperity of males and the poverty of females, and about the effects of
tradition or lack of tradition on the writer. She goes to sleep, as does
everyone in Oxbridge.
Chapters 2
Scene shifts from Oxbridge to London,
narrator sitting in a room writing “Women and Fiction” thinks about the
questions raised during the previous day at Oxbridge: “Why did men drink wine and women water? Why was one sex
so prosperous and the other so poor? What effect has poverty on fiction? What
conditions are necessary for the creation of works of art?” Searching
for answers to the questions, the narrator explores the British Museum in London.
She compared the dome of the museum to a huge bald forehead. She soon
realizes there are too many books written about women almost all by men for her
to digest them all. On the other hand, there are hardly any books by women on
men. She wonders why there is such a great disparity, and randomly selects a
dozen books. Trying to come up with an answer for why women are poor, she
locates a multitude of other topics on women in the books, and a contradictory
array of men's opinions on women.
Frustrated, she unwittingly draws a
picture of an unattractive, angry-looking professor von X engaged in
writing his monumental work entitled The Mental, Moral, and Physical Inferiority of the
Female Sex about the inferiority of women. She decides that
these books “had been written in the red light of emotion and not in the
white light of truth.” It occurs to her that she has become angry because
the professor has written angrily himself. Male writing, then, is too
aggressive, whereas women's writing is reactive. Had he written
"dispassionately," she would have paid more attention to his
argument, and not to him. After her anger dissipates, she wonders, ‘Why
these men are all angry’? She returns the books, finding them useless, and
goes to lunch.
She reads the newspaper at lunch, and
reflects that anyone reading it would find that England is a patriarchal
society- men have all the power and money, hold all the important positions,
make all the important decisions. The narrator knows that men are angry,
however, and wonders why they would be angry with so much power. She wonders if
holding power produces anger out of fear that others will take one's power. She
then thinks that the men are not truly angry, but that when they pronounce the
inferiority of women, they are really claiming their own superiority. She says
that throughout history, women have served as models of inferiority who enlarge
the superiority of men: "“Women
have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and
delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.” (Men
cut down the women in an attempt to enlarge themselves, is described as
"looking-glass" metaphor.) Men logically
become angry and defensive if women ever criticize them, then, since women
cease to be inferior and the men accordingly lose the status of superiority on
which they are dependent.
The narrator pays her bill, and is
grateful for the inheritance left her by her aunt, Mary Beton (who died by a
fall from her horse in Bombay.) She learned she would receive 500 pounds a year
for her life around the same time women gained the right to vote (All women got
right to vote through The Representation of the People Act 1928), and
she believes the money is more important. Prior to that she had earned money on
the odd jobs available to women before 1918. She hated doing that work, feeling
like a fearful slave whose soul was rusting.
Now, every time she pays for something
with part of her inheritance, she feels the rust and the accompanying fear and
bitterness are removed. She reasons that since nothing can take away her money
and security, she need not hate or enslave herself to any man. Moreover, she
feels that men, even with their wealth and power, contend with as major a
problem as do powerless women: they are constantly trying to increase that
power by subjugating others, and such efforts come at a heavy price.
On the other hand, after her aunt's
inheritance sank in, the narrator felt free to "think of things in themselves" she
could judge art, for instance, with greater objectivity. We can trace it in her
metaphors that revolve around light and refined purity. Here, as she often
does, the narrator absorbs the brilliant light of the sky: "a fiery
fabric flashing with red eyes." Perhaps the most important metaphor
combines light and refined purity in Chapter One when she describes brilliance
as "that hard little
electric light."
She believes money is a greater tool than the right to vote; money
eliminates a woman's dependence on a man, whereas the right to vote only gives
her the right to choose which man rules over her.
She walks home and sees various male
and female workers on her street. She thinks about the relative values of the
jobs. She believes that in a hundred years, women will no longer be considered
the "protected" gender, but will have access to the more grueling
jobs as well. She envisions a future in which ther will be no gender based
division of labour. She wonders what this has to do with her paper ‘Women and Fiction’.
Chapters 3
The narrator is disappointed at not having
found an incontrovertible statement on why women are poorer than men. She finds
that there were no women writers in Elizabethan England, the fertile
literary period.
“for
fiction, imaginative work that is, is not dropped like a pebble upon the
ground, as science may be; fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so
lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners” – Criticism about the works on material things
She believes there is a deep connection
between living conditions and creative works. She reads a latest history
book titled “History of England” by Professor Trevelyan and finds that women
had few rights in the era, despite having strong personalities, especially in
works of art. The narrator finds no material about middle-class women in the
history book, and a host of her questions remain unanswered.
“Imaginatively she is
of the highest importance; practically she is completely insignificant. She
pervades poetry from cover to cover; she is all but absent from history”- Women
scarcely mentioned in History (in
Chapter-III)
Woolf feels that any kind of
"protest" literature, dilutes the "incandescent" brilliance
of the writer.
She is reminded of a bishop's comment
that no woman could equal the genius of Shakespeare, and her thoughts
turn to Shakespeare. She imagines what would have happened had Shakespeare had
an equally gifted sister named Judith Shakespeare. She
outlines the possible course of Shakespeare's life: grammar school, marriage,
work at a theater in London, acting, meeting theater people, and so on. His
sister, however, was not able to attend school, and her family discouraged her
from studying on her own. She was married against her will as a teenager and
ran away to London. The men at a theater denied her the chance to work and
learn the craft. Impregnated by a theatrical man, she committed suicide. (Judith
is victimized by a number of socioeconomic factors: lack of education; discouragement from reading and writing; absence
of privacy; lack of employment opportunities in the artistic world; the burden
of children.)
“any woman born with a great gift in the sixteenth century would
certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely
cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at.”-
About Judith’s tragedy
“Who
shall measure the heat and violence of the poet’s heart when caught and tangled
in a woman’s body?” About
Judith’s tragedy
This is how the narrator believes such
a female genius would have fared in Shakespeare's time. However, she agrees
with the bishop that no women of the time would have had such genius, "For genius like Shakespeare's is not born among
labouring, uneducated, servile people," and women back then fit
into this category. Nevertheless, some kind of genius must have existed among
women then, as it exists among the working class, although it never translated
to paper. Even if a woman surmounted various obstacles and wrote something, it
would have been anonymous. (Recall: Female authors adopted male pseudonyms?)
The narrator questions what state
of mind is most amenable to creativity. She finds that creating a work of
art is extraordinarily difficult; privacy and money are scarce, and the world
is generally indifferent to whether or not someone writes. For women in the
past, the conditions were even harsher. The privacy
of a private room or vacations was a rarity. Moreover, the world was
not only indifferent to female writers, but actively opposed their creativity.
Over time, the effect on a budding female writer is very detrimental.
The narrator believes this male
discouragement accords with the masculine desire to retain the status of
superiority. Unfortunately, genius is often the most susceptible to the
opinions of others. She believes the mind of the
artist “must be ‘incandescent’… There must be no obstacle in it, no foreign
matter unconsumed”, like Shakespeare's. She argues that the reason
we know so little about Shakespeare's mind is because his work filters out his
personal "grudges
and spites and antipathies." His absence of personal protest
makes his work "free
and unimpeded." The narrator develops a theory that there must
be no external obstacles and concludes that ‘obstacles
are poison to a writer's mind’
Chapters 4
Code to remember: Four Ancient and Four Modern writers:
“LMDA-EGJC”
She speaks of incandescent brilliance
ruined by personal grievances against men in the Elizabethan writers, then of
genius that was more ably expressed by 19th-century women.
The narrator reflects again that no
women of Shakespeare's genius lived in Elizabethan times. More plausibly, an
aristocratic lady of the time might have written something. The narrator
believes that if such a lady wrote, however, fear and hatred would have been
marred her writing. She cites the poetry of the noble Lady Winchilsea,
which she finds stifled by its fear and hatred of men. Had she not been so
consumed with these negative, imprisoning emotions, the narrator believes she
would have written brilliant verse.
The narrator turns her attention to
the Duchess
Margaret of Newcastle, a contemporary of Lady Winchilsea. Both
women were noble, married to good men, and childless. The narrator reads
her verse and feels she suffers from the same personal grievances. Had she
lived today, she believes, the lonely Margaret would have been a far better
poet. The narrator contemplates Dorothy Osborne, a more sensitive,
melancholy Elizabethan figure who wrote only letters, as a proper woman
did, and not poetry. The narrator believes she had a great gift, but that her
letters betray Dorothy's insecurity over her writing.
For the narrator, the writer Aphra Behn, 17th-century novelist, playwright, and
poet, marks a turning point: a middle-class woman whose husband's
death forced her to earn her own living, Behn's triumph over circumstances
surpasses even her excellent writing. Behn is the first female writer to
have "freedom of the mind,"
and the narrator believes she inspired other girls to follow her
self-sufficient example. Unfortunately, the literary girls' parents frequently
rejected these plans in the interest of women's chastity, and the "door
was slammed faster than ever." Still, countless 18th-century
middle-class female writers and beyond owe a great debt to Behn's breakthrough
of earning money from writing. The earning of money, the narrator argues, goes
far in eliminating the sneers against women's writing.
"All
women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn ...for it
was she who earned them the right to speak their minds."- About Aphra Behn
Aristocratic
women, despite not needing to work for a living, are nevertheless indebted to
their husbands or other men, and the money they keep goes to them. Behn is
middle-class, whereas the other women who wrote lesser works were all
aristocratic. Behn is not dependent on men for money. Behn is truly independent
and, in fact, her ability to work for a living was what inspired the female
writers after her.
The narrator is confused why the
wealth of women's writing in the 19th century offers almost exclusively novels
after women had originally begun with poetry. She thinks about what the four
famous and divergent female novelists George
Eliot, Emily and Charlotte Brontë, and Jane Austen had in common besides being
childless. Oddly, their middle-class status would have meant less privacy and a
greater inclination toward writing poetry or plays, which require less
concentration. Austen, for example, is known to have
hidden her manuscripts when interrupted in her family's sitting-room.
However, the 19th-century middle-class woman was trained in the art of social
observation, and the novel was a natural fit for her talents.
Austen has limited life experience than
any other female writer, "perhaps it was the nature of Jane Austen not
to want what she had not." Experience is crucial only if the writer
desires to write about something well beyond his or her primary station in
life.
“Here
was a woman about the year 1800 writing without hate, without bitterness,
without fear, without protest, without preaching” -About Austen
“When people compare Shakespeare and
Jane Austen, they may mean that the minds of both had consumed all impediments;
and for that reason we do not know Jane Austen and we do not know Shakespeare,
and for that reason Jane Austen pervades every word that she wrote, and so does
Shakespeare”
The narrator finds that the work of
Austen did not suffer from her lack of privacy, nor was it wracked by hatred or
fear. Though she thinks that Charlotte Brontë may have had more genius in her,
Brontë has some hatred in her which disfigures her genius. Perhaps most among
the foursome, she could have benefited from more money, experience, and travel.
The narrator considers the varying effects the same novel can have on multiple
readers. What makes a novel universal is "integrity," which she
defines as truthfulness. Does the writer's gender impact her integrity?
Looking at Brontë's work, the narrator feels that beyond anger and resentment,
the fear in it leads to some degree of "ignorance."
The narrator also argues that traditionally masculine
values and topics in novels such as warare valued more than feminine ones, such
as drawing-room character studies. Female writers,
then, were often forced to adjust their writing to meet the inevitable
criticism that their work was insubstantial. Even if they did so without anger,
they deviated from their original visions and their books suffered. The
narrator finds it miraculous that in such a climate, Austen and Emily Brontë
were able to write their books with such confidence and integrity. Only they
ignored the sniping, critical chorus against them.
The lack of an existing literary tradition
is, in the narrator's opinion, the greatest obstacle for these heroic
nineteenth-century writers. Though she may have learned some things from male
writers, the narrator believes that "The weight, the pace, the stride of a
man's mind are too unlike her own for her to lift anything substantial from him
successfully." For instance, there was "no common sentence" available
for a woman's use, as the standard 19th-century sentence was fitted for men to
adapt to their own uses. While Charlotte Brontë and Eliot failed with that
sentence, Austen created her own "natural, shapely sentence" that enabled
deeper expression.
“Jane Austen looked at it and laughed at it and devised a
perfectly natural, shapely sentence proper for her own use and never departed
from it.”- about her style of sentence
The narrator says, “Literature is open to everybody. I refuse to allow you,
Beadle though you are, to turn me off the grass. Lock up your libraries if you
like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt, that you can set upon the freedom
of my mind.”
The narrator argues that the novel was
the chosen form for these women since it was a relatively new and pliable
medium. “The novel alone was young enough to be
soft in her hands another reason.” She wonders if women will come up
with some "new vehicle" for the poetry within them. She ceases her
remarks about the future of writing to question the effect of frequent
interruptions on women's books.
Chapters 5
The narrator looks at her shelf of
contemporary books by both men and women on a variety of topics women could not
have written about a generation ago. She feels the female writer, now given a
broader education, no longer needs the novel as a means of self-expression. She
takes down a recent debut novel called "Life's
Adventure, or some such
title," by Mary Carmichael. Viewing Carmichael as a descendant of Lady
Winchilsea, Aphra Behn, and the other female writers she has commented on, the
narrator dissects Life's Adventure.
Note: Mary Carmichael, the writer of Life's
Adventure shares the nom de plume (pen name or pseudonym)
of birth-control leader Marie Stopes (who wrote a similar novel, Love's
Creation).
First, she finds the prose style
uneven, perhaps as a rebellion against the "flowery" reputation of
women's writing. The narrator reconsiders; maybe Carmichael is purposely
deceiving the reader with unexpected stylistic shifts. She finds that the prose
is not as good as Jane Austen's. "I have decided whether she has a pen in her hand or a
pickaxe ……. The
smooth gliding of sentence after sentence was interrupted. Something tore,
something scratched ……. She is like a person striking a match that will not
light, I thought.." Later, when Carmichael has proved herself
more able, the narrator wonders if she will "light
a torch in that vast chamber where nobody has yet been." She
soon revises her opinion, however, noting that Miss Carmichael's writing
actually has nothing in common with Austen's; it is attempting something
completely different. “First she broke the
sentence; now she has broken the sequence.”
She reads on and finds the simple
sentence "'Chloe liked Olivia.'"
She believes the idea of friendship between two women is groundbreaking in
literature, as women have historically been viewed in literature only in
relation to men. Romance, the narrator believes, plays a minor role in a
woman's life, but the excessive concern fictional women have for it accounts
for their extreme portrayals as beautiful and good versus horrific and
depraved. By the 19th century, women grew more complex in novels, but the
narrator still believes that each gender is limited in its knowledge of the
opposite sex.
She reads on and discovers that Chloe
and Olivia share a laboratory. The narrator reflects more on how
impoverished literature would be if men were viewed only as lovers of women.
She believes that if Carmichael writes with some genius, then her book will be
very important. She reads another scene with the two women in it and thinks it
is a "sight that has never been seen since the world began."
Her high hopes for Carmichael's description of the intricacies of the female
mind make the narrator realize she has betrayed her original aim: not to praise
her own sex. She recognizes that for whatever mental greatness they have, women
have not yet made much of a mark in the world compared to men. Still, she
believes that the great men in history often depended on women for providing
them with "some stimulus, some renewal of creative power" that
other men could not. She argues that the creativity of men and women is
different, and that "It would be a thousand
pities if women wrote like men, for if two sexes are quite inadequate,
considering the vastness and variety of the world, how should we manage with
one only?"
The narrator believes Carmichael has much work
to do "merely as an observer"; she will have to "go without kind
or condescension" into the lives of the "courtesan" and
"harlot" whom male writers have stereotyped. However, the narrator
fears Carmichael will still write about these controversial subjects with
self-consciousness. Yet there are countless other women whose lives are
unrecorded, and Carmichael will have to do them justice as she discovers her
own mindbut she will have to do so without anger against men. Moreover, since each gender has a blind spot about itself,
only a woman such as herself can fill out the portrait of men in literature.
However, upon reading more of
Carmichael's novel, the narrator feels the author is "no more than a
clever girl," and is inferior to Chrales Brontë, even
though she bears no traces of anger or fear. In
a hundred years, the narrator believes, and with money and a room of her own,
Carmichael will be a better writer.
“She was no 'genius' that was evident.
She had nothing like the love of Nature, the fiery imagination, the wild
poetry, the brilliant wit, the brooding wisdom of her great predecessors, Lady
Winchilsea, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, Jane Austen and George Eliot; she
could not write with the melody and the dignity of Dorothy Osborne—indeed she
was no more than a clever girl whose books
will no doubt be pulped by the publishers in ten years' time. But,
nevertheless, she had certain advantages which women of far greater gift lacked
even half a century ago.”- About Mary Carmichael
Chapters 6
The next morning (Oct. 26, 1928), the narrator
feels that the London was indifferent to literature as no one seems to care
about Shakespeare (Ex: Antony and Cleopatra), the future of fiction, or the
development of women’s prose. She watches a young man and woman get into a taxi,
and their unity soothes her; she wonders if her thoughts these past two days of
men and women as different have been straining. She wonders what "'unity of the
mind'" means, since the mind always changes its focus. Perhaps
the unity of the man and woman in the taxi is satisfying because the mind
contains both a male and female part, and for
"complete satisfaction and happiness," the two must live in harmony.
This fusion, she believes, is what
poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge was describing when he said a great mind is
"androgynous." Coleridge
did not mean that the androgynous mind favors women in any way; in fact, it
does this less than the single-sexed mind. Woolf admits that
gender-consciousness hampers creative output and dims the incandescence of
genius. The androgynous mind does not harbor any anger over gender inferiority.
Rather, the "androgynous mind is resonant and porous; that it transmits emotion
without impediment; that it is naturally creative, incandescent and undivided."
Shakespeare is a fine
model of this androgynous mind,
though it is harder to find current examples in this "stridently
sex-conscious" age. She believes the Suffrage campaign for the women's
vote provoked men's defensiveness over their own sex. She reads a new novel
by a well-respected male writer, Mr A. The writing is clear and strong,
indicative of a free mind, but she later notices “he protests against the equality of the other sex by
asserting his own superiority," and this is as destructive an
impediment as any; only the androgynous mind can foster "perpetual
life" in its reader's mind. The narrator blames both sexes for bringing
about this self-consciousness of gender. She judges the androgyny of various
famous writers.
“Shakespeare was androgynous; and so were Keats and Sterne and
Cowper and Lamb and Coleridge. Shelley perhaps was sexless. Milton and Ben
Jonson had a dash too much of the male in them. So had Wordsworth and Tolstoi.
In our time Proust was wholly androgynous, if not perhaps a little too much of
a woman.”
She iterates her idea: if a writer's
mind is purely male or female, if there is not total freedom of thought,
then the writing will not be "fertilised." The taxi takes away
the man and woman.
Woolf takes over the speaking voice.
She says she will respond to two anticipated criticisms of the narrator. First,
she says she purposely did not express an opinion on the relative merits of the
two genders--especially as writers--since she does not believe such a judgment
is possible or desirable. Second, her audience may believe the narrator
laid too much emphasis on material things, and that the mind should be able to
overcome poverty and lack of privacy. She cites a professor's argument that of
the top poets of the last century, all but three were well-educated, and all
but Keats were fairly well-off. Without material
things, she repeats, one cannot have intellectual freedom, and without
intellectual freedom, one cannot write great poetry. Women, who have
been poor since the beginning of time, have understandably not yet written
great poetry.
“a poor child in England has little more hope than had the son
of an Athenian slave to be emancipated into that intellectual freedom of which
great writings are born.”
She also responds to the question of
why she insists women's writing is important. She says, Therefore I would ask you to write all kinds of books,
hesitating at no subject however trivial or however vast. As an avid
reader, the overly masculine writing in all genres has disappointed her lately.
Moreover, she believes that good writers make good human beings who are
intimately connected with "reality," and who may communicate this
heightened sense of reality to their readers. She encourages her audience to be
themselves and "Think
of things in themselves." She reminds them of what men have
thought of women. She admits that the young women in the audience have made few
significant strides in life even though numerous opportunities have been opened
up for them. She says that Judith Shakespeare
still lives within all women, and that if women are given money and privacy in
the next century, she will be reborn.
She lives in you and in me,
and in many other women who are not here to-night, for they are washing up the
dishes and putting the children to bed. But she lives; for great poets do not
die; - About Judith
Shakespeare
Character List
The Narrator
The unnamed female narrator is Woolf's alter ego who delivers the
lecture and is the only major character in A Room of One’s Own. She refers to
herself only as “I”; in chapter one of the text, she tells the reader, ”Call me Mary
Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael or any other name you please… it is not a
matter of any importance". The constantly shifting nature of
her identity emphasizes that her words apply to all women, not just herself.
The narrator lends a storylike quality to the
text, and she often blends fact and fiction to prove her points. This literary
journey is highlighted by numerous actual journeys, such as the journey around
Oxbridge College and her tour of the British library. She interweaves her
journeys with her own theories about the world—including the principle of
“incandescence (“nugger of pure truth”)” The narrator shares her distinctive
voice; witty and incisive, much of the essay's power lies in her ability to
form elegant metaphors for her abstract ideas. The narrator is also astutely
introspective without dominating the essay with her own personality;
She maintains throughout the essay that money
(500 pounds per year), and the privacy of a room of one's own, are
necessary for freedom of thought. Without these advantages, women are slavishly
dependent on men, and they write out of anger or fear. Only with the confidence
derived from money and privacy can a writer filter out his or her own
personality and concentrate objectively on reality itself; with this "androgynous"
mind, not hampered by thoughts on gender, true genius shines through.
Judith Shakespeare
The fictional sister of William Shakespeare,
the narrator imagines Judith's life of unrealized genius: though just as
brilliant as her brother, Judith is unable to fulfill her potential in her
patriarchal Elizabethan society and eventually commits suicide. She is an
example of why there were no women of genius in Elizabethan times; even if a
woman managed to rise above her uneducated, poor, servile state--something the
narrator hardly doubts possible--society would never allow her the opportunity
to utilize her mind in the same way as a man.
Mary Carmichael
She is the fictional author of the imaginary
novel Life's Adventure, contemporary
with the narrator of Woolf's essay. She shares the pseudonym of birth-control
leader Marie Stopes (who wrote a similar novel, Love's Creation).She
finds her subject matter--that of a friendship between two women who share a
laboratory--revolutionary, as women have always been viewed in literature
merely as lovers of men. In her first novel, she has "broken the sentence, broken the sequence"
and forever changed the course of women's writing.
Though Mary does not write with much anger
against men, the narrator still believes she is just an above-average writer
who is not a genius. However, this much is expected from someone with so little
to work from, and the narrator believes that in a hundred years or so, with
money and a room of her own, Mary Carmichael and her like will blossom and
depict men and women in ways not yet seen in literature.
Mary Beton: The
narrator's aunt, Mary Beton, bequeathed the narrator 500 pounds a year upon her
death. This inheritance allows the narrator to maintain her independence and
protect her freedom of thought. (Mary Beton is also one of the names Woolf
assigns to her narrator, whose identity, she says, is irrelevant.)
Mary Seton: A
friend of the narrator and student at the women's college, Fernham, Mary Seton's mother had thirteen children. She and the
narrator discuss the history of women and money.
Mr. A - An imagined male author, whose work is
overshadowed by a looming self-consciousness and petulant self-assertiveness.
The Manx cat: The
narrator sees a Manx cat on the lawn at Oxbridge. It reminds her of the pre-war
days in England, when people seemed to speak with more music in their voices.
The cat, missing a tail, may be a symbol of castration.
“Beadle” An Oxbridge security official who
stops the narrator on the lawn at Oxbridge and informs her that only men i.e., "Fellows and Scholars" are
allowed on the grass; women must remain on the gravel (harsh with small stones,
pebbles and sand) path.
Librarian: An
elderly man who denies the narrator entrance to the library.
Themes, Motifs, Imagery and Symbols
The importance of money (500 pounds)
For the narrator, money is the primary element
that prevents women from having a room of their own, and thus, having money is
of the utmost importance. Without money, women are slavishly dependent on men; Because
women do not have power, their creativity has been systematically stifled
throughout the ages. She gives an historical argument that lack of money and
privacy have prevented women from writing with genius in the past.
Woolf argues, “Intellectual freedom depends upon material
things. Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom. And women have always been
poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from the beginning of time . . .” She uses this quotation to explain why so few
women have written successful poetry. She believes that the writing of novels lends
itself more easily to frequent starts and stops, so women are more likely to
write novels than poetry: women must contend with frequent interruptions
because they are so often deprived of a room of their own in which to write.
Without money, the narrator implies, women will remain in second place to their
creative male counterparts. The financial discrepancy between men and women at
the time of Woolf’s writing perpetuated the myth that women were less
successful writers.
The importance of privacy (A room of one’s own)
The central point of A Room of One’s Own is
that every woman needs a room of her own—something men are able to enjoy
without question. A room of her own would provide a woman with the time and the
space to engage in uninterrupted writing time. Without privacy, constant
interruptions block their creativity. During Woolf’s time, women rarely enjoyed
these luxuries. They remained elusive to women, and, as a result, their art
suffered. But Woolf is concerned with more than just the room itself. She uses
the room as a symbol for many larger issues, such as privacy, leisure time, and
financial independence, each of which is an essential component of the
countless inequalities between men and women. Woolf predicts that until these
inequalities are rectified, women will remain second-class citizens and their
literary achievements will also be branded as such.
Aphra Behn is the first female writer to earn
her own money from writing. She paved the way for 19th-century novelists like
Jane Austen who were able to write despite the lack of privacy in their family
sitting-rooms. Woolf believes that contemporary female writers still generally
operate out of anger or insecurity, but that in the future, with money and
privacy, their minds will be freed and their genius will blossom.
The subjectivity of truth
In A Room of One’s Own, the narrator argues
that even history is subjective. What she seeks is nothing less than “the
essential oil of truth,” but this eludes her, and she eventually concludes that
no such thing exists. The narrator later writes, “When a subject is highly
controversial, one cannot hope to tell the truth. One can only show how one
came to hold whatever opinion one does hold.” To demonstrate the idea that
opinion is the only thing that a person can actually “prove,” she fictionalizes
her lecture, claiming, “Fiction is likely to
contain more truth than fact.” Reality is not objective: rather, it
is contingent upon the circumstances of one’s world. This argument complicates
her narrative: Woolf forces her reader to question the veracity of everything
she has presented as truth so far, and yet she also tells them that the
fictional parts of any story contain more essential truth than the factual
parts. With this observation she recasts the accepted truths and opinions of
countless literary works.
Interruptions
When the narrator is interrupted in A Room of
One’s Own, she generally fails to regain her original concentration, suggesting
that women without private spaces of their own, free of interruptions, are
doomed to difficulty and even failure in their work. While the narrator is
describing Oxbridge University in chapter one, her attention is drawn to a Manx
Cat(cat without a tail)—which causes the narrator to completely lose her train
of thought—is an exercise in allowing the reader to experience what it might feel
like to be a woman writer. Although the narrator goes on to make an interesting
and valuable point about the atmosphere at her luncheon, she has lost her
original point. This shift underscores her claim that women, who so often lack
a room of their own and the time to write, cannot compete against the men who
are not forced to struggle for such basic necessities.
Gender inequality
Throughout A Room of One’s Own, the narrator
emphasizes the fact that women are treated unequally in her society and that
this is why they have produced less impressive works of writing than men. To
illustrate her point, the narrator creates a woman named Judith Shakespeare,
the imaginary twin sister of William Shakespeare. The narrator uses Judith to
show how society systematically discriminates against women. Judith is just as
talented as her brother William, but while his talents are recognized and encouraged
by their family and the rest of their society, Judith’s are underestimated and
explicitly deemphasized. Judith writes, but she is secretive and ashamed of it.
She is engaged at a fairly young age; when she begs not to have to marry, her
beloved father beats her. She eventually commits suicide. The narrator invents
the tragic figure of Judith to prove that a woman as talented as Shakespeare
could never have achieved such success. Talent is an essential component of
Shakespeare’s success, but because women are treated so differently, a female
Shakespeare would have fared quite differently even if she’d had as much talent
as Shakespeare did.
Coleridge's Androgynous Mind
Woolf adapts Samuel Taylor Coleridge's idea
that the "androgynous" mind is a pure vessel for thought that
inspires the most objective and creative relationship with reality. Woolf does
not view androgyny as asexual, but rather as a union of male and female minds,
which she believes are different. She encourages this differentiation but sees
their fusion as a necessity; both genders have a blind spot about their own and
the opposite sex, and are dependent on each other to flesh out an accurate
portrayal of humanity (she also contends that the sexes are dependent on each
other to renew creative power). For instance, Woolf believes a female writer
must find a sentence for womanly needs. Ultimately, the androgynous mind, like
Shakespeare's, is unconcerned with its owner's petty grievances; it rises
beyond and filters out its personality as its genius shines incandescently upon
the world.
The Aggression of Men
Woolf posits that men historically belittle
women as a means of asserting their own superiority. In her metaphor of a
looking-glass relationship, men, threatened by the thought of losing their
power, reduce women to enlarge themselves. However, just as women's writing
suffers from the emotions of anger and fear, men's writing suffers from this
aggression. The men the narrator reviews do not write
"dispassionate," detached arguments that would otherwise convince the
reader, but expose their own prejudices. In the end, their writing revolves
around them rather than around their subject. Woolf points out that war is a
greater societal byproduct of this consuming aggression and defensiveness.
Institutionalized sexism
Much of "A Room of One's Own" is
dedicated to an analysis of the patriarchal English society that has limited
women's opportunity. Woolf reflects upon how men, the only gender allowed to
keep their own money, have historically fed resources back into the
universities and like institutions that helped them gain power in the first
place; in contrast, the women's university the narrator stays at had to scrap
together funds when it was chartered. Woolf compares the effect of the relative
wealth of the male and female universities: the luxurious lunch at the men's
college provokes pleasant intellectual banter, while the mediocre dinner at the
female college hampers thought. Women are not even allowed in the library at
the men's college without special permission, or to cross the lawn. Woolf
stretches back to Elizabethan times to give a fictional-historical example of
sexism: Judith Shakespeare, imagined sister of William, leads a tragic life of
unrealized genius as society scorns her attempts to make something of her
brilliant mind. Woolf traces such obstacles against women writers through the
modern day; beyond her main treatment of money and privacy (see 500 Pounds and
a Room of One's Own, above), she touches upon topics such as the masculine
derogation of female books, subjects, and prose style.
Metaphorical conceit of light
Woolf threads a conceit throughout "A
Room of One's Own" of light and purity as a metaphor for genius. The word
most frequently associated with genius is "incandescence"; for Woolf,
genius objectively illuminates the reality of the world while not concerning
itself with its owner's personal grievances. The flexibility of light as a
metaphor allows Woolf room to couch more subtle ideas within her words; when
she says that Mary Carmichael's depiction of a female friendship may allow her
to "light a torch in that vast chamber where nobody has yet been,"
the possible image of female genitalia serves notice of both Carmichael's
potential genius and revolutionary subject matter.
Important Quotations:
1.
Call me Mary Beton, Mary
Seton, Mary Carmichael or any other name you please—it is not a matter of
importance.
This line comes from Chapter One, and its
enigmatic and elusive tone regarding the true identity of the narrator is
maintained throughout the text. Woolf and the narrator both struggle with the
same issues, but they are two distinct entities. The narrator is a
fictionalized character—an invention of Virginia Woolf—and she remains vague
about her true identity. In this quotation she even instructs the reader to
refer to her by different names. This lack of one “true” identity for the
narrator gives A Room of One’s Own a sense of being universal: the ideas apply
to all women, not just one. The lack of one identity also makes the narrator
more convincing. By taking on different identities, the narrator transcends one
single voice, and consequently she makes herself a force to be reckoned with.
Her blasé attitude about something that is considered fixed and important by
most people—identity—makes her all the more intriguing.
2.
A woman must have money
and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.
This phrase from Chapter One is perhaps the
most famous line from A Room of One’s Own, and it functions as the thesis of
the work. The phrase “a room of one’s own” has gained such a stronghold in our
culture that it has almost become a cliché. With this line, and the entire
book, Woolf has touched off one of the most important assertions of feminist
literary criticisms. The oft-held argument that women produce inferior works of
literature must necessarily be qualified by the fact of the circumstances of
women. Unlike their male counterparts, they are routinely denied the time and
the space to produce creative works. Instead, they are saddled with household
duties and are financially and legally bound to their husbands. By being
deprived of rooms of their own, there is little possibility for women to
rectify the situation. Even though this is clearly a historical truth, Woolf’s
assertion was revolutionary at its time. It recast the accomplishments of women
in a new and far more favorable light, and it also forced people to realize the
harsh truths about their society.
3.
One must strain off what
was personal and accidental in all these impressions and so reach the pure
fluid, the essential oil of truth.
This assertion, presented in Chapter Two,
characterizes the narrator’s initial mission in A Room of One’s Own. She
endeavors to find the absolutely essential truth and expose it, but over the
course of the text, the narrator comes to realize that no absolute truth
exists. She sees that the experience of each person and his or her life is
inextricable from his or her perceptions of reality. In other words, we cannot
remove the self, the historical period, or any other inherent biases from
someone’s opinion. Everything depends on everything else, and the kind of
person someone is absolutely influences everything he or she does—even the kind
of art he or she creates. This idea is connected to her argument that the
plight of women has influenced the dearth of good literature that they have
produced. The narrator fictionalizes A Room of One’s Own, demonstrating this
synthesis of fact and fiction.
4.
It would have been
impossible, completely and entirely, for any woman to have written the plays of
Shakespeare in the age of Shakespeare.
This passage in Chapter Three is one of the
most significant conclusions of A Room of One’s Own. While the more common
argument is that the lack of important, impressive literary works by women
proves that they are less capable than men, the narrator takes the opposite
approach. She chooses to examine her historical period and question the context
in which women are judged. What she realizes is that the playing field is
incredibly unequal. Given the circumstances of the treatment of women of her
time, there is no way they could have rivaled men in literary achievements. The
narrator invents the figure of Judith Shakespeare to illustrate this point. She
tells a story of a fictional twin sister of Shakespeare, who is just as
talented as her famous brother but, because she is a woman, her talent leads to
a very different end.
5.
Life for both sexes—and
I look at them, shouldering their way along the pavement—is arduous, difficult,
a perpetual struggle. It calls for gigantic courage and strength. More than
anything, perhaps, creatures of illusion that we are, it calls for confidence
in oneself.
Woolf presents this claim in Chapter Two. She
asserts this point amidst a discussion about the unequal treatment of women by
men. In this discussion, she cites men as the reason for this—she believes that
men have systematically subordinated women in order to reinforce their own
confidence as the more capable sex—but she does not blame men for this. Rather,
she sympathizes with men in their quest for confidence, and she speaks of the
importance of confidence in creating art. The lack of confidence amongst women
has led to the generally inferior quality of their art. To Woolf, the anger in
women about their plight as second-class citizens is reflected in their
writing. And yet, they persist. She relates the fact that women continue to
write even though they are actually lacking in confidence to the way that
people continue living their lives even when wracked by doubt about their
relevance in society. In this way, she depicts women as valiant.
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