Anjitha Tom, Term Paper

                    

                     A Study on Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own

Virginia Woolf was born into a highly literate and artistic family as Adeline Virginia Woolf in the year 1882. She is one of the foremost modernists and feminists of the twentieth century. She was one of the members of Bloomsbury group, an intellectual circle of writers and artists that encouraged a liberal approach to sexuality and the traditional views. Her famous works include Mrs. Dalloway, To the Light House and Orlando.

She presented two lectures on the topic Women and Fiction at Cambridge University’s Newnham and Girton colleges in 1928 and these lectures were later expanded and revised and became the celebrated book A Room of One’s Own which got published in the year 1929. This book worked at the intersection of modernism and feminism, both of which she stood for. Through this book, she analyzed the differences between women as objects of representation and women as authors of representation and invited the audience to think about “the books that are not there”. This book is a landmark of twentieth century feminist criticism and opened up the entire territory of modern feminist thoughts.

The paper gives a detailed study on three celebrated moments from the book A Room of One’s Own, Shakespeare’s Sister, Chloe Liked Olivia and Androgyny.

In Shakespeare’s sister, Woolf is puzzled of the reason for the absence of women writers in the most fertile Elizabethan Age. She believes that absence has to do a lot with the living conditions of the time. She finds that women of the age only had few rights, despite having strong personalities, especially in the works of art. Here, she is reminded of the Bishop’s comment that no women equal the genius of Shakespeare and she imagines what would have happened had Shakespeare had an equally talented sister, named Judith. Woolf outlines the possible course of Shakespeare’s life, the grammar school, work at theatre in London, acting, meeting theatre people and so on. His talented sister however was not able to attend school since education was denied for women during the time and her family discouraged her from studying on her own. She was married against her will as a teenager and she ran away to London to pursue her desires at night. The men at the theatre denied her the chance to work and to learn the craft. An actor manager showed sympathy on her and later got impregnated by him, torn between her passion for the art and the life she lived, she committed suicide and got buried at some unknown cross roads. This is how Woolf believes such a female genius would have become in the time of Shakespeare.

However, she agrees with the bishop that no women of the time would have had such genius, “for genius like Shakespeare is not born among laboring, uneducated, servile people. It was not born in England among the Saxons and the Britons. It is not born today among the working classes” and women back then fit into this category. Yet she admits that genius of a sort must have existed among women as it must have existed among the working classes. Now and again an Emily Bronte or a Robert Burns blazes out and proves its presence. But certainly it never got itself on to paper.

Woolf finds that creating art is very difficult and one must need a private space and money of their own to write and the women of the age were denied both and the creativity of the female writers was opposed actively. She claims that when one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Bronte who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to. Woolf thinks that the male discouragement was in accord with the masculine desire to retain the status of superiority. She thinks that the anonymous writers were always women. Edward Fitzgerald suggests that it were women who made the ballads and the folk-songs, crooning them to her children, beguiling her spinning with them, or the length of the winter's night.

Towards the end of this part, she starts developing her theory that for a writer to attain genius like Shakespeare’s, there must be no external obstacles both from one’s inside and outside, only then a genius can be incandescent.

Another detailed study is on a moment that comes under chapter 5 of the book, Chloe liked Olivia. Here, Woolf proposes the idea of friendship between women and contemplates on its substance and harmony. For explaining this, she pulls down a novel called “Life’s Adventure” by Mary Carmichael. She at first claims that this prose work is not as good as Jane Austen’s. The smooth gliding of the sentence after sentence that can be find in Austen’s cannot be find here, instead it is interrupted, something tore and something scratched. She soon revises her opinion noting that Miss. Carmichael’s writing has nothing in common with Austen’s; it is attempting something completely different. The decisive moment in Mary Carmichael’s innovation comes with her words, “Chloe liked Olivia.” Woolf realizes how rarely literature has presented real, amicable relations between women. Women were always, at least until the nineteenth century, considered in their relationship to men and were represented with a peculiar nature in fiction, her beauty and horror, alternations between heavenly goodness and hellish depravity, and represented in the need of love, to get protected.

Here, in Life’s Adventure, Chloe and Olivia work together in a laboratory outside, a fact which greatly changes the kind of friends they can be. The narrator begins to think that an important transition has occurred in the field of literature, “for if Chloe liked Olivia and Mary Carmichael knows how to express it she will light a torch in that vast chamber where nobody has yet been.” Woolf claims that if men in literature were portrayed only in relationship to women, not in friends to other men, soldiers, thinkers, dreamers, literature would suffer; only a few parts of Shakespearian play would be written. Woolf watched how both Olivia and Chloe looked each other and looked deep down to their unrecorded gestures. She exclaimed at Carmichael’s writing and looked into the space where women are alone, unlit by the capricious' and coloured light of the other sex. Even if she portrayed the relationship between women, Woolf is not fully convinced with Carmichael. She points out that she does not represent the culmination of the literary development Woolf has in mind, “for she will still encumbered with that self-consciousness” that keeps her in the realm of nature- novelist, rather than a contemplative artist. She advices Carmichael to learn not only to tell the truth about women, but also to tell, gently and without rancor, that bit of truth about men that has gone untold because it is what they cannot see in themselves.

Woolf’s interest in homosexuality can be traced back to her own life. She had an affair with a poet as well as a gardener named, Vita Sackville West. After a tentative start of their affair, they began a sexual relationship. Woolf’s affection towards her resulted in a book written by her, Orlando, which is considered as the most charming love letter in literature. Through this book, she explores Vita, weaves her in and out of the centuries, tosses her from one sex to other, plays with her, dresses her in furs, lace and emeralds, teases her, flirts with her, drops a veil of mist around her. After the affair ended, the two women remained as friends until Woolf’s death in 1941.

Literature has portrayed only a little of the relationship between the same sexes. Since heterosexuality is seen as the norm by the society, the ‘other’ will not be accepted by it. Woolf is actually requesting the writers to write about the truth that are hidden behind the ‘norm’ which is considered as the only truth.

Another moment in “A Room of One’s Own” that is taken under study is “Androgyny”, which comes in the chapter six. Here, the major concept raised by Woolf is that of gender difference and that of androgynous mind. Woolf argues that for a mind to be fully fertilized it should have the fusion of both male and female living in harmony with each other and spiritually co- operating. An androgynous mind does not concern about the gender but with the subject it deals with. It does not care what the sex of the writer is but concentrates on the subject matter that it is about write. Androgyny does not imply a total absence of gender, but such a complete fusion that wipes away any gender consciousness and free the mind.

Woolf refers to what Coleridge has once said; he said that a great mind is androgynous. For her, Shakespeare is a fine model of this androgynous mind. An androgynous mind transmits emotion without impediment; it is naturally creative, incandescent and undivided. She points out that it is harder to find current example in this “sex- conscious” age. The narrator blames both the sexes for bringing about this self- consciousness of gender. She judges the androgyny of various famous writers. She tells that if a writer’s mind is purely male or female, if there is not total freedom of thought, then the writing will never be fertilized. It is one of the tokens of the fully developed mind that it does not think specially or separately of sex.

Woolf believes that the suffrage campaign for the women provoked men’s defensiveness over their own sex. She gives example for this by reading a new novel by a well- respected male contemporary writer. The writing is clear and strong, indicative of a free mind, but she later notices that the male writer protests against the equality of the other sex by asserting his own superiority. If a writer only has one mind her/his can only be understood by their own sexes, thus other sexes will suffer.

Again, Woolf talks of the writings by women. She does not consider the idea that writing out of protest can often be more powerful than writing out of complacency. She gives high position to complacency than the idea that was held high by other feminists. She insists upon the absence of anger and protest in writing. This is where she gets differentiated from other female writers.

She then comes back to the point that was discussed much earlier. She repeats that without material things, one cannot have intellectual freedom and without intellectual freedom one cannot have intellectual poetry. Through this, she again claims the idea of private space and money one must possess their own.

The book is generally seen as a feminist text and is noted in its argument for both a literal space for women writers within a literary tradition dominated by patriarchy.

Bibliography

Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. The Norton Antghology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Leitch B Vincent. New York: W.W Norton and Company Ltd. 2001. Print.

Abrams, M. H. A Glossary of Literary Terms. Wadsworth: Cengage, 2012. Print