Virginia Woolf (1882- 1941) was a novelist and theorist based in
Edwardian London at a time of historic change. Politically Britain's empire
declined steadily between the two world wars. Women got the right to vote and
became more socially mobile as they entered the universities and the
professions Room of One's Own argues that women writers should be enabled by a
guarantee of economic independence and privacy. Contemporaries found her
theory insufficiently radical in terms of the class struggle and the women's
movement.
CONTENTS
BRIEF
INTRODUCTION OF VIRGINIA WOOLF
EARLY
LIFE
A ROOM OF ONE'S OWN
BACKGROUND
OF THE ESSAY
TEXT
ANALYSIS
VIRGINIA WOOLF
Brief
Introduction of Virginia Woolf
BORN: 1882 in Leslie Stephen
DIED: 28 March 1941 (aged 59)
DIED: 28 March 1941 (aged 59)
LITERARY CAREER: Novelist, Essayist, publisher, critic
LITERARY WORKS: Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927)
and The Waves (1931)
Virginia Woolf (1882-
1941) was a novelist and theorist based in Edwardian London at a time of
historic change. Politically Britain's empire declined steadily between the two
world wars. Women got the right to vote and became more socially mobile as they
entered the universities and the professions Room of One's Own argues that
women writers should be enabled by a guarantee of economic independence and
privacy. Contemporaries found her theory insufficiently radical in terms of the
class struggle and the women's movement. Later theorists though have been able
to apply and extend her work by reconstructing the canon and rewriting literary
history. The applicability of Woolf s theory across cultures however may be
worth examining
EARLY LIFE
Virginia Woolf was born
in 1882 to Leslie Stephen - one of the editors of the Dictionary of National
Biography - and his wife Julia, one of the best-known society hostesses in late
nineteenth-century London. Woolf s own recollections of her childhood focus
largely on repression and abuse. Her adulthood was spent largely among friends
of the Bloomsbury group which was London's select coterie of intellectuals
comprising painters, writers and critics. The group included people as diverse
as the economist John Maynard Keynes, the iconoclastic biographer Lytton
Strachey and the novelist E. M. Forster. Contemporaries were struck - unlike
perhaps readers in the 1980's and 1990's with the sense of continuity rather
than discontinuity such a background shared with the age that had gone before
it.
Along with her husband
Leonard, Woolf began the Hogarth Press, an experimental venture in publishing
in 1917.
In 1941, after a
lifetime of mental disturbance she took her own life. Erica Jong, a later
feminist theorist, was to despair of the 'head
in the oven' group of women writers which would (over the century)
come to include Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton who also committed suicide.
A ROOM OF ONE'S OWN
BACKGROUND OF THE ESSAY
1) Age : The world of Woolf in a sense is light years
away from Wollstonecraft. Politically the
130-odd years saw the rise of the British empire overseas, its peak
during the Victorian age and the long twilight of its decline during which
Woolf was to write. The obvious crashing of public confidence that accompanied
the crash of this patriarchal structure went together with the growing tendency
of Britain to become progressively isolationist during this period.
Domestically Britain came to know of problems such as rural dislocation, urban
unemployment that came in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, and the rise
of Trade Unionism. By 1929 (when A Room of One's Own was published) she had
experienced two terms of government by the
Labour Party. Culturally the arts had been transformed out of
recognition by the increase in literacy and the rise of the novel.
2)Position of Women : Professionally more career options had opened
for women in the second half of the nineteenth century. School teaching,
nursing and typing meant that far more women entered the workforce than ever
before. By the turn of the century, college-teaching became another option as
did research. Beatrice Webb the economist, Mary
Kingsley the explorer, Jane Harrison the anthropologist may seem symptomatic
only of a tokenist representation of women. In their time though they
were not just pioneers in their fields but as women who wrote up their
research. So a new kind of woman-writer had entered the field as a new kind of
ancestor. The issue of ancestors thus takes on a new dimension
Most of all the woman
novelists had come into their own. The novel as popular form developed through
the late eighteenth and nineteenth century as the form which was primarily
about domestic space, the middle class, and above all, democratic. It did not
necessarily require a classical education to either read or write. When
Wollstonecraft wrote, the novel was in its infancy so that her reach of
reference was necessarily limited.
The
1870's had seen the establishment of public schools for girls and the great
women's colleges in London, Oxford and Cambridge. Wollstonecraft's plan that women be given an education where
' the cultivation of understanding' was placed above 'the acquirement of some
corporeal accomplishment', had in that sense been given a concrete shape. It
was this sort of a college audience that Woolf was to have for the two talks
that were published as A Room of One's Own
The essay now known as A
Room of One's Own, began as a two-part lecture series Woolf was invited to
deliver at two colleges in Cambridge -Newnham and Girton - which at that time
were both single-sex colleges that admitted only women. Girton has since become
educational The lectures were presented before the Arts Society at Newnham and
the ODTAA ('One Damned Thing After Another') at Girton. Both were undergraduate
societies; indeed they were relaxed and informal as the name of the second
society shows. The audience then would have been largely student-standard. And
all the students (reading for their B.A. degree) were young women. As women's
colleges Newnham and Girton were (then as now) relatively under-funded, when
compared to the men's colleges of the time. The students who attended Woolf s
lectures would have come largely from what today are called 'bedsits': single
rooms which include a bed, a writing-desk and chairs and are intended therefore
to double as sitting-room and bedroom. the men's colleges at that time would
have been able to provide their students with 'sets' of two rooms per person.
Woolf builds on them - explicitly and , implicitly - in developing her argument
that to write a woman needs financial independence and a room of her own and
that in these two matters (economic security and privacy) women have been traditionally
disadvantaged compared to men.
Woolf had established
herself as both a novelist and a critic of note. Her theory and practice seemed
alike to set the agenda for modernism at least in England and the coterie to
which she belonged -the Bloomsbury group -was viewed as being at the cutting-
edge of intellectual discussion. Yet Woolf herself - although she addressed a
university audience -remained acutely conscious all her life that she had not
gone up to university. Her education had been largely self-acquired as she read
on her own in her father's library. Her father had been a Cambridge don
and her brother Thoby had gone up to
Cambridge in his turn. Woolf herself tended to see this as a deprivation
imposed upon her by patriarchy. And yet - as the very presence of her
lecture-audience demonstrates - there were women who were free to enjoy the
intellectual freedom and development of university life.
First there is a sense
of shared space and concerns. Both speaker and audience are 'women together' so
to speak. Both come from the same ethnic group, both are from within pretty
much the same class within England: educated upper middle-class since the
Cambridge of 1928 had not too much government funding for students outside this
class to come to university.
Next a slight skew may
be detected in this relationship. Speaker and audience are likely to look at
one point quite differently, that of a university education, since one side is
experiencing it and the other side is conscious of having been deprived of it.
Then consider the fact
that once A Room of One's Own was published, the constituency by definition
underwent a change. The reading public did not necessarily share any of these
experiences with the theorists. Many of Woolf s reviewers were men Many women and men readers were (unlike the speaker
and the first audience) professionals.
Finally try to work out
the implications of this audience-speaker relationship and position yourself
vis-a-vis the text when you read it.
SUMMARY OF THE ESSAY
A woman must have money
and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.' In other words, economic
independence (which she places later at five hundred pounds a year) and
domestic space (privacy within the home and stretches of freedom from cares
associated with it) are according to Woolf, prerequisites for women to write.
She has just constructed an imaginary picture of Shakespeare's sister - as
talented as the dramatist - having to kill herself because gender-bias in
Elizabethan England prevented her from exploiting her talent and instead
exploited her vulnerability as a woman. In contrast she says Shakespeare's own
mind could develop finely to being 'incandescent [and] unimpeded.' This is the
state to which Woolf refers at the start of Chapter IV, which is the prescribed
unit. She begins by inverting a patriarchal argument which she has cited
earlier in which an old male professor tells a woman that no woman could have
written the plays of Shakespeare since these are the product of a masculine
mind which is superior. Naturally, says Woolf, no woman contemporary of
Shakespeare's could have written like him. The Elizabethan age was patriarchal
enough to restrict women entirely to the domestic sphere. This in turn conjures
up a world of high mortality (including probably deaths in childbirth) and low
social mobility for women. I will try to say a little about the women whom
Woolf cites (in chronological order) and suggest their significance to the
argument.
Anne Finch, Countess of
Winchilsea (1660-1720) was an eighteenth-century nature poet, derided by
Augustans such as Pope and Gray for composing poetry that was the foolish
indulgence (according to them) of a would-be intellectual woman. Her poetry is
seen today as representative of the late eighteenth-century age of sentiment
which explores nature through the feelings and imagination of a solitary
individual. The significance of +>Anne Finch's poetry (in terms of literary
history) is that she is the only woman poet to have been retrieved and placed
in the phase of pre-romantic poetry, normally thought to have been a wholly
male domain. In 1928 her poems were edited by Middleton Murry and this was also
the year in which Woolf gave these lectures.
+>Margaret, Duchess of
Newcastle and the contemporary of Anne Finch continues to be cited today
(alongside more bureaucratic sources such as the UN report on women) as one who
wrote on the inequitable division of labour between women and men which even
now stands internationally Citing the same extract that Woolf dies in her
piece, Naomi Wolf writes in The Beauty Myth : 'women work harder than men whether
they are Eastern or Western, housewives or jobholders. A Pakistani woman spends
sixty-three hours a week on domestic work alone, while a Western housewife,
despite her modem appliances works just six hours less' (Wolf, 23).
+> Dorothy Osborne an
eighteenth century correspondent of William Temple (the patron of Jonathan
Swift) is used by Woolf as an instance of how a woman with the instincts of a
writer as her letters show) is so conditioned by the hostility of a patriarchal
society that judges women writers to be either dangerously or ludicrously
insane that she decides consciously not to write for publication.
+>Aphra Behn (1640-1689)
the woman dramatist is cited by Woolf as the first woman writer to turn
professional, or in other words, to make money by her writing. As one from the
lower-middle class (unlike the others cited above) Aphra Behn alters the
paradigm of the woman writer. Today her play Oroonoko (about a noble black
slave in London) is studied as a document to understand the eighteenth
century's , exploitation of the slave trade.
+>Jane Austen (1 775-181
7). Charlotte Bronte (181 6-1854), Emily Bronte (1818- 1848) and George Eliot
(1819-1889) as famous novelists do not require Woolf s theory to rescue them
from obscurity, unlike the others mentioned above. Woolf extends her argument
to ask why women tend to write novels rather than poetic drama (as Emily Bronte
might have done) or historical biography (as George Eliot might have done).
Woolf’s own answer to
this question is that as middle-class women in a patriarchy that restricted
their freedom of movement, the social mobility and area of influence of women
was restricted to that of personal relationships. This is also the area of
operation of the novel (say, as against the epic which is usually meant to have
a cosmic sweep).
So in that sense gender
dictates genre. Woolf goes on (using Austen as an instance) to make this point
in another way. Middle-class women fear the opinion of others (even in their
family circle) and can write only in snatches since they have no room of their
own where they can write in their own time and space. Woolf also points out
that a woman writer lives under constant pressure from what later theorists
would call gender and ideology.
This constant strain
pushes women writers, and frequently their novels and characters as well, to
the point of insanity. She quotes from Jane Eyre to strengthen her case and
show how the psychological strain of the author finds an echo in her
protagonist and a submerged plot of insanity. Woolf concludes that the output
of a woman writer is inherently different to that of a man even on the level of
sentence-construction. The education of women therefore should be
correspondingly different to that of men
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