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VIRGINIA WOOLF: A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN VIRGINIA WOOLF AS A CRIRIC

A Room of One’s Own is considered the first major work in feminist criticism. Woolf uses a number of methodologies--- historical and sociological analysis, fictional hypothesis, bad philosophy, notably—to answer her initial question of why there have been so few female writers. She ties there minority status largely to socioeconomic factors, specifically their poverty and lack of privacy. Her mantra throughout the essay is that a woman must have five hundred pounds a year and a room of her own if she is to write creatively. Woolf also exposes the gender consciousness that, she believes, cripples both male and female writers. She says that most men look down upon women to maintain their own superiority; most women are angry and insecure about their inferior status in society. Male writing, then, is too aggressive, whereas women’s writing is reactive. Both genders thus obscure their subjects and instead focus on themselves and their own personal grievances. The writer of incandescent genius, Woolf says, rises beyond his or her petty irritations and attains a heightened, objective relationship with reality; the subject is the world, not the writer’s self. A Room of One’s Own, the essay, examines whether women were capable of producing work of the quality of William Shakespeare, among other topics. In one section, Woolf invented a fictional character Judith “Shakespeare’s Sister”, to illustrate that a woman with Shakespeare’s gifts would have been denied the same opportunities to develop them because of the doors that were closed to women. Woolf also examines the careers of several female authors, including Aphra Behn, Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters and George Eliot. The author subtly refers to several of the most prominent intellectuals of the time, and her hybrid name for the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge—Oxbridge has become a well known term in English satire, although she was not the first to use it. The title comes from Woolf’s conception that a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

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VIRGINIA WOOLF: A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN THE IDEOLOGICAL DEBATE: FEMINITY

VERSUS ANDROGYNY Never was a book more feminine, more recklessly feminine. It may be labeled clever and shrewd, mocking, suggestive, subtle, modern but these terms do not convey the spirit which essentially is feminine.

Times Literary Supplement

Each sex describes itself a remark with profound implications for Woolf’s own art and which applies with particular force to her works. Jane Austen simply did not use the typically Victorian omniscient narrator convention of Thackeray. Trollope and George Eliot’s heavy disguise of a male persona for an unspoken assumption among readers is that the Victorian omniscient narrator is a male persona, female omniscience in a patriarchal society. Under the conditions of this male dominated tradition which Woolf inherited to adopt the all knowing voice of omniscient narration was in effect to adopt a thoroughly masculine tone.

There is much debate in feminist circles over the “best” way to liberate women through writing. Helene Cixous and Virginia Woolf, in “The Laugh of Medusa” and “A Room of One’s Own” respectively epitomize these opposing ideologies, highlighting different historical sources for women’s literary persecution, theorizing divergent plans for women’s progress, and stylistically mirroring their ideas. For Cixous, women’s writing goes hand in hand with women’s liberation: Woolf, however, sees women’s writing as emblematic and dependent on women’s progress in general; only with “a room of her own and five hundred a year”, through widespread social change, will her fictional Marry Carmichael, be a poet.

Embarrassment of the self has destroyed women’s will to speak, to act, to individuate them. Though Woolf acknowledges this historical enslavement, she ties it less to bad self image and shame and more to a socioeconomic servitude that has shackled women to the domestic sphere and prevented them from writing.

Woolf’s Manichean views on gender relations centre on self sufficiency obtained through money. Money for Woolf is one of the defining providers of freedom and this freedom translates into a sense of superiority or in the case of poverty, inferiority: “Life… calls for confidence in oneself…. And how can we generate this imponderable quality…? Woolf relates this superiority/inferiority play to the relationship of men to women.

Since women have been traditionally oppressed to fit men’s needs, it follows that a man’s triumphs should parallel a woman’s failures. Woolf illustrates this with a concentrated look at the fictional life of William Shakespeare’s sister.

Judith, as Woolf calls her, is immediately presented as an appendage to the home, while her brother is allowed free rein: “That escapade sent him to seek his fortune in London. Very soon he got work in the theatre, became a successful actor, and lived at the hub of the universe…Meanwhile his extraordinary gifted sister, let us suppose, remained at home… she was to be promised to be married the son of a neighboring wool-stapler”.

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William’s “hub of the universe” is a depressing contrast to Judith’s wool-staple of a husband. Woolf’s martyr runs off to London, where she is greeted with more misogyny, and this time of a more personal nature: Judith eventually commits suicide in the face of this adversity. Her story is a parable of the intense social and economic struggle with which any creatively-oriented woman dealt, but Woolf locates another reason for women’s silence: a lack of economic and social freedom moored to a lack of personal freedom and privacy.

Woolf writes, “If a woman wrote, she would have to write in the common sitting-room. And, as Miss Nightingale was so vehemently to complain, ‘women never have half an hour… that they can call their own’—she was always interrupted… Furthermore, War and Peace is considered one of the world’s greatest novels because it is the masculine values that prevail. This an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This an insignificant book because it deals with feelings of women in a drawing room”.

Thus, according to Woolf, it is the triumvirate of economic, social and domestic slavery that has inhibited creative women in the past. Like Cixous, Woolf argues that men have affixed an inferior label to women which has muted them, unlike the counterpart; Woolf does not focus on the subtle differences of this inferiority complex, namely the theft of the body from women’s identity. Her historical study is more related to Betty Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique”, which explores the “Problem without a name” that has confined women to the sphere of domesticity. This division of opinion becomes more apparent in Cixous and Woolf’s solution to encourage women’s writing.

Woolf explains how she avoided the pitfalls of Judith’s life: a sizable inheritance has guaranteed her economic and private security. This money has rid from her mind the impulse of slave morality. Woolf alleges that “Genius like Shakespeare’s is not born among laboring, uneducated, and servile people”.

Woolf believes that Shakespeare was able to masterpieces because he had no axe to grind. To achieve this artistic incandescence, female writers must have what Coleridge termed an “androgynous mind”. Woolf’s essay is an example of this. With the time, she hopes, women will gain their freedom from the domestic sphere and, in an intimate finale, the opportunity will come and the dead poet who was Shakespeare’s sister will put on the body which she has so often laid down.

Written and Composed By:

Prof. A. R. Somroo

M.A. English, M.A. Education

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