A room of one's own

FICTION

catch the ‘tones’, the light and shade of experience.

NOVELS

Virginia Woolf felt that the focus on external realism was restricting and such a form

emphasised a plot development and a logical order which was not consistent with

experience (and so reality). She understood new stylistic techniques were needed to reflect

that experience.

➢ Mrs Dalloway describes the events of one single day in central London through the

mind of one character, Clarissa Dalloway, who is going to be the hostess of a high-

society party for friends later the same evening. It is a finely shaded portrait of an

individual personality.

➢ In “The Lighthouse”, two days in the life of a family on holiday are recorded:

One before the Great War;

One after it, when some of the characters have died.

Mrs Ramsay is a powerful figure in the family who is searching for a truth that lies

beneath surface facts. Her husband, Mr Ramsay, is more literal-minded and

contrasts with Mrs Ramsay. In the second part of the novel we learn that Mrs

Ramsay has died, but she continues to exert a spiritual influence over all those who

return to the holiday home years later.

Again, Virginia Woolf is more interested in her characters’ mental processes than in their

visible actions.

‘A SOCIETY’ (1921)

● A short story in which Virginia Woolf explored ideas around gender, knowledge and

power;

● The narrative method of “A Society” anticipates that of A Room of One's Own, in

which we are addressed by an ‘I’ who insists that we think of her as fictional (p.4)

● It may have been conceived as a response to Arnold Bennett’s book Our Women:

Chapters on the Sex Discord. Bennet wrote that «women are inferior to men in

intellectual power, especially in that kind of power which is described as creative».

● Desmond MacCarthy’s review of Bennett’s book in the New Statesman provided

further incentive for Woolf who wrote a response to it.

A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN

The title comes from the conclusion that women must have a private space, as well as

financial independence in order to write well.

➔ A Room of One’s Own began as 2 lectures, written to be delivered at the women-

only Cambridge colleges of Girton and Newnham in 1928, and published as a six-

chaptered book in 1929. The book’s official subject is “women and writing”.

➔ In order to address the subject of “women and fiction”, Woolf argues, we must first

take account of the educational, social and financial disadvantages women

have experienced throughout history.

➔ The text has been regarded as a key work of feminist criticism, revealing how

Virginia Woolf ranges beyond the essay’s official topic of women and fiction to

question issues around education, sexuality, and gendered values.

➔ In a frame narrative that opens and closes the essay, Woolf creates a fiction of

herself giving a lecture to an audience of women in October 1928, recounting

the experiences she had preparing the lecture and the conclusions to which she

came some episodes may refer to some actual episodes she went through in her life,

but these are fictionalized in the essay:

a) her exclusion from the library at Oxbridge and the contrast between the rich and

poor meals she had at the men’s and women’s colleges (chapter 1); this episode

gives her the occasion to discuss the different kind of limitations women had to

education;

b) her research on what men have written about women in the British Museum

(chapter 2);

c) her reflections on English women writers (chapters 3 to 5);

d) and her observations of a taxi in a London street scene representing the

androgynous mind (chapter 6).

➔ What Woolf suggests is that the conditions according to which women lived in the

Elizabethan age could not be in harmony with writing. Women were considered as

second-class citizens and it was like that until 1870 in which, thanks to the Married

Women’s Property Act, married women were legally allowed to own money.

Before 1870, any earnings would automatically become their husband’s property.

➔ And it was only in 1882, with the second draft of this Act, that married women

were able to own and control property by themselves. This patriarchal framework

had an impact on the condition of women before the 20th century, women’s lives

were dictated by men’s will, women had no existence without men in their lives.

Woolf subverts the idea that an essay should be should bring an objective truth.

In this situation here women cannot express their creativity, they could not write

fiction since their money and properties were completely under the control of the men

in their lives (be they their fathers or their husbands).

Women were excluded from formal education, because the patriarchal framework of

society considered women, not in need of education. They did not need to go out in

the world and earn that living because they were financially dependent on men.

They could have been servants or workers, but they did not need to go to university

because they couldn’t assign to other jobs rather than a governess or maidservant.

(page. 20)

WOMEN

➔ During the Victorian era, women were supposed to have a life centred around their

husbands and children.

➔ “The Angel in the house”: Victorian ideal of womanhood. Women were expected to

be perfect housewives, and not a lot of jobs were opened to them.

Angel in the House: intensely sympathetic + immensely charming + utterly unselfish

+ excelled in the difficult arts of family life + sacrificed herself daily. She never had a

mind or a wish of her own but preferred to sympathize always with the wishes of

others. She was pure.

«I killed her . . . [I] acted in self-defence. Had I not killed her she would have killed

me». The Angel in the House was an ideal built throughout generations of patriarchal

domination, meaning that it was anchored in the customs of society, and worse it was

even instilled in women throughout their education.

PROFESSIONS FOR WOMEN (Angel in the Hause)

● “Professions for Women” is an abbreviated version of the speech Virginia Woolf

delivered before a branch of the National Society for Women’s Service on January

21, 1931;

● It was published posthumously in The Death of the Moth and Other Essays.

● The text concentrates on that Victorian ‘phantom’ known as the ‘Angel in the

House’: a selfless, sacrificial woman whose purpose in life was to soothe, flatter, and

comfort the male’s population.

APHRA BEHN

Aphra Behn (1640 - 1689) → English dramatist, fiction writer, and poet

-

- The first Englishwoman known to earn her living by writing.

- Behn wrote many plays but her fiction draws more interest.

Her short novel Oroonoko (1688) tells the story of an enslaved African prince whom

Behn claimed to have known in South America. Its engagement with the themes of

slavery, race, and gender, as well as its influence on the development of the

English novel, helped to make it, by the turn of the 21st century, her best-known

work.

- The subject matter of her works made her the object of some scandal.

BREAKING AWAY FROM CODES

● Irony is used to avoid direct confrontation, to divert argumentation towards

something more powerful than just anger and questions. In Woolf’s speech, serious

arguments and ideas are intertwined with sprinkles of irony.

«. . . you are, in my opinion, disgracefully ignorant. You have never discovered

something important. You have never shaken an empire or led an army into battle.

The plays of Shakespeare are not by you, and you have never introduced a

barbarous race to the blessings of civilization. What is your excuse?» (p. 101) Here

she is referring to the female audience she is talking to. She says “why women have

never made a discovery of any sort of importance”. Because they were not allowed to

do that, because they had to stay home and be the angel in the house.

● A Room of One’s Own combines theory and artistic writing.

● Woolf uses fiction to corroborate the facts, to support her arguments, and to fill

the blanks in women’s history.

«Woolf . . . uses fictional strategies to talk about fiction and about ‘women and

fiction’; ‘fiction’ becomes a form of identity, a style and a concept, subject and object

simultaneously, and not merely a genre or theme. She also represents the

intertwining of fiction and history, both writing and inventing “women’s history”

through fictional characters who stand for, and stand-in for, the absence in the

historical narrative» (Laura Marcus 1997: 47).

● The most striking example of the use of fiction in her argumentation is Judith

Shakespeare, the famous author’s gifted sister.

“MORE TRUTH THAN FACTS”

● Judith is not the only character that Woolf imagined. Mary Carmichael, the woman

who wrote about Chloe and Olivia, also came from Woolf’s imagination, and so did

Mary Beton, Mary Seton and Mr A. But again, all these fictional characters were

created for a purpose: like Judith, they all served Woolf’s argumentation.

● Facts and fiction are so intertwined in A Room of One’s Own that the limits between

the literary genres are blurred. In the first pages of the essay, Woolf even states that

«fiction here is likely to contain more truth than facts» (p. 4).

● «[Woolf’s] narrative strategies in her lecture about women and fiction suggest that the

marriage of fiction and fact is particularly necessary if one is to write narratives about

women’s lives since nonfictional narrative forms have left unrecorded the facts of

women’s lives, while fictional narratives have distorted or ignored the real conditions

of female existence . . . [she parodies] the confident scholarly discourse that pretends

to capture facts and deliver truths about the world » (Boehm 1992: 93).

● She raises questions about the capacity of factual genres to be objective, to

tell truths.

● Woolf’s narrator goes over the process of writing while writing herself. The first word

of her essay is “But” as if the reader arrived in the middle of something as if

everything which was said before had to be protested against.

THE SHEEP AND THE PEN

● «The student who has been trained in research at Oxbridge has no doubt some

method of shepherding his question past all distractions till it runs into its answer as a

sheep runs into its pen [i.e. corral, a fenced enclosure for animals] . . .

But if unfortunately, one has had no training in a university, the question far from

being shepherded to its pen flies like a frightened flock hither and thither, helter-

skelter, pursued by a whole pack of hounds» (p. 25-26)

She addresses this idea of being objective as masculine sk