On Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own”
Many video essays and articles on this work focus exclusively on the title and simply summarize its dictum, which is: if a woman wishes to write in the early 20th century she requires, at the very least, 500 pounds a year and a room of her own. To truncate it further: a paycheck and privacy.
Or they centered their discussion on the hypothetical situation of Shakespeare’s sister. If she was blessed with equal dramatic genius, would she be allowed the same opportunity to indulge her passion for the theatre in late 16th century England? Again the short answer is no. Society made it practically impossible for her, or any woman at the time, to follow their creative pursuits.
While both of these are the most salient points, together they cover about a few pages at most. I want to instead uncover those “nuggets of pure truth,” chapter by chapter, that Woolf hoped she had planted in the text. It is my hope in this review that the poet, the prose writer, the artist, or anyone who harbors a fondness for reading will discover that delight which convinces us of the importance of literature.
CHAPTER ONE
At the beginning, Woolf clarifies the approach she will take on the topic “Women and Fiction,” which could mean:
● A few words on famous women writers, like Fanny Burney, Jane Austen, the Bronte’s, George Eliot, Mitford, Glaskell.
● Women and what they are like.
● Women and the fiction they write.
● Women and the fiction that is written about them.
She settles on the possibility that the latter three are inextricably linked to one another, and is ready to lay out her train of thoughts. But before that she makes an important confession: she cannot reach a conclusion. Nor can she be sure she is telling the truth. All she can do is sketch the path of how she arrived at the minor point, the title of the essay.
She recognizes the topic that she is commenting on involves sex, or what we today would more aptly call gender. This controversial space involves humans, male and female, creatures of infinite variety. It is hopeless to try to form some hard rule or overarching theory that remains constant, for so much potential invites so many contradicting objections. The most she can do as a fiction writer, which is one of the hallmarks of the medium, is to quietly record the secrets of the human heart. This requires observation of oneself with a scientific disinterestedness and a capacity for sympathy. The creation of the character Mary and the fictional Oxbridge in the essay eases this task.
“Fiction here is likely to contain more truth than fact.” (pg. 4)
Mary sits on a riverbank, then has a thought, and is now on her way to Oxbridge’s library. Patriarchy makes its first appearance in the silent and quick confrontation with the Beadle, who shoos her off the turf (reserved for Fellows and Scholars i.e., men) and has her walk in gravel. She thinks about Thackeray’s Esmond and how critics claimed it was his most perfect novel. She thinks the 18th century style might have inhibited it, though it depends whether changes made to the manuscript served the novel’s style or its sense. This is not far off how Nabokov, in his literature lectures, analyzes a novelist’s work. He famously stated that style and structure was all that mattered, and any grand philosophical ideas were “humbug”.
Again she’s reminded that women must follow special rules, for when she opens the main door to the library an old man blocks her entry. She could only proceed if she was accompanied by a Fellow or had a letter of introduction. Lacking both, she turns around and makes her way to a luncheon party.
My copy of the essay includes Mary Gordon’s foreword, where she highlights the superb description of this luncheon. I whole-heartedly agree, and have not yet found another that can compete with it. I will only offer a sample here or there to increase your appetite.
“…on this occasion began with soles, sunk in a deep dish, over which the college cook had spread a counterpane of the whitest cream, save that it was branded here and there with brown spots like the spots on the flanks of a doe.” (p. 10)
It must be noted that out of the whole animal kingdom how well the doe agrees with the imagery and the context. It is an animal that is delightful to both our sense of sight and our sense of taste, like any gourmet meal.
We are drinking wine with this meal, red and white, and are surrounded by close friends. Slowly we settle into the groove, that gentle, carefree attitude that makes us genuinely appreciate Bacchus and his gifts, though we must moderate our gratitude. Woolf captures the mood with her distinctive charm, which will appear now and again throughout the entire work.
“No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself. We are all going to heaven and Vandyck is of the company — in other words, how good life seemed…” (p. 11)
Mary then shares a keen insight on poetry. She thinks dead poets are misconceived as greater than living poets because older poems “celebrate some feeling that one used to have,” while present poems express “a feeling that is actually being made and torn out of us at the moment,” (p. 14).
She is on her way back to Fernham, where she will spend the evening in her friend’s college dormitory. Woolf unfolds a beautiful metaphor on the way.
“It was the time between the lights when colours undergo their intensification and purples and golds burn in window-panes like the beat of an excitable heart,” (p. 16).
The common essence that is attempting to solidify in our mind when we read this is a kind of burning intensity so great that it overwhelms the container it fills. Our eyes take in those blazing hues, as they appear to be the sole focus of our entire field of vision, for a moment, and afterwards spill into everything we set our eyes upon — a bright amorphous smudge that renews itself whenever we blink or flick our eye. Likewise with the beating heart, knocking about your chest which, if loud enough, will pack your ears with its thumps, shake your knees, smooth your legs, lighten your arms, turn your gait to flight, and make you feel like it commands the drift of your purpose, while your body reluctantly tags along.
We are given a brief description of dinner, too lackluster to recount here. This makes Mary exclaim another meaningful insight.
“The human frame being what it is, heart, body and brain all mixed together, and not contained in separate compartments…a good dinner is of great importance to good talk. One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.” (p. 18)
We close out this chapter in speculation on why women’s colleges were so underfunded. In a sentence or two: “to endow a college would necessitate the suppression of families altogether. Making a fortune and bearing thirteen children — no human being could stand it,” (p. 22). This is the first notable observation on the topic of the essay, an example of how a woman’s traditional social role and its accompanying norms sets her at a disadvantage with men. Society has spoken for her time, that precious time which could be used to improve her lot.
CHAPTER TWO
This chapter begins with a set of questions, such as:
● 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?
Mary is in London now, off on a search for answers at the British Museum. After browsing the stacks of books about women another fact hits her. At the time, you could safely say that women did not write books about men. Men on the contrary, regardless of qualification or ability, wrote hundreds of books about women.
“Are you aware that you are, perhaps, the most discussed animal in the universe?” (p. 26)
“…anyhow, it was flattering, vaguely, to feel oneself the object of such attention, provided that it was not entirely bestowed by the crippled and the infirm…” (p. 28)
Mary notices that these books about women by men were all written in anger, the “red light of emotion and not in the white light of truth,” (p. 33). She imagines why these men, who hold all the power, must be so angry? Then she strikes another insight. Men were not concerned with women’s inferiority, but with their own superiority. It was what provided them with their source of self-confidence in life.
“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,” (p. 35).
“…mirrors are essential to all violent and heroic action.” (p. 36).
It enlarges and extends for intimidation, giving the domination, any kind of desire for control over a person or group, a wider scope. Just the thought of a power, some malignant force overhead, is enough to produce the intended effect.
Then we are told Mary’s aunt passed and left a legacy. This is her source of 500 pounds. Before that she was doing odd jobs, work that she did not want to do, with a sycophantic demeanor, in the hope it would help her keep the job. She found such work had bred “the poison of fear and bitterness,” within her like some corrosive rust (p. 37). However, when she became financially independent, that resentment started to slowly fade away (Woolf will display later on the detrimental effect that resentment can have on a piece of art like the novel).
This is personal growth that heavily rewards the artist. Now we arrive at wisdom.
“It was absurd to blame any class or any sex, as a whole. Great bodies of people are never responsible for what they do. They are driven by instincts which are not within their control.” (p. 38)
This line may sound like a retelling of something she read or heard previously. Regardless, she had discovered this through her own efforts of personal reconciliation with the world. Thus, she does not just understand what is written above, as how we ‘should’ see the world. In fact, she feels it is true. She cannot go back and imagine the world as she had previously seen it.
“…as I realised these drawbacks, by degrees fear and bitterness modified themselves into pity and toleration; and then in a year or two, pity and toleration went, and the greatest release of all came, which is freedom to think of things in themselves.” (p. 39)
This is the natural disinterestedness of the mind. Without those stopgaps in her thinking — the prejudices, the preconceived notions — she will reach deeper levels of sympathy with the world and its phenomena. She will not only see the bad and the good, but they will occupy her mind simultaneously. The beauty of the particular in things will pass into an appreciation for the similarities in a broader general aspect: a “view of the open sky” (p. 39). And she will no longer have the desire in her mind to search for the truth, trying to serve a preresolved point, but to let it unfurl and arrive on its own accord, like a flower petal tossed in the wind, until it gently falls on your nose during the idle hours.
CHAPTER THREE
Mary marks the strange paradox of women in society and women in art, in particular late 16th century English society. Although on Shakespeare’s stage we receive the ambitious and cunning Lady MacBeth, or the larger-than-life Cleopatra, at the time “wife-beating” was practised throughout society, as husbands were recognized as “lord and master” of their households (p. 42).
“She dominates the lives of kings and conquerors in fiction; in fact she was the slave of any boy whose parents forced a ring upon her fingers.” (p. 44)
What follows is an imagining of Shakespeare’s gifted sister, who is named Judith, and how her life would play out if she attempted what Shakespeare had done. It could not happen. Judith, beaten by her father, would have fled home in pursuit of her dreams, only to be laughed out of every room and, against her will, married off to whoever took pity on her.
Woolf then gives us her famous line concerning all those women in the past whose artistic genius has been lost, their full potential unrecognized:
“When, however, 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 I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet…” (p. 49)
She points out another sad fact to consider. Even if women did write at the time and tried to produce something of literary worth, it would inevitably be of poor quality.
“All the conditions of her life, all her own instincts, were hostile to the state of mind which is needed to set free whatever is in the brain.” (p. 51)
For struggling men who had a modicum of artistic genius, they had to face a world that was indifferent to their creative pursuits. But women faced hostility, a world in complete opposition to any kind of artistic creation undertaken.
The chapter closes out on a comment about Shakespeare’s state of mind, for Woolf believes he must have possessed that which was most conducive to poetry, incandescent and unimpeded.
“For though we say that we know nothing about Shakespeare’s state of mind, even as we say that, we are saying something about Shakespeare’s state of mind.” (p. 56)
“All desire to protest, to preach, to proclaim an injury, to pay off a score, to make the world the witness of some hardship or grievance was fired out of him and consumed.” (p. 57)
Hazlitt claims he was as little of an egotist as it was possible to be. Keats puts him among Socrates and Jesus, as persons with that ability to completely sink the self and approach the world on its own terms.
How was a woman in the sixteenth and seventeenth century with any artistic capacity supposed to cultivate such a selfless attitude, propitious to works of genius, when the din of the world, thronging in her ears, constantly made her aware of her lowly position, and admonished her for it?
CHAPTER FOUR
Halfway through the 17th century we begin to see women writers, though only women of nobility from birth or marriage saw any kind of encouragement. Still, that resentment one would expect shows up here and there among their writings. Woolf cites a few verses of Lady Winchilsea and finds that her state of mind was “harassed and distracted with hates and grievances,” (p. 59). But instead of sharing those, let us look at a couple lines of Winchilsea that Woolf says contains “pure poetry”.
My hand delights to trace unusual things,
And deviates from the known and common way,
Nor will in fading silks compose,
Faintly the inimitable rose.
What makes this “pure poetry” is the music caught in these lines. Unconscious or consciously, the lines are balanced in sound, yet also show variety. See in the second line, the long ‘a’ or ‘ae’ sound in “deviates” matches the sound in “way”, while the ‘o’ holds three slightly different sounds in the phrase “known and common”. In the next line, the ‘o’ in “Nor” and the first ‘o’ in “compose” match. So does the ‘i’ in “will” and “silks”. The last line holds a treat. Polysyllables of such length as “inimitable” must be composed if not entirely, then mostly, of short vowel sounds so the rhythm of the line remains unbroken. Here a string of short, mostly unstressed syllables is followed by a word with one long, stressed syllable. This gives “rose” a slightly greater emphasis than it would normally have. The reader’s tongue, after the successive taps on the roof of the mouth, is delighted to relax with the long vowel at the end, like climbing atop a short hill, then leisurely sliding back down.
A couple more noble women who had a talent for writing are mentioned, like Margaret of Newcastle and Dorothy Osbourne. Woolf thought the former was of a scientific bent and should have made herself familiar in a laboratory, while the latter showed her ability in letters, though had convinced herself that a woman should not waste her time in literary pursuit.
This brings us to a writer of the utmost significance: Aphra Behn, the first notable middle-class English woman to make a living off of her writing. The death of her husband, and misfortunes of her own, demanded she support herself through her own efforts. That money could be made from writing gave a woman’s efforts a new dignity which no amount of criticism could deny. Woolf sees Behn as a catalyst for the rise of women writers in the next two centuries, a seed which gave rise to Fanny Burney and Eliza Carter, who in turn nurtured the fruits of genius later in the works of Jane Austen and George Eliot.
“For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.” (p. 65)
“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.” (p. 66)
So this brings us to the 19th century, and Mary, scanning all the books in the library written by women, ponders another question: why, since the natural inclination was to poetry, were all these women novelists? That has a simple answer too. Women, beyond their allotted custom of drudgery, spent their time entertaining in the sitting room, where one could be trained “in the observation of character, in the analysis of emotion,” (p. 67). The novel is one of the strongest mediums we have to convey those observations and analyses.
Mary opens up Pride and Prejudice, and declares that Jane Austen had an unimpeded mind, similar to Shakespeare’s. She then turns to a passage of Jane Eyre and spots that resentment in Charlotte Bronte which harms art, and in stifling its creation, produces a final misshapen form. In the passage cited in the essay, there is a clear and unexpected break of the narrator’s thoughts on the plight of women and a sound of laughter. To cut the following excerpt from Jane Eyre even shorter I think only better illustrates what Woolf was trying to portray.
“…it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex.
“When thus alone I not unfrequently heard Grace Poole’s laugh…”
It is not natural, when someone’s spirit is embroiled in the passions of condemning the injustice which afflicts them, to turn the opposite direction and hear the laughter of an unrelated topic. We would not be in the proper mood to laugh. Our first instinct would be to take that laughter personally as a slight against what we had just been thinking or saying.
As much as we may agree on the sentiment behind the condemnation, even if we can tie personal experience into it, making imaginative stories at first appear even more substantial, therein lies the fault. These are works of fiction concerning characters that are products of the writer’s mind, though the entire time is spent convincing us that they are not but in fact real people who could have existed. When the author slips and falls back into “their voice” the characters lose themselves and begin to fall apart. The reader then becomes aware that the fiction was just that, merely fiction. And the face of every character falls away like a mask, only to reveal the author’s face. The jig is up; and the enchanting magic — that particular aspect of fiction, of feeling that you are someplace so real that, though you are not presently living it, it is like a distant memory that you have cherished all this time — begins to disappear, and you are back home in hard reality, surrounded by surfaces, where a tree is just a tree, and a table just a table.
Any subject in life, no matter how controversial, is material to use in fiction. All the authors must remember is the one rule of fiction they cannot break. In these made-up situations, it is the characters who are involved, who the reader sympathizes with, and so the author must portray how those airy spirits would act, not how he or she would act.
“She will write in a rage where she should write calmly. She will write foolishly where she should write wisely. She will write of herself where she should write of her characters.” (p. 70)
To return to the state of women writers in the 19th century. Though Austen had Behn for support in her dreams to write, there was not yet a woman writer who had written natural prose in the style of a woman, no sentence that was shaped to reflect a woman’s experience in the world. Woolf shows her technical expertise when she mimics the style and tone of the writing that was then in vogue at the beginning of the 19th century.
“The grandeur of their works was an argument with them, not to stop short, but to proceed. They could have no higher excitement or satisfaction than in the exercise of their art and endless generations of truth and beauty. Success prompts to exertion; and habit facilitates success.” (p. 76)
In the face of that Austen shakes her head, knows it cannot contain the spirit of her genius, and crafts a new kind of sentence.
CHAPTER FIVE
Mary (Woolf) picks up a contemporary novel, the imagined Life’s Adventure, written by one Mary Carmichael and reads the opening pages. Carmichael is attempting something new, breaking a sentence here, a sequence there.
“Very well, she has every right to do both these things if she does them not for the sake of breaking, but for the sake of creating.” (p. 81)
In other words, the stray from conventions should have an effect that serves the greater artistic vision. A trick without purpose used once is a novelty, but twice becomes a gimmick.
What Carmichael does differently is compose a scene where only women are present. At the time it was perhaps a first in literature where women displayed affections for each other. Woolf explains why a scene like that is so radical. Up until that point women had been portrayed in their relation to men, and so men can only go so far in their depictions of women, before they hit upon the hard fact: they are not women. Much is lost as a result.
“…unrecorded gestures, those unsaid or half-said words, which form themselves, no more palpably than the shadows of moths on the ceiling, when women are alone, unlit by the capricious and coloured light of the other sex.” (p. 84)
It leaves the private life of the person a mystery.
At the time of writing this essay, Mary looks about her and sees countless stories starring women that have gone untold. What follows is another helpful dictum for the woman fiction writer who wishes to write about the opposite sex, although this applies to all fiction writers:
“…she should also learn to laugh, without bitterness, at the vanities — say rather at the peculiarities, for it is a less offensive word — of the other sex. For there is a spot the size of a shilling at the back of the head which one can never see for oneself.” (p. 90)
Only the opposite sex can serve that role in describing that blind spot.
CHAPTER SIX
Mary has a final discovery. Out of her window she watches life go on across the pavements of London. She spots a woman and a man meeting up on a corner, then entering a cab together. This scene leaves a distinct impression for her. Something was lost when one splits humans by gender and observes them under those categories. What was missing was captured in that scene. It was “the unity of the mind,” (p. 97). The mind is constantly shifting in and out of different states of being. Woolf says a woman is,
“…often surprised by a sudden splitting off of consciousness, say in walking down Whitehall, when from being the natural inheritor of that civilization, she becomes, on the contrary, outside of it, alien and critical.” (p. 97)
She then sketches a quick theory of the division of the human mind. There is a female side and a male side. Those who wish to create something must unite the two.
“Coleridge perhaps meant this when he said that a great mind is androgynous.” (p. 98)
It must be a mind that interacts with the world as a permeable membrane. She cites Mr. Galsworthy and Mr. Kipling as male writers who use only that side of the mind. Aspects of their writing appear to the woman as “cruel and immature” (p. 102). Their books drop in quality, and the effect will be felt by all readers, regardless of gender.
“They lack suggestive power. And when a book lacks suggestive power, however hard it hits the surface of the mind it cannot penetrate within.” (p. 102)
Their writings may present beautiful scenes to the mind’s eye, and our fancy will pick out this part or that, but they will not stir the imagination. The scene, particularly if it involves a woman, is missing that extra gloss of reality that moves our mind onto a higher plane and leaves us suspended in our thoughts and dreams. Any writer who begins and continues with a conscious bias towards gender is fated to produce something incomplete, missing that piece that makes great works essential.
Near the end another sad observation is made. For someone to develop that kind of unified mind requires intellectual freedom, and that does not come free. Another barrier to producing great works of art is money. Woolf cites Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, who takes a look at the best poets of the 19th century, and finds out of about twelve, nine were educated at University. Out of the remaining three, only Keats did not come from money, and his poetic career was cut short, right at his prime.
To round this review off I will leave with Woolf’s peroration. She asks for the women writers to know they are contributing to the good in the world; they are actively in the process of preparing it for the next genius to come through posterity, for that moment when Shakespeare’s sister will find her heir.
“Drawing her life from the lives of the unknown who were her forerunners, as her brother did before her, she will be born.” (p. 114).
In this review, I wanted to share the highlights of this essay that make me reread it again and again. It is hard to find a more charming, insightful essay, which offers so much to so many kinds of people. The end now begs the question. Has the ground been prepared for another genius? Perhaps she, with her dreams of producing great works of art, fell back into oblivion and we must wait for her to rise again. Or perhaps, at this very moment, she has her fingers over the keyboard, typing away frantically before her vision fades, and with each tap, slowly engraves her name to remain forever in the annals of history.
Work Cited: Woolf, Virginia, A Room of One’s Own, 1989 (USA, Harcourt)
