Cheryl's Updates

&��ܴǳ�;��A woman,�� wrote Virginia Woolf, ��must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.�� This line from �´ǴǱ��’s 1929 A Room of One’s Own has become a canonical statement in the history of feminist thought in a text much celebrated and debated, heralded as an important precursor to second-wave feminist theory and critiqued for it’s adherence to patriarchally controlled materialism and white-centric assumptions. Woolf boldly restructured the landscape of English literature of her time and A Room of One’s Own is one of her many groundbreaking works that, while still a product of its time that may lack the nuance and inclusivity of more modern standards of feminist theory, was a landmark work in progressively pushing thought towards that direction. A rhetorical masterpiece that delivers essay through a fictional framework told by “Mary”—a composite character of allusions that emphasizes the suffering and subjugation of women under patriarchal society such as the ballad —Woolf addresses the gatekeeping of women’s work and the lineage of neglect and dismissal of women’s interiority. She observes the refusal to allow women free expression, stating that if a woman’s ideas ��let its line down into the stream,�� men will find a way to block the idea and ensure the woman loses her line of thought. In this way patriarchal forces have refused an established women’s literary tradition that instead forces women to see themselves in fiction only through the interpretations of men and Woolf argues for financial and material freedoms in order to obtain intellectual freedom. Rife with insights and often quoted lines such as ��I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman,�� ´ǴǱ��’s A Room of One’s Own transcends itself as a historical document and continues to offer relevant insights, dazzle in its rhetorical brilliance, and inspire through its sharp critiques, dynamic metaphors, humor, and thought.

��Have you any notion how many books are written about women in the course of one year? Have you any notion how many are written by men? Are you aware that you are, perhaps, the most discussed animal in the universe?��

Composed from two lectures delivered by Woolf in October 1928 to Cambridge student societies, A Room of One’s Own remains a crucial chapter of �´ǴǱ��’s overall oeuvre on literature and women’s agency or social mobility. ��Women and fiction remain, so far as I am concerned, unsolved problems�� she writes and the short book has a power far beyond its page count in her attempts at wrestling with such problems. Sure there are many critiques which we can get into in a moment and many arguments over the ��variety of versions of �´ǴǱ��’s feminism,�� as Naomi Black writes in Virginia Woolf as Feminist, but, as Black arguees ��in the end, categories have to be jettisoned for the project of mapping the feminism of a given writer or activist,�� and we can both grapple with �´ǴǱ��’s piece as a progressive yet imperfect text of historical value along the long and winding road of feminist theory while also regarding the variety of thought from great minds who expanded upon, critiqued, and thereby elevated feminist theory to new heights with �´ǴǱ��’s works as an important tool along the way.

'All this pitting of sex against sex, of quality against quality; all this claiming of superiority and imputing of inferiority, belong to the private-school stage of human existence where there are 'sides,' and it is necessary for one side to beat another side, and of the utmost importance to walk up to a platform and receive from the hands of the Headmaster himself a highly ornamental pot.'

What stood out best to me is the way Woolf stood boldly for the importance of creating a space for women when, as her own book states, such attempts were rather forcefully dismissed and mocked by the domineering of men in society. Her diaries reveal an anxiety prior to publication that she would be ��attacked for a feminist and hinted at for a sapphist,�� yet even if her work was imperfect, it was necessary to start opening a space for discussion to occur in order to allow others to work on perfecting. In this way we can see the room as a rather dynamic metaphor, both a literal statement of a woman being able to wrest the physical space of a room from the confines of men in order to create but also as a metaphorical space for women to be able to engage in free expression.

��The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.��

The oppression of women and the silencing of their voices is a major element of this work. As Woolf observes, women were limited to seeing themselves through the writings of men, thus subjugating them to the prison of men’s imaginations, unable to be able to speak for themselves. And yet women were critical components of men’s fiction, ��one might go even further and say that women have burn like beacons in all the works of all the poets from the beginning of time,�� Woolf writes, listing larger than life figures such as Antigone, Lady Macbeth, the Duchess of Malfi, Emma Bovary, Anna Karenina, and others as ��the names flock to mind�� in this history of women written by men. She says how if women only existed in men’s fiction, we would assume them of ��the utmost importance…as great as a man�� yet these are fictional women and in reality ��she was locked up,,�� denied a voice, agency, and a space to put her words in history.

��A very queer, composite being thus emerges. Imaginatively she is of the highest importance; practically she is completely insignificant. She pervades poetry from cover to cover; she is all but absent from history. 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 finger. Some of the most inspired words, some of the most profound thoughts in literature fall from her lips; in real life she could hardly read, could scarcely spell, and was the property of her husband.��

Woolf points to the gatekeeping of women from education, property, public forum and more. ��Lock up your libraries if you like,�� she famously wrote, ��but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.�� We can see how Woolf assets that the patriarchal myth of men’s superiority requires the disillusionment and subjugation of women. In her statements on the criticism of Rebecca West, Woolf contends it was ��merely the cry of wounded vanity; it was a protest against some infringement of his power to believe in himself.�� Which is delightfully cutting in a way only Woolf could bite with her pen and points to how reducing women to objects and property became a way for men to feel better about themselves. ��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,�� she writes.

It is a fear of losing dominance that exacerbates these behaviors. Fearing a threat to power, they refuse to admit to women’s place in history and even reject their ability to interiority. I quite enjoy �´ǴǱ��’s ability to mock the men who try to deny or redirect from these behaviors, never afraid to call others out. Granted, Woolf had a financial and social status that gave her the privilege of being able to make these statements that was not afforded to many women, yet the critiques are sharp and necessary too. ��Why does Samuel Butler say, 'Wise men never say what they think of women'? Wise men never say anything else apparently,�� she quips, pointing to how the attitudes of men playing the whole “I’m a nice guy, respect women�� was just a facade to placate while refusing to attend to dismantling the social constructs and gatekeeping harming women.

��Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others.��

Which brings us to ‘the room.�� Woolf sees it that women must have material conditions in order to write, in order to create, in order to be able to put their interior life into the world. Having a taste of these conditions, Woolf understands firsthand how they have granted her access to the literary community that has been denied others. This argument for financial independence is echoed in the works of French author and philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, such as her statements made in another landmark work of second-wave feminism published 20 years later, The Second Sex:

��As long as a perfect economic equality [between women and men] is not achieved in society and as long as the mores authorize a woman to take advantage as a wife or mistress of the privileges possessed by some men, the dream of a passive success will always persist and so will limit women's own accomplishments.��

In her , professor Julie Robin Solomon argues that �´ǴǱ��’s preoccupation with the ��possession�� of the room and material goods finds her beholden to ��ideological pressures�� of capitalists aspirations that upholds inequality due to the nature of capitalist ideology which is dogmatic to feminist needs in part due to the patriarchal choke-hold on governmental control and economics and thus ��neutralize her feminist opposition to patriarchal social institutions.�� Similarly, Alice Walker—the first Black woman to win a Pulitzer Prize in fiction—finds that the arguments on materialism neglect women denied any access to money or property. She writes about , the first Black author to publish a book of poetry, in her critiques:

��What then are we to make of Phillis Wheatley, a slave, who owned not even herself? This sickly, frail, Black girl who required a servant of her own at times—her health was so precarious—and who, had she been white, would have been easily considered the intellectual superior of all the women and most of the men in the society of her day.��

These are all fair points and de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex has been similarly criticized on the same grounds. Which I find to be optimistic that writers and thinkers use these works as springboards to reach for new progressive heights and inclusive theories. �´ǴǱ��’s statements, while perhaps couched in capitalist aspirations as Solomon asserts, can be similarly regarded as an argument that the present state of capitalism is an ineffective and hostile system for women’s liberation or humane society in general. As de Beauvoir argues in a :

��It’s vital, no matter how hard it is, to be financially independent, even if it costs them a lot and it will, since it will still be their job to keep house. But it’s a necessary condition for being independent on the inside: mentally, psychologically, independent. Otherwise, women are offered no alternative way of thinking, they’re forced to think like their husbands, to cater to his whims, do his bidding, etc.��

One could, and hopefully should, take this as a reminder that women’s liberation, Black liberation, or equity of any kind is all incompatible with the demands of inequality that upholds the ideology of capitalism and social justice and economic justice are inextricably linked. The economic conditions are part and parcel of patriarchy and racism. As writer and activist Angela Davis once , ��as long as we inhabit a capitalist democracy, a future of racial equality, gender equality, economic equality will elude us.��

So what to make of the room. In Modernism and the Architecture of Private Life, Victoria Rosner asserts Woolf dresses herself in the man’s study to usurp its authority for women, that ��the secret instability in masculinity’s fortress�� defines an insecurity in masculinity where Woolf wants to ��trouble�� gender in the Judith Butler sense of gender politics. Woolf is ��exposing�� the ��naturalness�� of a man in his private work space as myth and upsetting the patriarchy by ��occupying the masculine study.�� It relates to the ideas of androgyny that Woolf presents in order to detach symbols from the false and socially-couched binaries of gender. Toril Moi argues in her book Sexual/Textual Politics that this was ��‘a recognition of the falsifying metaphysical nature�� of gender identities and would serve as a precursor for deconstructive theories from writers like Hélène Cixous or Julia Kristeva.

��[Woolf] understood that the goal of feminist struggle must be precisely to deconstruct the death-dealing binary oppositions of masculinity and femininity.��

This has sparked plenty of debate as well, from Nancy Topping Bazin criticizing �´ǴǱ��’s ambiguity in defining androgyny (though Bazin’s statements that masculinity and femininity should not be fused is an erasure of gender fluidity and non-binary persons such as myself) and Marilyn Farwell arguing that ��the universal is most often identified with whatever is male, this definition can be and has been another means for demanding that a woman write like a man,�� and the ambiguity of androgyny in �´ǴǱ��’s Room is subverting gender in order to bypass this demand while also a calculated maneuver to shrug off men who would dismiss her argument by blatantly denying any feminist ideas could hold weight in a patriarchal world.

Alternatively, feminist literary critic Elaine Showalter argues Woolf ��was advocating a strategic retreat, and not a victory; a denial of feeling, and not a mastery of it,�� while failing to interrogate capitalist functions of possession. Woolf, however, has argued elsewhere against the room as retreat, criticizing James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man for its ��sense of being in a bright yet narrow room, confined and shut in, rather than enlarged and set free.�� For Woolf, a room should not be an isolation from ��life itself,�� as the narrowness of rooms is a barrier against being able to ��find the right relationship between yourself that you know and the world outside.�� Critiques of the contradictory nature of the text are warranted, yet the room seems to function as a dynamic metaphor that can have a sense in all the various interpretations and simultaneously distance itself from them. What matters is the act of creating a tradition/space of women’s literature and acknowledging that it does not exist in a vacuum, something termed “Virginia’s Web�� in literary criticism:

��fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible; Shakespeare’s plays, for instance, seem to hang there complete by themselves. But when the web is pulled askew, hooked up at the edge, torn in the middle, one remembers that these webs are not spun in mid-air by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in.��

While this is a metaphor for how ��intellectual freedom�� mind be dependant ��upon material things,�� I think it also functions as a reminder that nothing exists completely independent and we must interrogate all avenues of social forces in order to better understand them, ourselves, our art, and our world.

��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 the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.��

�´ǴǱ��’s A Room of One’s Own is a magnificent landmark of literary criticism, social critiques, feminist thought and writing in general that has lasted for a century in print. It strikes at the heart of patriarchy and the myth of men’s superiority and has been frequently discussed and debated since the day it came to print. ��Why, if it was an illusion,�� Woolf writes, ��not praise the catastrophe, whatever it was, that destroyed illusion and put truth in it's place?�� This work was an earthquake to the establishment and continues to inspire readers and is just another reason why I’ve long loved Virginia Woolf despite her flaws and even have her tattooed on my arm. A quick book that will last in the mind long after you finish it, and never trust a male presenting person who dismisses it or calls it tiresome or trite as they are exactly who she is aiming this at.

4.5/5

��By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream.��&��ܴǳ�;