| As she opened her famous speech, Woolf said, "All I could do was to offer you an opinion upon one minor point - a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is write fiction." (p.4) But, as it turns out, this thesis of A Room Of One's Own is no small point but indeed a highly influential one that is still significant generations later. It is so influential, as a matter of fact, that is sometimes taken to be the only "minor point" offered by this work. But, for the purpose of this essay I'm going to leave that opinion to stand on its own and I will explore instead Woolf's statements about the genders and how they ought to interact - statements that clearly incriminate men but also shrink from the perhaps expected glorification of pure matriarchy and thorough rejection of masculine sensibilities. While under the belief that, "No age can ever have been as stridently sex-conscious as our own" (p. 99) begins to wonder what the relation between the sexes should be. There she indicates that "there are two sexes in the mind corresponding to the two sexes in the body, and whether they also require to be united in order to get complete satisfaction and happiness" (p. 98). In this speech about Women and Fiction Woolf indicts masculinity of many frailnesses and faults. She harps on the overuse of the letter "I," indicating the masculine ability to obscure its own with works with the fog of its own ego. In these years of recovery from the horrors of World War I and the whisperings of possible danger of the Third Reich, she even bows to the power of the gender hegemony that patriarchy has held, admitting that without it "the earth would still be a swamp and jungle. The glories of all our wars would be unknown" (p. 35). She admits the effect of male values bleeding into literary criticism, rendering books about war significant despite the assumption that a book must be unimportant if "it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room" (p. 74). In her research for this speech she finds that "there was an enormous body of masculine opinion to the effect that nothing could be expected of women intellectually" (p. 54). She knows though that this is not due to a male desire for women to be inferior; they are only worried that they, the men, get to be superior. And although she knows that this could be very discouraging to women she claims that whatever effect discouragement and criticism had upon their writing - and I believe that they had a very great effect - that was unimportant compared with th e other difficult which faced them...when they came to set their thoughts on paper - that is that they had no tradition behind them, or one so short and partial that it was of little help (p. 76). Woolf believed that women and men were quite different and ought not to try to act like one another. (p. 88) The reason that it is so detrimental for women to have no precedent for feminine writing is that their writing would be marred by masculine style..She posited that women must find their own forms to write. Ancient literary forms, such as the epic poem, would not be logical for women to work with because their size and shape had been normalized by masculine influences - which differed from feminine sensibilities. But, Woolf does not advocate a pure feminine sensibilities. She states that, "Perhaps a mind that is purely masculine cannot create, any more than a mind that is purely feminine" (p. 98). It is clear that the opposite is true to her thinking: A mind that is purely feminine would be just as imperfect as a mind that is purely masculine. "It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly" (p. 104). Here Woolf comes upon the philosophical profundity and practical advice that is of the greatest and most impressive value of a A Room Of One's Own. It is true that women would benefit, in Woolf's day, from independent security and freedom - represented here by five hundred pounds per year and a private room. It is of no ground breaking bit of progress, to state that, "One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well" (p. 18). And, it is not even important to point to the success of female writers such as Kate Chopin and Zora Neale Hurston (or male writers such as D.H. Lawrence) who may or may not have had these luxuries. It is a point well taken that women suffered from a lack of education, resources, and experience. But it is there is perhaps the greatest philosophical and literary value in the statement that it is best for all people to be woman-manly or man-womanly - and that the thought that is purely masculine or feminine, "It ceases to be fertalised" (p. 104). Return to Writing Ryan's Feminism page Return to Writing Ryan's Page of Reviews Return to Writing Ryan's main page |
| Analysis of Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own by Ryan Cofrancesco |