A Room of One's Own
In A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf's persistence that women writers needed two things, enough money and a place to write, indicated the growing awareness, not only of women's issues in general, but of how effectively a strong hold economic control put on women. Her thesis is that: ...a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction...one that leaves the great problem of the true nature of woman and the true nature of fiction unsolved...(Woolf, 21),Which is a limited range, yet she extends the hope that her expression may shed at least some light on those questions as well. Woolf tries to explain of how she arrived at her thesis. To present this argument, she takes an alternative route through fiction: I propose making use of all the liberties and licenses of a novelist, to tell you the story of the two days that preceded my coming here...how, bowed down by the weight of the subject which you have laid upon my shoulders, I pondered it, and made it work in and out of my daily life. (Woolf, 21) With this introduction, the narrative portion of the essay begins. She uses rhetorical question, personal experiences, comparisons, and provocative statement as her techniques to deliver a strong argument in
I shall take the liberty to defy that convention and to tell you. It is part of the novelist convention not to mention soup and salmon and ducklings, as if soup, salmon, and ducklings were no of importance. Woolf finishes her fictional essay with the point that has been to show the thought process behind her theory that fiction writing requires a private income and a private room, and the process has become the substance of the essay itself. She argues that women see and feel and value differently than men, and that because of this they must also write differently if they are to be true to themselves and their experience. The different outcomes of William and Judith Shakespeare serve to produce this point, and also to account for the fact that women simply were not writing literature at that time. It explores the history of women in literature through an exceptional and highly provocative exploration of the social and material conditions required for the writing of literature. The orientation, however, is materialist and social, and Woolf's thesis--that "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction"--announces that focus in no vague terms. There are two important thoughts in play here. The first is that all art, even Shakespeare's, is in fact enabled by a historical, social, and economic reality, whether or not that reality finds expression in the art itself. The fact that women have not historically been granted space or leisure for uninterrupted thinking is, in Woolf's view, a determining factor in the history of their literary achievements. Woolf's essay is a breakthrough of twentieth-century feminist thought. (Woolf, 24) Woolf describes her narrator's--The "I" who narrates the story is not Woolf--thoughts on women and fiction, she emphasizes the role of interruptions in the reflective process. Her technique is intended to convince the reader of the deep relevance of these physical conditions for the possibility of intellectual and creative activity.
Common topics in this essay:
Virginia Woolf's,
Judith Shakespeare,
writing literature,
woman money own,
money own write,
rhetorical question,
women historically,
soup salmon ducklings,
women fiction,
true nature,
woman money,
material social,
own write,
woolf's argument,
personal experiences,
|
Acceptance Essays
