A Room Of One’s Own
It has been eighty-three years since Virginia Woolf spoke at Newnham and Girton on the subject of women and fiction A Room of One’s Own, and though the context seems at times irrelevant to the world in which we live today, we must remember our roots in society. In reading the essay, A Room of One’s Own, we are able to better understand the turmoil and frustration of the female artist of the early twentieth century. Woolf’s writing is meant to be understood by all women, in A Room of One’s own the narrator says, “Call me Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael or any other name you please—it is not a matter of importance”(Woolf 5). This quote is an example of Woolf’s attempt to universalize the words in the essay so that they could potentially apply to every woman who read them. I thoroughly enjoyed Ms. Woolf’s use of the English language as an art from, and I believe this style was key to the essay’s success, and one of the reasons A Room of One’s Own is still in print today.
Among other reasons we can still understand and find relevance in A Room of Ones Own, is the groundbreaking ideas in the essay. In her own way Virginia Woolf took on the establishment, and tried to give a voice to those who had none. In correspondence between Woolf and her friend G. Lowes Dickinson, she writes that her goal for this essay is to "encourage the young women--they seem to get fearfully depressed." (Woolf xiv)
Throughout A Room of One’s Own, a few major ideas really were very easy to understand and relate to as a woman. Among these, one was more central than any other. This being the idea that a female fiction writer must have a fixed income of at least five hundred pounds a year and a room with a lock in which the author may cultivate her thoughts with out the constant interruptions of everyday life for a woman in the early twentieth century. Unless these women had an inheritance, as was the case for Virginia Woolf, they were forced to remain dependent upon their male contemporaries for financial support and in turn were expected to perform a specific role in this patriarchal society. It was the attitude of the time that women should not work outside the home if their husbands held jobs. As a result of this, wives seldom worked outside jobs. Women were expected to cook, clean and tend to the children, while at the same time maintaining beauty and elegance. In short they were expected to remain home and serve their husband while he tended to the matters of the world.
In my opinion Woolf’s declaration that a woman must have five hundred pounds and a room of one’s own holds another, more important meaning. Having a “room of one’s own” means that there is a need for both creative and personal freedom. As woman, the thought of spending everyday secluded at home, cooking and cleaning for a husband who doesn’t value my talents simply seems ludicrous. Living this life of monotony, a life that is comparable with a prison sentence must have driven all women mad, especially for the female artist of the time. Imagine being born with the talent and drive to create beautiful works of art and to then have your gift suppressed by a society who doesn’t fully understand you. In my opinion Woolf was a pioneer, she believed that all women, like men, are born with all the pieces to become successful and if the talent was seen and cultivated at a young age she could be, with out a doubt, as great as any man. In other words, if the society of the time would just embrace the potential the female sex, instead of limiting their rights and condemning them to a life of menial tasks at home, they would see that there is true power in women, and that power has the potential to change the world.
Another aspect of in A Room of One’s Own thoroughly enjoyed was the way in which the narrator, when interrupted, fails to regain her original thought. In my opinion this suggest that women without private spaces of their own, free of interruptions, can never really succeed. Virginia Woolf lived in a time in which, women had very few of their own institutions of higher learning, while gentlemen had many private universities which nurtured their talents and advanced them through life. In most of the Universities of the time, women were treated as nuisance, an example being the fictional college of Oxbridge. The narrator is unable to find time to be by alone and fully focus on her writing. Just as the faintest glint of thought starts develop in her mind, she walks onto a lawn, and is immediately met by a beadle, or lay minister of the church, who promptly pushes her back on to the gravel. She then attempts to find peace in the university library, but is once again turned away because a gentleman does not accompany her. In the story, men, eager on keeping woman out, control the lawn and the Library. In my opinion the narrator is alluding to the male dominated world in which she lived. Where a male of the era has multiple lush avenues at his disposal, the woman must follow the hard gravel path laid by men, and when that path leads her to place of knowledge and discovery she is excluded and must continue down her designated path. She has no freedom to discover the world and in turn, no way of truly discovering her self.
There appears to be no place for the narrator in Oxbridge just as Woolf must have felt of the world at the time, no place for an average woman to develop her art and do what she loves. Woolf knew that to find what she had been looking for she must have uninterrupted time to work, a place where she could work in peace and quiet and means to support herself for a female artist of the time to advance herself.
Another idea from a Woolf’s writing that was interesting is her statement that even history is subjective. Virginia Woolf tries to find the “essential oil of truth” and expose it, but throughout the story, the narrator comes to realize this essential truth does not exist. Woolf is able to understand that each person’s experience in life influences his or her perceptions of the world. In other words, we will always have our own biased opinions that are formed from the world we live in and our status in that world. I enjoyed this point because the kind of person someone is, god or bad, influences everything he or she does. For example if read a news article that discusses health care under President Obama and then I am asked to share what I read with others, it will not be the same as them reading the piece themselves. My own experience, or lack of, on the subject will still be represented in my explanation. As more people hear a story by word of mouth the story will undoubtedly continue change, because we are human and are all influenced by emotion, and all have our own understanding of the world in which we live.
Virginia Woolf was with out a doubt one of the most influential women of the modern era, she stood up to a world that wanted to keep her down and was a voice for all the woman who never had the chance to speak up. She was a visionary, and genius and that genius is shown in A Room of One’s Own. What began as two papers read at Newnham and Girton nearly a century ago, has become a landmark of twentieth-century feminist movement. Woolf presents a history of women in literature in a very unconventional and interesting way that made its context interesting for women of all race’s and creed. Her investigation of the social and material conditions required for the writing of literature, was groundbreaking in a time when women didn’t meet most of the supposed prerequisites. A Room of One’s Own will never cease to be of great importance to literature, because it sheds a light on the injustice’s women in the arts faced due to a sexist society, a society to which Woolf eventually succumbed by taking her own life. We must never forget the lessons Virginia Woolf left us and as a culture must continue to build and be better for the future generations who have yet to part the pages of A Room of One’s Own.

Works Cited

Woolf, Virginia, and Mary Gordon. A Room Of One's Own. New York: Brace and Co., 1929. Print.