Locks
Virginia Woolf and Man in a Cage

Virginia Woolf, on realising her admittance to an Oxbridge chapel would be prohibited, delights in the building’s exterior. Her vantage point is from the outside of the established patriarchal institutions and from there her critical work interrogates the structures that lock her out. The narrative essay A Room of One’s Own begins at Oxbridge, a mythical institution based on Oxford and Cambridge. There, being a women means she is physically prohibited from entering the library and the chapel. Even the bounds of the university lawns are restricted to her when a flapping, irate beadle responds automatically to her presence by ushering her from the grass to the gravel path. These white haired old dons, men with “tufts of hair growing on their shoulders,” run when another whistles and unthinkingly defend their stronghold of learning against the presence of a woman. In a Room of One’s Own, Woolf progressively unfolds an allegory of two sexes, both trapped in cages, where being locked in or out is detrimental to the society.

The thinking of the hairy old dons at Oxbridge is set in stone, like the foundations of the great buildings at the university. To them men and women have different and separate roles to play– men in the public sphere and women in the domestic. The skeleton of the meta narrative which informs their thinking continues thus: men create and build empires; women support and nurture men in the home, men are the bastions of truth, knowledge and the rational; women are ruled by emotions and are equated with nature. For the preservation of patriarchy, it becomes the interest of the powers that be to maintain the strength of those locks that keep men and women in their roles by reinforcing ideologies of gender. An individual’s sex determines which gender role they will be locked into. The ideology that informs the