A Room of One’s Own: A speculator work of Virginia Woolf

 

In her exceptionally influential fundamental A Room of One’s Own (1929), Virginia Woolf studied the cultural, most economical, and academic disabilities inside the patriarchal society that stop females from realizing their innovative potential. With her imaginary persona Judith (Shakespeare’s fictional sister), she illustrated that a female from Shakespeare’s schools would have been denied the possibilities that Shakespeare enjoyed. Examining the careers and works of female authors like Aphra Behn, Jane Austen, George Eliot, and the Bronte sisters, Woolf argued that the patriarchal schooling machine and analyzing practices situation (or “interpellate,” to use an Althusserian term) girls to examine from men’s factor of view, and make them internalize the aesthetics and literary values created/ adopted by means of male authors and critics inside the patriarchal gadget — wherein, these values, even though male based are assumed and promoted as frequent.
Woolf proposed that language is gendered in this polemical work, so commencing the language controversy, and stated that the woman author, having no alternative language at her disposal, is obliged to employ the sexist/ male vocabulary.
Woolf also recognized the necessity for a narrative structure to represent the fluid, incoherent feminine experiences that defy order and logic, which led to her use of the stream-of-consciousness approach in her books, depicting the lives of Mrs. Dalloway, Mrs. Ramsay, and others. Inspired by Carl Jung's psychiatric ideas, Woolf developed the concept of the androgynous creative mind, which she fictionalized in Orlando in an attempt to transcend the male/female dichotomy. She thought that the finest artists were always a mix of men and women, or "woman-manly" or "man-womanly."
A Room of One's Own can be perplexing since it presents contradicting ideas, not least Woolf's well-known section on androgyny, which influenced later deconstructive views of gender. Her narrator states, 'it is deadly for anybody who writes to think about their sex' (1929: 136), and a paradigm of writerly androgyny is proposed, based on the work of Samuel Taylor Coleridge:
It is necessary to be either woman-manly or man-womanly. It is dangerous for a woman to put the least amount of emphasis on any grievance; to argue even with justice in any cause; to talk knowingly as a woman in any way... Before the art of creation can be done, there must be some mental partnership between the woman and the man. It is necessary to achieve some sort of union of opposites. (1929: 136)
Woolf's ideal gender writer is Shakespeare, the poet and playwright. She goes on to name others – all males – who have accomplished androgyny (Keats, Sterne, Cowper, Lamb, and Proust, the lone contemporary). However, if the objective is for both men and women to attain androgyny, A Room of One's Own makes the argument for establishing a gendered vocabulary — one suited for women to use when writing about women.
One of Woolf's more contentious hypotheses in A Room of One's Own addresses the potential of an inherent politics in artistic form, as represented by the claim that literary sentences are gendered. A Room of ones Own concludes with the prophecy of a woman poet who will equal or match Shakespeare: 'Shakespeare's sister.' Women authors, on the other hand, must construct aesthetic forms in a variety of ways as they collectively prepare for her emergence. In forecasting that aspiring novelist Mary Carmichael "would be a poet... in another hundred years' time" (1929: 123), Mary Beton appears to be implying that women writers must explore and use language in certain ways before they can be poets.
She sees this as a direct effect of women's political activism for equality: "The Suffrage campaign was without a doubt to blame" (1929: 129). She expresses further political and artistic worries when she remarks on the Italian Fascists' need for a poet worthy of fascism: 'The Fascist poetry, one may fear, would be a terrible little abortion such as one sees in a glass jar in the museum of some county town' (1929: 134).
However, while fascism's severe patriarchy cannot generate poetry because it rejects a maternal line, Woolf contends that women cannot compose poetry until the historical canon of women's literature is unearthed and accepted. Women authors in the nineteenth century had a tough time since there was no female tradition to draw on: 'For we think back via our mothers if we are women' (1929: 99). As a result, they lacked literary means for articulating women's experiences. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the dominant sentence was "a man's sentence... It was a sentence that was unfit for women's usage" (1929: 99–100).
Woolf's assertion, made through Mary Beton, that women must write in gendered sentence structure, that is, develop a feminine syntax, and that 'the book has to be somehow adapted to the body' (1929: 101), appears to contradict the statement that 'it is fatal for anyone who writes to think of their sex.' 'No doubt we shall find her pounding it into shape for herself... and giving some fresh venue, not necessarily in verse, for the poetry in her,' she says of the novel, which she considers 'young enough' to be useful to the woman writer. Because poetry is still denied an audience. And then I wondered how a modern-day woman would create a five-act lyrical tragedy' (1929: 116).
Now, the purpose of A Room of One's Own has switched from women's fictional prose writing to poetry, the genre Woolf believes women least progressed in, while Shakespeare's virtuoso form, 'poetic tragedy,' is the form to which 'Shakespeare's sister' should strive. Woolf's musings on feminine syntax foreshadow French feminists such as Cixous's more contemporary research of écriture feminine. Woolf's concern in the body and bodies, in writing the body, and in the gender and positionality of the body predates feminist somatic research, and has been seen as materialist, deconstructive, and phenomenological (Doyle, 2001). Woolf's concern in bodily matters also motivates his prolonged attack of'reason,' or masculinist rationalism, as historically disembodied in A Room of One's Own.
Woolf's placing of black women is one of the most contentious and confusing sections in A Room of One's Own. Commenting on men's sexual and colonial desires, the narrator says, 'It is one of the great benefits of being a woman that one may pass even a really attractive negress without wanting to make an Englishwoman of her' (1929: 65). A number of feminist critics have questioned the applicability of Woolf's feminist manifesto to the experience of black women (Walker, 1985: 2377), and have focused specifically on this passage (Marcus, 2004: 24–58).
In her effort to extract women from imperialist and colonial actions, Woolf tragically rejects black people from the category of women altogether. This has been the focal point of much modern feminist discourse over identity politics. The category of women both unifies and divides feminists: it has been demonstrated that white middle-class feminists cannot speak for the experience of all women, and the reconciliation of universalism and diversity remains a major topic. 'Women – but aren't you sick of hearing the word?' In the last chapters of A Room of One's Own, Woolf retorts, 'I can guarantee you I am (Woolf, 1929: 145). The category of women is not chosen by women; rather, it is the place under patriarchy from which women must speak and from which they must be heard.