In A Room of One’s
Own, Virginia Woolf proves her merit as not only an educated woman, but a philosopher
of her age. To set the background for
her argument, she imagines Shakespeare had a sister of equal talent and merit,
but because of her situation, and without a room of her own or the money
properly support her writing, she dwindled as the invisible and “inferior”
sibling to the famous playwright. She
argues that women need to be educated, have financial support, and privacy in
order to flourish and attain genius. Through writing, she says, women can
achieve freedom, but they can only write if they have material
indulgences. Woolf takes the reader on a
historic journey of women writers and their own strengths, but mostly, their
shortcomings, because they lacked what Woolf considers to be of most value to a
writer. Her tone is effective as it is simultaneously witty and lovely, and
simple to read.
A Room of One’s Own reminded
me of a movie I once viewed titled Mozart’s
Sister, which I can’t help but think was inspired by Virginia Woolf. Although its main purpose seems to be for
entertainment, the movie took liberties describing the life of Maria Anne
Mozart, depicting her as a very promising musician who faded into obscurity
because of her sex. In the film, she was
a very daring woman who went as far as to cross dress in order to play for the
dauphin. The introduction to this book states that “[she] is concerned with the
fate of women of genius, not with that of ordinary women…not for universal
justice.” Even in this sense, the film
appears to reiterate Woolf’s theme. Had I
not read the book, I would, and had, missed the relation entirely. I have to pause and wonder how many other
stories or works I have observed were inspired by this intelligent feminist. While
I would not necessarily recommend the film because of some questionable
material, I find it interesting the parallels it used in relation to A Room of one’s Own, and how Woolf
continues to inspire and fascinate audiences more than eighty years after its
publication.
From her writing, I have found that Woolf is not a radical
feminist. She is conservative, in many
respects. One, in her adamant belief
that men and women are intrinsically different. This is not to say that she
considers them unequal, but merely unique.
However, she states that the greatest writers must find a way to be androgynous
in order to get their creative expression across without devolving too much of
the personal in their writing voice. I
find it fascinating that she brought up the point that women, without any precedence
except for male writers before them, were confined to writing about and in the manner
of men, which caused their writing to suffer because they had not had the
opportunity to share in those experiences in which they were writing about. I am impressed by her manner of speaking, and
her recognition of the subjectiveness of her viewpoint even while she attempts
to paint a very convincing argument. “At
any rate, when a subject is highly controversial – and any question about sex
is that – one cannot hope to tell the truth. One can only show how one came to
hold whatever opinion one does hold.” To
me, it is endearing, although her mild wordiness that tended to appear whenever
she was trying to make a point slightly got on my nerves. Overall, however, I found her work to be
enlightening and very suitably cast as a classic in feminist literature. The
theme to which I would ascribe this work is most certainly feminism, as that is
the focus point of the essay. Although
other themes are brought up, including gender as a role (or non-role) in
writing, the overarching theme was freedom for women.
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