Virginia Woolf in a Tiny Room of Her Own

A Critical Review
Mohamed Mahou (c)2010

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Virginia Woolf, a well-known figure in the Bloomsbury Group and one of the key founders of Modernism, was concerned with the position of middle-class women in British society. She wrote several seminal essays on the subject, for example “Three Guineas” (1935) and “The Second Common Reader” (1932). But, “A Room of One’s Own” remains the most contested statement of Woolf on women and fiction. Since its publication in 1929, it has been repeatedly reviewed and criticized. Woolf’s essay portrays some of the cultural and economic disabilities that have always prevented women from realizing their full creative potential. Woolf’s work, to be sure, is a major contribution in the development of literary theory, considering its inclusion of a woman’s vision of literature and history. However, this vision, as it is argued in this review, is far from being a full-fledged feminist perspective because it is limited in scope of its subject matter and manner.

In this paper, I will first examine some important ideas in “A Room of One’s Own”, especially those related to women in fiction and history. Then I will discuss Woolf’s contribution to literary theory, by comparing and contrasting her to other writers, both ancient and modern. Before finally deducing the limitations of Woolf’s “feminist” vision, I will try to show some characteristics of the woman’s work that Woolf is proposing in order to achieve the so-called “fiction of integrity” that will supposedly dignify the image of woman.

1. Women and Fiction

“A Room of One’s Own” is based upon two papers read to The Arts Society at Newnham and the Odtaa at Girton in October 1928. This extended essay , considered a landmark of the twentieth century” feminist” thought, reviews the state of women both in fiction and history. According to Woolf, the title women and fiction might mean different things. It might mean women and the fiction they like or it might mean women and the fiction they write, or it might also mean women and the fiction that is written about them. Woolf addresses the three meanings of the title to examine the struggle of the female British artist, to be on the same footing as the male peer.

Women, according to Woolf, have no existence except in fiction written by men, in which they are negatively represented. The most highly regarded literary works would characteristically feature male protagonists- Oedipus, Hamlet, Othello, to name but a few. Such artifacts exclusively mirror masculine sensibility and a man’s vision of the world. When the female characters are given a role to play, they are marginalized and subordinated to male characters. That is, women are at best complementary to male roles or in opposition to masculine desires. Woolf gives a justification for this representation. She states that "possibly when the professor (man) insisted a little too emphatically upon the inferiority of women, he was concerned not with their inferiority, but with his own superiority.” ¹Great characters like Lady Macbeth and Cleopatra, though they do not “seem wanting in personality and character”², are but a few exceptions that do not reflect ground reality. In fact, women’s misrepresentation in fiction does not surprise Woolf. To her, it was the male writers’ education that instilled in them the complex of superiority and the unjustified feeling of self-importance or even of greatness.

To make matters worse, women’s fiction, throughout history, is seriously flawed. The author’s survey of several female books in the British Museum reveals her dissatisfaction with the female art. In the sixteenth century, women’s writings were almost non-existent. Woolf explains away that scarcity: “To have lived a free life in London in the sixteenth century would have meant for a woman who was poet and playwright a nervous stress and a dilemma which might well have killed him.”³ For Woolf, the social order would not allow a girl to venture boldly into creative writing realms. Men, or to use one of Woolf’s terms“the Patriarchs”, would have an overriding tendency to deform any women’s attempt to write fiction. Patently, publicity, an unbecoming act in women, was viewed as a violation of chastity. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the same picture reigned supreme. Although women started rather shyly to experiment with the art of writing, they still had no audience that took them seriously and they wrote merely for survival. While talking about Aphra Behn, Woolf points out:

“ Hundreds of women began as the eighteenth century drew on to add their pin money, or to come to the rescue of their families by making translations or writing the innumerable novels which have ceased to be recorded even text-books, but are to be picked up in the four penny boxes in the Charing Cross Road.”⁴

In short, women in that time discovered the value of writing to win their bread. Essays on Shakespeare and translation works were almost exclusively their main writing genres.

To Woolf’s amazement, she comes across several books on the British Museum shelves entirely dedicated to the works of women authors in the nineteenth century. But all of these works are novels. The absence of poetry in women’s writings, in Woolf’s theory, is related to the lack of a personal room for women to write in. Prose-writing posed no serious challenge to women given that prose works required less concentration compared to poetry that required rooms of one’s own. One major characteristic of women novels in the nineteenth century is that they were written by women with little experience in life and who could barely afford to buy more than a few quires of paper upon which to write. Another negative point underlying these novels is their adoption of masculine values. In Woolf’s thesis, this is due to the effect of a fear-inspiring male-dominant society that hold in derision whatever emanates from the artistic wits of female writers. Woolf argues: “ The whole structure, therefore, of the early nineteenth- century novel was raised, if one was a woman, by a mind which was slightly pulled from the straight and made to alter its clear vision in deference to external authority.”⁵ Woolf concludes that the tone in which these novels were written and the themes they elaborate were overridingly masculine.

2. Women and History

In “A Room of One’s Own”, Virginia Woolf does not only review the state of women in fiction, but also their representation in history. The latter, according to Woolf, is written from a male-dominant perspective, the single triumphant consciousness. Though they pervade poetry in particular and fiction in general, woman is almost absent in history. In her reading of Professor Trevelyan’s History of England, Woolf finds a number of negative images of women. She observes: “Once more I looked up Women, found ‘position of’ and turned to the pages indicated. ‘Wife-beating’, I read, ‘was a recognized right of man, and was practiced without shame by high as well as low.”⁶Women in the time of Elizabeth were locked up and beaten; they were objects and properties of the “voluble” sex.

Woolf does not deny the existence of prominent women in historical books like Elizabeth. But, as Woolf states, middle-class women with nothing but brains and character at their command never take part in historical movements. To Woolf, reality is not recorded in these historical books. To redress the balance of the past, she urges the students of women colleges to rewrite history or at least to add a supplement to it so that “women might figure there without impropriety”⁷. A strange thing to Woolf, however, is the near- absence of women in history written about the eighteenth century. Two reasons are foregrounded to be behind that: the fear of publicity and women’s preoccupations with child-bearing and rearing along with household chores.

In “A Room of One’s Own”, the reader is immediately aware of the unfair misrepresentation of women both in literature and history. Virginia Woolf’s questioning of the two realms is a call for a fair treatment of women and the abolishment of sexism. Woolf’s contention is admittedly revolutionary and will bring in an added value to literary theory.

3. Woolf’s Contribution to Literary Theory

“A Room of One’ Own” is an exposition of ideas of the women’s movement that started after the First World War. Virginia Woolf’s essay is a major contribution to literary theory by its setting of the first agenda for much feminist criticism to follow. She managed to pin down the materialistic needs of a woman artist and she has examined the biased assumptions against women both in history and fiction. Above all, she has clearly forwarded the characteristics of a woman artistic work.

In order to produce art of high quality of Shakespeare or, to put it differently, to have, so to speak, “Judith Shakespeare” who is as clever as William Shakespeare, Women, according to Woolf, need independence and freedom. By independence is meant the right to own private space where they can write without external interruptions and intimidations. For Woolf, lack of physical conditions and poverty have hindered the growth of women’s art. For long time, they have been denied access to the world of education. Those who are given to writing, like Jane Austen, are forced to use common sitting-rooms, being, thus, impressed by the people’s feelings around them. Additionally, most women are often blocked off by raising children and taking care of their households.

Like Aristotle, Virginia Woolf negates the importance of history. It is, in her view, a compilation of lies, from which women are mostly, not to say wholly, ignored. In the sixteenth century, Sidney, the great English poet and courtier, discounted historians because of their mouse-eaten records. Of course, Aristotle’s and Sidney’s reserves against history aim at protecting the importance of poetry in their times. For them, history leaves no room for imagination. By way of contrast, Virginia Woolf’s refutation of historical accounts is done on the ground that they either misrepresent or ignore women’s contribution in the making of history. In modern times, feminist writers strongly give credence to Woolf’s views. For example, Assia Djebar, a postcolonial writer, subverted the colonial history in her renowned novel L’Amour, La Fantasia (1985). As a way of writing back against women’s exclusion, she rewrites the Algerian history using voices of militant women. Considering history as a man-made structure, postmodern feminists, like Linda Hutcheon, ⁸ encourage women writers to impose a new order on the past through parody, fantasy and other postmodern subversive strategies. Both postmodern and postcolonial feminists have further developed Woolf’s ideas by recasting history using different techniques, especially in the novel genre.

To my mind, the major contribution of Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own” to literary theory is its articulation or definition of a women’s artistic work. Though this is not done systematically and deeply, Woolf stresses some characteristics of women fiction, namely the novel genre. For Woolf, poetry, unlike the novel, is the highest form of expression. Women were not able to write poetry in the Elizabethan age simply because they had no private room at their disposal. Poetry, in Woolf’s theory, is demanding in terms of its concentration and privacy. Actually, like Romantic poets, notably Wordsworth, Woolf lays much focus on the centrality of poetry as the most refined and imaginative product of the poet’s mind. She notes:

“That woman, then, who was born with a gift of poetry in the sixteenth century, was an unhappy woman, a woman at strife against herself. All the conditions of her life, all her own instincts, were hostile to the state of mind which is needed to set free whatever is in the brain” ⁹

Since women were denied access to poetry, they, according to Woolf, resort to the novel as the last chance they could lay their hands on. The novel, however, falls short of expressing women’s sensibility in the true sense of the word. Indeed, she mentions some main features of the “female” novel. Chiefly, it should include women’s values and focus on their topics. Even the shape of the novel is to be reconsidered. She states:

“The book has somehow to be adapted to the body, and at a venture one would say those women’s books should be shorter, more concentrated, than those of men, and framed so that they do not need long hours of steady and uninterrupted work.”¹⁰

To differentiate herself from men’s sentence, the woman artist needs to provide a new outlet for her poetry through a modern novel. In another essay entitled, “Modern Fiction” (1919), Woolf negates any link of the new novel to reality. The main concern of fiction, according to her, is with the conscious and subconscious workings of the novelist, who enjoys complete freedom to base their work upon their own feelings.

4. A Critical Review of the Essay

Although Virginia Woolf’s book-length essay postulates some ideas of the woman’s movement, it is limited in its scope because it fails to hold a political standpoint. She tends to exclude women who are not part of the British middle class. Additionally, the means she is proposing to make a difference from male-dominating fiction are not truly effective.

In an elusive way, Woolf describes women’s experience using repetitions and multiple points of view. She refuses to reveal her own persona. She suggests: “Here then was I (call me Mary Baton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael or by any name you please- it is not a matter of any importance.)”¹¹ From a contemporary feminist perspective, this is a failure in drawing a real picture of women; it also denotes Woolf’s hidden fear to face her patriarchal society, which reflects somehow the stylistic impersonality of George Eliot and Jane Austen. In fact, her flight into androgyny, as Elaine Showalter suggests, is a denial of authentic feminist principles. An engaged feminist work, in addition to using real names, offers strong women experiences by reconstructing new images and deconstructing male cultural paradigms in different fields unlike Woolf’s arguments which are confined to fiction and history, ignoring other facets of society.

Another flaw in Woolf’s thesis is her exclusive concern with British upper middle class women. She affirms:

“But by no possible means could middle-class women with nothing but brains and character at their command have taken part in any one of the great movements which, brought together, constitute the historian’s view of the past.” ¹²

Black women and lower class women do not come within her scope. These women have, indeed, other preoccupations more complex than Woolf’s women who only need a private room to write fiction. Virginia Woolf’s view is elitist, not to say racist. Attitudes like these have pushed some black feminists such as Audre Lorde and Barbara Smith ¹³ to speak out their own experiences and to insist on the differences that distinguish their perspective from the white feminist criticism. Additionally, Woolf seems to ignore the British aristocratic women who enjoy better favorable conditions, but they are not as productive as Shakespeare. In her analysis of the poetry of the seventeenth century, Woolf totally denies the existence of female poets. A quick survey of the history of that time reveals the prominence of some women in writing; some of them, including Aemilia Layner, Margaret Cavendish and Katherine Philips, competed boldly with the school of John Donne and Dr Johnson. These women took up their pens to convey a distinctly female experience both in poetry and prose.

Concerning the female novel she is proposing, it is not really a complete genre. It is rather a mixture of different genres, hence the name "the poem-novel" used by E. M. Forster to distinguish Woolf’s hybrid narrative. Claire Sprague in Virginia Woolf: A collection of Essays (1971)¹⁴ affirms that Woolf is dissatisfied with the inadequacy of the label novel. She used different names for her novels; for example, To the Lighthouse is “an elegy”, The Waves is a “play-poem”. The novel she is advocating stands against the novel of integrity that does not reflect a sexist vision of the world. Woolf’s narrative focuses on women’s sensibility and subjectivity. Her limited vision in her writings is further suggested by E. M. Forster in his essay "Virginia Woolf”. He observes: “Most of them (writers) write with half an eye on their royalties, half an eye on their critics, and a third an eye on improving the world, which leaves them with only half an eye for the task on which she concentrated her entire vision.”¹⁵ Equally important, Woolf’s insistence on a distinct women’s style will not celebrate the multiplicity of women’s writing rather the focus will simply be on its difference from man’s sentence. To achieve normality that focalizes human sensibility in general, women writers should vary their topics as well as their interests. Their difference, to my mind, should be within the female writings as well as against male-dominating narratives.

5. Conclusion

Virginia Woolf’s essay is a collection of speculations on female artists. Her chief focus on British upper middle class and her total devotion to criticism of male writings have limited her scope. “A Room of One’s Own” can not be considered a feminist work as such. Her insistence on materialist circumstances that restrict women’s creativity and achievements are not put forward with force and temper. Ironically, she seems to draw a “tiny” room which will be enlarged by the contemporary feminist critics later on. In their seminal works, feminist writers, like Judith Butler, Helene Cixous, Julia Kristeva, to name but a few, exhibit the construction of a purely “female” tradition, based on women’s subjectivity and language. However, Woolf’s attempt is worth applauding. She is, as E. M. Forster declares, a “triumphant writer”¹⁶. She has overcome the “difficulties” of her age to make her voice heard.

Notes

1- Woolf, Virginia. “A Room of One’s Own”. ebooks@Adelaide . University of Adelaide . 24 August 2010 < http:// ebooks.adelaide.edu. au/w/woolf/ virginia /w91r.html> ch 3

2- Ibid.ch 3

3- Ibid. ch 3

4- Ibid.ch 4

5- Ibid.ch 2

6- Ibid. ch3

7- Ibid. ch3

8- Hutcheon, Linda. The Politics of Postmodernism. (London: Routledge. 1988) 66-67

9- Woolf, Virginia. “A Room of One’s Own”. ebooks@Adelaide . University of Adelaide . 24 August 2010 < http:// ebooks.adelaide.edu. au/w/woolf/ virginia /w91r.html> ch 3

10- Ibid. ch 4

11- Ibid. ch 1

12- Ibid. ch.3

13- Humm, Maggie. Feminist Criticism: Women as Contemporary Critics. (Great Britain: The Harvester Press, 1986), 105

14- Sprague, Claire, ed. Virginia Woolf: A Collection of Critical Essays. (New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1971), 7

15- Forster, E. M. “Virginia Woolf”. in Virginia Woolf: A Collection of Critical Essay, ed. Claire Sprague. (New Jersey: Prentice,1971), 25

16- Ibid. p 25

Works Cited

1- Forster, E. M.” Virginia Woolf”. In Virginia Woolf: A Collection of Critical Essays. ed. Claire Sprague .New Jersey: Prentice, 1971

2- Humm, Maggie. Feminist Criticism: Women as Contemporary Critics. Great Britain: The Harvester Press, 1986

3- Hutcheon, Linda. The Politics of Postmodernism. London: Routledge, 1988

4-Sprague, Claire, ed. Virginia Woolf: A Collection of Critical Essays. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1971

5- Woolf, Virginia. “A Room of One’s Own”. ebooks@Adelaide . University of Adelaide.24August2010<http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/w/woolf/virginia/w91r.html>