Symbolism of the "Room"

Without Money > Women Depend on Men & Cannot Afford Their Own Room.

No Room > No Privacy.

No Privacy > Interruptions Block Creativity.

So... therefore, her argument is that money is the main thing that prevents women from having a space of their own, so without money and privacy, women cannot write with genius.





This space without interruptions was considered a luxury of women in Virginia Woolf’s [watch this video - it's short yet informative] time. And Woolf repeatedly clarifies the prerequisite of an inheritance that requires no obligations in order to have what men take for granted and enjoy without question, a space to engage in uninterrupted writing time. She believes that writers who obsess about gender issues write with anger, and often put their own gender above the other. She talks in detail about Aphra Behn and applauds her for being the first female to make a living off of her writing, and then paving the way for future women like Jane Austen.

“Intellectual freedom depends upon material things. Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom. And women have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from the beginning of time . . .”

Because the narrator believes that material things lead to intellectual freedom, and poetry requires intellectual freedom, women must have money before they can be successful at writing poetry. Since women have always been poor, according to her, that is why, she elucidates, so few women have thrived in writing poetry. Women are subject to various and constant interruptions without a room, so the narrator believes it is more likely that a woman would more easily accomplish writing a novel, instead of poetry, because that type of writing lends itself to a more start-stop type of pace.


She uses the room as a symbol for the larger issues that make women second-class citizens in society and in their works to men, and claims that it will remain that way until women rectify these inequalities. Concerned with more than just the room, Woolf uses it as a symbol for independence, privacy, and creativity, the room in “A Room of One’s Own” is arguably the strongest motif of the essay; without money or a room, women will remain subordinate in second place to their male counterparts.

Chapter Six Analysis

On twenty-sixth day of October, 1928, the narrator, in the final chapter reflects on her work with the essay. She admits that looking for differences between men and women has been straining, but is at the same time calmed by watching a young couple get into a taxi. This unity represents both man and woman living in harmony, just as the mind works best if both male and female parts work together to be naturally creative, and as Coleridge described as an “androgynous” mind that he said was both “…incandescent and u n d i v i d e d”.

Nevertheless, Woolf is constantly reminding herself and refraining from writing without fear or anger. This was a tad confusing but... Ultimately, the androgynous mind that that the narrator speaks of seems to be gendered, but not necessarily preferring one gender over the other. It takes the fusion and productivity of both sexes in the mind to “fertilise” and cultivate innovative writing. Making another comparison to Shakespeare, the narrator claims he is a fine example of this androgynous mind, but believes that he is destructive by asserting the superiority of his own sex, in turn putting down the opposite gender. She also judges this standard on other various famous writers and concludes that the mind needs to hold both of the sexes at equal levels for full capacity and a fostering “perpetual life.”

Woolf takes over the position of the narrator in order to address criticisms she anticipates will be brought against her original narrator. First, that she didn’t opinionate the relative merits of males and females; and second, that her audience might have thought she was being classist and focusing too much on material things. I ask, isn't a mind is strong enough to work without money and privacy? But back to $=Freedom, she still argues that without money, the mind can’t experience intellectual freedom. Only with this freedom will great writing follow.

The essay is wrapped up by Woolf maintaining and insisting that women’s writing is important. Good writers are connected with "reality", and are the people who can relate this heightened sense of reality to their audience. Today, we can see that her point (backed up by the professor) that genius buds only in the rich and educated is wilted, but many of Virginia Woolf's other ideas about gender and writing still hold true in feminist thought.

Chapter Five Analysis

Woolf creates Mary Carmichael as a descendent of the generation of writers she talked about in Chapter Four, and she represents a change toward an average woman able to write without rage and an acute awareness of her gender. A fictitious novelist, current with the narrator of Woolf's essay, Carmichael in her first novel, has "broken the sentence, broken the sequence" and forever metamorphosed women's writing. The narrator initially questions Carmichael’s writing style and thinks it’s inconsistent and too “flowery,” but then reconsiders it to be purposeful in order match her style shifts with her unexpected mood shifts. She writes simplistically about a friendship between Chloe and Olivia, and surprisingly, the idea of a woman-to-woman friendship without relation in the text to men is groundbreaking for its time.

As the narrator continues to read Carmichael’s genius and hopes for further details of the inner-workings of the female mind, she realizes she has betrayed her original goal to not praise her own sex. She notes that neither men nor women know much about the opposite sex, but the genders compliment each other while each works for a greater understanding of the other and of their own gender.

[This picture reminds me of what Woolf is talking about with her connection between light and genius. It's as if the photo actually shows how this flower's growth is dependent on the light]

Woolf continues the metaphor of light as brilliance when talks about “Striking a match that will not light”; but possibly adds a sexual innuendo when the narrator wonders if she will “Light a torch in that vast chamber where nobody has yet been.” This perhaps insinuates an unexplored (private) physical region of the female character that she then parallels to “serpentine caves.”

Chapter Four Analysis

In this section, the author returns to an issue she originally shied away from in Chapter One: Factual Historical Examples of Prominent Female Writers. Woolf wants to illuminate the leaps the authors she discusses have made, that couldn’t have been achieved by the previous generation. According to the author, the works by the 17th century novelist, playwright, and poet, Aphra Behn (picture to the right), paved the way for future women writers and creative minds. She was independent, and her perseverance, talent, and freedom of thought was (and still is) truly an inspiration.

It was this freedom of thought that made Jane Austen (pictured below) so interesting and influential. Like other women of her time, Austen was limited to life experience; but experience is only helpful if one is writing about a subject outside his or her situation in life.

As repeated throughout the essay, women must ignore men and write freely. The proclamation that women value things differently than men, and therefore have a unique way of writing in order to be true to themselves – a woman’s sentence – is, to me, one of Woolf’s most stimulating assertions. She applauds Jane Austen, who had

“Devised a perfectly natural, shapely sentence proper for her own use and never departed from it.”

Woolf herself has stylistically created sharp, graceful, and cohesive works, and like Austen, found her own natural, shapely sentence.

Interruption Motif & The Manx Cat

With the country devastated by the war, the cat lacking a tail symbolizes England’s castration: its melodious language “cut-off” and substituted by ordinary conversation. In the same way the cat appears out of place, women at a university have a similar position, and without a welcome on the lawn.

The theme, or motif, of INTERRUPTIONS is significant in “A Room of One’s Own” and comes up when the narrator is interrupted and can’t seem to recover her concentration. These interruptions serve as a barrier for creativity and writing, and reaffirm that without a private space free of interruption, women are destined to difficulty in their work. In Chapter one, while describing the fictitious university, Oxbridge, her concentration shifts to a tailless Manx cat.





Though this out-of-place sight of a cat [I actually have a cat, Josey Quervo-named this because she is insane-who looks almost identical to this one - and yes, looks out of place] without a tail causes her to lose her train of thought, it also allows her to reflect on what it would be like to be a woman writer: Out of place and unwelcome. This interruption serves as an outside distraction that men don’t have to overcome in order to be successful in their endeavors. Women who don’t have “a room of their own,” a private place free of distractions, cannot contend with men who don’t have to fight for these mere necessities.

Chapter Three Analysis

Still concerned about her disappointing quest for an explanation for gender inequalities, and puzzled by invisibility of women writers in the fruitful literary Elizabethan period in England, she opts to investigate. She not only finds that there is nothing on the middle-class women in the history book (as if they didn’t even exist), but still she cannot answer the question of:

Why are women poorer than men?

[this shockingly still holds true when we see men paid higher salaries than women for doing the same jobs].

Though never translated to paper, the narrator knows that genius thoughts must have ran through many minds of women during these times of even more institutionalized sexism than the narrator’s times. Pondering what a female genius’ life would’ve been like in Shakespeare’s time, her imagination creates a fictionalized sister for him, one with an equally gifted mind. She makes up an entire narrative of what would’ve happened to Judith, the fictional sister of Shakespeare, in comparison to her brother. She concludes that while his genius was aided by attending school, getting married, acting, and working at the theater in London, making money for himself without familial obligations, she, on the other hand, was not allowed to attend school and was discouraged from trying to educate herself, married against her will as a teenager, lacked privacy and employment opportunities in the artistic world, and was burdened with children. Completing her fictional outline of Shakespeare’s sister’s tragic life, Judith is impregnated by a theatrical man, and she commits suicide. The narrator seems saddened by the fact that even if a strong-willed woman of that time prevailed over the obstacles placed in their way by the men in society and wrote something, it would’ve been

anonymous.

These socioeconomic factors affecting the lives of women act as a creative poison inhibiting maximum writing capabilities. Additional obstacles that men aren’t faced with, like discouragement and disdain from the surrounding patriarchal society, in addition to the scarcity of privacy and money, is disadvantageous to the maturing female writer.



Back to the looking-glass comparison of men and women, she goes on to say that this male discouragement is aided by their desire to remain in a superior status. And in order to attain genius like Shakespeare’s there must be no peripheral barriers or personal protests; only then can the mind truly be brilliant or “incandescent.”

Chapter Two Analysis

On a quest for answers, the narrator takes a trip to the British Museum in London. After randomly selecting a dozen or so books in hopes to discover the mysteries of men, wealth, creativity, and women, she soon apprehends that there are an abundance of books written about women by men, but hardly about men by women. Frustrated by this paradox and the fact that there was nothing about what she wondered in the book’s content, she draws a picture depicting an angry male writing about the inferiority of women. After returning the useless books, she goes to lunch.

We realize after reading about her experience with the books, that she is dealing with institutionalized sexism. But, why would anybody be angry if they have so much importance, power, and money in this patriarchal society? After pondering this question while reading a newspaper at lunch, she uses the “looking glass” metaphor to illustrate how it makes men seem twofold their natural size, indicating that their self-confidence is attained by making women inferior to them, which explains why they feel angry and defensive if criticized by a woman: this makes them lose their higher status in the model where women act as pawns to enlarge the “kingliness” [yes, i just made that word up] of men, on which they depend.


In a passage about the inheritance from her aunt and the effects it has on her life, and how money equals freedom, and is more important even than the right to vote… money makes women independent of men, whereas women’s suffrage merely gives her a chance to pick which man from the ballot will rule over her.

Chapter One Analysis

Women and Writing...


Two concepts that now seem to go hand in hand, in 1928 when Virginia Woolf braved this topic, had received little serious attention. The title and subject, “A Room of One’s Own” represents the idea that women at this time, in order to have enough security and privacy to write, must have a room of their own (and their own money).



Chapter one begins with the word “but” – a word that separates two contradicting ideas in a sentence – which immediately illuminates the contrarian temperament of the essay. Women were discriminated against in almost all aspects of education; from the university to the library, dinner and the lawn, the narrator is disallowed access to, is interrupted while speaking, and is overall treated as, and she recognizes that she is an inferior citizen, given inferior accommodations, who (back to her thesis) needs money and privacy to write.



Woolf insists that the "I" of the book is not the author, but rather a narrator persona.

"I is only a convenient term for somebody who has no real being"; "call me Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael, or by any name you please."

Whereas most of us would accredit the mental process of generating new ideas, the narrator frequently addresses the idea of wealth as a main ingredient for creativity. This had to do with the fact that the men of her time controlled the money, and therefore had fewer obstacles, as they could also manage the institutions that kept their higher positions intact, and instead celebrated the luxury of focusing on higher thinking, while the women did reproductive labor - cooked, cleaned, and bearing and raising children.

From Chapter One forward, Virginia Woolf uses light and purity as a metaphor for brilliance; or more frequently as she writes, “incandescence” is associated with genius. As the narrator outlines, money=freedom, while light=genius. She often admires the sky and the brilliant light it bestows.