A Room of One's Own Summary
Virginia Woolf,givin g a lecture on women and fiction,
tells her audience she is not sure if the topic should be what women are like;
the fiction women write; the fiction written about women; or a combination of
the three. Instead, she has come up with "one minor point--a woman must
have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction." She says she
will use a fictional narrator whom she calls Mary
Beton as her alter
ego to relate how her thoughts on the lecture mingled with her daily life.
A week ago, the narrator crosses a lawn
at the fictional Oxbridge university, tries to enter the library, and passes by
the chapel. She is intercepted at each station and reminded that women are not
allowed to do such things without accompanying men. She goes to lunch, where
the excellent food and relaxing atmosphere make for good conversation. Back at
Fernham, the women's college where she is staying as a guest, she has a
mediocre dinner. She later talks with a friend of hers, Mary
Seton, about how men's
colleges were funded by kings and independently wealthy men, and how funds were
raised with difficulty for the women's college. She and Seton denounce their
mothers, and their sex, for being so impoverished and leaving their daughters
so little. Had they been independently wealthy, perhaps they could have founded
fellowships and secured similar luxuries for women. However, the narrator
realizes the obstacles they faced: entrepreneurship is at odds with
child-rearing, and only for the last 48 years have women even been allowed to
keep money they earned. The narrator thinks about the effects of wealth and
poverty on the mind, about the prosperity of males and the poverty of females,
and about the effects of tradition or lack of tradition on the writer.
Searching
for answers, the narrator explores the British Museum in London. She finds
there are countless books written about women by men, while there are hardly
any books by women on men. She selects a dozen books to try and come up with an
answer for why women are poor. Instead, she locates a multitude of other topics
and a contradictory array of men's opinions on women. One male professor who
writes about the inferiority of women angers her, and it occurs to her that she
has become angry because the professor has written angrily. Had he written
"dispassionately," she would have paid more attention to his
argument, and not to him. After her anger dissipates, she wonders why men are
so angry if England is a patriarchal society in which they have all the power
and money. Perhaps holding power produces anger out of fear that others will
take one's power. She posits that when men pronounce the inferiority of women,
they are really claiming their own superiority. The narrator believes
self-confidence, a requirement to get through life, is often attained by
considering other people inferior in relation to oneself. Throughout history,
women have served as models of inferiority who enlarge the superiority of men.
The
narrator is grateful for the inheritance left her by her aunt. Prior to that
she had gotten by on loathsome, slavish odd jobs available to women before
1918. Now, she reasons that since nothing can take away her money and security,
she need not hate or enslave herself to any man. She now feels free to
"think of things in themselves"‹she can judge art, for
instance, with greater objectivity.
The
narrator investigates women in Elizabethan England, puzzled why there were no
women writers in that fertile literary period. She believes there is a deep
connection between living conditions and creative works. She reads a history
book, learns that women had few rights in the era, and finds no material about
middle-class women. She imagines what would have happened had Shakespeare had
an equally gifted sister named Judith. She outlines the possible course of
Shakespeare's life: grammar school, marriage, and work at a theater in London.
His sister, however, was not able to attend school and her family discouraged
her from independent study. She was married against her will as a teenager and
ran away to London. The men at a theater denied her the chance to work and
learn the craft. Impregnated by a theatrical man, she committed suicide.
The
narrator believes that no women of the time would have had such genius,
"For genius like Shakespeare's is not born among labouring, uneducated,
servile people." Nevertheless, some kind of genius must have existed among
women then, as it exists among the working class, although it never translated
to paper. The narrator argues that the difficulties of writing--especially the
indifference of the world to one's art--are compounded for women, who are
actively disdained by the male establishment. She says the mind of the artist
must be "incandescent" like Shakespeare's, without any obstacles. She
argues that the reason we know so little about Shakespeare's mind is because
his work filters out his personal "grudges and spites and
antipathies." His absence of personal protest makes his work "free
and unimpeded."
The
narrator reviews the poetry of several Elizabethan aristocratic ladies, and
finds that anger toward men and insecurity mar their writing and prevent genius
from shining through. The writer Aphra Behn marks a turning point: a
middle-class woman whose husband's death forced her to earn her own living,
Behn's triumph over circumstances surpasses even her excellent writing. Behn is
the first female writer to have "freedom of the mind." Countless
18th-century middle-class female writers and beyond owe a great debt to Behn's
breakthrough. The narrator wonders why the four famous and divergent
19th-century female novelists‹George Eliot, Emily and Charlotte Brontë,
and Jane Austen--all wrote novels;
as middle-class women, they would have had less privacy and a greater
inclination toward writing poetry or plays, which require less concentration.
However, the 19th-century middle-class woman was trained in the art of social
observation, and the novel was a natural fit for her talents.
The
narrator argues that traditionally masculine values and topics in novels‹such
as war‹are valued more than feminine ones, such as drawing-room character
studies. Female writers, then, were often forced to adjust their writing to meet the inevitable criticism
that their work was insubstantial. Even if they did so without anger, they
deviated from their original visions and their books suffered. The early
19th-century female novelist also had no real tradition from which to work;
they lacked even a prose style fit for a woman. The narrator argues that the
novel was the chosen form for these women since it was a relatively new and
pliable medium.
The narrator takes down a recent debut
novel called Life's Adventure by Mary
Carmichael. Viewing
Carmichael as a descendant of the female writers she has commented on, the
narrator dissects her book. She finds the prose style uneven, perhaps as a
rebellion against the "flowery" reputation of women's writing. She
reads on and finds the simple sentence "'Chloe liked Olivia.'" She
believes the idea of friendship between two women is groundbreaking in
literature, as women have historically been viewed in literature only in
relation to men. By the 19th century, women grew more complex in novels, but
the narrator still believes that each gender is limited in its knowledge of the
opposite sex. The narrator recognizes that for whatever mental greatness women
have, they have not yet made much of a mark in the world compared to men.
Still, she believes that the great men in history often depended on women for
providing them with "some stimulus, some renewal of creative power"
that other men could not. She argues that the creativity of men and women is
different, and that their writing should reflect their differences. The narrator
believes Carmichael has much work to do in recording the lives of women, and
Carmichael will have to write without anger against men. Moreover, since every
one has a blind spot about themselves, only women can fill out the portrait of
men in literature. However, the narrator feels Carmichael is "no more than
a clever girl," even though she bears no traces of anger or fear. In a
hundred years, the narrator believes, and with money and a room of her own,
Carmichael will be a better writer.
The
pleasing sight of a man and woman getting into a taxi provokes an idea for the
narrator: the mind contains both a male and female part, and for "complete
satisfaction and happiness," the two must live in harmony. This fusion,
she believes, is what poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge described when he said a
great mind is "androgynous": "the androgynous mindŠtransmits
emotion without impedimentŠit
is naturally creative, incandescent and undivided." Shakespeare is a fine
model of this androgynous mind, though it is harder to find current examples in
this "stridently sex-conscious" age. The narrator blames both sexes
for bringing about this
self-consciousness of gender.
Woolf takes over the speaking voice and
responds to two anticipated criticisms against the narrator. First, she says
she purposely did not express an opinion on the relative merits of the two
genders--especially as writers--since she does not believe such a judgment is
possible or desirable. Second, her audience may believe the narrator laid too
much emphasis on material things, and that the mind should be able to overcome
poverty and lack of privacy. She cites a professor's argument that of the top
poets of the last century, almost all were well-educated and rich. Without
material things, she repeats, one cannot have intellectual freedom, and without
intellectual freedom, one cannot write great poetry. Women, who have been poor
since the beginning of time, have understandably not yet written great poetry.
She also responds to the question of why she insists women's writing is
important. As an avid reader, the overly masculine writing in all genres has
disappointed her lately. She encourages her audience to be themselves and
"Think of things in themselves." She says that Judith
Shakespeare still
lives within all women, and that if women are given money and privacy in the
next century, she will be reborn.
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