Book #28: A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf

I started reading Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf and somehow it made me want so badly to revisit A Room of One's Own, which I read as required reading in English in high school, so I set that one down halfway to finish this one. I don't know why I wanted to read it again, since I didn't like it very much when I originally read it--I remember feeling like I was dragging to get through the few chapters assigned for reading each week and trying so hard to keep my attention. But this time, I think, since I have much more of a background and understanding of feminism and women's rights and Life with a capital L--not that I am well-versed in any of those things, but definitely more so than when I was 16--it was extremely interesting to me to read and I felt thoroughly absorbed in the major points that Woolf was making throughout the book. It's only 113 pages, so its length makes it easy to read and not to be intimidated by, but it includes a very good overview of Woolf's opinion of why women haven't written as much as men, and what women need to do in order to produce art like men have done over the centuries. So much of it seems almost commonplace or obvious now, but I think that is because of Woolf herself and the impact her writing and her thinking--and those of others in her generation--has had on us today.

Basically, Woolf's thesis is this: women must have an independent source of income, and a room of their own, in order to be able to produce good writing. That seems representative to me of the idea that art cannot be produced when the author is slaving away to provide the necessities of life, or when they are being distracted and taken away from their work by the demands of everyday life. So artists must be above those things--but women never have been throughout the ages. Women have been bearing children and taking care of those children and have been traditionally impoverished and at the mercy of their (commonly abusive) husbands for millennia, so it is no wonder that they have been unable to produce art like Shakespeare's in the time of Shakespeare. Because of this reality of women's circumstances, they also have a paucity of female authors as a heritage to trace back to or lean on as they write their own works, which are separate from the tradition of male writers. And many women who do write get caught up and twisted in their anger about their lack of freedom and abilities, which detracts from their finished products because they are writing about their anger instead of about their story. "Her books will be deformed and twisted. She will write in a rage where she should write calmly. She will write foolishly where she should write wisely. She will write of herself where she should write of her characters. She is at war with her lot" (69-70). So women who want to write well--she holds up Jane Austen as one of the only women who has done this successfully--need to write of their stories and not of their grievances, and cannot think about their gender as they write. Writing about your gender (as a male or a female) only brings up anger and the need to justify yourself.

I thought it was interesting how in a few places Woolf makes it very clear that she is not advocating for women to become exactly the same as men--equals, yes, but genderless, no.  "It would be a thousand pities if women wrote like men, or lived like men, or looked like men, for if two sexes are quite inadequate, considering the vastness and variety of the world, how should we manage with one only? Ought not education out to bring out and fortify the differences rather than the similarities? For we have too much likeness as it is . . ." (88). This stood out to me because it seems like many people in our society have taken this to the opposite extreme (like the recent law which passed in the Senate to have women sign up for the draft). Woolf celebrates the differences between women's and men's writing and doesn't wish to see the decline of one, rather the increase of another which would complement both--and this applies not just to writing, but to all aspects of both genders. Woolf is not very sympathetic to mothers bearing children--she seems to be of the view that having babies is a necessary evil which is important to populate the earth but which detracts from the ability of women to reach their full potential. At the end of her lecture, she cautions the young women in her audience that they should no longer be having ten or twelve children like previous generations but instead only two or three. I obviously do not agree with her viewpoint on this--that children are just detracting from women reaching their full potential--but I think it is obvious that when women are having lots of babies, they are obviously spending their time elsewhere than being able to write the Next Great American Novel (or British, or whatever).

(I feel the irony of writing about this right now because in the middle of writing this, I had to stop and help clean up a poopy accident, a mothering distraction which Woolf would have despaired of.)