"Like most uneducated English women, I love to read." Can these words really belong to Virginia Woolf, an “uneducated Englishwoman” who knew half a dozen languages, who wrote numerous novels and essays, who possessed one of the most rarefied literary minds of the 20th century? Tucked away in the final pages of A Room of One's Own, this commentary sparkles with Woolf's typically ironic and understated sense of humor. She is joking, but at the same time she wants to say something very serious: as a reader, she is worried about the state of the writer, and in particular the state of the writer. In fact, she worries so much that she fills about a hundred pages thinking about how her appetite for “wholesale books” might be satisfied in the future by women writers. Her concerns may be those of a reader, but the solution she offers comes directly from the philosophy of an experienced writer. “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she wants to write fiction,” Woolf states at the beginning of her essay. This “small point”, as she calls it, could have major repercussions on the future of literature. It would certainly enrich the life of reader Virginia Woolf, to say the least. But before that happens, writer Virginia Woolf must demonstrate how a few hundred books and a little privacy translate into a multitude of new books written by women. To do this, she uses a most natural example: A Room of Ones Own itself. Before becoming a founding feminist text or the source of countless cultural clichés, this essay was first written by a woman with some means and leisure. It is both the result and the provider of a set of ideal creative conditions for the female author. By employing an innovative narrative technique, Woolf shows how these external conditions influence women's prose style. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay A Room of One's Own is Virginia Woolf's fictional response to a very factual request. "We asked you to talk about women and fiction. What does that have to do with a room of one's own?" » asks Woolf, anticipating her audience's perplexity at the title of her work. This is due, she explains, to women writers' need for money and personal space. But this can only be properly explained through fiction. “I will develop in your presence as fully and freely as possible [my] train of thought... using all the liberties and licenses of a novelist,” she explains. One can imagine that this statement only added to the perplexity of Woolf's initial audience of female undergraduates in 1928. But Woolf is adamant on this point. She has no desire to rehash comments about the usual suspects in women's literature. Jane Austen, George Eliot, the Brontë sisters: these women will eventually be mentioned, but Woolf is not a historical surveyor. She writes modernist novels; naturally, she will write about women and fiction in the same modernist and romantic mode. But the fictional form of A Room of One's Own indicates much more than Woolf's predilection for the novel as a writer. Prose fiction has rather been the trend of successful female authors since their historical emergence. Woolf, who later notes that the best male writers compose "with the unconscious imprint of a long line of descent", knows that her genre has neither Shakespeare, nor Milton, nor Keats. Nor did women get their hands on biography, philosophy orthe story. How could a woman write without the grace with which tradition permeates the pen of the contemporary author? Woolf confronts this problem by writing in the mode of the richest tradition available to a woman writer: the novel. Here, the author has Pride and Prejudice and Middlemarch to reinforce her claim to form. A male author may demand his own share on the basis of Tom Jones or Bleak House, but he cannot deny any woman her fair share in the history of the English novel. For Woolf, "long lineage" is a crucial condition that affects a writer's talent; she writes in a novelistic form because it is one whose origins she can truly trace through her “mothers and grandmothers”. While female authors have had the greatest luck as novelists, female characters have also been more successful in fiction than in history. A visit to the British museum confirms that, while men have had much to say about the contemporary inadequacies of the opposite sex, “nothing is known about women before the 18th century”. There are scraps of knowledge about domestic violence and childbearing, but women's thoughts and habits have been obscured by years of social insignificance. It is no wonder that Woolf preferred to talk about women through fiction, because in history they tend to disappear completely. It is not the same in the literature of this same past. Male historians weren't interested in women, but, as she points out, male fiction writers certainly were. From Lady Macbeth to Madame de Guermantes, literature chronicles the lives of hundreds of dynamic women. “Imaginatively, woman is of the greatest importance,” Woolf observes, “but in practice she is completely insignificant...she is practically absent from history.” It makes sense, then, that Woolf would write A Room of One's Own in the genre that accords women the greatest importance rather than that which accords them the least significance. Just as Woolf found a form suitable for women. writer, so she discovered a phrase to accommodate her as well. Like Jane Austen mocking the 19th-century “man's sentence,” Woolf smiles at the realistic prose fashionable in her day and politely rejects it. Instead, she opts for a style that emphasizes her interest in how external conditions act and react with the mind. His own assessment of his style is deceptively simple. According to Woolf, her sentences “follow the train of thought.” The sentences and writers contained in A Room of One's Own have much in common: they are all meditative and meandering beings, sometimes harassed by material conditions. Take, for example, Woolf's account of her visit to the British Museum: “London was like a machine. We were all thrown back and forth on this simple base to create a pattern. The British Museum was another department of the factory. the hinged doors opened; and one stood there like a thought in the immense bald forehead so magnificently surrounded by a band of famous names. We went to the counter, took a piece of paper, opened a volume; from the catalog, and... the five dots here indicate five distinct minutes of amazement, wonder and perplexity. "The beginning of this passage is lyrical, poetic, very "writerly." Rich in comparison, musical and lively in their style, the first four sentences flow from a mind in comfortable and free circumstances. If London is a machine, the The person who utters these words is a carefree cog, functioning comfortably as an individual unit and as a tiny part of a larger mechanism. However, when you put spokes in the wheels, the cog works.as much as the machine. Woolf's prose, sensitive to her subject, reacts as a real person would. Here, shock is not expressed as “I was amazed” or “I couldn’t believe it.” Rather, it is recorded in the form of “five points” signifying the inescapable emptiness of a mind confronted with what is truly disturbing. Like the mind of a young writer, Woolf's sentences are impressionable; they are words with a living inner reality interpreting an unpredictable outer reality. Sometimes, however, this external reality proves to be a tedious interruption, as Woolf's writings seek to demonstrate. His walk around the Oxbridge campus is a striking example. Glancing around the college, Woolf thinks of an essay by Charles Lamb on a certain Milton manuscript held in the Oxbridge library. This leads him to think first about how Milton revised his poem, then about the fact that Thackeray's Esmond manuscript resides in the same building. His mind is occupied with these deep thoughts when his person and his intellect suddenly find themselves blocked in their path: "But then one would have to decide what is style and what is meaning, a question which - but there, I I was in fact at the door which leads to the library itself. I must have opened it, because immediately out came, like a guardian angel blocking the way with a flap of a black robe instead of wings, a silver and silver gentleman. contemptuous, who regretted in a low voice he replied that ladies are only admitted to the library if they are accompanied by a member of the College or provided with a letter of introduction “Here is a woman intellectually. curious, educated, receptive to the great thinkers and writers of the past, repressed by a fussy Beadle and a tradition of patriarchal oppression. The hyphen in the first sentence frustrates not only the clause, but also the intellectual potential of the young woman herself; the sentence is not allowed to fully develop, and neither is she. The first chapter of A Room of One's Own is peppered with such interrupted efforts. Later we find her thoughtfully reflecting on the wealth of Oxbridge: "It was impossible not to think - the thinking, whatever it might have been, was interrupted. The clock struck." And we head to Fernham after a few more hours: "Why, if it was an illusion, not praise the catastrophe, whatever it was, which destroyed the illusion and put the truth in its place?" Because the truth... these points mark the place where, in search of truth, I missed the arrival at Fernham. Barely has the crescendo of thought arrived when reality – inflexible, misogynistic – crushes it once again. Woolf's prose mimics these frustrations, describing and demonstrating the intellectual opportunities (or lack thereof) of women writers. Woolf further augments her thinking style with skillful use of symbolism. In the opening pages of A Room of One's Own, symbols of truncation and arrested development abound, often contrasted by symbols of wealth and maturity. Dining lavishly at Oxbridge, for example, Woolf is surprised from her postprandial leisure by the sight of a tailless cat passing the window. “The sight of the abrupt, truncated animal moving gently across the quadrangle,” she reflects, “changed for me, by an accident of subconscious intelligence, the emotional light. It was as if someone had dropped a shadow." It's hard to ignore, therefore, that the banquet she has just enjoyed was prepared for men, members of a university institution to which she is forbidden access. The meager dinner at Fernham a few pages later provides another counterpoint to the Oxbridge lunch. She reports: "Dinner was ready. Here is the soup. It was aplain soup with sauce. There was nothing special about it." Woolf could well have chosen any material conditions common to the two colleges - plumbing, size of the library, quality of teaching - in order to juxtapose the symbols of wealth and of poverty, however, works best with its prose style because it has the most immediate and consistent effect on human beings. It leaves an impression on the everyday experience of men and women. , "one cannot think well, love well, sleep well if one has not dined well." It seems reasonable to add "write well" to this list, because the lack of stuffed pheasants among women and literary tradition are not entirely foreign. The form of the female literary tradition and the structure of A Room of One's Own are not entirely foreign either. The tone of the essay develops as a chronology of famous female authors. , like Lady Winchilsea, your 17th-century female writer, the speaker flares with anger at the thought of her restricted opportunities. Here it is on exclusion from the library: “Never will I wake up these echoes, never will I ask for this hospitality” again, I swore as I descended the steps angrily. " And here we find her with Mary Seton in one of Fernham's anemicly furnished rooms: "we burst with contempt at the reprehensible poverty of our sex. What had our mothers done then so that they had no wealth to leave us? » The speaker in these opening pages is furious at the condition of women and her words resonate with Winchilsea's indignation. “How did we fall!” Fallen by erroneous rules,/And education is more than nature's fools;/Forbidden from any improvement of the mind,/And to be boring, expected and conceived", the poet wrote about women at the end 1600s. Two hundred years later, his frustration rears its head again through Woolf's eloquent pen. However, a change of scene comes with a change of tone. Beneath the vaulted ceiling of the British Museum appears. a speaker whose rage simmers less dramatically than Winchilsea's, a Charlotte Bronte-like lady whose anger emerges indirectly. these repressed feelings are an example of this: “While I was thinking, I had unconsciously, in my apathy, in my despair, drawn a picture of Professor von X busy writing his monumental work Mental Inferiority. , morals and physics of the female sex... The professor looked very ugly in my sketch... Drawing pictures was an idle way to finish unprofitable morning work. However, it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the buried truth sometimes emerges. A very basic psychology exercise showed me, looking at my notebook, that the sketch of the angry professor had been done in anger. Anger had snatched my pencil while I was dreaming. The “submerged truth” here, as Woolf later discovers in her assessment of Jane Eyre, is that women resent men who repress their active and intelligent natures. Both Woolf's drawing and Brontë's transition have "this shock in them, this indignation – we see that she will never succeed in expressing her genius in its entirety." Some progress has been made since Winchilsea; the woman writer has at least let her genius shine through. But it remains “distorted and twisted” by social constraint and the anger that accompanies it. Woolf locks the reader into the current state of women's literature with the imaginary novel Life's Adventure by neophyte writer Mary Carmichael. This..