Virginia Woolf. A Room of One’s Own. 1928. Project Gutenberg Australia. 2007. Web. 30 Oct. 2012.
This was recommended to me by a female colleague a few years ago. I have loved Woolf’s fiction since I read Flush in high school and had a good teacher teach To the Lighthouse in college. A Room of One’s Own is different. It is certainly interesting from a historical perspective, but the Western world has changed so much in the 85 years since she wrote it, that is seems almost medieval.
Much of the first part of this long essay (or collection of related essays) is the most dated. Here Woolf cites writings by numerous men–mostly academics–that show that women are fascinating but that men are far superior to them. It is impossible to imagine any male in an academic situation today writing something like that except possibly in jest. The president of Harvard had to resign for merely wondering why fewer women than men were attracted to math and science majors.
The title of the book comes from Woolf’s observation that there have been few serious women writers in English, and virtually none before the nineteenth century. Since writing seldom pays—Charles Dickens or Tom Clancy today are exceptions—a writer needs an independent source of income and a place away from others where she can write: a room of one’s own. Through most of history, women have had neither of these things.
Woolf also points out that in much poetry and fiction women are treated with great respect: “a person of the utmost importance, very various; heroic and mean; splendid and sordid; infinitely beautiful and hideous in the extreme; as great as a man, and some even greater.” Then she adds, “But this is woman in fiction.”
Perhaps the most moving parts to contemporary reader is her realistic observation that simply most people do not care about literary art. Both Flaubert and Keats, she observes, faced indifference which frustrated them. The problem was compounded in Woolf’s day for women who have to face “not indifference but hostility.” A writer—you?
Woolf also believes that prose fiction is easier to write than drama or poetry. Jane Austen, who apparently did not have a room of her own, could be interrupted while writing prose fiction and not completely lose her train of thought.
One of the other observations that Woolf makes is also quite dated. She writes that since the publishing business is made up of nearly all men, women do not have much of a chance of being accepted as writers. Drawing room romances, she says, are not as important as books on war.
How times have changed! Now most editors, especially those who first see proposals and typescripts are women. Women are the gatekeepers. A recent books for teachers listing books for middle and high schoolers by topic has a brief listing on World War II. There is not a single book about a battle, a general or other soldier, or any political leader of the whole war. A boy or man would say there was nothing about the war at all. The only books listed are a few books about Hiroshima written from the point of view of civilians and a novel about an American girl who fell in love with a German soldier who was a POW in the United States. (The Holocaust was a separate entry). It is almost as if fighting did not exist in the war; that Pearl Harbor, D-Day, North Africa, Stalingrad, Guadalcanal, or any of that ever happened. It is as if Americans decided to test their new bomb on a helpless Japanese city and kidnapped a young German and brought him to America! As a former boy, I’d ask where are the cool books about World War II, whether fiction like The Guns of Navarone or Run Silent, Run Deep or nonfiction like Commando Extraordinary or The Longest Day?
Woolf would be more than satisfied at the way women have taken over the publishing business. Not to mention that no academic who wanted to keep his job would write a word about male-female differences, let alone male superiority!
No, Virginia, times have changed. Women write more fiction than men do now. I am not sure, Virginia, whether you would be terribly impressed with the romances, “chick lit,” or even the self-absorbed “liberated” writings of Jong or Gilbert. Descriptions of subjective, ephemeral emotional rot are no less dry than descriptions of battles. Yes, women have lost their fascination. They are definitely more than equal to men today. Frankly, I would take Rosalind or Desdemona over any one of the sisters of the traveling pants. But what do I know? I’m just a guy.
She says that writers like Kipling are “to a woman incomprehensible.” Could be, but if more young men read Captains Courageous, boys would not be such wimps, and women would admire them more. Ironically she quotes a true male chauvinist of her day who writes “that when children cease to be altogether desirable, women cease to be altogether necessary.” To most men in the Western world that Aristotelian statement is sad and extreme. But today we frequently hear the opposite, that men are valued only as sperm donors (ask Neil Young). Men have become nearly as unnecessary as the children our liberated women abort.
O brave new world, Mrs. Woolf, that has such women in it!