Locating its origins in a series of lectures delivered in 1928 at Newnham College and Girton College (at the time the only two women's colleges at CamLocating its origins in a series of lectures delivered in 1928 at Newnham College and Girton College (at the time the only two women's colleges at Cambridge), A Room of One’s Own is at once a deeply personal and searching account of one woman's writing life, and an urgent critical intervention into women’s history. Woolf's essay, which makes a definitive claim that financial security is an imperative requirement for female intellectual independence, both came at a moment and helped produce a moment in which new cultural roles were being envisioned for women.
The basic premise of A Room of One’s Own is succinctly summed up by its author: “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” The second longing is of the domestic variety, a desire for an interior space untouched by the exigencies of the male gaze. Woolf is using “a room of one’s own” metonymically to represent her desire for an intellectual existence entirely independent of men. A room of her own will provide Woolf with the financial security and the space necessary to pursue the work that fulfills her. The room, in other words, is the grounds upon which Woolf locates an agency of empowerment: she envisions this room of her own—her space of study—as a profound act to reaffirm the importance of a female intellect so unsettling to the social order its value demanded its constant disavowal. The first longing—money—is paramount for the realization of the second—a room of one’s own. Recognizing how poverty binds women to awful material and psychic configurations, Woolf conceives of her newly found financial independence as a panacea against feeling poised on the verge of drowning: “my aunt's legacy unveiled the sky to me.”
A Room of One’s Own also illuminates the difficulty of recovering women lives from the annihilating force of historical neglect. Woolf’s text is distinctly preoccupied with the absence of an established female literary tradition. I found it interesting how Woolf, in speaking to an overarching project to wrest back control of women’s stories from their historic (and continued) abuses, traces narratives of women’s inherent inferiority to intricate processes of male projection. To put it differently, Woolf contends that the patriarchal myth of inherent male superiority necessitated female disempowerment precisely to reaffirm itself. “Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses,” she writes, “possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.” Women’s intellectual and economic independence, according to Woolf, embodied the threat of male decline and made it palpable. Fearing the collapse of the dominant male order, men projected both their fears about female independence from male control by deeming women unfit for history.
Woolf’s great achievement in A Room of One’s Own is to reckon with both history and interiority, and to collapse the boundary between public and private. For much of Western history, women writers have not been recognized, and their work has been largely relegated to history’s ill-lit margins. How can a woman, therefore, write in a textual and historical space largely defined by an overwhelmingly male canon? How can she articulate an experience that has scarcely been touched by words? These questions have clearly occupied Woolf, who, in A Room of One’s Own, chooses a rogue approach to writing. Resisting coherence and proscriptive forms of agency typical of critical texts, Woolf opts instead to meet the reader in the concrete realities of her lived experience. Woolf speaks in a language that is never still, combining memoir, literary criticism, political and cultural critique in order to imagine a new model for how to produce productive and lasting knowledge about women’s lives. She insists on holding space for the detours, interruptions, and digressions, which imbues her essay with the impression of spontaneous improvisation. The rigorously thought-out vignettes, however, point to a text closely observed, its pieces clearly arranged and rearranged. This is one of the primary strengths of A Room of One’s Own: how her consistent willingness to examine her own claims and her continuing insistence on her own positionality as a woman writer offer spaces and modes of recording history as a part of an alternative feminist project.
That said, A Room of One’s Own does not always escape its author’s blind spots. Woolf’s 500-pound allowance and the room of her own that it afforded her are defining achievements, epitomizing the attainment of financial independence and the enjoyment of freedom from social convention. They are certainly significant when compared to what was possible for women in Britain at the time, particularly working-class women, whose position is one of legal (and oftentimes physical) powerlessness. Women who were single and without family were particularly vulnerable to economic destitution, as they were not expected to be financially self-sufficient. Where Woolf’s inheritance allowed her a liberating alternative to the marriage plot, most women at the time could not afford to forsake the security and convenience of marriage in favor of independence and intellectual freedom. At one point in A Room of One’s Own, Woolf confesses that her newfound fortune loomed larger in her mind than the women’s vote of 1918: “Of the two—the vote and the money—,” Woolf writes, “the money, I own, seemed infinitely the more important.” While Woolf’s comment can be dismissed as simply insensitive, the moment does evince how individualistic thinking can easily reproduce our relationship to patriarchal forms of power. For a moment, Woolf becomes complicit with the very system she disavows, having claimed a position of power within it.
Whether Woolf’s ambivalence simplifies her argument or not, it is undeniable that Woolf has produced an important inquiry into what a literature that decenters the male gaze as sovereign can and should look like. Woolf’s concluding call for women to reconstitute themselves as dominant by reviving the “dead poet who was Shakespeare's sister” is guided by a fierce and expanded sense of what might be possible if women allowed themselves to wrest their voices from a dominant order intent on denying them their sound. Woolf’s clarity of vision when she writes about the torturous vagaries of being a woman in a world that cannot fully saturate her crosses almost a hundred years to address each of us intimately. As we think of recent grim setbacks in women’s rights, it is imperative to keep listening for resonances in A Room of One’s Own.
(Note: This review was reworked from a longer essay I wrote for class.)...more
chai (thelibrairie on tiktok!) ♡
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