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A Room Of One's Own By Virginia Woolf

1911 Words8 Pages

Written by Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own is one of the first feminist writings that was ever written. While this essay follows a fictional narrator, it was based on lectures she spoke at women’s colleges making the essay nonfiction. In this essay, Woolf attempts to reason how an author’s place in society is seen in his or her work. One of the major issues she addresses is the reason why there had never been a “female Shakespeare.” Woolf came to the conclusion that women did not have access to the essential tools to write Shakespeare quality writing as men did. For women to be able to write, she argued, they must have money and a room of their own. Woolf went on to explain that women were deprived of privacy, independence, education, and …show more content…

In the first pages of the book, Woolf is speaking as herself as she presents her thesis that she proves in the essay. However, Woolf the goes on to change her persona. “Call me Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael or by any name you please--it is not a matter of any importance” (Woolf 5). This was done in order to make the experiences the fictional character faces in the book more universal so that the ideas in the essay apply to all women. If Woolf made the character herself, readers may have thought that the experiences she faced were only specific her. Throughout the essay “Mary Beton” is constantly being rejected because of her sex such as when she is not allowed to use the library. This use of persona makes the reader feel that women are truly oppressed since “Mary Beton” is oppressed and she is symbolic of all women. Along with persona, Woolf’s syntax and diction is used throughout the essay which relates to …show more content…

Additionally, words like “assembled” made the dinner seem like it was forced and it did not just flow like lunch at the men’s college. While the meal at the men’s college is luxurious and plentiful, the meal at the women’s college is only “sufficient.” Despite the meal being sufficient, Woolf continues to depict the food as uncharitable, plain and transparent, and dry which makes the meal seem plain and undesirable. The drastic differences between the meals as demonstrated through syntax and diction relates to purpose as this contrast exhibits how women are oppressed in society. The entire meals themselves can be seen as an allegory for men’s and women’s opportunities. The men’s meal is spectacular and endless which represents the great and ceaseless opportunities men receive in life while the woman's meal is only sufficient and has a lack of choices just as women can only hope at best to have a few sufficient opportunities. In addition to syntax and diction, throughout the essay tone is

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Do you know that Shakespeare is not the only gifted writer in his family? This mysterious member exists in the English writer Virginia Woolf’s imagination. In her famous essay “Shakespeare’s Sister,” Woolf uses the hypothetical anecdote of Judith Shakespeare as her main evidence to argue against a dinner guest, who believes that women are incapable of writing great literature. During the time when Judith is created, women are considered to be naturally inferior to men and are expected to be passive and domestic. Regarding her potential audience, educated men, as “conservative,” Woolf attempts to persuade them that social discouragement is the real cause of the lack of great female writers without irritating them by proposing “radical” arguments.

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Virginia Woolf: Shakespeare’s Sister In the essay “Shakespeare’s sister” Virginia Woolf asks and explores the basic question of “Why women did not write poetry in the Elizabethan age”. Woolf sheds light on the reality of women’s life during this time and illustrates the effects of social structures on the creative spirit of women. In the society they lived in, women were halted to explore and fulfill their talent the same way men were able to, due to the gender role conventions that prevailed during this era. Through a theoretical setting in which it is it is imagined that William Shakespeare had a sister (Judith), Virginia Woolf personifies women during the sixteenth century in order to reflect the hardships they had to overcome as aspiring writers.

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One of the most significant works of feminist literary criticism, Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One`s Own”, explores both historical and contemporary literature written by women. Spending a day in the British Library, the narrator is disappointed that there are not enough books written by or even about women. Motivated by this lack of women’s literature and data about their lives, she decides to use her imagination and come up with her own characters and stories. After creating a tragic, but extraordinary gifted figure of Shakespeare’s sister and reflecting on the works of crucial 19th century women authors, the narrator moves on to the books by her contemporaries. So far, women were deprived of their own literary history, but now this heritage is starting to appear.

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