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Luca Zerafa

M.A. Modern and Contemporary Literature and Criticism

151691M

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ENG5017

Literary Criticism and Theory: An Advanced Introduction

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29 June 2014

!Some works in literary criticism and theory are literary themselves.

Comment on the literary qualities of [A Room of One’s Own by

Virginia Woolf].

Statement of Authenticity

!I declare that the following essay is my original work and that any

work done by others is properly cited.

!!!________________________ ________________________

Name Date

!!________________________

Signature

!1

A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf, first published in 1929, was written around a decade after

women gained the right to vote in England, in 1918, and is surprisingly one of Woolf’s most

accessible, entertaining works. Woolf’s extended essay about woman and her place in the literary

world is often considered to be the touchstone work in feminist literary theory and the themes and

concerns within Woolf’s text have been both developed and disputed by later feminist literary

critics. Woolf deals with very serious social issues, and yet upon reading A Room of One’s Own, one

is struck by its intimate style and engaging narrative; in fact, Woolf herself predicted that her work

will be met kindly by the press, who will ‘talk of its charm, & sprightliness’. Woolf, adopting the 1

voice of a literary critic, describes her essay as one which makes for ‘easy reading’. Indeed, A 2

Room of One’s Own was an instant bestseller, selling ‘more than twenty-two thousand copies in the

first six months of its appearance. A Room of One’s Own is in part a consideration of the literary 3

legacy, or lack thereof, of the woman writer and yet Woolf’s essay is captivating, humorous, and

narrative-driven. In this essay, some of the literary elements of Woolf’s text, which include aspects

of narrativity, metafiction, literary allusion and imagery, will be analysed. Linda Hutcheon’s A

Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction will be considered when discussing the literary

devices employed by Woolf, which bear a resemblance to the techniques found in the postmodern

novel; and in the section discussing the imagery employed by Woolf, Peter Stockwell’s Cognitive

Poetics will be consulted for its theory on the schema, ‘which has been used to revisit the issue of

literariness and literary language’. Schema theory creates a structure to analyse the imagery in a 4

literary work and how that imagery functions upon the reader.

A Room of One’s Own is based on a series of lectures Virginia Woolf was invited to deliver

at Newnham College and Girton College, in October 1928, and considers the art of fiction through a

Naomi Black, Virginia Woolf as Feminist (New York: Cornell University Press, 2004), p. 114.1

Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 3: 1925-30 (Massachusetts: Mariner Books, 1981), p. 2

262. Susan Gubar, ‘Introduction’, in A Room of One’s Own (New York: Harcourt, Inc., 2005), p. xlvii.3

Peter Stockwell, Cognitive Poetics: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 79.4

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highly sex-conscious lens. When asked to speak about the relationship between women and fiction,

Woolf could only give her opinion with regard to one facet of that relationship: that a woman must

have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction. Woolf’s narrator proceeds to

substantiate this argument by surveying the history of literary production, arguing that it is the

material and financial limitations of the female writer that have prevented her from reaching the

lofty heights of literary achievement, such as that of Shakespeare and Milton. A Room of One’s Own

is abundant in tangents, interruptions, and hesitations, and one often wonders where the narrator is

going with this – ‘what bearing has all this upon the subject of my paper, Women and Fiction?’ the 5

narrator asks herself following a description of the affects her inheritance has had upon her –

however, the aforementioned argument is implicit in the style and narrative content of Woolf’s

essay. Woolf composed her extended critical essay between 1928 and 1929, while she was

simultaneously working on her fictional works, such as Orlando and The Moths, and in A Room of 6

One’s Own she adopts various literary techniques. Woolf immediately constructs a shifting-narrative

voice:

Here then was I (call me Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael or by any name you please - it is not a matter of any importance) sitting on the banks of a river a week or two ago in fine October weather, lost in thought. 7!

This narrative voice creates a distance between herself and the (occasionally contradicting) opinions

within the essay. The contradictions within the narrator’s argumentation, one of the most obvious

being her championing of ‘androgynous’ writing while placing great importance on gender, allow 8

space for the reader to shift between different interpretations, much like the reader’s experience

with a literary work of fiction would be. The narrator’s main interest is in the material conditions

Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (New York: Harcourt, Inc., 2005), p. 40.5

Christiane Bimberg, ‘The Poetics of Conversation in Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own: Constructed 6

Arbitrariness and Thoughtful Impressionism’, Connotations, 11, 2001/2002. <http://www.connotations.de/pdf/articles/bimberg01101.pdf> [accessed 29 June 2014] (p. 1). Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, p. 5.7

Ibid., p. 97.8

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surrounding the production of literature, and similarly, Woolf’s work delineates her own writing of

the ever-elusive essay ‘Women and Fiction’.

I must ask you to imagine a room, like many thousands, with a window looking across people's hats and vans and motor-cars to other windows, and on the table inside the room a blank sheet of paper on which was written in large letters WOMEN AND FICTION, but no more. 9!

The narrator frequently uses the first-person plural: ‘without self-confidence we are as babes in the

cradle. And how can we generate this imponderable quality, which is yet so invaluable, most

quickly?’ The issues the narrator must confront are similar to those of the women in the audience

and the reader – Woolf makes herself relatable through her use of the ‘we’ rather than the ‘I’. The

narrator’s use of ‘we’ suggests multiplicity in narration, adding to the distance between the creator

and her work. Woolf retrospectively reflects upon this literary technique in her extended essay as a

form of camouflage.

I forced myself to keep my own figure fictitious; legendary. If I had said, Look here am I uneducated, because my brothers used all the family funds which is the fact – Well theyd [sic] have said; she has an axe to grind; and no one would have taken me seriously. 10!

As she approaches the end of the opening paragraph of A Room of One’s Own, Woolf makes her

‘figure fictitious’ by stating that “‘I’ is only a conventional term for somebody who has no real

being’. The creation of the fictional narrator, this ‘no real being’, distances Virginia Woolf the 11

writer, from the persona. Woolf’s narrative voice is consistently self-questioning, and she draws

attention to this in her draft, ‘Women & Fiction’: ‘But – “but” <were> ‘buts’ beginning again? What

was <did> I mean by it this time (sic)’, Woolf asks herself. Indeed, the opening sentence, as well 12 13

as the final sentence, begin with the word ‘but’, working the writer’s desire to engage with the 14

audience and with herself in an inclusive and conversational series of half-monologues. A Room of

One’s Own is the process of approaching the ever-elusive resultant essay ‘Women & Fiction’, and

Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, p. 25.9

Virginia Woolf, Letters of Virginia Woolf, 1932–1935 (New York: Mariner Books, 1982), p. 195.10

Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, p. 4.11

Virginia Woolf, Women & Fiction: The Manuscript Versions of A Room of One’s Own (Oxford: 12

Shakespeare Head Press/Blackwell, 1992), p. 149. Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, p. 3.13

Ibid., p. 112.14

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the ubiquitousness of Woolf’s ‘but’, of her constant self-questioning, reflects the process of the

mind as it reaches its opinions. The layers of narrative strands found in A Room of One’s Own add

to the text’s evasiveness which, in a critical essay, is quite unorthodox and is more suggestive of

literary performance. The narrator thus emphasises the fact that she is ‘not capable of proclaiming a

certain “truth”. What she can do is document the process of the genesis of her ideas’. In Chapter 15

Two, the narrator questions the origin of masculine ‘anger’, which oppresses the female sex, and

juxtaposes this philosophical probing with the very mundane act of searching for a place to have

lunch:

But why, I asked myself, having returned the books, why I repeated, standing under the colonnade among the pigeons and the prehistoric canoes, why are they angry? And, asking myself this question, I strolled off to find a place for luncheon. What is the real nature of what I call for the moment their anger? I asked. Here was a puzzle that would last all the time that it takes to be served with food in a small restaurant somewhere near the British Museum. 16

!Woolf is humorous in the combination of philosophy and lunching: the narrator’s physical needs are

almost incompatible with the subject of her ‘puzzle’, and the suggestion that the length of time it

would take to answer this question is similar to that of serving food at a restaurant is bathetic. The

subject of the origin of the anger of man is treated off-handedly. Yet, this section further underscores

the need for nourishment and satisfaction in order to be able to deal with highbrow issues. Here, the

narrator conveys her thoughts and emotions as they occur to her, suggesting the stream-of-

consciousness technique used in Woolf’s fictional works, such as To The Lighthouse. In this

extended essay, Woolf is concerned with the ‘always-altering mind bringing modulating

perspectives to the idiosyncratic circumstances it perceives’, adhering to her description of life as 17

a ‘luminous halo, a semitransparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness

to the end’, rather than a ‘series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged’. Indeed, this fictional 18

narrative approach to literary criticism ‘offers a new model for mapping the borderland between art

Bimberg, p. 2.15

Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, p. 33.16

Gubar, ‘Introduction’, p. xxxix.17

Jane Goldman, The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 18

2006), p. 104.

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and the world’. She dramatises the fluidity of human reasoning and deduction in the second 19

chapter of A Room of One’s Own in which she compares her ‘modulatory’ note-taking to a male

student’s:

It was impossible to make head or tail of it all, I decided, glancing with envy at the reader next door who was making the neatest abstracts, headed often with an A or a B or a C, while my own notebook rioted with the wildest scribble of contradictory jottings. 20

!The narrator in A Room of One’s Own goes through these intellectual changes as she explores her

physical world. Woolf, sometimes explicitly, dedicates a lot of effort to setting the scene: ‘When

you asked me to speak about women and fiction, I sat down on the banks of a river and began to

wonder what the words meant’. Woolf places great importance to her physical surroundings and 21

this scene-setting device works on two counts. Firstly, the reader accompanies the narrator on a

journey in both a physical (within the world of the text) as well as critical sense. The reader

experiences the narrator’s thoughts as she experiences them, creating an intimate relationship

between the two. Additionally, due to the significance of the physical in the text, the narrator

dramatises the effect of one’s physical space upon one’s intellectual abilities and development. The

descriptive sections of the text, which serve to set the scene, are found at the beginning and at the

end of each chapter in A Room of One’s Own; the first chapter of Woolf’s extended essay winds

down into a night-time scene: ‘All human beings were laid asleep – prone, horizontal, dumb.

Nobody seemed stirring in the streets of Oxbridge. Even the door of the hotel sprang open at the

touch of an invisible hand – not a boots was sitting up to light me to bed, it was so late’. This 22

emphasises that intellectual stimulation is found within and depends on one’s physical

surroundings. This concept is present in Woolf’s 1927 novel, To the Lighthouse, where Lily Briscoe

has difficulties with her painting, and uses her physical space to remind herself of her solution:

Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (London: Routledge, 1988), p. 23.19

Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, p. 30.20

Ibid., p. 321

Ibid., p. 24.22

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‘She took up the salt cellar and put it down again on a flower pattern in the table-cloth, so as to

remind herself to move the tree’. 23

What the narrator presents to the reader, and how she chooses to present it, juxtaposes the

differences in opportunities offered to men and women. These sections read like a diary, and Woolf

utilises the physical differences between the male and the female as a gateway into deeper

philosophical questions. A lot of attention is given to the minutiae of the luncheons attended by the

narrator in the first chapter of A Room of One’s Own. Whilst novelists, the narrator warns us, ‘have

a way of making us believe that luncheon parties are invariably memorable for something very

witty that was said […] they seldom spare a word for what was eaten’. Woolf here underscores her 24

interest in the physical nourishment upon which the ‘very witty’ depends. In this section of A Room

of One’s Own, the narrator demonstrates the difference in artistic production which occurs due to

the differences between comfort and its lack. The meal at Oxbridge, the men’s university, is a hearty

feast which began with ‘soles, sunk in a deep dish, over which the college cook had spread a

counterpane of the whitest cream, save that it was branded here and there with brown spots like the

spots of the flanks of a doe’. The introduction of the dinner at Fernham, the women’s university, is 25

bathetic in comparison: ‘Dinner was ready. Here was the soup. It was a plain gravy soup’. The 26

disparity in physical sustenance between men and women may be taken synecdochally in the

narrator’s investigation of women and fiction, particularly when compared to men and fiction. In

the following chapter, the narrator asks: ‘Why did men drink wine and women water? Why was one

sex so prosperous and the other so poor?’. The luncheons are symbolic of the differences in 27

treatment between the sexes – they are both in fact models, and though not physically distant, they

Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse (London: Urban Romantics, 2012), p. 67.23

Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, p. 10.24

Ibid.25

Ibid., p. 17.26

Ibid., p. 25.27

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are indeed different. Following her lecture, the forty-six-year-old Virginia Woolf reflected in her

diary upon her mixed feelings toward her audience. She described them as

Starved but valiant young women – that’s my impression. Intelligent eager, poor; & destined to become school-mistresses in shoals. I blandly told them to drink wine & have a room of their own. […] They were very eager, egotistical, or rather not much impressed by age & repute. Very little reverence or that sort of thing about. 28

!The narrator resents the historical circumstances that hinder the woman writer, much like Woolf

would always resent the fact that the family funds were made unavailable to her and her sister, thus

denying them an education, in favour of her brothers’ university career. Woolf uses fictive narrative

in order to pose a philosophical question, a device much used in novels such as Dostoevsky’s The

Idiot, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, and Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles.

And again, much like Prince Myshkin, Anna, and Tess, the characters in Woolf’s A Room of

One’s Own also work on a symbolical level. The narrator of Woolf’s text approaches literary

criticism from a historical point of view; and yet the history presented to the reader is speculative.

The narrator tells us that ‘[f]iction must stick to facts, and the truer the facts the better the fiction’. 29

Woolf reappropriates historical facts in order to suit her literary needs within A Room of One’s Own

and recount a possible alternative history to answer, in part, the question of women and fiction.

Here is another diary entry in which Woolf meditates on her creative process:

About W.&F. I am not sure – a brilliant essay? – I daresay; it has much work in it, many opinions boiled down into a kind of jelly, which I have stained red as far as I can. […] [H]ere my public has been too close: fats; getting them malleable, easily yielding to each other. 30

!Woolf takes advantage of the historically unwritten, of the ‘space’ in history, and creates character-

symbols in order to address the issue of women’s role in literary history, and perhaps one of the

most famous character-symbols in Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own is the Bard’s sister,

Judith Shakespeare.

Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 3: 1925-30, p. 200-1.28

Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, p. 16.29

Wolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 3: 1925-30, p. 223–4.30

!8

Through her delineation of Judith Shakespeare, Woolf presents the history of English

literature as a cultural constructed institution, rather than an organic system, and dramatises the

‘experience of a talented female in early modern English society’, which, indeed, is not a happy 31

one. Judith is described as being as similar to William Shakespeare in every way except for the fact

that while he is male, she is female – ‘she was as adventurous, as imaginative, as agog to see the

world as he was’, and yet she was denied an education. Judith displays intellectual curiosity, and 32

within her lie the makings of a woman-Shakespeare, yet the social demands placed upon women in

Renaissance England thwarted this possible genius. Judith is discouraged from devoting her time to

writing by her parents. She tries to rebel against her teenage betrothal and is beaten by her father.

She runs away to London and is rejected by the theatre scene, falls pregnant, and finally she ‘killed

herself one winter’s night and lies buried at some cross-roads where the omnibuses now stop

outside the Elephant and Castle’. The disparity in outcome between Judith Shakespeare and 33

William Shakespeare is due to her being female and his being male, and the narrator again uses

bathos in order to highlight woman’s near irrelevance within literary history. Woolf uses this

fictional narrative to answer the silence that is women’s literary history before the time of Fanny

Burney and Jane Austen, and Judith Shakespeare universalises the female writer’s experience in an

oppressive, patriarchal environment. This fictional episode is performed as metafiction within the

narrative passages of A Room of One’s Own. The speculative history of Judith Shakespeare,

‘situat[ed] in historical discourse [and] refusing to surrender [its] autonomy as fiction’ serves to 34

connect the barriers and frustrations experienced by the narrator in the very first narrative passages,

to women’s historical lack of access to education. Woolf thus addresses the fictiveness of this

episode:

Margaret Ezell, ‘The Myth of Judith Shakespeare: Creating the Canon of Women’s Literature’, New 31

Literary History, 21 (1990), 579–592, (p. 583). Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, p. 47.32

Ibid., p. 48.33

Hutcheon, p. 124.34

!9This may be true or it may be false – who can say? – But what is true in it, so it seemed to me, reviewing the story of Shakespeare’s sister as I had made it, is that any woman born with a great gift in the sixteenth century would certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half with, half wizard, feared and mocked at. 35!

The self-reflexivity of A Room of One’s Own, in which the narrator constantly points out the literary

devices she employs, lend the work a multi-layered narrative architecture: the deepest (most hidden)

layer contains the episode delineating Judith Shakespeare’s struggles and suicide; the lecture within

which the episode is narrated, acting as an intermediary layer between narrator and audience; and

finally, the revealing of the episode’s fictitiousness, at which point the narrator looks directly at the

audience/reader and states what has happened in terms of its real-world, rather than text-world,

implications. Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own is characterised by, as Linda Hutcheon puts it in A

Poetics for Postmodernism, ‘both history and an internalised, self-reflexive investigation of the

nature, the limits, and the possibilities of the discourse of art’, in this work, the discourse of art 36

turned artistic, literary. The narrator explains that she is ‘telling [us] stories’ – by exposing her tale 37

for its fictiveness, Virginia Woolf, in a postmodern-like ruse, bestows her fictional narrative with the

‘force and authority of fact’. 38

Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own alludes to a great number of texts, which suggests,

recalling T. S. Eliot’s ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, the importance of ‘literary parenthood’ 39

in the creation of a new work. Woolf’s use of the literary device of allusion covertly links her text to

other texts which in turn assume new meanings. The narrator’s mention of ‘Mary Beton, Mary 40

Seton, Mary Carmichael’ and later on, naming herself as ‘Mary Hamilton’ is an allusion to the

‘Ballad of the Four Marys’, sometimes referred to as ‘Ballad of Mary Hamilton’:

Yesterday the queen had four Marys;

Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, p. 49.35

Hutcheon, p. 22.36

Helena Grice and Tim Woods, ‘I’m Telling You Stories’: Jeanette Winterson and the Politics of Reading 37

(Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998), p. 1. Ezell, p. 583.38

Hutcheon, p. 125.39

David Palumbo-Liu, The Poetics of Appropriates: The Literary Theory and Practice of Huang Tingjian 40

(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), p. 163.

!10

This name she’ll have but three;

There was Mary Beaton and Mary Seaton

Mary Carmichael and me. 41

The persona of the ballad is lady-in-waiting, Mary Hamilton, who is about to be hanged ‘because of

an illicit sexual relationship and resulting pregnancy (sometimes by the king) as well as, in some

versions, an infanticide’. The ‘me’ for most of A Room of One’s Own, however, is Mary Beton; the 42

name ‘Mary Beton’ reappears as the name of the benefactress and namesake of the speaker, Aunt

Mary Beton. The narrator makes further reference to the ‘Ballad of the Four Marys’ by depicting a

conversation between herself and her friend Mary Seton at Fernham College. The narrator compares

the comfort and luxury of Oxbridge with the aridity of Fernham college by speaking of Mary

Seton’s mother’s lack of monetary legacy:

If she had left two or three hundred thousand pounds to Fernham, we could have been sitting at our ease tonight and the subject of our talk might have been archaeology, botany, anthropology, physics, the nature of the atom, mathematics, astronomy, relativity, geography. 43!

The conversations between Mary Beton and Mary Seton are starting points for the narrator to

meditate upon the relationship between financial prosperity and women’s access to education.

Additionally, Woolf’s allusion to the four Marys aligns with her use of multiple narrative voices and

points of view, adding to quality of discourse of the narrative. By referring to a ballad, an artistic

form usually ‘preserved orally for generations, passed along through recitation’, the narrator in A 44

Room of One’s Own hints at the genesis of the extended critical essay as a lecture given by a female

for females, and underlines the importance it lays on communications: ‘the whole of the mind must

lie wide open if we are to get the sense that the writer is communicating his experience with perfect

fulness’. 45

Susan Gubar, ‘Notes’, in A Room of One’s Own (New York: Harcourt, Inc., 2005), p. 114.41

Ibid.42

Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, p. 21.43

Academy of American Poets, Poetic Form: Ballad (New York: Academy of American Poets, 2014) <http://44

www.poets.org/poetsorg/text/poetic-form-ballad> [accessed 29 June 2014]. Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, p. 103.45

!11

The fourth chapter of A Room of One’s Own is devoted to the narrator’s literary criticism of

canonical texts written by women, taking Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë as her main focuses.

While she describes Pride and Prejudice as a ‘good book’, with its creator writing without anger 46

forgetting her sex, as it were, Charlotte Brontë is taken to task for her inability to overcome the

restrictions and disadvantages she endured as a woman living in mid-nineteenth century England;

the narrator laments the fact that Charlotte Brontë’s fury at her unfair circumstances thwarted her

talent and her genius. Following the literary criticism of canonical fiction in Chapter Four, the

narrator comes at last ‘to the shelves which hold books by the living; by women and by men; for

there are almost as many books written by women now as by men’, and begins a literary 47

evaluation of a fictitious work of fiction, Life’s Adventure, by Mary Carmichael, at which point yet

another reference to the ‘Ballad of the Four Marys’ is made. The name, according to Susan Gubar,

‘evokes Marie Carmicahel, the pseudonym used by Marie stopes, an early birth-control activist,

who published a work entitled Love’s Creation in 1928’. Life’s Adventure contains the phrase 48

‘Chloe likes Olivia’, a passage with lesbian overtones, exploring the possibility intimacy and love

between women, without the presence or necessity of maleness. The narrator obliquely alludes to a

real-world lesbian classic, The Well of Loneliness by Radcliffe Hall, first published in 1928. A few

sentences preceding the phrase ‘Chloe liked Olivia’, the narrator humorously asks ‘Are there no 49

men present? Do you promise me that behind that red curtain over there the figure of Sir Chartres

Biron is not concealed?’ A few pages later, as the narrator is speaking of the relationships between 50

male writers and women, she states

I began thinking of all those great men who have for one reason or another admired, sought out, lived with, confided in, made love to, written of, trusted in, and shown what can only be described as some need of and dependence upon certain persons of the opposite sex. That all these relationships were absolutely Platonic I would not affirm, and Sir William Joynson Hicks would probably deny’. 51

Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, p. 67.46

Ibid., p. 77.47

Gubar, ‘Notes’, p. 137.48

Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, p. 80.49

Ibid., p. 80.50

Ibid., p. 85.51

!12

!The two men mentioned in these passages, Sir Chartres Biron and Sir William Joynson Hicks, are

actual historical figures, and the narrator’s mention of them refers, somewhat tenuously, to Hall’s

The Well of Loneliness. Sir Chartres Biron was the ‘chief magistrate in the obscenity trial against

Jonathan Cape, publisher of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness’, while Sir William Joynson 52

Hicks was ‘[a]n English Conservative politician [and] evangelical religious figure and the home

secretary who […] banned The Well of Loneliness’. The narrator of A Room of One’s Own avoids 53

explicitly naming Radclyffe Hall’s lesbian-themed work; however, it is through these allusions to

legal and literary history within the passages delineating the narrator’s criticism of a fictitious novel

with lesbian overtones that Woolf hints at The Well of Loneliness and allows the reader to compare

the text within A Room of One’s Own to the real world text, The Well of Loneliness. Through her

choice of reference – naming those who thought it obscene – notes the difficulty of a non-

phallogocentric text to survive within a patriarchal society, as opposed to the fictitious lesbian work,

which sits upon a shelf in the Oxbridge Library.

Woolf takes a quote from an established socio-politically charged text and reappropriates it

within her own literary work. In the third chapter of A Room of One’s Own, the narrator discusses

man’s opinion of woman, and her role within society. She refers specifically to Mr. Oscar Browning

who stated that ‘the best woman was intellectually inferior of the worst man’, and Mr. Greg, who 54

states that the ‘essentials of a woman’s being […] are that they are supported by, and they minister

to, men’. ‘There was an enormous body of masculine opinion’, states the narrator in relations to 55

Browning’s and Greg’s opinions, ‘to the effect that nothing could be expected of women

intellectually’. However, William Rathbone Greg’s essay, ‘Why are Women Redundant?’, to which

the narrator of Woolf’s text refers, is specifically concerned with female servants, rather than

Gubar, ‘Notes’, p. 137.52

Ibid., p. 138.53

Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, p. 53.54

Ibid.55

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women in general: ‘In a word, they [servants] fulfil both essentials of a woman’s being; they are

supported by, and they minister to men. We could not possibly do without them’. As they are 56

useful to men, female servants are not placed within Greg’s category of ‘redundant’ women. The

majority of ‘redundant’ women in England who would not find husbands were, however, from the

middle- and upper-classes, and presumably able to financially maintain a ‘room of [their] own’.

These unmarried, rich English women, stated Greg, ‘really and deliberately prefer the unsatisfying

pleasures of luxury and splendour to the possible sacrifices of married life’. Due to the fact that 57

there were women whose main aim in life did not revolve around a male, Greg envisioned a life of

‘celibacy, struggle and privation’ for these women, and condemned them to redundancy. The 58

narrator reappropriates Greg’s text to mock not only his own phallocentric ideals, but also the

phallocentric ideals within, and masculinist order of, literary production, against which texts like

The Well of Loneliness, Life’s Adventure, and A Room of One’s Own, all depicting the possibility of

female independence from a male presence, and female autonomy, must work. A Room of One’s

Own is rife with literary allusions, and the cases analysed above, to the ‘Ballad of the Four Marys’,

Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness and ‘Why Are Women Redundant?’ by William Rathbone

Greg, are just a few examples among many. Woolf’s choice of literary allusion allows a deeper

investigation of her core themes, of the relationship between women and fiction, financial

prosperity and artistic production. Furthermore, the allusions to the works of Jane Austen, Emily

Brontë, and Christina Rossetti, signify the existence of a network of female writing, a ‘vision of

interconnectedness […] simultaneously casting light on the workings of aesthetic conceptualisation

and on art’s sociological situation’. 59

Another literary value which may be identified in Virginia Woolf’s work of literary criticism

is her use of imagery. The literary schema is a set of pre-determined elements and expectations

William Rathbone Greg, Why are Women Redundant? (London: Trubner & Co., 1869), p. 23.56

Ibid., p. 21.57

Ibid., p. 17.58

Hutcheon, p. 24.59

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found in an image – by depicting an image, the writer evokes meanings which have been culturally

shaped. The writer may adhere to the link between the schema and its meaning, or disrupt it,

forming a new schema. In the first chapter of Woolf’s extended essay, the narrator delineates the 60

concept of the idea through the schema of the fish; as the narrator is prevented from walking on the

grass, her train of thought is interrupted and ‘they had sent her little fish into hiding’. Later, the 61

narrator once again describes her thinking process in terms of fish and fishing imagery:

Thought – to call it by a prouder name than it deserved – had let its line down into the stream. It swayed, minute after minute, hither and thither among the reflections and the weeds, letting the water lift it and sink it until – you know the little tug – the sudden conglomeration of an idea at the end of one's line: and then the cautious hauling of it in, and the careful laying of it out? Alas, laid on the grass how small, how insignificant this thought of mine looked; the sort of fish that a good fisherman puts back into the water so that it may grow fatter and be one day worth cooking and eating. 62!

By conflating the schema of the idea with the schema of the fish, and the schema of the thinking

process with the schema of fishing, the narrator draws upon the symbolical and mythological

history of the images of the fish and fishing. The narrator places a lot of importance on the fact that

she is depicting a process, that ‘one can only show how one came to hold whatever opinion one

does hold’, making her use of fishing as a symbol for the content of her narrative very apt. In her 63

exploration of the relationship between women and fiction, the narrator searches for a female

literary line in order to inspire her contemporaries and future generations; the fish, according to J. E.

Cirlot’s A Dictionary of Symbols, is ‘a symbol of fecundity, imparting a certain spiritual sense’. It 64

is interesting to point out that in the introductory narrative of A Room of One’s Own, it is a beadle, a

guardian of male knowledge, that prevents the female narrator from obtaining this object of

fecundity. This image is not only symbolic of women’s historical barring from education, but it also

represents the fact that Virginia Woolf’s own education was sacrificed for her brothers’.

Furthermore, the beadle is depicted as following the orders of the college – it is the patriarchal

Stockwell, p. 78.60

Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, p. 6.61

Ibid., p. 5.62

Ibid., p. 4.63

J. E. Cirlot, A Dictionary of Symbols (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 107.64

!15

system, rather than the individual alone, which has suppressed women’s education. Fishing, on the

other hand, allegorises the extraction of ‘the unconscious elements from deep-lying sources – the

‘elusive treasure’ of legend. The narrator must explore the dark waters of female literary heritage 65

in order approach that which she searches for. The lack of women writers (when compared to male

writers) within the literary Canon is a result of political and social prejudices against works written

by women, and these women have remained hidden in historical darkness while their male

equivalents have been illuminated by the discriminating light of literary patriarchy.

There are, of course, other literary aspects of A Room of One’s Own. A very important

element of Woolf’s critical text is her use of satire. The narrator echoes an Austenesque sense of

humour in the oppression of women, one which attacks and subvert the prevailing phallocentric

mode of writing. Furthermore, A Room of One’s Own must be read in conjunction with Virginia

Woolf’s works of fiction in order to gain further insight into her literary criticism and aesthetic. An

analysis of the critical aspects of To the Lighthouse and Orlando, in particular, would work very

well with this analysis of the literary elements of A Room of One’s Own. Woolf’s extended essay is

not unique in its straddling the line between fiction and literary criticism: Maurice Blanchot’s

‘Awaiting Oblivion’ (1962) also uses fictional narrative as a starting point for its literary criticism,

while Time Parks’s collection of essays Adultery and Other Diversions (1999) investigates the

connection between ‘ideas, which have been fixed by mere words, and the real knowledge we have

acquired through perception’ through a memoir-like narrative, akin to what Woolf had done 66

seventy years earlier. Woolf’s unique combination of literary storytelling with literary criticism

produces a relatable and poignant depiction of and meditation upon both the world she inherited and

the world she lived in. Ultimately, the narrator in A Room of One’s Own is hopeful about the

relationship between women and fiction: ‘Moreover, in a hundred years, I thought, reaching my

Cirlot, p. 108.65

Robert Grudin, Reviews of Adultery and Other Diversion: Tales Out of Italy (New York: New York Times 66

Book Review, 1999) <http://tim-parks.com/non-fiction/adultery-and-other-diversions/reviews-of-adultery-and-other-diversions/> [accessed 29 June 2014].

!16

own doorstep, women will have ceased to be the protected sex. Logically they will take part in all

the activities and exertions that were once denied them’. 67

!!

Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, p. 40.67

!17

List of Works Cited: !Academy of American Poets, Poetic Form: Ballad (New York: Academy of American Poets, 2014) <http://

www.poets.org/poetsorg/text/poetic-form-ballad> [accessed 29 June 2014]

Bimberg, C., ‘The Poetics of Conversation in Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own: Constructed

Arbitrariness and Thoughtful Impressionism’, Connotations, 11, 2001/2002. <http://www.connotations.de/

pdf/articles/bimberg01101.pdf> [accessed 29 June 2014]

Black, N., Virginia Woolf as Feminist (New York: Cornell University Press, 2004)

Cirlot, J. E., A Dictionary of Symbols (London: Routledge, 2001)

Ezell, M., ‘The Myth of Judith Shakespeare: Creating the Canon of Women’s Literature’, New Literary

History, 21 (1990), 579–592

Goldman, J., The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006)

Greg, W. R., Why are Women Redundant? (London: Trubner & Co., 1869)

Grice, H., and Tim Woods, ‘I’m Telling You Stories’: Jeanette Winterson and the Politics of Reading

(Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998)

Grudin, R., Reviews of Adultery and Other Diversion: Tales Out of Italy (New York: New York Times Book

Review, 1999) <http://tim-parks.com/non-fiction/adultery-and-other-diversions/reviews-of-adultery-and-

other-diversions/> [accessed 29 June 2014]

Gubar, S., ‘Introduction’, in A Room of One’s Own (New York: Harcourt, Inc., 2005)

Hutcheon, L., A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (London: Routledge, 1988)

Palumbo-Liu, D., The Poetics of Appropriates: The Literary Theory and Practice of Huang Tingjian

(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993)

Stockwell, P., Cognitive Poetics: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 2002)

Woolf, V., A Room of One’s Own (New York: Harcourt, Inc., 2005)

——, Letters of Virginia Woolf, 1932–1935 (New York: Mariner Books, 1982)

——, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 3: 1925-30 (Massachusetts: Mariner Books, 1981)

——, To The Lighthouse (London: Urban Romantics, 2012)

——, Women & Fiction: The Manuscript Versions of A Room of One’s Own (Oxford: Shakespeare Head

Press/Blackwell, 1992)