A Room Of One's Own By Virginia Woolf

In the excerpt from A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf argues that women writers face unfair educational, financial and social disadvantages. Throughout the excerpt, she hopes to persuade readers that in a patriarchal society, a woman must have privacy and financial independence in order to fulfill her literary potential. To accomplish this goal, Woolf effectively appeals to logos, pathos and ethos; however, her emphasis on establishing credibility most successfully persuades her readers.

Virginia Woolf and Frederick Douglass are two significant writers who suffered from inequalities. Specifically, in, “A Room of One’s Own”, Virginia Woolf focuses on exposing the unequal treatment of women to the eye of the public, and in “A Narrative of the Life of Frederick” Frederick Douglass wrote an autobiography, which revealed the unjust of society toward African Americans and hoped to achieve more rights. Frederick Douglass and Virginia Woolf both lived in a white male dominated society which restricts opportunities for African Americans and women. The severity of their inequities made these two writers dealt with their situations differently. Although aiming to help two unlike groups of individuals, Frederick Douglass and Virginia Woolf

Back in the day almost everyone viewed woman to be the person who cleans, cooks, has children, and obeys her husband. Even woman themselves had this view hammered into their minds at such a young age, the views that women are inferior to men. This stigma of woman can be found traced throughout Virginia Woolf’s essay of two meals, a meal for men and a meal for women at a college. She uses numerous composition techniques and effectively disperses them throughout her narrative. By doing so, she accurately demonstrates her views on society’s stigma of a woman's role in an eloquent manner.

able to get rid of. At the end of the poem Sexton admits the thoughts of suicide are something you can never get rid of, “and yet she waits for me, year after year” (line 25). Sexton justifies the reasons for her suicide by saying that her thoughts and bad memories will never stop coming back because this has been happening for years and years now there is no going back for Sexton. She leaves us with the last stanza filled with unfinished things. This could be a metaphor for her life that is unfinished because of her death occurrence.

Today the equality between men and woman is closer then it ever has before in history, with women CEO’s and stay at home dads. This happened because of the strong woman in history fighting for the same rights as man, private property, creative freedom, and the power to use their intellect. Virginia Woolf is one of those ladies arguing that, “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction." She believes that women are locked in some sort of intellectual prison and not being able to have money or privacy keeps them locked, unable to blossom intellectually.

Few works address the complex lives of women and literature like Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own, an essay that explores the history of women in literature through an investigation of the material and social conditions required for the writing of literature. Woolf, born in 1882, grew up in a time period in which women were only just beginning to gain significant rights. Likewise, the outbreak of WWI left a mark on the world that Woolf lived in and also affected the literary style of many writers at the time. In her essay, Woolf presents two passages that describe two different meals that she receives during two university visits; the first passage describes the first meal that was served at a men's college, while the second passage

Women have been devalued by men for as long as people can remember. In the past, when men were off at war, women had to work jobs and keep business functioning routinely. Filling in the gaps the men left to go off to combat was no trouble for women, but as soon as the men returned, the women had to return to the kitchen. Women are the inferior option, the substitute if the male species were to be wiped out. Women aren’t acknowledged for all they are, nor are they given the same opportunities as men. In the story, “What if Shakespeare had a sister”, Virginia Woolf discusses how incompetently women were regarded in society. Women were dispossessed of all their rights, being nothing more than a housewife, being restricted of their potential. In, “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, is a narrative of a woman being trapped and living in a patriarchal world. In the sonnet “Quincenanera” Judith Ortiz Cofer, discusses a girl growing into a woman who knows she will be treated miserably by society. As portrayed in all these stories, a theme of women being deprived of their rights. Gilman and Cofer both defend Woolf’s assertions about the contradiction of women’s depiction compared to real life because of the expectations of reproductive work, devaluation, repercussions of women being denied of their true freedom, and sexism.

Reading literature, at first, might seem like simple stories. However, in works like William Faulkner's “A Rose for Emily,” Katherine Mansfield's “Miss Brill,” and Kate Chopin's “The Storm,” the female protagonists are examples of how society has oppressive expectations of them simply because of their gender.

Woolf demonstrates how women writers have often failed in this because of our frustration and bitterness with a world that presented to us and our writing not welcome, or even indifference, but hostility (41). She makes it clear that if there is ever going to be a “Shakespeare’s sister,” we must---at least while we are writing---swallow that sense of having been wronged, for it stands as an impediment to our creativity. This is the mental freedom that women writers must attain.

As Mary tries to gather more information to support her argument on the topic of women and fiction, she runs into Professor Von X, the author of a book on the mental, moral, and physical inferiority of women. In the passage from A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf utilizes figurative language, such as metaphor, and historical figures to assert that men need women to be inferior in order to maintain their own sense of superiority.

Woolf supports this claim by focusing on the anonymous writer named “Anon” (anonymous), that we as readers have seen so many times in literature. Could this “Anon” have been a woman, this “Anon” that has written so many poems and ballads? From Woolf’s point of view, “whatever she had written would have been twisted and deformed, issuing from a strained and morbid imagination” (54). She does not reach a conclusion as to the lack of women writers before the 18th century, she can only make assumptions on the time period and enlighten her audience to make sure that women are able to express their creativity without any constraints issued by society.

In her essay “In Search of a Room of One’s Own” Virginia Woolf used Shakespeare’s sister as a metaphor to explain the position of women in Elizabethan era. Since author finds it difficult to find any trace of women in the Elizabethan era, she creates a fictional character through imagination, and to feel situations that the women in Elizabethan society would have had to go through. Woolf compares fiction to a “spider’s web” (520) that permeates life “at all four corners” (520). Through this metaphor, she personifies narratives of women suffering as a spider’s web that cling to our material reality. For Woolf, our lived stories are a part of this web which can be changed, destroyed or, re-spin with our imagination. In my paper, I argue that Wolfe uses the metaphor of a spider’s web as a heuristic device to make a case for literacy analysis and fiction as tools for exercising narrative agency and challenging stories that deny us representation in this world. To illustrate this, she creates an imaginative character, named Judith Shakespeare, to surface the gender inequality in the Elizabethan era. For this purpose, she not only writes a new chapter of Elizabethan history that centers the perspective of the women, but she also gives voice to women of that era who, like Judith her main character, were silenced and delegitimized by the spider’s web of their time.

Through their works, Kate Chopin and Virginia Woolf were able to portray a certain relationship between women and society. While some literary pieces are optimistic towards women, others are not. In this case, The Awakening, a novella written by Kate Chopin, focuses on the inner battle that the main character Edna faces throughout her life. On the other hand, Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, discusses ideas related to gender inequality. Both women seem to be facing inner turmoil that correlates back to the relationship between women and society during these time periods. Ultimately, their experiences are what drives them to change how they fit into societal norms. Therefore, the texts in this essay theorize the relationship between women and society in a way that can be encouraging towards women.

1.It is significant that Woolf’s essay is partly fictional, for it shows her greater knowledge of her writing, as she was a woman herself writing fiction. She does not write completely in non-fictional mode, as to not stay biased to her views and experiences, yet to allow the readers to have an open imagination on where the events that had happened at “Oxbridge” could also take place.

Many female writers see themselves as advocates for other creative females to help find their voice as a woman. Although this may be true, writer Virginia Woolf made her life mission to help women find their voice as a writer, no gender attached. She believed women had the creativity and power to write, not better than men, but as equals. Yet throughout history, women have been neglected in a sense, and Woolf attempted to find them. In her essay, A Room of One’s Own, she focuses on what is meant by connecting the terms, women and fiction. Woolf divided this thought into three categories: what women are like throughout history, women and the fiction they write, and women and the fiction written about them. When one thinks of women and