Analysis of the Position of Women in Woolf's 'A Room of One's Own' and Marmon's 'Yellow Woman'

Virginia Woolf in “A Room of One’s Own” uses the symbolism of a room to express solitude and leisure time. Women were excluded from education and the unequal distribution of wealth. Through this idea, women lack the essential necessities to produce their own creativity. Women wrote out of their own anger and insecurity. Men wrote intellectual passages that were highly praised because a woman could never live up to a man’s expectations in literature due to lack of education.

After reading “Yellow Woman” a sense of mystery is imposed on the readers. The story itself is very short and dreamlike. It is as if there is no beginning to the story. The narrator wakes up on the sand of a river bank next to a man she does not know. The man known as Silva acts very strangely towards her throughout the entire story. He is always laughing and smiling while at the same time forcing the narrator to do what he wants. By the same token, the narrator never puts up any sort of a fight to leave. The Narrator in the story knowingly follows Silva’s every word even knowing deep down she knows that she probably shouldn’t. She uses her time with him as an escape from her own

Many critics might agree that what makes a work of literature great is its attention to detail. Subtleties in a story can truly immerse the reader in its plot and provide a new level of storytelling. This is especially important in the short stories “The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin, “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and “A Jury of Her Peers” by Susan Glaspell. All three stories are notable feminist literary works published between the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. They concentrate on the struggles of women against their own husbands and against society as a whole, in which women in these works dealt with sexism, abuse, repression, and confinement in their forced domestic roles. Uniquely, all three stories also feature their main conflicts within a confined setting, often limited to one or two rooms in a house. While this detail may go unnoticed to some, the specific settings of “The Story of an Hour”; “The Yellow Wallpaper”; and “A Jury of Her Peers” play a role in furthering the theme of the domestic confinement and

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.

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.

In Virginia Woolf’s feminist essay “A Room of One’s Own,” Woolf argues that “a woman must have money and a room of her own” (16) if she is to write fiction of any merit. The point as she develops it is a perceptive one, and far more layered and various in its implications than it might at first seem. But I wonder if perhaps Woolf did not really tap the full power of her thesis. She recognized the necessity of the writer’s financial independence to the birth of great writing, but she failed to discover the true relationship to great writing of another freedom; for just as economic freedom allows one to inhabit a physical space---a room of one’s own---so does mental freedom allow one to inhabit one’s own mind and body “incandescent and

In Virginia Woolf’s short essay, Shakespeare’s Sister (1928), she explores the misogynistic world’s effect on women artists from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century. Depicted through an imaginary sister of Shakespeare, and her own experiences, Woolf explains how “in the nineteenth century a woman was not encouraged to be an artist.” Instead, women were deemed of no value beyond the home or child bearing (Jacobus 702). Such gender issues have emerged in every facet of our society, primarily concentrating on gender equality in areas like education, status, awareness, and availing of socio-economic opportunities. In today’s context, with an overall look at history, in comparison to men, women remain relatively more constrained by

The first major point made by Woolf in A Room of One’s Own is synonymous with the essay’s thesis. Woolf first introduces this theme in the beginning of her essay: “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction” (4). The concept of a woman needing to possess finances and an individual space is recurrent throughout the book. To Woolf, this idea is tantamount to obtaining freedom. During the era in which Woolf lived and set A Room of One’s Own, women faced various limitations that stripped them of their ability to find true creative liberation. With so much of their time spent in the house and no access to finances, women struggled to find separation from the home. Thus, Woolf’s emphasis on money and a room symbolizes the separation and freedom

The comparative study of texts and their appropriations reflect the context and values of their times, demonstrating how context plays a significant role. Virginia Woolf’s novel modernists Mrs Dalloway (1925) and Steven Daldry’s post modernists film The Hours (2002), an extrapolation, explore the rapid change of social and philosophical paradigms of the 20th century, focusing on women whose rich inner lives are juxtaposed with their outer lives. They place the characters in their respective context, to respond to, the horrors of the consequences of war and AIDS and the vagaries and difficulties of relationships, sexuality and mental illness. Through their differing intertextual perspectives the film and novel represent similar values, within different contextual concerns.

Throughout Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf uses the characters Clarissa and Lucrezia not only to further the plot of the story but to make a profound statement about the role of wives in both society and their marriages. While these women are subjected to differing experiences in their marriages, there is one common thread that unites each of their marriages: oppression. These women drive the story of Mrs. Dalloway and provide meaning and reason in the lives of the men in the story; however, these women are slowly but surely forced to forsake their own ambitions in order to act in accordance with the social standards set in place by marriage for women. For women outside of many modern cultures, marriage has been a necessity for a woman’s safety and security, and it required her to give up her freedom and passions and subjected her to an oppressed lifestyle. Ultimately, through the wives in Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf communicates that marriage is an institution where in women are forced to suppress their individual desires and passions in order to serve their husband and further his own ambitions as first priority.

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.

A room of one’s own is based in the format of a lecture at a women’s college on the topic of women and fiction. Woolf bases her essay around the thesis that “women need money and a room of their own in order to write fiction”. Characters such as Mary Beton, Mary Carmichael, and Mary Seton are used as imaginary narrators, whom of which are grappling the same topic as Woolf. The narrator uses Oxbridge and various libraries to reflect on different educational experiences available to men and women. At Oxbridge the narrator focuses on the material differences, while in a British library the narrator concentrates on the matter in which women are written about. The British library proves to show the topic of women are written by men and with

Woolf through these instances tried to emphasize the necessity of a private room for a woman writer where she can focus all her energies on her writings without any interruptions from the outside world. The essay not only focuses on feminism but also on women who have not been able to realize their true potential because of the lack of money and privacy. In her essay, Virginia Woolf has tried to focus on the need for a woman to have money, a room and privacy just like men at that point of time had, to write fiction. She is, in a way, asking for equal rights for women as men. She also points out that women who write fiction should not copy men’s style because everybody has different style and hence women will not be able to bear the weight of a man’s style of

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

For centuries women have been forced into a role which denied them equal opportunities. Virginia Woolf expresses her frustration on why women were denied privacy in her novel, A Room of One’s Own. Woolf compares the traditional lifestyle tailored made for the opposite sex and the sacrifices that came with it. Women are limited intellectually as to not interfere with their domesticated duties. Even having the same desires for activities and education as men, a women’s place was not allowed in the man’s world.