How Does Virginia Woolf Use Figurative Language

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.

In her memoir, Virginia Woolf discusses a valuable lesson learned during her childhood fishing trips in Cornwall, England. To convey the significance of past moments, Woolf incorporates detailed figurative language and a variety of syntax into her writing. Woolf communicates an appreciative tone of the past to the audience, emphasizing its lasting impact on her life.

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.

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.

American Literature has always been about men and for men. In this essay, we are going to analyze the women’s role in the book, as inferior and weaker gender.

This subsequently allows audiences to understand the role of gender inequality in society and how it has historically permeated into literature. However, Atwood later acknowledges the restricting role feminism also played in the depiction of female characters in more modern literature. Atwood uses hypophora in order to direct the audience, “is it not today - well somehow unfeminist - to depict a woman behaving so badly? Isn’t bad behaviour supposed to be the monopoly of men?”, “Were women to be condemned to virtue for life, slaves in the salt-mines of goodness?”. This continued use of questioning catalyses a reflection upon the ironic idea that feminism, a movement created to equal the sexes, has supported a similar one-dimensional view of women as being solely good. In doing so Atwood ultimately challenges the audience’s view upon how female characters should be represented within literature, ultimately arguing for a barrierless approach which enables writers to explore the complex nature of female

The classic feminist essay A Room of One’s Own, written by Virginia Woolf, was first published on October 24th, 1929 by the Hogarth Press in England, and by Harcourt Brace & Co. in the United States in a time that desperately needed such a work. Woolf’s commentary sparked much debate in the literary world, as it concerns not only the struggles of women in fiction, and how they are systematically oppressed in a field dominated by men, but also the general inequality demonstrated by a patriarchal society. This dissertation, though relevant and groundbreaking during the time it was written, has lost a majority of its persuasiveness and power in a modern society that is far more likely to embrace women in fiction. Due to an ever changing civilization, Woolf’s novel no longer possesses much cutting edge, and is thus deemed irrelevant, a word practically synonymous with boring today.

For the most part, society’s conception of women in the 19th century influenced the portrayal of female characters in writing generated during that time. The Cult of Domesticity claimed that true womanhood was marked by a natural inclination to domesticity and submissiveness. All women were thought to be weak, and writers often wrote off their female characters succumbing to their “natural” weakness by death or suicide, a result of their inability to handle life’s trials and tribulations.

Initially being lectures delivered at a female college in 1928, Woolf’s essay on ‘women and fiction’ questions the oppression of women under the patriarchal society and their objectification by men, as reflected when “women have served all these centuries as looking-glass possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size,” hence metaphorically emphasizing women’s inferiority and their societal class. Taking away this ‘mirror’, the “man may die, like drug fiend deprived of his cocaine,” in which the simile highlights and reinforces the societal expectations of women as ‘looking-glasses’ to give the male gender a sense of superiority, a crucial acquisition of their lives. These relevant and engaging ideas on gender inequality certainly provokes responses from the audience, as Rachel Bowlby, a professor at University College London, remarks that “men’s college dining, halfway to heaven; women’s college dining, one star.” These disparities even in the food consumed by the differing genders are reflected in the men’s luncheon as highlighted by the highly descriptive language and layering in “whitest cream… partridges, many and various… their sprouts foliated as rosebuds but more succulent.” This is juxtaposed with the women’s diet “Dinner was ready. Here was the soup. It was a plain gravy soup,” the shorts sentences as well as the dull descriptions elucidates the gender disparities. Thus, personally, Bowlby clearly summarises Woolf’s ideas of patriarchy and gender inequality. Through the exploration of these timeless ideas, Woolf portrays the social and historical context of her

In Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, Woolf contemplates the root of her anger sketch of the professor, Woolf describes, “It referred me unmistakably to the one book, to the one phrase, which had roused the demon; it was the professor’s statement about the mental, moral and physical inferiority of women. My heart had leapt. My cheeks had burnt. I had flushed with anger,” (32). I would usually consider myself a fairly mild-mannered person, it usually took a lot to get me to the state of anger that Woolf describes when remembering the professor’s statement about the inferiority of women. However, there was one particular incident this year that changed all of that. Deciding to brave my fear of needles and general dislike of pain or discomfort,

In discussions of Virginia Woolf’s essay, “Shakespeare’s Sister,” one controversial issue has been whether her metaphor on women needing “a room of one’s own” is valid and relevant. On the one hand, some argue that women are independent enough today to have no desire of a room of their own. On the other hand, others contend that Woolf’s metaphor holds no meaningful value. My own view is that Woolf’s ideas about women needing a room of their own are valid and are still relevant because of how deeply sexism negatively affects our social climate by constantly putting down women.

A Room of One’s Own is an essay written by writer Virginia Woolf in 1929. The essay follows a persona Woolf creates, Mary, in her thought process to conclude that in order to write fiction, a woman needs money and a room of ones own, both of which women did not have at the time. A Room of One’s Own is a very detailed piece and requires several readings from different angles to draw out all sorts of information. Throughout this essay, I hope to examine a few of those viewpoints and explore the possible meanings of the title ‘A Room of One’s Own’.

Woolf's thesis is that "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction." These are the basic material and social conditions in which achievement becomes possible (Roseman 17). She hopes to settle the problem of women and fiction objectively, rejecting that women are naturally inferior to men. Woolf frequently returns to the material details of the situations: the food that was eaten, money that was spent, comfort of the

The way one person perceives the world is not always the way another perceives, just as a reflection shows a person but reflected backwards. The mirror does not create falsehood; it instead shows the views of every side. Every person is going to see something different when looking into the mirror depending on where they stand. When Virginia Woolf writes she tells the world of an idea everybody can relate to. She writes on women and men and shows how they related through the mirror. Sometimes to empower and others to educate those that don’t have that view point or understand. She writes both the common and uncommon views and shows how they both stand together in one mirror. Two text which reflect two Ideas through the mirror to show the world are Professions for Women and Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid.

The narrator returns home disappointed that she hasn't found some piece of truth to explain the poverty that women don’t share with men. Woolf thinks she needs a historian to describe the conditions of women through history. Compared to men, woman’s lives seem non-existent. She describes fiction as being connected to life but as careful as a spider-web and, in