Virginia Woolf Rhetorical Analysis

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.

Yet, in this presentation of logic, there is a great deal of pathos tied in as well. Women have fought hard for the right to have their own place to live and here she recognizes the tremendous achievement that they have won for themselves, while not downplaying the obstacles that they are yet to face. Virginia Woolf uses all three appeals and often ties them together to better get her point across.

Eavan Boland’s poem “It’s a Woman’s World” illuminates the fact that history has shaped an unfair role for women in today’s society. Boland criticizes the gender bias with regards to the limitations placed on women and their job choices despite their ability to be just as successful in the workplace as men. Regardless of the fact that the bias against women in the workplace is often overlooked, Boland aims to show the shared reaction of women to the gender bias prevalent in our society by using short sentence fragments, repetition, and a fire motif throughout the poem.

Women have long been fighting for their right to be seen as equal to men. Even to this day, women continue to fight for their rights, things such as the right to non-gender discriminatory wages. While there may be some arguments over the state of gender equality in the modern world, it is undeniable that there have been great strides made toward recognizing the female 's worth in the workforce and as a human being. Despite these strides, however, things are still not yet ideal for women and many of the issues females face today are the very same issues that have been plaguing them for decades. While it is unfortunate the oppression of women has been so long-lived, the length of that exposure has thankfully enabled many talented writers to both lament over the fact and emphasize the need for gender equality.

In Virginia Woolf’s speech “Professions for Women”, it employs various techniques in order to get her argument across. Throughout the speech Virginia Woolf brings forward a problem that is still relevant today: gender inequality. Woolf’s combination brings of extended metaphors, irony, vivid imagery, anaphora and repetition emphasizes her philosophical ideal of supporting gender equality.

Surely, she craved to write—meaning to work here—endangered her husband’s position as an authority. He would not have control any longer toward the narrator—his wife. In the 19th century upper class and middle class women were not expected to earn their own living. Women rarely had careers and most professions refused entry to women. In the middle of the 19th century it was virtually impossible for women to become doctors, engineers, architects, accountants or bankers. After a long struggle the medical profession allowed women to become doctors. It was not until 1910 that women were allowed to become accountants and bankers. However, there were still no women diplomats, barristers or judges. Women were allowed to become teachers majority of women became teaches but this was also a low paying job.

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

In the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries, women’s rights was a hot topic. Virginia Woolf and Alice Walker are two women with two views that somewhat agree about this topic, with the goal of finding a way to use the limited resources that they have for the good of others. They particularly use women of their time period as the major examples in their essays. But it all comes down to this. Walker in her essay “In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens” agrees with Woolf that women’s abilities were scarce and that we need to look harder for their contributions, along with challenging Woolf’s writing of “In Search of a Room of One’s Own” that women in her day were able to use them more efficiently than in Woolf’s day in her mother’s garden.

“Professions for Women” spoken by Virginia Woolf  delivers a message to women that it is not hard to get a job and earn pay without disrupting the “family purse” and the “family peace”. Women getting a job would add to the “family purse” along with the men’s money and disrupting the “family peace” would happen if the woman wasn’t in the house to cook, clean, or raise the children. Woolf tells her audience that being a woman with a job, hardships will come,

In this essay I will examine the ideas behind women’s unequal portrayal, and the struggle for identity of female writers.

Virginia Woolf is considered one of the acknowledged avant–gardes of the 20th century. She is an English writer, a novelist, an author, and a publisher. Woolf is well – known for her unique writing style in her novels and essays. Although her misery at a young age, she insisted on continuing her education and becoming a writer. Unfortunately, she ended her life by committing suicide. Virginia’s works made a controversy around her even after her death which is still going in the 21st century ; being related to feminism. In this essay, more focus is put on Woolf through her life, literary works, and the controversial opinions about her.

As an upper-class woman herself, she is not addressing the state of middle or lower class women as we have seen with Gilman and Martineau respectively. She furthermore implied that the only work worthy of pursuing is "one of the liberally endowed professions" (Woolf 21). "We might have been exploring or writing; mooning about the venerable places of the earth; sitting contemplative on the steps of the Parthenon, or going at ten to an office and coming home...to write a little poetry" (21). These tasks of writing, history, or poetry are the tasks that Woolf sees fit to pursue and as such her discussion will always be somewhat slanted in that direction.

Approaching the Womens Service League (mostly professional women as well), that was a clever move to gain their respect through humility. Once that kind of mood was set she probably gained the attention of the audience and was able to convey the message from her speech so the other women could actually adhere her message. Woolf shares her own personal relations of her parents and how “the man she marries would be as worthy of her as she to him”. “They were to be equal partners”, this only a dream many women during the Victorian and Modernist era dreamed of. The subjects that were spoken throughout the speech were relatable to each women, almost as a piece of her was given to the women through her words. From the disconnection and attraction to her husband, to the sexual abuse from one of her step brothers, in my opinion she opened the assurance that it was okay for women to talk about the things they had been so long silenced to. The speech gave me the outlook that women needed to be fulfilled with their life instead of sex symbols, motherly figures, and Susie homemakers. To me Virginia Wolf was saying it is up to us to change our lives by giving up the “angel” that lingers around over homes, personalities and over all perception of how and what our lives should be. Not literally killing the Victorian angel but considering all the capabilities that the modernist era had to offer; a more

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