Virginia Woolf Speech Analysis

The next expressive woman known during the renaissance era was Virginia Woolf. Virginia Woolf was raised in a very educated home with a great privilege to be a freethinking woman. She began writing her own novel very young, and had written many more popular modernist titles such as “To The Lighthouse” and “Mrs. Dalloway.” Woolf had many opportunities available to her that many women of her day were not; she studied many different languages and went to college for four years. Virginia Woolf believed that women had little or no say in their future; she wanted to use her education and social connections to make a voice in the world where women unfortunately had none.

    I chose to compare and contrast two women authors from different literary time periods.  Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861) as a representative of the Victorian age (1832-1901) and Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) as the spokeswoman for the Modernist (1914-1939) mindset.  Being women in historical time periods that did not embrace the talents and gifts of women; they share many of the same issues and themes throughout their works - however, it is the age in which they wrote that shaped their expressions of these themes.  Although they lived only decades apart their worlds were remarkably different - their voices were muted or amplified according to the beat of society's drum.

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.

The life of a lady in the 19th century is painted in a romantic light. Pictured in her parlor, the lady sips tea from delicate china while writing letters with a white feathered quill. Her maid stands silently off in the background, waiting for orders to serve her mistress. What is not typically pictured, is the sadness or boredom echoed on the lady’s face. Perhaps the letter is to a dear friend, not seen in ages, pleading with the friend to visit, in hopes that the friend will fill the void in the lady’s life made from years spent in a loveless marriage; or possiblyk20 the lady isn’t writing a letter at all, but a novel or a poem, never to be read by anyone but her. Edith Warton and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, are 19th Century ladies who dare to share their writing with the world. Through their works, the darker side of a woman’s life in the late 1800’s is exposed. Gender politics in the 19th dictates that a lady is dependent on her husband for her financial security and social standing; that is if she is fortunate enough to marry at all. In Edith Warton’s The House of Mirth, Lily Bart is a beautiful woman in her late 20’s, who fails to marry a wealthy man. The narrator in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper slowly goes insane under her physician husbands misguided attempts to cure her of depression. The downfall of Lily Bart and the narrator of The Yellow Wallpaper is

1. The first essay clearly shows the impact that an ideology of domesticity on women in New England in the 1830’s. The writer at first calls this time period a “paradox in the “progress” of women’s history in the United States”. During this time apparently two contradictory views on women’s relations to society clashed, unusually, those two being domesticity, which essentially limited women, giving them a “sex-specific” role that they must abide to, this mostly being present at the home with their husbands and whatever kids they may or may not have had at that time, and feminism, which essentially tried to remove this domesticity, trying to remove sex-specific limits on women’s opportunities and

Virginia Woolf, an avid woman novelist of the early twentieth century, faced many difficulties on her journey to becoming a successful writer. In her speech, which she delivers to the National Society for Women’s Service, she recounts her experiences as both a newly acquainted journalist and already established professional, all while giving detailed accounts of her struggles with the ghosts of oppression. These personal experiences not only help to establish and defend her credibility, they also serve as a means of developing her perspective on women’s functionality in successful careers. In addition, Woolf utilizes various rhetorical devices, such as the extended metaphor and parallelism, to portray the constant struggles of women in the workforce. She attempts to shed light on what obstructs all social advancement for women – the Victorian ideal of femininity – while encouraging her audience to confront this internal obstacle. Though she intended for her speech to be advice for women in any and all professions who are facing their own internal battles against oppression, Woolf insists her story is only one of many that have yet to be told.

In the second half of the colonial time period in North America, ever-nearing the American Revolution in 1775, there were much fewer roles for women. While they still dealt with and controlled everything having to do with childbirth and the family, their professional lives were downgraded. Their three main jobs were to watch the children, encourage faith in the house, and be subordinate to men (Dunklee 2). As education was becoming slightly more widespread, only men were taking advantage of higher education, meaning they were the ones who would receive the jobs. Even if a lady did happen to be wealthy enough and come from a powerful enough family to get higher education, they were not socially accepted into having jobs. Women were reduced to only having what was seen as small tasks, caretaking, sewing and writing (WIC 2). All of the jobs available were chores to benefit the individual family, not be put out into society. Even the more creative exercises such as writing poetry, were done for the woman’s own benefit as a creative outlet, not as something to be put out into the world as it was for many men (Bloch). The roles available to women had evolved to include very few options, many of which weren’t even to be recognized by

Florence Kelley delivered a speech to the National American Woman Suffrage Association. The reason Florence Kelley delivered this speech was to convince the women of the asscocitation to abolish child labor.

Jane deliberately disobeyed her husband and sought out her wants. Disregarding what others had to say about her strange behavior; Jane proceeded to do what she wanted; to write. Nevertheless, Jane was slightly still submissive towards her husband due to the fact that she hid her journals to prevent displeasing John. Her tiny action that went against John’s morals that was bestowed upon her was the mark of Jane’s awakening. Jane’s awakening had caused a ripple effect on other women; they all began to draw out their inner beings. The conservatives in America could do nothing, but to sit back and watch the changes unfold right in front of them. There was no way out of this change; sooner or later those that degraded the rebellious females would realize that women can and will be much more than those wimpy little wives they were always told to be.

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

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.

For women, the narrator contends, "here begins the freedom of the mind," the possibility that in the course of time one will be able to write whatever one likes. With Mrs. Behn, writing by women cased to be "a sign of folly" and became an activity of practical importance. "Money dignifies what is frivolous if unpaid for" she observes, and Mrs. Behn 's success in the Seventeenth Century led to very many women earning money through writing in the Eighteenth Century.

Throughout the essay, the narrator is very intricate in describing women as a social class. They are generally poor and considered lower class. As a way to describe the money truly needed to write the narrator writes, “Intellectual freedom depends upon material things. Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom. And women have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from the beginning of time . . .” (DeShazer 69). This explains why women write novels and fail to succeed at writing poems. In writing novels, it is easier to compete with interruptions, while poetry must be one straight long shot. With no money, women will be forced to remain second to the males in society. Therefore, the financial discrepancy between men and women at this time only held the myth to be true that women are less successful writers than men.

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

The title of my project is Virginia Woolf as a feminist in reference to Mrs. Dalloway.