Virginia Woolf Women

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.

Virginia Woolf , a feminist in the 1920’s, writes two passages based on meals she has at two different colleges. One of the schools is an exclusively male college; the other an exclusively female college. Woolf depicts the inequalities between meals at male and female institutes to expose the injustice women faced in that time. At the men’s college the meal-parallelling their higher status- was quite an exorbitant occasion. They had “partridges many and various” to eat that evening.

To begin, one notable difference between the two authors’ perspective is that Woolf does not include her immediate surroundings. She excludes

Woolf’s essay ends with the moth giving up trying to live as it perishes. She builds up at the ending by appealing to human emotions or pathos by developing a depressing tone. She writes, “He was trying to resume his dancing, but seemed either so stiff or so awkward that he could only flutter to the bottom of the windowpane..” Here the audience can see how

Throughout her essay, Woolf never once describes to us her immediate surroundings. By describing only what is outside, Woolf isolates herself from the rest of the world, instead of embracing it as Dillard did. She is chiefly concerned with describing where she isn't. Her focus is on the world outside of her window. She describes the field that is being plowed, the black, net-like flock of birds flying together. These images engender a rather unpleasant feeling of dreariness.

The men’s meal is one that leaves Woolf feeling as though “we are all going to heaven. She lists off the potatoes being thin as coins, sprouts “foliated as rosebuds”, and pudding so good that if it were otherwise related to “rice and tapioca” would be nothing less than completely downgrading. The “luncheon party” was so proper that them speaking of what was being eaten was unacceptable. The men were greeted with things such as serving men and cushioned window seats for they are considered to be the most vital in their society. Their attitude was nothing less then snobbish for they were made to feel so high. Treated inferior to woman, and they sought to believe it themselves.

The differences between men’s and women’s colleges were considerable in Virginia Woolf’s day. Rather than proclaim this in an ordinary way, Woolf uses the separate meals served at each college to illustrate the differences between the schools. Woolf makes a far more forceful, thoughtful distinction between the male and female schools through such contrast than if she had simply numbered their variations. Woolf details the relative poverty of the women’s school, and therefore women’s position in society, through varied sentence structure, expression and imagery between the descriptions of the meals. Virginia Woolf uses different structures in each passage to portray the judgement within the educational system to expose this part of society.

The theme of Woolf's essay places emphasis on the fact that women need money and a room of one's own to write successfully. Woolf's description of a man's meal and a woman's meal address the issue of material resources that women often lack. By using literary elements such as sentence length, figurative language, and diction, Woolf succeeds in presenting the financial and material differences between men and women. Woolf leaves little doubt about her views and convictions and establishes a theme about women that will be

“ The coffee was very slow … until Mr Whitbread had finished ... Hugh was so very slow” the agonising sense of immediacy both draws our attention back to clock time whilst allowing us to delve into Clarissa’s past as she recalls that Hugh is always so absurdly slow. As reality is blurred in psychological time, external time punctuates the novel “There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical, then the hour, irrevocable” this reminds the reader that this story is in fact occurring in a single day and every event experienced outside of this timeframe is a figment of a characters memory. Woolf makes these memories the focus of the novel rather than external time to create a mobile reality where she fabricates the sense of movement by traversing time through the consciousness of her characters. These memories therefore are from a specific point of view and therefore exclude some properties of the remembered moment and parts of said reality may simply be “dissolved in the air” as the memory fades with ongoing time.

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.

While Woolf makes very good points throughout her essay based many interesting points, one cannot help

Woolf writes about life for women during that time period. She herself being a woman, found it hard to get her work to become public. During that time women are seen as property and that they must follow social norms. Things such as obeying her husband and waiting to be allowed to speak(if she were allowed to speak) were “just how things are done”. In society women are looked down on and seen as things or property rather than people who have feelings,

In the novel Mrs Dalloway, Woolf conveys her perspective, as she finely examines and critiques the traditional gender roles of women in a changing post-war society. Woolf characterisation of Clarissa Dalloway in a non linear structure, presents a critical portrayal of the existing class structure through modernist’s eyes. Titling her novel as Mrs Dalloway presents Clarissa’s marriage as a central focus of her life, drawing attention to how a women’s identity is defined by marriage. Despite the changing role of women throughout the 1920s, for married women life was the same post war. Clarissa experiences ‘the oddest sense of being herself invisible…that is being Mrs Dalloway…this being Richard Dalloway,”

of Woolf’s essay. Though her thesis is confined to fiction and does not extend into any

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.