A Room Of One's Own: A Virginia Woolf Analysis

In A Room Of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf dissects a woman’s role in literature as writers, as well as fictional characters. Despite the belief that only male artists existed before her time, Woolf gave this speech to explain why she believed the truth was much more complex.

Woolf begins by discussing how female characters are portrayed in fiction, as objects to be admired by the male protagonist yet never heard. Women have been romanticized as the subjects of countless stories and poems since the dawn of time. But off paper, the women who inspired these works of fiction were unseen slaves to their husbands who likely were not educated enough to read their writing. In the years preceding Woolf, women did not have access to education at the level their male peers did. With the exception of the upper-class, most women did not have the resources to reach their potential as female writers.

Woolf goes on to discuss the tragedy of being a female genius both in her time, and the Elizabethan era. Though these women were not published and praised like any male intellectual, these women did exist. Woolf believed that “this poet who never wrote a word and was buried at the crossroads still lives,” (11) despite never having a chance to have their work recognized. While many tend to believe there were very few female writers in the past, Woolf believed they existed in silence. They were denied a platform to have their works published and supported because it was considered taboo.

In her description of Shakespeare’s fictional sister, Woolf truly illustrated the fate of so many talented women of past eras. While men were handed education, work, and respect of everyone around them, a woman could fight her whole life and never have the same results as her male cohorts. No matter what a woman wanted for herself, she was forced to become a child-bearing housewife for her husband by the age of 21. Any sign of retaliation could result in an act of violence that would further push her into solitude and oppression. Woolf wrote that this female writer or artist “lives in you and in me, and in many other women who are not here tonight, for they are washing up the dishes and putting the children to bed” (11). She acknowledged that while many female creatives were suffocated by men and society as a whole, these geniuses existed and wrote all about it.

Works cited

Woolf, Virginia; A Room of One’s Own. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. 1929.

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