Explain the title of Virginia Woolf's book
Virginia Woolf’s extended essay, A Room of One’s Own, based on a series of lectures she delivered in 1928, discusses how women were treated unequally in the society which led them to not producing great works of fiction. The essay attempts to unravel the complex relationship between women and works of fiction. It’s based on the main theme that, “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction” (Woolf 3). In this paper, I will discuss how Woolf’s room functions as a device, in both a literal and a metaphorical way, to provide a solution to the historical problem of how women find it more difficult to write fiction than men. The …show more content…
The economic privilege would mean that a woman can possess a room where she could have the privacy to write about what is important to her. This is also interlinked with the other part of the thesis, which states that it is essential for a woman writer to possess money. Woolf goes on to explain how access to money plays out differently in case of male writers and female writers. She explains how financially stable women are not necessarily financially independent, as they depend upon their fathers goodwill to acquire even the smallest amounts of money. Woolf gives the examples of poor male writers such as Keats, Tennyson and Carlyle, to show how even they manage to find a way around social problems by looking at society’s reaction to such men as an indifference towards their writing, while women depending upon a man for their income are viewed with hostility and disdain if they choose to write. Woolf illustrates this using the example of Aphra Behn, a middle class woman who began to write for a living after her husband’s death. Society viewed her with disdain and used her as an example to discourage young girls who wanted to write. Nevertheless, Behn continued writing, thus setting an important precedent for middle class women in the future who wanted to pursue writing. This shows us the need for a societal recognition of women as individuals by themselves instead of a view of them that is determined by the men around them. Identifying privacy as directly linked to dignity, Woolf ties this literal understanding of the “room” to the idea of women’s need for agency over their own lives through an exclusive physical space that allows them to exercise control and make independent
Virginia Woolf’s extended essay, A Room of One’s Own, based on a series of lectures she delivered in 1928, discusses how women were treated unequally in the society which led them to not producing great works of fiction. The essay attempts to unravel the complex relationship between women and works of fiction. It’s based on the main theme that, “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction” (Woolf 3). In this paper, I will discuss how Woolf’s room functions as a device, in both a literal and a metaphorical way, to provide a solution to the historical problem of how women find it more difficult to write fiction than men. The …show more content…
The economic privilege would mean that a woman can possess a room where she could have the privacy to write about what is important to her. This is also interlinked with the other part of the thesis, which states that it is essential for a woman writer to possess money. Woolf goes on to explain how access to money plays out differently in case of male writers and female writers. She explains how financially stable women are not necessarily financially independent, as they depend upon their fathers goodwill to acquire even the smallest amounts of money. Woolf gives the examples of poor male writers such as Keats, Tennyson and Carlyle, to show how even they manage to find a way around social problems by looking at society’s reaction to such men as an indifference towards their writing, while women depending upon a man for their income are viewed with hostility and disdain if they choose to write. Woolf illustrates this using the example of Aphra Behn, a middle class woman who began to write for a living after her husband’s death. Society viewed her with disdain and used her as an example to discourage young girls who wanted to write. Nevertheless, Behn continued writing, thus setting an important precedent for middle class women in the future who wanted to pursue writing. This shows us the need for a societal recognition of women as individuals by themselves instead of a view of them that is determined by the men around them. Identifying privacy as directly linked to dignity, Woolf ties this literal understanding of the “room” to the idea of women’s need for agency over their own lives through an exclusive physical space that allows them to exercise control and make independent