Talking about Virginia Woolf, I am always haunted by the image of Nicole Kidman with a fake nose in THE HOURS. Since young, I have always heard people referring her as a feminist and a symbolic icon of stream of consciousness. However, reading the book, seeing the words directly by my own did actually changed my idea about her and also of the feminism and the stream of consciousness.
The first chapter of the book acts like a prelude which gives almost no clue but to throw out some topics and questions followed. I was informed clearly at the very beginning that the main subject to be discussed in this book would be WOMEN AND FICTION, but after following Woolf around the campus, the luncheon table and the unwelcoming library, casually, I got nearly distracted from the thesis. I said to myself this was what stream of consciousness should be like: roaming around and writing down anything that occurred to one which was relatively easier for the narrator to tell than for the readers to follow. I enjoyed the random and freedom of her mind but I have to admit that this is the toughest part for reading throughout the book, because I got frequently worried that either we were doing something meaningless or I missed the whole point.
“The scene, if I may ask you to follow me, was now changed. The leaves were still falling, but in London now, not Oxbridge;” since the moment Woolf got herself a pencil and a notebook and sat in the British Museum, everything began to make sense. This very stream of consciousness led me freely and clearly through the history, or maybe Woolf would prefer the word “hertory”, from the Shakespearian time to her own age focusing on WOMEN AND FICTION. It is very interesting indeed to witness the process of reaching an epiphany through a seemingly unpurposed development. For example, Woolf might first sense the “heat” in some male writers’ books towards women which she later realized as anger. She then automatically went search for the reason of this anger and she found that male needed this emotion to demonstrate their superiority which supported their illusion of confidence. If she stopped here, she might be buried in the sea of radical feminists of that age. While the fact was that she was endowed with 500 pounds a year and a room of her own, “Therefore not merely do effort and labour cease, but also hatred and bitterness.” She adopted the new attitude towards the other half of human race that “They are driven by instincts which are not within their control”. Simultaneously, she let go of her own prejudice and grudge against male.
This kind of quality can be found all through the book and thereby Woolf interpreted what “androgynous” stands for: the perfect state of mind should not be dominated by his or her own sexual limits, but to transcend this monopoly of gender can one truly achieve greatness. Virginia Woolf is a lucky woman. She stood at the tipping point of the history of both feminism and female fiction creation. She pointed out herself that it is impossible for feminists or female writers of initial stage to jump out of the circle of grievance and to truly create with peace because of their limits in education, social status and a series of complex circumstances. And it’s also not very likely to create a great piece if one has no predecessors to refer to. These limits and difficulties got exactly moderated at the age of Woolf, when a woman was allowed some say in literature, science and even politics while the society in general was still under the impression of patriarchy. She still struggled for equality but in a more liberal way which no longer advocates overwhelmingness upon the other gender. She still wrote novels but she had already compared Jane Austin with Shakespeare and came to realize the importance of writing man-womanly or woman-manly. What’s more, she got a room of her own which to my understanding, symbolizes the freedom from certain chores and toil of mundane life, thus enabling one to get rid of all the bias caused by personal bitterness and to view the world from a higher and vaster level.
But Woolf never seemed able to find the real peace in this kind of intensive search. Though she filled the pages with her splendid imagination (e.g. the story of Shakespeare’s sister) and her light-hearted humor, I can sense the doom that her talents and her ideas would be finally beyond her body and beyond the times. I’m saying this partly because I have been spoiled about her life story and ever since I read this book, I have never been able to review THE HOURS with a dry eye. The melancholy, indifference and tranquility of the appearance and the searching, asking and struggling beneath it together built the complete image of Virginia Woolf, which touches me profoundly. Allow me to end this with the lines she said to her dearest at the railway station of Richmond:
“I choose not the suffocating anesthetic of the suburbs but the violent jolt of the capital. That is my choice. The meanest patient, even the very lowest is allowed some say in the matter of her own prescription. Thereby she defines her humanity. You cannot find peace by avoiding life, Leonard.”
In a nut shell, A room of one’s own reveals a truth that if women yearn for independence of thought to work on the cultural field, they must get economic independence and a quiet, distraction-free space as a prerequisite.
In effect, no matter in economic, political, or educational field, women have always been struggling. And in this master piece, Virginia Woolf amplifies the reasons, obstacles as well as objects of Women’s struggling.
Today, I’m going to explore the a new panorama that in today’s society, whether those obstacles still exist; how much the situation has improved; how many objects have been realized and how far we are to the true equal and harmonious society.
Economy
Dating back to the old days, women were grinded by poverty for they owned neither property nor the permission to earn it and they were the property of their husbands. According to Virginia Woolf, after the year 1880,a married woman was allowed by law to possess her property and many professions were open to them. Nowadays, women were able to make a living by themselves freely. But don’t forget gender discrimination never vanishes and a great number of unfair treatments have always been keeping women from exerting their potentials. A survey conducted by CUPL (China University of Political Science and Law) in 2010, gender discrimination reached as high as 68.98% among all employment discriminations. Modern as Face book, female workers are looked down upon and suffer from sexual harassment. Let alone the widening gender pay gap. In a word, the more economic independence women can get, the more obstacles they face.
Marriage and family
As we know, in the old days, engagement was often decided when or before a girl was in a cradle. What’s worse, “wife beating was a recognized right of a man. A woman never had her own space for her life was constrained by her children and husband. Though the situation was much better today, in many backward regions where the ghost of feudal thought are still haunting, women are still not allowed to choose their own husband and become the biggest victims of domestic violence and sexual abuse. Even the family of Li yang, which was reckoned an outstanding model of international family, broke up due to family violence. And his wife, Kim, who loved him the most, yet was hurt the most. Besides, the traditional dross like son preference drives women to a dead end. That’s why the Japanese Crown Princess Masako(雅子), a promising young diplomat graduated from Harvard and Oxford, is reduced to “a prisoner of the Chrysanthemum Throne” (a book written by Australian reporter Ben Hills). Moreover, in many countries, women are meant to be “the angle in the houses” (from Woolf) once they get married. It seems, oddly enough, that the tender women are, the bitterer they become.
Literature and education
Cats do not go to heaven, women can not write the plays of Shakespeare. That’s what indicated by a bishop in the age of Virginia Woolf. Sadly, she could not help thinking he was right. To amplify her ideas, she assumed that Shakespeare had “a wonderfully gifted sister”, who escaped marriage and took the road to London. But after suffering from a series of torture, she killed herself. She was pulled asunder by her own talents and the external pressure that she had no other ways but end her days. As a new day dawns, women began to get formal education and freedom to write gradually. Nevertheless, she couldn’t enter the library alone or walk on the turf where only the fellows and scholars were allowed. Now the situation has improved dramatically. In the world of literature, women can write whatever they want (to some degree). But who can feel the unwillingness when poor Joanne Rowling was demanded to change her name as J.K Rowling so as to attract the young boy readers? Similarly, in school, women even perform better than men in some fields. But they also make more sacrifices.
According to a piece of news on Guangzhou daily, in 2013, among 112 universities of 211 project, 81 of them set gender restriction when recruiting students. Of course the requirements vary from professions, but a professor admitted that the university has to cater for the needs of the market, which means as a whole, girls have to put in more efforts than boys to get the equality. Let alone some girls who don’t have the opportunity to study in some poor regions. “Life for both sexes is arduous, difficult, a perpetual struggle.”(from Woolf). It is really a shameful fact that the changes the society has, the more sacrifices women have to make while men just be themselves as always.
Politics
Since 1919 when women in Britain were given a vote, women around the world have participated in political affairs actively. And we are always delighted at the news when another woman president was elected. However, there’s no doubt that we are still living in a patriarchy society. Woolf said even the most transient visitors to this planet could not fail to be aware of this fact once they read the newspaper. “That was the newspaper in your times!” I thought to myself. But when I picked up the paper beside me, I was astonished. A ribbon of very large letters ran across the page. In Iran, a council woman was disqualified for she’s too pretty. What a moral action!
The truth is that the patriarchs disdain to share power with a young woman and will definitely not allow any new power to invade their own land or even harm their own vested interest. By contrast, Australia named the sexist male politician. And the Ukrainian heavy-weight boxing champion has decided to run for president. What an ironic comparison! It is true that women have taken a great leap in the political stage. But actually it’s just a small step compared to men who can do whatever they want in their own land. Not to mention some backward regions where women’s basic rights and safety can’t be guaranteed.
The truth revealed by Woolf still applies to today’s world that even they should not be rivals, the more rights women strive for themselves, the much angrier men get.
Conclusion
Women never give up or give in! Their firm inner fiber is passed on from generation to generation. Times have witnessed their struggle. Now, space woman, woman entrepreneur, woman president are not unfamiliar. It is women’s perseverance that creates their own success. But in the daily competition, women still lose out and that the playing field is far from equal. The thought that women are inferior to men have been deeply for thousands of years. Changes are proceeding but there’s still more to do before we see fully equality.
Virginia Woolf said her hope was not to prove that women are superior to men but embrace a whole new world where men and women are equal and coordinate harmoniously. In other words, women are struggling not only for themselves but also for the whole society. Today, under considerable strain of modern competition, this campaign is calling for our concerted efforts!
Therefore, the slogan should be changed to “the society is struggling!”
Unreachable sensibility perched on the foundation of profundities and wisdom,yet bearing the burden of such a soul too intricate and delicate to act as if balanced and sometimes seemed to be stuck in predicament.Words flowed in a touching integrity language without one single blot,like a lyric manifesto in prose but not a bit prosaical style,and in rhythmical order.One that should not only be admired,looked upon to,saluted in rhapsodical praise,but not ever be enough to lived with.It’s for certain the sort of writing that surfacing from the fountain of perpetual life,churning up even an amateur’s mind.A rational outburst for those anonymous forerunners who had rummaged for ages getting almost nothing except sneers from outside,bitterness inside.Their endeavor vapored,fleshes rotted,for instance, see Shakespeare’s sister:
She died young——alas,she never wrote a word.She lied buried where the omnibuses now stop opposite the Elephant and Castle.
However:
Now my belief is that this poet who never wrote a word and was buried at the cross-roads still lives…for great poets do not die;they are continuing presences;they need only the opportunity to walk among us in flesh.
We ‘re in debt to those martyrs,soaking in immense privilege while lacking the sense of where it stemed from.
As the line goes:
But I maintain that she would come if we worked for her,and that so to work,even in poverty and obscurity,is worth while.
And that’s all be asked for,just a room of one’s own,as simple as it is,but makes peroration and eloquence wordless.
A Room of One’s Own is one of Virginia Woolf’s non-fictions. It has been attached with great importance, compared with others of the same kind, mostly because of its feminist awareness. The famous “sister of Shakespeare”, Judith, is a movingly strong support for the main argument, “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction” (Woolf 7). Maybe because this striking theme overshadows A Room of One’s Own as a piece of literary work, not so many people have made an effort to examine the text itself. This is a pity. The conversation-like writing style in such an argumentative writing is quite noteworthy as well.
A conversation-like writing style in an argumentative essay involves debates between the affirmative side and the negative side, as well as the whole process of deduction. The debates, in this book, happen mainly in the narrator’s thinking, as she occasionally challenges her own beliefs and then defends them. The unusually detailed and honest records of the flows of thought make the essay easy to follow and pleasant to read.
One merit is the heightened credibility as a result of a thorough examination of the argument. Too many details may result in redundancy sometimes; yet as here the writing style is practiced by a reasonable writer (namely, Woolf), the effect is quite the opposite. Although Woolf shifts her attention from one to another frequently, the argument within a subtopic is complete and convincing because of the faithful records of her thinking. For instance, in chapter five of A Room of One’s Own, the narrator actually drifts away from the “Room Theory”, but aims at a less relevant topic “women in fictions”. (Of course, it is not totally irrelevant, because only after female writers have money to go outside and have experiences other than domestic ones will they be able to write female characters other than mothers and daughters.) However, when it is read as an independent chapter, it is well organized. The chapter begins with an examination of a novel called Life’s Adventure, by Mary Carmichael. In the narrator’s opinion, the language of the novel is not very good, but the characterization of women in that is unique. From the very brief summary, it is natural to think that the focus of this chapter will be on the uniqueness, yet the narrator is so faithful a recorder that the criticism accounts for almost one-fifths of the chapter. Anne Fernald makes a comment on this point, “she [Woolf] focuses on perfecting the detail of her argument, hoping to uncover small truths; she does not pretend to present a theory, but offers a collection of persuasive observations” (172). In this way, doubts on her objectivity can be largely avoided so that readers’ attention may be concentrated on what Woolf wanted them to concentrate on.
Besides, a particular feature of this kind of writing style is the frequent usage of questions and suppositions. The questions are not just rhetoric questions which are used to make emphasis or unwittingly show the author’s contempt for readers’ intelligence; they are the kind of question to which the narrator herself even does not have definite answers. They invite the readers to think as well. (Admittedly, this is partly because that Woolf did not want to make definite statements; neither did her believe in them. She, not the narrator, makes it very clearly, “it is for you to seek out this truth and to decide whether any part of it is worth keep” (Woolf 8).) As for the suppositions, Judith Shakespeare for instances, they are more effective in activating the readers’ minds. When one comes across with the following sentence, “Let me imagine, since facts are so hard to come by, what would have happened had Shakespeare had a wonderfully gifted sister, called Judith, let us say” (Woolf 52), it is completely natural for him or her to start to imagine even before more description is given. In this way, the asking-and-answering within the narrator’s mind extends itself to a similar interaction between the narrator and the readers.
Another thing we need to note about this book is that it also contains much literary criticism, revealing Woolf’s preference on writing, especially novel writing. Although A Room of One’s Own is not a novel, it has some fictional elements as well, the invented narrator and her friend Mary Seton for example. Therefore, the book can also exemplify her writing principles. As Guo and Wang note in their dissertation, Woolf lived in Victorian Age when rationality is thought highly of. However, women were different. They laid greater emphasis on emotion, thus making themselves better at expressing ambiguously and implicitly. (90) This may be best demonstrated in the multiple usages of images which can be seen in the situations the narrator is in. Obscure images can be found in chapter one in which the narrator’s daily experiences are described in full detail. The tailless Manx cat is such an intriguing example. It seems to be a queer imagine, only explicable when it is seen by the narrator as she is thinking to herself. Yet the description of the cat is also thought-provoking, “it is strange what a difference a tail makes” (Woolf 17). What’s the difference? Maybe it refers to the biological differences between male and female. Maybe it’s just a saying. This kind of seemingly unintended imagines give rise to a variety of interpretations.
In conclusion, this conversation-like writing style presents the entire deductive process to the readers for them to judge the argument. It is fictional, because the narrator and some people mentioned are fictional; but at the same time, “there may perhaps be some truth mixed up” (Woolf 8), because the thinking is real. Although sometimes her cautiousness and relativity are undue, A Room of One’s Own is on the whole a successive attempt, more or less, to change the tone of Mr. Know-It-All in many argumentative essays. “Her argument is not a logical progression, but rather a gradual unfolding, by indirection and accident, of a complex of ideas that casts the conventional landscape of women's literature in a new light.” (“SparkNote”)
Works Cited
Fernald, Anne. "A Room Of One's Own, Personal Criticism, And The Essay." Twentieth Century Literature 40.2 (1994): 165. Academic Search Complete. Nankai University Library. 14 Dec. 2012. < http://search.ebscohost.com/ >
“SparkNote on A Room of One’s Own.” SparkNotes LLC. 2002. Web. 14 Dec. 2012. <SparkNotes.com.>
Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. London: Harper Collins Publishers, 1977.
郭张娜,王文. “弗吉尼亚•伍尔夫与女性写作——从《一件自己的房间》说起.” 外语 教学24.3(2003): 88-91. CNKI. 南开大学图书馆. 2012年12月10日. <http://www.cnki.net/ >
Even today, a so-called modern society, women's liberty is still veiled by prodigious difficulties, such as domestic limitation, gender discrimination, religious dogma, archaic doctrine, etc. As to me, I am not a sage, I am not Providence, but a mortal, who tries to seek her little own room to store her infinite thought and capacious mind.
She is not just a well-known modernist writer, who is famous for her unreachable “stream of consciousness” words, but also a creative and sharp critic on man-dominant literature, sexual prejudice and social exclusion that woman suffered from. She is Virginia Woolf, a woman writer who is considered as “the alpha and omega of feminist criticism, its origin and its ‘goal’” (Laura Marcus, 2000), Virginia Woolf’s critical and creative theory of feminism has been a center of controversy, both literary and non-literary from her time to ours. Most of her literary theories are perfectly practiced in her novels and biographies; they are also explicitly demonstrated in her essays. The most famous and influential one is A Room of One’s Own (1829), which is widely recognized as “the first modern test of feminist criticism, the model in both theory and practice of a specific socialist feminist criticism”. (Jane Marcus, 1984) She devoted herself to analyzing and promoting woman’s writing and tried to find the diverse and deep-rooted reasons for the absence of female writers in literature history; further, she did not leave the problem unsolved, but found a “Woolf’s way” – “kill the angle in the house” to let the women who “has Shakespeare’s genius” (Virginia Woolf, 1928) to write, to exude the electric that they can and amaze the world.
Virginia’s literary advocacy of the aesthetic of androgyny is another aspect that she left the literature world as a controversial theory. The defined androgynous mind is a state of mind that is a “moment of being”, with the masculinity and femininity cooperate together as “a natural fusion”. Her androgyny theory is widely practiced in many of her experimental works, which shows that, the perfect mind of state is with both of the features to reach the balance of body and mind.
From what we can find through English literature history, especially in Britain, the voice of women was seldom heard until the time of Geoffrey Chaucer, when those women were not “writers” but “religious ”, who wrote not poems nor novels but their inner spiritual experience with God. It also suggests that by that time the women who lived a “normal” life had no voice being heard at all. (Guo, 2003) In the 17th century, Aphra Behn, the first woman writer who took writing as profession, started the history of women’s professional writing.
It is the economic and politic changes in society that directly affect the development of women’s writing. Along with the more education for women and the increasing social property, women were given relatively more opportunity to reach their self-value through different ways. In 1928, women were given the equal right to vote as men. What came along with the possession of political right was the prosperity of women’s writing.
What Woolf saw from the history of women’s literature is not only material, but spiritual; not so visible, rather invisible. It is the sexual prejudice and the tyranny of patriarchy that she saw: “the most transient visitor to this planet, I thought, who picked up this paper could not fail to be aware, even from this scattered testimony, that England is under the rule of a patriarchy.” (Virginia Woolf, 1928) In A Room of One’s Own, she makes the famous line that suggests the women with “thought” calling for breaking free from the traditional “household” social character, and the tyranny of patriarchal society: “[…] a woman must have money and a room of her won if she is to write fiction”. The obstacles that the women are facing are not just material but also spiritual.
作者觉得有思想的女人,或者真正的女作家需要思想的独立,或者经济的独立。这两者或许相辅相成,就像她里面写道的"I need not hate any man; he cannot hurt me. I need not flatter any man; he has nothing to give me."正好验证了这两点。
During the Great Recoinage of 1816, the mint was instructed to coin one troy pound (weighing 5760 grains) of standard (0.925 fine) silver into 66 shillings, or its equivalent in other denominations. This effectively set the weight of the shilling, and its subsequent decimal replacement 5 new pence coin, at 87.2727 grains or 5.655 grams from 1816 to 1990, when a new smaller 5p coin was introduced. 随便wiki一下就能知道500镑多么富有了 = = 伍尔芙这种跟朋友一起假扮阿比西尼亚王子忽悠皇家海军闲到此等地步的人,才会有时间去写墙上的斑点和思考女权的意义。可惜现在阅读她的人大都不具备这个条件