A Room of One’s Own
Virginia Woolf
How does one begin to review A Room of One’s Own? Where does one begin and what path does one take? When does this becomes a narrative so old and yet so relevant? When does it shift from looking at others to looking at oneself. It is not just a room perhaps, but an invitation to self-reflection. To self-analysis and thought. Thought about oneself, and the others. Thoughts about the seen and the unseen, the said and the unsaid. A Room of one’s Own- transcends the physical world and enters the realm of the mind, into time. The walls of the room becoming amorphous, malleable, uncertain…
It is an invitation to look into oneself…the multiplicity of the roles played and the meandering path that we take to arrive at a place where we, as woman can perhaps write our own story.
First published in 1929, A Room of One’s Own is an extended essay, divided into 6 chapters. Delivered as a part of two lectures in 1928 in two women’s colleges, the Newnham Arts Society at Newnham College and the ODTAA Society at Girton College, respectively. The slim work, delving into developing the capacity of imagination and creativity of women and creating an atmosphere to nurture it, is starkly still relevant in the 21st century.
She begins by searching the shelves of library for women authors and to her chagrin finds few. Scattered pieces about women, by men, were available and they reiterated a particular point of view about women. Women writing substantially on their own enters the world of public publication much later in the history of writing. Thus, the question, of why? This question is central to the narrative of these essays and Woolf tries to dismantle the real cause behind it. Causes seen and unseen.
Throughout her essays she indicates several reasons that act as prop roots to hold on this image of a woman, as she sees herself and as the world sees her. She is deprived of the education, mentors, guidance, independence and most importantly, space. A room here is not a mere structure of four walls, it is a world that a woman curates for herself and herself alone. Where she is free- to think, to question, to imagine, to live! Where she develops her views and writes about them, without having to look over her shoulder, where she can choose to be herself, as she sees fit.
For a woman, Woolf argues the very premise of education, is compromised by its unavailability and by the ambivalence in the way women are depicted in fiction and treated. She is barely able to defy the very patriarchal set up she is born into.
“Women have burnt like beacons in all the works of all the poets from the beginning of time. Indeed if woman had no existence save in the fiction written by men, one would imagine her a person of the utmost importance; very various; heroic and mean; splendid and sordid; beautiful and hideous in the extreme; as great as a man, some would say greater. But this is woman in fiction.”
The society that she is in, doesn’t assist her in this journey as well. As Lev Vygotsky has said in his work, Mind in Society, internalisation of culturally produced sign systems brings about behavioural transformation and forms a bridge between early and later forms of individual development, the absence of the milieu to write, perhaps deterred her from the very act of writing. (see Mind and Society, lev Vygotsky)
She maintains her narrative on the importance of material things, “ intellectual freedom depends upon material things. Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom. And women have been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from the beginning of time.”
Woolf further questions the understanding of genius and gifted, are some individuals born with it and the role that the external world, the milieu, the nurturing plays in developing the genius in an individual. She wonders, “yet genius of a sort must have existed among women…now and again as Emily Bronte and Robert Burns blazes out and proves its presence.”
What makes this narrative compelling is not the depiction of the times, buts its relevance even today. As I reflected, a question that disturbed me was, do we plan for a room of our own when we imagine a house today? This question is not just in the context of the apartments available, the finances and the budget, the number of family members, the growing children and the elderly parents. This question is in the context of an imagination of a space for the woman, only for herself as herself. To be idle in perhaps, “it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.”
A Room of One’s Own, “stands for the power to contemplate, that a lock on the door means a power to think for oneself”. To question and imagine, to be creative and vocal, to say it aloud. To build a space for the women we are and for the ones who are coming after us.
It becomes a narrative that breaks the constructed barriers of geography, time, nations, age, languages, differences, when “womanhood is not a protected occupation anymore”. In A Room of One’s Own, every woman is the same.
As I revisited the library shelves that Woolf browsed through in search for writing by women, I typed in a search about living authors, women and men. It was a curious find. More women authors are published today that men. However, their work pertains largely to fiction- young adult and contemporary fiction and romance. Male authors still dominate the fields of research, academic work and non-fiction genre.
A new imagination of a room would perhaps bring us to this thought, have the pages of the fictions taken the shape of a new room? A space where ideas are explored and created, a platform for a powerful and yet indirect form of expression perhaps. Are we building our new rooms through the words of our manuscripts saved in folders on our laptop?
Or, alternatively, are we still seeking that room, where serious, uninterrupted, focussed , questioning, research and thinking can be carried out?