Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own: A Critical Review
Texts: Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own; Anne Dillard, The Writing Life

As I sat down at my desk in the cloudy hours of the morning, I could do nothing but ponder an overwhelming and vitally important question: is Virginia Woolf’s subject of women’s place in fiction substantial enough to fill an entire book? For an inquiry such as this would require many tangents and thought processes, ones which I did not know immediately how to begin. In contemplation, I found my introspection drifting to an entirely different yet even more relevant query: does Woolf’s addressing of her topic involve a reader to the point of actual interest? In my idleness, I found I had begun to sketch a figure of Ms. Woolf, bent over her notebook, letting the ink run over the page as if some massive leak had infected her pen; she wrote furiously, with a determined look. I found it amusing to consider the causes of such a visage - bitterness against the male race? Bitterness against future readers? For quite ironically, in her quest to write of women’s obstacles in writing, Ms. Woolf failed to overcome her own.

Virginia Woolf, although replete with countless intriguing notions and worthy ideas, has a habit of disguising them amidst an avalanche of excessive musings. In attempts to tackle her bulging prose, one has the feeling of going at it with a pickaxe - hacking apart layers of stony rubbish to get at the good stuff underneath. A Room of One’s Own is a considerable effort on her part to get across her ideas alone; however, a reader has the tendency to get sleepy trudging through the swamps of style. Once in a while, Woolf has a truly insightful observation, and it’s a great pity that some people get too frustrated to find it.

The extremely broad topic of women and fiction is too large even for the most adept of essayists, so A Room of One’s Own has been smartly whittled down to - in the most basic of respects - female writers’ restrictions and problems in the past and present. This is not to say that the book is strictly confined to such a subject; Woolf excels at spiraling into tangents and expounding on the most extraneous of information (“Even if one could state the value of any one gift at the moment, those values will change...”). However, she manages to focus on a main point: in order to write, a woman must have money and a room of her own. She goes about addressing her topic in an essay style, describing her pursuits and thought processes as she goes along. The overall feel has coherence, but is generally one of wordiness.

This book suffers in the way that Woolf’s true thoughts are never pinpointed exactly - there are too many good concepts hidden in thick paragraphs. She identifies her own universal truths as any essayist would, but they are sparse, and one gets the feeling that this 114-page book would have worked much better as a 15-page essay. After babbling away for pages on how her mind refused to attack her subject with a focus, Woolf suddenly emerges on page 31 with a beauty: “Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.” This statement happens to coincide perfectly with what Woolf herself has been doing in the book; however, the “idleness” is often what submerges the truth in Woolf’s case. After having finished A Room of One’s Own, one may find that the “submerged truths” tend to remain buried and fail to be remembered - the words “A Room of One’s Own” bring to mind pages and pages of words rather than specific, concrete ideas.

The opening of the book is, thankfully, Woolf at her most successful - a journey, both figuratively and literally, into the subconscious. She describes distinct actions with a lush flavour and interprets settings with a poet’s eye. She travels through a college campus, eats at a luncheon, has a conversation. This method of subconsciously collecting information lets the reader focus on what she is physically doing. When reading Woolf, this is a definite advantage, because one does not become lost in her cavernous mind. Before the luncheon, Woolf discusses the happenings around her in a light, breezy prose, and a reader easily follows her as “Men with trays on their heads went busily from staircase to staircase...the strains of the gramophone blared out from the rooms within.” Although deviations such as these are difficult to connect to Woolf’s main point, they nevertheless are stimulating to read, and easy for those with impatience.

Quite the opposite of a method like this is Woolf’s incessant need to ask questions. Sometimes, they work and provide good thought material for a reader, exemplified as she first sits down to write and think - “Why did mean drink wine and women water? Why was one sex so prosperous and the other so poor? What effect has poverty on fiction? What conditions are necessary for the creation of works of art?” Inquiries like these have at least an indirect relevancy to the topic at hand, and while this is not always necessary, it is always appreciated. More importantly, it is known that Woolf will at least address the questions presented. However, taking a look at another point in the essay, it is clear that at times that her questions are not always answered, or even discussed. After writing for more than a brief period on what would happen if women ceased to be the protected sex, Woolf inquires, “But what bearing has all this upon the subject of my paper, Women and Fiction?” Good question. She then goes in search of “truth” and “facts”, so the question ends up seeming superfluous.

Woolf’s mind has a tendency to run away with her - or, more appropriately, run away and leave the rest of us in a cloud of dust. Her constant asking of unanswered questions is an example of when a reader is at the mercy of her mental processes - “...where, I asked myself, picking up a notebook and a pencil, is truth?” The question is vague and steers a reader into a philosophical direction instead of an introspective one. Sometimes this can be intriguing, but it’s more likely to be extremely annoying. Ironically, Woolf works best in a concrete scene with definitive actions - a situation which she addresses only to drive her thought processes. A reader is more likely to be towed by a rope through, as she puts it, “the course of this rambling.”

But, surprise! There are times in A Room of One’s Own when her internal meditation actually works. The most prime example is her method of envisioning: she often abandons herself to her mental pictures instead of mental rambling. This may seem contradictory to the entire genre to which she applies herself, but in her case it adds flavour and image to an otherwise tedious style, such as what she was using directly prior to a mental visualization technique in the second chapter. First, a passage filled with words and rambling: “And if I could not grasp the truth about W. (as for brevity’s sake I had come to call her) in the past, why bother about W. in the future?” Then, while thinking to herself (although this is nothing new), she realises that she has drawn a characature of an angry, pompous male professor on her paper meant for words. This gives Woolf an entirely new direction to move in, which at least heaves her entire argument forward a notch or two. Another part of the essay where this mental picturing takes place is in the opening chapter, during her conversation with Mary Seton in the sitting room. Her mind is not on what anyone is saying; rather, two photographic images have formed in her head and are switching back and forth at random: “these two pictures, disjointed and disconnected and nonsensical as they were, were for ever coming together and combating each other and had me entirely at their mercy.” It can be said that, as long as Woolf is at the mercy of her own mind, her audience is no longer at the mercy of it.

Still, these slight bursts of inspiration are not quite enough to draw one into the sludge of text Woolf creates. Her paragraphs, sometimes stretching pages at a time, read like an extremely loquacious person who won’t shut up and let someone else talk. Her style is in perfect contrast with that of Annie Dillard, particularly in The Writing Life. Dillard’s use of short, choppy anecdotes and deeply rooted metaphors work much better in a novella-like setting; she jumps from scene to scene using associative techniques, which often seem to go more quickly and with more ease that Woolf’s chronological procedure. Dillard’s little bursts of prose connect to each other but keep a reader on tiptoe: “The line of words is a fiber optic, flexible as a wire; it illuminates the path just before its fragile tip. You probe with it, delicate as a worm.” And immediately thereafter, “Few sights are so absurd as that of an inchworm leading its dimwit life.” Dillard makes one feel as if the book is a series of campfire tales. Woolf’s continuous and connected thoughts belong in a concise essay or short story. One almost gets the urge to become her English teacher and scribble “Condense! Condense!” all over the pages. Woolf’s book, in short, needs to be an essay.

But even in condensing, what would be accomplished? A Room of One’s Own would no doubt be easier and more enjoyable to read, but as far as the main point goes, one has to wonder whether it has any real relevancy for a contemporary audience. It’s easy to see where Woolf is coming from, writing in a time when female writers are finally crawling out of the woodwork, an age when they are at last receiving due credit and attention. Since the dawn of time, women have been treated as the “weaker” sex, ostracised, put upon, and abused. Woolf is drawing upon world history up until the early 20th century - small wonder she resolves the topic the way she does, since it is only in the late 20th century when women’s social and political level has been elevated significantly. Still, the question of money and a room of one’s own is a bit more irrelevant in this day and age - women are allowed to earn their own wealth, and most have the luxury of a bit of solitude.

Of course, at times, the question of time period is completely unrelated, because Woolf’s argument lacks coherence and validity in itself. The fact of whether or not a reader agrees with what she says is an entirely personal matter; however, sometimes Woolf becomes so bent on her purpose of identifying with women that she stumbles. An early example of a failed, almost hypocritical argument occurs in chapter two. Woolf has been complaining about how men in the past have tended to lump women together in their “predetermined” inferiority, and yet, lo and behold, what does she do: “The professors - I lumped them together thus - were angry.” In performing an act she had previously been attacking, nearly the entire tangent loses its validity. In chapter four, Woolf claims that female writing needs, in turn, female predecessors. “It is useless to go to the great men writers for help, however much one may go to them for pleasure,” she writes. “Lamb, Browne...Dickens, De Quincey - whoever it may be - never helped a woman yet, though she may have learnt a few tricks of them and adapted them to her use. The weight, the pace, the stride of a man’s mind are too unlike her own for her to lift anything substantial from him successfully.” It is not difficult to suppose where an emotion likes this originates, looking at Woolf’s time period, when there is almost no female literary legacy. Such a deficiency would no doubt be discouraging; however, Woolf is becoming pretentious in assuming that she can speak for the entire female population; indeed, it is certain that many female writers - both in her age and contemporary times - have been greatly influenced by the male tradition. Arguments such as these tend to alienate part of her audience.

This is not to say that there are no worthy moments of speculation in the entirety of A Room of One’s Own. The concept of Shakespeare’s sister Judith, an ingenious writer forced to despair and suicide, reveals Woolf in her forte: an extremely picturesque imagination. Her epiphany, as well, which takes place as she observes a man and a woman getting into a taxi together, shines brightly through a mass of dull grey matter. If a reader is persistent enough, treasures like these pop up despite the book’s major shortcomings.

While a considerable effort in idea, A Room of One’s Own does not manifest Woolf’s thoughts into text as well as it should. A small note preceding the text explains that the book was originally written as two papers for a spoken lecture, then expanded and altered into a novella-form. Its overzealous attempt at chronicling thought patterns proves that A Room of One’s Own should have remained a lecture.


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