Short
Summary: Virginia Woolf, giving a lecture on women
and fiction, tells her audience she is not sure if the topic
should be what women are like; the fiction women write; the
fiction written about women; or a combination of the three.
Instead, she has come up with "one minor point--a woman must
have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."
She says she will use a fictional narrator whom she calls Mary
Beton as her alter ego to relate how her thoughts on the lecture
mingled with her daily life.
A week ago, the narrator crosses a lawn at the fictional
Oxbridge university, tries to enter the library, and passes by
the chapel. She is intercepted at each station and reminded that
women are not allowed to do such things without accompanying men.
She goes to lunch, where the excellent food and relaxing
atmosphere make for good conversation. Back at Fernham, the
women's college where she is staying as a guest, she has a
mediocre dinner. She later talks with a friend of hers, Mary
Seton, about how men's colleges were funded by kings and
independently wealthy men, and how funds were raised with
difficulty for the women's college. She and Seton denounce their
mothers, and their sex, for being so impoverished and leaving
their daughters so little. Had they been independently wealthy,
perhaps they could have founded fellowships and secured similar
luxuries for women. However, the narrator realizes the obstacles
they faced: entrepreneurship is at odds with child-rearing, and
only for the last 48 years have women even been allowed to keep
money they earned. The narrator thinks about the effects of
wealth and poverty on the mind, about the prosperity of males
and the poverty of females, and about the effects of tradition
or lack of tradition on the writer.
Searching for answers, the narrator explores the British
Museum in London. She finds there are countless books written
about women by men, while there are hardly any books by women on
men. She selects a dozen books to try and come up with an answer
for why women are poor. Instead, she locates a multitude of
other topics and a contradictory array of men's opinions on
women. One male professor who writes about the inferiority of
women angers her, and it occurs to her that she has become angry
because the professor has written angrily. Had he written
"dispassionately," she would have paid more attention to his
argument, and not to him. After her anger dissipates, she
wonders why men are so angry if England is a patriarchal society
in which they have all the power and money. Perhaps holding
power produces anger out of fear that others will take one's
power. She posits that when men pronounce the inferiority of
women, they are really claiming their own superiority. The
narrator believes self-confidence, a requirement to get through
life, is often attained by considering other people inferior in
relation to oneself. Throughout history, women have served as
models of inferiority who enlarge the superiority of men.
The narrator is grateful for the inheritance left her by her
aunt. Prior to that she had gotten by on loathsome, slavish odd
jobs available to women before 1918. Now, she reasons that since
nothing can take away her money and security, she need not hate
or enslave herself to any man. She now feels free to "think of
things in themselves"‹she can judge art, for instance, with
greater objectivity.
The narrator investigates women in Elizabethan England,
puzzled why there were no women writers in that fertile literary
period. She believes there is a deep connection between living
conditions and creative works. She reads a history book, learns
that women had few rights in the era, and finds no material
about middle-class women. She imagines what would have happened
had Shakespeare had an equally gifted sister named Judith. She
outlines the possible course of Shakespeare's life: grammar
school, marriage, and work at a theater in London. His sister,
however, was not able to attend school and her family
discouraged her from independent study. She was married against
her will as a teenager and ran away to London. The men at a
theater denied her the chance to work and learn the craft.
Impregnated by a theatrical man, she committed suicide.
The narrator believes that no women of the time would have
had such genius, "For genius like Shakespeare's is not born
among labouring, uneducated, servile people." Nevertheless, some
kind of genius must have existed among women then, as it exists
among the working class, although it never translated to paper.
The narrator argues that the difficulties of writing--especially
the indifference of the world to one's art--are compounded for
women, who are actively disdained by the male establishment. She
says the mind of the artist must be "incandescent" like
Shakespeare's, without any obstacles. She argues that the reason
we know so little about Shakespeare's mind is because his work
filters out his personal "grudges and spites and antipathies."
His absence of personal protest makes his work "free and
unimpeded."
The narrator reviews the poetry of several Elizabethan
aristocratic ladies, and finds that anger toward men and
insecurity mar their writing and prevent genius from shining
through. The writer Aphra Behn marks a turning point: a
middle-class woman whose husband's death forced her to earn her
own living, Behn's triumph over circumstances surpasses even her
excellent writing. Behn is the first female writer to have
"freedom of the mind." Countless 18th-century middle-class
female writers and beyond owe a great debt to Behn's
breakthrough. The narrator wonders why the four famous and
divergent 19th-century female novelists‹George Eliot, Emily and
Charlotte Brontë, and Jane Austen--all wrote novels; as
middle-class women, they would have had less privacy and a
greater inclination toward writing poetry or plays, which
require less concentration. However, the 19th-century
middle-class woman was trained in the art of social observation,
and the novel was a natural fit for her talents.
The narrator argues that traditionally masculine values and
topics in novels (such as war) are valued more than feminine ones,
such as drawing-room character studies. Female writers, then,
were often forced to adjust their writing to meet the inevitable
criticism that their work was insubstantial. Even if they did so
without anger, they deviated from their original visions and
their books suffered. The early 19th-century female novelist
also had no real tradition from which to work; they lacked even
a prose style fit for a woman. The narrator argues that the
novel was the chosen form for these women since it was a
relatively new and pliable medium.
The narrator takes down a recent debut novel called Life's
Adventure by Mary Carmichael. Viewing Carmichael as a descendant
of the female writers she has commented on, the narrator
dissects her book. She finds the prose style uneven, perhaps as
a rebellion against the "flowery" reputation of women's writing.
She reads on and finds the simple sentence "'Chloe liked
Olivia.'" She believes the idea of friendship between two women
is groundbreaking in literature, as women have historically been
viewed in literature only in relation to men. By the 19th
century, women grew more complex in novels, but the narrator
still believes that each gender is limited in its knowledge of
the opposite sex. The narrator recognizes that for whatever
mental greatness women have, they have not yet made much of a
mark in the world compared to men. Still, she believes that the
great men in history often depended on women for providing them
with "some stimulus, some renewal of creative power" that other
men could not. She argues that the creativity of men and women
is different, and that their writing should reflect their
differences. The narrator believes Carmichael has much work to
do in recording the lives of women, and Carmichael will have to
write without anger against men. Moreover, since every one has a
blind spot about themselves, only women can fill out the
portrait of men in literature. However, the narrator feels
Carmichael is "no more than a clever girl," even though she
bears no traces of anger or fear. In a hundred years, the
narrator believes, and with money and a room of her own,
Carmichael will be a better writer.
The pleasing sight of a man and woman getting into a taxi
provokes an idea for the narrator: the mind contains both a male
and female part, and for "complete satisfaction and happiness,"
the two must live in harmony. This fusion, she believes, is what
poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge described when he said a great mind
is "androgynous": "the androgynous mind transmits emotion
without impediment; it is naturally creative, incandescent and
undivided." Shakespeare is a fine model of this androgynous mind,
though it is harder to find current examples in this "stridently
sex-conscious" age. The narrator blames both sexes for bringing
about this self-consciousness of gender.
Woolf takes over the speaking voice and responds to two
anticipated criticisms against the narrator. First, she says she
purposely did not express an opinion on the relative merits of
the two genders--especially as writers--since she does not
believe such a judgment is possible or desirable. Second, her
audience may believe the narrator laid too much emphasis on
material things, and that the mind should be able to overcome
poverty and lack of privacy. She cites a professor's argument
that of the top poets of the last century, almost all were
well-educated and rich. Without material things, she repeats,
one cannot have intellectual freedom, and without intellectual
freedom, one cannot write great poetry. Women, who have been
poor since the beginning of time, have understandably not yet
written great poetry. She also responds to the question of why
she insists women's writing is important. As an avid reader, the
overly masculine writing in all genres has disappointed her
lately. She encourages her audience to be themselves and "Think
of things in themselves." She says that Judith Shakespeare still
lives within all women, and that if women are given money and
privacy in the next century, she will be reborn. |