(response essay to Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own)

Woolf’s primary interest in A Room of One’s Own concerns the position of women in the tradition of writing. Woolf reads literature as cultural output of a society. Considered so, the production of literature is shaped by the cultural dynamics of a society.


Woolf identifies patriarchy as a socially dominant collective outlook that has shaped the production and character of literature for over three centuries. Patriarchal values have, over time, become the yardstick against which other stances are measured. The process by which these values are put forward as fundamental can be recognized only with an insight that allows one to see their conditionality.


Women's suffrage provides Woolf with such insight. The suffrage was the first instance where patriarchy’s authority is challenged. In its demand for equal rights for women, the suffrage – if indirectly – questions the basis of patriarchal control. The reasonable assumption is that men are capable of things that women are not – things that are crucial to their superior position. The fact is that, until the time Woolf was writing, men and women have never functioned on equal grounds. The occupations and social roles of men and women have always been designated as different. If women have never been allowed to do things that men do, how is one to know whether women are less capable than men are? The suffragette logic argues that women equal men in their capacity for active participation in public and political life – that they can do more than to manage domestic affairs. Its very logic recognizes patriarchal domination as a construct.


In reading literature as a society’s cultural product, Woolf identifies in the concerns, tones and themes of individual texts social attitudes, particularly with regards to gender roles. In the work of Bronte and a certain Professor X, for instance, Woolf recognizes a tone of anger. A Room of One’s Own clarifies that the social condition in which these works are produced can well account for the presentation of arguments in them. Bronte, writing in the nineteenth century, was dissatisfied with the way women were conditioned, yet – given the social framework in her time – could do little about the fact, and this dissatisfaction found its way into her book. The professor, writing his work following the occurrence of suffrage, is angry in defense of patriarchy whose authority, in the early twentieth century, was in question.


Woolf’s work helps to clarify that, throughout three centuries and as a consequence of events like World War I and women’s suffrage, social attitudes with regards to gender relations have developed in such a way that there is excessive emphasis on the distinction between the sexes. Woolf argues that this emphasis in social attitude is carried over into literature. One writes either as a man or a woman – with qualities and interests that are taken to characterize each gender identity, so that there is in the writing an emphasis on sex-consciousness: “(p)erhaps to think…of one sex as distinct from the other is a effort. It interferes with the unity of the mind…” (100). Woolf further asserts that the best writing (the kind she terms ‘incandescent’) is free of sex-consciousness – “(i)t is when (the two sexes in the mind fuses) that the mind is fully fertilized and uses all its faculties” (102).


Woolf’s perspective recognizes the binary mode of thinking about gender as a corollary of social events. She also perceives the effects this way of thinking has on literature. It is important that Woolf is distant from the events she discusses in A Room of One’s Own (the women’s suffrage originated in the late nineteenth century and the First World War was over at least a decade before the book was published). The distance allows her a measure of objectivity. It is difficult – almost impossible – to be objective about a particular event when one is involved in the event. The writers that Woolf discusses belong to a time when the binary mode of thinking about gender relations is customary. They lack, as a result, the objectivity to see the defects of their perspective and the effects that that perspective bears on the writing they produce.
Through the analogy of a room Woolf communicates women’s need for autonomy – in private and economic terms – if they were to write fiction that is not sex-conscious. Any form of dependency on men relegates women to a subordinate position, which means that women’s experience is conditioned by their dependency. Dependency requires one to give up at least a portion of one’s freedom. Woolf’s concern does not predominantly lie with limitations of freedom, but with how these limitations affect the character of fiction written by women. This is Woolf’s arguments with regards to the matter: “(one will be required to) sacrifice a hair of the head of (one’s) vision, a shade of its colour, in deference to some Headmaster with a silver pot in his hand.” (110) Relationship of dependence involves feelings of deference, of being indebted to – which in turn require one to curb one’s opinions and ideas. The writing of fiction is affected by this requirement for moderation: the tone of resentment that Woolf identifies in Jane Eyre, for example, is recompense for the need to exercise restraint.


Gender identity is only one aspect of human identity. Motivated by sex-consciousness, any writing is likely to be limited and narrow in perspective in the sense that it describes human experience only in terms of gender. Sex-consciousness becomes a sort of worldview that governs one’s interpretation of the world and, in turn, one’s perspective in writing. Such perspective holds back writers: it incapacitates the possibility of describing human experiences in their true quality, unadulterated by a gendered perspective. Writers, Woolf opines, should be able to “(t)hink of things in themselves” (115) – which is to say that writers must be able to interpret the world and their experiences as human beings, not as beings of particular sexes. Human interpretations of the world (as opposed to gendered ones) promise fuller and more rounded perspectives, but these require a mind that is not controlled by sex-consciousness - what Woolf terms the androgynous mind.


To allow women rooms of their own is a matter that also concerns men’s position in society and, by extension, their perspective as writers. They will no longer define themselves in terms of women’s dependency. In such circumstances, men and women as writers will “see human beings not…in their relation to each other but in relation to reality.” (117) Their writing will, consequently, cease to be sex-conscious.


The creation of ‘incandescent’ literature requires a society that is liberal in its thinking.