Nov 13, 2009

A Room of One's Own | Introduction

A Room of One's Own is a classic text of the feminist movement. It is an expanded treatment of issues that Woolf presented in two essays she read to audiences at women's colleges in 1928. While the book is focused on women and fiction, its ideas and discussions overlap with larger questions pertinent to women's history.

At the center of the book is its famous thesis, which is echoed in the book's title. In asserting that a woman needs a room of her own to write, Woolf addresses both a historical and a contemporary question regarding women's art and their social status. The historical question is why there have been few great women writers. The contemporary question is how the number of women writers can increase. Woolf s answer—this matter of a room of one's own—is known as a "materialist" answer. That is, Woolf says that there have been few great women in history because material circumstances limited women's lives and achievements. Because women were not educated and were not allowed to control wealth, they necessarily led lives that were less publicly significant than those of men. Until these material limitations are overcome, women will continue to achieve, publicly, less than men. Woolf s materialist thesis implicitly contests notions that women's inferior social status is a natural outcome of biological inferiority. While most people now accept the materialist position, in Woolf s time, such arguments still had to be put forward with conviction and force.

A Room of One's Own Summary

Chapter One
Near the start of A Room of One's Own, Woolf insists that the "I" of the book is not the author, but rather a narrator persona. (‘‘I is only a convenient term for somebody who has no real being"; "call me Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael, or by any name you please.’’) So, it is best to say that the book opens with the narrator asserting the book's thesis, which is that for women to write fiction, they must have rooms of their own and five hundred pounds a year income (income that comes from a source other than work). The idea is that a writer needs uninterrupted time to think, and privacy, and cannot spend all of her day working if she is to have the energy and quietude of mind necessary to produce literature.

To illustrate this thesis, this chapter offers a series of anecdotes. In one of these, a lunch to which the narrator is invited at an all-male college is contrasted to a dinner at a nearby women's college. The women eat a very plain and dull dinner while the men (and their guests) are served a rich and sumptuous lunch. The chapter concludes with the narrator noting that for many centuries a great deal of money, public and private, has gone toward the education of men. In contrast, little or no money has been spent on the education of women. Woolf has made a first important point: women are impoverished and under-educated, so if there are few women writers in the history of letters, this should come as no surprise.

Chapter Two
The narrator is now in the British Library, where, she says, she will attempt to discover why it is that women are so poor and men are so rich. She consults some of the literature written about women by men, and she very quickly discerns a common theme, succinctly expressed in the title of one of the books: The Mental, Moral, and Physical Inferiority of Women. ‘‘England,’’ the narrator concludes, ‘‘is under the rule of a patriarchy.’’ What this means is that it is a society governed and controlled by men, and it is such because men are considered the superior and more capable gender. According to the narrator, men write about and constantly reiterate the inferiority of women to maintain their privileged social status and their control of power. Also, she says, by convincing... » Complete A Room of One's Own Summary