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Renting her Room

A Room of One's Own is Virginia Woolf's earnest inquiry into the world of women considered nigh unimportant and impregnable. The book took its shape from a series of lectures that Woolf delivered on the topic of Women and Fiction. Through the blend of her own experiences and the study of the writers of the past, Woolf paints a detailed picture of the status of women in the erstwhile society and the society of the century past. While the picture is applicable to erstwhile Britain, the conclusions that she draws are versatile. There are luminous insights into patriarchy. She has kept the entire church of patriarchy under her magnifying glass, and while she displays no desire to be a renegade and fight the ancient order, she has illuminated each boulder, each foundational stone on which the building had acquired menacing proportions, she analyzes the tendril of each creeper that has sprouted on its moss, and lays bare the ugly sanctum sanctorum of its ideology, which has poisoned the society since centuries.

The book can be considered one of the pioneers of feminist literature. Though, the pièce-de résistance of the book, according to me, is the idea of a "Third Sex" propounded by Woolf. Her theory is that the writer, to be true to her art cannot write as a male or a female alone. There has to be a marriage of both the genders that reside in the author's consciousness, and from that union alone can a truly worthwhile creation emerge. Whilst if the author writes as a man or a woman alone, there's too much ego, a big 'I' that pervades the entire length of their work, which impoverishes the true subject, the idea that the work is supposed to represent. She quotes Coleridge; “a great mind is androgynous.” She gives a justification, saying that a subject deserves complete and thorough analysis, before it can be converted into a finished artefact. Unto this end, it is required of the creator to remove all prejudices that come with the circumstances of one's existence and adopt a wholesome perspective, which cannot come from a one sided analysis. Woolf asserts that there is a "spot the size of a shilling" behind our necks, that we cannot see, and thus should be grateful to anyone who can hold the mirror for us.

In her course of research on "Women and Fiction", Woolf encounters many male "Mirror holders", who dismiss the entire being and experience of being a female with a single chauvinistic claim, the most notable being Mr. John Langdon Davies, who in his book "A SHORT HISTORY OF WOMEN", writes, "that when children cease to be altogether desirable, women cease to be altogether necessary". Ms. Woolf asserts that a woman is so used to the deprivation of privacy and personal opinions, that it is almost impossible to know what she does beyond the eyes of the observer, what might the acutest of her movements be like. (In this Ms. Woolf is reminiscent of the Heisenberg's Uncertainty principle; the woman, of course, being the electron). She has been so well characterised by the self-proclaimed mirror holders through the centuries, that she cannot escape the "cookie-cutter" roles, beyond which lies ostracisation. So acutely conscious of her own self, that she cannot be lost in the contemplation of those "higher" spiritual matters, which demand complete absolution of an individual's identity. Though there is a positive note towards the end of the book. While reading one of the erstwhile "new-age" women authors Woolf is pleasantly surprised to find a certain Mary Carmichael, in whose writing she finds that "her pages were full of that curious sexual quality which comes only when sex is unconscious of itself."

The works of many authors, both male and female have been scrutinised acutely with an esprit that Woolf has so brilliantly used to convey a subtle sense of irony throughout the book. Woolf analyses the works of the Brönte sisters, Jane Austen, Shakespeare, Proust, Shelley and ties them together with a thread of her astute observations. In one example, she asserts the superior acumen of Austen and Shakespeare as writers, as opposed to Charlotte Bronte, claiming that in the former’s works, the circumstances in which they wrote are not reflected, and Miss Bronte’s works are constantly broken by her outbursts against the environment in which she lived.

The most powerful motif used by Woolf is that of Shakespeare's sister. Using the example of the Bard, she proceeds to hypothesize the existence of Judith Shakespeare, a woman as intellectually endowed as her brother, if not more. She compares each milestone in the life of the sister and the brother, where the latter progressively climbs the rungs of literary and thespian society by following his natural thirst to explore the latitudes of human expression, while the former is repeatedly subjugated to condemnation, mockery, the lecherous eyes of the same society that has put her brother on a pedestal. Disillusioned, depressed and crestfallen, she takes her own life on a winter’s night. Through the effigy of Judith Shakespeare to represent all the women who have had to bury their latent passion for intellectual pursuits, Woolf adjures her audience to persevere, even in the face of severe prejudice, that she may live again, that she may find solace in her own words.

Even though the books runs on currents of oppression of women and the entrenched patriarchy, Woolf displays no unnecessary anger or frustration, idolising a true writer, using her experiences as inspirations, and yet not letting the emotions behind the experiences colour her quest for an answer. The crux of Ms. Woolf’s thesis may be summarised in her words “By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream.” And in these words ‘A Room of One’s own’ provides the means of nourishment to the soul of any artist, man or woman. The book, in its entirety, is not so much a feminist writing, as an appeal of an artist to suffuse her art with the flavour that it has been hitherto deprived of, a perspective that has never been shared or understood.


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