{"id":16358,"date":"2023-07-27T14:50:44","date_gmt":"2023-07-27T12:50:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/stolb01web.ddns.net\/wordpress\/?page_id=16358"},"modified":"2025-02-19T09:41:13","modified_gmt":"2025-02-19T08:41:13","slug":"jessica-gildersleeve-on-the-relevance-of-woolfs-manifesto-today","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/stolb01web.ddns.net\/wordpress\/?page_id=16358","title":{"rendered":"Jessica Gildersleeve: On the relevance of Woolf’s manifesto today"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This article was first published on September 23, 2020 in The Conversation<\/a> and is republished here under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Guide to the classics: A Room of One\u2019s Own, Virginia Woolf\u2019s feminist call to\u00a0arms<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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A young Virginia Woolf photographed in 1902. Wikimedia Commons<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Jessica Gildersleeve<\/a>, University of Southern Queensland<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I sit at my kitchen table to write this essay, as hundreds of thousands of women have done before me. It is not my own room, but such things are still a luxury for most women today. The table will do. I am fortunate I can make a living \u201cby my wits,\u201d as Virginia Woolf puts it in her famous feminist treatise, A Room of One\u2019s Own (1929).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That living enabled me to buy not only the room, but the house in which I sit at this table. It also enables me to pay for safe, reliable childcare so I can have time to write.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is as true today, therefore, as it was almost a century ago when Woolf wrote it, that \u201ca woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction\u201d \u2014 indeed, write anything at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Still, Woolf\u2019s argument, as powerful and influential as it was then \u2014 and continues to be \u2014 is limited by certain assumptions when considered from a contemporary feminist perspective.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Woolf\u2019s book-length essay began as a series of lectures delivered to female students at the University of Cambridge in 1928. Its central feminist premise \u2014 that women writer\u2019s voices have been silenced through history and they need to fight for economic equality to be fully heard \u2014 has become so culturally pervasive as to enter the popular lexicon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Julia Gillard\u2019s A Podcast of One\u2019s Own<\/a>, takes its lead from the essay, as does Anonymous Was a Woman<\/a>, a prominent arts funding body based in New York.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even the Bechdel-Wallace test<\/a>, measuring the success of a narrative according to whether it features at least two named women conversing about something other than a man, can be seen to descend from the \u201cChloe liked Olivia\u201d section of Woolf\u2019s book. In this section, the hypothetical characters of Chloe and Olivia share a laboratory, care for their children, and have conversations about their work, rather than about a man.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Woolf\u2019s identification of women as a poorly paid underclass still holds relevance today, given the gender pay gap. As does her emphasis on the hierarchy of value placed on men\u2019s writing compared to women\u2019s (which has led to the establishment of awards such as the Stella Prize<\/a>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Invisible women<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

In her book, Woolf surveys the history of literature, identifying a range of important and forgotten women writers, including novelists Jane Austen, George Eliot and the Brontes, and playwright Aphra Behn<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In doing so, she establishes a new model of literary heritage that acknowledges not only those women who succeeded, but those who were made invisible: either prevented from working due to their sex, or simply cast aside by the value systems of patriarchal culture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To illustrate her point, she creates Judith, an imaginary sister of the playwright Shakespeare.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What if such a woman had shared her brother\u2019s talents and was as adventurous, \u201cas agog to see the world\u201d as he was? Would she have had the freedom, support and confidence to write plays? Tragically, she argues, such a woman would likely have been silenced \u2014 ultimately choosing suicide over an unfulfilled life of domestic servitude and abuse.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In her short, passionate book, Woolf examines women\u2019s letter writing, showing how it can illustrate women\u2019s aptitude for writing, yet also the way in which women were cramped and suppressed by social expectations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She also makes clear that the lack of an identifiable matrilineal literary heritage works to impede women\u2019s ability to write.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Indeed, the establishment of those major women writers in the 18th and 19th centuries (George Eliot, the Brontes et al), when \u201cthe middle-class woman began to write\u201d is, Woolf argues, a moment in history \u201cof greater importance than the Crusades or the War of the Roses\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Male critics such as T.S. Eliot<\/a> and Harold Bloom<\/a> have identified a (male) writer\u2019s relation to his precursors as necessary for his own literary production. But how, Woolf asks, is a woman to write if she has no model to look back on or respond to? If we are women, she wrote, \u201cwe think back through our mothers\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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A vintage snapshot of T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf taken in 1924. Wikimedia Commons<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Her argument inspired later feminist revisionist work of literary critics like Elaine Showalter<\/a>, Sandra K. Gilbert and Susan Gubar<\/a> who sought to restore the reputation of forgotten women writers and turn critical attention to women\u2019s writing as a field worthy of dedicated study.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

All too often in history, Woolf asserts, \u201cWoman\u201d is simply the object of the literary text \u2014 either the adored, voiceless beauty to whom the sonnet is dedicated or reflecting back the glow of man himself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

A Room of One\u2019s Own returns that authority to both the woman writer and the imagined female reader whom she addresses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Stream of consciousness<\/h2>\n\n\n
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Virginia Woolf in 1927. Wikimedia Commons<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

A Room of One\u2019s Own also demonstrates several aspects of Woolf\u2019s modernism. The early sections demonstrate her virtuoso stream of consciousness technique. She ruminates on women\u2019s position in, and relation to, fiction while wandering through the university campus, driving through country lanes, and dawdling over a leisurely, solo lunch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Critically, she employs telling patriarchal interruptions to that flow of thought.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A beadle waves his arms in exasperation as she walks on a private patch of grass. A less-than-satisfactory dinner is served to the women\u2019s college. A \u201cdeprecating, silvery, kindly gentleman\u201d turns her away from the library. These interruptions show the frequent disruption to the work of a woman without a room.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is the lesson also imparted in Woolf\u2019s 1927 novel To the Lighthouse<\/a> where artist Lily Briscoe must shed the overbearing influence of Mr and Mrs Ramsay, a couple who symbolise Victorian culture, if she is to \u201chave her vision\u201d. The flights and flow of modernist technique are not possible without the time and space to write and think for herself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A Room of One\u2019s Own has been crucial to the feminist movement and women\u2019s literary studies. But it is not without problems. Woolf admits her good fortune in inheriting \u00a3500 a year from an aunt.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Indeed her purse now \u201cbreed(s) ten-shilling notes automatically\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Woolf was lucky enough to possess a purse that bred ten-shilling notes. Wikimedia Commons<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Part of the purpose of the essay is to encourage women to make their living through writing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But Woolf seems to lack an awareness of her own privilege and how much harder it is for most women to fund their own artistic freedom. It is easy for her to advise against \u201cdoing work that one did not wish to do, and to do it like a slave, flattering and fawning\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In her book, Woolf also criticises the \u201cawkward break\u201d in Charlotte Bronte\u2019s Jane Eyre<\/a> (1847), in which Bronte\u2019s own voice interrupts the narrator\u2019s in a passionate protest against the treatment of women.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here, Woolf shows little tolerance for emotion, which has historically often been dismissed as hysteria when it comes to women discussing politics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A Room of One\u2019s Own ends with an injunction to work for the coming of Shakespeare\u2019s sister, that woman forgotten by history. \u201cSo to work, even in poverty and obscurity, is worthwhile\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Such a woman author must have her vision, even if her work will be \u201cstored in attics\u201d rather than publicly exhibited.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The room and the money are the ideal, we come to see, but even without them the woman writer must write, must think, in anticipation of a future for her daughter-artists to come.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

An adaptation of A Room of One\u2019s Own<\/a> is currently at Sydney\u2019s Belvoir Theatre.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jessica Gildersleeve<\/a>, Professor of English Literature, University of Southern Queensland<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This article is republished from The Conversation<\/a> under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This article was first published on September 23, 2020 in The Conversation and is republished here under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. Guide to the classics: A Room of One\u2019s Own, Virginia Woolf\u2019s feminist call to\u00a0arms Jessica Gildersleeve, University of Southern Queensland I sit at my kitchen table to write this essay, … Continue reading “Jessica Gildersleeve: On the relevance of Woolf’s manifesto today”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":9170,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-16358","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stolb01web.ddns.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/16358","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stolb01web.ddns.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stolb01web.ddns.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stolb01web.ddns.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stolb01web.ddns.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16358"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/stolb01web.ddns.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/16358\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16360,"href":"https:\/\/stolb01web.ddns.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/16358\/revisions\/16360"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stolb01web.ddns.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/9170"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stolb01web.ddns.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16358"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}