Tuesday, June 10, 2008

Virginia Woolf - Women as Writers

Virginia Woolf's "From A Room of One's Own" and "Professions of Women" are both very convincing works of literature. In the first essay, she begins by chronicling her readings of the historian Professor Trevelyan. In this historian's book History of England, Woolf finds that women are portrayed as "...heroic and mean; splendid and sordid; infinitely beautiful and hideous in the extreme." She goes on to claim that these women are works of fiction and that the real women of this Elizabethan era were in fact "locked up, beaten, and flung about the room." It is very intriguing how Woolf descries women as only considered of high importance in imagination, but that when it really comes down to it, a woman is practically "insignificant." She is a "worm wingled like an eagle." Sifting through the history book, she reads us the table of contents, citing chapters such as "The Crusasdes...The University...The House of Commons...The Hundred Years' War..." Great women like Elizabeth and Mary were mentioned here and there, but that was it. Woolf is obviously ashamed.

The most interesting aspect of this essay, I found, was her description of Shakespeare's gifted (yet oppressed and eventually suicidal) sister, Judith. When Woolf writes, "any woman born with a great gift in the sixteenth century would certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at." She goes on. I could not help but recall Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper." I think Woolf is trying to hint at something. She is not implying that only a genius can achieve greatness, but anyone can. We are all capable of emotion. We are all conscious human beings with "brains and character," as she puts it. Women just do not have the opportunity in this patriarchal society to express and freely portray that emotion, wit and creativity as a man can. Her point is very well taken.

In "Professions of Women," Woolf describes two experiences, "The first--killing The Angel in the House--I think I solved. She died. But the second, telling the truth about my own experiences as a body, I do not think I solved. I doubt that any woman has solved it yet." The Angel in the House, as I interpreted it, is a subconscious "phantom" woman that tries to skew Woolf's writing when she is trying to compose a review of a book written by a man. Woolf wants to write with a mind of her own. She wants to analyze the book objectively, not subjectively. She tries hard to void her review of opinion and prejudice, and according to her, she achieves that goal.
She then describes a sort of trance that a writer goes through before finally being enlightened. A woman, she claims, usually runs into a dead end with an "explosion" of "foam and confusion." She writes that "though men sensibly allow themselves great freedom in these respects, I doubt that they realize or can control the extreme severity with which they condemn such freedom in women." I feel that Woolf is trying to imply that women have become desensitized by man's dominance in society. Women's imagination cannot run wild, and it is difficult from them to put creativity in writing due to this subconscious sentiment that they are, in fact, considered inferior in their society. I do frankly have trouble completely understanding what Woolf is getting at here.

Either way, Woolf was undeniably one of the most prolific writers of her time. Time permitting, I certainly intend to read more of her works.

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