When I began reading A Room of One’s Own, I expected to quickly settle into a familiar text, perhaps gaining a new and improved perspective on its contents but generally just refreshing my mind of the discussions, assignments and thoughts that I had while reading it in high school. However, after thoroughly enjoying a comfortable reread of what serves as the book’s opening scene—in which Virginia Woolf is shooed off the grass by the beadle—I found that the words and the ideas they represented were unfamiliar. I remembered reading the book, attending class and completing the assignments—if only I had transferred them to my laptop, so that I might reread them three years later—but I could not remember any details from the book past the first few pages. As I continued to read this weekend, I continuously expected to reach a point where the text was once again familiar. Just one scene, a few lines of dialogue, or a single point would suffice to ease my worries about the state of my memory. At twenty years old, revisiting a book three years later should not, I thought, result in the discovery of such a void.
Upon reflection, however, I realized that the reason for this disconnect is not a faulty memory. Rather, I believe that I feel that I am reading it fresh as a result of the gulf of personal growth and knowledge gained since I read it. These changes that have occurred within me since high school affect my understanding and experience of reading Virginia Woolf’s musings, to point that I do not recognize the text as something I have read before. For example, whereas I might have blown off Woolf’s descriptions of the seasons when I read them the first time, and thought with a shrug that months must have passed between scenes, I now felt that Woolf used the seasons to craft the sort of atmosphere that subtly contributes to a certain mindset. A season has innumerable feelings, events and places associated with it, and though these differ from person to person the common ground and agreed-upon associations are similar enough to the individual’s associations that Woolf could use a brief description of the trees or park to enhance the potency of her arguments. Thus, in the time that has elapsed since I last read A Room of One’s Own, I have acquired the ability to appreciate that Woolf uses many of the descriptions in the essay to portray emotional truths, rather than physical facts.
In a similar vein, I no longer am confused by the voice narrator. In high school, I spent a great deal of time trying to figure out who the narrator is, since Woolf writes that it is not really herself, but could be “Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael,” or any number of other people, for “it is not a matter of any importance” (5). While reading the essay, however, I eventually disregarded that disclaimer and took Woolf’s Is at face value. It was she, quite concretely, who was walking down the path, looking at X, Y and Z, and thinking all those powerful thoughts. This time, however, I felt that Woolf uses the idea of the narrator-by-any-name to generalize her voice to be that of any “Mary,” some range of which we get from reading about each of those Marys in the subsequent chapters.
As I begin Chapter 6 with the recognition of my new perspective on A Room of One’s Own, I cannot help but wonder whether I will it have a similar experience when I reread Sula. I seem to remember more of the content of Sula than I did of A Room of One’s Own, but I have so enjoyed this fresh reading experience that I hope I read Sula equally differently, if not due to life experience and knowledge then because I have now read other writing by Toni Morrison.
I liked your first journal entry and how you explained the differences in reading to your own growth as a person. My favorite part was when you discussed the seasons and how although people have different feelings about them, certain things about seasons are universal.
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