Reflections on A Room of One’s Own
Reading A Room of One’s Own in a newly shared room in my apartment near campus, I could not help but relate to the title and Woolf’s opening about the necessity of a private space for a woman to develop her thoughts. Though I am not a fiction writer, I consider myself an academic, much like Woolf portrays herself here. Finding peace among the chaos is difficult, and it intrigued me that Woolf cast aside her own persona for an alternative any-woman as she searched for answers to her alarmingly rare questions. If only that were possible in reality! The personal connections I had throughout the chapters were chiefly superficial- based on my knowledge of history and women’s rights. Nonetheless, I was impressed by the author’s ability to capture routinely over-simplified issues while holding historical circumstances accountable for them.
Despite my understanding of the discussion of the “inferior sex” and my avid love of Jane Austen, I was struck most by chapter three. As a theater minor and occasional performer, I found myself completely stunned by the Woolf’s observations of historical poetry, plays, and epics. How could I have missed this before? The almighty Clytemnestra, the powerful and dangerous wife of Agamemnon, is one of the most featured women in mythology. To a modern reader or audience, independent and authoritative women are a fact of life (if I do say so myself). But to an Athenian commoner, the story of Clytemnestra must have been shocking, right? Woolf raises this point with the highest level of certainty and her source states:
It remains a strange and almost inexplicable fact that in Athena’s city, where women were kept in almost Oriental suppression as odalisques or drudges, the stage should yet have produced figures like Clytemnestra and Cassandra, Atossa and Antigone, Phedre and Medea, and all the other heroines who dominate play after play of the ‘misogynist’ Euripedes. But the paradox of this world where in real life a respectable woman could hardly show her face alone in the street, and yet on the stage woman equals or surpasses man, has never been satisfactorily explained.
Woolf picks up on this monumental point, talking about the “woman” in literature:
She pervades poetry from cover to cover she is all but absent from history. She dominates the lives of kings and conquerors in fiction; in fact she was the slave of kings and conquerors in fiction; in fact she was the slave of any boy whose parents forced a ring upon her finger. Some of the most inspired words, some of the most profound thoughts in literature fall from her lips; in real life she could hardly read, could scarcely spell, and was the property of her husband.
This passage led me to the word “fantasy.” This phenomenon of ancient literature that Woolf calls a “queer, composite being” seems to truthfully come back to the objectification of women. Greeks may have been celebrated for their revolutionary poetry and playwriting, but Woolf points out the huge contradictions about the works and society. Women were scarcely treated as more than property, yet symbolized passion and power in literature. The contradiction transforms through to the age of Elizabeth I, where Woolf once again questions the reign of a woman in an empire of oppressed women.
These short passages have caused my understanding of “great” literature to change and Woolf’s astute analysis offers considerable material for further reading and consideration on the topic of “women and fiction.”
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