The foundation of A Room of One’s Own was a speech that Woolf had to give about Women and Fiction. She used this as
the basis for her work and, in fact, the book is the compendium of her essays for this speech. Virginia Woolf was strong in her beliefs. She saw everything being controlled by men in all society spheres. She centred her arguments on the literary points of view. She defended, as seen in the image, that “A woman must have money and a room of her own”.
There is a lot of symbolism in this sentence, which contains the title of the work. A Room of One’s Own as a title has a powerful meaning. If we pay attention to the words, we get the sense of rule, something that you can own, because it is yours. And it is a room, a space endowed with privacy, a place where you can do what you want without the permission of others. We consider that the title is nice and adequate to what Virginia Woolf explains in her work.
It is important to mention too the importance she gives to money since she saw this as the only way of becoming powerful, as the only way of being someone autonomous and strong.
Through her unnamed character, Woolf shows us how mistaken we can be with, let’s call it, our universally established truths. Woolf shows a great writing manner in doing this, as she is able to make us see that reality is always subjective and that opinions can be more trustful since we can explain them. It is an important fact that the only major character in the work has no name. This gives universality to her. If we, for example, think of another Virginia Woolf’s work, for example, Mrs. Dalloway we immediately think of the central character, Clarissa Dalloway. The image of a woman appears in our head, it is the image of one particular woman. The strategy Virginia Woolf is using in A Room of One’s Own is different. Not mentioning the protagonist’s name, implies that all the women could be represented by her, and all the women need what the unnamed protagonist is mentioning. So, this book can also be used as a weapon in order to attract women from everywhere.
Something that has called our attention is how Woolf uses interruptions. For example, in Chapter one, the narrator is being mislead by a cat without a tail. We, in the beginning, could be confused by this, but if we pay attention to the details, we can determine that Woolf is putting this in the story in order to demonstrate exactly what she is criticising: As women don’t have a room of their own, they mislead all the time; they cannot concentrate, so, women produce worse literature than men. Men don’t have this problem, because they don’t have to even imagine these situations, they have a room, they have privacy and they have the chance to be concentrated when writing.
In our opinion, Virginia Woolf is showing how wise she is when telling all this in the way she is doing it. His writing procedure is impeccable. How she plans what she is going to say and how is going to put it on the paper and make the reader see exactly what she wants him/her to see is a clear depiction of her ability to show how male society disallows women.
Another magnificent show of Woolf’s ability in writing as a critique to male society, is the creation of the character Judith Shakespeare. It is very interesting how Woolf depicts this character, as a sister of William Shakespeare. Everything is planned in this story and Virginia Woolf is expecting the reader’s attention and also the reader’s subtle knowledge. When we mention this subtle knowledge, we are making reference to the fact that, nowadays, everybody can think that William Shakespeare is ‘the greatest of the greatest ones’, so, if he has a sister, we expect her to be exactly like her brother. And yes, we are right, Judith Shakespeare is depicted in the story as talented as his brother. Woolf makes us go to that moment of creative power. We have two Shakespeares, two brothers, William, the one we know, and Judith. Both are equally talented. Then, Woolf takes benefit of what she has just said, to make us see reality. Judith is not taken into account only for being a woman. In fact, she ends committing suicide because of the awful situation she had in her life. She didn’t want to marry, and she’s hit because of that. She wanted to write, but was not considered only because of her sex. Suicide is used here as a way of escaping reality. A sentence we have considered that could define what we want to say is: if you don’t want to hear me, I don’t want to be among you. This sentence reflects, in our opinion, what suicide means in the case of Judith Shakespeare. Suicide is also a good topic in the world of Virginia Woolf, but that would be part of another paper.
What Woolf is trying to mean with all this is that if Shakespeare had been a woman, possibly, she wouldn’t have become so famous. The interesting thing is that, in order to make us show this, she invents a sister for William Shakespeare. This is what really makes Woolf’s writing procedures magnificent projectile weapons, she creates the perfect situation where the reader could see in a very visible and understandable way how women are being treated.
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