A Room of One’s Own is so major a document in the development of feminist thought, criticism and writing, and there is so much to say about it, that I hardly know where to begin. Fortunately, there has been much illuminating commentary.

Deconstructing the Patriarchal Lecture

Perhaps we can decide to begin with a momentous point made by Jane Marcus, a leading feminist writer on Woolf, in “Taking the Bull by the Udders’: Sexual Difference in Virginia Woolf — A Conspiracy Theory” in Jane Marcus, Virginia Woolf and the Languages of Patriarchy, 136-62. Marcus points out:

In A Room of One’s Own Virginia Woolf deconstructs the lecture as a form. The lecture was another version of the discourse of male domination. “Lecturing,” she wrote, “incites the most debased of human passions — vanity, ostentation, self-assertion, and the desire to convert. (145)

This point is momentous, not only for its bearing on our present situation, but also for its explication of one of the many ways in which A Room of One’s Own is a text that subverts patriarchy and its institutions. It begins, not with an idea of the lecturer’s, or a fact, but with the resistant word, “But…”, introducing an objection of the listener. The listener, not the lecturer, is the first to speak. The deconstruction of the lecturing discourse continues, as the speaker rejects the idea of delivering up at the end of an hour’s discourse “a nugget of pure truth.” Instead she will begin by offering an opinion upon one minor point: “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction” (4). The speaker tells us that she will spend the rest of the time in describing to her audience how she came to this conclusion, giving the audience the opportunity to formulate their own opinions and judgments. Truth as an absolute is brought into question (5) in a way that prefigures ideas of poststructuralist theorists. As many readers, including Jane Marcus, have noticed, the patriarchal discourse of “lecture” in A Room of One’s Own has been deconstructed down to a non-authoritarian conversation among women. The hierarchical and structured, the binary relationship between the lecturer and the lecturee, has been transformed into a multiple meeting of equal minds. This can be seen as emblematic of one of feminism’s positive goals.

Deconstructing Individualism and Essentialism

What Virginia Woolf described as the “vain and vicious” system of lecturing is further and more fundamentally subverted in A Room of One’s Own by the fluidity or uncertainty introduced into the identity of the lecturer: “‘I’ is only a convenient term for somebody who has no real being.” (5) “Here then was I (call me Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael or by any name you please)….” (5; cf. 131, about the letter ‘I’). These names are shared among women characters mentioned later: Mary Seton is the friend at Fernham (Book 1); Mary Beton is the aunt who passed on a legacy to the speaker (Book 2); Mary Carmichael is the author of the contemporary novel commented upon in Book 5. Not only does this lecturer refuse the patriarchal role of presiding, but she blends her identity with that of other women. This is a statement of sisterhood and of women’s common cause and of unity, an idea to which the text returns often, and especially at the end.

The rejection of stability, of firm outline, in the speaker’s identity parallels, as Toril Moi argues (Sexual/Textual Politics 9-10), the rejection in poststructuralist theory of the liberal humanist faith in the concept of the individual.

Chris Weedon offers a clear explication of the ideas involved (Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory 32-5). The western intellectual tradition presupposes a unique, coherent essence at the heart of the individual. Against this, poststructuralism proposes “a subjectivity which is precarious, contradictory, and constantly being reconstituted each time we think or speak.” Each subjectivity is the meeting place of many competing discourses, and is constituted by them. For example, the discourse of femininity presented in soap operas conflicts in many respects with the discourse of femininity hopefully presented in a Women in Literature course; if we meet with both discourses, then both help to constitute our constantly-changing subjectivity. Since the individual essence postulated by liberal humanism is more resistant to change than a subjectivity that is constantly reconstituted in discourse, poststructuralist theory offers more hope for change than does liberal humanism. When she embraces a shifting identity with indefinite outlines in A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf therefore contributes to the growing modern rejection of faith in an individual essence. She joins with the forces promoting change.

A Subversive Matrix

To this point, we have considered two techniques employed in A Room of One’s Own to undermine the patriarchal institution of the lecture. However, Woolf’s essay is a matrix of conventional and subversive arguments and devices, and I can hope to unravel only a few in the time we have. On the one hand A Room of One’s Own unmasks patriarchal power, self-aggrandisement and greed; and on the other hand, it claims a place for women, both in the broader society and in literary life. When Room discusses the female literary tradition, it makes such a tradition accessible for the first time. While it discusses androgyny, the meeting of male and female in the creative mind, or, more exactly, the creative mind’s indifference to such a split or geometrically divided world, A Room of One’s Own presents in metaphor an ideal of wholeness and unity that overflows the defined boundaries and limitations of gender. More deeply, it searches for a way to transcend the binary foundations of patriarchal discourse. (See Barbara Hill Rigney, “ ‘A Wreath Upon the Grave’: The Influence of Virginia Woolf on Feminist Critical Theory,” in Jeremy Hawthorn, Criticism and Critical Theory 77.)

Another pervasive and subtly subversive device used in A Room of One’s Own to undermine patriarchal literary tradition or the network of men “thinking back through their fathers,” is that of allusion and metaphor. For example, the (tailless) Manx cat trespassing on the male turf of the Miltonic universe that is undermined in A Room of One’s Own is symbolic of the literary female. The names of Mary Seton, Beton and Carmichael are taken from an anonymous ballad, “The Ballad of the Four Marys,” from Shakespeare’s time. The article by Alice Fox, explicating these and other allusions, is helpful for understanding the achievement of A Room of One’s Own. The notes in the Oxford edition are also helpful.

Yet other subversive devices pervading Woolf’s essay are comedy and irony, here employed as weapons against patriarchy. For example, irony is obvious in the commentary on the bishop, pp. 59-60. Comedy is present in the text’s representation of women’s lives and men’s expectations from women’s labour, pp. 28-9. But I repeat that these subversive devices pervade the text, and could be exemplified endlessly.

The broadest interwoven strands in the complex tapestry of A Room of One’s Own are: first, conventional argument and information, shaped into a reassuring and conventional structure; and, second, an unpredictable sequence of narratives, that also contribute to and in some cases govern, the elements of conventional structure. These narratives are intrinsically subversive of the forms of lecture or polemical writing. This is not because of their mere presence – anecdote has been a feature of sermons and lectures and political addresses from before the time of Jesus; but because in A Room of One’s Own the narratives are pervasive and fundamental. A brief outline of the six sections will illustrate these points clearly, and I hope, incontrovertibly:

Book 1: Oxbridge Men’s and Women’s Colleges

Narrative determines the shape of this section, which records the speaker’s experiences of a day in a fictionalised Oxbridge. The narrative begins in the morning, and closes very late, as the speaker returns to her inn to sleep. The narrative encapsulates the strength and exclusivity of patriarchal intellectual traditions: as a woman the speaker is excluded from the turf and from the library; she watches the assembling of dons for a church service as an outsider (See the photo of dons in the Oxford edition). The material foundations and supports of patriarchal traditions are displayed in references to the magnificence of the buildings and grounds; to the library holdings: manuscripts of Milton’s Lycidas and Thackeray’s Henry Esmond; and to the food, drink and service of the luncheon partaken in a college reserved for men. The first half of the chapter therefore deals with patriarchy. The second half, in which the speaker has dinner in a women’s college, Fernham, displays through the narrative the limited intellectual opportunities available to women. Women’s culture is not exclusive: beadles and gates and locks are beyond the means of women’s colleges. Women’s poverty is evident in the poor food consumed at dinner. When women think back through their mothers, they find, not endowments by kings and industrial magnates, but Mrs. Seton, – she had thirteen children by a minister of the church (p. 26). Women have only been able to hold property in their own right for forty-eight years (since the passing of the Married Women’s Property Act in 1870, revised 1882, which is the year Woolf is thinking of, the year of her birth) ( p. 29). The narrative of Book 1 has therefore established patriarchy’s economic power and greed, and women’s poverty and exclusion, and the effect of this imbalance on the relative intellectual attainments to date of the sexes.

Book 2: The British Museum and the Tea Shop

In Book 2 we continue to accompany the indeterminate speaker on her non-authoritarian, unitary quest for inspiration and information. At the beginning of the book, she sets out from her London house; at the end of the Book, and at the end of the day, she returns to her house. The Book is bounded at each end by descriptions of the London streets. There are two central sections: the first is made up of questions, and is set in the Reading Room of the British Museum: the question into which the questioning of this section is subsumed is, Why are men, especially authoritarian, intellectual, middle-class men, angry at women? The second section is set in a tea shop in the vicinity of the Museum, and en route for home, and it provides answers. The anger of intellectual men, the defenders of patriarchy, is explained in terms of feeling and psychology: 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. 45). Patriarchal writings must therefore affirm the “mental, moral and physical inferiority of women,” because women’s “inferiority” is the chief support of men’s sense of superiority, of men’s self-confidence. Book 2 goes on to contrast the patriarchy’s insatiable search for wealth and power with the speaker’s contentment with her modest income, which has provided her with intellectual and emotional freedom:

Indeed my aunt’s legacy unveiled the sky to me, and substituted for the large and imposing figure of a gentleman, which Milton recommended for my perpetual adoration, a view of the open sky. (p. 50)

Economic independence frees women from patriarchal thinking and patriarchal traditions.

Book 3: Home Research I–Shakespeare’s Sister

The three central books of A Room of One’s Own, Books 3 to 5, are loosely governed by the external narrative of the speaker’s discoveries while doing research at home. These researches occupy another whole day, since Book 5 concludes when it is night, continuing the pattern of Books 1 and 2. However, the creative energy and narrative interest migrates in these books to fictional and real biographies of women writers of the past.

Book 3 asks why no detailed history of women has been written, for example, of Elizabethan England, when the greatest English literature was produced. This leads to the imaginary biography of Shakespeare’s sister, Judith (pp. 60-62), the structural centre of Book 3, and the central narrative of A Room of One’s Own. It suggests that whether they were gifted or not, women in Shakespeare’s time had no voice with which to influence literature or public debate. Later women writers hid their identity under anonymity or masculine pseudonyms. They were constrained by the contemporary cult of chastity and modesty which severely limited women’s access to the wider world. The discussion invites questions, such as: How is sexual repression linked with cultural and social repression? Book 3 then traces psychological impediments to women’s writing in the centuries following Shakespeare’s.

Book 4: Home Research II–Our Literary Mothers

This chapter is centrally concerned with thinking back through our mothers, i.e. with establishing the tradition of women’s writing, through, in the first instance, as Group A, the biographies of four seventeenth-century women writers–in turn, Anne, Countess of Winchilsea, Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle, Dorothy Osborne, and Aphra Behn. Secondly, women’s literary tradition is established through biographies of four major nineteenth-century women novelists. These make up Group B: Jane Austen, Charlotte and Emily Bronte, and George Elliot. The narratives are selective and interwoven with polemical points about the social and psychological obstructions to women’s writing, and with literary points defining incandescent, or non-passionate, non-didactic prose-writing. Concerning the latter, Woolf argues that writing which is egocentric because it arises from a wounded sensibility or anger is inferior to that produced by a detached mind. (We may or may not agree with this. It certainly seems to work well in Woolf’s own case, as in the present instance.) The women’s literary tradition that Woolf uncovers has encouraged the development of research in this area. For an account of the influence, and also for a critique, from a contemporary feminist viewpoint of some of Woolf’s assumptions, you should read Margaret J. M. Ezell, “The Myth of Judith Shakespeare: Creating the Canon of Women’s Literature.”

Book 5: Home Research III–Women’s Writing Now

While Books 3 and 4 dealt with women’s writing of the past, the subject of Book 5 is women’s writing of the present. The narratives are the continuing external account of home reading and the plot of the new novel by Mary Carmichael. The polemics continue with the presentation of positive ideas, such as women’s friendship for each other, their potentialities and talents apart from their relationships with men; and with critiques of patriarchal literature, in which women are (or have been in the past) rarely depicted except in their relationships with men; and with critiques of the patriarchal appropriation of women’s energy for literary production. Woolf affirms that women’s immense contribution to civilisation lies open for exploration by the novelist of the present.

Book 6: Androgyny and a London Street

Another day dawns, and the narrative turns outward again, as the speaker reports what she saw of a London street while watching from her window. Multiple small incidents culminate in a meeting :

…[the stream] brought all three together at a point directly beneath my window; where the taxi stopped; and the girl and the young man stopped; and they got into the taxi; and then the cab glided off as if it were swept by the current elsewhere. (p. 125)

This short narrative embodies the impulse to unification that governs Book 6. Earlier chapters have dealt with the opposition between the genders and with one gender’s victimisation by the other. Book 6 tries to resolve this fission through the concept of androgyny, which Woolf presents as the essence and source of artistic and literary creation. The discussion keeps referring back to earlier events and ideas, and in this way the text achieves a symbolic discursive unity that makes its theme concrete. For example:

• The falling leaf “seemed to point to a river, which flowed past, invisibly, round the corner, down the street, and took people and eddied them along, as the stream at Oxbridge had taken the undergraduate in his boat and the dead leaves” (p. 125)
• “But why was I bored? Partly because of the dominance of the letter ‘I’ and the aridity, which, like the giant beech tree, it casts within its shade.” (p. 131); compare the opening renunciation of “I” as “a convenient term for  somebody who has no real being” (p. 5).
• The final recollection of this kind goes back to the narrative of Shakespeare’s sister (p. 149), and the final unification proposed in Woolf’s essay is of all women, including the speaker and her audience, with this dead woman poet. “Judith Shakespeare,” says Woolf, lives in all women in the form of their creativity.The final hope is that she will be reborn “in a hundred years time” through women’s efforts for self-realisation and political and economic reform. 

A Room of One’s Own was delivered as a series of talks at Cambridge University in October 1928, and so now there isn’t long to wait.

A Room of One’s Own : SUGGESTED READING

Burt, John. “Irreconcilable Habits of Thought in A Room of One’s Own and To the Lighthouse.” English Literary History 49:4 (1982):889-907.

Ezell, Margaret J. M. “The Myth of Judith Shakespeare: Creating the Canon of Women’s Literature.” New Literary History: A Journal of Theory and Interpretation, 21:3 (1990 Spring), pp. 579-92.| JSTOR Subscriber Link This article discusses Woolf’s development of a women’s literary canon.

Farwell, Marilyn R. “Virginia Woolf and Androgyny.” Contemporary Literature, 16:4 (1975 Fall), pp. 433-51. | JSTOR Subscriber Link This article is relevant to Book 6 of A Room of One’s Own.

Folsom, Marcia McClintock. “Gallant Red Brick and Plain China: Teaching A Room of One’s Own.” College English 45:3 (1983): 254-62. 

Kaivola, Karen. “Revisiting Woolf’s Representations of Androgyny: Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Nation.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 18:2 (1999): 235-61. JSTOR Subscriber Link  This article discusses Woolf’s treatment of androgyny in A Room of One’s Own and Orlando, together with issues of gender, race, and literary theory.

Kamuf, Peggy. “Penelope at Work: Interruptions in A Room of One’s Own.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction, 16:1 (1982 Fall), pp. 5-18.| JSTOR Subscriber Link This article discusses the narrator’s role, and the treatment of sexuality in A Room of One’s Own.

Marcus, Jane. “Art and Anger.” Feminist Studies, 4:1 (1978 Feb), pp. 68-98. http://www.jstor.org/view/00463663/sp040006/04x0146p/0  This article compares Woolf’s ideas on women writers’ anger with treatments of the theme in contemporary examples of American literature.

Marcus, Jane. “Liberty, Sorority, Misogyny.” Heilbrun, Carolyn G. and Higonnet, Margaret R., ed. The Representation of Women in Fiction. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1983. 60-97.

Marcus, Jane. “Critical Response I: Quentin’s Bogey.” Critical Inquiry 11:3 (1985): 486-97.

Marcus, Jane. “‘Taking the Bull by the Udders’: Sexual Difference in Virginia Woolf: A Conspiracy Theory.” Marcus, Jane, ed. Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury: A Centenary Celebration. Bloomington: Indiana Press, 1987. 146-69. 

 Marcus, Jane. Virginia Woolf and the Languages of Patriarchy. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1987. 

Marshall, Denise. “Slaying the Angel and the Patriarch: The Grinning Woolf.” Women’s Studies 15:1-3 (1988): 149-77.

Rigney, Barbara Hill. “‘A Wreath upon the Grave’: The Influence of Virginia Woolf on Feminist Critical Theory.” Hawthorn, Jeremy, ed. Criticism and Critical Theory. London: Arnold, 1984. 72-81. 

Rosenman, Ellen Bayuk. “Sexual Identity and A Room of One’s Own: ‘Secret Economies’ in Virginia Woolf’s Feminist Discourse.” Signs, 14:3 (1989 Spring), pp. 634-50.| JSTOR Subscriber Link This article discusses Woolf’s theories of criticism and sexuality in A Room of One’s Own.