Читать книгу A Room of One's Own - Virginia Woolf - Страница 12

Named after Coventry Patmore's 1854 poem of the same title, Woolf's so‐called ‘Angel in the House’ conveys the way the idealised image of woman becomes a spectre that stops women from writing. This ‘angel in the house’ is both a symbol of cultural discourses about women's roles and a persistent internal monologue that discourages women from writing.

Both A Room of One's Own and ‘Professions for Women’ steer clear of the more militant outrage that characterises Three Guineas (1938), an essay frequently published alongside A Room of One's Own. But the essay (cast as a lecture, as in the two earlier works, or as a letter, as in Three Guineas) was a form that Woolf found appropriate for expressing her social and political views. As Anne E. Fernald (1994) notes, the essay was ‘well‐suited to making arguments for social change, in spite of many dismissals of it as too polite, too conciliatory, too willing to play the feminine role of “hostess” to contradictory or even offensive ideas.’

It is more useful to see A Room of One's Own as an essay rather than as, for instance, a feminist manifesto, since it ‘refuses to stake out a set position’ or an ‘assumption of authority’, as Randi Saloman (2013) suggests. She notes that its style may be meandering and even indeterminate, but it is through the very open‐endedness of the essay that young women reading it can be inspired to imagine unique futures.