Читать книгу A Room of One's Own - Virginia Woolf - Страница 13

A Room of One's Own is not only critical as a document in feminist history: it also demonstrates several aspects of Woolf's approach to the new possibilities of narrative within the modernist movement. Alongside James Joyce, Katherine Mansfield, and T.S. Eliot, Woolf is recognised as one of the great writers of literary modernism, the period roughly spanning the last years of the nineteenth century up until the end of the Second World War. But how specifically is Woolf's modernism expressed in A Room of One's Own?

Modernism is associated with experimentation in form, particularly narrative fragmentation. The stream of consciousness technique, influenced by psychoanalysis and its revelations about the mind, seeks to represent the endless movements of thought. Indeed, whereas literature of the nineteenth century is primarily associated with realism, and an assumption that the world can be represented just as it is, modernism shifted from an interest in external to internal representation.

Writers such as Woolf, as well as visual artists including Vincent Van Gogh, sought to capture the individual impression of a moment in time. Woolf termed this ‘moments of being.’ Her short story, ‘Kew Gardens’ (1919), demonstrates this, describing the individual thoughts and impressions of a range of people – and even a snail – wandering the gardens. In the contrasts and conflicts between the contemplations of these people, as well as the elevation of the snail's own consciousness, Woolf makes clear the impossibility of a single, unified realism or even, as A Room of One's Own reiterates, a unified truth.

Much of the early sections of A Room of One's Own demonstrate not only an emphasis on the importance of the ordinary, but also the stream of consciousness technique. Woolf ruminates on women's position in, and in relation to, fiction while wandering through the university campus, driving through country lanes, and dawdling over a leisurely solo lunch. Critically, however, she also uses frequent patriarchal interruptions to that flow of thought – a college beadle waving his arms in exasperation as she walks on a private patch of grass, a less‐than‐satisfactory dinner served in the women's college, a ‘deprecating, silvery, kindly gentleman’ who turns her away from the the university library. These episodes serve to underscore the way in which such interruptions disrupt the work of a woman without a room.

The same lesson, incidentally, is imparted at the conclusion of To the Lighthouse, in which the artist Lily Briscoe must figure out how to shed the overbearing influence of Mr and Mrs Ramsay if she is to ‘have her vision.’ The Mr Ramsay character, a professor based on Woolf's own father, demands the full attention and respect of his wife and family. The novel opens with an example of the stream of consciousness technique, depicting a confrontation between Mr and Mrs Ramsay as to the expected weather. Oblivious to the desires of his young son, who wishes to travel on a small boat to the lighthouse just off shore from the Ramsays' holiday house, Mr Ramsay insists that he is correct, that both his wife and son must align with his view of the world. Part of the evolution of the novel involves Mr Ramsay coming to tolerate, if not understand, the consciousnesses of those around him. Crucially, it is the artist, Lily Briscoe, who imparts this knowledge to him. Standing in some ways for Woolf herself, Lily must not only kill the ‘angel in the house’ (Mrs Ramsay, the symbol of Victorian womanhood), but confront Mr Ramsay, the symbol of patriarchal intellectualism as gatekeeper. Only then can she work.

Woolf knew that the flights and flow of modernist technique took time and effort to get right. It would not be possible for women writers who did not have the luxury of time and space to be alone and properly think through style, pacing, and characterisation. The tradition‐smashing nature of modernist literature and art still required a level of material and social freedom among its practitioners.