Читать книгу A Room of One's Own - Virginia Woolf - Страница 9

From the moment of its publication, A Room of One's Own was taken up as a critical work of the feminist movement. The day prior to its release, Woolf recorded in her diary her fears for its reception, simultaneously concerned that it would be cast aside for its ‘charm, & sprightliness,’ even while she was ‘attacked for a feminist & hinted at for a sapphist’ (see Favre 2020). She need not have worried. Although some critics, such as Woolf's regular adversary Arnold Bennett, disagreed with her arguments, most recognised the essay's contribution to feminism. Indeed, author Rebecca West (1931) described it approvingly as ‘an uncompromising piece of feminist propaganda’. Later, prominent feminist critic Susan Gubar would recognise it as ‘a classic in the history of Western feminism’ (see Ziarek 2010).

Woolf's emphasis on the necessity of a room has a wider sociological significance. Her essay signals a move away from the doctrine of separate spheres, which characterised gender relations in Britain in the nineteenth century. Under this social structure, men occupied the public sphere while women were confined to the private. They were expected to serve the interests of their home and family rather than their individual needs or desires. A room of one's own, then, signifies the feminist reimagination of the domestic space. As well as being ‘the site of a dynamic female potential,’ as Christina Stevenson (2014) puts it, and the physical and mental privacy necessary for intellectual work (Wendy Gan 2009), a separate room assigns meaning to ‘woman's social and political existence’ (Julie Robin Solomon 1989).

It is precisely because of this domestic confinement that women had not been afforded the time, space, or cultural respect necessary to write. Those who did published their work under pseudonyms (such as George Eliot), hid their work from those closest to them (Jane Austen had to draft her novels surreptitiously in a corner of the sitting room), or channelled their creative energy into ‘appropriate’ narrative forms, such as diary‐writing.

In this way, women's voices were routinely silenced, dismissed as boring or shallow, or framed as of concern only to their own gender. Over and over, a woman was reminded, she was suited only to be the object of the literary text – the adored, voiceless beauty to whom the sonnet is dedicated – or she reflected back the glow of man himself: ‘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,’ Woolf writes. ‘Have you any notion of how many books are written about women in the course of one year? Are you aware that you are, perhaps, the most discussed animal in the universe?’

In A Room of One's Own, Woolf seeks to return that authority to the woman writer as well as to the female student and imagined female reader whom she addresses.