'A Room of One's Own'

Paper Summary:

This paper reviews 'A Room of One's Own' by Virginia Woolf. The paper argues that Virginia Woolf privileges men and masculinity over women and femininity in her essay. The paper draws examples from the essay to support the argument.

From the Paper:

"Why was there no woman with Shakespeare's brilliance? She agrees with the biased views of various professors that "it would have been impossible, completely and entirely, for any woman to have written the plays of Shakespeare in the age of Shakespeare" (46). Woolf explains that even if a woman had possessed the creative gifts of Shakespeare, the world would never have known it. She suggests that perhaps Shakespeare had a "wonderfully gifted sister," but she did not have the opportunities he had. Shakespeare's sister "remained at home. She was as adventurous, as imaginative, as agog to see the world as he was. But she was not sent to school" (47). Woolf even imagines Shakespeare's sister being forced into marriage, coerced by her parents, running away, and eventually killing herself because of her frustrated genius. Woolf adamantly insists that "it is unthinkable that any woman in Shakespeare's day should have had Shakespeare's genius," but her reason is not that women are inferior. Instead, they were poor, uneducated, and enslaved by domestic duty. Since "genius like Shakespeare's is not born among labouring, uneducated, servile people,"(48) no woman had a chance to develop and express her "incandescence" like Shakespeare did. Instead, she "would certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at. For it needs little skill in psychology to be sure that a highly gifted girl who had tried to use her gift for poetry would have been so thwarted and hindered by other people, so tortured and pulled asunder by her own contrary instincts, that she must have lost her health and sanity to a certainty" (49). "

Sample of Sources Used:

• Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One's Own. New York: HBJ, 1929.

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