A Room of One's Own

(Responding to Question #4)

I find it interesting the ways in which "A Room of One's Own" really speaks to everything we have discussed thus far in class about the everyday and what it means to live in the realm of the everyday.  I think that Virginia Woolf is able to access the everyday in ways which other scholars which we have read leading up to now cannot.  I think, first and foremost, she is able to do this because she talks about the everyday experience by literally narrating an everyday experience of her own.  In class discussion we often come back to this idea that the everyday is the thing which escapes, that thing which cannot be qualified or classified, or else it becomes something of significance, an event, which then can no longer exist in the realm of the everyday.  By discussing her experiences in this type of stream of consciousness, it is almost as if we are transported into Woolf's everyday realm without distinguishing it as such, therefore keeping its status as an everyday escaping event.  With scholarship such as the works of Lefebvre, De Certeau, etc., the goal is to define or classify our everyday experiences in order to better understand them, but how can we understand them at all without first disregarding them as significant, memorable experiences in the first place?

Woolf is careful in her writing to display her experiences as this rambling stream of consciousness in order to draw attention to the fact that this is how they would present in real life.  When we are in the midst of an everyday experience we are unaware, just as Woolf shows in her description of the tail-less cat for example.  The experience is memorable to her because it leads to thoughts about life and truth but the actual event of spotting the cat is presented almost as an aside rather than a plot point.

It's refreshing, especially in a class which is centered around the everyday, to read scholarship which presents itself as a narration or story, as if inviting you to dive into the everyday experience rather than classify or categorize it.