Fictional Writing At Its Best--Virginia Woolf

“A Room of One’s Own” by Virginia Woolf

"A Room of One's Own" by Anais Woolf
http://www.artpistol.co.uk/art-gallery/room-ones-own

How is the everyday an important concern in Woolf’s work?  How does she provide access to the everyday in ways that differ or relate to works that we’ve read?

Virginia Woolf brilliantly explores the everyday life of women in the 1920s through a detailed and tedious account of her thought processes of the everyday that combines fictional storytelling with aspects of truth.  By approaching the topic of “women and fiction” in this manner, and I can only assume that the everyday life of women was not a subject that was highly accessible through the discourse of this time, Woolf manages to produce a persuasive means of communicating the truth behind the everyday sexist encounters and the oppression of women through a fictional character.  She makes it clear that the identity of the narrator is irrelevant, “call me Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael or by any name you please--it is not a matter of any importance”, because her story is true and applicable to all women of her lifetime (Woolf 3).

Woolf’s poetic technique differs from other works we have read thus far because she does not give us philosophical writing, a literary analysis or a research study, but rather a stream of consciousness.  Fictional or not, the inequality within the thoughts she has and personal encounters she describes rings true for womankind in a way that many writers have not been able to access through alternative styles of writing.  Woolf writes with a certain directness and honesty, while recognizing the limitations of her individual perspective outright, that makes it incredibly difficult, nearly impossible, to refute or disagree with her argument in any way.  She states very explicitly that her ideas are conveyed strictly through opinion and personal sentiment and in no way is her writing developed from any sort of factual perspective, because “one can only show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does have” (Woolf 2).

An important connection is made regarding the relationship that women have with two distinct concepts: instinct and reason.  Although logic and reason would tell her that she should have the same rights as men and be allowed to walk on the turf, oppressive instincts overwhelm her thinking and send her walking on the gravel, where women belong.  How did it come to be that women instinctually feel inferior to men?  Is this still true today?