Thursday, December 3, 2015
Separate but unequal
Woolf is writing in a fictional, novelist style, which I think is a way to express everyday aspects of female academic life in a universalized way. That is, the fact that the narrator is basically anonymous may make it simultaneously easier for readers to recognize the ordinariness of her experience, and more difficult to reject her experience as unique to Woolf (and therefore inapplicable to the wider female condition). This is a very supportive technique because I think she's trying to convey the way in which the everyday disadvantages of women's lives prevent their emergence in academia, literature, culture. Without 'a room of her own,' the narrator is subject to all the distractions and interruptions of thought that female were especially subjected to. Without money, the narrator can't escape from the role demands of her gender or the intellectually stifling environment (e.g. of a shitty college), both of which are recognizably everyday aspects of a woman's life and therefore of their intellectual repression.
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Luke ~
ReplyDeleteI also think that it is significant that Woolf chooses to write in this anonymous way, showing that she is anything but self-centered and that she is just a normal girl trapped in a misogynistic way of life. The fact that she takes us step by step through her train of thought shows a sense of humbleness because she knows that what she is saying is crazy (for her time) but she is honestly just trying to say what she is thinking. She does so in quite a magnificent way.