a room of one's own

I have an extremely silly confession to make: I read Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own, not because I expected to enjoy it or get anything useful from it, but most of all because it's the source of the Archive of Our Own's name. To be fair, this is a symptom of the essay's abiding cultural influence, but that doesn't do all that much to preserve my dignity.

My only experience of Woolf prior to this was reading "Kew Gardens" in high school, and I did not like it.^[1] Honestly, the other embarrassing reason I went for A Room of One's Own over To the Lighthouse or Mrs. Dalloway (both of which would be English-language novels like I said I was going to read) was that I really had hated "Kew Gardens" and I figured I could check Woolf off my list of authors-to-try without spending altogether too much time with her, since it's only a little over a hundred pages.

And then, after all those modest expectations, I loved it.

The book didn't offer anything especially revolutionary by contemporary standards (it is, unavoidably, ninety-six years old), but perhaps better than being revolutionary is being solid and even brilliant as an introduction to what is now basic feminist thought.

Particularly, I find that a lot of women my age severely undervalue having income of one's own. I don't object to homemaking and stay-at-home parenting per se—both are, in my mind, indisputably labor and should be treated as such—but I find myself extremely concerned with the forfeiture of independence that so often accompanies them, seemingly without concern. Over my dead body would I allow the best man in the world, whom I loved beyond all reason and trusted beyond all doubt, to be the only income in the house without at least a bank account of my own. To rely on the continued goodwill and honor of someone else for access to essential resources is a profoundly unsafe situation that should be avoided if even remotely possible.

Woolf carefully walks her audience through the significance of the proverbial five hundred a year (basically, a liveable income in 1929) of one's own, and its profound effect on one's life. She moves through this to the sort of questions you so often get even today from the real assholes among us, like "if women are as smart as men, then why is there no female Shakespeare?":

For it is a perennial puzzle why no woman wrote a word of that extraordinary literature when every other man, it seemed, was capable of song or sonnet. What were the conditions in which women lived? I asked myself; for fiction, imaginative work that is, is not dropped like a pebble upon the ground, as science may be; fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible; Shakespeare's plays, for instance, seem to hang there complete by themselves. But when the web is pulled askew, hooked up at the edge, torn in the middle, one remembers that these webs are not spun in mid-air by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in.^[2]

It is, in twenty-first century terms, a sort of back-to-basics feminism, one which even goes so far as to grant ideas such as that "no woman wrote a word of that extraordinary literature" (a point I honestly would not have given up so easily). But even where I quibble with the details, I have to admit that Woolf's arguments are brilliantly accomplished; the bleak tale of the theoretical Judith Shakespeare that follows the quote above is extremely effective.

And even on the point with which I take issue, I think there's probably more gradually building argumentation and much more irony happening than some readers seem to pick up; I wouldn't discount the idea that that might explain the passage I quoted above.

Something like that is certainly happening when Woolf says this:

At the thought of all those women working year after year and finding it hard to get two thousand pounds together, and as much as they could do to get thirty thousand pounds, we burst out in scorn at the reprehensible poverty of our sex. What had our mothers been doing then that they had no wealth to leave us? Powdering their noses? Looking in at shop windows? Flaunting in the sun at Monte Carlo?^[3]

While looking up some basic biographical facts about Woolf, I found someone taking this statement stone-cold literally, despite the fact that it is followed, in the very same paragraph, by this:

Making a fortune and bearing thirteen children—no human being could stand it...you would never have come into existence at all. Moreover, it is equally useless to ask what might have happened if Mrs Seton and her mother and her mother before her had amassed great wealth and laid it under the foundations of college and library, because, in the first place, to earn money was impossible for them, and in the second, had it been possible, the law denied them the right to possess what money they earned. It is only for the last forty-eight years that Mrs. Seton has had a penny of her own. For all the centuries before that it would have been her husband's property—a thought which, perhaps, may have had its share in keeping Mrs Seton and her mothers off the Stock Exchange.

It is absurd in the extreme to take a paragraph that goes here and believe that it is meant as a genuine critique of Mrs. Seton and her ilk simply because it starts there. It is not a genuine criticism, but rather a display of the sort of unfair critique to which women are subject and a demonstration of why, precisely, it is unfair. The train of thought that starts the paragraph is not what you're meant to walk away with (which is, on occasion, how reading works).

Even in places where really did I need to offer Woolf a bit of grace (especially with reference to gender essentialism), I was mostly just sad on her behalf. Like, in chapter five, she says this:

Ought not education to bring out and fortify the differences rather than the similarities? For we have too much likeness as it is, and if an explorer should come back and bring word of other sexes looking through the branches of other trees at other skies, nothing would be of greater service to humanity; and we should have the immense pleasure into the bargain of watching Professor X rush for his measuring-rods to prove himself 'superior'.

This is a woman who loved women and who, had she not died by suicide, might have lived to see Stonewall.^[4] She was so tantalizingly close to hearing word of other sexes and genders who looked through the very same branches as she did: the visibility of both nonbinary and intersex people underwent a sea-change in the 1990s, only half a century after her death and maybe a decade or two past the age she might have reached had she been a little luckier. I honestly think it would take a meanness of spirit to resent her for how she talks about gender, when she clearly longs for the sort of world I'm lucky enough to live in.

Overall, I enjoyed Woolf's tactics, and most of all her framing. Instead of sticking to the realm of fact, she creates the characters Mary Beton, Mary Seton, and Mary Carmichael as stand-ins for the different ways women relate to literature: Mary Seton attends an Oxbridge college that isn't real; Mary Beton offers her thoughts on a book by Mary Carmichael that doesn't exist. The device is delicious if you like weird things, and I do.

That frame makes it genuinely hard for me to categorize this book's genre. It's traditionally considered a non-fiction essay, but I think we should be a lot less comfortable with that categorization than we seem to be. I don't think I'd call it a novel, but I'm honestly not sure—I could make an argument for it, at least. It might approach a dramatic monologue, in that it was originally a pair of lectures and it's written in a character (Mary Beton is the speaker, not Woolf herself, another point that seems to be lost on the readers of the internet as a whole).

Whatever the genre, though, A Room of One's Own was incisive, and beautifully written, and just odd enough to delight me. I'd highly recommend it.