Tuesday, February 19, 2008

My Internal Struggle About Her Need/Claim for a Need for A Room

Were women that oppressed? To only want the necessities, a room of their own? IT IS THE TITLE OF THE NARRATIVE. Striking and descriptive, tactful and Subtle. What does it mean? Not to share the room with a man, or even a mate? A scary thought, one which made me writhe in displeasure, that she would bottle up herself, stuck in so much contempt against a whole half of humanity, even though some of them hadn’t been in control of their own outcome.
It’s a reciprocal hate that she is unjustified in returning.
“Turn the Other Cheek.”

Who Am I to judge though, because the same time, is hers not a simple request that can’t be given? Was not England the bastion of liberalism, ushering in the 20th century? Obviously, as we have been learning, NOT! The Women wanted Only 500 pounds, equivalent to a “simple lifestyle, not worrying about food, or living expenses”?
I guess that I can’t speak, not having been particularly around nor a minority when she was writing.

BUT, its at the same time, not like she didn’t have food to eat. A dinner of plain soup (WHAT WAS SO PLAIN ABOUT IT?), aveage beef, some vegetables and potatoes (IRISH HAD JUST EXPERIENCED A FAMINE), and bad custard, prunes, biscuits and CHEESE, along with water.
She could have been eating that night the grass she so wanted to walk on!!!
And more reasonable, when the men are ahead, or anyone for that manner, why would she we want to emulate their example?

I’ll think I’ll return to my room, as a White Male, a White Male…

2 comments:

jacob said...

To want only the necessities is, I think, not what Woolf recommends to flourishing female writers; rather, "Intellectual freedom depends upon material things. Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom (2148)." Having a room of one's own is, to Woolf, the first step toward intellectual freedom; it is the first "material thing" required to give a person the leisure of creative and imaginary thought. And I agree with her - I'm nearly tormented by overheard conversations and loud laughing when I try to write, and thus often, after just setting my schoolwork at a table, rise to move elsewhere upon hearing some fellows talking loudly.
However much, though, Woolf identifies successful authors as wealthy, I think she pushes for a more internal sense of wealth - wealth to Woolf is having the capacity to self-indulge at leisure - "to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future of the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners...(2149)." Such a lifestyle requires little more than a few pennies to buy bread and a train ticket every now and then.

dj said...

Alex, I think you’re a bit off on your interpretation of Ms. Woolf’s request. I do not believe that she was reciprocating hate, nor was she asking for women to shut themselves away from the masculine world. Rather, she was merely conjuring the idea that women do need a certain stable income and a quite room in order to compose the kind of writing that Ms. Woolf sees as so apparently absent in history. In addition, I think that she believes that those dreams are becoming a reality or at least that the times have changed enough for the possibility of realization. You mention Woolf describing the oppression of women, as if it the pursuit of her piece. In actuality, her speech was a charge to her female audience. It was an imploration. She describes the oppression and reasons in the past why women were unable to write, but she also asserts that “the excuse…no longer holds good.” Thus, while “you (women) have never made a discovery of any sort of importance…never shaken an empire or led an army into battle,” you no longer have the excuse not to. She is no longer begging for equal treatment; she is begging for women to utilize what has been given to them, to capitalize on new freedoms, and to make the changes that women in the past were, quite simply, unable to perform.