Virginia Woolfs Vision Essay Research Paper Virginia

Virginia Woolf`S Vision Essay, Research Paper

Virginia Woolf’s Vision

Almost sixty-five years have lapsed sinee Virginia Woolf spoke at Newnham and Girton colleges on the subject

of women and fiction. Her remarkable words are preserved for future generations of women in A Room of One’s

Own. This essay is the “first manifesto of the modern feminist movement” (Samuelson), and has been called “a

notable preamble to a kind of feminine Declaration of Independence” (Muller 34). Woolf writes that her modest

goal for this ground-breaking essay is to “encourage the young women–they seem to get fearfully depressed”

(qtd. in Gordon xiv). This treatise on the history of women’s writings, reasons for the scarcity of great women

artists, and suggestions for future literary creators and creations accomplishes far more than simple inspiration and

motivation for young writers. Woolf questions the “effect . . . poverty [has] on fiction” and the “conditions . . .

necessary for the creation of works of art” (25), and she persuasively argues that economics are as important as

talent and inspiration in the creative process. She emphatically states and, with brilliant fiction, supports her

thesis that every woman “must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction” (4). Woolf’s witty and

beautifully crafted essay has a practical message for aspiring women writers: as pioneers in the virtually

unexplored frontier of women’s literature, and to create timeless, powerful works of art, they must forsake the

established mores of masculine creativity and forge their own traditions and styles.

Woolf introduces this new literary tradition through the structure of her lecture. Rather than follow the

traditional format established through centuries of male lecturing, she “transform[s] the formidable lecture form

into an intimate conversation among

female equals” (Marcus, “Still” 79). She preserves this intimacy in the written essay as well. Woolf’s nephew and

biographer, Quentin Bell, writes that “in A Room of One’s Own one hears Virginia speaking . . . . she gets very

close to her conversational style” (144). Rather than submit her audience to the usual “dictation of the expert to

the ignorant” (Marcus, Virginia 145), Woolf involves her audience in her quest for answers. She advises them that

she plans to “make use of all the liberties and licenses of a novelist,” that her fiction is “likely to contain more

truth than fact,” and that they must “seek out this truth and . . . decide whether any part of it is worth keeping”

(4-5). She does not disclose “the truth as she sees it”; rather, she requires the audience to “participate in the

drama of asking questions and searching for Woolf’s creative departure from established lecture style delightfully

foreshadows her intent to generate entirely new feminine traditions and searching for answers” (Marcus, Virginia

145).

Woolf encourages women to personally participate and identify with her ideas. She creates a fictitious narrator

through which she chronicles her thoughts and discoveries as she researches the topic of ‘women and fiction, “‘I’ is

only a convenient term for somebody who has no real being . . . call me Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary

Carmichael or by any name you please–it is not a matter of any importance” (4-5). Ellen Rosenman writes that by

“denying a ‘real’ existence, the narrator associates herself with anonymity,” and that “if we turn this statement

around . . . [she] is Everywoman” (160-61). By choosing these particular historical names to represent anyone and

everyone who joins the quest for truth, including herself, Woolf “accounts for much of the irony of her ’story’ and

much of the force” of her essay (Jones 228). Through her clever use of fiction, Woolf shrewdly removes herself

from the position of authority, enhances audience identification with her narrator, and invites women to join her

search for “the true nature of women and the true nature of fiction” (4).

Woolf’s narrator, “Mary,” begins the quest for “the pure fluid, the essential oil of truth” (25) in the British

Museum, the very bastions of male literary tradition. Rosenman suggests that Woolf is laying the foundation of a

female tradition by allowing Mary to travel “through a series of alien rooms,” including the British Museum and

‘the common sitting room,’ “to a room of her own” (157). Mary’s “stupefaction, wonder and bewilderment” (Woolf

26) at the plethora of contradictory, inaccurate, oven trivial volumes about women by men whose only

qualification is “that they are not wmen” (27) awakens the reader to this travesty without directly revealing Woolf’s

personal feelings of fury and humiliation. Alex Zwerdling notes that her “awareness of the possibly hostile

audience strongly affects the tone of the essay,” and that she replaces “anger” with “irony” and “sarcasm” with

“charm” (225). Woolf uses Mary’s voice to ruefully inform the reader that “one cannot find truth on the shelves of

the British Museum or extract it f

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