Women and Fiction

Opening the pages of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, I suppose I was expecting another one of her novels. Instead, I was faced with a manifesto of sorts – a “story” of the relationship of women and fiction through the eyes of Virginia Woolf and I was not entirely sure what to make of it. I enjoyed the fact that as I was reading, I was able to imagine her in the lecture hall amidst collegiate women of the time, carrying on as a sort of Betty Friedan. Perhaps this story was Virginia Woolf’s version of The Feminine Mystique and now, going back and really considering the issues that Friedan addressed in her book, I can remove the “perhaps” from the beginning of this sentence. While encouraging women to become successful on their terms, Woolf realized the pitfalls of such dreams, most significantly domestic life. She realized that with the position of women being altered, other aspects of “normal” daily life would be forced to change as well. With these realizations at hand, Woolf pushes on in order to come to some sort of declaration about women and fiction to her female attendees. In her attempt to come across answers, she finds out more and more about women writers. Woolf explores the female literary tradition, not only from the masculine, patriarchal viewpoint, but also from within the strongholds of the feminine literary scope as well. Instead of being locked within the confines of the novel, Woolf sees change in the future for women, specifically with experimental writing. It seems that through education and the arduous process of time passing, the stylistic components of female literary works will progress. Her eventual floundering at the end of the essay(?) put me in a state of unrest or at least confusion. Woolf spends over one hundred pages presenting an argument about female oppression and in the end, the artist can not focus on the matter. While I realize her point, it somehow fell short for me. I guess I just expected…well, more.

Moving on to Jane Marcus’s article, I really did not buy it at first. Marcus’s argument that Woolf’s writing was an attack on all the men in her life seemed really far-fetched for me and much too psychoanalytic. Once that was dismissed, I rather enjoyed aspects of Marcus’s article. Her description of where Virginia’s lectures took place was very interesting and something that is intangible in Room alone. I imagined being there with her speaking, but what I imagined and what Marcus described were entirely different. Marcus’s article also made me consider the relationships between women more fully. The relationship, seduction, or interactions even, are much more verbal than physical. The courtship begins through language and is subversive in nature and in reading Room, I am not sure that I grasped that concept initially. Considering the nature of relationships between men and women, it is not at all surprising that women would develop a more fruitful, emotional relationship with other women. My doubts, however, lie within the fact that Marcus seems to make all who attended the lectures to be wholly homosexual. While I am sure that there were some attendees who engaged in homosexual or bisexual behavior, I do not think that everyone participated.