A Room of One's Own Summary and Analysis

11/24/2019 A Room of One’s Own Chapters 1 Summary and Analysis | GradeSaver
A Room of One's Own Summary and Analysis of Chapters 1

Virginia Woolf, asked to give a lecture on women and fiction, tells her audience what she thought that title might mean:
what women are like; the fiction women write; the fiction written about women; or a combination of the three.
However, she felt she could not form a conclusive truth about those subjects, and instead has come up with "one minor
point--a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction." She says she will use devices of
fiction in relating how her thoughts on the lecture mingled with her daily life; she uses a fictional narrator whom she
calls Mary Beton as her alter ego, and the essay begins.
A week ago, while sitting by a river, the narrator compares the production of a thought of hers on women and fiction
(which she will not relate now, though she says one may detect it in the course of her lecture) to a fisherman's catch,
albeit a measly one which he throws back. Nevertheless, the thought excites her, and as she hurries across a lawn at the
fictional Oxbridge, a Beadle (a minor parish official) intercepts her; only Fellows and Scholars, not women, are allowed
on the lawn. The interruption makes her forget her thought. Instead, she ponders the genius of literary figures, such as
Milton and Thackeray, and goes to the library. An elderly man there informs her that women are admitted only with a
Fellow or a letter of introduction. She angrily vows to herself never to "ask for that hospitality again" of entering the
library. She passes the chapel, listening to the organ and watching the congregation troop inside, but does not want to
enter, as she would be denied permission again. She reflects on the royal wealth that had gone into building the
university; the wealth now comes from independent men.
She goes to lunch and describes the gourmet food on display: soles, partridges, a delicious dessert, and excellent wine.
The good food and relaxing atmosphere inspire "rational intercourse" in the conversation. She sees a Manx cat without
a tail walking across the quadrangle, and suddenly feels that something is "lacking." She thinks back on a pre-war
luncheon in which people said the same things as now but sounded more musical.
She walks through the late October afternoon to Fernham, the women's college where she is staying as a guest. She
has a dinner of plain soup, mediocre beef, vegetables, and potatoes, and bad custard, prunes, biscuits and cheese,
along with water. She feels one cannot "think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well." A friend of
hers, Mary Seton (referred to hereafter as "Seton"), has a bottle of a good drink, and they drink and talk by the fire. The
narrator thinks more about the kings in the past and financial magnates of their time who have built the colleges with
their gold. She wonders what lies beneath their college. Seton summarizes how funds were raised with difficulty for the
college, and therefore why they cannot afford expensive meals.
The narrator and Seton denounce their mothers, and their sex, for being so impoverished and leaving their daughters
so little. Had they been independently wealthy, perhaps they could have founded fellowships and secured similar
luxuries for women. However, the narrator realizes that had Seton's mother gone into business, she would not have had
Seton or the rest of her children. Moreover, only for the last forty-eight years have women been allowed to keep
money they earned; before that, it belonged to their husbands. Walking back to her inn, the narrator thinks about the
effects of wealth and poverty on the mind, about the prosperity of males and the poverty of females, and about the
effects of tradition or lack of tradition on the writer, among other topics. She goes to sleep, as does everyone in
Oxbridge.
Analysis:
"A Room of One's Own" begins with the word "But," an unconventional starting point that emphasizes the contrarian
nature of the essay. Contrarian, because Woolf sets out to engage a topic that, in 1928, had received little serious
attention: women and writing. As she explains, the subject is too vast for her to sum up in a short space, so she
proposes a highly contrarian idea: women must have the security and privacy of their own room and their own money.
(For comparison, 500 British pounds in 1928 is equal to roughly 200,000 British pounds in 2001, or roughly $300,000
U.S. dollars.) The narrator unravels the reasons behind this basic premise throughout the rest of the essay.
Immediately, we see how the institution of the university discriminates against women. At the lawn, library, and dinner,
the narrator is either denied admission or given inferior accommodations. Though the narrator will later explore more
fully what effect this has on the mind, already we see that the obstacles damage the mental process--on the lawn, she
forgets her carefully-crafted thought from the river once she is redirected. Both the recognition that she is a second-
class citizen and the interruption feed into Woolf's thesis: women need money and privacy to write.
The lawn pops up again later as the narrator sees the tailless Manx cat walk across it. It reminds her first of the pre-war
days, and we can conjecture that the tailless cat is a vision of symbolically castrated England. Devastated by the war,
England is no longer what it once was, and its musical language has been cut off, replaced by regular conversation.
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More pertinently to the narrator, the tailless cat also appears as out of place at the college as a woman might. Without
a "tail" of her own, the narrator is similarly unwelcome on the lawn.
To return to the narrator's main premise, wealth is repeatedly cited as a necessary ingredient for creativity. The men she
sees have fewer obstacles in life; unconcerned with petty (or even major) grievances, they are free to discuss higher
ideas at their luxurious lunch. Generations of men, both aristocratic and independently wealthy, have fed money back
into the institutions that keep their comfort and position intact. Women, conversely, have few of these luxuries. While
their mediocre food at dinner is a minor annoyance, it is representative of greater inequalities women have endured for
centuries at the hands of society and nature. Few women have independent wealth with which to enjoy creative lives or
enable such activity in others, and until recently they could not have utilized their own wealth under law. Moreover,
they are saddled with bearing and raising children. The narrator has hinted that such conditions impair women's
creative abilities, and will detail her theories in later chapters.
Woolf tells the audience she will "develop in your presence as fully and freely as I can the train of thought which led me
to think" about her ideas. Woolf has done this by creating a fictional lecturer (based on herself; the essay is based on
two lectures she delivered at Newnham and Girton colleges in October, 1928) whose thoughts seem much more
palpable to the reader than those in the standard essay. "Mary Beton" has a distinctive voice--sophisticated, witty,
poetic, ironic--that sustains and enlarges her abstract arguments. She also speaks of her "train of thought"; the wording
is similar to the new Modernist technique of "stream-of-consciousness." Developed by James Joyce and William
Faulkner, and tweaked by Woolf in "To the Lighthouse," stream-of-consciousness relates the ongoing chaotic narrative
of a character's thoughts. Though Mary Beton's narrative flits around frequently--from the luncheon to the Manx cat to
Tennyson--"A Room of One's Own" is a carefully structured essay that is a true "train of thought," and attention should
be paid to Woolf's rhetorical skill as an essayist. Moreover, the narrator's absence of a "real being," as Woolf says, will
play an important role when Woolf presents her aesthetic ideology.

Searching for answers to the questions she posed about men, women, wealth, and creativity, the narrator explores the
British Museum in London. She soon realizes there are too many books written about women almost all by men for
her to digest them all. On the other hand, there are hardly any books by women on men. She wonders why there is
such a great disparity, and randomly selects a dozen books. Trying to come up with an answer for why women are
poor, she locates a multitude of other topics on women in the books, and a contradictory array of men's opinions on
women. Frustrated, she unwittingly draws a picture of an unattractive, angry-looking professor at work on one of the
books about the inferiority of women. It occurs to her that she has become angry because the professor has written
angrily himself. Had he written "dispassionately," she would have paid more attention to his argument, and not to him.
After her anger dissipates, she wonders why these men are all angry. She returns the books, finding them useless, and
goes to lunch.
She reads the newspaper at lunch, and reflects that anyone reading it would find that England is a patriarchal society--
men have all the power and money, hold all the important positions, make all the important decisions. The narrator
knows that men are angry, however, and wonders why they would be angry with so much power. She wonders if
holding power produces anger out of fear that others will take one's power. She then thinks that the men are not truly
angry, but that when they pronounce the inferiority of women, they are really claiming their own superiority. The
narrator believes life is difficult for both genders, and that it requires self-confidence. Self-confidence is often attained,
she believes, by considering other people inferior in relation to oneself. She says that throughout history, women have
served as models of inferiority who enlarge the superiority of men: " looking-glasses possessing the magic and
delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size." Men logically become angry and defensive if
women ever criticize them, then, since women cease to be inferior and the men accordingly lose the status of
superiority on which they are dependent.
The narrator pays her bill, and is grateful for the inheritance left her by her aunt. She learned she would receive 500
pounds a year for her life around the same time women gained the right to vote, and she believes the money is more
important. Prior to that she had earned money on the odd jobs available to women before 1918. She hated doing that
work, feeling like a fearful slave whose soul was rusting. Now, every time she pays for something with part of her
inheritance, she feels the rust and the accompanying fear and bitterness are removed. She reasons that since nothing
can take away her money and security, she need not hate or enslave herself to any man. Moreover, she feels that men,
even with their wealth and power, contend with as major a problem as do powerless women: they are constantly trying
to increase that power by subjugating others, and such efforts come at a heavy price. On the other hand, after her
aunt's inheritance sank in, the narrator felt free to "think of things in themselves" she could judge art, for instance,
with greater objectivity.
She walks home and sees various male and female workers on her street. She thinks about the relative values of the
jobs. She believes that in a hundred years, women will no longer be considered the "protected" gender, but will have
access to the more grueling jobs as well. She wonders what this has to do with women and fiction.
Analysis:
We see more evidence of institutionalized sexism; all the books in the library about women are by men, and frequently
men with a chip on their shoulder. The narrator quickly identifies this chip as defensiveness. Men, used to feeling
superior at the expense of women, grow angry and fearful when their superiority is threatened. Hence, they cut down
the women in an attempt to enlarge themselves, as the narrator describes in the "looking-glass" metaphor.
There are two reasons why this instinctive aggression is harmful. First, it produces many of the social ills the narrator
outlines, among them war. In their constant battle for power, men destroy that which they are fighting for. Remember
the narrator's nostalgia for the pre-war musical hum of conversation, now replaced by regular conversation.
The second, more subtle, reason men's aggression is harmful relates to freedom of thought. The men are overly
concerned with attacking the other sex and so, ultimately, end up concentrating mostly on their own gender. Their
arguments lose objectivity, as they are not developed "dispassionately," and instead become subjective, easily picked-
apart beliefs. Their power does not confer freedom of thought, but pigeonholes them into a confined way of thinking.
Woolf does not believe this defensiveness is exclusive to men; she points out that both men and women require
"confidence" in life. She will later explore how such defensiveness impairs women's freedom. For now, however, money
remains the greatest guarantee of freedom, as the narrator expresses in a well-known passage regarding the personal
effects of her inheritance. It is no wonder, then, that she believes money is a greater tool than the right to vote; money
eliminates a woman's dependence on a man, whereas the right to vote only gives her the right to choose which man
rules over her.
As the narrator says, money has given her the freedom to "think of things in themselves." Woolf is developing an
aesthetic ideology with this concept of personal freedom granting objectivity of thought, and we can trace it in her
metaphors that revolve around light and refined purity. Here, as she often does, the narrator absorbs the brilliant light
of the sky: " a fiery fabric flashing with red eyes." Remember also the "nugget of pure truth" the narrator says she
understands the audience desires in Chapter One. Perhaps the most important metaphor combines light and refined
purity in Chapter One when she describes brilliance as "that hard little electric light."
In the same way, by creating a fictional narrator, Woolf has somewhat removed her own personality from the essay and
argued "dispassionately." Though the narrator is obviously based on Woolf and shares her voice, the essay is ultimately
not about her, and is even less about Woolf. In contrast to the angry professor whom the narrator sketches, the
narrator is detached and able to think clearly and without personal prejudices.
About Equal Rights

A Room of One's Own Summary and Analysis of Chapters 3 telling about Shakeshpeare's sister Judith
The narrator is disappointed at not having found an incontrovertible statement on why women are poorer than men.
She decides to investigate women in Elizabethan England, puzzled why there were no women writers in that fertile
literary period. She believes there is a deep connection between living conditions and creative works. She reads a
history book and finds that women had few rights in the era, despite having strong personalities, especially in works of
art. The narrator finds no material about middle-class women in the history book, and a host of her questions remain
unanswered.
She is reminded of a bishop's comment that no woman could equal the genius of Shakespeare, and her thoughts turn
to Shakespeare. She imagines what would have happened had Shakespeare had an equally gifted sister named Judith.
She outlines the possible course of Shakespeare's life: grammar school, marriage, work at a theater in London, acting,
meeting theater people, and so on. His sister, however, was not able to attend school, and her family discouraged her
from studying on her own. She was married against her will as a teenager and ran away to London. The men at a
theater denied her the chance to work and learn the craft. Impregnated by a theatrical man, she committed suicide.
This is how the narrator believes such a female genius would have fared in Shakespeare's time. However, she agrees
with the bishop that no women of the time would have had such genius, "For genius like Shakespeare's is not born
among labouring, uneducated, servile people," and women back then fit into this category. Nevertheless, some kind of
genius must have existed among women then, as it exists among the working class, although it never translated to
paper. Even if a woman surmounted various obstacles and wrote something, it would have been anonymous.
The narrator questions what state of mind is most amenable to creativity. She finds that creating a work of art is
extraordinarily difficult; privacy and money are scarce, and the world is generally indifferent to whether or not someone
writes. For women in the past, the conditions were even harsher. The privacy of a private room or vacations was a rarity.
Moreover, the world was not only indifferent to female writers, but actively opposed their creativity. Over time, the
effect on a budding female writer is very detrimental.
The narrator believes this male discouragement accords with the masculine desire to retain the status of superiority.
Unfortunately, genius is often the most susceptible to the opinions of others. She believes the mind of the artist must
be "incandescent" like Shakespeare's, without any obstacles. She argues that the reason we know so little about
Shakespeare's mind is because his work filters out his personal "grudges and spites and antipathies." His absence of
personal protest makes his work "free and unimpeded."
Analysis:
Lacking historical evidence, Woolf again uses her fictional powers in describing the plight of Shakespeare's sister. She
first details all the factors that aided Shakespeare's natural genius: his early education; his freedom to leave his wife for
London; his ready employment in the theatrical world; his ability to earn money for himself; his opportunities to explore
other walks of life; his lack of familial responsibility. Judith, conversely, is victimized by a number of socioeconomic
factors: lack of education; discouragement from reading and writing; absence of privacy; lack of employment
opportunities in the artistic world; the burden of children.
The narrator again cites the looking-glass relationship between men and women: men rely on women's supposed
inferiority to enlarge themselves. Beyond the socioeconomic factors described above, women writers have the
additional obstacle of discouragement and disdain from their patriarchal society.
And obstacles, the narrator concludes, are poison to a writer's mind. She starts developing her theory that for a writer
to attain genius like Shakespeare's, there must be no external obstacles, nor can there be personal grudges within the
work. Only then can genius be "incandescent," yet another word choice that equates brilliance with light.
The modern reader may find Woolf's theories classist; indeed, the statement "For genius like Shakespeare's is not born
among labouring, uneducated, servile people" would be met with furor if published nowadays. However, it is important
to remember that Woolf believes that money and personal independence foster freedom of thought, and that poverty
and its attendant ills inhibit such thought. Moreover, she admits that brilliance does emerge from the working class,
albeit rarely.
Still, Woolf is clearly at odds with any kind of "protest" literature, feeling that it dilutes the "incandescent" brilliance of
the writer. Many contemporary critics maintain that protest literature is the strongest kind of art, the only art that can
truly effect social change. Indeed, much contemporary feminist and minority literature theory emphasizes protest as a
means to reclaim voices historically drowned out by white males. Woolf will soon elaborate on her controversial theory.
The narrator reflects again that no women of Shakespeare's genius lived in Elizabethan times. More plausibly, an
aristocratic lady of the time might have written something. The narrator believes that if such a lady wrote, however, fear
and hatred would have been marred her writing. She cites the poetry of the noble Lady Winchilsea, which she finds
stifled by its fear and hatred of men. Had she not been so consumed with these negative, imprisoning emotions, the
narrator believes she would have written brilliant verse.
The narrator turns her attention to the Duchess Margaret of Newcastle, a contemporary of Lady Winchilsea. Both
women were noble, married to good men, and childless. The narrator reads her verse and feels she suffers from the
same personal grievances. Had she lived today, she believes, the lonely Margaret would have been a far better poet.
The narrator contemplates Dorothy Osborne, a more sensitive, melancholy Elizabethan figure who wrote only letters, as
a proper woman did, and not poetry. The narrator believes she had a great gift, but that her letters betray Dorothy's
insecurity over her writing.
For the narrator, the writer Aphra Behn marks a turning point: a middle-class woman whose husband's death forced her
to earn her own living, Behn's triumph over circumstances surpasses even her excellent writing. Behn is the first female
writer to have "freedom of the mind," and the narrator believes she inspired other girls to follow her self-sufficient
example. Unfortunately, the literary girls' parents frequently rejected these plans in the interest of women's chastity,
and the "door was slammed faster than ever." Still, countless 18th-century middle-class female writers and beyond owe
a great debt to Behn's breakthrough of earning money from writing. The earning of money, the narrator argues, goes
far in eliminating the sneers against women's writing.
The narrator is confused why the wealth of women's writing in the 19th century offers almost exclusively novels after
women had originally begun with poetry. She thinks about what the four famous and divergent female
novelists George Eliot, Emily and Charlotte Brontë, and Jane Austen had in common besides being childless. Oddly,
their middle-class status would have meant less privacy and a greater inclination toward writing poetry or plays, which
require less concentration. Austen, for example, is known to have hidden her manuscripts when interrupted in her
family's sitting-room. However, the 19th-century middle-class woman was trained in the art of social observation, and
the novel was a natural fit for her talents. The narrator finds that the work of Austen did not suffer from her lack of
privacy, nor was it wracked by hatred or fear. Though she thinks that Charlotte Brontë may have had more genius in
her, Brontë has some hatred in her which disfigures her genius. Perhaps most among the foursome, she could have
benefited from more money, experience, and travel. The narrator considers the varying effects the same novel can have
on multiple readers. What makes a novel universal is "integrity," which she defines as truthfulness. Does the writer's
gender impact her integrity? Looking at Brontë's work, the narrator feels that beyond anger and resentment, the fear in
it leads to some degree of "ignorance."
The narrator also argues that traditionally masculine values and topics in novels such as war are valued more than
feminine ones, such as drawing-room character studies. Female writers, then, were often forced to adjust their writing
to meet the inevitable criticism that their work was insubstantial. Even if they did so without anger, they deviated from
their original visions and their books suffered. The narrator finds it miraculous that in such a climate, Austen and Emily
Brontë were able to write their books with such confidence and integrity. Only they ignored the sniping, critical chorus
against them.
Furthermore, the early 19th-century female novelist had no real tradition from which to work. Though she may have
learned some things from male writers, the narrator believes that "The weight, the pace, the stride of a man's mind are
too unlike her own for her to lift anything substantial from him successfully." For instance, there was no "common
sentence" available for a woman's use, as the standard 19th-century sentence was fitted for men to adapt to their own
uses. While Charlotte Brontë and Eliot failed with that sentence, Austen created her own "natural, shapely sentence"
that enabled deeper expression. The narrator argues that the novel was the chosen form for these women since it was a
relatively new and pliable medium. She wonders if women will come up with some "new vehicle" for the poetry within
them. She ceases her remarks about the future of writing to question the effect of frequent interruptions on women's
books.
Analysis:
Previously, the narrator gave the fictional-historical example of Judith Shakespeare as a woman whose genius was
stifled because of sexist circumstances. Here, she finally gets around to discussing true historical examples of female
writers, a topic she initially shied away from in Chapter One. First, she speaks of potentially incandescent brilliance
ruined by personal grievances against men in the Elizabethan writers, then of genius that was more ably expressed by
19th-century women.
The turning point in female writers, as the narrator sees it, is the example of self-sufficiency provided by Aphra Behn,
17th-century novelist, playwright, and poet, whose works include the novel Oroonoko and the play The Rover. The
narrator's selection of Behn as the most important female writer shows that Woolf is not, as her previous remarks may
have implied, classist. Behn is middle-class, whereas the other women who wrote lesser works were all aristocratic.
More important is that Behn has mostly fit the narrator's criteria for freedom of thought: she is not dependent on men
for money. The narrator also thought it was best for the money to have been inherited, and thus eliminate the need for
slavish employment. However, the aristocratic women, despite not needing to work for a living, are nevertheless
indebted to their husbands or other men, and the money they keep goes to them. Behn is truly independent and, in
fact, her ability to work for a living was what inspired the female writers after her.
The narrator also weighs in on the range of experience allotted to the women. Men are allowed more freedom, and
their works often reflect this; Tolstoy, as the narrator notes, could not have written War and Peace had he been rooted
in seclusion. The key to Austen's success in freedom of thought, she believes, is that though Austen was as limited in
life experience as any other female writer, "perhaps it was the nature of Jane Austen not to want what she had not."
Experience is crucial only if the writer desires to write about something well beyond his or her primary station in life.
The social novels of the four female writers represented are logical choices, then, but unfortunately the patriarchal
atmosphere dictates that such novels are deemed less important than traditionally masculine novels about war and so
on. Woolf has suggested throughout the essay that women must ignore men and write freely, and she may lead
readers to believe that she feels men and women are equal in all ways. While she certainly thinks they have equal
intelligence, here she concedes that men and women have different kinds of intelligence, different minds, and that they
naturally write in different styles. Again, Woolf holds to her conviction that women should not simply rebel against the
masculine "common sentence," but that they should ignore it, since it is of no use to them, and form their own style.
Woolf herself has done this; she did not simply ape the new Modernist narrative device of stream-of-consciousness, but
perfected the modified "free indirect discourse" in To the Lighthouse and other works. She is also known as one of the
great English stylists, and her essays, especially this one, uphold this claim; witty, elegant, and focused, she, like Austen,
found her own natural, shapely sentence.

The narrator looks at her shelf of contemporary books by both men and women on a variety of topics women could
not have written about a generation ago. She feels the female writer, now given a broader education, no longer needs
the novel as a means of self-expression. She takes down a recent debut novel called "Life's Adventure, or some such
title," by Mary Carmichael. Viewing Carmichael as a descendant of Lady Winchilsea, Aphra Behn, and the other female
writers she has commented on, the narrator dissects Life's Adventure.
First, she finds the prose style uneven, perhaps as a rebellion against the "flowery" reputation of women's writing. The
narrator reconsiders; maybe Carmichael is purposely deceiving the reader with unexpected stylistic shifts. She reads on
and finds the simple sentence "'Chloe liked Olivia.'" She believes the idea of friendship between two women is
groundbreaking in literature, as women have historically been viewed in literature only in relation to men. Romance, the
narrator believes, plays a minor role in a woman's life, but the excessive concern fictional women have for it accounts
for their extreme portrayals as beautiful and good versus horrific and depraved. By the 19th century, women grew more
complex in novels, but the narrator still believes that each gender is limited in its knowledge of the opposite sex.
She reads on and discovers that Chloe and Olivia share a laboratory. The narrator reflects more on how impoverished
literature would be if men were viewed only as lovers of women. She believes that if Carmichael writes with some
genius, then her book will be very important. She reads another scene with the two women in it and thinks it is a "sight
that has never been seen since the world began." Her high hopes for Carmichael's description of the intricacies of the
female mind make the narrator realize she has betrayed her original aim: not to praise her own sex. She recognizes that
for whatever mental greatness they have, women have not yet made much of a mark in the world compared to men.
Still, she believes that the great men in history often depended on women for providing them with "some stimulus,
some renewal of creative power" that other men could not. She argues that the creativity of men and women is
different, and that "It would be a thousand pities if women wrote like men for if two sexes are quite inadequate,
considering the vastness and variety of the world, how should we manage with one only?"
The narrator believes Carmichael has much work to do "merely as an observer"; she will have to "go without kind or
condescension" into the lives of the "courtesan" and "harlot" whom male writers have stereotyped. However, the
narrator fears Carmichael will still write about these controversial subjects with self-consciousness. Yet there are
countless other women whose lives are unrecorded, and Carmichael will have to do them justice as she discovers her
own mind but she will have to do so without anger against men. Moreover, since every one has a blind spot about
themselves, only a woman such as herself can fill out the portrait of men in literature. However, upon reading more of
Carmichael's novel, the narrator feels the author is "no more than a clever girl," even though she bears no traces of
anger or fear. In a hundred years, the narrator believes, and with money and a room of her own, Carmichael will be a
better writer.
Analysis:
Woolf views Carmichael as the descendant of the tradition she outlined in Chapter Four, and she represents an
enormous change in the state of writing: an average female writer is finally able to write without anger of hatred,
without a stifling awareness of her gender, with a standard "feminine" sentence as a model.
The narrator applauds Carmichael's treatment of the relationship between Chloe and Olivia. Indeed, a female friendship
seems the only possible subject she might endorse; if Carmichael wrote about men, the narrator might criticize her for
writing with anger, and if Carmichael wrote about women and men, she would probably denounce her for continuing
the portrayal of women merely as lovers.
A female friendship, however, is material with which only women have first-hand experience. Carmichael's novel
compensates for the blind spot men have in describing humanity, especially since she writes without anger of fear (or
excessive praise of her own gender, as the narrator realizes she herself has done). But the narrator does not see this
blind spot as a travesty; rather, it means the sexes are different and can complement each other in their attempt to
understand themselves. Similarly, each gender has a blind spot about itself, and only through the observations of the
opposite sex can it gain full enlightenment.
Woolf continues her metaphors for genius as light, and possibly adds a sexual twist in this chapter. Carmichael writes,
at first, as if she is "striking a match that will not light." Later, when Carmichael has proved herself more able, the
narrator wonders if she will "light a torch in that vast chamber where nobody has yet been." Perhaps in describing this
unexplored region of female character, Woolf draws a parallel to the undiscovered area of female genitalia: "It is all half
lights and profound shadows like those serpentine caves where one goes with a candle peering up and down, not
knowing where one is stepping."
Nevertheless, Carmichael is a decent writer, and what is important to Woolf is that her writing does not suffer from
anger or fear, but from a simple lack of genius and craft. Though she is obviously an inferior writer to Charlotte Brontë,
Carmichael does not bear the same grudges which hamper her writing. In some time, given more socioeconomic
opportunities, Carmichael and all contemporary female writers, Woolf seems to imply will blossom.

The narrator reflects on the general public's understandable indifference to literature on the morning of Oct. 26, 1928.
She watches a young man and woman get into a taxi, and their unity soothes her; she wonders if her thoughts these
past two days of men and women as different have been straining. She wonders what "'unity of the mind'" means, since
the mind always changes its focus. Perhaps the unity of the man and woman in the taxi is satisfying because the mind
contains both a male and female part, and for "complete satisfaction and happiness," the two must live in harmony.
This fusion, she believes, is what poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge was describing when he said a great mind is
"androgynous." Coleridge did not mean that the androgynous mind favors women in any way; in fact, it does this less
than the single-sexed mind. Rather, the "androgynous mind transmits emotion without impediment it is naturally
creative, incandescent and undivided." Shakespeare is a fine model of this androgynous mind, though it is harder to
find current examples in this "stridently sex-conscious" age. She believes the Suffrage campaign for the women's vote
provoked men's defensiveness over their own sex. She reads a new novel by a well-respected male writer. The writing is
clear and strong, indicative of a free mind, but she later notices he protests "against the equality of the other sex by
asserting his own superiority," and this is as destructive an impediment as any; only the androgynous mind can foster
"perpetual life" in its reader's mind. The narrator blames both sexes for bringing about this self-consciousness of
gender. She judges the androgyny of various famous writers. She iterates her idea: if a writer's mind is purely male or
female, if there is not total freedom of thought, then the writing will not be "fertilised." The taxi takes away the man and
woman.
Woolf takes over the speaking voice. She says she will respond to two anticipated criticisms of the narrator. First, she
says she purposely did not express an opinion on the relative merits of the two genders--especially as writers--since
she does not believe such a judgment is possible or desirable. Second, her audience may believe the narrator laid too
much emphasis on material things, and that the mind should be able to overcome poverty and lack of privacy. She cites
a professor's argument that of the top poets of the last century, all but three were well-educated, and all but Keats
were fairly well-off. Without material things, she repeats, one cannot have intellectual freedom, and without intellectual
freedom, one cannot write great poetry. Women, who have been poor since the beginning of time, have
understandably not yet written great poetry.
She also responds to the question of why she insists women's writing is important. As an avid reader, the overly
masculine writing in all genres has disappointed her lately. Moreover, she believes that good writers make good human
beings who are intimately connected with "reality," and who may communicate this heightened sense of reality to their
readers. She encourages her audience to be themselves and "Think of things in themselves." She reminds them of what
men have thought of women. She admits that the young women in the audience have made few significant strides in
life even though numerous opportunities have been opened up for them. She says that Judith Shakespeare still lives
within all women, and that if women are given money and privacy in the next century, she will be reborn.
Analysis:
Woolf begins by admitting that thinking of gender differences has been straining, and this concept is her major point in
the chapter and throughout the essay: gender-consciousness hampers creative output and dims the incandescence of
genius. She cites Coleridge's idea of the androgynous mind as the goal for human mental endeavors, and it follows
from Woolf's previous notions: since it is of both genders, the androgynous mind does not harbor any anger over
gender inferiority. Rather, the androgynous mind finds objectivity in its relationship with, as Woolf calls it, "reality." In
other words, the androgynous mind is not concerned with itself, but with its subject, an impulse Woolf has lauded
throughout the essay.
It is important to remember that androgyny does not imply a total absence of gender, but such a complete fusion that
obliterates any gender-consciousness and frees the mind. Therefore, one may still write about men and women, as
Woolf has previously encouraged in her discussion of Mary Carmichael; it only means that one should not do so with
any sexual ax to grind. This is why Woolf's narrator is a woman; it allows Woolf to write with, as she put it, "integrity"
(we believe in the truthfulness of the narrator; had Woolf written as a man, her essay might have smacked of
implausibility). However, Woolf constantly restrains herself from writing with anger or fear, checking herself when she
slips into such imprisoned thought. Ultimately, the androgynous mind is a highly gendered concept; when Woolf uses
the word "fertilised" to describe the interaction of the sexes in the androgynous mind, she emphasizes the productivity
of both genders in it.
While Woolf anticipates two criticisms of her work, she ignores two strong rebuttals. She does not consider the idea
that writing out of protest can often be more powerful than writing out of complacency; that independence can make
one lazy and eliminate the burning desire to write often found in "hungry" writers; that the rebellion in more
"imprisoned" writers may force them to contemplate their own anger more than their subjects, but that their anger
often is the subject. Woolf's insistence upon the absence of anger and protest in minority writing has undergone much
revision in recent years, but her idea still holds much sway in feminist thought.
Woolf's other idea that is less palatable now is her (and the professor's) "proof" that genius flowers only in the rich and
educated. Although she previously recognized that women writers in the past had less opportunity to write, both in
terms of free time and training, here she inexplicably overlooks it when the subject is the poor. Still, she uses the idea
only to promote the necessity of financial independence for women which, along with their need for privacy, caps the
essay's main premise.

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What are the main points Woolf makes about women's lack of financial independence in the past?

How does Woolf describe the difference between the meals at the men's college versus the women's college?

11/24/2019 A Room of One’s Own Chapters 1 Summary and Analysis | GradeSaver

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