A Room of One’s Own

1. A Room of One’s Own 11/05/2009

2. Section 2 • The narrator now takes us to the British Museum in London, where she continues to investigate the subject of "Women and Fiction." Looking through the catalogue she professes astonishment at the sheer number of books that men have written about women. She notes that this subject attracts not only doctors and biologists, as expected, but also "agreeable essayists, light-fingered novelists, young men who have taken the M.A. degree; men who have taken no degree; men who have no apparent qualification save that they are not women" (27). After noting the contradictory conclusions reached by these various male authors, she finally abandons her search for information or ideas that would shed light on her topic of "Women and Fiction." She confesses: "It was distressing, it was bewildering, it was humiliating. Truth had run through my fingers. Every drop had escaped" (31)

3. Conclusion • The student by her side (28) • But while I pondered I had unconsciously, in my listlessness, in my desperation, been drawing a picture where I should, like my neighbour, have been writing a conclusion. I had been drawing a face, a figure. It was the face and the figure of Professor von X engaged in writing his monumental work entitled The mental, moral, and physical inferiority of the female sex.

4. Dreams / inspiration • She tells us that in her depiction this professor is a man who is not attractive to women, being, in fact, angry and rather repulsive. She then apologizes for drawing when she should have been finishing her work, but explains, "it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top" (32). • inspiration can arrives through a meandering, non-discursive process rather than via one that is more direct or verbal

5. Anger / patriarchy / superiority • She then continues along this train of thought, reporting that even after her own anger had cooled, she was at a loss to explain the anger she sensed in the professors' writing. For she explains that the piles of books written by male authors were not objective but seemed instead to be coloured by anger, rendering them worthless for scientific purposes. She characterizes the emotion in these books as "anger disguised and complex, not anger simple and open" (33) but assures us that it is anger, nonetheless, and reports that it permeates every aspect of the male opinion. She then remarks that since men are dominant in nearly every aspect of the culture it seems strange that they should be so angry.Woolf is puzzled by this incongruity until she realizes that men's superiority is, in fact, dependent on the inequality between the sexes. She considers the idea that men are not so much concerned with the inferiority of women, but with their own supposed superiority, and are therefore threatened by women's attempts to gain equal footing. She notes that life requires great self-confidence and realizes that the quickest and easiest way to feel more confident is to believe oneself superior to others. She concludes by saying, "Hence the enormous importance to a patriarch who has to conquer, who has to rule, of feeling that great numbers of people, half the human race indeed, are by nature inferior to himself. It must indeed be one of the chief sources of his power" (35).

6. Mirror • “Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size. Without that power probably the earth would still be a swamp and jungle. The glories of all our wars would be unknown [ . . . ] Whatever may be their use in civilized societies, mirrors are essential to a violent and heroic action" (35-6).

7. Mirror (2) • "For if she tells the truth; the figure in the looking-glass shrinks; his fitness for life is diminished" (36). She continues her "looking-glass" analogy by proposing that men are as dependent upon the flattery of women as a drug addict is on his cocaine. • [Women’s complicity?]

8. Economics • Woolf has been dining alone at the library during this interlude, and her philosophical musings are interrupted by the appearance of the bill at her table. She explains that the fact that she is able to pay the bill is the result of an inheritance left to her by an aunt. She recalls that she received news of her inheritance on the same night that she heard of the success of the women's Suffragette movement and comments dryly, "Of the two - the vote and the money - the money, I own, seemed infinitely the more important" (37).

9. Five hundred pounds • She reminds us how difficult is for women to make a living and admits how hard it was for her and how bitter and fearful she felt in the days when she was faced with the constant prospect of poverty. • “No force in the world can take from me my five hundred pounds. Food, house and clothing are mine forever. Therefore not merely do effort and labour cease, but also hatred and bitterness. I need not hate any man; he cannot hurt me. I need not flatter any man; he has nothing to give me.” (38)

10. Male rage for acquisition • “True, they had money and power, but only at the cost of harbouring in their breasts an eagle, a vulture, for ever tearing the liver out and plucking at the lungs—the instinct for possession, the rage for acquisition which drives them to desire other people’s fields and goods perpetually; to make frontiers and flags; battleships and poison gas; to offer up their own lives and their children’s lives.” (38)

11. Two economies • Difference between having enough money to guarantee one the freedom to write and the pursuit of wealth for itself, which would also limit one's ability to create freely.

12. Men's and women's work • As she returns home at the end of this long day she notices the peaceful domesticity of her neighbourhood and considers the relative merits of men's and women's work. She concludes that it is impossible to measure whose work is ultimately more meaningful and asks whether a charwoman who has brought up eight children is of less value to the world than a barrister who has made a hundred thousand pounds (39).

13. Future • "in a hundred years [ . . . ] women will have ceased to be the protected sex" (40). • "Remove that protection, expose them to the same exertions and activities, make them soldiers and sailors and engine-drivers and dock-labourers, and will not women die off so much younger, so much quicker, than men that one will say, 'I saw a woman today,' as one used to say, 'I saw an aeroplane'" (40) • Anything may happen” (the unfinished sentence)