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From A Room of One’s Own. By: Virginia Woolf. Presented by: Calie Albitz , Jade Strella and Todd Zimmerman. Background Information. Written during the time when the England’s woman suffrage movement had won substantial victories.
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From A Room of One’s Own By: Virginia Woolf Presented by: CalieAlbitz, Jade Strella and Todd Zimmerman
Background Information • Written during the time when the England’s woman suffrage movement had won substantial victories. • A year before “A Room of One’s Own” was published, the voting age for women was lowered to twenty-one. • Woolf was very active with the Women’s Rights Movement although the people she was associated with disdained the protest for increased women’s rights. • This work is based on “Women and Fiction” which is a series of lectures that she delivered at Newnham and Girton colleges, Cambridge. • These lectures consisted of educational, social and financial disadvantages that she believed woman faced that thwarted them from becoming successful writers.
Literary Element: Argument • Virginia Woolf utilizes the literary element of argument in order to get her point across. • An argument is a type of persuasive writing in which logic or reason is used to try to influence a reader’s ideas or actions. • Example: In the story, Woolf states, “And undoubtedly, I thought, looking at the shelf where there are no plays by women, her work would have gone unsigned.” -- This part of the story supports Woolf’s argument that she portrays throughout the story.
Woolf’s Main Opinion • Argues that women in the Elizabethan Age were not able to utilize their minds because they were only to do household chores and were not provided with an education. • Women were not given an opportunity to be successful. • Woolf believed that if a woman was not able to use the great gift that they were born with then the woman would eventually go insane and end up killing themselves. - “For it needs little skill and psychology to be sure that a highly gifted girl who had tried to use her gift for poetry would have been so thwarted and hindered by other people, so tortured and pulled asunder by her own contrary instincts that she must have lost her health and sanity to a certainty.”
Social Conditions • Women were thought to do only household duties. • Women were not given the opportunity to attend school. • Generally, women married very young (around 16). They usually had kids before they were 21. • Men felt that they controlled beating and sometimes resorted to abuse. • Women were thought to be under men and incapable of doing tasks that men did.
Shakespeare’s hypothetical sister • In the story, Woolf supports her argument by comparing Shakespeare and his hypothetical sister, Judith. • Shakespeare’s “sister” would most likely have had an intelligent and creative mind like her brother’s mind. However, she would never be able to utilize her talents because she wasn’t given the chance due to lack of education. • From the text: “She had no chance of learning grammar and logic, let alone of reading Horace and Virgil. She picked up a book now and then, one of her brother’s perhaps, and read a few pages. But then her parents came in and told her to mend he stockings or mind the stew and not moon about with books and papers.”
Shakespeare’s hypothetical sister • Judith’s father forced her to marry the son of the neighboring wool stapler. • This led Judith to run off to London and pursue theater. • “She stood at the stage door; she wanted to act, she said. Men laughed in her face. The manager—a fat, loose-lipped man—guffawed. He bellowed something about poodles dancing and women acting—no woman, he said, could possibly be an actress.” • Unable to make the most of her great mind, talent and ideas Judith went mad which resulted in her suicide.
Testing Your Knowledge • What is the general consensus as to why women did not write poetry in the Elizabethan age? • How were women in the Elizabethan time period perceived? • What was the significance of Woolf’s fictional story of Judith Shakespeare? • Why did Shakespeare’s sister, Judith, kill herself?
Works Cited • Forssen, Annika K. “It’s heavenly to be alone!: A Room of One’s Own as a Health Promoting Resource for Woman.” March 2006. pg 171- 181. Web. 18 May 2009. <http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direc t=true&db=hch&AN=20350334&site=ehost-live> “Virginia Woolf.” Whitehall High School: Contemporary Authors. Gale. 21 May 2009. <http://infotrac.galegroup.com/itw/infomark/74/291 /63628656w16/purl=rc1_CA_0_H1000108183&dyn= 3!xrn_1_0_H1000108183?sw_aep=pl3028>. “Woolf, Virginia.” Literar Ca Valcade. Feb2003. Ebsco Host. 21 May 2009. <http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=f5h&AN=8 973290&site=ehost-live>.
