From Renting to Ownership

Throughout history, women have time and time again tried to create a name, a face for themselves, apart from the male dominated society of which they lived. Virginia Woolf discusses this idea in her work, "A Room of One's Own." She recounts the various ways women throughout history have tried to make their mark on the literary world, but often that process has been hindered by men. Men have, not always directly, hindered the works of women who had the potential to be great writers of their day. Women have not only been denied the privilege of writing, but once it was seen as acceptable for women to pursue careers in writing, and in some ways given a room, they were limited in what they could write about. So, this "room" that it appeared women were finally given, was, in fact, a room, but was it their own? No, this room was designed, constructed, and given to women by men. Women had no say in its size, its shape, its location, or the time of its arrival. Women had to be complacent and certainly just thankful to have a room that they could call their own. I do not feel as though Virginia Woolf came to the point in hisory where women actually owned the room, it seemed the women she discussed were "renting" the room, and had to comply with rules of the landlord.
Real ownership of the room is expressed in Gilman's work, "The Yellow Wallpaper," where the narrator is forced to stay in a room which she hates: the color of the walls, the wallpaper its self, and the smells. However, this is where she is told to stay, by her husband. In fact, she begs her husband, " I wanted one downstairs that opened on the piazza...but John would not hear of it." The narrator spends her days being preoccupied with the wallpaper. At the end of the summer, the narrator successfully pulls of the wallpaper, and she says to her husband, "'And I've pulled off most of the wallpaper, so you can't put me back!'" The room is closer to the idea of a room that she imagined, the dream she had for the room.
Here, unlike in Virginia Woolf's essay, there is more of a sense that now the room is the way the narrator wants it, it is no longer just an ordinary room. I thought it was interesting to draw on the idea that now the part of the room that the narrator despised so much is gone, and her mind is freed of that preoccupation. The narrartor, like women who were finally able to go from the "renting" to the "owning" stage of the room, can take pride in what they have done to make that room truly their own. In my opinion, Gilman better addresses the idea of a room of one's own, where as Woolf only addresses the idea of obtaining that room, but not really owning it.