Playing With Fire

The ultimate beauty of Virginia Woolf’s book, A Room of One’s Own flourishes in the way Woolf grows as a woman throughout her thought process in writing her essay. In starting this essay, Woolf admits she had no idea where to begin, as she sits in a library, staring at a "blank sheet of paper on which was written in large letters WOMEN AND FICTION, but no more" (25). As the pages turn, the reader can see the way Woolf develops her own theory as to why women need a room of one’s own and money to be able to write. Woolf admits that she is actually asking the reader to “live in a presence of reality, an invigorating life, it would appear, whether one can impart it or not” (110). In the foreword in the beginning of the book, Mary Gordon writes something that I cannot agree or come to terms with. Gordon interprets Woolf’s essay in her own way and states, “Yet the writer cannot, for Woolf, work to be rid of the self; the writer must be born into a world which never allows grievances to appear, or must be born of a soul made of stuff that will not bear the impress of resentment” (viii). I would have to say that I strongly disagree with the first part of this statement and I actually received a very different view of what Woolf was saying about women writers and reality in this book than Mary Gordon. I do not think it is possible for a writer to be born into a society where grievances do not appear. It is possible, of course, to try to rid one's self of the grievances that hinders her writing, but as for being completely born into a world without them, that I cannot agree. The inequality between men and women has always exsisted and probably will always exist. If it were possible to be born into a society without hardships or inequality, I do not think Woolf would have wasted her time on making the points she does in this book or writing it at all for that matter.

To me, Mary Gordon is suggesting that Woolf believes men and women who write famous works of literature were born into that era for that purpose only. Take Shakespeare for example. No one in his day and age (and maybe not even today) could have ever written with such beauty as Shakespeare. Does that mean that no one will ever write anything beautiful again? I agree that there is a time and a place for everything and that maybe everything happens for a reason, but I do not believe that a writer cannot work to be rid of the self. Jane Austen was able to write literature without bitterness, resentment, fear and hate (68) and who is to say that she was "born" to write this way. Jane Austen could have learned to write this way by simply practising. Did not Emily Dickinson sit in her room until all hours of the morning writing lines of poetry just to discard them until she wrote the perfect poem? Most of the women writers in Woolf's time were uneducated and therefore probably taught themselves to write as beautifully as they did. Also if what Mary Gordon says is true, why would Woolf continually exhaust herself trying to explain the importance of women having a room of one's own to be able to write? Although Woolf decides that this in not the only means necessary for a woman to be able to write, it is the spark that ignites the fire that makes Woolf begin this essay in the first place.