A Room of One's Own Lecture Notes PDF

Chapters 1 & 2 ​ Pursuit and Interruption of Knowledge ○​ “It was impossible not to reflect– the reflection whatever it may have been was cut short” ○​ Women Lack Access to Knowledge ○​ The Academy (major) ​ Fishing Allegory - she is walk...

Chapters 1 & 2 ​ Pursuit and Interruption of Knowledge ○​ “It was impossible not to reflect– the reflection whatever it may have been was cut short” ○​ Women Lack Access to Knowledge ○​ The Academy (major) ​ Fishing Allegory - she is walking in a space reserved for only mean ​ Establish a College - women cannot establish a college because there is no endowment, no money, and they are unable to work ​ Library Collection - women were only able to enter the library if the were accompanied by a affiliate of the academy (a man) ○​ General Interruptions/Lacking Closures (minor) ​ Cannot reach conclusion about Women and Fiction ​ Cat at Banquet ​ Lunch and Evening Time ​ Creativity and Money ○​ “Certainly, as I strolled round the court, the foundation of gold and solver seemed deep enough” ○​ Uses comparison of two meal to Theorize connection between money and the Academy ○​ Good food allows good conversation and rumination → money supports thought → history of establishing men’s colleges with ample funds from men → women’s colleges lack funding → women struggles to build academy → Question what women were doing → raising children ​ Creativity vs. Procreativity ○​ “Only is Mrs. Seton and her like had gone into business at the age of fifteen, there would have been– that was the sang in the argument– no mary.” ○​ Asks why the women’s college has no endowment from its foremothers like the men’s college has from its forefathers ○​ Motherhood is all consuming ○​ Cannot be in business and a mother ○​ Women are poor ​ Men Author Women but Not Vice Versa ○​ “Have you any notion how many books are written about women in the course of a year? Have you any notion how many are written by me? … Women do not write books about men.” ○​ Researching why women are poor ○​ Proliferation of scholarship by men about women ○​ Inaccessibility of truth ○​ Repeated inferiority of women  ​ Thread of Anger ○​ “All that I had retrieved from the morning’s work was the one fact of anger.” ○​ She is angry/insulted by research findings of women’s inferiority ○​ Turns it back to source to recognize anger in men ○​ “When I read what he wrote about women I thought, not what he was saying, but of himself” ○​ “Looking glass” analogy ○​ Women are positioned as inferior to enlarge men’s egos by comparison ○​ Society and social development run by men, necessity of women to bolster them ○​ Women’s opinions obsolete, “criticisms” and facts of existence unnecessary ○​ Women’s truth telling therefore threatening ​ Money Allots Escape from Emotionality ○​ “Five hundred a year stands for the power to contemplate.” ○​ BUT Woolf is free of that anger because of money “I need not hate any man. He cannot hurt me. I need not flatter any man; he has nothing to give me.” ○​ Inheritance from aunt ○​ Open ment horizons, “intellectual freedom” ○​ Fear and bitterness → pity and toleration → internalized presence of and critique by patriarchy → free, uninhibited, decontextualized thought ○​ “Freedom to think of things in themselves” ○​ Offers argument to free women of their “protection” (oppression in the name of protection) for gender equity and creative thought Chapters 3 & 4 ​ Woman as Representation versus woman as reality ○​ Contrary conception of women ​ Researching life of elizabethan woman and finds no information, no “facts” ​ Woman proliferates in art but absent from history ​ Woman idealized in are but denigrated in reality ​ Theme of resulting “monstrousness” not to hysteria ​ Women occupy art rather than produce it. Representation realm ​ A call for facts, and fiction ○​ Therefore, Woolf calls for the “facts” on the absent histories of everyday women, the minutiae of their lives “What one wants, I thought– is a mass of information. [There’s] a scarcity of facts. … History scarcely mentions her ○​ Declares the Woman must be recuperated through a combination of fact and fiction “What one must do to bring her to life was to think poetically and prosaically at one and the same moment, thus keeping in touch with fact that she  is a vessel in which all sorts of spirits and forces are coursing and flashing perpetually.” ​ Facts vs. Fiction ○​ “Fiction here is likely to contain more truth than fact.” ○​ Establishes Binary ​ Contrasts lack of historical documents on 17th century women (“facts”) with proliferation of women in literature (“fiction”) ○​ Breaks Down Binary ​ Supplies missing women’s lives with imaginings ​ Slippage between factual and fictional realms ​ Makes it art to fictionalize ​ The lost factual history of women’s fiction ​ Pragmatics of conscious social erasure of women’s histories and women’s art; requires artistic intervention ​ “Lies will flow from my lips, but there may perhaps be some truth mixed up with them.” ○​ Fictionalization ​ “One can only show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does hold.” ​ Cannot speak directly about sex– too controversial ​ Metatextual ​ Creativity Tied to Material Things ○​ “Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible; Shakespeare's plays, for instance, seem to hang there complete by themselves. But when the web is pulled askew, hooked up at the edge, torn in the middle, one remembers that these webs are not spun in mid-air by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in.” ○​ The body ○​ The money ○​ The place ​ A Writer’s State of Mine ○​ “To write a work of genius is almost always a feat of prodigious difficulty. Everything is against the likelihood that it will come from the writer's mind whole and entire. Generally material circumstances are against it. [..] But for women, I thought, looking at the empty shelves, these difficulties were infinitely more formidable.” ○​ The incandescent mind ​ Male write/poet  ​ Free of obstacles ​ Free from social critique ​ Not harboring fear, hatred ​ Not writing against conflict ​ Shakespear ○​ The disfigured mind ​ Woman writer/poet ​ Socially criticized, draws anger ​ Jeered, draws laughter ​ Nothing is expected of her, indifference ​ Thwarted ​ Foremothers ○​ Lack of Tradition Behind Women Writers ​ “For we think back through our mothers if we are women.” ​ Lack of previous canon of lit by women versus established canon by men ○​ Collective Artistry ​ “For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice. Jane Austen should have laid a wreath upon the grave of Fanny Burney, and George Eliot done homage to the robust shade of Eliza Carter …” ​ Must recognize few previous woman authors for paving the way ​ Gender Expectations Affect Literary Form ○​ “Anybody may blame me who like.” —Jane Eyre ○​ Interruptions, breaks, incontinuities, jerks: stylistic form reflects internalized concerns about gender expectations for women ○​ Grace Poole as an “upsetting” entrance in Jane Eyre “the woman who wrote those pages had more genius in her than Jane Austen; but if one reads them over and marks that jerk in them, that indignation, one sees that she will never get her genius expressed whole and entire. Her books will be deformed and twisted. She will write in a rage where she should write calmly …” ○​ Extension of pragmatic “interruption” argument into the stylistic form itself ○​ BUT Mary Carmichael “is tampering with the expected sequence … not for the sake of breaking, but for the sake of creating.” (Chapter 5) Chapters 5 & 6: ​ Women’s Relationships ○​ “Chloe liked Olivia” ○​ Mary Carmichael’s Life’s Adventure  ​ Breaks with the expected sequence: not out of fear, anger, or remembering woman’s position but out of invention and revelation ​ Woolf treats book as conglomeration/result of all previous positions, methods, discoveries of the woman writer, Carmichael a descendant of all women writers ​ Women’s Relations devoid of the relational axis of men, gay women “perhaps for the first time in literature ​ “For if Chloe likes Olivia and Mary Carmichael knows how to express it she will light a torch in that vast chamber where nobody has yet been” ​ Relationships between women as penned by men too “simple” ​ Women only seen by the other sex and in relation to the other sex ​ Man is partially hampered in his knowledge of women ​ Need women’s opinion of women ​ Women’s Experiences ○​ “All these infinitely obscure lives remain to be recorded” ○​ Men’s literature focuses on men’s role, values, and insight, does not have suggestive power for women, does not touch women ​ “For the motion which is so deep, so subtle, so symbolic to a man moves a woman to wonder.” ○​ But great men were inspired by women, a creativity force to femininity ○​ Highly developed creative faculty among women ○​ Women should write about women and their experiences ​ “It will be a curious sight, when it comes, to see these women as they are.” ​ “All these infinitely obscure lives remain to be recorded.” ○​ High (men’s) culture versus low (women’s) culture, the room is the bridge ​ “She will go without kindness or condescension, but in the spirit of fellowship, into those small, scented rooms where sit the courtesan, the harlot and the lady with the pug dog.”