Analysis of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own Essay

Using the example of Judith, Shakespeare’s imaginary sister, Woolf depicts this character as how society discriminated against women. Judith, a woman, was just as talented as her brother, William Shakespeare, though had to write in secret. A man’s talent was highly recognized in

As Woolf closed, she said, “do not look for Judith Shakespeare in Sir Sidney Lee’s Life of a Poet.” She died young and never was able to write a word; however, Woolf believes “Judith Shakespeare” lives on in today’s society. She believes Judith is a representation of women alive and not alive who were not able to speak or write their minds. She created Judith to show that even when great writers die, even if they never physically wrote words on paper, they still live

The Modernist skepticism is vivid in Woolf's portrayal of a woman, Isabella, who has not conformed to society's accepted norms and would seem to be - at first glance - all the better for it.  But, upon closer inspection it is with a sigh of resignation that Virginia recognizes the illusion that her fanciful exploration created for her.  Isabella (possibly representative of Virginia herself or of womanhood in general) is elevated and

able to get rid of. At the end of the poem Sexton admits the thoughts of suicide are something you can never get rid of, “and yet she waits for me, year after year” (line 25). Sexton justifies the reasons for her suicide by saying that her thoughts and bad memories will never stop coming back because this has been happening for years and years now there is no going back for Sexton. She leaves us with the last stanza filled with unfinished things. This could be a metaphor for her life that is unfinished because of her death occurrence.

In Virginia Woolf’s speech “Professions for Women”, it employs various techniques in order to get her argument across. Throughout the speech Virginia Woolf brings forward a problem that is still relevant today: gender inequality. Woolf’s combination brings of extended metaphors, irony, vivid imagery, anaphora and repetition emphasizes her philosophical ideal of supporting gender equality.

Woolf begins her speech by immediately acknowledging the reasons she was invited to speak for the Society. Through the use of anaphora, she is able to contest that she does, indeed, meet the criteria, as it is true she is an employed woman. However, Woolf shrouds a bit of doubt on her credibility with the addition of the rhetorical question, “but what professional experiences have I had?” (1). Nevertheless, she quickly recovers by stating that though she was a woman pursuing a career in literature, a profession in which “there are fewer experiences for women than any other” (1), she was able to make a name for herself like those who had paved the road before her. Woolf admits that her experience was not as rough as the women who preceded her because they “ma[de] the path smooth, and regulat[ed] [her] steps”. As a result, she had “very few material obstacles in her way” (1). Woolf incorporates the subtle use of a metonym when she states, “no demand was made upon the family purse” (1), in order to establish that her family suffered no economic strife through her writing.

Woolf demonstrates how women writers have often failed in this because of our frustration and bitterness with a world that presented to us and our writing not welcome, or even indifference, but hostility (41). She makes it clear that if there is ever going to be a “Shakespeare’s sister,” we must---at least while we are writing---swallow that sense of having been wronged, for it stands as an impediment to our creativity. This is the mental freedom that women writers must attain.

Virginia Woolf saw it the same way; in how women of a time before the eighteenth century had little to no history of prominent women as literary artists or in general. In her essay, Woolf states that there is very little mention in history of women, and if mentioned they usually happen to be a royal lady such as an Elizabeth or Mary. A middle-class woman could never participate in such a movement of acknowledgment, even if she had brains and character to dispense. No average Elizabethan woman ever just wrote her story, regardless of the circumstance of the era, because she would have been “snubbed, slapped, lectured, and exhorted”(Jacobus 702). It was proven that there are just few exceptions in evidence, such as women’s letters (Jacobus 695-696).

Woolf believes that women are different from men both in their social history as well as inherently, and that each of these differences has had important effects on the development of women 's writing.

The dark is often a scary place. It is a place that is inherently uncertain and obscure and is therefore perceived as an unfortunate state to be in. Yet in Rebecca Solnit’s essay on Virginia Woolf, entitled Woolf’s Darkness: Embracing the Inexplicable, Solnit disagrees with this perception of the dark and on the contrary labels it as something to celebrate, using Woolf’s writing as evidence. Solnit frequently refers to Woolf in her writing as the basis for what she has to say and uses Woolf’s ideas to expand her own thinking. While there are many clear arguments being made by Solnit, it is unclear where Solnit’s essay as a whole is leading the reader. The exact destination seems undefined but there is significance in the journey on the way. She makes good points as she asks the reader to dive deeply with her into the concepts of uncertainty and imagination but where she is going with her thoughts is hard to pinpoint. The way she flows from concept to concept, intertwining the thoughts of others with her own but with no clear final goal, ties nicely into the idea of what an essay is. Overall, Solnit’s journey seeks to analyze Woolf by drawing on principles of uncertainty and the future and using such analysis to inspire the reader’s writing, to enable their imagination. Solnit does this effectively by using an investigative and critical narrative that celebrates the mysteries of uncertainty and all it contains.

In her essay “In Search of a Room of One’s Own” Virginia Woolf used Shakespeare’s sister as a metaphor to explain the position of women in Elizabethan era. Since author finds it difficult to find any trace of women in the Elizabethan era, she creates a fictional character through imagination, and to feel situations that the women in Elizabethan society would have had to go through. Woolf compares fiction to a “spider’s web” (520) that permeates life “at all four corners” (520). Through this metaphor, she personifies narratives of women suffering as a spider’s web that cling to our material reality. For Woolf, our lived stories are a part of this web which can be changed, destroyed or, re-spin with our imagination. In my paper, I argue that Wolfe uses the metaphor of a spider’s web as a heuristic device to make a case for literacy analysis and fiction as tools for exercising narrative agency and challenging stories that deny us representation in this world. To illustrate this, she creates an imaginative character, named Judith Shakespeare, to surface the gender inequality in the Elizabethan era. For this purpose, she not only writes a new chapter of Elizabethan history that centers the perspective of the women, but she also gives voice to women of that era who, like Judith her main character, were silenced and delegitimized by the spider’s web of their time.

“Thinking about Shakespeare’s sister,” resonated how women were treated and how their opportunities differ from that of a man. Virginia Woolf tries to boil down the main cause of why there are not any great women authors. Is it because women do not have the ability to be or raw talent great writers? Woolf’s essay examines the life of William Shakespeare’s sister to answer this question: What kind of life would have Judith lead? Judith is a fictional character created from Virginia Woolf’s imagination.

While Woolf makes very good points throughout her essay based many interesting points, one cannot help

Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own excerpt consisted of important matters that needed to be brought to the table, but too many people were afraid of speaking up to society’s rules. Virginia implies facts about Shakespeare’s life to add that Shakespeare’s times was not the best times for female writers and their opinions. While Virginia imagines Shakespeare’s life with a sister, she says, “Any woman in Shakespeare’s days should have had Shakespeare’s genius” (897). Shakespeare’s era was ruled and taught by men and known for the men having very important roles in society, unlike the women. Virginia repeats the phrase “the element of grammar and logic” (896) to the emphasis on Shakespeare learning opportunity unlike his “sister” named Judith. Shakespeare learned about literature, how to solve problems

The narrator returns home disappointed that she hasn't found some piece of truth to explain the poverty that women don’t share with men. Woolf thinks she needs a historian to describe the conditions of women through history. Compared to men, woman’s lives seem non-existent. She describes fiction as being connected to life but as careful as a spider-web and, in