Woolf Two Meals

Two Meals, Two Lives Woolf contrasts two passages in the first chapter of “A Room of One’s Own” to illustrate the inequality between the treatment of men and women and how this inequality leads to less success for women. Woolf does this by comparing two meals. One meal is a feast of beauty at the all men Oxbridge University and the other is a bleak dinner served at the women’s college. Woolf’s use of diction, syntax and tone exemplify the inequalities and their impacts. Woolf paints a picture of the feast set before the men by using extremely heady and sophisticated words in the first passage. The men's meal is better in quantity, preparation, service, quality and variety than the food at the women’s college. She uses words such as, “counterpane”,

The sentences she uses in the first passage are lengthy, similar to how the men's feast is so large. Also, she uses a lot of animation to demonstrate that the men's meal was much more extravagant than the women's meal. The large amount of heavy syntax mirrors the excessive amount of food that the passage describes. For example the meal is multiple courses, and within each course there are multiple options. She takes three and a half lines to describe just the partridges being served. Woolf uses this writing style to show that while men have multiple opportunities, they also have choices that they can make within the

She sets the scene in October at a dinner, already creating a more bleak feeling. The month of October symbolizes shorter, colder, darker, and drearier days. Also at this point in the year, dinner time is after sunset. The words she chooses are as plain and simple as the food items being served. This way of writing shows that there are no choices of, and this symbolizes a woman’s life. She uses the words “plain,” “homely trinity,” “rumps,” “bargaining,” “cheapening,” “uncharitable,” “stringy,” “dry,” “miser’s,” “scraped,” “emptied,” and “violently”. By using a depressive quality and she gets rid of the sophisticated glamour that is possessed in passage one. The separate and unequal settings of college imprison women in the world of inequality. The descriptions in passage two also take on a tone that would be similar to a mother speaking and this reminds the place in society where women are supposed to be. An example of this would be when she tells the readers to feel grateful because coal miners have less. Almost all mothers tell their children to be grateful because someone else in the world has