A Room Of One's Own Essay

1396 Words3 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: Life of women in the 19th century

A Room of One’s Own by Virquinia Woolf is a collection of her many essays explaining the disadvantages of a life as a woman in the 18th and 19th centuries. One of the main areas that had disadvantages was the education system. Woolf writes about two hypothetical experiences, one of which was set at Oxbridge in all-boys school, and the other at Fernham which is an all-girls school. In both experiences she describes what her journey at the campus would be like, and the different treatments that are given to each school. Patriarchy is revealed in the hypothetical experiences at Oxbridge and Fernham through the differences campus security, the nourishment that food supplies the body, and the flexibility the students are given after the luncheon. …show more content…

Oxbridge has money to not only pay for the tools needed for education, but also a security which allows Oxbridge to decide who they want on and not on the campus. On the other hand Fernham’s security is laid back. People are easily able to come on and off the campus without dealing with security guards. “The gardens of Fernham lay before me in the spring twilight, wild and open, and the long grass, sprinkled carelessly flung, were daffodils and bluebells, not orderly, perhaps at the best of times, and now wind-blown and waving as they tugged at their roots” (Woolf 18). This description of the campus shows how unkempt the campus is, grass has been grown out and is not tamed by workers. This is due to that Fernham does not have the extra money to spend on the look of the campus. The campus is wild and free, there is no security to control the flow of people, and it is open to all. Women in the society, did not have the opportunities that men are granted. They do not have the right to own their own things, all money that they make is given to their husbands. Women were considered the property of their husbands. The women at Fernham are lucky to even be given in educated

Show More
Related

  • Virginia Wolf

    332 Words  | 1 Pages

    In Virginia Woolf’s two passages describing two very opposite meals that was served at the men’s college and the other at the women’s college; reflects Woolf’s attitude toward women’s place in society.

    Read More

  • Virginia Woolf Two Meals Analysis

    543 Words  | 2 Pages

    Virginia Woolf describes both a meal at a men’s college, and a meal at a women’s college, drawing out sharp differences. While the men were spoiled with delicacies, the women were served boring and unappealing dishes. Through Woolf’s structure, language, detail and tone, she portrays her attitude towards the place of women in society. She uses comparison and contrast to show the immense inequality between the two colleges.

    Read More

  • College Meals

    545 Words  | 2 Pages

    Throughout Virginia Woolf’s writings, she describes two different dinners: one at a men’s college, and another at a women’s college. Using multiple devices, Woolf expresses her opinion of the inequality between men and women within these two passages. She also uses a narrative style to express her opinions even more throughout the passages.

    Read More

  • Facades versus Reality

    1806 Words  | 4 Pages

    In George Orwell’s Such, Such Were the Joys, the school Crossgates is perceived as a prestigious private school, when in fact its true operations run as a deceiving and disappointing institution. Orwell explained first how the institution’s standard of living was poorer quality than lower-class living. The narrator who came from a poor family retold that he “took a social step upwards by attending [Crossgates], and yet the standard of comfort was in every way far lower than in my own home, or indeed, than it would have been in a prosperous working-class home” (Orwell 434). Crossgates was perceived to have been a lavished place to reside, where the school kids would have top-notch residing quarters. Instead, the Crossgates boarding situation lacked all hospitability and had a lower standard of living than what would constitute as lower class.

    Read More

  • Women's Suffrage Dbq

    1346 Words  | 3 Pages

    Taking a step back from the sway of government, we must also look at the education of women. To prove that women were as capable as men, they needed to have the same level of education. Seeing as women were told their place in society was in the kitchen or at home cleaning, their education was often ignored. Therefore during 1850, schools dedicated to the education of women started to appear. The North London Collegiate School and the Cheltenham College were started with the hopes of educating the women of Great Britain. These schools were filled with women who were already teachers and had the enthusiasm of learning instilled in their hearts. “The terrible sufferings of the women of my own class for want of a good elementary training have more than ever intensified my earnest desire to lighten, ever so little, the misery of women brought up ‘to be married and taken care of’”. The dedication of women across Great Britain to gain an education and show that they were as capable as men goes to show how important this movement truly was. Already before World War I,

    Read More

  • college

    774 Words  | 2 Pages

    "NWHM Exhibit: The History of Women and Education." NWHM Exhibit: The History of Women and Education. Web. 20 Mar. 2014. .

    Read More

  • Confrontation of Gender Roles in the Works of Mill, Tennyson, and Woolf

    1976 Words  | 4 Pages

    Woolf, Virginia. "A Room of One's Own." The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Ed. M.H. Abrams et al. 7th ed. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2000. 2153-2214.

    Read More

  • The Outsider in Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own

    761 Words  | 2 Pages

    In A Room of One's Own Virginia Woolf writes: "I had no wish to enter had I the right, and this time the verger might have stopped me, demanding perhaps my baptismal certificate, or a letter if introduction from the dean"(8). This particular line jumps out at me for several reasons. First off, I find it rather humorous. I was rather surprised by this remark as well. I did not think that I would be reading anything that would make me laugh even the slightest bit. Despite this, Woolf is angry after being refused entrance to the university library, and she shows it with this bit of wit and sarcasm. She does not think that it is fair or proper to keep women out of such places. I am also willing to bet that this is not the first time that she has ever been asked to leave a place solely because she is a woman. In this respect she is an outsider in two ways: she is not a member of the university, and she is a woman. This frustrates her greatly, but she does not just explode in her writing. She makes little comments here and there tha...

    Read More

  • The Theme Of Personal Identity In A Room Of One's Own

    1010 Words  | 3 Pages

    How can one establish one’s own personal identity when one’s societal expectations rules one’s life? Virginia Woolf uses her story, A Room of One’s Own, to show the stifling reality of the struggles in making room for women in the twentieth century culture. Virginia Woolf established a feministic view in the patriarchal world of the early 1900s. Woolf begins the story with a witty narrator preparing a lecture on women and fiction, and that the reality for a female to write fiction was not conducive to the weary life handed to her. The narrator of A Room of One’s Own points out that the cultural expectations for women in society was quite different from what many women’s goals actually were in life.

    Read More

  • A Room of Ones Own by Virginia Woolf

    2178 Words  | 5 Pages

    A Room of One's Own is an based on Woolf's lectures at a women's college at Cambridge University in 1928. Woolf bases her thoughts on "the question of women and fiction". In the essay, Woolf asks herself the question if a woman could create art that compares to the quality of Shakespeare. Therefore, she examines women's historical experience and the struggle of the woman artist. A Room of One's Own explores the history of women in literature through an investigation of the social and material conditions required for writing. Leisure time, privacy, and financial independence, are important to understanding the situation of women in the literary tradition because women, historically, have been deprived of those basics (Roseman 14).

    Read More

  • Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own

    1324 Words  | 3 Pages

    Though published seventy years ago, Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own holds no less appeal today than it did then. Modern women writers look to Woolf as a prophet of inspiration. In November of 1929, Woolf wrote to her friend G. Lowes Dickinson that she penned the book because she "wanted to encourage the young women–they seem to get frightfully depressed" (xiv). The irony here, of course, is that Woolf herself eventually grew so depressed and discouraged that she killed herself. The suicide seems symptomatic of Woolf's own feelings of oppression within a patriarchal world where only the words of men, it seemed, were taken seriously. Nevertheless, women writers still look to Woolf as a liberating force and, in particular, at A Room of One's Own as an inspiring and empowering work. Woolf biographer Quentin Bell notes that the text argues:

    Read More

  • The History of Women in Education

    1189 Words  | 3 Pages

    Education has been the hurdle keeping women from gaining equality in society, by separating them from their male counterparts. Women who sought higher education were considered, heathens and the most disgusting beings that would perish. Without education to empower them, women were stripped of their dignity and rights by their husbands and other men of the community. The struggle for women higher education is a battle that still has not reached its citadel.

    Read More

  • A Room Of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf

    835 Words  | 2 Pages

    First, due to the development of technology, not only can women express their ideas and stories freely, they can even have readers from anywhere in the world. Virginia Woolf describes the situations in which she was demanded to leave the grass at Oxbridge (fictional university) and denied again the access to the library. These situations prompted Woolf to make a conclusion on why a woman needs a private space of her own. The grass at Oxbridge and the fortress-like library depict the barriers betw...

    Read More

  • Virginia Woolf's A Room of One’s Own

    2616 Words  | 6 Pages

    In Virginia Woolf’s feminist essay “A Room of One’s Own,” Woolf argues that “a woman must have money and a room of her own” (16) if she is to write fiction of any merit. The point as she develops it is a perceptive one, and far more layered and various in its implications than it might at first seem. But I wonder if perhaps Woolf did not really tap the full power of her thesis. She recognized the necessity of the writer’s financial independence to the birth of great writing, but she failed to discover the true relationship to great writing of another freedom; for just as economic freedom allows one to inhabit a physical space---a room of one’s own---so does mental freedom allow one to inhabit one’s own mind and body “incandescent and unimpeded.” Woolf seems to believe that the development and expression of creative genius hinges upon the mental freedom of the writer(50), and that the development of mental freedom hinges upon the economic freedom of the writer (34, 47). But after careful consideration of Woolf’s essay and also of the recent trend in feminist criticism, one realizes that if women are to do anything with Woolf’s words; if we are to act upon them---to write the next chapter in this great drama---we must take her argument a little farther. We must propel it to its own conclusion to find that in fact both the freedom from economic dependence and the freedom from fetters to the mind and body are conditions of the possibility of genius and its full expression; we must learn to ‘move in’: to inhabit and take possession of, not only a physical room, but the more abstract rooms of our minds and our bodies. It is only from this perspective in full possession of ourselves that we can find the unconsciousness of ourselves,...

    Read More

  • Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own: Women and Fiction

    1151 Words  | 3 Pages

    Woolf divided this thought into three categories: what women are like throughout history, women and the fiction they write, and women and the fiction written about them. When one thinks of women and fiction, what they think of; Woolf tried to answer this question through the discovery of the female within literature in her writing. Virginia Woolf Throughout her life Virginia Woolf became increasingly interested in the topic of women and fiction, which is highly reflected in her writing. To understand her piece, A Room of One’s Own Room, her reader must understand her.

    Read More

More about A Room Of One's Own Essay

Open Document