Virginia Woolf's Argumentative Essay

Writer and modernist now known as a feminist, Virginia Woolf, in her informative essay, “What if Shakespeare had had a sister”, described the oppression of women in the literary world during the Elizabethan era; known as the golden age for everyone, except for women. Woolf’s purpose is to present to her readers the restrictions and obstacles women faced in order to obtain little or any literary achievement. She adopts an informative, yet frustrated tone in order to answer her own question and inform her audience, “why no woman wrote a word of that extraordinary literature” (466). In order to solve her problem effectively, Woolf utilizes rhetorical devices such as: diction, allusions, metaphors and by using pathos in order to convey to the readers

In order to prove why women did not write in the past she appeals to several literary allusions. In her essay she mentions the ideas of Professor Trevelyan on the lives of women, “they were married whether they liked it or not before they were out of the nursery, at fifteen or sixteen… It would have been extremely odd… had one of them suddenly written the plays of Shakespeare” (479). Woolf includes this statement in order to help demonstrate why women could not write in the time of Shakespeare. When including this piece of information it allows her audience to being to understand her argument of the essay. Woolf argues that women did not write because they were restricted and could not. She continues to unveil that women were oppressed by including allusions to female writers such as, “Currer Bell, George Eliot, George Sand, all the victims of inner strife as their writings prove, sought ineffectively to veil themselves by using the name of a man” (473). When woolf mentions the pseudonyms of the female writers it enhances her argument by proving that women were not supported in the literary world, thus resulting in injustice for women. The literary allusions used in Woolf’s essay allows the audience to understand the origin of her argument, and why the problem was