Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and James Joyce’s The Dead

In her extended essay, A Room of One’s Own (1928), Virginia Woolf argues that in order to write great literature, women have two central needs: an incomes and a room with a locking door. For Woolf, the figure standing between women and literature is the patriarch: “Professor von X, engaged in writing his monumental work entitled The Mental, Moral, and Physical Inferiority of the Female Sex” (Woolf 2107). The Professor becomes the face of oppression in Woolf’s text as she discusses the “dominance of the professor” because “[his] was the power and the money and the influence…With the exception of the fog he seemed to control everything. Yet he was angry” (Woolf 2109). To Woolf, the patriarch only “seems” to control everything, suggesting he – in reality – does not. Instead, he is unable to control everything, and thus is angry. Yet, because the Professor is in possession of money, he controls influence. Meanwhile, women become the patriarch’s moneyless, influence-less inferior. In James Joyce’s short story “The Dead,” the Professor is Gabriel Conroy. He too “tries to control everything.” For example, when he buys his wife Gretta galoshes, she jokes “he’ll buy [her] a diving suit” next (Joyce 25). Gabriel is the one charged with “piloting” a drunk Freddy Malins into his aunt’s house for their annual dinner party (Joyce 28), the one to give the pre-dinner speech (Joyce 24), and carve the goose (Joyce 38). For most of the story, Gabriel acts as if he controls every aspect of his life: even the weather. When the dinner scene grows claustrophobic, Gabriel imagines people standing in the snow, believing “the air is pure there” (Joyce 46). Separated from the weather by a pane of glass, he imposes meaning upon it as he does everyth...

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...the fantasy of transcending gender and sex” (Kaivola 239). The snow in “The Dead” completes an act of erasure between two seemingly irreconcilable concepts: life and death. Similarly, Woolf’s androgynous author offers idealistic reconciliation between two other irreconcilables: man and woman.

In their own way, these two narratives cross and share a common end point. In each case, it is the cohesive, independent female identity that has the potential to dissolve the figure of the patriarch. The egotism and self-conciousness of Gabriel and Woolf’s patriarch alike are absorbed and replaced by a grey, impalpable, indifferent world. Both the outcome of Woolf’s reality and Joyce’s fiction are uncertain. The future is hopeful but may just prove a bleak continuation of the present. The fog and ambivalent snow may disperse and melt, and a system of difference will remain.