Source

1

• Source

Source
2
Virginia Woolf
biography

• ? 1882-1941
• ? Woolfs family
• 
  Leslie Stephen
• 
  Julia Jackson Duckworth
• 
  Gerald Duckworth, her stepbrother
• 
  Stella Duckworth, her stepsister
• 
  Laura, half-sister
• 
  Toby, brother
• ?Father's influence and the early schooling
• benefited from the ongoing
  intellectual exchange
• occurring in her rich cultural
  milieu

Source
3

• ?Childhood experiences of death and sexual abuse
  lead to depression
• the death of her family
  her stepbrothers
• ? the stream-of-consciousness technique---
• best known as one of the
  great experimental novelists during the modernist
  period.
• The Voyage Out (1915)
• Night and Day (1917)
  traditional narratives
• Jacob's Room (1922)
  narrative experimentation with the novel
• 
  
  Mrs. Dalloway (1925)
• To the
  Lighthouse (1927)
• 
  the new narrative form that Woolf
  
• 
  developed, the "stream-of-consciousness

Source
4

• ? A feministlesbianism, androgyny, women and
  writing
• Mrs. Dalloway -houses one of Woolf's
  earliest homoerotically suggestive
• scenarios. The
  description of Clarissa Dalloway and Sally
  Seton's
• relationship with
  each other as young women clearly alludes to a
• lesbian
  attraction. It anticipates the sexuality of
  Orlando and the
• relationship
  between Chloe and Olivia in A Room of One's Own.
  
• Both Orlando
  (1928) and A Room of One's Own (1929) show
• Woolf's concern
  to the questions of women's subjugation and of
  the
• relation between
  women and writing.
• ? Last Years
• By March 1941,
  Woolf's felt another recurrence and her
  depression became insurmountable.After rewriting
  drafts of her suicide note, she put rocks in her
  pockets and drowned herself in the River Ouse.

5
Works Cited

• Virginia Woolf. 28 Dec. 2005
  lthttp//www.kirjasto.sci.fi/vwoolf.htmgt.
• Virginia Woolf. The Literature Network. 28 Dec.
  2005 lthttp//www.onlineliterature.com/virginia_wo
  olf/gt.
• Virginia  Woolf . Literature and Culture
  Teaching Database (??????????). 2004.  Hermes
  Database Project ????????. 28 Dec. 2005
  lthttp//hermes.hrc.ntu.edu.tw/lctd/asp/authors/aut
  hor.asp?id00055gt.

6
A Room of Ones Own

• ...a woman must have money and a room of her own
  if she is to write fiction...        
• -Virginia Woolf

7
A Room of Ones Own

• The
  dramatic setting of A Room of One's Own is that
  Woolf has been invited to
• lecture
  on the topic of Women and Fiction. She advances
  the thesis that "a
• woman
  must have money and a room of her own if she is
  to write fiction." Her
• essay is
  constructed as a partly-fictionalized narrative
  of the thinking that led her
• to adopt
  this thesis. She dramatizes that mental process
  in the character of an
• 
  imaginary narrator ("call me Mary Beton, Mary
  Seton, Mary Carmichael or by
• any name
  you please--it is not a matter of any
  importance") who is in her same
• 
  position, wrestling with the same topic.
•  
• The
  narrator begins her investigation at Oxford
  College, where she reflects on
• the
  different educational experiences available to
  men and women as well as on more material
  differences in their lives. She then spends a day
  in the British Library perusing the scholarship
  on women, all of which has written by men and all
  of which has been written in anger. Turning to
  history, she finds so little data about the
  everyday lives of women that she decides to
  reconstruct their existence imaginatively. The
  figure of Judith Shakespeare is generated as an
  example of the tragic fate a highly intelligent
  woman would have met with under those
  circumstances. In light of this background, she
  considers the achievements of the major women
  novelists of the nineteenth century and reflects
  on the importance of tradition to an aspiring
  writer. A survey of the current state of
  literature follows, conducted through a reading
  the first novel of one of the narrator's
  contemporaries. Woolf closes the essay with an
  exhortation to her audience of women to take up
  the tradition that has been so hardly bequeathed
  to them, and to increase the endowment for their
  own daughters.

8
Summary of Shakespeares
Sister

• The
  narrator returns home disappointed at not having
  rounded up some useful
• tidbit of truth
  from her researches at the British Library. She
  turns at this point
• to history,
  which, she conjectures, "records not opinions but
  facts." As her
• starting point,
  she chooses to look into the lives of English
  women during the
• Elizabethan
  period--an era of surpassing literary
  accomplishment.
• History turns
  up little except a few terse statements about the
  legal rights
• of women in
  the early modern period (which were virtually
  non-existent). This reticence on the topic of
  women, and the fact of her utter powerlessness,
  strikes discordantly with the prevalence in
  literature of complex and strong female
  characters from ancient times to the present. "It
  would have been impossible," the narrator
  concludes from this thought-experiment,
  "completely and entirely, for any woman to have
  written the plays of Shakespeare in the age of
  Shakespeare." To illustrate this conclusion, she
  conjures the imaginary character of Judith
  Shakespeare.

9
Summary of Shakespeares Sister

• Having explored
  the deep inner conflicts that a gifted woman must
  have
• felt during the
  Renaissance, the narrator goes on to ask, "What
  is the state
• of mind that is
  most propitious to the act of creation?" She
  marvels at the
• "prodigious
  difficulty" of producing a work of genius, and
  observes that
• circumstances
  generally conspire against it. She cites as
  obstacles the
• indifference of
  most of the world, the profusion of distractions,
  and the
• heaping up of
  various forms of discouragement. This is true for
  all artists,
• but how much
  more so for women!
• A woman would not even have a room of her
  own, unless her parents were exceptionally
  wealthy, and in her spending money and
  discretionary time she would be totally at the
  mercy of others. Being regularly told of female
  ineptitude, women would surely have internalized
  that belief the absence of any tradition of
  female intellectuals would have made such
  arguments all the more viable. Though we like to
  think of genius as transcendent, the narrator
  holds that the mind of the artist is actually
  particularly susceptible to discouragement and
  vulnerable to the opinion of others. The mind of
  the artist, she says, "must be incandescent.
  ...There must be no obstacle in it, no foreign
  matter unconsumed."

10
A Room of Ones Own Shakespeare's Sister
Comparison in Similarities
Aspects William Shakespeare Judith Shakespeare
Gift quickest fancy for the tune of words a taste for theater Same
Look gray eyes rounded brows Same
11
A Room of Ones Own Shakespeare's Sister
Comparison in Differences
Aspects William Shakespeare Judith Shakespeare
Education Learning at school None, but secret study
Housework None Yes
Marriage Married and had a child Forced to get married but ran away
Career Servitoractordramatist Fled and got no chance
Social Life Knowing everybody, practice wits in the street, And access to the queen No dinner in tavern No roam of street in midnight
Ending The greatest dramatist Suicide
12
A Room of Ones Own Shakespeare's Sister

• Theme
• Womens position in fiction and in real life
• Critique of patriarchal society
• Material and social difficulties

13
A Room of Ones Own Shakespeare's Sister

• Womens position in fiction
• Be the highest importance
• Pervades poetry from cover to cover
• Dominates the lives of kings and conquerors
• in fiction
• Inspired words and profound thought in
• literature fall from her lips

14
A Room of Ones Own Shakespeare's Sister

• Examples
• Among Dramatists Clytemnestra, Antigone,
  Cleopatra, Lady Macbeth, Phedre, Cressida,
  Rosalind, Desdemona, the Duchess of Malfi
• Among Prose Writer Millamant, Clarissa, Becky
  Sharp, Anna Karenina, Emma Bovary, Madame de
  Guermantes

15
A Room of Ones Own Shakespeare's Sister

• Womens position in real life
• Be insignificant
• Be absent from history
• The property of her husband and slave of
• marriage
• Be Rarely educated

16
A Room of Ones Own Shakespeare's Sister

• Examples
• year 1470 - Wifebeating was a recognized
  right of man, and was practised without shame by
  high as well as low. . . . Similarly, the
  daughter who refused to marry the gentleman of
  her parents choice was liable to be locked up,
  beaten and flung about the room, without any
  shock being inflicted on public opinion. Marriage
  was not an affair of personal affection, but of
  family avarice, particularly in the chivalrous
  upper classes. . .. Betrothal often took place
  while one or both of the parties was in the
  cradle, and marriage when they were scarcely out
  of the nurses charge.
• year 1670 - It was still the exception for women
  of the upper and middle class to choose their own
  husbands, and when the husband had been assigned,
  he was lord and master, so far at least as law
  and custom could make him.

17
A Room of Ones Own Shakespeare's Sister

• Critique of patriarchal society
• Chastity
• He shall be superior

18
A Room of Ones Own Shakespeare's Sister
Critique of patriarchal society

• Examples
• Pericles the publicity in women is detestable
• A bishop Its impossible for any woman to have
  the genius of Shakespeare.
• Mr. Oscar Browning womans intellect is
  inferior to the worst mans

19
A Room of Ones Own Shakespeare's Sister

• Material and social difficulties
• Mighty poets in their misery dead
• For genius like Shakespeares is not born among
  labouring, uneducated, servile people.

20
Works Cited

• A Room of Ones Own. SparkNotes. 28 Dec. 2005
  lthttp//www.sparknotes.com/lit/roomofonesown/secti
  on3.rhtmlgt.
• Virginia  Woolf . Literature and Culture
  Teaching Database (??????????). 2004.  Hermes
  Database Project ????????. 28 Dec. 2005
  lthttp//hermes.hrc.ntu.edu.tw/lctd/asp/authors/aut
  hor.asp?id00055gt.
• ????, lt?????gt,??????, 1990.

21
Professions for Women

• Women's Service League
• Talks about the two obstacles she faces in her
  professional life

http//www.intemperies.net/blog/images/misc/vwoolf
2.jpg
22
obstacle one

• battle with a certain phantom - the Angel in the
  House

23
obstacle two

• telling the truth about her own experiences as a
  body

24
source
source
Source
source
Source
25
Why a writer?

• The cheapness of writing paper is, of course,
  the reason why women have succeeded as writers
  before they have succeeded in the other
  professions. (2215)

26
very few material obstacles in my way

(2215)

• BUT

27
Source

• Source

28
Who is she?

• She was intensely sympathetic. She was immensely
  charming. She was utterly unselfish. She excelled
  in the difficult arts of family life. She
  sacrificed herself daily. If there was chicken,
  she took the leg if there was a draught she sat
  in itin short she was so constituted that she
  never had a mind or a wish of her own, but
  preferred to sympathize always with the minds and
  wishes of others. (2215)
• Her purity was supposed to be her chief beauty
  (2215)
• tell lies if they are to succeed (2216)

29
How can a writer write if she doesnt have her
own thoughts?
Thoughts By Frida Kahlo Diego
you cannot review even a novel without having a
mind of your own (2216)
source
30
So, she starts to take action.

• I turned upon her and caught her by the throat.
• I did my best to kill her.
• Had I not killed her she would have killed me.
  
• I took up the inkpot and flung it at her.
• She died hard.
• (2216)

31
Why take such an effort?

• Killing the Angel in the House was part of the
  occupation of a woman writer. (2216)
• express the truth about human relations,
  morality, sex (2216)
• "I do not believe that anybody can know until she
  has expressed herself in all the arts and
  professions open to human skill. (2216)

32
Next obstacle

• To fight against The consciousness of what men
  will say of a woman who speaks the truth about
  her passions had roused her from her artists
  state of unconsciousness
• (2217)

http//www.burkhartstudios.com/burkhart/drawings/v
irginia_woolf.jpg
33

• Men, her reason told her, would be shocked.
• 
  (2217)
• For though men sensibly allow themselves great
  freedom in these respects (2217)
• a novelists chief desire is to be as
  unconscious as possible
• 
  (2217)

34

• she has still many ghosts to fight, many
  prejudices to overcome. Indeed it will be a long
  time still, I think, before a woman can sit down
  to write a book without finding a phantom to be
  slain, a rock to be dashed against.
  (2217)

35
1831 2005

• room
• money

36
(No Transcript)
37
(No Transcript)
38
(No Transcript)
39
(No Transcript)
40
(No Transcript)
41

• She could write no more. The trance was over.
  Her imagination could work no longer.
• 
  (2217)

42
celebration of female sexuality

• The Vagina Monologues
• By Eve Ensler

http//news.bbc.co.uk/olmedia/1675000/images/_1678
874_eve300.jpg
http//etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/w/woolf/virgi
nia/woolf_v.jpg
43
Study Questions

• Shakespeares Sister
• 1. According to Woolf, why wouldnt Shakespeares
  sister have had the same career as Shakespeare?
• 2. What are the historical roots for women's
  poverty?
• 3. Why are men so rich and women so poor,
  according to Woolf?
• 4. What explains the startling contrast between
  women's estate in fiction (as "shining beacons"
  and as symbols of humanity) and in history (as
  slaves)?
• Professions for Women
• 1. What is a woman?
• 2. How are the women different in the past
  and present generations?
• 3. Why is killing the angel in house so
  important?
• 4. Why dont men allow women to speak the
  truth about
• their own experiences?

44
Work Cited

• Chien ???. ??????Taipei ????. ? 87. 11?.
• Showalter, Elaine.  Killing the angel in the
  House The Autonomy of Women Writers. 26
  Dec. 2005
• lthttp//www.indiana.edu/ovid99/showalter.ht
  mlgt.
• Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain. 26 Dec.
  2005
• lthttp//www.virginiawoolfsociety.co.uk/index.
  htmlgt.
• Woolf, Virginia. Professions for Women. The
  Norton Anthology of English Literature. Ed. M.H.
  Abrams, et al. 7th ed. Vol. 2. New York Norton,
  2000. 2214-19.