Discuss gender, class, and ethnicity in relation to creativity and self actualization in Charlotte Perkin Gilmans "The Yellow Wallpaper" and Virginia Woolf's "A Room of One's Own"

The Scope of Woolf’s Feminism in A Room of One’s Own

A highly contested statement on women and fiction, Virginia Woolf’s extended

essay A Room of One’s Own has been repeatedly reviewed, critiqued, and analyzed since

its publication in 1929. Arnold Bennett, an early twentieth-century novelist, and David

Daiches, a literary critic who wrote an analysis entitled Virginia Woolf in 1942 (Murphy

247), were among those to attempt to extricate the themes and implications of Woolf’s

complex essay. The two critics deal with the often-discussed feminist aspect of Woolf’s

essay in interestingly different ways. Bennett states that Woolf’s essay is not a feminist

work, rejects the idea that Woolf’s discussion of women and fiction may lean towards the

political, and reduces the essay’s scope to a collection of musings on women and fiction.

Daiches responds to A Room of One’s Own in the opposite way: he claims that Woolf’s

work is feminist, and Woolf’s feminism emphasizes not only women and their

relationship to fiction, but all people of genius who have not had an opportunity to use it

because of their lack of money and privacy. While Bennett restricts the scope of the

essay to a non- feminist, completely apolitical ideology and Daiches enlarges the scope to

a wide, universal feminism, Woolf’s own intention in writing A Room of One’s Own may

have actually been to create a work that lay somewhere in between these two extremes.

In one of the earliest reviews of A Room of One’s Own, British novelist Arnold

Bennett addressed the question of feminism in the essay and concluded that Woolf was

not writing from a feminist perspective. “It is a book a little about men and a great deal

about women. But it is not ‘feminist.’ It is non-partisan,” Bennett declared. In

Describing Woolf’s perspective as “non-partisan,” Bennett labels it non-political, and

therefore defines feminism as an inherently political system of thought. As Professor

Wendy Nicholson said in her lecture on A Room of One’s Own, at the period in which

Woolf was writing, feminism, by popular definition, meant wanting the vote for women.

This is certainly not Woolf’s brand of feminism; having received the news of her

inheritance at the same time as women won the vote, Woolf wrote that “of the two-the

vote and the money-the money, I own, seemed infinitely more important” (Woolf 37).

But although such matters as the vote are an important part of feminism, the word has

evolved to embrace many non-political beliefs. Indeed, during Woolf’s time, there was a

strong feminist movement outside of the political sphere, but the common conception

was that feminists were only interested in the vote. In the most general sense, today’s

definition of feminism is simply the belief in securing equal rights and opportunities for

women. That women should be allowed equal opportunities to write fiction is the thesis

of Woolf’s essay. Though her thesis is confined to fiction and does not extend into any

other facet of society, the idea is feminist by this broader, more recent definition. In

Bennett’s time, however, when the words “feminist” and “suffragist” were considered

synonyms, Woolf’s blatant nonchalance about women’s suffrage may have been

considered no t only non- feminist, but anti- feminist.

Arnold Bennett also claims that Woolf “comes to no satisfactory conclusion about

the disparateness between men and women.” Bennett, in this critique, is again limiting

the scope of what Woolf is attempting to accomplish in A Room of One’s Own. She

makes no pretense of attempting to explain the differences between men and women.

She acknowledges that these discrepancies exist, and that one must recognize them in

order to write fiction of integrity. She warns against women trying to use men’s style in

their writing: “The weight, the pace, the stride of a man’s mind are too unlike

[woman’s]…for her to lift anything substantial from him successfully” (Woolf 76). Later

in the essay, she queries, “Ought not education to bring out and fortify the differences

[between the sexes] rathe r than the similarities?” (Woolf 88). Woolf is certainly aware of

the differences between women and men, and she advocates that these differences be

cherished. However, her concern is that women have not been allowed to develop their

own style throughout history-they have had not the time, the money, the privacy, or the

tradition. Only a few women writers have been able to shed the impediments that afflict

their sex and write “as women write, not as men write” (Woolf 74). Bennett limits the

span of Woolf’s essay by narrowly defining it as an attempt to explain the differences

between the sexes. Woolf’s intent is actually quite different: she praises the differences

between the genders, and focuses her essay on why, if there are so many differences,

women have not been able to develop their own personal style in the area of fiction.

David Daiches, a later critic, also seems to have misunderstood the scope of A

Room of One’s Own. While Bennett claims that it is not at all a feminist work but simply

a study of men and women, Daiches does believe that Woolf’s essay is feminist. He

labels her feminism as “rooted in a larger democratic feeling,” and asserts that Woolf

utilizes her analysis of woman’s situation to make a more universal statement. Daiches’s

interpretation of Woolf’s underlying theme is this: “All those who have talent should be

given the opportunity to develop and use it…[and] should be allowed to have an income

and a room of their own.” Though Woolf often uses generalizing statements about the

near impossibility of a working class person creating good fiction, she does this only as

an argumentative tactic to prove her point about women. It is not the other way around,

as Daiches implies. Woolf’s interest, in this essay, is in women. She uses many devices

to support her point about the necessity of money for creating great fiction, including

lines such as, “For genius like Shakespeare’s is not born among uneducated, servile

people…it is not born today among the working classes” (Woolf 48). This might lead

one to believe that her point does extend beyond the situation of women, as Daiches

believes, to address the larger issue of genius and the effect of class on its actualization.

However, Woolf quickly continues, “How then, could it have been born among

women…?(Woolf 48). Her focus is women, and particularly, British upper middle-class

women. In her exploration of money as a necessity for women to create art, she is not

addressing money as a class issue, but as a gender issue. Woolf’s major point is that

women have never been allowed to have money, even the aristocratic women; it was their

husbands who owned the property and the money. Though Woolf is aware of the effect

of class on creation of fiction, in this essay she is concerning herself only with the fact

that women, who were inherently poor, had no chance of writing fiction.

Daiches attempts to expand Woolf’s scope to be larger than it is, and is therefore

disappointed with Woolf’s result. He describes her view as one that is “largely

concerned with ends and tends to ignore discussion of means.” Daiches has universalized

Woolf’s theory and placed on it a set of expectations which it cannot fulfill, and indeed

was never intended to fulfill. He seems to expect that if Woolf makes a sweeping

statement about how genius must be nurtured-with money and a private room in which to

write-then she must provide some solutions for how this is to be accomplished. In

Daiches’s interpretation, Woolf’s essay appears an idealistic, silly idea that poses no

practical solutions for how those who exhibit potential for genius should be picked out

and placed in a situation in which they have money and privacy. Woolf’s intentions,

though, are not at all what Daiches suspects. She is an intellectual, not a politician, and

does not concern herself with the practical aspects of her theory. A Room of One’s Own,

is not meant to be a socially prescriptive work that lays out a plan for the betterment of

society; the essay, in fact, is much more limited in application than Daiches believes.

Woolf is focused on the issue of women and why they have not created great works of

fiction, not on the universal problem of unrealized potential among the working classes.

“But, you may say,” Woolf begins her essay A Room of One’s Own, “we asked

you to speak about women and fiction-what has that got to do with a room of one’s

own?” (Woolf 3). Hence, the thesis of Woolf’s essay emerges-that in order for women

to write fiction, they must have 500 pounds a year and a room of their own. Critics

Arnold Bennett and David Daiches both wrestle with Woolf’s essay and ultimately

misinterpret the scale of her point. Bennett underestimates the scope of the essay by

denying its feminist nature and incorrectly defining the point Woolf was attempting to

explore, and Daiches mistakenly universalizes Woolf’s feminism by claiming that her

theory applies not only to women, but to all members of the lower class. Though these

two critics distort the scope of the essay, their comments do point out important limits on

Woolf’s feminism. As Arnold Bennett says, Woolf’s concerns are not political; although

our modern definition of feminism is wider than Bennett’s was, Woolf’s lack of political

interest does certainly limit the scope of her feminism. David Daiches’s critique of the

essay points out another important characteristic of Woolf’s feminist thought. Her

feminism is not, as Daiches believes based in a “larger democratic feeling.” Woolf’s

feminism is in actuality quite limited in tha t she only applies it to British, upper middle-

class women writers. Virginia Woolf’s essay-which to Bennett seemed non- feminist and

to Daiches seemed feminist- universalist-is, by our modern definition, feminist; however,

the borders of culture, class, and profession that composed her frame of reference

drastically limit the scope of Woolf’s feminism.