Narrative Technique in A Room of Ones Own - Research Paper Example

Narrative Technique in A Room of Ones Own Toward a Feminine Literary Dialectic: Virginia Woolf and the ‘Poverty’ of Women in Fiction Virginia Woolf’s narrative technique in A Room of One’s Own has been the subject of much debate since the 1929 publication of this unique literary presentation of her Cambridge lectures. Woolf’s feminist perspective on what was a controversial subject for that era would seem, at first blush, to have been a matter for a straightforward yet eloquent first-person explication by one of the 20th century’s most gifted and innovative stylists. Yet her subject matter would have been confounding to such a pedestrian narrative approach: there was no literary oeuvre for women authors, no foundational reference point for women other than perhaps the drawing room (Jane Austen) or female writers who simply wrote like men. The genius of Woolf’s accomplishment in A Room of One’s Own lies in the narrative invention she used to place women in context relative to the writing of fiction. Having relatively little in the way of historical substance with which to frame this discussion she created a proxy of sorts in Mary Beton, substituting an objective universal feminine consciousness for a subjective, first-person imposition. As such, Mary Beton “deflects attention from Virginia Woolf as a personality and focuses it on the narrator’s general openness of mind” (Fernald, 165). That “openness” frees Woolf to consider not only the social Name 2 circumstances that have made it impossible for women to play a more prominent part in the development of fiction, she also deftly employs example and logical reflection to shed light on the injustice of stifling a creative mind based on gender bias. Woolf opens a window on what literature might have become had women been empowered to write freely, unfettered by the constraints of Victorian patriarchy. A Room of One’s Own is a wonderfully inventive marriage of fiction and opinion, an accomplishment all the more remarkable for its avoidance of “authority,” of resisting the declarative voice that tells the reader: “This is what should be meant by women in fiction.” As Woolf explains, “I should never be able to come to a conclusion, I should never be able to fulfill what is, I understand, the first duty of a lecturer – to hand you…a nugget of pure truth…” (Woolf, 2). Her ‘I’ is not ‘her’ Kathleen Wall wrote in her 1999 treatise, “Frame Narratives and Unresolved Contradiction in Virginia Woolf’s ‘A Room of One’s Own,’” that analyses of Woolf’s unique narrative construct have in general upheld the literary legitimacy of her invention. “Critics have tended to see the fiction as affecting her rhetoric, not her argument, which they continue to view as coherent” (Wall, 184). In other words, they are willing to accept it, to take it on faith that when Woolf writes of “Judith Shakespeare,” it is a sincerely cautionary tale that illustrates by artful example rather than by lecturing, an opinion more oblique than parallel. Judith, Shakespeare’s “extraordinarily gifted sister,” was “as adventurous, as imaginative, as agog to see the world” as her brother, who enjoyed all the benefits bestowed upon males in Name 3 Elizabethan England (Woolf, 50). Having speculated as to Judith’s gifts, Woolf questions her own presumption, concluding that no woman could, after all, have possessed and evolved the abilities of a William Shakespeare. “For genius like Shakespeare’s is not born among labouring, uneducated, servile people” (Woolf, 52). As Wall points out, Woolf’s rhetoric and her argument don’t always fit neatly, but her supposition about Judith and the fundamentally patriarchal world into which she would have been born proceeds from the viewpoint of an “I,” an objective feminine voice that is not Woolf’s. Fernald supposes that Woolf’s narrative choice in A Room of One’s Own has something to do with the fact that she wanted to avoid superimposing her persona on her message, one she felt very strongly about. Fernald asks “Why is A Room of One’s Own taken so personally by so many readers when it is full of devices designed to distance Virginia Woolf from the speaking voice of the essay?” (Fernald, 165). She thought the answer may lie in Woolf’s status as a “cultural icon” (Ibid, 165). Injecting “Mary Beton” in the role of narrator removes the appearance that Woolf herself is preaching to the reader in any conceivable way and is, instead, expanding on a hypothesis via an untainted, intellectual exercise in logic. This she could not have accomplished had she simply addressed the reader as Virginia Woolf lecturing on a controversial subject. Woolf explains the limitations of the lecturer venue by saying that “One can only give one’s audience the chance of drawing their own conclusions as they observe the limitations, the prejudices, the idiosyncrasies of the speaker” (Woolf and Gubar, 4). It would have been easy for Woolf to rant, to launch a feminist tirade. Her father, Sir Name 4 Leslie Stephen, had encouraged her to read widely but in Victorian England, young women receiving a well-rounded university education was something at which men scoffed. Woolf had also experienced the darker side of male domination, having been sexually abused by her half-brothers. One can only speculate as to the cause of her erratic behavior in later years, possibly a manifestation of the frustrations of her youth, which she may have carried into her seniority. Seen in the light of her personal history, it is remarkable that Woolf chose intellect, and to reason through the use of fiction rather than to vent her literary spleen in A Room of One’s Own. It must have been a terrible temptation to rage. Instead, she breaks down the historical background of anti-feminine bias in literature, using context and setting to underscore her point. Objectification as modus operandi Antony and Cleopatra, Woolf tells us, would have been a very different play had the relationship between Cleopatra and Octavia been permitted to expand beyond the social restrictions of femininity. “Cleopatra’s only feeling about Octavia is one of jealousy. Is she taller than I am? How does she do her hair? The play, perhaps, required no more. But how interesting it would have been if the relationship between the two women had been more complicated” (Woolf, 89). Woolf then stretches the issue to its logical extension, concluding that all relationships in the “splendid gallery of fictitious women” are simplistic (Ibid 90). It is easy to imagine a young Virginia Woolf reading Antony and Cleopatra in her father’s library, puzzled and angered over what must have seemed a one-dimensional portrayal of women in otherwise extraordinary circumstances. A person of her intelligence and natural inquisitiveness would surely have felt frustrated over what Shakespeare’s characterizations implied for her sex Name 5 in Shakespeare’s time as well as the 20th century. It must have been sobering to realize that society had not advanced very far in this respect from Shakespeare’s day. This leads Woolf to the objectification of women in fiction. Despite her nimbleness of mind, Judith Shakespeare is never considered anything but an indentured servant, wife, mother; the predestined roles of a 17th-century female. Dominated by her father and husband, a prisoner of gender discrimination, she commits suicide. Woolf’s point is all the more poignant for having been framed within the context of a fictional example, rather than through the angry exposition of a superbly perceptive observer and intelligent female writer. With rare exceptions (Jane Austen being the most notable), Woolf asserts that objectification is the modus operandi not only for men writing about women in fiction, but also for women writing about women. Women are uniformly portrayed as creatures in the orbit of stronger male figures, seen “only in relation to the other sex…considered only “through the black or rosy spectacles that sex puts upon (a man’s) nose” (Woolf, 190). Woolf marvels that in spite of the introduction of so many new voices and literary styles over the past two centuries, there have been relatively few enlightened attempts to develop women beyond their traditional roles. The poverty of women Mary Beton and Mary Seton have an instructive exchange about the literal and literary poverty of women. Their conversation is a lament about how the disenfranchisement of women has led to a paucity of women in fiction (Gubar, 217). Just as Woolf claims that a lack of physical resources prohibited any woman from writing like William Shakespeare, Mary Name 6 Beton and Mary Seton complain that, having received nothing of value from their mothers, they were left without the temporal and spiritual werewithal to succeed. They concede that a woman’s place is one of powerlessness. The narrator notices something to like about Mary Carmichael’s writing style and wonders at the circumstances in which she writes (Boehm, 193). “…if Mary Carmichael knows how to write, and I was beginning to enjoy some quality in her style; if she has a room to herself, of which I am not quite sure; if she has five hundred a year of her own…then I think that something of great importance has happened” (Woolf , 91). In other words, Mary Carmichael has either established a long-overdue precedent or she has, through her own self-discipline and inner resources, overcome that poverty of environment and lack of wealth which typically holds women writers back. If this is indeed the case, then Mary Carmichael has achieved something that very few have - namely, the ability to write as a woman. Woolf reminds us that the greatest female authors, save Austen, have written like men. In this, the woman writer was “corrupted by an alien standard of art; and Emily Bronte or George Eliot, writing in the accepted masculine style of their times, wrote by that much the worse. Only an exceptional Jane Austen wrote entirely as a woman, so that with less genius Emily Bronte she achieved greater success” (Kronenberger, 1929). In a New York Times interview, Woolf said women were subject to another potent threat, a kind of “boomerang” over-reaction to all those centuries of oppression. Woolf said it is essential that the great creative mind maintain gender equilibrium and remain an “androgynous” voice (Ibid). Name 7 Symbolism Some critics have suggested that Woolf speaks in the voice of Mary Hamilton near the end of A Room of One’s Own. “Mary Hamilton” was the alias of a Scottish woman executed for infanticide and the subject/narrator of a ballad about her tragic fate, known as “The Ballad of the Four Marys.” Woolf’s use of this symbolism plays into her treatment of motherhood – in the ballad, Mary is lady-in-waiting for the Queen of Scots but, having given birth to the king’s child, is compelled to kill the child. The ballad recounts Mary’s inner monologue as she thinks back on the events that have led to her doom. Woolf’s introduction of the ballad and the figure of Mary Hamilton alludes to the fate of women who abrogate their responsibility as women. Trapped within the sanctity of motherhood, they are destroyed. This has been the figurative destiny of women in fiction. The symbolism in A Room of One’s Own also points, more hopefully, to those things that women require in order to find their own literary voices. For Woolf, a sufficient income “stands for the power to contemplate,” while something as simple as a lock means the female writer can at last have the privacy that an author needs in order to be creative, to understand the deeper meaning of her own thoughts (Woolf, 117). Without money and privacy, women are ensnared in the vicious cycle of poverty: poverty of imagination and of the pocketbook. In this guise, Woolf’s symbolism reinforces her assertion that there can be no great work of fiction, no true creativity, if the means to nurture it do not exist. It’s not surprising that this resonated with Woolf since, in her time, the right of women to keep money they had earned was a relatively new development. Name 8 Conclusion Narrative technique can serve multiple purposes. In A Room of One’s Own, it simultaneously tells the story and conveys a cogent and compelling message. Woolf’s interposition of an “intermediary” narrative voice is important in that it allows her to address the subject of women in fiction with the authority of a “universal” voice. As such, the hovering presence of Mary Beton, and the other Marys, lend moral weight to Woolf’s argument that artists must have resources to flourish, and that women have “had them so much less frequently than men that a special plea for them has a special force” (Kronenberger, 1929). Woolf used narrative to create a vivid sketch of the figurative shackles that have hampered female authors. A Room of One’s Own opened a long-overdue discussion about the importance of women first thinking as women before they can truly write as women. Name 9 Works Cited Boehm, B.A. “Fact, Fiction and Metafiction: Blurred Gen(d)res in ‘Orlando’ and ‘A Room of One’s Own.’” The Journal of Narrative Technique. Vol. 22, 3. Fall 1992. Ypsilanti, MI: Dept. of English Language and Literature at Eastern Michigan University. Fernald, A. “‘A Room of One’s Own,’ Personal Criticism, and the Essay.” Twentieth Century Literature. Hempstead, NY: Hofstra University Press. Vol. 40, 2. Summer 1994. Gubar, S. Rooms of Our Own. Champaign, IL: Univ. of Illinois Press. 2006. Kronenberger, L. “Virginia Woolf Discusses Women and Fiction.” The New York Times. 10 November 1929. Wall, K. “Frame Narratives and Unresolved Contradictions in Virginia Woolf’s ‘A Room of One’s Own.’” Journal of Narrative Theory. Vol. 29, 2. Spring 1999. Ypsilanti, MI: Dept. of English Language and Literature at Eastern Michigan University. Woolf, V. A Room of One’s Own. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company. 1929. Read More