Stories a Room of Ones Own, To the Lighthouse and The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - Essay Example

A Comparison of three Stories in Literature James Joyce as a spent his lifetime flowing in different locations. He swam in unemployment, poverty, and debt. He grew up in Ireland and in any piece of literature work that he wrote he had to write stories with Ireland as the setting. In his novel “the portrait of the artist as a young man,” the plot cannot be nailed down on the exact facts and dates, but the setting is in Ireland. The novel flows freely between the different periods in the life of Stephen Dedalus’ who is the main protagonist. Virginia Woolf as a writer is among the founders of modernism. In her writings, she was concerned with middle-class women and their position in society. She bases her settings, themes, subjects, and conflicts on the experiences that she underwent as a woman and as a writer. Her essay “A Room of one’s own,” portrays how economic and cultural disabilities have prevented women from reaching their highest potential in creative writing. Woolf asks whether women could produce high quality work of art. In doing so, Woolf examines the historical injustices and experiences that women went through. She also looks at how the women artists struggle with their work and other feminism work that requires their attention. The paper is going to analyze some interesting aspects in the stories “A Room of one’s own”, “To the Lighthouse” and “The Portrait of the Artist as a young man.” It is also going to compare the plot and the styles used in the three stories, as well as how they connect. Woolf in her essays reacts to the gender prejudices that she experienced during her time. She examined the relation between women and arts, women and writing and her resistance towards women stereotypes. Woolf s’ writings are a gender break, and they define gender roles in families and the Victorian society. As a writer of modernism, literary and gender codes of the Victorian, age really bothered Woolf. Traditional concerns especially the gender roles of women really vexed her; this can be seen in what she writes, in “A Room of one’s own”, that if we were women we should think through our mothers’ times. Being a writer of modernism and one born in the Victorian Britain where traditions were passed from one generation to another, the questions of tradition are important to her Woolf’s writing ventures and the fictional world provided her with new perspectives compared to the warring factions, which she felt so acutely. The fictional characters that she created allowed her to express the repressing feelings that were within her. She used fiction in “A Room of one’s own” to show how women were represent in poetry. The fiction in Woolf’s’ stories was to show the fiction that women write or the fiction that is written about them. Woolf’s perspective on artists and women writers was nourished in through her diaries, novels, and essay. In her novel “To the Lighthouse,” Woolf’s voice is represented strongly as that of a modern woman writer. The most interesting thing in this novel is how Woolf has used Lily the novel protagonist in expressing those things that were hard for a woman to talk about during the period. The characterization of Lily as an unmarried painter is an articulation of Woolf’s own view. Mr. Tansely keeps on whispering at Lily’s ear as she does her work. Hence, making it hard for her to concentrate with the canvas and this brings Woolf (1927) to her conclusion, “women can’t write, women can’t paint….” if men are by their side. That is why Lily decides to remain single. However, in “A Room of one’s own, Woolf represents a woman as one who is struggling to break the bonds of poverty and tradition to be like a modern woman who is not bound by gender roles. In the story of Joyce James in the novel “A Portrait of an Artist as a young man,” the most interesting thing is that the book entirely depends on its pure nature and the unfailing reality (Wells, 2007). The book has some few fictional characters just as “To the Lighthouse” of Virginia Woolf. Similarly, “A room of one’s own” also uses fictions women characters that are also the novel’s genre. “In the portrait of a young man as the artist,” Joyce tells about the adolescent conditions of the protagonist in the novel Stephen Dedalus’. There is a profound secrecy and immense shyness when matters of sex arise, which are accompanied with nightmare revelations. Likewise, in the story “To the lighthouse”, matters of sex are revealed when Lily finds it hard to concentrate with the canvas just because the Tansely was whispering at her. Another instance where Woolf talks about sex is when a small boy, Mr. Tansely falls in love with Mrs. Ramsey, who is much older than him. Concerning the plot, in “A Portrait of an Artist as a young man,” Joyce creates a prose broth that makes a person think deeply about his life if he has ever sinned or rebelled. The artist explores a character who is young, talented, and intelligent. It creates a portrait of a person who is lonely and in pain. In Woolf’s novel, “A Room of one’s own”, Woolf shows how women are marginalized and are not given a place in art (Woolf, 1989). In case they are represented in literary works, the authors marginalized them and in the highly regarded literary works, it is men who are the most favored. Therefore, the connection between the two stories is the use of art and literary works to express feelings. In “To the Lighthouse,” Woolf uses a stream of consciousness technique where the writer captures the unbroken flow of the characters’ internal thought. This technique involves using the feelings and unspoken thoughts of a character without using narration or dialogue. In this novel, the characters actions occur in the inside through thoughts and feelings and not on the outside. Although there is a voice of narration in each of the characters, much of the narration is an exposition of the characters’ consciousness. In “the portrait of a young man as an actor”, the author uses a confusing style when presenting his work. The work of Joyce cannot be called anything modern, but just an experiment (Wells, 2007). As a reader goes through his work, he gets lost through the plot several times before mastering the flow of the story. Nevertheless, Joyce uses the novel in pushing the limits of conventional plot constructs and English language. Just like in a room of one’s own, Woolf in the novel “To the Lighthouse” uses literary form of literature known as indirect discourse where the narrator’s identity is not clear. In To the Lighthouse, the dialogue in the novel is not demarcated by speech marks and the phrases used could be merely thought or easily spoken. His religion, family and his country Ireland hindered Stephens’s creativity in the novel A portrait of a young man as an actor, while the creativity of women in Woolf’s novel was hindered by cultural beliefs that make women not to concentrate in writing. For example, they were also not able to write poetry due to poverty and the demanding nature of poetry writing. Additionally, they were not able to have rooms of their own where they could sit privately and do their work. In To the Lighthouse, women could not write or paint well if they were in involved in matters of love and sex. For example, “To the Lighthouse” Lily was not able to concentrate in her work when Tansely kept on whispering to her as she was concentrating with her work. In the three stories, the matters of fiction were evident. The writing styles were similar in the two stories of Woolf, that is “To the Lighthouse” and “A Room of one’s own” apart from “The Portrait of the artist as a young man” which had a different approach where Joyce used innovative literature. The stories connect in several ways such as expression of feelings through art, creativity, and deviation from standards of literary writing and English language. References Wells, H.G (2007) A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Review Woolf, V. (1989). A room of ones own. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovi Woolf, V. (1927). To the lighthouse. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co. Read More