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heich 's review for:
A Room of One's Own
by Virginia Woolf
4.5 stars
did not know Virginia Woolf was so funny: "How much thinking those old gentlemen used to save one! How the borders of ignorance shrank back at their approach! Cats do not go to heaven. Women cannot write the plays of Shakespeare." / "Chloe liked Olivia."
she definitely writes like a novelist, for like her stream of consciousness pieces, she opens her mind to the Newnham & Girton College students; her writing flows from one topic to another, bound by little structure.
here are some parts that stuck with me:
she unpicks the history of the suppression of women, exploring the idea that men are rather not concerned by women's inferiority, but with their own superiority. she dissects the mindset of Napoleon and Mussolini: "for if [women] were not inferior, they would cease to enlarge". "how is he to go on giving judgement, civilizing natives. making laws, writing books, dressing up and speechifying at banquets, unless he can see himself at breakfast and at dinner at least twice the size he really is?"
she documents the transformation she had when she inherited 500 pounds per year from her aunt. she need not hate or flatter men, but began to pity them. for as their superiority complex grew at the diminishment of women, so did their "instinct for possession, the rage of acquisition that drives them to desire other people's fields and goods perpetually, to make battleships and poison gas, to offer up their own lives and their children's lives". this was a lose-lose predicament, she reflected. now that she had a room of one's own, it came with the release and "freedom to think of things in themselves": is that picture beautiful or not? is this, in her opinion, a good book or bad? what joy to think such things! (one day I hope to be rich enough to be free of male validation)
she reflects on the irony/paradox that while in reality the role of the woman is suppressed, men have written women to be so infinitely complex in fiction-"heroic and mean; splendid and sordid, infinitely beautiful and hideous in the extreme; as great as a man, some think even greater"-yet they are only explored in relation to men. indeed, so many great works of art have failed the bechdel test.
"A very queer, composite being thus emerges. Imaginatively she is of the highest importance; practically she is completely insignificant. She pervades poetry from cover to cover; she is all but absent from history. She dominates the lives of kings and conquerors in fiction; in fact she was the slave of any boy whose parents forced a ring upon her finger. Some of the most inspired words, some of the most profound thoughts in literature fall from her lips; in real life she could hardly read, could scarcely spell, and was the property of her husband."
she ponders why there have been so many great male writers in history, yet so few women. she proposes a thought experiment of what would happen if Shakespeare had an equally talented sister (spoil alert: nothing. she dies nameless). "who shall measure the heat and violence of the poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body?" "women, then, have not a dog's chance of writing poetry" how many lost novelists & unrealised poets have there been who amounted to no more than a woman? the world is indifferent to a man's poetry, and hostile to a woman's. during the begone ages, only men can afford to be "incandescent", "unimpeded", to over-sprinkle their writing with 'I's.
truly ahead of her age, she touches on the double standards women still experience today: "football and sport are 'important'; the worship of fashion, the buying of clothes 'trivial'...This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room."
further, she laments about "all these infinitely obscure lives of women that remain to be recorded"; discusses the effects of poverty on fiction and how fiction withers under fascist rule ("doubtful whether poetry can come of an incubator"); argues that the best writers are androgynous (a mix of both femininity and masculinity), for characters are a reflection of the multi-faceted nature of the author; a monotonous personality will only produce flat characters.
she also has some great general advice for all writers: "praise and blame alike mean nothing." to warp yourself for the critique of others is insanity.
she circles back to the book's title: "intellectual freedom depends upon material things. poetry depends upon intellectual freedom"
the final harsh "peroration", as she has it, is my favorite passage in the book, but I let you find it.
-
quote of the book: "yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top"
tldr: i'd give anything to revive Ms. Woolf and make her my commencement speaker.
did not know Virginia Woolf was so funny: "How much thinking those old gentlemen used to save one! How the borders of ignorance shrank back at their approach! Cats do not go to heaven. Women cannot write the plays of Shakespeare." / "Chloe liked Olivia."
she definitely writes like a novelist, for like her stream of consciousness pieces, she opens her mind to the Newnham & Girton College students; her writing flows from one topic to another, bound by little structure.
here are some parts that stuck with me:
she unpicks the history of the suppression of women, exploring the idea that men are rather not concerned by women's inferiority, but with their own superiority. she dissects the mindset of Napoleon and Mussolini: "for if [women] were not inferior, they would cease to enlarge". "how is he to go on giving judgement, civilizing natives. making laws, writing books, dressing up and speechifying at banquets, unless he can see himself at breakfast and at dinner at least twice the size he really is?"
she documents the transformation she had when she inherited 500 pounds per year from her aunt. she need not hate or flatter men, but began to pity them. for as their superiority complex grew at the diminishment of women, so did their "instinct for possession, the rage of acquisition that drives them to desire other people's fields and goods perpetually, to make battleships and poison gas, to offer up their own lives and their children's lives". this was a lose-lose predicament, she reflected. now that she had a room of one's own, it came with the release and "freedom to think of things in themselves": is that picture beautiful or not? is this, in her opinion, a good book or bad? what joy to think such things! (one day I hope to be rich enough to be free of male validation)
she reflects on the irony/paradox that while in reality the role of the woman is suppressed, men have written women to be so infinitely complex in fiction-"heroic and mean; splendid and sordid, infinitely beautiful and hideous in the extreme; as great as a man, some think even greater"-yet they are only explored in relation to men. indeed, so many great works of art have failed the bechdel test.
"A very queer, composite being thus emerges. Imaginatively she is of the highest importance; practically she is completely insignificant. She pervades poetry from cover to cover; she is all but absent from history. She dominates the lives of kings and conquerors in fiction; in fact she was the slave of any boy whose parents forced a ring upon her finger. Some of the most inspired words, some of the most profound thoughts in literature fall from her lips; in real life she could hardly read, could scarcely spell, and was the property of her husband."
she ponders why there have been so many great male writers in history, yet so few women. she proposes a thought experiment of what would happen if Shakespeare had an equally talented sister (spoil alert: nothing. she dies nameless). "who shall measure the heat and violence of the poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body?" "women, then, have not a dog's chance of writing poetry" how many lost novelists & unrealised poets have there been who amounted to no more than a woman? the world is indifferent to a man's poetry, and hostile to a woman's. during the begone ages, only men can afford to be "incandescent", "unimpeded", to over-sprinkle their writing with 'I's.
truly ahead of her age, she touches on the double standards women still experience today: "football and sport are 'important'; the worship of fashion, the buying of clothes 'trivial'...This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room."
further, she laments about "all these infinitely obscure lives of women that remain to be recorded"; discusses the effects of poverty on fiction and how fiction withers under fascist rule ("doubtful whether poetry can come of an incubator"); argues that the best writers are androgynous (a mix of both femininity and masculinity), for characters are a reflection of the multi-faceted nature of the author; a monotonous personality will only produce flat characters.
she also has some great general advice for all writers: "praise and blame alike mean nothing." to warp yourself for the critique of others is insanity.
she circles back to the book's title: "intellectual freedom depends upon material things. poetry depends upon intellectual freedom"
the final harsh "peroration", as she has it, is my favorite passage in the book, but I let you find it.
-
quote of the book: "yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top"
tldr: i'd give anything to revive Ms. Woolf and make her my commencement speaker.