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A review by alicetheowl
A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf
4.0
In some ways, A Room of One's Own is outmoded. The feminist movement has come a long way since getting women the right to have their voices heard in the political arena.
However, it surprises me, how relevant many of Woolf's points remain relevant. Men are still writing disparagingly about women. They don't come right out and say they're inferior, but the inference that they don't stack up to men, that they exist to look pretty, that their only relevance is a contrast to or companion for men, is there almost everywhere you look.
One of Woolf's ideas, that men write about women only in relation to men, has translated into something called Bechdel's Law. A movie passes Bechdel's Law only if two women converse about something other than men. I've been silently submitting movies to this law for almost the last decade, and have seen a total of 5. I'm not going out of my way to avoid female-friendly movies! Out of the hundreds of movies I've seen, FIVE pass the test? Hmm. Woolf might have something there.
But where she loses the point is when she softens it at the end. No one, she says, should write with gender in mind. Neither men nor women. Men because it makes them all defensive about being better (and I liked her analogy of women being better), and women because they feel like they need to prove something.
I dislike that conclusion because it reflects the view that a writer must be a blank slate, writing about everyman in an attempt to be objective. I hate objective in my fiction. I want to hear a writer's voice, loud and clear, and have protagonists and antagonists that give me a little insight into who wrote the thing.
Another complaint is that Woolf is writing from privilege. She knows it, and admits it. Inheriting 500 pounds a year gives her the independence to look at these kind of things, and to write about whatever she wants, with none of the traditional hindrances.
In denying the future possibility of a poor, public-educated person hammering out a few hundred words a day and producing a masterpiece, Woolf is choking the very life out of reading. "Write what you know," and all that. Do we really want to only read what middle- to upper-class white, Harvard-educated people have to say about the world? Only their experiences?
I sure as hell don't.
I suppose Woolf can be forgiven somewhat for her perspective; she didn't see the possibility because, as she cites, it was so rare. Despite her praising Shakespeare to high heavens, it doesn't even seem to occur to her that genius can come from humble beginnings. Granted, a decent education does help.
I would recommend this book to pretty much any perceptive reader. I would ask, while you're reading, that you think about what Woolf is saying, and whether it has anything to do with the perception of sub-genres, especially ones that appeal to women. Are things completely fair yet? Or is there, as during Woolf's time, a backlash against the headway feminism has brought, pushing back against the progress women have earned?
Consider it, at least.
However, it surprises me, how relevant many of Woolf's points remain relevant. Men are still writing disparagingly about women. They don't come right out and say they're inferior, but the inference that they don't stack up to men, that they exist to look pretty, that their only relevance is a contrast to or companion for men, is there almost everywhere you look.
One of Woolf's ideas, that men write about women only in relation to men, has translated into something called Bechdel's Law. A movie passes Bechdel's Law only if two women converse about something other than men. I've been silently submitting movies to this law for almost the last decade, and have seen a total of 5. I'm not going out of my way to avoid female-friendly movies! Out of the hundreds of movies I've seen, FIVE pass the test? Hmm. Woolf might have something there.
But where she loses the point is when she softens it at the end. No one, she says, should write with gender in mind. Neither men nor women. Men because it makes them all defensive about being better (and I liked her analogy of women being better), and women because they feel like they need to prove something.
I dislike that conclusion because it reflects the view that a writer must be a blank slate, writing about everyman in an attempt to be objective. I hate objective in my fiction. I want to hear a writer's voice, loud and clear, and have protagonists and antagonists that give me a little insight into who wrote the thing.
Another complaint is that Woolf is writing from privilege. She knows it, and admits it. Inheriting 500 pounds a year gives her the independence to look at these kind of things, and to write about whatever she wants, with none of the traditional hindrances.
In denying the future possibility of a poor, public-educated person hammering out a few hundred words a day and producing a masterpiece, Woolf is choking the very life out of reading. "Write what you know," and all that. Do we really want to only read what middle- to upper-class white, Harvard-educated people have to say about the world? Only their experiences?
I sure as hell don't.
I suppose Woolf can be forgiven somewhat for her perspective; she didn't see the possibility because, as she cites, it was so rare. Despite her praising Shakespeare to high heavens, it doesn't even seem to occur to her that genius can come from humble beginnings. Granted, a decent education does help.
I would recommend this book to pretty much any perceptive reader. I would ask, while you're reading, that you think about what Woolf is saying, and whether it has anything to do with the perception of sub-genres, especially ones that appeal to women. Are things completely fair yet? Or is there, as during Woolf's time, a backlash against the headway feminism has brought, pushing back against the progress women have earned?
Consider it, at least.