Get a Room: Out of the Kitchen

I have been eating non-stop for days. Cupcakes. Dip. Mac and cheese. Party leftovers are weighing me down and making me slow and lazy. I am not taking a picture of any of the junk I am eating tonight, but just know that a root beer float may have been involved.

But I need to get out of my box of shame and into A Room of One's Own (1929). Virginia Woolf knew her published lectures would deeply affect women, but she was also aware that they would be dismissed for being written by a woman. She confessed to her diary, "I shall be attacked for a feminist & hinted at for a sapphist . . . I am afraid ti will not be taken very seriously." We treat female writers differently than male writers. We assume they only write about "women's issues," or that they are tapping into some deeper emotional stream or that their art is somehow lesser. Woolf was trying to figure out how to get past that almost a hundred years, and unfortunately, her words are still relevant today. So let's get started, shall we?

First of all, as Woolf describes "Oxbridge," I can't help but think of my masters institution, the College of Charleston. The old library, Towell Library, has a narrow door; they intentionally built the door to be smaller to prevent women (who would have been wearing wide skirts) from entering the door. Location, location, location.

Woolf attempts to demonstrate how ideas do largely depend on the physical and physical access. The ability to chase down an idea, to pour over an original text, to be able to listen to and engage with peers and mentors. She makes knowledge and writing physical, first ruminating on the food (suitable for this blog!: "whitest cream," "patridges, many and various, came with all their retinue of sauces and salads," "their potatoes, thin as coins," "the roast and its retinue," "a confection which rose all sugar from the waves," and "the wineglasses had flushed yellow and flushed crimson") before embarking on the walk. The text wanders with the wanderer, we even get ellipses when the demands of the journey cause an idea to slip away. When Woolf writes, "I spare you the twists and turns of my cogitations, for no conclusion was found on the road to Headingley," it's hard to separate the twists of the road from the turns of her mind; they are one and the same. It seems, then, that writing is not just about the metaphysical, but the physical itself. As Woolf says, "[f]iction must stick to facts, and the truer the facts the better the fiction." The corporeal world is full of facts--seasons, paths, anatomy, time, etc.--to influence and direct the writer.

But the physical can just as easily deter a writer. A man opposing a woman's walk across the grass can cause her to lose her thought and prevent a theoretical breakthrough. A poor dinner at a women's college can impede intellectual discourse. The community can refuse to provide necessary funds to build a physical place for female academia. And how can one make money and fight for equal education when one is burdened by the physicality of motherhood? As Woolf points out, the physical existence of families is predicated upon the mother's physical energies being directed to it as its sole concern:

For, to endow a college would necessitate the suppression of families altogether. Making a fortune and bearing thirteen children--no human being could stand it. Consider the facts, we said. First there are nine months before the baby is born. Then the baby is born. Then there are three or four months spent in feeding the baby. After the baby is fed there are certainly five years spent in playing with the baby. You cannot, it seems, let children run about the streets.

I can't help but think of Judith Butler and her unpacking of the illusory mind-body dichotomy and how it is gendered. Here, Woolf seems to locate this same false dichotomy, and reveals how the male mind can only exist because the female body has alleviated its responsibilities. Academia and the pursuit of ideas is still largely physical; men can ignore the physicality because of women and the sacrifices which they choose or are forced to make. This then gets translated into the legacies they are able to bequeath and the cultural inheritances they feel entitled to claim.

In this light, it almost seems like aunts are more important than mothers for creating a legacy for women writers. A mother, in Woolf's essay, is tied to a father; and so her possessions are controlled by a man, reducing her ability to provide a monetary inheritance for a daughter. An aunt, though, is more free. Woolf claims that between her aunt's monetary legacy and the political claim over the right to vote, Woolf would choose the money every time. The guaranteed income provides her a level of power that cannot be denied and so her "aunt's legacy unveiled the sky to [her], and substituted for the large and imposing figure of a gentleman . . . a view of the open sky."

Woolf indicates an awareness that these legacies hinge upon privilege. A noble family. A wealthy aunt. Access to private libraries or rooms. And so one of the really incredible things she does is provide an alternative canon of literary aunts: Rebecca West, Jane Austen, the Brontes, Lady Winchilsea, Margaret of Newcastle, Aphra Behn, Fanny Burney, and Eliza Carter. These aunts of literature and scholarship who constructed a cultural legacy for subsequent women to embrace and champion. These are noble women and middle class women who deny the burden of the physical legacy of their own foremothers, but find ways to enter the masculine sphere and claim art and academia as their own (there still doesn't seem room for lower class women in Woolf's essays: Woolf imagines that once women cease to be the protected sex, "nursemaids will heave coal. The shop-woman will drive an engine . . . make them soldiers and sailors and engine-drivers and dock labourers." Lower-class women, then, don't inherit the same cultural legacy and become artists in Woolf's world but rather become additional laborers.).

But it is important to note that these women don't simply embrace a masculine notion of culture. A significant part of the legacy they create is a challenge to the established hierarchy of art. They don't write about war rooms but drawing rooms; they don't write about violent battles but subtle exchanges; they don't write about sport but fashion. They establish their own focus and concerns.

This is the legacy Woolf urges her readers to embrace. She imagines a writer, Mary Carmichael, as "the descendant of all those other women of circumstances I have been glancing at and see what she inherits of their characteristics and restrictions." As Woolf reads what she assumes to be Carmichael's first text, she is at first disappointed and believes her to be an inferior writer to Austen:

For while Jane Austen breaks from melody to melody as Mozart from song to song, to read this writing was like being out at sea on an open boat. Up one went, down one sank. This terseness, this short-windedness, might mean that she was afraid of something.

But Woolf soon decides that Carmichael is not afraid but experimenting. She doesn't say this, but she seems to be a female modernist writer, and like the other modernists, toying with the legacy she has inherited. In other words, Woolf has given us a model for the daughter to this metaphysical legacy. Rather than simply copying Austen or emulating male writers like the Brontes allegedly do, she provides an example for how to carry on this legacy.

Of course, even though it is a legacy of thought, it still bears the physical requirements of a private room and a permanent stipend. Writers get hungry too, y'all.

#woolf #virginiawoolf #aroomofonesown #judithbutler #writer #womanwriter #aunts #nochildren #legacy