Name : Shakir Afzal .

Roll No: 21960001.

Course: M.A English.
A Room of One’s Own Summary and
Analysis of Chapters 1.
Virginia Woolf, asked to give a lecture on women and fiction, tells her
audience what she thought that title might mean: what women are like; the
fiction women write; the fiction written about women; or a combination of
the three. However, she felt she could not form a conclusive truth about
those subjects, and instead has come up with "one minor point--a woman
must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction." She says
she will use devices of fiction in relating how her thoughts on the lecture
mingled with her daily life; she uses a fictional narrator whom she calls Mary
Beton as her alter ego, and the essay begins.

A week ago, while sitting by a river, the narrator compares the production of
a thought of hers on women and fiction (which she will not relate now,
though she says one may detect it in the course of her lecture) to a
fisherman's catch, albeit a measly one which he throws back. Nevertheless,
the thought excites her, and as she hurries across a lawn at the fictional
Oxbridge, a Beadle (a minor parish official) intercepts her; only Fellows and
Scholars, not women, are allowed on the lawn. The interruption makes her
forget her thought. Instead, she ponders the genius of literary figures, such
as Milton and Thackeray, and goes to the library. An elderly man there
informs her that women are admitted only with a Fellow or a letter of
introduction. She angrily vows to herself never to "ask for that hospitality
again" of entering the library. She passes the chapel, listening to the organ
and watching the congregation troop inside, but does not want to enter, as
she would be denied permission again. She reflects on the royal wealth that
had gone into building the university; the wealth now comes from
independent men.

She goes to lunch and describes the gourmet food on display: soles,
partridges, a delicious dessert, and excellent wine. The good food and
relaxing atmosphere inspire "rational intercourse" in the conversation. She
sees a Manx cat without a tail walking across the quadrangle, and suddenly
feels that something is "lacking." She thinks back on a pre-war luncheon in
which people said the same things as now but sounded more musical.

She walks through the late October afternoon to Fernham, the women's
college where she is staying as a guest. She has a dinner of plain soup,
mediocre beef, vegetables, and potatoes, and bad custard, prunes, biscuits
and cheese, along with water. She feels one cannot "think well, love well,
sleep well, if one has not dined well." A friend of hers, Mary Seton (referred
to hereafter as "Seton"), has a bottle of a good drink, and they drink and
talk by the fire. The narrator thinks more about the kings in the past and
financial magnates of their time who have built the colleges with their gold.
She wonders what lies beneath their college. Seton summarizes how funds
were raised with difficulty for the college, and therefore why they cannot
afford expensive meals.

The narrator and Seton denounce their mothers, and their sex, for being so
impoverished and leaving their daughters so little. Had they been
independently wealthy, perhaps they could have founded fellowships and
secured similar luxuries for women. However, the narrator realizes that had
Seton's mother gone into business, she would not have had Seton or the rest
of her children. Moreover, only for the last forty-eight years have women
been allowed to keep money they earned; before that, it belonged to their
husbands. Walking back to her inn, the narrator thinks about the effects of
wealth and poverty on the mind, about the prosperity of males and the
poverty of females, and about the effects of tradition or lack of tradition on
the writer, among other topics. She goes to sleep, as does everyone in
Oxbridge.

ANALYSIS :
"A Room of One's Own" begins with the word "But," an unconventional
starting point that emphasizes the contrarian nature of the essay.
Contrarian, because Woolf sets out to engage a topic that, in 1928, had
received little serious attention: women and writing. As she explains, the
subject is too vast for her to sum up in a short space, so she proposes a
highly contrarian idea: women must have the security and privacy of their
own room and their own money. (For comparison, 500 British pounds in
1928 is equal to roughly 200,000 British pounds in 2001, or roughly
$300,000 U.S. dollars.) The narrator unravels the reasons behind this basic
premise throughout the rest of the essay.

Immediately, we see how the institution of the university discriminates

against women. At the lawn, library, and dinner, the narrator is either
denied admission or given inferior accommodations. Though the narrator
will later explore more fully what effect this has on the mind, already we see
that the obstacles damage the mental process--on the lawn, she forgets her
carefully-crafted thought from the river once she is redirected. Both the
recognition that she is a second-class citizen and the interruption feed into
Woolf's thesis: women need money and privacy to write.

The lawn pops up again later as the narrator sees the tailless Manx cat walk
across it. It reminds her first of the pre-war days, and we can conjecture that
the tailless cat is a vision of symbolically castrated England. Devastated by
the war, England is no longer what it once was, and its musical language has
been cut off, replaced by regular conversation. More pertinently to the
narrator, the tailless cat also appears as out of place at the college as a
woman might. Without a "tail" of her own, the narrator is similarly
unwelcome on the lawn.

To return to the narrator's main premise, wealth is repeatedly cited as a

necessary ingredient for creativity. The men she sees have fewer obstacles in
life; unconcerned with petty (or even major) grievances, they are free to
discuss higher ideas at their luxurious lunch. Generations of men, both
aristocratic and independently wealthy, have fed money back into the
institutions that keep their comfort and position intact. Women, conversely,
have few of these luxuries. While their mediocre food at dinner is a minor
annoyance, it is representative of greater inequalities women have endured
for centuries at the hands of society and nature. Few women have
independent wealth with which to enjoy creative lives or enable such
activity in others, and until recently they could not have utilized their own
wealth under law. Moreover, they are saddled with bearing and raising
children. The narrator has hinted that such conditions impair women's
creative abilities, and will detail her theories in later chapters.

Woolf tells the audience she will "develop in your presence as fully and
freely as I can the train of thought which led me to think" about her ideas.
Woolf has done this by creating a fictional lecturer (based on herself; the
essay is based on two lectures she delivered at Newnham and Girton
colleges in October, 1928) whose thoughts seem much more palpable to the
reader than those in the standard essay. "Mary Beton" has a distinctive
voice--sophisticated, witty, poetic, ironic--that sustains and enlarges her
abstract arguments. She also speaks of her "train of thought"; the wording
is similar to the new Modernist technique of "stream-of-consciousness."
Developed by James Joyce and William Faulkner, and tweaked by Woolf in
"To the Lighthouse," stream-of-consciousness relates the ongoing chaotic
narrative of a character's thoughts. Though Mary Beton's narrative flits
around frequently--from the luncheon to the Manx cat to Tennyson--"A
Room of One's Own" is a carefully structured essay that is a true "train of
thought," and attention should be paid to Woolf's rhetorical skill as an
essayist. Moreover, the narrator's absence of a "real being," as Woolf says,
will play an important role when Woolf presents her aesthetic ideology.