The Inner Workings of a Feminist Mind
... and conserved when written down on a piece of paper. Her past experiences would prove to become an important asset to her work. A type of criticism dominant in Woolf's work states that “the author's own childhood traumas, family life, sexual conflicts, fixations, and such will be traceable within the behavior of the characters in the literary work” (wsu). Nearly all of Virginia Woolf’s books have a character that has gone through sexual abuse; such as Cam Ramsey in To the Lighthouse and Rachel Vinrace in The Voyage Out. The same pattern holds true with A Room of One’s Own. The perfect example is Woolf’s fictional character, Judith Shakespeare, sister to famed William Shakespeare. Woolf describes Judith as a woman with just as much genius as her brother but was not able to express it due to repression by society and her parents. Judith was not able to go to school so she could not learn grammar and logic. Plus, she loved theatre and wanted to act, but could not get any training. However, Judith was a genius “for fiction and [she] lusted to feed abundantly upon the lives of men and women and he study of their ways” (Woolf 48). Instead of being able to write, Judith was forced into a marriage with a man she did not love. To make matters worse, she was forced to raise a baby she did not want. If Judith ever dared complain to her father about her loveless marriage, her father would end up beating her. Eventually Judith ended up killing herself due to the abuse that she faced. The parallels between Judith and Woolf are astounding. Virginia herself was not able to obtain an education and had to learn secretly from her sister Vanessa. Even though Virginia’s marriage to Leonard Woolf was not forced, their marriage was not full of love and they were seen as a power couple (The Hours). Eventually, Virginia Woolf decided to commit suicide by putting rocks into her pockets and drowning herself in a river. Virginia Woolf’s turbulent past made her become a “feminist,” and those views are conveyed through her writing. In A Room of One’s Own, Judith Shakespeare shows how Woolf’s childhood sexual abuse comes to life in her work. However, she also shows how women were repressed by men and society when they wanted to express themselves, especially in writing fiction. During the Victorian age, it was commonly known that women were seen as the inferior sex to men. Throughout A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf was able to show how women were deterred from society when they wanted to gain knowledge and opportunities in life. One of the first examples of oppression is when the narrator is at the University of Oxbridge, a male college. She is first rejected from the library, simply because she was a woman. Then while walking around the campus, the narrator accidentally wanders off the gravel path onto the grass when beadle immediately comes up telling her to get off the grass. The turf was a place where only the Fellows and Scholars could walk upon (Woolf 6). The rejection from the library and getting kicked off the grass shows how women did not have an equal opportunity to gain knowledge. Not being able to go into the library and oppression from those like the beadle show how society set up barriers for women so they are unable to develop their ideas. Unfortunately, women give into these barriers because it is too much trouble to challenge society. However, Woolf shows how women can make a living off a career in writing through the fictional character of Alpha Behn. Mrs. Behn was an ordinary middle-class woman who had to make a living off of her writing due to the death of her husband. She had to work on the same playing field as men, but by working hard she was able to succeed and make money by writing. It was important for Alpha Behn to be successful because now that she “had done it, girls could go to their parents and say, You need not give me an allowance; I can make money by my pen” (Woolf 64). Unfortunately, despite the success of Mrs. Behn, girls still had doors shut in their faces by their parents and men when they wanted to write fiction. Woolf proves that a patriarchal society limits the opportunities of talented women, and ergo presented an effective feminist argument that women were suppressed by men in society but through hard work could make a living. Throughout A Room of One’s Own, Woolf constantly reiterates her thesis that “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction” (Woolf 4). With privacy an...