The shift of perspective in “A Room of One’s Own”
Near the middle of A Room of One’s Own, while considering what could have been the life of women during the past centuries, Virginia Woolf regrets that they are largely absent from the writings of historians (themselves mostly men), unless they’re an Elizabeth, or a Mary. Remarkably, she published this essay in 1929, the same year where in France scholars like Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch were starting to look at history in a new way: not just as a succession of kings and battles, but as a whole, from the bottom up, with the goal to understand and reconstruct the daily life of ordinary people. Speaking of women, Woolf deplores that all these infinitely obscure lives remain to be recorded; and this is what those young scholars were now planning to achieve.
This endeavour of what became to be known in France as l’École des Annales, — to write the history of life itself, in its minute details, with its feelings and sensations, to explore the interactions of social classes, of economy and human experience, — all of this brought us over the last decades a lot more depth in the knowledge of our ancestors. The peasants, the soldiers, the artisans, the outlaws, and of course women, are no longer faint shapes in the shadows, accessories to the orbits of prophets and empires; they became flesh, and took up residence in our minds.
And what strikes me here is that the program of the Annales was in history precisely the same as Woolf’s in literature.
Woolf’s essay is about “Women and Fiction”, or rather, it’s about trying to write such an essay. Instead of plainly delivering it as a lecture, she tells a story where we see the essay being thought about, researched, or (so to speak) embodied into the narrator. This shift in perspective is itself an application of her recommendations, to write in a woman’s voice, in order to give a voice to women. And that implies giving a voice to the sensitivity to oblique points of views, to empathy, to details, to sensations.
As a comparison, she mentions (with much wit) Kipling’s and Galsworthy’s novels: Do what she will a woman cannot find in them that fountain of perpetual life which the critics assure her is there. It is not only that they celebrate male virtues, enforce male values and describe the world of men; it is that the emotion with which these books are permeated is to a woman incomprehensible. […] The fact is that neither Mr. Galsworthy nor Mr. Kipling has a spark of the woman in him. Thus all their qualities seem to a woman, if one may generalise, crude and immature. This verdict refers to the crude and immature view of reality as a brute sequence of events, playing only in one flat foreground, the battle-scene of the world, much as the older historians were recounting the past fates of their kingdoms.
From that perspective, we may consider that the works of some of Woolf’s contemporaries, such as Marcel Proust or James Joyce, are also written in that new literary vein, informed by women’s voice (In our time Proust was wholly androgynous, if not perhaps a little too much of a woman.) There is no dichotomy to be found between men’s and women’s literature; there is only art, and foremost depth and truth to life, and the simple fact that opening the artistic field to women is the only right way forward to reach the highest peaks of art, regardless of gender. Quoting again: It is fatal for anyone who writes to think of their sex. It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly.
For this voice to be heard, this space to be open, Woolf argues that the prerequisite is that women should be able to have a life for themselves, not defined in relation to men, or, as the title’s metaphor implies, a room of one’s own. Intellectual freedom depends upon material things. Not only the material ability to have for herself the time and the solitude that are necessary for artistic creation; not only the opportunity to study and learn a craft; but also, at the very centre, the basic material freedom of being master of herself, of not having to justify her actions, her thoughts or her tastes. And this might be the core of the moral lesson of this essay. Equality, justice, freedom are not only good and valuable in themselves: they are valuable because they let us unveil the treasures to be found in human beings, and let them crystallize, for the ages to come, in long-lasting beauty.
