I have read the essays assigned for this unit before, but they are never tiring. Each one holds a piece of my truth in what writing means to me and sheds light on what each writer interprets good writing is to them. As far back as I can remember, I have always written my thoughts down. I would describe myself as, “not a reader, but I am a person that writes”. If I used the word “writer”, it was in lieu of the word “reader”, it was not as a title or a designation, it was an adjective only. Even after completing an entire book 8 years ago, I did not consider myself an author or a “writer”. It was not until recently that I even understood the power of the designation of being called a WRITER!
In a previous class, I had to research and write a paper after reading the assigned class essays, then pick one of the writers to imitate. I chose Virginia Woolf’s speech A Room of One’s Own (Shakespeare’s Sister) (Wolfe, 1929) to try to become the intricate writer. My story was named the curtains of One’s Own Window, and my writing took over my entire being. I wrote sentences that I would have never thought possible that came out of my soul as if Ms. Woolf herself possessed me. Woolf’s speech was supposed to be about women and fiction writers, but ended up being a grand tale of her process of accepting and understanding the responsibility and weight of what she had been asked to do. She told of her journey on how she found her words for that particular speech. The burden and responsibility she felt from being asked to represent all women, their role in history and finally to their evolvement into writing fiction was amusing to me, yet a bit long winded. My essay imitating her was almost as long winded, but thankfully it too ended with a prof...
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... the utmost greatest gift of words, but lacks the ability to communicate them on its own. Therefore, it searches out, and then enters into different people at different times to use them as its muse in order to satisfy its unending desire to tell its tales. We who write are its tool and we become enamored, and feel its frustration, then sympathize to then be possessed by its desire. We then come to be consumed and compelled to gift to the “writer” our own words and give it some peace unto its thwarted soul. Good writing is simply to allow yourself to be used in that fashion.
Works Cited
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus. London. Published Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor & Jones. 1818.
Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. 1928. Cambridge University. Retrieved from Project Gutenberg Australia at http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0200791.txt.
The purpose of Baker’s essay and its placement in The Prentice Hall Guide for College Writers is to encourage young writers to realize that writing truly is a privilege. It is also placed in the book to show college English students that writing does not have to be a grim task and that thinking of it in that manner will only make the student average.
Virginia Woolf, in her novels, set out to portray the self and the limits associated with it. She wanted the reader to understand time and how the characters could be caught within it. She felt that time could be transcended, even if it was momentarily, by one becoming involved with their work, art, a place, or someone else. She felt that her works provided a change from the typical egotistical work of males during her time, she makes it clear that women do not posses this trait. Woolf did not believe that women could influence as men through ego, yet she did feel [and portray] that certain men do hold the characteristics of women, such as respect for others and the ability to understand many experiences. Virginia Woolf made many of her time realize that traditional literature was no longer good enough and valid. She caused many women to become interested in writing, and can be seen as greatly influential in literary history
Throughout Virginia Woolf’s writings, she describes two different dinners: one at a men’s college, and another at a women’s college. Using multiple devices, Woolf expresses her opinion of the inequality between men and women within these two passages. She also uses a narrative style to express her opinions even more throughout the passages.
In her extended essay, A Room of One’s Own (1928), Virginia Woolf argues that in order to write great literature, women have two central needs: an incomes and a room with a locking door. For Woolf, the figure standing between women and literature is the patriarch: “Professor von X, engaged in writing his monumental work entitled The Mental, Moral, and Physical Inferiority of the Female Sex” (Woolf 2107). The Professor becomes the face of oppression in Woolf’s text as she discusses the “dominance of the professor” because “[his] was the power and the money and the influence…With the exception of the fog he seemed to control everything. Yet he was angry” (Woolf 2109). To Woolf, the patriarch only “seems” to control everything, suggesting he – in reality – does not. Instead, he is unable to control everything, and thus is angry. Yet, because the Professor is in possession of money, he controls influence. Meanwhile, women become the patriarch’s moneyless, influence-less inferior. In James Joyce’s short story “The Dead,” the Professor is Gabriel Conroy. He too “tries to control everything.” For example, when he buys his wife Gretta galoshes, she jokes “he’ll buy [her] a diving suit” next (Joyce 25). Gabriel is the one charged with “piloting” a drunk Freddy Malins into his aunt’s house for their annual dinner party (Joyce 28), the one to give the pre-dinner speech (Joyce 24), and carve the goose (Joyce 38). For most of the story, Gabriel acts as if he controls every aspect of his life: even the weather. When the dinner scene grows claustrophobic, Gabriel imagines people standing in the snow, believing “the air is pure there” (Joyce 46). Separated from the weather by a pane of glass, he imposes meaning upon it as he does everyth...
Woolf utilizes a rhetorical question in order to develop her call to action, which is that women should overcome their fears and express themselves. In the last paragraph, she states, “But this freedom is only a beginning; the room is your own, but it is still bare. It was to be furnished; it has to be decorated; it has to be shared. How are you going to furnish it, how are you going to decorate it? With whom are you going to share it, and upon what terms?” The author is building upon the metaphor of life being like a room; it should not be bare, for a bare room...
Works Cited Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein: A Norton Critical Edition. ed. J. Paul Hunter. New York: W. W. Norton, 1996.
Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Maurice Hindle. Frankenstein, Or, The Modern Prometheus. London: Penguin, 2003. Print.
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein: A Norton Critical Edition. Ed. J. Paul Hunter. New York: W. W.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe. "On Frankenstein." The Athenaeum 263 (10 Nov. 1832): 730. Rpt. in Nineteenth-
"Like most uneducated Englishwomen, I like reading." Can these words really belong to Virginia Woolf, an "uneducated Englishwoman" who knew half a dozen languages, who authored a shelf's length of novels and essays, who possessed one of the most rarified literary minds of the twentieth century? Tucked into the back pages of A Room of One's Own, this comment shimmers with Woolf's typically wry and understated sense of humor. She jests, but she means something very serious at the same time: as a reader, she worries about the state of the writer, and particularly the state of the female writer. She worries so much, in fact, that she fills a hundred some pages musing about how her appetite for "books in the bulk" might be satiated in the future by women writers. Her concerns may be those of a reader, but the solution she proffers comes straight from the ethos of an experienced writer. "A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction," Woolf asserts early in her essay. This "one minor point," as she calls it, could have major repercussions for the future of literature. It would certainly, in the least, enrich the life of Virginia Woolf the reader. But before this can happen, Virginia Woolf the writer must demonstrate how a few hundred pounds and some privacy translate into a wealth of new books by women. To do this, she uses a most natural example: A Room of One's Own itself. Before it became a seminal feminist text or the source of countless cultural clichés, this essay was first a piece of writing by a woman of some means and leisure. It is both the result and the purveyor of a set of ideal creative conditions for the female author. Employing an innovative narrative technique, Woolf ...
...e literary world in relation to its conventions concerning women writers, her feminism, which consist not just of her obvious feminist politics but her captivation and concern with gender characteristics, molded her writing greatly. This, in turn, contributed greatly to the contemporary feminism of her time as she took personal experiences in life and used them as an inspiration throughout her writing. With that being said, perhaps her single most important work of feminist literary criticism, A Room of One's Own contributed most as it explores the circumstantial and historic possibilities and personal experiences of Virginia Woolf concerning contemporary feminism and literary achievement.
In the twentieth century women did not have many rights. Women were expected to stay at home and do housework, cook food, have babies, and take care of them. Women was not supposed to be writers, Virginia Woolf and many other women overcame that standard. Virginia Woolf became a writer during this time and wrote about something she deeply cared about, feminism. Woolf’s work highlights women’s work, who does not have the rights or enough money to use it.
Virginia Woolf is often categorized as being an aesthetic writer. Most of her works played largely on the concept of suggestion. They addressed many social issues especially those regarding feminine problems. Woolf was acutely aware of her identity as a woman and she used many of writings as outlets for her frustrations. According to her doctrine, the subjugation of women is a central fact of history, a key to most of our social and psychological disorders (Marder 3). The two works I will focus on is A Room of One's Own and "A Society" from Monday or Tuesday. They are both works that challenge the roles of men and women.
Virginia Woolf was born January 25, 1882 to an English household in London. Her father was Sir Leslie Steven, a historian and author who was a major figure during the golden age of mountaineering; her mother Julia Prinsep Steven, an India native, nurse and also an author of the profession. With two substantial successors as her parents, Woolf was one of seven siblings granted with majestic opportunities. These opportunities included being educated by her parents. During this time girls were not allowed to go to school and many did not have the privilege of parents whom were able to instil education. Knowing this, Virginia was bound to excel in life. In fact, Woolf utilized her privileged life to her potential. She spent time in numerous locations which she eventually incorporated into a lot of her work and modernist novels such as, Profession for Women. In the essay, Profession for Women Woolf discusses, “the Victorian phantom known as the Angel in the House that selfless, sacrificial woman in the nineteenth century whose sole purpose in life was to soothe, to flatter, and to comfort the male half of the world’s population.” The essay shows how women struggled daily with the views Victorian society placed upon them. The ways of the Victorian era transcended over into the modernist times because some women were too afraid to explore their true selves. However, Virginia did not accept these ways because she knew as a woman she could not be complete if she lived up to the Victorian standards. Woolf determined that unless one has explored and experimented the new things attainable from the world then they also cannot be complete. In this essay, I will be responding to Virginia Woolf’s essay Professions of Women and the struggle of ...
The light that Virginia Woolf shed not only on women in literature in 1929, but on women’s equality as a whole, has finally paid off. Throughout the decades succeeding her book, women have been climbing their way up the social ladder inch by inch. The historical meaning of A Room of One’s Own started off as this almost plea for a woman’s voice to be heard. Though women have the same rights as men, are they suddenly seen as the same, or are there times where the word “equality” just becomes a social appearance? This theme of wanting to be heard, and women’s equality still resonates with the gender today. Women can look back and realize how far they have come. Women are now heard through mediums such magazines, books, poems, novels, lectures, and essays to name a few. Women are able to understand this text that Woolf gave them and use it as a tool to remember that power in literature comes great responsibility. The responsibility here is to maintain, progress, and preserve the important role women play in society by means of educating men. Women should also not think of themselves, in this generation, as superior to men just because they are now regarded in the same manner. “All this pitting of sex against sex, of quality against quality; all this claiming of superiority and imputing of inferiority, belong to the private-school stage of