Rhetorical Analysis Essay On Virginia Woolf

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At one point in time, women and men had equal rights. However, those rights started to slowly slip away as time passed on by. In Virginia Woolf’s two passages, she holds a very strong position on the place that women have in society. She proves that sexism still exists by explaining this unjust treatment through her experiences at both genders’ colleges. In order to successfully convey her underlying negative attitude, Woolf uses intricate, detailed diction and imagery. In the first passage, Woolf vividly describes her pleasant experience at the men’s college, but at the same time deliberately displays her outright anger. She uses words such as “defy” in “I shall take liberty to defy that convention” in order to portray her vexation of how …show more content…

Whenever Woolf discusses the men’s luxurious college meal, she take time to describe every single little detail. She emphasizes how superb these meals are through her strings of lengthy breathless sentences. Like her sentences, the meals are breathless and leave people mouthwatering and in awe. Woolf asserts, “the college cook had spread a counterpane of the whitest cream.” It wasn’t just any particular cream; it was the whitest cream. Not only are the men served with the best food, but the fact that they have a personal chef implies their high class. Moreover, Woolf even elaborately notes how candle lighting was used in place of regular light bulbs to display how her heavenly and classy she felt to attend the men’s college. However, in the blunt and abrupt descriptions of the women’s college, a dark cloud seems to put out all the light and happiness. Feeling very dissatisfied with the meals served, Woolf takes note of how the people respond to such deficient treatment. She recounts, “Everybody scraped their chairs back; the swing-doors swung violently to and fro.” This observation confirms how truly unenjoyable her experience was and how it felt like eating was a forced necessity. She does not speak highly of the meal at the women’s college at all, whereas with the men’s college, she speaks so highly of the meal that she feels as if she has been sent to

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