A Room Of One's Own

HERE YOU WILL FIND SOME SCKETCHES ABOUT ' A ROOM OF ONE'S OWN

I had been drawing a face , a figure. It was the face and the figure of Professor von X engaged in writing his monumental work entitled The Mental, Moral, and Physical Inferiority of the Female Sex.

They had been written in the red light of emotion and not in the white light of true.

The most transient visitor to this planet, I thought, who picked up this paper could not fail to be aware, even from this scattered testimony, that England is under the rule of a patriarchy. Nobody in their senses could fail to detect the dominance
of the professor.

The other day when Z, most humane, most modest of men, taking up some book by Rebecca West and reading a passage in it, exclaimed, "The arragant feminist! She says that men are snobs!" The exclamation, to me so surprising - for why was Miss West an arrant feminist for making a possibly true if uncomplimentary statement about the other sex? - was not merely the cry of wounded vanity; it was a protest against some infrigement of his power to believe in himself.

My aunt, Mary Beton, I must tell you, died by a fall from her horse when she was riding out to take the air in Bombay [ ... ]
[ ... ] she had left me five hundred pounds a year for ever [... ] Before that I had made my living by cadging odd jobs from newspapers, by reporting a donkey show here or a wedding there; I had earned a few pounds by addressing envelopes, reading to old ladies, making artificial flowers, teaching the alphabet to small children in a kindergarten. Such were the chief occupations that were open to women before 1918 [... ] No force in the world can take from my five pounds.Food, house and clothing are mine for ever. Therefore not merely do effort and labour cease, but also hatred and bitterness. I need not hate any man; he cannot hurt me.

I thought how much harder it is now than it must have been even a century ago to say which of these employments is the higher, the more necessary. Is it better to be a coal-heaver or a nursemaid; is the chairwoman who has brought up eight children of less value to the world than the barrister who has made a hundred thousand pounds?

Moreover, in a hundred years, I thought, reaching my own doorstep, women will have ceased to be protected sex. Logically they will take part in all the activities and exertions that were once denied them. The nursemaid will have coal. The shop-woman will drive an engine. All assumptions founded on the facts observed when women were the protected sex will have disappeared.

Women are poorer than men because - this or that. Perphaps now it will be better to give up seeking for the truth, and receiving on one's head an avalanche of opinion hot as lava, discoloured as dish-water. It would be better to draw the courtain; to shut out distractions; to light the lamp; to narrow the enquiry and to ask the historian, who records not opinions but facts, to describe under what conditions women lived, not throughout the ages, but in England, say in the time of Elizabeth.

Not being a historian, one might go even further and say that women have burnt like beacons in all the works of all the poets from the begining of time [... ] .Indeed, if woman had no existence save in the fiction written by men, one would imagine her a person of the utmost importance, very various; heroic and mean; splendid and sordid; infinitely beautiful and hideous in the extreme; as great as a man, some think even greater. But this is woman in fiction, In fact, as Professor Trevelyan points out, she was locked up, beaten and flung about the room.

[ ... ] .It would have been impossible, completely and entirely, for any woman to have written the plays of Shakespeare in the age of Shakespeare. Let me imagine, since facts are so hard to come by, what would have happened had Shakespeare had a wonderfully gifted sister, called Judith, let us say. Shakespeare himself went, very propably - his mother was an heiress - to the grammar school, were he may have learnt - Ovid, Virgil and Horace - and the elements of grammar and logic [ ... ].
Meanwhile his extraordinarily gifted sister, let us suppose, remained at home. She was as adventurous, as imaginative, as agog to see the world as he was. But she was not sent to scool. She had no chance of learning grammar and logic, let alone of reading Horace and Virgil. She picked up a book now and then. one of her brother's perphaps, and read a few pages. But then her parents came in and told her to mend the stockings or mind the stew and not moon about with books and papers [ ... ].
She made up a small parcel of her belongings, let herself down by a rope one summer's night and took the road to London. She was not seventeen [ ... ] Like him,she had a taste for the theatre. She stood at the stage door; she wanted to act; she said. Men laughed in her face [ ... ] .at last Nick Greene the actor-manager took pity on her; she found herself with child by that gentleman and so - who shall measure the heat and violence of the poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body? - killed herself one winter's night and lies buried at some cross-roads where the omnibuses now stop out-side the Elephant and Castle.

When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist.

It was the relic of the sense of chastity that dictated anonymity to women even so late as the ninteenth century

[ ...] very interesting and obscure masculine complex which has had so much that she shall be inferior as that he shall be superior

I found several shelves given up entirely to the works of women. But why, I could not help asking, as I ran my eyes over them , were they, with very few exceptions, all novels? The original impulse was to poetry. The "supreme head of song" was a poetess. Both in France and in England the women poets precede the women novelists.

And since a novel has this correspondence to the real life, its values are to some extent those of real life. But it is obvious that the values which have been made by the other sex; naturally, this is so. Yet it is the masculine values that prevail. Speaking crudely, football and sports are "important"; the worship of fashion, the buying of clothes "trivial". And these values are inevitably transferred from life to fiction.

The other difficulty which faced them ( I was still considering those early nineteenth- century novelists ) when they came to set their thoughts on paper that is that they had no tradition behind them, or some so short and partial that it was of little help.

Suppose, for instance, that men were only represented in literature as lovers of women, and were never the friends of men, soldiers,thinkers, dreamers; how few parts in the plays of Shakespeare could be allotted to them; how literature would suffer! We might perphaps have most of Othello; and a good deal of Antony but no Caesar, no Brutus, no Hamlet, no Lear, no Jaques - Literature would be incredibly impoverished, as indeed literature is impoverished beyond our counting by the doors that have been shut upon women.

[ ... ] Give a room of her own and five hundreds a year, let her speak her mind and leave out half that she now puts in, and she will write a better book one of these days. She will be a poet.

For one can hardly fail to be impressed in Rome by the sense of unmitigated masculinity; and whatever the value of unmitigated masculinity upon the staste, one may question the effect of it upon the art of poetry. At any rate, according to the newspapers, there is a certain anxiety about fiction in Italy. There has been a meeting of academicians whose object it is "to develop the Italian novel". "Men famous by birth, or in finance, industryu or the Fascist corporations" came together the other day and discussed the matter, and a telegram was sent to the Duce expessing the hope " that the Fascist era would soon give birth to a poet worthy of it ". We may all join in that pious hope, but it is doubtful whether poetry can come out of an incubator.Poetry ought to have a mother as well as a father. The Fascist poem, one may fear, will be a horrid little abortion such as one sees in a glass jar in the museum of some country town. Such monsters never live long, it is said; one has never seen a prodigy of that sort cropping grass in a field. Two heads on one body do not make for length of life.
However, the blame for all this, if one is anxious to lay blame, rests no more upon one sex than upon the other.

For further information:
A lecture by Joel Rich given in the University of Chicago First Friday series, February 1992.

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