42 pages • 1 hour read
Virginia WoolfA Room of One's Own
Nonfiction | Essay / Speech | Adult | Published in 1929A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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BetaChapters 3-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 3 Summary
At her home in London, Mary Beton is disappointed because she has only furthered her suspicions about men writing distorted portrayals of women in literature of all types. Mary examines women’s role in British history, which she concludes is very minimal. Women are absent from history, both as the real-world players recorded in history books and from their own self-representation. The same men who write about women without knowing them also paint, compose symphonies, and create elaborate poetry about women. These salient representations of women are not supported by her role throughout history, where she has been relegated to domestic tasks and objectified.
Mary describes a thought experiment supposing that William Shakespeare had an equally capable sister named Judith. She wonders what this (fictional) figure might have accomplished had she also lived in Elizabethan England. Judith, like her brother, is interested in literature; however, she is discouraged from pursuing it, unlike her brother. At 16 years old, Judith must marry the man her father selects according to tradition. When Judith rejects this, she is framed as the aggressor for violating her father’s expectations. Judith runs away to pursue a career in theater, but laws forbid women from acting. Without support from her family, a chance to be formally educated, or any legitimate way to enter the arts, Judith is an outcast. She gets pregnant when an “actor-manager” decides to take “pity on her” (63), leaving Judith with no choice but to end her own life. Judith, like many women of her time, either never got the chance to write what she wanted or wrote it anonymously, afraid of the ramifications of publishing under her own name. Many works written anonymously were perhaps written by women who were in the same circumstances as Judith.
This thought-experiment encapsulates Woolf’s main arguments in this chapter: Women are neither present in writing about history nor do they write their own work because of formal structures (e.g., as laws barring them from education, working, voting, etc.) and informal structures (e.g., sociocultural norms and expectations) that limit women from fulfilling their creative potential. Men create these laws and hold all the authority to change this system, rendering women like Judith unable to access their autonomy, perpetuating the patriarchal system and its sexist limitations.
Chapter 4 Summary
Continuing the discussion of women in 16th century England, Mary Beton concludes that “no woman could have written poetry then” because the conditions of life were too oppressive for creative women to express themselves (73). Women who lived during this era would only have been able to write if they were from the highest social classes, but even then, they would have faced ridicule from those who thought women were incapable of intelligent expression. To examine the progression of women’s suppression, Mary chronologically examines the small body of English work written by women before the 20th century. Her examples here are actual writers rather than hypothetical ones.
Mary examines work produced by women in the 17th century. Lady Winchilsea (Anne Finch) wrote poetry that shows the effects of sexist constraints: Lady Winchilsea feels “harassed and distracted with hates and grievances” against the system which tells her she is inadequate (74). Margaret Cavendish, the 17th century Duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, wrote many works using her own name, but the lack of educational opportunities available even to a woman of the upper class prevented Cavendish from achieving greatness in her writing. The letters of Dorothy Osborne convey her internalized misogyny and reject the notion of an excellent woman author (an assessment Mary considers to be troublingly ironic). Finally, Aphra Behn, who, unlike the other examples, was a middle-class woman, wrote to support herself. Behn illustrates an important change in the literary landscape of 17th century England, wherein it became possible for women to profit from their works.
Mary transitions to examining the 19th century works of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, and George Eliot (the pseudonym of Mary Ann Evans). These authors all wrote novels, and Mary concludes that the novel counteracted some of the most pervasive problems women face (e.g., lack of personal space and education). The novel, a relatively new form of literature at the beginning of the 19th century, had not yet been defined by men. Women authors, therefore, used this opportunity to represent themselves authentically. This authenticity (which Mary also calls “integrity”) is the quality that distinguishes excellent writing. Austen and Emily Brontë accomplish this because their novels are honest without expressing outrage toward the subjugation of women. Eliot and Charlotte Brontë, on the other hand, do express grievances in their work, which Mary argues is detrimental to their integrity. Mary wonders what the “future of fiction” holds for women (92), suggesting that they will invent new forms of literary expression.
Chapters 3-4 Analysis
These two chapters focus on several aspects regarding the English literary canon and the absence of women. Woolf employs some sweeping generalizations in this section, but her comments are focused on authors from the United Kingdom, and they are therefore limited in application. There are far more male authors represented in the traditional English literary canon, and often canonical works written by women are products of anger, frustration, or displeasure about their positions as women. It is this anger, Woolf argues, that is a hallmark of women’s fiction, and it ultimately reduces the quality of women’s work, diluting their genuine expression with external frustrations that men do not face.
The device of Judith Shakespeare in Chapter 3 is well suited to Woolf’s stream of consciousness style narration. Woolf guides readers through her portrayal of Judith to illustrate how difficult it was for women to write in the past. Her linking of Judith to William Shakespeare illustrates that excellent male writers—though rare—were allowed and encouraged to be great, but their female counterparts never had a chance. Shakespeare’s greatness is magnified by his ability to transcend feelings of inadequacy so that his work reflects his truest creative thoughts. Judith and the women authors discussed in Chapter highlight the opposite situation: Women who were capable of greatness were discouraged from seeking autonomy and became mired in the frustrations of their sex. In this way, Woolf’s main argument that women need a room of their own can be understood more fully. If women are subjected to greater criticisms and strict social expectations, they will likely be unable to produce authentic work under the watchful eyes of the patriarchy, and thus need their own space to produce creative work.
Much of Woolf’s reasoning used to assess the authors discussed in Chapter 4 employs an essentialist outlook regarding both sex and achievement. Essentialism is an ideological outlook that presumes inherent differences between two things and frames these differences as key components of identity. A Room of One’s Own, like many works of first and second wave feminism, rejects the notion that women are inherently inferior but not the underlying essentialist outlooks that frames men and women as inherently different. This situates her assessment of the authors and their work and leads to her suggestion that women will invent new forms of literary expression to better suit qualities inherent to women’s writing. In this view, the goal of women’s liberation is not to transcend sex or gender (or even to differentiate between the two), but rather to embrace feminine qualities rather than condemn them. Woolf employs a similar type of essentialist framing to her discussions about achievement because she believes there are inherent qualities associated with great work, especially the intangible and undefined “integrity” she describes in Chapter 4.
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