A Room of One's Own

This was great. Really, Woolf is awesome when she affects this more conversational tone...not that she's not awesome otherwise, but there's something less--mental, I'd say, and more soulful in A Room of One's Own than other works we've read by her. In many of the others, she's concerned with matters of the mind, but in this, I think, whether she meant it or not, she's concerned with matters of the heart, and the tone really strikes that chord.

So there's a lot to go over in just these chapters. My attention was first drawn to the story of her ersatz character not being admitted to the library. I thought this was a particularly salient moment, because I think we, nowadays, tend to misunderstand just how deep the depths of this patriarchal abyss reached. The funny thing was, it was nothing obvious. It wasn't like there were splatter-pages of spousal abuse plastered everywhere. It was in the little things, things that we don't even consider today as being of any importance whatsoever. She's not admitted to the library, not because she's not a member, not because she doesn't go to the college, but specifically because she is a woman. Wow.

And I love the talk she has about money, or the politics of money, using Mrs. Seton as a bit of a launching point. But one of my favorite quotes thusfar is when she's harping sardonically on romance: "When the guns fired in August 1914, did the faces of men and women show so plain in each other's eyes that romance was killed?" What drew me to this quote was its similarity to a passage from Hemingway in A Farewell to Arms (I think I acutally might have mentioned this before), where he talks about how the "old words" from before the war were eradicated by it; that quote, and this one, is just more and more affirmation of how WWI really changed everything. It's hard to put society, empire, civilization on a Victorian pedestal after such wanton destruction and the harsh realities of blood and gore and mankind have been laid before you. Likewise, I enjoyed the way she described "men's anger" at women, which is not anger at all, but a sort of inferiority complex hidden in reams of superiority. That men won't tolerate women thinking because of some childish need to be superior is simultaneously pathetic and sad--and it was interesting to see the metaphor of the mirror (men use women to make themselves twice their size)--used here in its original form (I think we mentioned in in class about To the Lighthouse.). This quote, in particular: "For if she begins to tell the truth, the figure in the looking-glass shrinks, his fitness for life is diminished." (36) How lame of men to need to oppress women to inculcate their self-worth.

So yeah, awesome first two chapters, can't wait to read the rest.