2. Jane
A Room of One’s Own starts very unusual: “But, maybe you will say, we asked you to talk about the women and the novel – what does it have to do with having A Room of One’s Own?” The first impression from this opening sentence is that, it already belongs to a conversation, which simply continues in the text. This is the first one in the series of stylistic and rhetorical choices that Woolf uses, directed towards the deterioration of the hegemony of the patriarchal model of thinking and writing. If we consider the fact that A Room of One’s Own is conceptualized upon the two lectures given in the mentioned women’s colleges in Cambridge, this opening statement as well as the tone of the whole text, differ drastically from the idea and the concept of the lecture itself, thus reminding much more of something else, namely – of a dialogue.
In other words, Woolf chooses to begin rhetorically with a theoretical purpose in it: by avoiding the “major duty of a lecturer” in her “lecture”, namely, to bestow “the grain of pure truth” to her audience in the one hour speech, that she would than, simply place somewhere on the shelves of her library, the author of this essay, deconstructs the concept of the lecturing itself, as it is founded in the patriarchal, university conventions. Her lecturing starts and continues to be a conversation (“among women”). She also protests by placing the “But” from the first sentence, in the mouth of the silent student’s audience, thus showing that the “lecturing” as a form of education is a one-way or maybe even a blind street.
Based upon the authoritative patriarchal structure where the “expert” dominates the “student”, the “lecturing” is a typical product of the “man’s” academy practice at a university such as Cambridge, in relation to which, Woolf immediately places herself very differently. In A Room of One’s Own, she finds and inaugurates new form of human relation based upon the model of woman’s discourse – that is, as a conversation among equal1F. This kind of strategy in the text, has of course its own motivation, which is in this case, a double one. By abolishing the “voice” of the unknown male professor, Woolf actually abolishes the “voice” of the Father, the “Victorian” Lesley Steven, who as a representative of the traditional humanism, has spoken on the language of the patriarchal hegemony, based upon the principle of power. The language of the “fathers” is just one among the orthodox symbolic systems, that Virginia Woolf refuses to accept, because she finds it very repressive. Thus, her feminist politic is primarily located in her textual practice, which is in this essay, directed exactly towards the deterioration of the logical or rational form of writing, a deterioration that happens deep inside, because the convention of “lecturing” has been taken over, simply and only to deconstruct the ideology which created it in the first place.
The idea of “conversation among equal” that Woolf offers with her rhetorical sentence in the very beginning of A Room of One’s Own, has its own realistic model. Woolf finds this model in Jane Ellen Harrison, that some define as the major character of this text. She was a historian of religions, classical anthropologist and one of the first educated women in England. Jane Harrison has been earning her living teaching at the man’s schools and in the Britain museum, for fifteen years. There, she has specially studied the Greek vases. Her studies analyzed the figures of the Olympian Greek Goods as some sort of patriarchal exchange of the matriarchal cults. However, “the great Jane Harrison” as Woolf used to call her, was most famous after her brilliant presentations, in which, according to her colleagues, her “lecture” was not conceptualized as a speech for the “grain of pure truth” but more as a drama. A drama in which the questions being asked and the search after the answers, was common for all the participants, as was the sharing of “emotions of justification and recognition”2F. Jane Harrison died in April 1928, but she entered A Room of One’s Own as a symbolic figure of a woman – artist and “marginist”, who erases the gap between herself and the audience, while having the personal drama of conceiving.
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1. See Jane Marcus, Virginia Woolf and the Language of Patriarchy, Indian University Press, 1987, 145-146
2. Marcus, 148