3. Merry
In the first chapter of A Room of One’s Own, we find the author’s second important rhetorical choice: by rejecting the rational and logical argumentation of facts for her subject “the women and the novel”, Woolf on the contrary decides to “obtain the whole freedom and the rights that she, as novelist has”. She does it, only to show the “drift of the thoughts” that made her realize, that a woman must have A Room of One’s Own and 500 pounds per year, to be able to write novels. By deciding to accept the novelist’s freedom, she accepts the fiction:
“There is no need for me to emphasize that this, what I am about to describe, does not actually exist; Oxbridge is a fiction; so is Fernam; “I” is only an appropriate expression for someone that does not really exist. Lies will run down from my lips, but there might be some truth in it; it is up to you, to seek for that truth and to decide if there is some part of it, worth keeping”.
Making a parody out of the cultural passivity that the Western culture (the culture in general) is imposing on the women, the lecturer/narrator of A Room of One’s Own, by refusing to give over “the grain of the pure truth”, decides to use a radical model, namely, to describe the personal intellectual process, the personal approach of getting closer to the truth. At this point, Woolf’s stylistic choice is consciously guided towards blurring the cognitive range of the facts, thus implying that the historical facts, especially those from the history of the woman – are not what they seem to be. Instead, she sees statements, created upon the power that the political structures have on the culture, statements that could fail just as easily as they were praised to become dogmas3F. The fiction is not a final choice, though. Moreover, the coherency of the fictious “I” of the narrator, the “I” that needs to tell the “story” of how it prepared its speech regarding the women and the novel – is being questioned. Woolf does not omit to destruct that coherent romanesque subject by placing behind her “I”, a composite woman’s figure; “(…) call me Merry Beton, Merry Seton, Merry Carmichael, or any other way you want to call me (…)”. The identity of that figure is so to speak, mobile, fluid, not fixed. Merry is of course, just one among the many allusions – keys in the text that has very complex roots; these are actually four girls that accompany the Queen Merry of Scotland in a very old English ballad. Woolf masks the four of them in her own narration. The virginity, the youth and the freedom of this composite figure do not only have a symbolic meaning in the text. Moreover, its fluidity and the unfixed character imply some sort of gender fluidity, which could also easily be seen from the aspect of the current postmodern concepts.
4. Let us praise the unknown women
It is clear to notice from the first chapter of A Room of One’s Own, the opposition of two worlds. The narrator is first fishing in a river in a very pastoral, idyllic atmosphere. Next in roll, is the visit to the university which turns out to be an unsuccessful one, because of the choleric university clerk, keeper of the strict order of the male’s culture, who does not let the narrator (because she is a woman) inside the Oxbridge library to find the works of Milton and Tackeray. “The pastoral” is opposed to the miserable order at the university, just as the further description of the student’s feast at Oxbridge is juxtaposed with the description of the moderate women’s dinner, who are students at Fernam. “(…) and, thinking of the security and the well-being of the one sex and the poverty and unsafety of the other, as well as of the influence of the tradition and its absence in the mind of the writer, I finally though that it is about time to fold the wrinkled skin of the day (…).” The allusion is more than clear; Woolf dramatizes the importance of the material context for the education and the culture, and with it, as K. Simpson will notice, she anticipates the writing of the Marxist’s feminist critic.
In the second chapter, the context of space is being changed. The narrator speaks out from London, the center of the British Empire, or more precise, form the library of the British museum. The result from the study on the subject “women and the novel” is more than defeating; the library shelves are full of books from men that have been scientifically proving the women’s inferiority throughout centuries. The scientific “objectivity” of the “raging professors” has actually helped the narrator to realize the relation between the economic dependence and the psychological autonomy of the woman, and – nothing else, no truth, no “essential oils” will be the subject of her future lectures. The library space itself is a very frustrating one, so the narrator withdraws home, back to her own room, her own library. Symbolically, this new space implies new approach towards the subject. To the chronology of the frozen woman’s power of expression, offered by the professors X and Y (Woolf of course subtracts the names of those famous professors on purpose, which can be understood as the one among the series of subversive narrative choices; intellectual decapitalisation of the male’s mind is a necessary condition to enter the new sphere of cultural interests), the narrator opposes the small, pure, yet worth chronology of the woman’s letter, which stands on the margins of the literature and history. In his own room, step by step, the narrator is discovering, or maybe even creating the new reading interests.
Creating this new brilliant parabola of Judith Shakespeare, the imagined Shakespeare’s sister, as a tragically, symbolic figure of a woman who is a culture’s victim, not only does Woolf ruins the myth of the “uneducated genius”, but she even unshaped the mechanisms of the social repression that keep the woman away from producing a culture. The fact that Judith “kills herself one winter night” carrying a child inside, is an extension of the picture of “untamed poet’s heart, captured and entangled inside a woman’s body”. It is also metaphorically announcing the painful history of the women that had the courage to write; Lady Vinchly, the crazy Margaret Cavendish, Afra Bent… The list of the satanized ones is long, and the forms of Satanism have changed through centuries. On the other hand, these women had no tradition to rely upon, and if you are a woman, as Woolf says, than you are thinking through your mother. That is why, Woolf’s narrator, places his list opposite of that one of Milton, Pope, Gray, Sterne, Tackeray or even de Quincy. Moreover, that little something that the daughters earn from their literate mothers – mostly as readers that is – points out the constitutive power of the sexes in the new textuality.
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3. Catharine R. Stimpson “Woolf’s Room, Our Project; The Building of Feminist Criticism” in The Future of Literary Theory, New York, Routledge, 1989, 129-143