Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf?

In a serendipitous literary irony, the name Virginia Woolf became part of the popular lexicon only after the 1962 play ‘Who is afraid of Virginia Woolf?’ Till then, few knew of this remarkable writer and fewer still, how influential she was in the cause of gender equality. An irony, because her book A Room of One’s Own, will endure long after that play is forgotten. A Room of One’s Own, published in 1929, centres on how patriarchy, in practice, conditions women to internalise a set of values, although male-centric, assumed as universal. Woolf’s importance is that she persuasively connects feminism to anti-fascism, to explain the origins of patriarchal violence, making the book perhaps the first modern primer on feminist politics. The title alone serves as a powerful metaphor, signifying not merely the declaration of political and cultural space for women, but the breaching of the boundaries set by men.

Born in 1882, Virginia Woolf was a leading light of the Bloomsbury Group of progressive writers, philosophers and artists in London. Home-schooled because she was a girl while her brothers went to university, Woolf addressed the question: Why does literary history in the early 20th century have such few examples of great women writers? The patriarchy and the prejudices of the time suggested that this was proof of the intellectual inferiority of women. Virginia Woolf disagreed. Instead, she argued, it had to do with the fact that over the centuries, across cultures, male-dominated society had systematically denied women ‘a room of one’s own’ — access to education, economic independence, and autonomous identity.

What might have happened, Woolf asks in a rhetorical question, had Shakespeare had a wonderfully gifted sister, called Judith. The answer: Any woman born with a great gift would have been so thwarted and hindered by other people, that quite simply, by her circumstance and society, she would have been a woman at strife against herself.

At a time when art was considered a province of the mind and had little to do with economic circumstances, Woolf was a pathbreaker highlighting how limits are placed on women even in their daily lives. Woolf’s narration of her experience at an Oxbridge college where she is refused access to the library because of her gender, and the opulence of her lunch at a men’s college relative to the austerity of her dinner at a women’s college provides the materialist argument: “Intellectual freedom depends upon material things”, an early example of cultural materialism.

The timeless relevance of the book is in the opening of the mind, and the resistance to intellectual closure; and its beauty, the luminescent writing and the quality of intimacy of a woman speaking to women. Woolf’s prose often borders on poetry, as much for the imagery as for the language. The technique of the shifting narrative personae to voice the argument, and her opening declaration “…Call me Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael or by any name you please, it is not a matter of any importance…” is brilliant, to say, the ‘I’ that a woman uses is only a convenient term for somebody who has no real being. Not much has changed since. Women continue to be rendered the mere instruments of the ends of others -- homemakers, caregivers, or bearers of a family’s wellbeing -- but never themselves.

Woolf’s metaphorical narrative often blurs the distinction between literary criticism and fiction, and reads like a novel in parts. Woolf examines both women in history and woman as a symbol, pointing to the wide chasm between women in the real world and ‘woman’ in the symbolic order, and I quote: “She pervades poetry from cover to cover; she is all but absent from history. She dominates the lives of kings and conquerors in fiction; in fact, she was the slave of any boy whose parents forced a ring upon her finger. Some of the most inspired words, some of the most profound thoughts in literature fall from her lips; in real life, she could scarcely spell, and was the property of her husband.”

Read this passage again using the present tense instead of the past, and it becomes clear that Woolf’s portrayal of the effects of prejudice on the everyday lives of women is relevant in our own times. To paraphrase Virginia Woolf, women “have served all these centuries as looking glasses reflecting the figure of man at twice his natural size.” Woolf’s analysis of the patriarchal system of domination -- that the public and private worlds are inseparably connected, and the tyrannies and servilities of one are the tyrannies and servilities of the other -- provides a powerful framework to understand social groups suffering the effects of prejudice around us, which we choose to ignore. For this reason alone, one must read A Room of One’s Own.

(Gurucharan Gollerkeri the former civil servant enjoys traversing the myriad spaces of ideas, thinkers, and books)