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Summary
Woolf has been asked to speak on the topic of Women and Fiction. Her thesis is that "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction." This thesis has a limited scope, she admits—one that "leaves the great problem of the true nature of woman and the true nature of fiction unsolved." Yet she extends the hope that her reflections may shed at least some light on those questions as well. The essay is designed as an explanation of how Woolf arrived at her thesis. To present this argument, she says, she must take a detour through fiction: "I propose making use of all the liberties and licenses of a novelist, to tell you the story of the two days that preceded my coming here—how, bowed down by the weight of the subject which you have laid upon my shoulders, I pondered it, and made it work in and out of my daily life." With this introduction, the narrative portion of the essay begins.
The narrator sits on the banks of a river at "Oxbridge" (a fictional university meant to suggest Oxford and Cambridge) pondering the question of women and fiction. She represents her musings metaphorically in terms of fishing: "thought... had let its line down into the stream" of the mind, where it drifts in the current and waits for the tug of an idea. As soon as she gets a bite, however, she is interrupted by the approach of the Beadle, a university security guard who enforces the rule by which women are not allowed to walk onto the grass. She scurries back to her proper place on the gravel path, remarking that while "no very great harm" had been done, she had lost her "little fish" of an idea.
As she revels in the tranquility and beauty of her surroundings, the narrator remembers an essay by Charles Lamb about revisiting Oxbridge. She is inspired to view the manuscript in the library, only to be told that "ladies are only admitted to the library if accompanied by a Fellow of the College or furnished with a letter of introduction." The library is fortress-like—impermeable and indifferent—in stark contrast to the narrator's own vulnerability. "Never will I ask for that hospitality again," she vows in anger. Distracted by the sound of organ music, the she watches as a cross-section of the university population assembles for a service in the chapel. She is struck by the insularity of the academic setting, seeing the university as a kind of laboratory or museum and its inhabitants as odd specimens who have no place in regular life. Soon they have all gone inside, however, and she remains outside, weighed down with the feeling her own exclusion.
The narrator then reflects on the history of the university, thinking in particular of the materials, labor, and money upon which it was founded and maintained. The clock strikes, interrupting this train of thought. She describes the elaborate lunch that was served at the college, where the flood of wine and the dessert and the wealth of good company create an overwhelming sense of abundance and optimism. "And thus by degrees was lit, half-way down the spine, which is the seat of the soul, ...the profound, subtle, and subterranean glow which is the rich yellow flame of rational conversation."
Her attention is then distracted by the sight of "a cat
without a tail," which looks odd and out of place in these opulent
surroundings. The sight of "that abrupt and truncated animal" prompts
her to as sense that something is lacking in the lunchtime atmosphere and
conversation. To answer the question of that lack, the narrator shifts
the scene to a similar luncheon party, before the war, in similar rooms—"but
different." She speculates about the change in the kind of conversations
people had before World War I, and the kind of poetry they wrote,
and observes that a drastic change has taken place. The romantic
views of a
The narrator describes a meal at Fernham, which compares but poorly with the grand luncheon earlier in the day. "The lamp in the spine," she writes, "does not light on beef and prunes." Everything looks slightly less hopeful from this perspective, and we see that with reduced privilege comes a corresponding atrophy of one's sense of power and possibility—"that is the dubious and qualifying state of mind that beef and prunes at the end of the day's work breed between them." Conversation is gossipy rather than profound, and the narrator retires to the room of her friend Mary Seton with a vague feeling of discontent. They discuss the founding of the women's college, which involved a arduous and often discouraging effort to raise sufficient financial and political support. The picture contrasts sharply with the history of male universities, which have been continually and generously supported for centuries.
Why have women have always been so poor, the narrator wonders, thinking about how different things would have been "if only Mrs. Seton and her mother and her mother before her had learnt the great art of making money and had left their money" for the education of their daughters. She is forced to concede, however, that a great sacrifice would have been required: "There would have been—that was the snag in the argument—no Mary." Plus, law and custom conspired to prevent those women from having any legal property rights at all; they were themselves considered property. The chapter's closing reflections are on "the urbanity, the geniality, and the dignity which are the offspring of luxury and privacy and space," the effect of poverty on the mind, and particularly "the effect of tradition and of the lack of tradition upon the mind of a writer."
Commentary
Woolf elects not to respond to the problem of "women and fiction" by delivering pat remarks on famous women writers, hoping instead to explore the issue in deeper ways. She recognizes that her chosen approach is such that she might "never be able to come to a conclusion" or distill "a nugget of pure truth" for her listeners to carry home. "When a subject is highly controversial," she explains, "one cannot hope to tell the truth. One can only show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does hold." By choosing fiction as the medium for her argument, Woolf continues to thematize the complex network of relationships between truth and fiction, facts and lies, and opinions and emotions. "Fiction is likely to contain more truth than fact," she explains. "Lies will flow from my lips, but there may be some truth mixed up with them."
The "I" who narrates the story is not Woolf—it matters little what name we give her, Woolf insists—and yet her experiences and thoughts are to provide the background and argument for Woolf's thesis. Already, the narrative situation illustrates one of Woolf's fundamental aesthetic principles: Art should have a kind of "incandescence" in which everything that is purely personal burns away, leaving something like the "nugget of pure truth" to which Woolf has referred. The imagery of light and fire that is already accumulating in this chapter are meant to suggest this kind of aesthetic purification. Woolf's aesthetic argument will be developed more fully as the essay continues.
The orientation here, however, is materialist and social, and Woolf's thesis—that "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction"—announces that focus in no uncertain terms. What are the basic material and social conditions in which aesthetic achievement becomes a realistic possibility? By addressing this question, she hopes to situate the problem of women and fiction in an objective and historicized framework—in rejection of a theoretical tradition founded on the assumption that women are naturally inferior to men. Woolf's argument constantly returns to the concrete material details of the situations she describes: the food that was eaten, the money that was spent, the comfort of the accommodations, and the demands on people's time. Her strategy is designed to convince the reader of the deep relevance of these physical conditions for the possibility of intellectual and creative activity.
As Woolf describes her narrator's thoughts on women and fiction, she emphasizes the role of interruptions in the reflective process. By dramatizing the effects of these interruptions, Woolf bolsters her argument that a private room is a basic requirement for creative work. The fact that women have not historically been granted space or leisure for uninterrupted thinking is, in Woolf's view, a determining factor in the history of their literary achievements. Intelligence, at least in the model of Charles Lamb, works by "wild flash[es] of imagination" or the "lightning crack of genius"—insights which nevertheless take time to gestate. Yet time and time again, just as our narrator seems to be on the verge of an insight of this sort, her thinking is cut off—usually by an authority figure trying to keep her in her place. Where a man would have been given free rein, the narrator is restricted to a narrow path on the Oxbridge campus. Nor is she permitted to enter the college library. These obstacles symbolize the effects of an educational culture that radically restricts the scope of a woman's intellectual exposure. Woolf identifies the fact of being denied access—whether to buildings or ideas—as another type of infringement on the freedom of the female mind. This exclusion is a more radical kind of interruption, one that disturbs not just a single thought or reverie, but the life-long developmental of an individual or the historical development of an intellectual tradition.
