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.
