The Importance of Money
For the narrator of A Room of One’s Own,
money is the primary element that prevents women from having a room
of their own, and thus, having money is of the utmost importance.
Because women do not have power, their creativity has been systematically
stifled throughout the ages. The narrator writes, “Intellectual
freedom depends upon material things. Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom.
And women have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely,
but from the beginning of time . . .” She uses this quotation to
explain why so few women have written successful poetry. She believes
that the writing of novels lends itself more easily to frequent
starts and stops, so women are more likely to write novels than
poetry: women must contend with frequent interruptions because they
are so often deprived of a room of their own in which to write.
Without money, the narrator implies, women will remain in second
place to their creative male counterparts. The financial discrepancy
between men and women at the time of Woolf’s writing perpetuated
the myth that women were less successful writers.
The Subjectivity of Truth
In A Room of One’s Own, the narrator
argues that even history is subjective. What she seeks is nothing
less than “the essential oil of truth,” but this eludes her, and
she eventually concludes that no such thing exists. The narrator
later writes, “When a subject is highly controversial, one cannot
hope to tell the truth. One can only show how one came to hold whatever
opinion one does hold.” To demonstrate the idea that opinion is
the only thing that a person can actually “prove,” she fictionalizes
her lecture, claiming, “Fiction is likely to contain more truth
than fact.” Reality is not objective: rather, it is contingent upon
the circumstances of one’s world. This argument complicates her
narrative: Woolf forces her reader to question the veracity of everything
she has presented as truth so far, and yet she also tells them that
the fictional parts of any story contain more essential truth than
the factual parts. With this observation she recasts the accepted
truths and opinions of countless literary works.
