Virginia Woolf's A Room Of One's Own

510 Words3 Pages
Can you imagine bearing the skill to describe an individual’s personality by merely looking at their house? Virginia Woolf embraces her unique ability of creating phenomenal symbolism in A Room of One’s Own regarding institutionalized sexism. As a female writer in a male dominated world, she was aware of society’s condemnation of women’s education. She describes the meals that were served at a male college and a female college. She compares the two meals through diction, tone and sentence structure, which transcribes women’s lack of educational opportunity. Much of "A Room of One's Own" is dedicated to an analysis of the patriarchal English society that has limited women's opportunity. Woolf reflects upon how men, the only gender allowed to keep their own money, have historically fed resources back into the universities and like institutions that helped them gain power in the first place; in contrast, the women's university the narrator stays at had to scrap together funds when it was chartered. Woolf compares the effect of the relative wealth of the male and female universities: the luxurious lunch at the men's college provokes pleasant intellectual banter, while the mediocre dinner at the female college hampers thought. Women are not even allowed in the library at the men's college without special permission, or to cross the lawn. Woolf stretches back to Elizabethan times to give a fictional-historical example of sexism: Judith Shakespeare, imagined sister of William, leads a tragic life of unrealized genius as society scorns her attempts to make something of her brilliant mind. Woolf traces such obstacles against women writers through the modern day; beyond her main treatment of money and privacy (see 500 Pounds and a Room of One's Own, above), she touches upon topics such as the masculine derogation of female books, subjects, and prose style. She goes to
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