A Room of One’s own (3)

Chapter 3 Woolf begins this chapter by looking at historical sources in order to shed further light on the problem of women and fiction. She addresses herself specifically to the history of Elizabethan England, noting, "it is a perennial puzzle why no woman wrote a word of that extraordinary literature when every other man, it seemed, was capable of song or sonnet. What were the conditions in which women lived, I asked myself; for fiction, imaginative work that is, is not dropped like pebble upon the ground, as science may be; fiction is a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners" (41). Woolf reminds us that creative expression does not occur in a vacuum but is instead bound inextricably to human experience. She also suggests that the absence of women's fiction in a particular historical period is less an indication of a dearth of talent than a sign that women's experiences and knowledge were not valued.

Webs / Material circumstances She maintains that "these webs are not spun in mid-air by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in" (41). She examines women's living conditions from the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries and discovers that women were considered to be the property of their husbands. She also finds that it was legal for men in these times to beat and abuse their wives and daughters. She notes that the literary depictions of women in these centuries contrast sharply with the facts of their lives, as female characters in fiction were celebrated and deified while the real women of this time were routinely sold into marriage, locked up, and beaten.

His / tory When she attempts to find out any details about the day-to-day lives of these women, Woolf discovers that very little information exists. She points out that while we have access to records of famous women of the eighteenth century, the lives of women from earlier centuries remain shrouded in mystery. She explains her frustration by saying, "Here am I asking why women did not write poetry in the Elizabethan age, and I am not sure how they were educated; whether they were taught to write; whether they had sitting-rooms to themselves; how many women had children before they were twenty-one; what, in short, they did from eight in the morning till eight at night" (45). Woolf reinforces her premise that the lives of these women, which were obviously complex and real, have nevertheless been lost to history, in part because of the absence of female-authored fiction. She also reinforces the idea that seemingly insignificant daily activities have a profound influence on creative expression.

Judith Shakespeare she imagines what would have happened if Shakespeare had had an equally gifted sister, whom she calls Judith. She reminds us that Shakespeare received an education, got married, and then set off to London to make his fortune on the stage. She imagines Judith, in the meantime, forced to stay home with domestic chores, deprived of an education, furtively hiding any scribbling she might manage to set down. She then details the hardships Judith would have faced had she attempted to leave home in order to pursue her brother's line of work. Our narrator concludes this story by imagining that poor Judith would have been forced to take her own life in despair.

In the first place," she says, "to have a room of her own, let alone a quiet room or a sound-proof room, was out of the question, unless her parents were exceptionally rich" (51). She adds that women were similarly inhibited by the "enormous body of masculine opinion to the effect that nothing could be expected of women intellectually". And she considers the effect that this collective opinion would have had on the self-confidence of every girl..

Writing in anger Women and Fiction: Woolf reinforces her position that being born with a gift for writing is not enough to make one a great writer. According to her theory, one must have opportunity for education and life experience, a degree of social acceptance, and a mind unhampered by bitterness and fear. In other words, environmental factors are as important as innate talent. Woolf observes, "the mind of an artist, in order to achieve the prodigious effort of freeing whole and entire the work that is in him, must be incandescent, like Shakespeare's mind" (55). She adds that in Shakespeare's case his genius had driven out any thoughts of his own hardships, leaving no room for pettiness. She makes it clear that women must transcend their grievances against the injustice of their lives if they are ever going to be able to write anything to rival Shakespeare.