I feel like crying tonight. I am missing both my book club (is there any worse admission from a literary mom?) and a gathering of some of my favourite women in the neighbourhood for what I know will be an ex-rated conversation after a few glasses of some yummy red wine.
And why am I missing these two events? Because I am too exhausted to move, I am on the verge of a major cold, I have 20 essays to mark, another friend who has just been diagnosed with breast cancer, an exam to prepare, a toddler bed to build, the first attack of the black crayola monster all over the beautiful yellow bedroom wall to clean, groceries to buy and at this hour I’ll have to hit the 24hr Dominion, bills verging on obscenely late to be paid, a living room covered in toys, a husband who usually pays no attention to the real estate market – all of a sudden keen on getting our real estate agent and me out looking at homes – cause that’s not too time consuming, and my eyes fall on one of my favourite books of all time and I think, if I only had a room, all to myself, where I could hide away and lock the door occasionally, all would be well!
Those of you of a certain age and stage may remember Claire Huxtable, recently named TV’s greatest mom by MSNBC.
She was the matriarch of the Huxtable family on the Cosby and show and the kind of mom I had always hoped to be – so far, not even close. One of my favourite episodes is called Claire’s Place (if you can find it on youtube, please let me know, I gave up in the 200’s) where Cliff builds Claire a room of her own. Demonstrating just how enduring good literature is, this concept of a room of one’s own was not fresh to the Cosby writer’s rather an homage to Virginia Woolf’s 1929 extended essay.
In 1928, successful Modernist writer, Woolf was invited to Newnham College, one of two women’s colleges at Cambridge, to discuss the topic of women and fiction. A Room of One’s Own, one of the original arguments for independence for women, is the printed collection of those talks. Woolf’s thesis examines the idea that a woman “needs money and a room of her own to write fiction.” This idea has been extrapolated by feminist literary critics over the years to include the concept that women need time and space of their own in order to learn, discover, appreciate and develop themselves.
For a formal essay, the book has great literary merit with the use of symbolism, motifs and some short plot narratives to keep the reader’s attention while fully nodding her head in agreement with Woolf’s theories.
In one chapter, Woolf creates a fictitious character in Judith Shakespeare, William’s twin, in order to demonstrate the gender inequities for women in general and writer’s specifically. Judith, who is more talented than William but robbed by society and its rules of an opportunity and outlet for those talents, commits suicide.
In another, Woolf discusses the careers of Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters and George Eliot. Eliot, a pseudonym for author Mary a Evans, who knew she could not get her fiction published as a woman, wrote Middlemarch, the first quintessential trashy summer novel in 1871. It is set in Middlemarch, the fictional town of Coventry in the 1830’s.. Although the story revolves around the unfortunate marriage of Dorothea Brooke, her friendship with Dr. Tertius Lydgate, the trials of his social climbing wife Rosamund, and all their friends and acquaintances, it is also a treatise of the limited power and subservient role of women in the early 1800’s. Their only access to money is through marriage and inheritance and any time spent alone would be considered suspect and cause for scandal.
Now that I am a mother/step-mother myself, I believe that what Woolf suggested through the plight of the women who wrote before her almost a hundred years ago is truer of mothers than anyone else. Sometimes a wife, a mother, a woman needs to be able to close a door behind her and just be. At the moment, my quiet place is in the laundry room and with the dryer running, I can’t even hear the fights over the computer and tv. At the moment I can’t fit a chair in there, but I can lean against the washer and breathe deeply for a few moments before I go back into the fray.
Here’s a little reading quiz I wrote for my Grade 12’s a few years ago, if you’re so inclined. Answers next week.
A Room of One’s Own
Reading Quiz
Fill in the blank:
1. “A woman must have ? and ? if she is to write fiction.”
2. The imaginary narrator of Woolf’s essay is ? (write any one answer)
3. Who is Shakespeare’s fictional sister?
4. At the fictional university of Oxbridge, where Woolf sets her essay, women are not allowed to a) b) c)
5. At the British Museum, the narrator realizes that most books about women are written by ?
6. Three reasons why Shakespeare’s imaginary sister cannot become a writer are:
7. The novel is the best form of literature for 19th century female writers such as Austen, the Brontes and George Eliot because they were trained in the art of?
8. Aphra Behn was the first woman writer to be ?
9. Why would “Chloe liked Olivia” be a good title for Chapter 5?
10. Samuel Taylor Coleridge said that a good mind is “_______________________”, meaning “it transmits emotion without impediment; it is naturally creative, incandescent and undivided.”
11. What is the first word of Chapter 1?