Log #5

A Room of One's Own

Virginia Woolf

     I read this book these days. To be honest, A Room of One's Own is so difficult to me that I cannot fully understand Virginia Woolf's language. Therefore, what I write in this log is the meager understanding to this book of mine.

     Virginia Woolf indicated that a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction. She created a character Mary, who wants to figure out why women cannot write down fantastic fiction. Mary finds that as a woman, she is not allowed to step on the turf and enter the library. She is discriminated due to her identify as a female. Imagining that Shakespeare had a sister who was gifted like her talented brother, what would happen? There would not be another genius Shakespeare, but a despised corpus buried at the cross-roads outside the Elephant and Castle. Women wanting to compose would receive the following comment, "A woman’s composing is like a dog’s walking on his hind legs. It is not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all." Women wanting to write fiction needed to have a pseudonym such as George Eliot and Currer Bell. Therefore, Mary finds that women wanting to write should have money, which gives them confidence and independence, and gets rid of hatred and bitterness. Besides, a woman needs a room with a lock to assure the power to think for herself.

     This situation has changed now. Virginia Woolf mentioned in the book that several years before, women hadn't been given a vote, but since 1919, they had the right. Likewise, when Virginia Woolf wrote this book, she thought that without financial support and individual privacy, women couldn't write fiction freely. However, in modern society, females can present their works with no restriction. The society is changing, and maybe some problems such as gender pay gap, women's education in third countries, sexual harassment in workplaces, and other gender discrimination cases could soon be solved in near future. Even though we never need to pursue money and our own room in order to become a writer, we still need them to become people we like (or become a successful woman, a respectable person). We need the confidence which can be brought by money or something else; we need the power to think for ourselves instead of being exhausted because of identities as a wife, as a daughter, and as a woman who should be gentle. I hope that one day every woman can cherish herself and be proud as a female. (Of course, men can be proud as females, too.)