Virginia Woolf and Modernism Essay

A Room of One’s Own

In chapter 3 of A Room of One’s Own, Woolf begins by turning to history in an attempt to find information on the relationship between women and literature, however, she fails and employs fiction to tell her story. The lack of actual historical information is a testament to the treatment accorded to women in the 16^th century and this is an element of modernity that Woolf uses; the oppression of women in the Elizabethan age.

Woolf finds very little historical material on the legal rights of women in the said period and despite this, she gives her readers a detailed analysis of the opposing roles to which a woman living in the 16^th century encountered, and which have been erased by modernity. She accomplishes this by pooling together the little historical material available and merging it with fictional works. She asserts that chauvinist assumptions would have been internalized, proving that oppression of this form comes from both internal and external factors. Woolf writes “It would have been impossible, completely and entirely, for any woman to have written the plays of Shakespeare in the age of Shakespeare.” (Woolf, chapt. 3).

To illustrate her point on the oppression of women, Woolf uses an imaginary person known as Judith Shakespeare, William Shakespeare’s brother. Judith is as talented, possibly as her brother, but gets very little education. Even though she is her father’s favorite child, her family expects her to follow the conventional culture that leaves her with little space to develop her talent. The quest to follow her passion finally sees her run from home and her attempts to go into acting are met with negativity and scorn. A theater manager takes her in but impregnates her and she eventually kills herself.

Judith Shakespeare’s life is a generalization of the life of a woman with Shakespeare’s ability at the time, these have however changed, thanks to modernity.

Three Pictures and The Fascination of the Pool

Woolf further promotes the theme of modernism in The Three Pictures through the concept that one of the goals of modernism is to open our minds to newer ways of viewing the world. She writes that although we can see pictures from the words that they create, these same pictures can deceive us. She cautions us from the beginning that we are walking on a risky ground for it is unavoidable that we can be ‘quite wrong’ in our interpretation of pictures (Woolf, para. 1). The first picture captivates our mind and generates joyful thoughts, the second, accompanied by an unexplained shriek, interrupts the harmony and compels us to doubt our judgment and we start to question whether the beauty that we seek to take in and comprehend is just superficial. We fool ourselves and believe it is “far more likely that this calm and content and goodwill lay beneath the surface than anything treacherous, sinister” (Woolf, para. 9). Woolf informs us that beauty is not necessarily found in that which looks beautiful.

In The Fascination of the Pool, Woolf expresses the sense of modernity in the same context as stated above, i.e. that of opening our minds to newer ways of viewing the world. She gives us a view of the world further than the pool, the water in the pool represents the mind for it is not an inactive reflector of the world but obtains its identity from the reflecting surface. She writes “Many, many people must have come there alone, from time to time, from age to age, dropping their thoughts into the water, asking it some question, as one did oneself this summer evening.” (Woolf, para. 4). This illustrates the pool as the inheritor of ages of thoughts from many voices which, changed in this pool, function ironically in a realm aspect beyond our understanding.

Conclusion

From Woolf’s works, I learned a couple of fresh ideas of looking at life. For example, from The Three Pictures, we should not give meaning to the things in this world at face value for there is always a hidden, deeper meaning attached that we can only understand once we open up our minds to new ideas.

Works Cited

Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. New York: Harcourt Inc., 1929.

Woolf, Virginia. The Fascination of the Pool. New York: Harcourt Inc., 1985.

Woolf, Virginia. The Three Pictures. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989.