"A Room of One's Own" de Virginia Woolf

Résumé du document

Ce document est un commentaire de texte de qualité, complet et entièrement rédigé (en anglais), qui porte sur "A Room of One's Own" de Virginia Woolf.

Extraits

[...] But they seldom spare a word for what was eaten. It is part of the novelist's convention not to mention soup and salmon and ducklings, as if soup and salmon and ducklings were of no importance whatsoever, as if nobody ever smoked a cigar or drank a glass of wine. [...]

[...] Thus, the first three chapters of Woolf's A room of One's Own allow her to put her thesis in context and to put in fiction the thoughts of the author who leads the reader with her in her philosophical walks. The need for a personal space is then staged in the narrative by abrupt external interruptions - often the work of male protagonists (p.6 ‘he was a Beadle; I was a woman.') which prevents the narrator from continuing her reflection. [...]

[...] ‘A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction' : here are the words that summarize the thesis of Virginia Woolf in A Room of One's Own[1], published in 1929. This is a pamphlet in which the author demonstrates in several points the reasons for which a woman must possess a financial capital and a personal space to be able to write. This essay is a milestone in the history of feminist thinking, exposing the patriarchal restrictions imposed on women of the XXth century. [...]

[...] She then imagines what an author might look like writing about the inferiority of women.[7] The figuration of a furious man, with capricious and childlike behavior, is tasty and subversive; especially since Woolf uses the stereotype usually given to women that is the emotional, hysterical behavior. What's more, here is yet another narrative stage dug in the fictional prism that wraps this essay. Thus, Woolf proposes a ballad through the lucubrations of his mind, a reflection in motion that puts his thesis in situation. A room of One's Own is in a way the implementation of pedagogy by example. As Woolf points out at the beginning of chapter her ‘duty' is to propose a reflection on the subject 'woman and fiction'. [...]

[...] First of all, in order to defend her thesis, Virginia Woolf is setting a situation of writing. Indeed, she uses a fictionalised ‘I': Here then was I (call me Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael or by any name you please—it is not a matter of any importance) sitting on the banks of a river a week or two ago in fine October weather, lost in thought.[2] Here there is a subjective identity which stages the ‘I-narrative' in a wandering and wondering alter-ego. [...]