The presence of dissonance and harmony in Beethoven's Fifth Symphony is also reflected in Virginia Woolf's motif alluding to the fictive creation of "Shakespeare's sister" in the essay, "A Room of One's Own." While Woolf's voice creates a reality that is both dissonant and harmonious to her own life as a writer, the struggle for the female to be taken seriously as a writer in a male-dominated world becomes the main premise of the chapter. Woolf relates her research into women's lives during Shakespeare's times and creates a fictional character called Judith, who is Shakespeare's imaginary sister. Woolf argues that Judith would have been gifted as Shakespeare, but, "thwarted and hindered by other people, so tortured and pulled asunder by her own contrary instincts that she must have lost her health and sanity to a certainty." The story of Judith is tragic because she is not given the opportunity to express herself as an artistic genius, on par with her own brother's talent. The desire to express this genius becomes increasingly violent, as Judith ends up being beaten by her father for refusing to marry and runs away to become an actress. Finally, she ends up pregnant by the theatre's manager and killing herself. Woolf's voice throughout the chapter is angry yet contemplative of the state of mind of the artist, which demonstrates Woolf's dissonant and harmonious tone throughout the essay. The act of creation, of writing, she observes, is met with much indifference from the world. As Woolf states, the world "does not ask people to write poems and novels and histories; it does not need them." In fact, the act of creation harmonizes...
While women were epitomized by men, they were thought not to be capable of being artists, musicians or writers in men's eyes. This hostility towards women which Woolf describes in her essay seems contradictory to the actual representation of women during Shakespeare's times. Yet Woolf attempts to harmonize this idealism of women to her actual dissonant view of women as catalysts for genuine artist creation that could be described as "genius."
Beethoven's Fifth Symphony in C Minor strikes harshly to rouse the reader's attention, combining this dissonant energy with the melodious flow of the music. Similarly, Woolf also sets out to describe the balance of life as an artist, that not only is there the existence of a male mind, but the female mind must also be allowed to be expressed in society. This incandescent desire in "freeing the whole and entire of the work" speaks to the general theme present in Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, where the dissonance in harmonies frees the tension of balancing the various voices present in each movement. There is a release that Beethoven seeks in the end, which Woolf also seeks out for her female writers and, most of all herself. This "incandescent" desire is the dissonant voice present in both the works of Beethoven and Woolf, to tear down the walls of tradition, to defy classical forms and structures, so that the genius can be seen and not fit into a certain category but simply be what it is meant to be in the face of a world of indifference.
