Economics in Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own

Woolf on the Economics of Gender Inequality The seeds of gender equality, however elusive such a thing may continue to be, were surely planted by the frustration of women confined to the roles crafted by longstanding patriarchy. Herein, women inclined toward any level of independent thought or transcendent desire were stunted by the obligations of sociological appropriateness. Women were strictly daughters, wives and mothers. Certainly, in a world were men pontificated abstractly, while affording little time for emotional intimacy with family, women were the cross-bearers of domestic responsibility and the perpetuation of love. There was little time or space beyond that in which a women could propose to be herself, thinking and acting upon her own desires. Virginia Woolf's work invited a new perspective of the individual woman both in times of male-dominated stagnancy and self-guided metamorphosis. One of Woolf's first watershed devices was the very simple assertion of a female protagonist, or as is the case in some of her most significant works, multiple female protagonists, whose willful uniqueness highlighted an otherwise dull and superficial universe. And yet, when asked to speak at length on this very subject of the female protagonist throughout history, Woolf would compile the essays making up A Room of One's Own to the basic premise that these have frequently been manifested under conditions of severe limitation. This was especially true when it was first published in 1929, a time which Woolf describes as having been defined by a preceding history of substantial gender-based economic inequality. At the heart of her discussion, Woolf makes the argument that women in fiction have been historically a poor fit for reflection of the ways in which actual women think or feel. Primarily, this is because women themselves have so consistently been excluded from the recording of history, both as author and as subject. The idea that the female has throughout human history been defined in the eyes of the opposite sex suggests a clear distortion that extends both to the portrayal and the impression that women themselves have no story to tell. This underscores the most important declaration of Woolf's discussion, which pertains to the obstructions that have detained women from the opportunity to tell this story with greater accuracy. She centers the who of her discussion "upon one minor point-a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction; and that, as you will see, leaves the great problem of the true nature of woman and the true nature of fiction unsolved." Here, Woolf cites the inherently unequal nature of society as it is precipitated by the absence of material power available to women. The notion that women could not be expected to make a living through the writing of fiction, magnified by the belief that a women should not be expected to work for a living in the first place, functions in Woolf's perspective as a clear impediment to the entrance of women into the field of literature. Referring to her initial point, this is a clear impediment to literary fiction's capacity to accurately portray the female figure. Woolf traces this experiences to something that we begin to understand as a socially enforced device of patriarchy. If power was defined by property, and women had neither, they might at best have been considered the property of a powerful man. As Woolf considers a history rife with instances of arranged marriages and women of ambition relegated to the quite confines of the home, she attaches this to a clear economic principle. Her discussion reflects on the idea of heredity, which of course feeds into the perpetuation of familial and cultural wealth. In something less feministic and more scrutinizing of her own gender, Woolf considers derisively those women who had previously helped to establish the egregious patter or patriarchy. She denotes that "at the thought of all those women working year after year and finding it hard to get two thousand pounds together, and as much as they could do to get thirty thousand pounds, we burst out in scorn at the reprehensible poverty of our sex. What had our mothers been doing then that they had no wealth to leave us? Powdering their noses? Looking in at shop windows? Flaunting in the sun at Monte Carlo?" Of course, there is no small degree of sarcasm in this line of question. Woolf is patently aware as she frequently notes that forces of irresistible and ingrained persistence dispatched women to behave thusly, and to take little consideration of opportunities for self-expression or self-betterment. But she decries this condition as one which has prevented even those women given the rare and unlikely chance for a room and the resources to produce insights there from to effectively depict the woman of the real world in fiction. This is because the author will have been deprived of so many access points with the real world that she can hardly be expected to properly channel these experiences into something more than vivid fictional speculation. To this point, there is something deeply psychological at hand in what Woolf explains of the female exclusion from the field, helping to illuminate for one of the first times in the literary or academic contexts really the inner-psyche of womankind. There is a dispossession of self in the absence of entitlement to money or property within which a women can be her own person, develop her perspective according to its own impulse rather than that foisted upon her by society and estimate herself as something more than an appendage of her husband. The very idea of their self-guided participation in the economy might have seemed, Woolf conjectures of the women who passed before her, pointless or inaccessible. She suggests, "every penny I earn, they may have said, will be taken from me and disposed of according to my husband's wisdom-perhaps to found a scholarship or to endow a fellowship in Balliol or Kings, so that to earn money, even if I could earn money, is not a matter that interests me very greatly. I had better leave it to my husband." The power balance between man and woman is fairly clear in this context and, in Woolf's opinion, proves an irreconcilable condition for the would-be female writer. And of course, for man, who may be inclined to view the female in a proprietary sense, the depictions in fiction may be presumed to be one-sided at best and reinforcing of the idealization and objectification of the woman. In either regard, the correlation between man's economic power and woman's sexual disadvantage becomes quite clear to us in Woolf's discussion. And herein lay the centering point of her discussion, that the existing depictions of women in literature are fundamentally and problematically bankrupt of realism. The economic exclusion of women from the world at large, and by an extension from participation in commercial literature, artistic expression, general education and philosophical discourse, would be complimented by a continuity of the treatment of women in fiction. Appropriately, the economic discourse precipitates our understanding of fiction as a field held as being open only to the earning potential of men. Therefore, in her own research on the subject of women in fiction, Woolf considered many of history's archetypal heroines and idealized women to understand their point of origin and that which perhaps these figures may have demonstrated about the female condition. Of course, this endeavor would be met with her expectant disappointment at the universality of male authorship in all matter relating to woman. She asks here, "why are women, judging from this catalogue, so much more interesting to men than men are to women? A very curious fact it seemed, and my mind wandered to picture the lives of men who spend their time in writing books about women; whether they were old or young, married or unmarried, red-nosed or hump-backed- anyhow, it was flattering, vaguely, to feel oneself the object of such attention." Again, Woolf's sarcasm rears its head here, as she unpacks the idea that men should be so preoccupied in shaping an image of women that conforms to the circumstances which a patriarchal society has manifested. In this regard, there is a damning economic symbiosis between the real subjugation of women and the images conjured of the fairer sex by their alleged admirers. Woolf demonstrates the woman of fiction and the woman of this point in history as both being concocted of male desires, ambitions and materialist conceits. Here, monetary wealth is tantamount to sexual, marital and intellectual subjugation. From the perspective of her time and place, Woolf sees something irreconcilable in the conditions facing women, especially in the quest to express themselves with literary honesty and accuracy. Today, there is continued relevance to this idea as women still grapple for equal pay in various lines of profession, where they struggle to obtain the same levels of authority as their male counterparts and where their vantage battles to gain respect in an artistic world accustomed to the male viewpoint. Woolf's claimed association between economics and gender inequality remains unfortunately pertinent today.