A room to yourself

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A Room of One 's Own is a 1929 essay by the British writer Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), which received great acclaim during her lifetime and is now one of the most widely read texts in the world belongs to the women's movement . The essay combines theses on feminism and gender difference with those on literary history and poetics . In German translation he was entitled A room for himself alonefirst published in 1978, translated by Renate Gerhardt. 2001 saw the publication of Ein Eigene Zimmer , translated by Heidi Zerning , and 2012 saw the publication of Ein Zimmer für sich einlone, translated into German by Axel Monte .

Creation, form and effect

The author Virginia Woolf came from a wealthy intellectual family who had numerous contacts with writers . As a teenager she experienced the Victorian restrictions on girls and women, but by the time she wrote her essay A Room of One's Own she was already one of the most respected cultural figures in her language area as a woman and played a central role in the Bloomsbury Group . The text of the essay is based on two lectures that Woolf gave in October 1928 at Girton College and Newnham College - two institutions of the renowned University of Cambridge . These colleges were the first in England to be founded in 1869 and 1871 exclusively for the study of women, with the male professors of the main house at Cambridge going to lecture at the 'ladies' site.

A Room of One's Own
Vanessa Bell , 1929
Dust jacket for the Hogarth Press book edition

Link to the picture
(Please note copyrights )

Due to the length, the lectures could not be read out in full. In the months that followed, Woolf compiled them into a lengthy essay to be published in book form. In March 1929, a shorter, less polished version appeared in The Forum magazine under the title Women and Fiction . The first edition was published on October 24, 1929 by the " avant-garde " London publishing house Hogarth Press , founded by Virginia and her husband Leonard Woolf in 1917 . In addition, 600 copies were printed, signed by Virginia Woolf. At the same time, an American edition was published by Harcourt Brace & Co in New York. According to her biographer and nephew Quentin Bell , the book sold "extraordinarily well" and earned her kind letters from her regular readers. The essay is "most revealing to anyone interested in Virginia's life. Because in 'A Room of One's Own' you can hear Virginia speaking.” Kindler's New Literature Lexicon rated the work, which is aimed at a “female audience”, as “entertaining” bringing together fact and fiction and stimulating “one's own reflection”.

Indeed, it is here that Woolf expresses very clearly her views on the subject of "Women and Literature" on which she was asked to speak. In addition, the essay is also instructive for her own writing; Woolf formulates a number of tasks that literature must fulfil, equally for women and men. Because it does not differentiate according to gender in terms of "creative potential" and the literary task. In many places, Woolf reflects on what it means to write, to narrate, to approach a topic. She leaves the speaking to the narrator , one of Queen Mary Stuart 's "four Marys" . (The "Four Marys" is taken directly from a Scottish ballad sung in the first person by Mary Hamilton on the eve of her execution). This trick shows that she doesn't just want the essay to be understood as a personal opinion, but as social criticism, an attitude that is expressed on behalf of many women in history.

A Room of One's Own is one of the fundamental texts of the women's movement, which is received very frequently. Virginia Woolf's reputation as a major 20th-century author is also based on this essay. Along with Three Guineas from 1938, it is one of the basic works of feminism. The precise description of the discrimination or even exclusion of women in the university sector made clear the need for academic women's and gender research in order to investigate the mechanisms that cause the imbalance in education, power and income. Not uniformly rated in literary criticism , the essay is sometimes described as brilliant because of its rhetorical form . The author in Kindler's new literature lexicon (1992) sums it up:

"With her witty polemics and her convincing conclusions, Woolf also justified the study of the literary tradition of women and an expanded canon formation ."

Sociological-historical classification

The treatise was written in the late 1920s , at a time when working as a writer was becoming increasingly common for women in England. This did not mean that they had equal chances of success as their male counterparts - but middle-class women who wrote literary works or pursued science began to be recognized.

The Married Women's Property Acts were passed in England in 1870 and 1882, allowing women to own property. In 1919, women gained universal suffrage and were free to choose their profession. Virginia Woolf herself benefited from this new freedom. After the end of the First World War , like many others, she registered a "change" in the general mood brought about by the new freedoms of women , but was aware of her historically unique privileged position. Like many of her fellow writers, she saw herself as a feminist and pioneer of female literature and, following Wolfgang Karrer and Eberhard Kreutzer (1989) , linked aspects of literary sociology (“author sociology”) and aesthetic principles of women’s artistic approaches. Her essay is aimed directly at the young generation of women, among whom she wanted to create awareness of their historical situation and their tasks in the emancipation movement . Their goal, however, was not difference, but, in addition to the elimination of disadvantages, equality through " androgynous " rapprochement between men and women.

contents

The printed version is divided into six chapters; the following summary of the most important contents and theses does not follow this classification, but is arranged thematically. Woolf begins her analysis with a fictional, highly gifted literary figure - William Shakespeare's sister - and describes the obstacles she would have faced simply because of the fact that women were culturally, socially and economically disadvantaged in history.

Your own room

The essay refers explicitly to the social circumstances mentioned. As a result, Woolf had to meet two conditions in order for women to be able to produce “great literature”: “five hundred (pounds) a year and a room of their own”. £500 wasn't a very large sum, but it was enough to make ends meet. Material security is the central requirement of the essay, for it meant independence from husbands or handouts . This claim was very important to Woolf; it runs through her life as well as through her literary work. Virginia Woolf herself had enjoyed the luxury of her own room since 1904, when her family moved to a house in Bloomsbury after the death of her father . It was not until 1926 that her self-earned income exceeded the £500 mark.

In addition to material security, a separate room for creative work was essential for Woolf, because until the late 19th century women were given almost no privacy due to their responsibilities in the house. Few had the privilege of spending a few hours a day undisturbed to write. For thousands of years, for example in Greek antiquity ( oikos ), the house was considered the room for women, while the world outside belonged to men. But even in this space, in which the woman had influence - which she often left only with permission and accompanied - she was not entitled to a room of her own. The "own room" is on the one hand a " metaphor for privacy", but it is also a concrete place.

"Women have sat in closed rooms for millions of years, so that even the walls are now permeated by their creative power." The women's rooms can and must therefore become the subject of literature. When Woolf speaks of the "chambers" and "caves" which the "torch" of literature must illuminate, this also includes the "soul", the whole of life; the countless everyday experiences, dreams, thoughts, moments lost forever without the possibility of writing.

The metaphor of the "room of one's own" has several dimensions, which Woolf formulates or indicates in the text:

  1. A separate space within the house in the sense of private ownership; material independence
  2. personal privacy; mental independence
  3. Only the androgynous soul with male and female parts makes literary genius possible
  4. A separate discursive space in history ; the right to a share in the field of cultural production.

The two colleges

Woolf begins her text with a fictional walk across the campus of Oxbridge - Oxbridge is portmanteau for the exclusive universities of Oxford and Cambridge . The female character is prevented from walking across the lawn and is denied access to the library. This already addresses the first institutions to which women were denied access: science and the world of books. This university is said to be "spirit, absolved of all contact with reality (unless you set foot on the lawn again)" - but the restricted access also proves that this sanctuary of the spirit is subject to the prevailing social regimentation.

Afterwards she is invited to a dinner party; the sumptuous meal demonstrates that the male-dominated university stands on golden foundations. The second dinner takes place at the fictional women's college "Fernham"; here you spoon thin soup from simple plates. The narrator laments "the shameful poverty of our sex"; the women's colleges funded by donations could not look back on generations of wealthy female patrons like their traditional male counterparts.

Since the education of young women was particularly important to Virginia Woolf, the scenes in the two colleges directly address the situation of the listeners and readers. As the female normality of an unmarried woman, they were familiar with rather poorly paid jobs: in raising children, in nursing or in journalistic odd jobs.

Female Literary History

The difference between the sexes is mainly conceptualized in material terms, but Woolf also describes a difference in tradition: every male writer could look back on a long line of role models; Women, on the other hand, don't. The narrator thinks of "the security and prosperity of one sex, and the poverty and insecurity of the other, and the effect of tradition, or lack of tradition, on the mind of a writer".

She invents a sister of William Shakespeare , the equally talented Judith Shakespeare , and shows what it would have been like for a gifted writer in the 16th century: she is mocked, turned away from the theater, finally becomes pregnant and, out of desperation, takes her own life. The tragic fictional biography is representative of many female authors in literary history before 1900.

In her essay, Woolf calls for research into female literary history. She herself had been a literary critic in The Times Literary Supplement since 1904 . In A Room of Her Own , she lists a number of women authors, paying tribute to Margaret Cavendish , Dorothy Osborne , Aphra Behn , Emily Brontë , Christina Rossetti , Jane Austen , and her contemporary Marie Stopes , who wrote under the pen name Mary Carmichael . However, one notices all of them - with the exception of Jane Austen - the oppression, the pressure to conform and the anger that distorts their lyrics. This judgment is not shared by mainstream feminist literature. According to Woolf, outstanding literature must be free from partisanship . Only through a material improvement in the situation of women can they, too, reach the poetic “white heat” of the creative spirit. According to Woolf, political art cannot suffice, says the English literary history published by Hans Ulrich Seeber in 1991, because it confuses “propaganda with the artistic interpretation of the totality of life.”

Woolf also makes demands on contemporary female writing, decades before the theory of écriture feminine : women should "write how women write, not how men write", namely from the perspective of the woman who poetically portrays the "female world experience". The subject of this literature should be women, their experiences and reflections, not female characters who are only there to drive men into fights of jealousy; rather, literature needs descriptions of women as they really are, their everyday actions, thoughts, relationships with each other and with men. One must make “the accumulation of life that has never been described” the material of literature; light a torch "in that spacious chamber where no one has yet been".

Woolf tried to meet this requirement with the numerous female characters in her novels. The "extensive chamber" of the female living space, which has already been mentioned above, was actually almost "undiscovered land" in terms of literature at that time (apart from the great novels by Austen and Brontës or Theodor Fontane 's female characters Effi Briest , Frau Jenny Treibel and others).

Since then, feminist literary studies have taken account of the demand for research into the share of women in literary history. More and more female authors are being rediscovered; Encyclopedias and biographies open up the female part of literary history, which had largely been forgotten until Woolf's time. Woolf herself has been and is widely recognized as a great modernist writer and is often compared to Marcel Proust and James Joyce .

The demand for the rediscovery of literary tradition by women writers was also recognized. The "sisterhood" or the ancestral gallery of the literary "mothers" should finally be able to replace or complete that of the "fathers". The character of Judith Shakespeare has also developed a life of its own in women's literature. It is possible that Woolf knew at least the title of the light novel Judith Shakespeare (2 vols., Leipzig: Tauchnitz 1884) by William Black (1841–1898). Usually, however, this figure is interpreted from Woolf's biographical situation, for Shakespeare was for every English-language writer of the time - and clearly for them - the greatest father figure in literature.

The patriarchy

Women are always only the subject of literature, the spokeswoman notes: "Are you aware that you are perhaps the most discussed animal in the universe?" The British Library , the national memory of Great Britain, is full of writings written about women by authors who openly or secretly hate women; the narrator imagines an author 'suffering from a feeling that drove him to prick the paper with his pen, as if in writing he were killing a noxious insect'. Patriarchy is omnipresent; the world full of angry men who need woman only as a mirror - a mirror "with the magical and uplifting power to reflect the figure of man twice as large". What plagues her is actually the fear of losing her own inflated self-esteem – when women emancipate themselves, men lose their mirror.

The narcissism thesis is due to psychoanalysis ; later it was very popular in the women's movement and in psychoanalytic literature and was often repeated in a similar form, but also sharply criticized.

The androgyny thesis

A perfect writer, Woolf explains in the sixth and final section of the essay, must be androgynous , that is, he must achieve a "natural merging" of his masculine and feminine sides in his mind. It is as if "there are two sexes in the mind corresponding to the two sexes in the body, and they too must be united in order to attain perfect satisfaction and bliss." Purely "male" spellings are boring and dead; the great writers, beginning with Shakespeare, were all androgynous.

This postulate is also controversial in the reception. Modern literary studies hold back with theses about the psyche of the authors, and numerous authors of women's literature reject this claim. Similar to Virginia Woolf is found in Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex .

For her essay, Woolf paused work on the novel Orlando , an expression of her love affair with Vita Sackville-West . Its most important theme is "cheerful androgyny"; the title character lives multiple lives in successive epochs, changing gender from age to age. A private room is therefore often related to Orlando and the subject of gender identity .

sexuality

In A Room of Her Own , as in many of Virginia Woolf's novels, there are allusions to lesbian love . At the time, court cases were taking place in Britain over homosexual scenes in contemporary literature. The trial of Radclyffe Hall , author of the lesbian-tinged novel The Well of Loneliness , took place in Woolf's immediate circle.

Virginia Woolf held Sigmund Freud in high esteem and published his writings in English translation through his own publishing house, the Hogarth Press . So it's not surprising that she uses some "Freudian" imagery in A Room of Her Own . During the opening lunch scene, the guests suddenly see a tailless Manx cat . At the end of the meal, the conversation turns back to the cat, casually stating, "It's funny what a difference a cock makes." This symbol was often taken to represent penis envy and inferiority complexes . In more recent criticism, however, the image has been interpreted differently: it points to the difference in power and financial means that is linked to gender. A little later in the text there is talk of a poet whose blossoming talent is crushed by her (patriarchal) environment, "as if a giant cucumber had spread over all the roses and carnations in the garden and suffocated them".

literature

expenditure

  • Virginia Woolf: A Room of Her Own / Three Guineas . Translated by Heidi Zerning. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2001, ISBN 3-10-092573-4 (the edition quoted here)
  • Virginia Woolf: A Room of Her Own . S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2001, ISBN 3-596-14939-8 .
    • also published by Buchergilde Gutenberg, Frankfurt am Main 2004, ISBN 3-7632-5515-X . (Afterword see web links)
  • Virginia Woolf: A room to yourself. Transl.: Renate Gerhardt, Transl. Poems: Wulf Teichmann. Gerhardt-Verlag, Berlin 1978. (Fischer TB, Frankfurt am Main 1981, ISBN 3-596-22116-1 )
  • A room to yourself. Transl., preparation of the note and epilogue Axel Monte. (Reclams Universal Library, 18887). Reclam, Stuttgart 2012, ISBN 978-3-15-018887-3 .
  • A room to yourself. Transl. and epilogue: Antje Rávik Strubel. Kampa Verlag, Zurich 2019, ISBN 978-3-311-22003-9 .

text variants

  • Women & fiction: the manuscript versions of A room of one's own . ed. SP Rosenbaum. Oxford: Blackwell 1992, ISBN 0-631-18037-0 .

secondary literature

  • Elaine Showalter : A literature of her own. British women novelists from Brontë to Lessing. Princeton UP, Princeton, NJ 1977, ISBN 0-691-06318-4 .
  • Margaret JM Ezell: The Myth of Judith Shakespeare: Creating the Canon of Women's Literature. In: New Literary History: A Journal of Theory and Interpretation. 21.3 (1990), pp. 579-592.

audiobook

  • Virginia Woolf: Ein Eigene Zimmer , 4 CDs, unabridged reading by Erika Pluhar , Random House, Cologne 2007, ISBN 978-3-86604-520-0 (= woman voices audio book edition , number 9).

web links

supporting documents

  1. ↑ Translation of the poems: Wulf Teichmann. Gerhardt-Verlag, Berlin 1978, ISBN 3-920272-29-8 . (see: Rainer Maria Gerhardt , published as a Fischer paperback in 1981)
  2. ↑ Brief description of Fischer Verlag
  3. ↑ With 167 notes, afterword and references. Philip Reclam Jr. Stuttgart, 2012, ISBN 978-3-15-018887-3 .
  4. ↑ Virginia Woolf reading, Bayerischer Rundfunk, May 25, 2013 ( Memento of March 15, 2014 in the Internet Archive )
  5. ↑ Hans Ulrich Seeber (ed.): English literary history. Stuttgart 1991, p. 344.
  6. ↑ Edition History, uah.edu., accessed 8 March 2014.
  7. ↑ Quentin Bell: Virginia Woolf. A Biography . Frankfurt a. M. 1982, ISBN 3-518-37253-X .
  8. ↑ A Room of One's Own. In: Walter Jens (ed.): Kindler's New Literature Lexicon. Vol. 17, Munich 1992, p. 829.
  9. ↑ 1929. Virginia Woolf: A Room of One's Own. In: Wolfgang Karrer, Erberhard Kreutzer (eds.): Works of English and American literature. 1890 to the present. Munich 1989.
  10. ↑ "As a woman, my country is the whole world." Icon of Feminism Virginia Woolf . ORF.at, January 24, 2012.
  11. ↑ Virginia Woolf. Feminism pioneer ( March 6, 2014 memento at Internet Archive ) . Stern online, January 25, 2007.
  12. ↑ "As a woman, my country is the whole world." Icon of Feminism Virginia Woolf . ORF.at, January 24, 2012.
  13. ↑ A Room of One's Own. In: Walter Jens (ed.): Kindler's New Literature Lexicon. Vol. 17, Munich 1992, p. 830.
  14. ↑ Virginia Woolf: A Room of Her Own / Three Guineas . See Fischer 2001, p. 16.
  15. ↑ 1929. Virginia Woolf: A Room of One's Own. In: Wolfgang Karrer, Erberhard Kreutzer (eds.): Works of English and American literature. 1890 to the present. Munich 1989.
  16. ↑ 1929. Virginia Woolf: A Room of One's Own. In: Wolfgang Karrer, Erberhard Kreutzer (eds.): Works of English and American literature. 1890 to the present. Munich 1989.
  17. ↑ Virginia Woolf: A Room of Her Own / Three Guineas . See Fischer 2001, p. 113.
  18. ↑ a b Review of the new translation , FAZ May 2, 2002.
  19. ↑ Ellen Ellrodt: Virginia Woolf and the Independence of the Mind. In: Katharina Kaminski: The woman as culture creator. Königshausen & Neumann, 2000, ISBN 3-8260-1845-1 , p. 187 f.
  20. ↑ A Room of One's Own. In: Walter Jens (ed.): Kindler's New Literature Lexicon. Vol. 17, Munich 1992, p. 830.
  21. ↑ Virginia Woolf: A Room of Her Own / Three Guineas . See Fischer 2001, p. 88.
  22. ↑ Jost Schneider (ed.): De Gruyter Lexicon. Methodological history of German studies. Berlin 2009, p. 145.
  23. ↑ Virginia Woolf: A Room of Her Own / Three Guineas . See Fischer 2001, p. 12.
  24. ↑ Virginia Woolf: A Room of Her Own / Three Guineas . See Fischer 2001, p. 25.
  25. ↑ Virginia Woolf: A Room of Her Own / Three Guineas . See Fischer 2001, p. 28.
  26. ↑ Rüdiger Ahrens: Virginia Woolf. In: Encyclopedia of English Literature. Stuttgart 1979, p. 512.
  27. ↑ Jost Schneider (ed.): De Gruyter Lexicon. Methodological history of German studies. Berlin 2009, p. 145.
  28. ↑ Hans Ulrich Seeber (ed.): English literary history. Stuttgart 1991, p. 343f.
  29. ↑ Virginia Woolf: A Room of Her Own / Three Guineas . See Fischer 2001, p. 76.
  30. ↑ Hans Ulrich Seeber (ed.): English literary history. Stuttgart 1991, p. 343.
  31. ↑ Virginia Woolf: A Room of Her Own / Three Guineas . See Fischer 2001, p. 90.
  32. ↑ Virginia Woolf: A Room of Her Own / Three Guineas . See Fischer 2001, p. 85.
  33. ↑ English Literary History . Editor: Hans Ulrich Seeber. Stuttgart 1991, p. 343f.
  34. ↑ Rüdiger Ahrens: Virginia Woolf. In: Encyclopedia of English Literature. Stuttgart 1979, p. 513.
  35. ↑ Virginia Woolf: A Room of Her Own / Three Guineas . See Fischer 2001, p. 31.
  36. ↑ Virginia Woolf: A Room of Her Own / Three Guineas . See Fischer 2001, p. 35.
  37. ↑ Virginia Woolf: A Room of Her Own / Three Guineas . See Fischer 2001, p. 39.
  38. ↑ Virginia Woolf: A Room of Her Own / Three Guineas . See Fischer 2001, p. 98.
  39. ↑ A Room of One's Own. In: Walter Jens (ed.): Kindler's New Literature Lexicon. Vol. 17, Munich 1992, p. 830.
  40. ↑ Biography Radclyffe Hall , fembio.org
  41. ↑ Virginia Woolf: A Room of Her Own / Three Guineas . See Fischer 2001, p. 18.
  42. ↑ Virginia Woolf: A Room of Her Own / Three Guineas . See Fischer 2001, p. 64.