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Mysticism in A Room of One's Own 1. Virginia Woolf will go down in history as one of the greatest female writers of twentieth century. The importance of her legacy cannot be underestimated, regardless of what our attitude towards her writings might be. Her name is strongly linked to what we refer now as womens emancipation movement and feminism, although in recent years the attempt has been made to look at her writings from different point of view. This revisionist approach is caused by the fact that feminism as social philosophy has been much discredited. In this work we will try to analyze the ways of how Virginia percepts surrounding reality this approach will enable us to come to conclusion whether certain psychological deviations that we attribute to promoters of feminism, can be found in her works, namely Room of ones own essay.
When it comes to analyzing legacy of female writers, especially those who claim their writings equal to mens in every respect and even better, it becomes obvious that in order to convince readers of validity of their argument, they try hard to sound logical. Yet their logic is not firmly based on ability to analyze rather on desire to give their subconscious drives logistic form, so it can compete with mens ideas. Woolf's Room of one own essay is a good example of that. This essay is based on Virginias lectures at womens college at Cambridge University. In it, she raises the question of women and fiction. She goes a great length examining different issues, related to the question can women produce a literary piece of great brilliance, like of Shakespeare's? ...
for example. In other words, Woolf tries to come up with answers to a question whether womens intellect can have properties of genius. At the beginning were to prove that Virginia Woolf's way of thoughts is being very irrational and heavily engaged in sentimentalism and from there we will establish link to mystical aspects of her essay, which cannot be understood without analyzing her arguments in brief. Basically Virginias main thesis is that the only reason that there are no examples of womens literature exploits gaining any importance whatsoever, is because women were used to be deprived of good education, financial means that guarantee independence and privacy, so they could concentrate on writing. In her opinion, womens inability to compete with men when it comes to writing fiction is only socially motivated and if women were given preconditions, mentioned above, theyd succeed. While arguing this point, Virginia indulges in graphomania her thoughts are hard to grasp because she constantly intermix them with symbolism that she attaches to what she sees around.
She tries to sound sophisticated, but her sophistication is of artificial nature, as she is having a hard time trying to stay focused on the subject. Virginia is being quite blunt when she says that despite her best intensions, whatever she says might not make much sense, as she has chosen a very laid back approach to discussing the issue of women and literature. She wants to prove her point, but every once in a while, shes being honest with herself, admitting that she might: never be able to come to a conclusion or to come even close to finding nugget of pure truth. Even if we didnt know that the author is being a woman, wed still be able to figure it out by the fact that authors logical approach to corresponding issue is being irrational in its core: Fiction is likely to contain more truth than fact - lies will flow from my lips, but there may be some truth mixed up with them" (Woolf, Ch. 1). In Chapters 1 and 2 Virginia tries to find an answer to the reason of inequality between men and women and she concludes that such inequality has purely social motives. It is hard not to notice her bitterness towards mens arrogance, yet she wants to appear an unbiased while discussing the matter and she repeats a few times that she has no hard feelings for men.
Life for both sexes -- and I look at them, shouldering their way along the pavement-is arduous, difficult, a perpetual struggle. It calls for gigantic courage and strength. More than anything, perhaps, creatures of illusion that we are, it calls for confidence in oneself (Woolf, Ch. 2). Here we see the author, being interested in something very particular, concealing it under cover of common sense, neutral phrases. She shows a great talent of being able to add some oil to a fire, while appearing nothing but a woman in her search for greater truth. Virginia is strongly against heroic concept of history; she associates it with mens domination.
She sees the whole history of Western civilization as result of perpetual struggle between human drives for freedom and security. In her opinion, time has come when we need to change the objectives in favor of last ideal. The inconsistency and irrationality of her thoughts are best represented in the fact that while trying to sound objective, Virginia never doubts the validity of heroic concept as such that has led to the accomplishments of a man-centered culture. She admits that men and women have the equal right to enjoy the advantages of manly culture. Yet, without having established her argument in favor of switching to security concept, she still insists on it.
When she does that, we realize that we deal with another case of financially liberated woman, trying to find a greater meaning for her existence, rather than just fitting in its traditional role of housewife and mother. In Chapter 3 Virginia comes to a conclusion that itd turn to be impossible for woman in the time of Shakespeare to write anything that would match its quality. For it is a perennial puzzle why no woman wrote a word of that extraordinary literature when every other man, it seemed, was capable of song or sonnet. What were the conditions in which women lived? (Woolf, Ch. 3). And again Virginia tries to explain everything by socio-political factor, namely education, while forgetting that Shakespeare himself didnt have a good education and couldnt even dream of being able to write out of boredom like many wealthy women used to do then and still keep on doing nowadays, claiming their masterpieces to have historical importance. Neither had Jonathan Bach any ambitions, he just simply tried to make money for his family, without realizing that in future his music will be considered a works of genius.
Virginia is being irrational again in this chapter too her approach is very emotional one, though she tries not to admit in it. When she sounds rational, its only because she wants to prove something totally irrational but morally justified. She forgets that wealthy women at the time of Shakespeare were free to do whatever they wanted too, they used to get a fine education yet they preferred to just stay at home, taking care of domestic affairs. Virginia fails to see that women were only striving to happiness and thats why they acted like they did, because that was totally natural for them. She had taken a feminist approach when discussing this issue and thats why things dont make sense to her, yet she wouldnt be a good feminist admitting its own wrongness when confronted with facts, so she just keeps on finding ever newer excuses.
Faced with a fact that there is no female-genius can be found throughout the history (this situation continues up to this day, even though women have received much desired liberation), Virginia finds nothing better than to say that women geniuses have actually existed, but they have never became known to people: Yet genius of a sort must have existed among women as it must have existed among the working classes (Woolf, Ch. 3). In chapters 4, 5 and 6 Virginia argues that women have different values than man. This is only the time when we can agree with her. She recognizes the fact the women have never gained an excellence writing fiction.
The only exception is Charlotte Bronte, who is still ranked as average at best, when having compared her literary legacy to those of men writers, her contemporaries. The same trend can be found in the fields of art, music and science. Virginia says that women feel different and they can only gain excellence when it comes to describing something that corresponds to very depth of their nature. If it is so, how come we dont know of any female writers that would masterfully describe what they felt during pregnancy? Not even to mention writing poem about it We only know of pregnant women feelings because of men, who were able to write about it with such degree of accuracy that even women had to recognize it as totally genuine. Women are different from men psychologically.
In his work Character and Gender, written in 1900, Austrian psychologist Otto Veinenger has outlined the real reasons for womens inability to match mens accomplishments in any field: The main difference between men and women is the fact that men are capable of abstract thought by being able to detach mentally from their penises. Womans whole body is just one sexual organ, thats why women get aroused while having any part of their bodies touched. Women are always sexual men only from time to time Womens point of existence is a man, while mens existence has higher abstract goals, such as serving its country or some higher abstract ideals. Those women that gained any historical significance, were psychologically a men, trapped in womans body Joan of Arc is the best example (Veinenger. Part 3, Ch. 4). I guess, it can also be applied to Virginia Wolf as well - if we look at her last pictures, we can see that she clearly expressed deep seated subconscious desire to be just a man short haircut, absence of any makeup even wearing pants on occasions. 2.
From here I would like to develop my argument that Virginias mysticism, which is found in her Room of ones own novel, is nothing but a result of her psychological inconsistency. It is widely known that Virginia Wolf used to manifest many symptoms, which modern psychiatry considers as signs of schizophrenia. She also used to be romantically involved with many women Sandra Shtahlman in her article The Relationship Between Schizophrenia Mysticism states that: The nature of schizophrenia, and other forms of psychosis, is still under debate and a significant issue is the relationship between psychosis and the mystical, or religious, experience. Throughout history this question has been addressed by scholars from all fields of inquiry. Currently, psychologists are looking at the similarities and differences between the experiences, hoping to shed light on the nature, process, and treatment of psychosis (Stahlman). But let us come with a definition of what is Mysticism in the first place.
Brainy Encyclopedia defines it as: The doctrine that the ultimate elements or principles of...
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Research essay sample on Mysticism In A Room Of One Part 1
