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Virginia Woolf published her six-chapter extended essay, ‘A Room of One’s Own,’ in 1929, based on a series of lectures she had given the previous year at Girton and Newnham, Cambridge University’s two women’s colleges. . By then an established and esteemed novelist, the subject she was exploring was ‘Women and Fiction’. Published just ten years after women won suffrage in Britain, the book is considered a precursor to voluminous feminist literary activity in the late 20th century.

Despite the lack of formal academic training, Virginia Woolf was a cultured self-taught. It uses a narrative form of an imaginary young woman named Mary with any of the three last names, investigating the topic of ‘Women and fiction’. She concludes that, at the very least, a woman needs “a room of her own” (with a key) and some cash to live (500 a year in Mary’s case). What she is saying clearly, after careful historical analysis of the lives of men and women in relation to each other in the past, and to the day of her deliberations, is that women are deprived of artistic and literary expression because of their economy. personal and social subordination on the part of men, and not for lack of innate ability or talent.

The purpose of this essay is to analyze and comment on the author’s extensive use of binary categories beginning with the central, historically charged categorization of the differences between men and women. Although two sets of binaries, reason / emotion and fiction / fact, are explored in this essay, Woolf’s awareness of the complexities of apparent binary categories is much broader and will be examined more closely in the following paragraphs.

Although there appear to be no “opposites” in nature, dualism appears to be deeply ingrained in human language and thought. Binary opposites or polarizations are not always logical opposites, but they are necessary for language units to have value and meaning. Following Saussurean structuralism, it is generally held that “ binary opposition is one of the most important principles governing the structure of language, ” while “ paired contrasts ” are not always “ opposites, ” at any rate. exact sense, they are believed to be necessary as a means of ordering the “dynamic complexity of experience.” Most linguists believe that “binary opposition is a child’s first logical operation.” Another powerful influence on binary thinking in the West was Descartes’s mind-body dualism.

Binary thinking is also hierarchical. One of the two terms is considered positive and the other negative. Religious thought cannot exist without the polarization of guilt and innocence. Structuralists believe that the world is organized in masculine and feminine constructions, roles, words and ideas. For example, masculinity (phallus) is associated with dominance and femininity (vagina) with passivity. Poststructuralists seek to deconstruct the entire edifice of binary thought, without allowing one to be intrinsically superior to the other, giving instances of binary opposition that contradict and undermine their own authority.

However, there is a growing consensus that such ‘antitheses’ are aspects of a deeper unity and that’ all so-called opposites such as reason / emotion and spirit / substance are simply ‘apparent’ binary opposites (Forceville, 1996). Woolf’s essay, having used a plethora of binaries in its exposition, concludes with the acceptance of that “deeper unity” in its recognition of the qualities “man-woman” and “woman-man” in human nature.

Until recently enough has been said about the fundamental importance of binary thinking in the use of language that it is not surprising that Woolf’s essay is filled with many examples of the complexities between apparent binaries. Of course, the main concern when talking about ‘Women and Fiction’ is defining and delimiting the subject. Woolf shows that this is not an easy matter. In the course of his research, reading books written by men about women, he unearths many ‘fictions’ such as the insistence on the inferiority of women on all fronts. These views are not based on “facts.” Woolf dramatizes the effect of discrimination and disempowerment of women by asking the reader to imagine an equally gifted sister of Shakespeare. Unable to achieve any of her creative goals and ambitions, Judith Shakespeare commits suicide only after what was expected and allowed for women to do since time immemorial: give birth.

Since Woolf’s lectures are given from a personal point of view and he makes no pretense of being academic, he implores his audience not to expect a clear conclusion. He uses a fictional device to present his argument based largely on facts that he collects in the British Museum Library. At Oxbridge University he visits, presumably by invitation, figures like Beadle, Fellows, and Scholars, whom he introduces almost casually in Chapter One, return at the end, emphasizing their relevance to the narrative and its theme. He was forbidden to invade their “territory”, both literally and metaphorically. She was also not admitted to a library there because of her gender. She confronts and questions binaries like illusion and truth. It also dichotomizes the sensitivities before and after the war. She describes the trees and river in Oxbridge as lazy and resigned at sunset, as it turns glorious and expectant in the morning. It also addresses the binary qualities of “laughter” and “heartbreak.” Their thought processes are clear and well articulated mainly through the use of these binary signifiers.

The binary theme continues to contrast the sumptuous lunch offered at a well-endowed male reservation in Oxbridge with the rather ‘poor’ food for dinner at a female college. While gold and silver are said to be ‘buried’ within 500-year-old grand buildings sponsored by kings and nobles, the women’s college built in the 1860s struggled to raise the initial 30,000. She contrasts the security and prosperity of men with the poverty and insecurity of women throughout history reflected in all facets of their lives.

In chapter two, he deals with the binary concepts of interest and confusion, as well as fun versus boredom, allied with the roles of masculinity and femininity. When he talks about the freedom from fear and bitterness that the inheritance of Mary’s late aunt gave him, he can also contrast that with the pity and tolerance (‘tolerance’) he feels for the woman from his position of freedom. Reflecting on the culinary delights you enjoyed the day before, you wonder why men drink wine while women drink water. He also contrasts two kinds of anger he felt at Professor von X’s spiel on “The mental, moral and physical inferiority of the female sex.” Her anger at the treatment of women was at first a complex emotion of disgust, while later it morphs into a “simple and open” anger that she could use constructively.

By the time you get to Chapter Three, you haven’t uncovered any facts, just opinions totally harmful to women (fiction). Now turn to historians (fact). She refers to Prof. ‘History of England’ from Trevelyan. There he finds that the abominable treatment of women by men during Elizabethan times is considered the norm. Hitting the wife was a common practice. The marriages were arranged in advance to suit the men. On the contrary, the women who were portrayed in literature possessed a personality and dignity that were denied to the common middle-class woman. Women “burned like beacons in the works of all poets from the beginning of time.” While women in literature such as Antigone, Cleopatra, Lady Macbeth and Emma Bovary could be ‘heroic or petty’, ‘splendid or sordid’, ‘infinitely beautiful or extremely horrible’, the average woman was a complete nullity, hidden in sight. . Binaries abound in this chapter as in ‘women are imaginatively of the highest importance’ while ‘practically she was completely insignificant’.

When we get to Chapter Four, we find Lady Winchilsea’s struggle with poetry, with Aphra Behn having more success with her works. This further supports Woolf’s ideas about why and how women were denied freedom of speech. Woolf first uses the word “incandescent” to describe the creative mind, like a quote from Lady Winchilsea. He needed his mind to ‘consume all impediments and become incandescent’. But sadly, he was “harassed and distracted with hatred and grievances.” Aphra Behn was the first woman in England to earn a living writing, although her personal life is not said to have been worthy of emulation. However, Behn paved the way for 18th-century novelists like the Bronte sisters, Jane Austen, and George Eliot. In describing them and the novels of the early 19th century, Woolf speaks of their virtues in binary terms as fast, not sloppy, expressive without being precious.

In chapter five, Woolf introduces a representative contemporary fiction writer whom he names Mary Carmichael. It is an imaginary figure chosen to show what is lost in writing from a position of defense and protest. Woolf praises the fact that Carmichael is no longer aware of being a woman in his imaginative writing. There are binaries like ‘heavenly goodness’ and ‘hellish depravity’, compared to writing that is ‘serious, deep and light’ with others, ‘lazy and conventional’. She advises contemporary writers to “illuminate your own soul with its depths and its shallows, and its vanities and its bounty.” Although Carmichael’s fiction may be “destroyed by the publisher in ten years,” Woolf is confident that his successors in another “hundred years” would have reached their glorious full potential.

In chapter six, Woolf describes a man and a woman approaching from opposite sides of the street. The setting is a London street seen by the author from her apartment window. They get into a taxi and drive off. For Woolf, this is a symbol of the union of binaries. The stress he was going through for the past two days has eased and he now has an idea of ​​the “unity of the mind”. As Coleridge had said, great minds are androgynous. The true creator is “incandescent” and “undivided”. Sex awareness gets in the way of creativity. She says that ‘it is fatal for anyone who writes to think about their gender’. Finally he comes to the conclusion that good writing arises from a marriage of opposites. Gender, masculinity / femininity is no longer relevant. Honest, creative and enduring fiction arises from a clear mind and capable of facing the facts.

Virginia Woolf has devoted herself to a thorough examination of many binary concepts, including masculinity / femininity, reason / emotion, and reality / fiction in her monograph which is apparently about women and fiction. This brief analysis reveals that he concludes that it is the androgynous mind, which is “naturally creative, incandescent, and undivided” that can arrive at the “truth” by “putting together many varieties of error.” His understanding of the vagaries and complexities of binary thinking reflected in this book shows that he was one of the pioneering and formative minds of his time.

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