A Room of One's Own

"All was dim, yet intense too" (17).

Points for Reflection

T. S. Eliot's "The Hollow Men" (1924-25; 1925), PDF

1. in the book Poets of Reality: Six Twentieth-Century Writers (1965), J. Hillis Miller writes that "In 'The Hollow Men' all the richness and complexity of culture which gives [the earlier poem] 'The Waste Land' such thickness of texture disappears." In other words, the poem gives us symbols without clear referents, a series of simple images untied to particular socio-historical elements of western civilization. Take a stab at providing those referents yourself--at filling in the blanks. What elements of human experience might this enigmatic poem be most preoccupied with evoking by way of the objective correlative?
2. does this poem's pervasive tone match or move contrary to its apparent message?
3. some have suggested that this enigmatic poem is about a very particular place, time, and people: the British in post-war London. What elements of the poem suggest such particularity?
4. do other elements of this poem seem universal?
5. does the minimal punctuation confuse you, or seem appropriate?

Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own (1928; 1929)

Chp. 1

1. Woolf prefers narrowing her focus drastically to attempting to draw broad conclusions about the question of women and literature (3-4). She aims at merely showing, transparently, the personal musings that led her to the title of her essay (4); she refutes, that is, the assumption that she or anyone else can/should draw sweeping conclusions about any topic.  How does this strategy differ from that of her literary forebears?
2. can you identify any predecessors who would agree that “Fiction [. . .] is likely to contain more truth than fact (4)? Does her subsequent fiction about Oxbridge and Fernham feel like it carries the weight of truth?
3. the narrator calls Charles Lamb’s essay style “congenial,” with a “wild flash of imagination” that creates cracks in his work but also wonderful poetry (7).  Is this an apt description of Woolf’s own style in this extended essay?
4. what tone dominates the narrator’s description of Christianity?
5. the narrator declares that novelists tend to privilege descriptions of witty banter at the dinner table, ignoring mention of the food served (10).  Can you recall any exceptions?
6. does the narrator’s luncheon experience allow her to retain her female subject position, or does she imaginatively become a male academic, briefly (10-13)?
7. what difference does the narrator find between imagined conversation before WWI, and that which follows it?  What of the difference in poetry between Victorians and Moderns?
8. does the narrator’s citation of poetry by Alfred Tennyson (12) and Christian Rossetti (13) imply a difference between them, or commonality? Examine the excerpts closely.
9. what difference does the narrator identify which presumably separates Victorian from Modern poetry?  Do you think her observations apply equally well to poetry by H.D., W. B. Yeats, and T. S. Eliot?
10. does the narrator decide whether the romantic optimism which shaped much Victorian poetry, and which (relatively speaking) remains in absentia from Modern poetry, was indeed an “illusion"?
11. how does the outdoor environment at Oxbridge compare to that at Fernham?  What of the meals provided to the respective residents?  How do the financial underpinnings of the two colleges differ?
12. under what conditions might the “heart, body and brain all mixed together” become individuated in “separate compartments” in future (18)? Is the narrator being sarcastic, or serious?
13. does the narrator complain about the contents of her meal at Fernham?
14. can you identify the narrator’s attitude towards STEM fields?  When she speaks of how her and Miss Seton’s conversation might have gravitated towards the sciences naturally if more money flowed into Fernham (21), is she envisioning a preferred alternative?
15. assuming the narrator occupies the same period as Woolf, are her and Miss Seton’s assumptions about whether their mothers could have earned and saved money accurate?
16. would Mary Wollstonecraft agree with the narrator that wealth has a positive effect on the mind, and poverty a negative impact (24)?

Chp. 2

1. does Woolf's assertion that women do not write books about men, while men write about little else other than women (27-29), hold water when one reviews the works of the female authors she listed in the opening (3)?  What does she mean, really?
2. can you locate any passages where Woolf’s narrator betrays an ableist prejudice?
3. the narrator compares her own thought processes to the orderly, methodical approach of a student categorizing knowledge from a scientific manual. Does one approach to reality appear more enviable than the other?
4. the narrator suggests that many men who write of women write from a passionate position, one characterized either by love or anger (and finds herself doing the same thing as she takes notes on male attitudes towards women). Do you find this to be an accurate assessment of British literature written before the 20th century?  Do you think it inappropriate to write out of emotion?  Does the narrator’s position recall Wordsworth’s notion of “emotion recollected in tranquility”?
5. how does the anger of the narrator differ from the anger she sees in male descriptions of women (31-39)?
6. the narrator identifies her own anger at the idea that women are intellectually inferior to men, explains away that anger, and says she is done with it (32). Do any passages later in the book suggest that her anger has, perhaps unconsciously, reemerged and again shaped the tone of her rhetoric?
7. unpack the narrator’s conviction that male newspaper writers talk of themselves even when ostensibly writing about women (33-34).
8. the narrator identifies the paradox of male hegemony & dissatisfaction, then explains male anger towards women—or, perhaps, a conviction of male superiority—as a product of what psychological mechanism?
9. do you believe that we are all creatures of illusion overly concerned with self-confidence, or that this tendency is gendered male?
10. the narrator claims that many men’s sense of self has rested on having a proximate woman mirror back—and magnify—his own “figure” at twice its natural size (35-36).  Are there other ways of explaining the heterosexual man's need for a female's support?
11. can you think of other groups whose sense of identity has historically relied on the presence of a subservient, second-class other?
12. for what array of reasons does the narrator value a fixed income more than voting rights?
13. the narrator suggests male aggression is a function of instincts they cannot control, faulty education, and other "conditions of life" (38, 39). Do the same factors inform female aggression, and are females generally less aggressive than men?
14. have Woolf's predictions about the future (40) proven accurate?
    
    

Seated Woman (1927)
Pablo Picasso

Dr. Paul Marchbanks
pmarchba@calpoly.edu