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ornamental line

Masterpieces Are Not Single

" the experience of the mass is behind
the single voice” (65).



Points for Reflection

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

Chp. 5

  1. do you think it possible to, as Woolf’s narrator implies, compose art which is not “a method of self-discovery” (79-80)?
  2. as you consider the literature you've read from earlier eras, do you too find that relationships between fictional women are usually set within the context of their relationships with men (82-83)? Does this principle apply to fictional representations of male relationships—do they often play out within the context of their relationships with women?
  3. years before Eve Sedgewick’s Between Men (1985), Woolf’s narrator noted that the pre-nineteenth century literary arts largely defined female fictional characters in terms of their relations with men instead of with one another (82).  The narrator points to this tendency to explain what about the typical characterization of women in the arts?
  4. why might men have replaced epic poetry with the novel, according to this narrator?
  5. do you agree that men cannot know women fully (82), and that women cannot know men fully either (83)?
  6. in the midst of pointing out how difficult it is to find formal praise and details about women’s lives (85-86), the narrator notes that she slips “unthinkingly into praise of my own sex” (85).  Has she, in complementary fashion, slipped into criticism of men at any point?
  7. the narrator observes that “there is no mark on the wall to measure the precise height of women,” and proceeds to enumerate their roles within the home. Do you think that, in the twenty-first century, it has grown easier to measure either a woman’s or a man’s vital contributions to the domestic sphere?
  8. In speaking of the ways women invigorate men’s minds, does the narrator make any essentializing generalizations about either sex?
  9. what lie does the narrator accuse novels of routinely telling?
  10. does the narrator’s suggestion that female writers like Mary Carmichael “illumine [their] own soul with its profundities and its shallows, and its vanities and its generosities, [thereby saying] what [their] beauty means [them] or [their plainness” contradict what she said earlier about the fallacy of using “art as a method of self-expression” (89-90), or can the two claims be reconciled?
  11. though she finds much to criticize in the first novel of (made-up) author Mary Carmichael, and much to envision for her future writings, the narrator does praise what in Miss Carmichael's novel?
  12. what does the narrator mean by suggesting a woman can only write fully as a woman when she forgets that she is a woman (93)?
  13. can you deduce the narrator’s attitude towards science’s empirical method, and the impulse to quantify which accompanies it?


Chp. 6

  1. does London’s apparent indifference to the Arts in 1928 map onto twenty-first century America?
  2. Woolf’s narrator holds that it is somehow easier for the mind to slide towards unity, as it does watching a woman and man together enter a cab (96-98), than it is to focus on the “severances and oppositions in the mind” (97) which create social tensions. Does this ring true for you?
  3. what characterizes the fully developed, “androgynous mind”?
  4. what problematic tendency, what “shadow,” does the narrator find in some male writing?
  5. what attributes does Woolf find in the writing of William Shakespeare and Samuel Taylor Coleridge that provide an ideal benchmark for the androgynous mind?
  6. what criteria damn the fiction of John Galsworthy and Rudyard Kipling, as well as the expected poetic output of fascist Italy?
  7. can you locate any more passages where Woolf’s narrator has evinced an ableist prejudice?
  8. to what modern movement does Woolf attribute male self-assertion in writing?
  9. given her definition of the androgynous mind, can you agree with those marked as possessing an “androgynous mind,” those demarcated as too masculine, and those considered too feminine (103-104)?
  10. why does Woolf drop the voice of a narrator and assume her own voice towards the close?
  11. can you find any more evidence that Woolf resists the empirical quantification of knowledge?
  12. does Woolf ultimately reify sexual and critical binaries, or dissolve them?
  13. has war benefited women in any way?
  14. does Woolf view the writing of fiction as an interdisciplinary venture?
  15. what might Woolf mean by the claim that “good writers, even if they show every variety of human depravity, are still good human beings” (109 bot).
  16. why does Woolf so highly value writing and reading?
  17. what attributes does Woolf attribute to women, specifically?
  18. can you identify the tone with which Woolf calls out her female audience for their lack of accomplishments in the modern era?


an abstract, cubist painting of an androgynous white face with brown eyes and yellow lips
Dora Maar (1936)
Pablo Picasso


Dr. Paul Marchbanks
pmarchba@calpoly.edu