Questions:
Woolf claims that the particular social realities in which women live create distinctively female values and outlooks. Does she think this is a good thing or a bad thing?
What is the role of tradition in the experience of a women writer? In that of writers in general?
形容心情的成语
A Room of One’s Own
狗开头的成语Virginia Woolf 1
Abridged
[1] 历史上的皇帝That one would find any woman in that state of mind in the sixteenth century was obviously impossible. One has only to think of the Elizabethan2tombstones with all tho children kneeling with clasped hands; and their early deaths; and to e their hous with their dark, cramped rooms, to realize that no woman could have written poetry then. What o
ne would expect to find would be that rather later perhaps some great lady would take advantage of her comparative freedom and comfort to publish something with her name to it and risk being thought a monster. Men, of cour, are not snobs, but they appreciate with sympathy for the most part the efforts of a countess to write ver. One would expect to find a lady of title meeting with far greater encouragement than an unknown Miss Austen or a Miss Brontë at that time would have met with. But one would also expect to find that her mind was disturbed by alien emotions装神弄鬼 like fear and hatred and that her poems showed traces of that disturbance. Here is Lady Winchila3, for example, I thought, taking down her poems. She was born in the year 1661; she was noble both by birth and by marriage; she was childless; she wrote poetry, and one has only to open her poetry to find her bursting out in indignation against the position of women:
How we are fallen! fallen by mistaken rules,
爱护花草And Education’s more than Nature’s fools;
Debarred from all improvements of the mind,
And to be dull, expected and designed;
And if someone would soar above the rest,
With warmer fancy, and ambition presd,
So strong the opposing faction still appears,
The hopes to thrive can ne’er4 outweigh the fears.5
The human race is split up for her into two parties.’; Men are the ‘opposing faction men are hated and feared, becau they have the power to bar her way to what she wants to d o—which is to write.
[2] It was a thousand pities that the woman who could write like that, who mind was tuned to nature and reflection, should have been forced to anger and bitterness. But how could she have helped herlf? I asked, imagining the sneers and the laughter, the adulation of the toadies, the scepticism of the professional poet. She must have shut hers
elf up in a room in the country to write, and been torn asunder by bitterness and scruples perhaps, though her husband was of the kindest, and their married life perfection. She ‘must have’, I say, becau when one comes to ek out the facts about Lady Winchila, one finds, as usual, that almost nothing is known about her.
Putting her back on the shelf, I turned to the other great lady, the Duchess whom Lamb loved, harebrained, fantastical Margaret of Newcastle6. They were very different, but alike in this that both were noble and both childless, and both were married to the best of husbands. In both burnt the same passion for poetry and both are disfigured and deformed by the same caus. Open the Duchess and one finds the same outburst of rage. ‘Women live like Bats or Owls, labour like Beasts, and die like Worms. . .’7 Margaret too might have been a poet. She should have had a microscope put in her hand. She should have been taught to look at the stars and reason scientifically. Her wits were turned with solitude and freedom. No one checked her. No one taught her. The professors fawned on her. At Court they jeered at her. She shut herlf up at Welbeck8 alone.
楚楚家[3] Here, I remembered, putting away the Duchess and opening Dorothy Osborne’s letters9. The strange thing is, what a gift that untaught and solitary girl had for the framing of a ntence, for the fashioning of a scene. Listen to her running on:
most commonly when we are in the middest of our discour one looks aboute her and spyes her Cow’s goeing into the Corne and then away they all run, as if they had wing’s at theire heels. I that am not soe nimble stay behinde, and when I e them driveing home theire Cattle I think tis time for mee to retyre too.
[4]One could have sworn that she had the makings of a writer in her. And so we come, I continued, replacing the single short volume of Dorothy Osborne’s letters upon the shelf, to Mrs Behn10.百年孤独读书笔记
[5] And with Mrs Behn we turn a very important corner on the road. We leave behind, shut up in their parks among their folios11, tho solitary great ladies who wrote without audience or criticism, for their own delight alone. We come to town and rub shoulders wit
h ordinary people in the streets. Mrs Behn was a middle–class woman with all the plebeian virtues of humour, vitality and courage; a woman forced by the death of her husband and some unfortunate adventures of her own to make her living by her wits. She had to work on equal terms with men. She made, by working very hard, enough to live on. The importance of that fact outweighs anything that she actually wrote, even the splendid ‘A Thousand Martyrs I have made’12, or ‘Love in Fantastic Triumph sat’13, for here begins the freedom of the mind, or rather the possibility that in the cour of time the mind will be free to write what it likes.
[6] Aphra Behn proved that money could be made by writing at the sacrifice, perhaps, of certain agreeable qualities; and so by degrees writing became not merely a sign of folly and a distracted mind, but was of practical importance. A husband might die, or some disaster overtakes the family. Hundreds of women began as the eighteenth century drew on to add to their pin money14, or to come to the rescue of their families by making translations or writing the innumerable novels which have cead to be recorded even in
text–books, but are to be picked up in the fourpenny boxes in the Charing Cross Road15. The extreme activity of mind which showed itlf in the later eighteenth century among women—the talking, and the meeting, the writing of essays on Shakespeare, the translating of the classics—was founded on the solid fact that women could make money by writing. Money dignifies what is frivolous if unpaid for. Thus, towards the end of the eighteenth century a change came about which, if I were rewriting history, I should describe more fully and think of greater importance than the Crusades or the Wars of the Ros16.
