In Which Our Heroine Cops To the Fact That She Ain't Jane Austen

[mallorys_camera]

Jane Austen's abilities as a writer evince themselves in her astute social observations, her ear for dialogue, her delight in small ironies.

But her brilliance manifests in the fact she was even able to write at all.

She had no privacy. She wrote in the drawing room.

In her classic essay A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf spends a great deal of time marveling over this: "'How she was able to effect all this', her nephew writes in his Memoir, 'is surprising, for she had no separate study to repair to, and most of the work must have been done in the general sitting-room, subject to all kinds of casual interruptions."

Elsewhere in the essay, Woolf describes these interruptions, "Dogs will bark; people will interrupt; money must be made; health will break down."

The title of Woolf's essay has become synonymous with a kind of platonic feminist ideal: the space to think one's own thoughts which depends, of course, upon the concession – however grudging – that these thoughts are worth being thought.

This is where class and money enter into the equation. Things have improved a bit for rich and middle class women, but poor and working class women don't have the leisure to entertain their own thoughts and for the most part – never having had it – they don't miss it; in fact, they welcome prepackaged thoughts into their heads rather the same way they welcome frozen pizzas into their refrigerators: it's less work for them. Hence the preoccupation with entertainment franchises and celebrity misdoings. Prepackaged life.

This is why I like to read women's journals – okay, call them blogs if you must – online.

These women are taking the time to stake out the territory inside their own heads. I'm moved by that impulse if not always by their words.

(Of course, the women on my particular LJ flist are all jewels with very interesting thoughts.)

I've written innumerable nonfiction pieces, a handful of short stories and one novel in my lifetime. Oh, and about 50 billion pages of this ongoing journal. Maybe I'll never write anything else. I don't share Jane Austen's brilliance; I can't compartmentalize. It's hard for me to keep the faith with my imagined universes when there are so many things calling for my immediate attention.

Maybe some day I'll learn to. Or maybe some day I'll have that room of my own.

White walls. A view of the ocean. Not much to ask for.

Except maybe it is...

Comments

[bel-ebat.livejournal.com]

i read a room of one's own a couple of summers ago and was very moved by it- it inspired at least two separate entries in my journal.

we're reading to the lighthouse in my british novel of the 20th century class right now, and i actually just (15 minutes ago, to be exact!) came out of a lecture discussing the ultimate elitism of her message in a room of one's own- how it certainly helped to be independently comfortable. my professor (who is actually a man and a big reverse snob who openly airs his dilemmas about when his family joined the country club a few years ago) is wary of her as a feminist in terms of how impossible it is reconcile the autonomy she stood for with carrying about anything collective and political.

it's all a little difficult for me to grasp as a problem in a personal way. i think my biggest flaw has always been the same as my biggest strength- i live very much and very consciously in my own world. recently, i've been thinking of all the things a girl has to do and be and have to maintain that power over time and outside of the academic shell- it's so difficult for me to swallow the hypothetical but inevitable negotiations even now.

[mallorys-camera.livejournal.com]

Only sixty-five years separate Jane Austin's death (1817) from Virginia Woolf's birth (1882.) I knoiw the Bloomsburies have a reputation as modernists, but really Austen and Woolf were both Victorians, fighting the same battle which was one of kind rather than degree. Only fifty years before Austen's death, Samuel Johnson made the comparison between a woman preaching and a dog walking on its hind legs. The falacy that had to be disputed was that a woman -- whatever her circumstances -- was incapable of critical thought.

That being said, I reread A Room of One's Own a couple of nights ago. Woolf does make a few references to the plight of working class women. Very few. But some. Of course, Woolf herself was every inch the aristocrat and actively despised the one working class writer of her acquaintance, D. H. Lawrence. Of course, he wasn't big on women who think either.

[a1icey.livejournal.com]

i'm glad to see this discussion - when i read virginia woolf's short stories in high school the autonomy aspect was emphasized. but your reading of it has more explanatory power.

[mallorys-camera.livejournal.com]

Thank you.

[misslam2u.livejournal.com]

It's heavy, isn't it, to realise that this may be it. That this may constitute the whole of my shared writing experience is humbling but not humiliating, strangely.

Somehow it was better than a spiral saved from a sixth grader's health class full of a season's tormented scribblings, which I would then loose or put aside when my immediate attention was called away for dinner or homework or baby or teen angst.

xo,la

[mallorys-camera.livejournal.com]

...humbling but not humiliating...

Nice turn of phrase!

[misslam2u.livejournal.com]

Right back at-cha, Dude.