The mental wanderings of a English graduate student attempting to swim through the bevy of texts and other influences connected to my study of English rhetoric.
Saturday, March 24, 2007
Virginia Woolf's "Room of One's Own"
I have been rereading a portion of Virginia Woolf's book, A Room of One's Own, and it has struck me again how deeply Woolf must have felt about her world after WWI. Although my studies of Woolf have led me to believe that she supported the enlightened attitude of her generation, I noted that she talks about how the musical qualities of pre-war conversation has been lost. Later in the same chapter, she mentions the death of romance and how modern poetry has lost the ability to envoke strong emotions in the reader. In fact, she states that ". . . one cannot remember more than two consecutive lines of any good modern poet" (14). I find her discussion of these post-war losses in direct conflict with her desires for women to take a more active role in society. When spending a semester reading and discussing many of Woolf's works, I often caught myself wondering if she was really a romantic at heart who would have preferred being taken care of or if she was really the feminist so many people have come to define her as. One thing is certain, the more I read her work, the more I see new things -- must be why she's so intriguing to so many!
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