Virginia and the Wolf

It is so very interesting when you are able to pick up a piece of text that could've been written months, decades, or hundreds of years ago and feel such a true connection to the author. I believe Virginia Woolf was a brilliant woman, with so many important things to say, that could write like no other. The 15 pages of Four in A room of one's own are read so much like a conversation that you almost forget you're not physically talking to her. You can even feel her impeccable brilliance seeping through the words with how she ends the chapter, pulling on her inner Charlotte Bronte to express the true severity of her topic, without ever actually having to say it.

The way she thinks, speaks, and writes can be considered so modern and yet she wrote A room of one's own in 1929, eighty six years ago. How she views the mind of a woman is, what I believe, to be the true version. There are no limits, no reason's to put it down, no hidden agenda. Men criticised, harrassed, and undermined women's work ever since the beginning of time. Men became predators, becames wolves, that women had to hide their true thoughts from. Once those trapped and hidden thoughts come free they cannot be stopped. There is no denying that there are differences between men (the classic "not all guys" comment), but throughout history there has been some noticable issues. There will, naturally and biologically, be differences between men and women, but women were able put together a form of writing that men had not taken over yet. Women took hold of the flexible form of a novel and made it theirs.

Woolf mentions Margaret of Newcastle (1623-1673) and, while describing the clear sadness held, within Woolf, about how Margaret could have been famous for her intellect if only she "had a microscope put in her hand...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" (page 3). Margaret was not realized for what she truly was in her day, a "wild, generous, untutored intelligence" (page 3), and that lead to her to "obsurity and folly" (page 4). Woolf touches on something that I think about so often while reading old texts or learning about a woman in history that could flourish beyond belief in our time. It is fascinating to try and imagine those women, those writers, those stories in the present day. If only all the women writers, that were criticised and mocked in their day, had the (close to) absolute freedom that women have today. Their works would not be nearly as tainted with bitterness, fear, and condemnation.

One woman I loved to learn about, and try to imagine in present day, is Aspasia Annia Regilla (commonly known only as Regilla). Regilla was an incredibly influential Roman woman, married to a Greek. She was born in 125 and died in 160. With only 35 years of life, Regilla was more impressive than any other woman in that time period within Rome. She had multiple statues dedicated to her, she had an impressive and reserved seat at any sort of Collesium games, and her murder is still written (The Murder of Regilla by Sarah B. Pomeroy), talked, and debated about today. The intelligence that she must have portrayed to receive the respect of all men, to recieve such reverence, in that time period shows how incredible she was as a woman. To place Regilla into present day can only incite some type of excitement and wonder. Women have been harrassed and shut down for hundreds of years so to imagine what all these incredible women could do with even more life and more freedom is mind blowing. It would take everything we know and blow it out of the water.

This got me thinking onto something else that Woolf mentioned. Woolf explains why novels became the women's form with what their lives looked like. A woman's place in the house within the nineteenth century was the sitting-room. With people constantly interrupting, constantly visiting, and interacting. They would have to hide their work, but "all the literary training that a woman had...was training in the observation of character, in the analysis of emotion. Her sensibility had been educated for centuries by the influences of the common sitting-room. People's feelings were impressed upon her; personal realtions were always before her eyes" (page 7). These women took to writing novels because the stories were always right there in front of her, playing out in an order good enough to write about. So many relationships and emotions were constantly drummed into these women whether they wanted it to happen or not. Their was their entire lives. Nothing else was getting in the way.

Realizing that this activity is not done in any way, shape, or form these days (other than being a secretary) is what lead me to think that this may be the reason why we consider all these older stories and novels 'classics'. What these women experienced are what made their writing's so incredibly real and deep. If we have lost touch with simply experiencing life and relationships, can we ever get back to seeing what they did and understanding the eternal relationship between our minds, life, and nature?

#literature #women #VirginiaWoolf #reading