In her critical paper, Virginia Woolf introduces various binaries and complicates them by placing the opposite states into the contexts of time and place to illustrate and deepen these distinctions. For instance, she elaborates on the binary of women and men by explaining the two as complex socio-cultural categories in the Elizabethan era rather than a simple biological fact. On behalf of Shakespeare’s hypothetical sister, Woolf highlights the patriarchal system’s injustices, including men’s increased access to opportunities for power and enlightenment (5). In a similar manner, she explores the binaries of fact versus fiction, the material versus the spiritual, and being forced to use male-centered language versus women’s authentic means of artistic expression. Rather than simply stating their existence, Woolf uses famous people’s biographies to connect the opposite categories to women’s lack of creative and financial freedom as a social class (1). Specifically, Christina Rossetti’s and Alfred Tennyson’s works, as well as Mary Seton’s story, are instrumentalized to accomplish this purpose. By adding contexts to the opposites, the narrator manages to illustrate their complexity and, probably, the possibility of change over time.
The author makes points regarding the difference between the binaries’ popular perceptions and the actual situation, thus encouraging the audience to take an in-depth look at the seemingly simplistic categories and recognize their paradoxes. Woolf contrasts the imposed perspective on fiction’s proximity to actual facts as an indicator of a literary work’s quality with an alternative opinion that fiction might be better than factual information in conveying truth (9). Also, using the story of Mary Seton’s mother, Woolf dispels the myth about the distribution of tasks and areas of responsibility between men and women as something that promotes both parties’ self-fulfillment (12). Using this approach, the author effectively challenges her peers’ oversimplified understandings of various sociological and artistic phenomena.
Work Cited
Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own (1929). Victorian Persistence, 2013. Web.