A Room Of One's Own
Length Of Time In Possession : 1 day
I did a module on Virginia Woolf at university. I read Jacob's Room, Orlando, To The Lighthouse, Mrs Dalloway and Between The Acts, I also read a lot of general remarks by her, but I did not read A Room Of One's Own. I actually got a first in the essay I wrote on Woolf, a fact that still baffles me to this day, as I generally found no particular affinity for her as an author.
I saw A Room Of One's Own up for grabs in the library, and as it's rather slight, thought : Why Not?
It's an extended essay over several chapters, and interesting from a number of perspectives. It is borne of a much shorter address that Woolf was asked to give to Oxbridge on Women And Fiction, and generally is a feminist perspective on the historical progress of women as authors. Ironically, it's now a historical piece in itself, and one far detached from the realities of today's female writers.
Woolf, from a wealthy, well connected background argues that to succeed as a female writer one needs an independent means, (Woolf rather quaintly recommends £500 a year) and a room of one's own to write in.
She talks about Charlotte Bronte and Jane Austen, how in Austen's case writing, prior to her fame, was almost a dirty secret, how Charlotte's frustrations at the limitations of her sex can be seen in Jane Eyre almost to its detraction as a work of fiction. (I've always thought Jane Eyre over-rated)
The male reaction to female writing and how it was seen as an intellectual threat is a diverting topic and the sexism of even Woolf's own era extraordinary.
Perhaps the most interesting of all her reflections is on that of "Shakespeare's Sister" - a fictional entity who if she had wished to pursue the same career as her brother would have been laughed at and degraded, and would have most likely died a victim of sexual exploitation on a roadside near Elephant and Castle. Bleak as this is, I believe Woolf is correct nonetheless.
Where 'A Room Of One's Own' gave me most cause to reflect was in the discussion of women pre-Bronte and pre-Austen who were routinely silenced and had no creative outlet and were expected to have no opinion. It made me think that women today with literary ambitions should pursue them to the fullest, because we are lucky to live in far more enlightened times.
Woolf slightly misses the mark towards the end with the idea that even so, women's writing would remain the province of the upper class, working class women having no time for such pursuits with their poverty and life of drudgery. Snobbish though this may sound to our ears, Woolf even though she was a progressive simply could not conceive of two things : the world women know in 2013 and the literary world of 2013, a world were gender, sexuality and every social class is represented without any notion that this is something remarkable. If at times we grow complacent with the ways of the modern world we should remember just how huge a social and cultural transformation occurred throughout 20th Century Britain and just how fortunate, women particularly, are as a result.
One wonders what on earth Virginia Woolf would have made of it.
Verdict : 9/10
Destination : Return To Library
Showing posts with label Feminism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Feminism. Show all posts
Saturday, 17 August 2013
Saturday, 17 November 2012
Book #94 The Red Tent by Anita Diamant
The Red Tent
The Red Tent by Anita Diamant is a novel which caught my eye in a bookshop many moons ago, listed in the back of my mind as a 'To Read' and never actually came to read it until roughly 12 years later, as a result of it slipping in and out of recall.
The novel is the story of Dinah, the only daughter born to the famous Jacob of many sons of the Bible (and the musical), his four wives, all apparently siblings and Dinah's entire life story from when her father met her mothers to her eventual death.
Though Dinah is a Biblical character, not much was known about her, apart from one main biblical story around which Diamant weaves the most dramatic section of narrative, so in general Diamant was free to build the picture of Dinah she chose.
It is beautifully done. In many ways The Red Tent is a very female very feminist novel, The Red Tent itself being the place the women retreated to from the general family camp whilst they bled at the new moon. There is a huge focus on sexual awakening, menstruation, womanhood and the entry into womanhood, and fertility in general. The story follows the Biblical emphasis on the woman providing her husbands legacy, providing him with sons, the joy of being able to do this and the heartbreak of being unable.
The book also looks at the secrets of women, their private conversations, feelings, superstitions and rituals, kept sacred from the men in the privacy of the Red Tent, and childbirth itself too, a private process of pain, fear and delight dealt with only by women.
In many ways the barriers between men and women's lives are now broken down, and so it is interesting to see this separation of the two, the clear lines between the female world and the male, down to the stories the two genders pass on, the heritage they feel is worth telling. It is another time and in many ways another world.
The prose is very beautiful and I connected with it straight away and had read the book in hours, it was poetic and had a hypnotic quality, you really felt like you could picture the characters and their surroundings, the atmosphere was great.
Dinah's story is in many ways sad, reflecting the difficult lot of women at the time, the loss of which many, though of course not all, modern women can be thankful for, but it is also somehow sad to see that this private culture and camaraderie between women, also broken with the passage of time.
I really enjoyed this book, and read it in one day within a seven hour period. When a book grabs you like this, and doesn't let go, you know it's quite special and this book is surely, particularly for women worth the read 9/10
The Red Tent by Anita Diamant is a novel which caught my eye in a bookshop many moons ago, listed in the back of my mind as a 'To Read' and never actually came to read it until roughly 12 years later, as a result of it slipping in and out of recall.
The novel is the story of Dinah, the only daughter born to the famous Jacob of many sons of the Bible (and the musical), his four wives, all apparently siblings and Dinah's entire life story from when her father met her mothers to her eventual death.
Though Dinah is a Biblical character, not much was known about her, apart from one main biblical story around which Diamant weaves the most dramatic section of narrative, so in general Diamant was free to build the picture of Dinah she chose.
It is beautifully done. In many ways The Red Tent is a very female very feminist novel, The Red Tent itself being the place the women retreated to from the general family camp whilst they bled at the new moon. There is a huge focus on sexual awakening, menstruation, womanhood and the entry into womanhood, and fertility in general. The story follows the Biblical emphasis on the woman providing her husbands legacy, providing him with sons, the joy of being able to do this and the heartbreak of being unable.
The book also looks at the secrets of women, their private conversations, feelings, superstitions and rituals, kept sacred from the men in the privacy of the Red Tent, and childbirth itself too, a private process of pain, fear and delight dealt with only by women.
In many ways the barriers between men and women's lives are now broken down, and so it is interesting to see this separation of the two, the clear lines between the female world and the male, down to the stories the two genders pass on, the heritage they feel is worth telling. It is another time and in many ways another world.
The prose is very beautiful and I connected with it straight away and had read the book in hours, it was poetic and had a hypnotic quality, you really felt like you could picture the characters and their surroundings, the atmosphere was great.
Dinah's story is in many ways sad, reflecting the difficult lot of women at the time, the loss of which many, though of course not all, modern women can be thankful for, but it is also somehow sad to see that this private culture and camaraderie between women, also broken with the passage of time.
I really enjoyed this book, and read it in one day within a seven hour period. When a book grabs you like this, and doesn't let go, you know it's quite special and this book is surely, particularly for women worth the read 9/10
Monday, 19 March 2012
Book #27 Cham by Jonathan Trigell
Cham
After having read and LOVED both Genus and Boy A by Jonathan Trigell, I felt I needed to complete the trio by reading his second novel Cham. I was really nervous of reading Cham, because I had loved both the others and didn't want to feel disappointment, and also because it has had some very critical reviews on Amazon.
At first hand Cham is a novel about Itchy, who works seasonally at French ski resort Chamonix, the location where Jonathan Trigell himself happens to live. In the holiday town, which has a certain cache of cool, tourists come and go, whilst those who work the season stay.
But in this town, a place of thrills and enjoyment, a rapist stalks the international revellers, who is he, and who should be scared?
It would be a mistake to think that this novel is either about Chamonix, or skiing, though both appear in part as background, so if you go to Chamonix and love it or if you're going to Chamonix and are looking for a touristy book, this is not that book. With that, I'm not saying that you shouldn't read Cham, you should, you should just adjust your expectations of it.
This novel is about Itchy and the psychology of Itchy, who himself is running scared from his past. A fan of Byron and Shelley who popularised Chamonix in their era, Itchy is an interesting study. He comes across as a disgusting person, an advantage taking egotist and this opinion of him increases in the reader the more you learn. The lifestyle he lives at Chamonix is very much like that of 'a lad in university', all drunkenness, and pleasure and shagging about.
If this was the sum of the novels parts it might be a fair assessment to call it shallow, but it's not. Via Itchy, Trigell seeks to examine the treatment of women, particularly young women in today's society.
He shows with skill and subtlety how though we live in a post-feminist era, the lives of and in some ways the behaviour of young women is not really as empowered as it appears and has instead morphed into a new kind of patriarchy, with new kinds of abuses, often abuses that are mislabelled as womens liberation or sexual freedom.
If Boy A is a novel about how convicted criminals are treated after time served and Genus is a novel about the poor and the disenfranchised, Cham is a novel about the peculiar new world women find themselves in. How they are treated, how they treat each other and more importantly how they treat themselves.
I think that Cham is a rather feminist novel, an unusual thing for a man to achieve. In the use of the mirroring with the story of Byron and Shelley, Trigell shows that though their patriarchs mistreated them, it was the women in their lives who were stronger, who endured.
Ultimately Cham is a deep novel which cunningly masquerades on the surface as a shallow one. 9/10
After having read and LOVED both Genus and Boy A by Jonathan Trigell, I felt I needed to complete the trio by reading his second novel Cham. I was really nervous of reading Cham, because I had loved both the others and didn't want to feel disappointment, and also because it has had some very critical reviews on Amazon.
At first hand Cham is a novel about Itchy, who works seasonally at French ski resort Chamonix, the location where Jonathan Trigell himself happens to live. In the holiday town, which has a certain cache of cool, tourists come and go, whilst those who work the season stay.
But in this town, a place of thrills and enjoyment, a rapist stalks the international revellers, who is he, and who should be scared?
It would be a mistake to think that this novel is either about Chamonix, or skiing, though both appear in part as background, so if you go to Chamonix and love it or if you're going to Chamonix and are looking for a touristy book, this is not that book. With that, I'm not saying that you shouldn't read Cham, you should, you should just adjust your expectations of it.
This novel is about Itchy and the psychology of Itchy, who himself is running scared from his past. A fan of Byron and Shelley who popularised Chamonix in their era, Itchy is an interesting study. He comes across as a disgusting person, an advantage taking egotist and this opinion of him increases in the reader the more you learn. The lifestyle he lives at Chamonix is very much like that of 'a lad in university', all drunkenness, and pleasure and shagging about.
If this was the sum of the novels parts it might be a fair assessment to call it shallow, but it's not. Via Itchy, Trigell seeks to examine the treatment of women, particularly young women in today's society.
He shows with skill and subtlety how though we live in a post-feminist era, the lives of and in some ways the behaviour of young women is not really as empowered as it appears and has instead morphed into a new kind of patriarchy, with new kinds of abuses, often abuses that are mislabelled as womens liberation or sexual freedom.
If Boy A is a novel about how convicted criminals are treated after time served and Genus is a novel about the poor and the disenfranchised, Cham is a novel about the peculiar new world women find themselves in. How they are treated, how they treat each other and more importantly how they treat themselves.
I think that Cham is a rather feminist novel, an unusual thing for a man to achieve. In the use of the mirroring with the story of Byron and Shelley, Trigell shows that though their patriarchs mistreated them, it was the women in their lives who were stronger, who endured.
Ultimately Cham is a deep novel which cunningly masquerades on the surface as a shallow one. 9/10
Thursday, 22 December 2011
Book #93 Surfacing by Margaret Atwood
Surfacing
I have read many but by no means all of Margaret Atwood's novels over the years starting with The Handmaid's Tale (1985) which I studied at A Level in 1999 and followed by Alias Grace ( published in 1996) The Blind Assassin (2000) Oryx and Crake (2003) and The Penelopiad (2005). Of these The Handmaid's Tale probably remains my favourite with Oryx and Crake a close second.
I found Surfacing, written in 1972, a bit of a difficult experience. Set in Canada, a nameless protagonist travels back to her home town with her boyfriend Joe and friends Annie and David to locate her estranged father, who has purportedly gone missing. The group go out into the Canadian wilderness in order to search with some hiking, fishing and discussions along the way.
There is a clear feminist agenda in this novel, which, for 1972 is current and appropriate but reminded me somewhat of the problems I had with Doris Lessing's Shikasta. The novels protagonist is a divorcee who has also deserted her child whom she refers to as "it", we never know the gender. For 1972 this is shocking, outrageous behaviour possibly making her despised by those who read her story. Of course, nowadays being divorced is much less of a social offence, though a woman leaving her child is still considered rather unnatural.
Far more clever to me was the character of David, whose appearance of being "right on" is a veneer beneath which lies an old school misogynist, only supportive of women's liberation when it suits his desires.
The novel has many nature, wilderness descriptive prose sections which in the end reminded me of David Vann's Legend Of A Suicide. The allusions to spiritual experience versus temporary insanity left me cold which is bizarre as I normally like that sort of thing. Atwood's second novel, you can see signs of what she will become in the next decade, but unfortunately for me I found it dated, unsubtle and occasionally boring.
6/10
I have read many but by no means all of Margaret Atwood's novels over the years starting with The Handmaid's Tale (1985) which I studied at A Level in 1999 and followed by Alias Grace ( published in 1996) The Blind Assassin (2000) Oryx and Crake (2003) and The Penelopiad (2005). Of these The Handmaid's Tale probably remains my favourite with Oryx and Crake a close second.
I found Surfacing, written in 1972, a bit of a difficult experience. Set in Canada, a nameless protagonist travels back to her home town with her boyfriend Joe and friends Annie and David to locate her estranged father, who has purportedly gone missing. The group go out into the Canadian wilderness in order to search with some hiking, fishing and discussions along the way.
There is a clear feminist agenda in this novel, which, for 1972 is current and appropriate but reminded me somewhat of the problems I had with Doris Lessing's Shikasta. The novels protagonist is a divorcee who has also deserted her child whom she refers to as "it", we never know the gender. For 1972 this is shocking, outrageous behaviour possibly making her despised by those who read her story. Of course, nowadays being divorced is much less of a social offence, though a woman leaving her child is still considered rather unnatural.
Far more clever to me was the character of David, whose appearance of being "right on" is a veneer beneath which lies an old school misogynist, only supportive of women's liberation when it suits his desires.
The novel has many nature, wilderness descriptive prose sections which in the end reminded me of David Vann's Legend Of A Suicide. The allusions to spiritual experience versus temporary insanity left me cold which is bizarre as I normally like that sort of thing. Atwood's second novel, you can see signs of what she will become in the next decade, but unfortunately for me I found it dated, unsubtle and occasionally boring.
6/10
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