ISABELLA THOBURN COLLEGE

NAME - AAVIKA MISHRA

CLASS - B.A. 2nd YEAR
SECTION A
COLLEGE ROLL NO. - 194137
UNIVERSITY ROLL NO. – 190380020010
NAME OF THE TEACHER – DR. KHARE
PAPER 2
TOPIC: THEMES AND CONTENTS IN
JUDITH SHAKESPEARE
-BY VIRGINIA WOLF
 PLOT

The narrator returns home disappointed at not having rounded up some useful tidbit of
truth from her researches at the British Library. She turns at this point to history, which,
she conjectures, "records not opinions but facts." As her starting point, she chooses to
look into the lives of English women during the Elizabethan period—an era of surpassing
literary accomplishment, but only among men. It is a virtue of Shakespeare's plays, she
observes, that they seem, like enchanted spider-webs, "to hang there complete by
themselves." In reality, however, even his works "are not spun in mid-air by incorporeal
creatures, but are the real work of suffering human beings, and are attached to grossly
material things, like health and money and the houses we live in."

History turns up little except a few terse statements about the legal rights of women in
the early modern period (which were virtually non-existent). This reticence on the topic
of women, and the fact of her utter powerlessness, strikes discordantly with the
prevalence in literature of complex and strong female characters from ancient times to
the present. "A very queer, composite being thus emerges. Imaginatively she is of the
highest importance; practically she is completely insignificant. ...Some of the most
inspired words, some of the most profound thoughts in literature fall from her lips; in
real life she could hardly read, could scarcely spell, and was the property of her
husband." In light of this paradox, the solution to the problem of trying to conceptualize
the Elizabethan woman seems to be to pool the resources of history and fiction.

"It would have been impossible," the narrator concludes from this thought-experiment,
"completely and entirely, for any woman to have written the plays of Shakespeare in
the age of Shakespeare." To illustrate this conclusion, she conjures the imaginary
character of Judith Shakespeare. Judith is as gifted perhaps as her brother, but receives
no education except that which she can create for herself in what free time she has.
Although she is "the apple of her father's eye," her family expects her to conform to a
social role that leaves no room for the development of her talent. She writes some, in
secret, but hides or burns her work for fear of reprisal. She becomes engaged at a young
age. When she begs to be allowed not to marry, she is chastised and beaten by her
father. After this she runs away, driven by "the force of her own gift alone." She wants
to go into acting, but meets with rejection and ridicule. She is finally taken up by a
theater-manager, becomes pregnant by him, and commits suicide.

This is how the life of a woman with Shakespeare's genius might have looked at that
time, the narrator argues. But she goes on to assert that "it is unthinkable that any
woman in Shakespeare's day should have had Shakespeare's genius"- -or no more than
the first germ of genius, and certainly not the kind that would ever have translated itself
into brilliant writing. "For genius is not born among labouring, uneducated, servile
people," except with the rarest exceptions—and even then, that social condition glares
through as a limitation of the art. In that age, genius engendered witches and lunatics
among women, and "Anonymous," she argues, was most likely a woman as well.

Having explored the deep inner conflicts that a gifted woman must have felt during the
Renaissance, the narrator goes on to ask, "What is the state of mind that is most
propitious to the act of creation?" She marvels at the "prodigious difficulty" of
producing a work of genius, and observes that circumstances generally conspire against
it. She cites as obstacles the indifference of most of the world, the profusion of
distractions, and the heaping up of various forms of discouragement. This is true for all
artists, but how much more so for women! A woman would not even have a room of
her own, unless her parents were exceptionally wealthy, and in her spending money and
discretionary time she would be totally at the mercy of others. Being regularly told of
female ineptitude, women would surely have internalized that belief; the absence of
any tradition of female intellectuals would have made such arguments all the more
viable. Though we like to think of genius as transcendent, the narrator holds that the
mind of the artist is actually particularly susceptible to discouragement and vulnerable
to the opinion of others. The mind of the artist, she says, "must be incandescent.
...There must be no obstacle in it, no foreign matter unconsumed."
 THEMES

1. Women and Femininity

Pick a random page of A Room of One's Own and you're nearly guaranteed to find some
reference to women. This isn't exactly surprising, since Woolf's essay is a long, hard
look at how to be a woman writer in a man's world. And she's thorough about it: she takes
a gander at how traditional roles like wife and mother are filled with irritating
interruptions that make it so a woman can't get a thought down on paper. She cracks the
history books to look at how men have written about women. She points her eye inward
to look at tiny differences between how men and women read and write. In the end?
Well, we can't say much for the past—but we are starting to feel a little better about the
future of women.

2. Literature and Writing

For one million dollars: what do geniuses need to write great books? (You've used up all
your lifelines.) Oh, okay, need a hint? Well, how come Shakespeare was able to be so
awesome? Instead of asking the audience, Woolf takes the history books down off the
shelf and works out her own ideas. In A Room of Her Own, the simple answer is that
writers need money and their own space to write anything good. But they need more
than that: great writers need to send the male and female parts of their minds out on a
hot date. And with this metaphor, Mary describes what's going on in the mind of an
awesome writer: some sexy, sexy gender-bending.
 3. Freedom and Confinement
In A Room of One's Own, Woolf tells us a woman needs a room of her own, with a lock
on the door, in order to have the freedom to write (6.10). That is, she needs the freedom
to confine herself in a room in order to have the mental freedom she needs to create art.
Confusing, right? Woolf plays with what those ideas might mean: she goes over the
difference between being locked out and locked in and explains that physical freedom
influences mental freedom. All of this in order to perform what sounds like a freaky
occult ritual: to allow dead Judith Shakespeare to inhabit a new body.

4. Visions of London
There's just something about writers and cities. In a book in which so little happens, the
setting in which things do happen is important. Aside from her visit to Oxbridge and
Fernham, Mary Beton never leaves London. London is also where all the excitement is:
Judith Shakespeare escapes to London because it's the only place she can gain the
experience to write her plays and poetry, and Mary Beton has a vision of the London
street that inspires her with the idea that she needs to finish her essay. In A Room of One's
Own, London is a big "machine" or a "factory" and everyone, even a woman writing at a
desk in her own room, is an employee.

5. Power
James Brown said it best: "It's a Man's Man's Man's World. Why? Because men have all
the power. Or do they? You could argue that A Room of One's Own is all about power:
men's power over women, women's power over men and over themselves, and even
artistic power. Woolf carefully traces the effects of power on the minds of both men and
women, showing that the power that men have has to come from believing that women
are inferior. For Woolf, too, the power of authority is the power to interrupt. In order for
women to write well and express their thoughts completely, of course, they can't be
interrupted. They have to take back the power.