Virginia Woolf, “A Room of One’s Own”

QUESTIONS (WITH ANSWERS)

1. What kind of text is it?
It is an essay with an argumentative point, despite it’s written to initially seem to
be a fictional narrative text.

2. What rhetoric devices support the previous answer?

There is a first person narrator that expresses thoughts and emotions to the
reader. It is employed as the ‘stream-of -consciousness’ device, or sudden loud
voice of the inner thinking in the narrator’s head, so that it is also “heard” by the
reader. Using argumentation in the shape of dialogue with the self meant an
innovative practice at the time, as a fictional approach replaces the traditional
form of an essay. The fact that the manuscript for this book was based on a speech
implies the use of strategies found in Aristotelian Rhetorics with an argumentative
goal, that is, an aim to alter opinion, feeling and judgement by effective verbal
means. According to Aristotle, this act of ‘influencing’ or ‘persuading’ is based on
the interaction of three critical elements: logos, pathos and ethos. Aiming at a
person’s intelligence, logos appeals to the head with the use of logic, numbers,
explanations and facts. Strategies as “compare and contrast” or “cause and effect”
demonstrate logos to the reader. Pathos, on the other hand, appeals to the
addressee’s heart, emotions, sympathy, passion, etc. and aims at making the
reader/listener “’see and feel’ what one is saying”.
Finally, ethos appeals to the reader’s conscience, ethics, morals and values.
The use of the “train-of thought” that is, chain of thinking interrupted by a chain of
thought, where the authors acknowledges her subjectivity, makes her seem more
honest to the eyes of the reader. This reinforces the “ethos” so her persuasiveness
is shifted to the reader’s “ethos” who will not feel convinced by another, but just by
their own thinking. All the reflections described in this train of thought, as
unconnected as they seem at first, give us information about the narrator’s
emotional motives. We can see through her eyes and almost experience ourselves
what she or her invented characters feel. This enables the author to reach her
readers’ pathos in a very effective way. In addition to the appeal to pathos, her
train of thoughts creates the opportunity of identification and switching point of
view, and by this change of perspective it is easier to follow the logical
development (logos) of her argumentation as well; suddenly the connection
becomes clear and the effect is that her arguments seem much more profound and
well-supported than a traditional argumentation would have been.
3. Which stylistic resources can be found?
Within this train of thought Woolf experiments with some different stylistic ideas. She
uses very long sentences balanced by shorter sentences, which creates a rhythm in the
text. Many of her sentences are also interrupted by descriptions of momentary actions.
Among the stylistic devices, we can find the following :
direct questions and irony, such as in : “Must they all be scrapped because Emma and
Mr Woodhouse are dead?”
anaphora, i.e. “Something tore, something scratched”
repetition, i.e. “from melody to melody as Mozart from song to song”
frequent use of the personal pronoun “one”instead of the first person singular
pronoun “I”. i.e. “Up one went, down one sank”
parody and humour, i.e. “There will be time for that when I have decided whether she
has a pen in her hand or a pickaxe”
comparison , i.e. “She is like a person striking a match that will not light”
juxtaposition, i.e. “But why, I asked her as if she were present, are Jane Austen’s
sentences not of the right shape for you?”
multi-levelled metaphors, i.e. “she remembers that women’s writing has been called
flowery and so provides a superfluity of thorns”

4. Why are Jane Austen and Mozart mentioned?

Woolf is supposed to be reading a female author, whom she compares with a recognized
and influential woman writer as Jane Austen. She mentions Mozart as establishing the
comparison on how influential Austen might be to female writing so as Mozart is to
classical music.

5. What is the meaning of “whether she had a pen or a pickaxe”?

The book she’s reading is not following a stylistic set canon, this is why, she pretends to be
putting under trial the mastery of the author as a writer. It would be as asking: “Does she
write Literature or does she just make holes?” It is an ironic, as it sounds as an
stereotyped male evaluation of women’s lack of literary skills in that time.

6. What does the author mean by “I tried a sentence or two on my tongue”?

It is an example of train-of-thoughts interruption. She reads a couple of sentences loud in
order to check how they sound to her. She is trying to convince the reader of her
investigation being both rigorous but subject to her own senses and feelings.

7. According to the extract, how would you report the author’s opinion on female
literature?
Woolf combines traditional devices with more personal ideas, and thereby creates her
own individual pattern of style with her train or chain of thoughts. She is trying to
contextualize women literature and roles, as assessed and assigned by men. She tries to
make the reader aware of the necessary recognition of female literature as well as allow
women’s voices to be heard without prejudices, so that they will have to neither
“disguise” nor reject to their own identity.