“Being rich is not about how much money you have or how many homes you own; it’s the freedom to buy any book you want without looking at the price and wondering if you can afford it” (John Waters, Role Models). In this quote, Waters associates wealth with the ability to readily acquire literature. While it is true that opulence grants individuals more opportunities and resources, Virginia Woolf provides a strict correlation between the two in her essay A Room of One’s Own and thus suggests it is impossible to be a successful woman without money. Adrienne Rich argues, “Virginia Woolf is addressing an audience of women, but she is acutely conscious—as she always was—of being overheard by men… She drew the language out into an exacerbated thread in her determination to have her own sensibility yet protect it from those masculine presences.” She suggests Woolf writes with a concern for the opinions of the opposite sex. Although she writes with attentiveness to her audience, she writes with the will of appealing to the upper class lecture attendees and fails to consider the possibility of success coming forth from lower classes. She uses men as a symbol of wealth in her essay and promotes the idea of affluence granting intellectual freedom while completely rejected the notion of a lower class women being able to write fiction freely without acquiring money. By doing so, she promotes a rigid social structure with prevalent socioeconomic barriers in which only upper class women may succeed.
Rich argues that Woolf writes to appeal to a male as well as a female audience, trying “to be calm, detached, and even charming in a roomful of men where things have been said which are attacks on her very integrity,” yet the claims she makes in favor of men are not to appease men but to rather appease the upper classes as wealth was associated with men at the time. In a nation where men earned the most income and owned the majority of property, men ultimately connoted wealth. When observing Oxbridge University on the way to a luncheon, the narrator, Mary, thinks to herself, “from the purses of men who had made, say, a fortune from industry, and returned, in their wills, a bounteous share of it to endow more chairs, more lectureships, more fellowships in the university where they had learnt their craft” (10). She describes the large sums of money forefathers of the University donate and how they are used to finance educational opportunities. The description of the grandeur of the university may perhaps seem to be admiring the accomplishments of men but it is rather awe of the wealth and all the resources granted from it. Men, being the more affluent gender at the time, are merely a factor while considering the distribution of wealth. This representation of wealth through men is further seen through the disparities between the two luncheons she attends. After attending a luxurious luncheon filled with five course meals and supposed finer things in life held by Oxbridge and a bland, poorly-funded, not intellectually stimulating luncheon by the women’s college Fernham, she contemplates the wealth disparities by questioning, “Why did men drink wine and women water? Why was one sex so prosperous and the other so poor? What effect has poverty on fiction?” (25) She introduces the gender gap and begins to question the importance of capital for writing literature, which continues over the course of the essay in which she demonstrates her belief of its upmost significance in prosperity. Through Mary’s narration, she describes men as almost synonymous with wealth. She doesn’t necessarily want to charm men but rather wishes women would aspire towards the riches men possess in order to be successful.
Woolf writes this essay for the purpose of giving a lecture at women’s colleges in order to describe the social injustices women face and how to remedy them. However, in the process of persuading upper class women in addition to the men who overhear, she constructs and perpetuates a rigid class system, in which only the moneyed listeners may achieve. Continuing to contemplate in the beginning of her essay, Mary says, “I thought how it is worse perhaps to be locked in; and, thinking of the safety and prosperity of the one sex and of the poverty and insecurity of the other and of the effect of tradition and the lack of tradition upon the mind of a writer” (24). Once again, she is addressing the few literature upper class women who didn’t meet the model Mary describes. In her cogitation, she reveals the detriment caused by poverty and lack of resources. However, she fails to acknowledge the ability of success to arise out of such adversity. Rather, she is advocating prosperity for wealthy women as opposed to poor women. She wishes to support her thesis that a woman must have a private working space and money to write fiction, but inherently rejects the ability of lower class citizens to become accomplished. Although she recognizes a middle-class woman (while completely disregarding the lowest of classes), Aphra Behn, who faces adversity and earns money on her own, she emphasizes the point of her money over the nature of her literature. She introduces her as follows:
“Mrs. Behn was a middle-class woman with all the plebeian virtues of humour… she made by, working very hard, enough to live on. The importance of that fact outweighs anything she actually wrote… for her begins the freedom of the mind, or rather the possibility that in the course of time the mind will be free to write what it likes” (64).
She describes Behn as a woman who wrote to finance her living expenses since her husband passed away. Rather than praising her works, she praises her ability to earn income, which would grant her both a room and money to write fiction successfully. It is important to note that Mary does not praise her as a successful writer, as a middle class women she merely has the opportunity to write with the money she has acquired but isn’t necessarily going to succeed. By outwardly ignoring the existence of the lower classes and merely acknowledging the possibility of success of a middle class woman if she gains money suggests wealth is essential to success and any deviation would not allow for a successful writer to be born.
Virginia Woolf may wish for women to aspire towards wealth in order to be successful, but she doesn’t address the ways in which women can overcome economics issues and become successful writers within their own class. Rather she recycles her classist theory up until the very end of her essay. She ends her essay with a summation of her points by saying, “Intellectual freedom depends upon material things. Poetry depends on intellectual freedom. And women have always been poor… That is why I have laid so much stress on money and a room of one’s own” (108). She relates the ability to write freely to having money and fails to recognize any deviation from that. While intellectual freedom certainly is made easier with material items, it is not restricted to only the ones who can “afford” it. Intellectual freedom is independent of material things but it is certainly fostered by the opportunities granted by wealth. With such materialistic assertions, Woolf sustains the notion that only the wealthy may achieve and although she hopes women aspire towards this wealth; she doesn’t encourage literary success within the lower classes, as it would not be fitting among the group of literate, upper class women listening to her lecture.
Virginia Woolf, a writer from the upper classes, promotes the idea that affluence is needed in order to be a successful writer. While this persuasive technique may be genius in order to appeal to the upper class college women who attended her lectures, she unquestionably instilled a classist view among her students. She fails to recognize the ability of poor women to also succeed with the limited resources they have. We know her thesis of women needing a room and money is flawed because of the numerous successful female writers that have sprung forth out of adversity. For example, J.K. Rowling and Sandra Cisneros are just two of many authors who were successful at writing fiction despite coming from impoverished backgrounds. Instead of making strides towards affluence, women should be encouraged to become educated and well versed in literature in order to write fiction.