Conclusion: Woolf, Rhys, and Narratives of Obscurity

Abstract

We begin in a room. It is full of books and a writing desk and a brown ring on the carpet left by a hot kettle.¹ This room in which Virginia Woolf works is nothing like the quarters occupied by her predecessors. Woolf declares her bald and unapologetic ownership in her manifesto A Room of One’s Own, in which she re frames the conventional definition of the interior. Woolf’s professional freedom is gained through her study, a location dedicated to and for woman’s intellectual work that essentially promises freedom of thought. Victoria Rosner argues that A Room of One’s Own provides a set of ‘shifting locations [that] take the reader on a tour of obstacles to female authorship and finally show that nothing is more essential for women writers than a traditional, masculine study — a somewhat unsettling conclusion for a text committed to the construction of a separate female literary tradition .…’² However, the room is not simply a reenactment of patriarchal privilege. Woolf suggests that the room connotes a recognition of women’s intellectual vocation and intellectualism, a space for work. It is not necessarily masculine — or at least, the study is masculine only insofar as intellectual work is gendered as such. Of course, this is exactly the kind of coding that Woolf attempts to overturn. When she claims a room of her own, she reclaims that social space because the body within it is feminine and equally intellectual.