When the time comes for dealing with literature and, mostly, with the role of women in it, it is required to talk about Virginia Woolf.
Virginia Woolf is one of the best female english writers. Throughout her life, she was worried about several issues: society and its clases, love, ageing and time, death, nature and our surroundings, gender, but also the literature for itself.
This time we will focus on Mrs. Woolf's concern for literature and writing and the impossibility of women to creat art on their own.
Therefore, her main work focused on this concern is A Room Of One's Own.
A Room Of One's Own is a feminist essay relating, mainly, the problem of female writers all through the years and why is that there were so many men compared to the presence of the women in the art.
Thus, Woolf concluded that "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction", using "room" as privacy, leisure time and financial independance. For that reason, women's presence in literary world has been rather deficient: women depend on men because women's financial independance in most cases was absolutely hopeless. Nowadays, maybe we women do not depend that much on men, but we surely need some financial independance to write; art does not usually lead to wealthiness without putting too much effort in it.
So, whether this fact remains, there will be no gender equality and women's literary achievements will always be inferior.
However, in Woolf's own case, who was highly lucky in this area (though maybe not that much in the others), did not happen as we are predicting: she was married to Leonard Woolf, who gave her each and everything she would need for her to create art and, being himself writer and editor, revised and corrected her texts.
To illustrate this alarming matter, Woolf creates Judith Shakespeare, Shakespeare's hypothetical sister he could have had, with a genious as big as his but unable to develop it because her parents would not ever let her obtain enough educational aptitudes. She would, cosequently, feel miserable enough to end up killing herself, leaving her brother William as the only art legacy, though she, with the required opportunities, could have been as (even better, if possible) good as William.
When looking at things under Woolf's perspective, one of the most important things when it comes to writing is money. That is why V. Woolf asserts that "Intellectual freedom depends upon material things. Poetry depends upon itellectual freedom. And women have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from the beginning of time...".
Furthermore, one does not usually make enough profit to live loosely. In fact, most of people who have been devoted to art and, moreover, they have made a significant profit is due to the certainty that they surely had already money and credit facilities.
Another Virginia Woolf's book which it deals with pretty much a similar issue is Orlando. In this story, the theme of people needing economic freedom and leisure time in order to produce any kind of art, including literature, is frequent as well.
Orlando is a writer who is suffering from gender transformations and time travelling until he reaches the 20th century, when, according to Woolf's belief, women could have more freedom when it comes to writing:
"And she heaved a deep sigh of relief, as, indeed, well she might, for the transaction between a writer and the spirit of the age is one of infinite delicacy, and upon a nice arrangement between the two the whole fortune of his works depends. Orlando had so ordered it that she was in an extremely happy position; she need neither fight her age, nor submit to it; she was of it, yet remained herself. Now, therefore, she could write, and write she did. She wrote. She wrote. She wrote."
> Orlando.
On a different maner, in this blog, we all believe in good sense of humour in order to live life more peacefully and laugh at our problems so that we can minimize them.
You will be able to watch below a parody of Virginia Woolf, who was almost always in very low spirits made by the Muchachada Nui comedians.
Autumn.
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