English LL ACT 2020-22

Friday, February 26, 2021

A Room of One's Own, Questions Chapter 4

Chapter Four

      Woman and Novel Writing:
                Building a tradition

At the Home Library Again
1. the work of Lady Winchilsea
2. the letters of Dorothy Osborne
        3. the significance of Aphra Behn
        4. women and novel writing
        5. Austen and Bronte compared
        6. On Novel Writing: Integrity and Genius
[Ethics and Aesthetics again]
7. Fiction & a Theory of Values: a Voice
of One's Own
8. Imitation: the Sentence

Discussion Questions

1. What might Woolf mean when she writes, "money dignifies what is frivolous if unpaid for" ? How might this relate to the title of this book? Margi

2. Woolf's character reflects: "The strange thing is, I thought, turning over the pages of Dorothy's letters, what a gift that untaught and solitary girl had for the framing of a sentence, for the fashioning of the scene." If you are inclined to agree with Woolf's assessment, find a discuss a passage from Dorothy Osborne in the quoted text which might support her appropriate appraisal.
Sara

3. What are the main reasons provided by Woolf's character for admiring Jane Austen? Daniel

4. What is the main criticism from Woolf's character for the work of Lady Winchilsea? Jorik

5. What does Woolf's character find strange in thinking about George Eliot, Jane Austen and the Bronte sisters? Viola

6. What is the relation between, women, writing, the middle-class and novels? Ben

7. Woolf wrote:

"For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are
           the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking
           by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass
           is behind the single voice."

What might Woolf mean by this? How might this be related to some of the themes we have discussed in the previous chapters? Reina

8. In comparing Jane Eyre and Pride and Prejudice, what does she criticize Charlotte Bronte for and what does she admire Jane Austen for? Ben

9. What does Woolf's character discover in comparing the life of George Eliot with a life like that of Tolstoi? Margi

10. In Woolf's character loose sketch of an aesthetic theory, what does she mean by the "integrity" of the artist? Daniel

11. What is essence of the art of writing? What does this have to do with the writing of women?

Reina

12. What is the fundamental difference between men and women according to Woolf? What would it mean for women writers to have a tradition of their own? Jorik

13. What does Woolf's character think writing is about? How is the accessibility of literature and the formation of the English sentence related to "the freedom of the mind"? Where it would seem, does individuality begin? Viola

14. What is Woolf's character's fundamental criticism of women writers in the past? Sara

15. Woolf's character singles out this following sentence as a man's:

"The grandeur of their works was an argument with them, not to stop short,
but to proceed. The could have no higher excitement or satisfaction than

in the exercise of their art and endless generations of truth and beauty.
Success prompts to exertion; and habit facilitates success."

Woolf's character finds Dr. Johnson and Gibbon behind this. Do you agree? Do a style analysis. Compare this sentence with Austen or Burney or even Eliot. Could there be such a thing as "a woman's sentence" as Woolf's character seems to suggest? All

Tuesday, February 23, 2021

Semantic fields

a new definition for you...

Semantic (or sometimes called lexical) fields are a technique often used by writers to keep a certain image persistent in their readers' mind. They are a collection of words which are related to one another be it through their similar meanings, or through a more abstract relation.

Thursday, February 11, 2021

A Room of One's Own, Questions Chapter 3

Chapter Three

Roughly....

On the relation between Truth & Fact
in Fiction: Limits and the unimaginable

At the Library: The Topics/ Themes [?]
1. Ask the historian: condition of
women in the time of Elizabeth
2. Woman in Fiction: the composite being
3. are there women 'writers' in the past?/
women in history (the margins)
4. history and fiction: the imagination
5. the Bishop and Judith: What is genius?
[Is a female genius imaginable?]
(The use of fiction and literature)
6. the second meaning of a room
7. issue of chasity: Anon
8. Art and Circumstance: the origin of art
(the mirror speaks the truth)
9. Art & Politics: Issue of self-denigration,
Responsibility & Truth (Art and Life)

[What is a true work of Art?]

Discussion Questions

Section I: Fiction and History

1. What task does Woolf's character set for herself at the beginning of the chapter in reading Trevelyan’s History of England? What does she discover about the relationship between writing fiction and history?

a) Is the following analogy a good one: history is concerned with facts while fiction is concerned with values? Where does this analogy break down?

b) What is truth in history? What is truth in fiction? What is the relation between fact, values and reality in fiction? Does the writing of history and the writing of fiction serve different social functions? In what ways are they similar? In what ways are they different?

c) Is there a way in which fiction and history might be complimentary to each other? In thinking about their relationship, does it challenge our notion
of Truth? Does this lead us to an idea of the social function of fiction? What role does the imagination have in all this?

2. Woolf writes:

Everything is against the likelihood that it will come from the writer’s mind
whole and entire. Generally material circumstances are against it.

What does this tell us about what she thinks about the origin of art? What does this have to do with history? What does this have to do with Woolf’s character’s professed topic: ‘women and fiction’? Is this somehow related to her theory of genius?

3. Woolf’s character reflects:

It was a woman Edward Fitzgerald, I think, suggested who made
the ballads and the folk-songs, crooning them to her children,
beguiling her spinning with them, or the length of the winter’s night.

How does this provide insight into how history might be written in time to come? What is the relationship between history, fiction and the imagination? What does this have to do with facts and what might this suggest about how history is written? What are ‘facts’? Are 'meanings' (of words or events) facts? What is the (social) function of fiction?

Section II: Women and Society

1. Why does Woolf call women a "composite being"? What does she mean?

2. What is Woolf’s character’s objection to Lady Bessborough in the latter’s correspondence with Lord Granville Leveson-Gower? How does this relate to Mr. Oscar Browning, the Saturday Review and Mr. Greg? What seems to be Woolf view on the relationship between art and politics?

3. Opening a book about music, Woolf’s character finds,

Of Mlle. Germaine Tailleferre one can only repeat Dr. Johnson’s dictum
concerning a woman preacher, transposed into terms of music.
‘Sir, a woman’s composing is a like a dog’s walking on his hind legs.
It is not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all.’ So accurately
does history repeat itself.

Why is this important? What does Woolf hope to show by citing his example?

4. Is Woolf a polemicist? How so or why not? (Also think about how this is related to Lady Bessborough, female authors who take up male pseudo names, and the Bishop.)

5. Is Virginia Woolf a 'feminist'? If so, in what ways?

Section III: The Main Thread

1. What eventually happened with Judith in Woolf’s character’s story? How is this related to the theme of chastity and the theme of courage and confidence? Is self-confidence an issue in the pieces we have read from Woolf so far? How so? What does all this have to do with talk of conditions and history, even society?

2. As discussed, what is the second meaning of 'room' in Woolf's metaphor 'a room of one's own? How does this issue arise in this chapter?

3. In “Professions for Women”, Woolf writes:

You have won rooms of your own in the house hitherto exclusively owned
by men. You are able, though not without great labor and effort, to pay
the rent. You are earning your five hundred pounds a year. But this freedom
is only a beginning; the room is your own, but it is still bare. It has
to be furnished; it has to be decorated; it has to be shared. How are you
going to furnish it, how are you going to decorate it? With whom are you
going to share it, and upon what terms?

Is there a connection between what she has stated here and the contents of this chapter? Is this related to the end of chapter two where she talks about 'the protected' sex--perhaps also think of Lady Bessborough--and Fernham?

4. What is the connection between Woolf’s character’s description of Mr. Oscar Browning, the description of the worm (P.44, ch.3), the image of Prometheus (P.38, ch.2) and the looking-glasses passage (P.35, ch.2)? Does the description of Mr. Oscar Browning have anything to do with what she says in the following, “For if she [woman] begins to tell the truth, the figure in the looking-glass shrinks; his fitness or life is diminished” (P.36, ch.2)?

5. Woolf writes:

The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more
interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.

How is this consistent with what she learns from the Professor X episode in Chapter 2 and what she says in Chapter 1? (see below)

At any rate, when a subject is highly controversial--and any question about
sex is that--one cannot hope to tell the truth. One can only show how one
came to hold whatever opinion one does hold. One can only give one's
audience the chance of drawing their own conclusions as they observe
the limitations, the prejudices, the idiosyncrasies of the speaker.
Fiction here is likely to contain more truth than fiction.

Explain.

Section IV: Women and the Literary Cannon: Towards a Theory of Art

1. Woolf's character alludes to Thomas Gray's Elegy and substitutes Jane Austen for John Milton:

...I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet,
of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen...

Why is this allusion significant, if at all? Is it fitting in the context of this book and in terms of the task she has been burdened with, as she tells us?

2. Have your heard the phrase 'a genius gives birth to a work to a work of art'? how is Woolf's use of this idiom appropriate given her theme 'women and fiction'? Do you think Woolf over-states her point? Why or why not? What do you think Woolf means by 'genius'?

3. Earlier in the chapter she writes:

What were the conditions in which women lives, I asked myself; for fiction,
imaginative work that is, is not dropped like a pebble upon the ground,
as science may be; fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly
perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners."****

Later we find:

Chastity had then, it has even now, a religious importance in a woman's
life, and has so wrapped itself round with nerves and instincts that to cut it
free and bring it to light of day demands courage of the rarest.

α) What is the relationship between these two passages?

b) What does the issue of chastity have to do with publishing anonymously? What does this have to do with the task she takes up in chapter one, namely 'women and fiction'? Is there a relationship between art and politics?

c) What kind of courage is she referring to? Does this have anything to do with the theme of chastity?

(Note: Think about the function of the story about Judith in this chapter in relation to history and fiction. What do social conditions and history have to do with this?)

4. Woolf's objection to the Bishop is not only to what might be meant by his assertion that "it is unthinkable that any woman in Shakespeare's day should have had Shakespeare's genius" but also to our notion of genius and what the word means. In the context of this chapter, what are the several senses of the word 'genius'?*** How has Woolf challenged our notion of genius? (Who, what and when do we consider someone or something, a genius or a work of genius?) What might we mean by genius? Is there just one meaning of the term?

5. What is the function of fiction? How might fiction be said to enrich our lives? How might ethics be related to aesthetics, i.e. fiction? How is this related to the theme of courage?