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10 - Woolf - Answers

The document is an essay by Virginia Woolf that uses a fictional narrative and stream-of-consciousness to argue that women need financial and intellectual freedom to develop as writers. It references Jane Austen and Mozart to establish the potential influence of women writers and uses rhetorical devices like irony and comparison to examine societal expectations of women.

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Sergio Ruge
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67 views3 pages

10 - Woolf - Answers

The document is an essay by Virginia Woolf that uses a fictional narrative and stream-of-consciousness to argue that women need financial and intellectual freedom to develop as writers. It references Jane Austen and Mozart to establish the potential influence of women writers and uses rhetorical devices like irony and comparison to examine societal expectations of women.

Uploaded by

Sergio Ruge
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOC, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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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.

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