Virginia Woolf & Plight of Women in Literature
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Virginia Woolf was a writer who was much concerned with the general plight of women in literature in her era. Indeed, she showed considerable interest and concern with the place of women in her society and with the need for women to foster a solidarity with one another, making her a feminist in her point of view. Her feminism derived from her perception of the very real discrimination experienced by women throughout Victorian society, and the woman as artist also had to overcome a degree of prejudice against she and her work. At the same time, it is evident that women in the arts did achieve a certain freedom from the structures of society that other women could not, and Woolf herself is a clear example of this. Her personal life shows considerable divergence from the mores of her time, yet her writings also show that she was fully aware of the social restrictions faced by women in general. In her fiction, relationships between women serve as examples of how women can and do support one another in some cases and undermine one another in others. Among these relationships are mother-daughter relationships which in part may derive from her own odd relationship with her mother and from her observation of other such relationships, and the mother-daughter relationship is key in much of Woolf's fiction. The issue of the plight of women in society has been addressed directly by different writers, and Virginia Woolf showed concern for the matter in her criticism as in her fic
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s of gender, in terms of the expression of women writers and the problems they encountered in finding their fictional voice. Woolf commented on the oppression and repression of women writers in her time and in so doing says much about the relations between men and women in society and specifically about the need for women to achieve freedom so they feel they can express themselves through writing in the same way men do. In her book A Room of One's Own, Woolf makes it clear that there is a close relationship between the position of women in society and their ability to express themselves in fiction. Fiction may come from within, but it is also dependent on certain modes of thought, on ways of dealing with and relating to one's environment, and on how one views oneself in relation to the rest of society. Woolf states that a woman will not be able to write fiction unless she has money and a room of her own (Woolf, A Room of One's Own 4). There is a degree of independence of spirit in those who achieve these two external freedoms.
Mrs. Dalloway is a novel in which Woolf reflects her concerns about women. She makes use of her literary style in a way that exemplifies women's writing, as she has defined it in other works, such as
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Approximate Word count = 1368
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)
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