'A Room of One's Own,' personal criticism, and the essay

Twentieth Century Literature, Summer, 1994 by Anne Fernald

The power of subjective readings such as Woolf's has tempted many critics to write personal essays. For many, the most accessible and straightforward way to do this is to use the first-person pronoun. However, this apparently simple move toward connection can alienate the reader, as Woolf notes here:

But after reading a chapter or two a shadow seemed to lie across the page. It was a straight dark bar, a shadow shaped something like the letter "I." One began dodging this way and that to catch a glimpse of the landscape behind it. Whether that was indeed a tree or a woman walking I was not quite sure. Back one was always hailed to the letter "I." One began to be tired of "I." (Room 99-100).

A happy accident of English allows Woolf to compare "I" to a great tree, whose trunk the letter "I" resembles. The problem with "I" is that it comes to dominate, and ultimately obscure, the subject it purports to describe; "I" wants to be its own subject. Thus, the egotistical "I" quickly becomes an authoritative one. In the end, it is less personal than many third-person forms. Personal writing, as Woolf shows throughout her essays, is nervous about and critical of the authoritative voice.

Like writing in the first person, the autobiographical anecdote has become a frequent device of those seeking to make their writing more personal. As we have already seen, this device poses problems of its own. When, for example, Jane Tompkins writes about having to go to the bathroom, or Patricia Williams notes which chapters were written while she was wearing a bathrobe and which she wrote fully dressed, the effect is to force the reader into the role of an admiring spectator. Impressed by their own courage in raising the curtain on their private lives, these authors overlook the degree to which they have put themselves on center stage. When Virginia Woolf compares the work of an essay to that of a curtain, it is not the stage curtain suggested by contemporary self-display. Instead, Woolf evokes an image of a sheltering library or four-poster bed: a good essay "must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in, not out" (Common 222). This description is revealing in its inclusiveness. However narrowly Woolf might have imagined common readers, nothing in this sentence excludes any of us, for Woolf leaves "us" undefined.

Although A Room of One's Own opens with an autobiographical anecdote, it is an anecdote that focuses our attention on Woolf's idea, on the subject of women and fiction, not on Virginia Woolf herself: "When you asked me to speak about women and fiction I sat down on the banks of a river and began to wonder what the words meant" (3). Unlike Tompkins or Williams, Woolf tells us something about herself to help bring into focus the complexity of the idea, the seriousness with which she approaches the topic, not because she wants us to like her. This interest in the well-chosen clue that will help to explain one's ideas is central to personal criticism, as is the desire to situate explanation in the context of everyday life. In this mixed and ongoing conversation the essay must not only explain its opinions but also show a willingness to be persuaded otherwise. In her essays Woolf continually appeals to her mood, her opinion, her own knowledge, checking received opinions against the text and herself. So there is a sense of literature being open to anyone willing (and able--which is why she argues for rooms and money) to do that kind of rigorous thinking. It is not a kind of thinking dependent on any one education, on any system.