Friday, November 6 " A Room of One's Own" introduction

Learning Targets for Wolfe's "A Room of One's Own"
                             I can read closely for textual details
                             I can annotate a text to support my comprehension and analysis
                             I can engage in a productive, evidence-based  conversation
                             I can determine the meaning of unknown vocabulary from contextual clues
                             I can generate and respond to questions in a scholarly discourse.

In class: this marking period is officially closed.

Punctuate the following:

 Professor Brown has left the laboratory however you may still be able to reach her through email.

              vocabulary quiz for "A Room of One's Own"
              last opportunity to turn in Hamlet essays, with the exception of those couple of people with whom I spoke that could turn them in on Monday, after which they are only worth 50 points

New material: vocabulary for week of November 9, class handout; copy below
                       Introduction to Virginia Woolf's essay "A Room of One's Own"
            Handout of the text (class handout / copy below)  If you are absent, please make sure you have read this through.

       To begin: Looking at a portrait of Virginia Woolf: 



Portrait of Virginia Woolf (1881-1942)  taken by the celebrated photographer George Charles Beresford in 1902.
On the back of your vocabulary quiz, write a complete sentence responding to the following question: What do you note about the woman, beyond her obvious physical characteristics?  (Incorporate a semi colon)

(The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was an artistic and literary group in the mid to late 19th century, who thought art should express genuine ideas, so relied on great, natural detail.) 

Beresford  had the author sitting and looking away from the camera. He was obviously inspired by the Pre-Raphaelites. 

Perhaps, what with the strong and abundant hair tied loosely in a bun, and the jaw running in an uninterrupted arc from the careful chin to the over-attentive ear, it was his sitter’s profile that brought to mind those Victorian painters. It’s the first of these pictures that was to be the most successful. 

In it she is looking away, as if a private thought had caught her attention. There is determination in the neck. The open shell of the ear is unusually large, tensing the rim. It hints at the great danger of listening, as if acknowledging that ears cannot choose not to hear what is directed at them. 

More than most, she would have known the danger of that, the lasting stain of language. She seems to be concerned with this, trying to accept the vulnerability. 

Her cheek, occupying the central space in the photograph, seems full with utterance. Those shut lips are concealing an ocean of words. 

What Beresford managed to capture is depth and its promise; an instinctive devotion to reality, to what Woolf was to later call “the white light of truth.”

“A Room of One’s Own”  by Virginia Woolf

     Be that as it may, I could not help thinking, as I looked at the works of Shakespeare on the shelf, that the bishop was right at least in this; it would have been impossible, completely and entirely, for any woman to have written the plays of Shakespeare in the age of Shakespeare. Let me imagine, since facts are so hard to come by, what would have happened had Shakespeare had a wonderfully gifted sister, called Judith, let us say. Shakespeare himself went, very probably—his mother was an heiress—to the grammar school, where he may have learnt Latin—Ovid, Virgil and Horace—and the elements of grammar and logic. He was, it is well known, a wild boy who poached rabbits, perhaps shot a deer, and had, rather sooner than he should have done, to marry a woman in the neighbourhood, who bore him a child rather quicker than was right. That escapade sent him to seek his fortune in London. He had, it seemed, a taste for the theatre; he began by holding horses at the stage door. Very soon he got work in the theatre, became a successful actor, and lived at the hub of the universe, meeting everybody, knowing everybody, practising his art on the boards, exercising his wits in the streets, and even getting access to the palace of the queen. Meanwhile his extraordinarily gifted sister, let us suppose, remained at home. She was as adventurous, as imaginative, as agog to see the world as he was. But she was not sent to school. She had no chance of learning grammar and logic, let alone of reading Horace and Virgil. She picked up a book now and then, one of her brother’s perhaps, and read a few pages. But then her parents came in and told her to mend the stockings or mind the stew and not moon about with books and papers. They would have spoken sharply but kindly, for they were substantial people who knew the conditions of life for a woman and loved their daughter—indeed, more likely than not she was the apple of her father’s eye. Perhaps she scribbled some pages up in an apple loft on the sly but was careful to hide them or set fire to them. Soon, however, before she was out of her teens, she was to be betrothed to the son of a neighbouring woolstapler. She cried out that marriage was hateful to her, and for that she was severely beaten by her father. Then he ceased to scold her. He begged her instead not to hurt him, not to shame him in this matter of her marriage. He would give her a chain of beads or a fine petticoat, he said; and there were tears in his eyes. How could she disobey him? How could she break his heart? The force of her own gift alone drove her to it. She made up a small parcel of her belongings, let herself down by a rope one summer’s night and took the road to London. She was not seventeen. The birds that sang in the hedge were not more musical than she was. She had the quickest fancy, a gift like her brother’s, for the tune of words. Like him, she had a taste for the theatre. She stood at the stage door; she wanted to act, she said. Men laughed in her face. The manager—a fat, loose-lipped man—guffawed. He bellowed something about poodles dancing and women acting—no woman, he said, could possibly be an actress. He hinted—you can imagine what. She could get no training in her craft. Could she even seek her dinner in a tavern or roam the streets at midnight? Yet her genius was for fiction and lusted to feed abundantly upon the lives of men and women and the study of their ways. At last—for she was very young, oddly like Shakespeare the poet in her face, with the same grey eyes and rounded brows—at last Nick Greene the actor-manager took pity on her; she found herself with child by that gentleman and so—who shall measure the heat and violence of the poet’s heart when caught and tangled in a woman’s body?—killed herself one winter’s night and lies buried at some cross-roads where the omnibuses now stop outside the Elephant and Castle. This may be true or it may be false—who can say?—but what is true in it, so it seemed to me, reviewing the story of Shakespeare’s sister as I had made it, is that any woman born with a great gift in the sixteenth century would certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at. For it needs little skill in psychology to be sure that a highly gifted girl who had tried to use her gift for poetry would have been so thwarted and hindered by other people, so tortured and pulled asunder by her own contrary instincts, that she must have lost her health and sanity to a certainty. No girl could have walked to London and stood at a stage door and forced her way into the presence of actor-managers without doing herself a violence and suffering an anguish which may have been irrational—for chastity may be a fetish invented by certain societies for unknown reasons—but were none the less inevitable. 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 the light of day demands courage of the rarest. To have lived a free life in London in the sixteenth century would have meant for a woman who was poet and playwright a nervous stress and dilemma which might well have killed her. Had she survived, whatever she had written would have been twisted and deformed, issuing from a strained and morbid imagination. And undoubtedly, I thought, looking at the shelf where there are no plays by women, her work would have gone unsigned. That refuge she would have sought certainly. It was the relic of the sense of chastity that dictated anonymity to women even so late as the nineteenth century. Currer Bell, George Eliot, George Sand, all the victims of inner strife as their writings prove, sought ineffectively to veil themselves by using the name of a man. Thus they did homage to the convention, which if not implanted by the other sex was liberally encouraged by them (the chief glory of a woman is not to be talked of, said Pericles, himself a much-talked-of man) that publicity in women is detestable. Anonymity runs in their blood.

Vocabulary for the week of November 9      Quiz on Friday, November 13

1)    acquisitive-  adj -able to get and retain information; concerned with acquiring wealth or

                              property, greedy, avaricious

2)  banal- adj- hackneyed, trite, commonplace, stale

3)  carping- adj- tending to find fault in a hairsplitting way, nit-picking

4) coherent –adj- consistent, comprehensible, cohesive, unified

5) to congeal- verb- to change from liquid to solid, thicken, harden, jell, coagulate

6)  to eschew-  verb- to avoid, shun, keep away, steer clear of, forgo

7)  to substantiate- verb- to establish by evidence, to prove, verify, confirm, validate

8. reconnaissance- noun- survey made for military purposes, scouting expedition

9)  insatiable- adj- not to be satisfied, unquenchable, ravenous, voracious

10)  largesse- noun- generosity, lavish, munificence, bounty