Virginia Woolf tries to subtly invoke the inference that “Women are truly defined through their past experiences.” Therefore, this is the way Woolf is trying to define the being a women writer (writer’s of Woolf’s time and preceding her time) and why she writes the way she does.
These past experiences are lived by the women before her and ingrained in her being, affecting the outcome of her prejudices. All the discipline and the inequality that women have experienced over hundreds of years bears on the judgment of a women writer. She writes with bitterness of men in mind, transposing that hatred into her words. This hatred is showed by Woolf to be caused by things such as the forbiddance of money, fame, and a room of one’s own.
Therefore this feeling causes her mind to be in error, as she is using only partial part of her mind. However, error this may be, it connects back to my first sentence, because this fault in judgment is the defining element of a past women writer. Without the men treating women as inferior, women would not be what they are. Thus, the practices of writers in the past have not gone to waste but built up who the writer of today is(again referring to Woolf’s day). The ideas in the books women write “continue each other, in spite of our habit of judging them separately.” Therefore, that is the connection, we as women writers are bound by a lineage of past women writers.
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I specifically liked this line in your entry: "Without the men treating women as inferior, women would not be what they are." I agree with this statement. If women had never been so oppressed, we never would have become as successful and determined that we are today. It's not that we still have a hatred for the male sex, but it's almost as if we owe it to women in the past, who fought for our rights, to take advantage of every opportunity that we are handed.
Good post!
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