The Meaning Behind Mary

Woolf narrates her book A Room of One’s Own through a variety of female characters, announcing in the beginning, “Here then was I (call me Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael, or by any name you please—it is not a matter of any importance) sitting on the banks of a river a week or two ago in fine October weather, lost in thought” (5).

The most interesting part about Woolf's use of multiple narrators, however, is the fact that the three main characters she mentions are all called Mary. I researched the name Mary and it's origins and although it became popularized by biblical references, it is thought that it originally stemmed from a Hebrew word meaning "sea of bitterness," "rebelliousness," or "wished for child."

Several times throughout the book Woolf mentions, deliberately, the bitterness behind many women poets and authors. When telling the story of Lady Winchilsea who wrote poetry about the position of women during her time Woolfe states, "Yet it is clear that could she have freed her mind from hate and fear and not heaped it with bitterness and resentment, the fire was hot within her" (60). Obviously, many women were enraged at their position in society but the fact that many of her female characters were writers shows their willingness to break the rules and become rebels.

However several scholars recognize that Egyptians used a word very similar to Mary as "beloved" before the Hebrews.

I was fascinated that the two connotations of the same name are exactly the opposite. While one is full of hostility the other is filled with love. I drew connections between the different meanings behind the one name into Woolf's theory of Charlotte Bronte's angry text and Jane Austen's calm writing. The two women were completely different writers and yet they both created a path for future writers. Perhaps, despite the differences in name or in writing, the fact that they merely wrote made a deep enough impact to ignore the reasons they wrote the way they did.