Virginia Woolf A Room of One's Own Flashcards
The unconscious - the drawing (‘elementary exercise in psychology’)
‘while I pondered I had unconsicously…been drawing a picture….yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top. A very elementary exercise in psychology, not to be glorified by the name of psychoanlysis, showed me…..[the sketch] had been made in anger…..had anger, the black snake, been lurking among [my emotions]?’
What is no book born…
‘probably no book is born entire and uncripple as it was concieved’
How is Mary Carmichael’s writing commented upon?
‘perhap sshe had done this unconsciously, moerely giving things their natureal order, as a woman would, IF SHE WROTE LIKE A WOMAN/ But the effect was somehow baffling….therefore I coudl not plume myself…whenever I was about to feel the usual thigns in the usual places, about lvoe,a bout death, the annyoign greature twitched me away, as if the important point were just a little further on’
What does the narrator praise about Mary Carmichael’s writing>
Her ‘senisibility’ as it ‘feasted like a plant…on every sight and sound…lighted on small things and showed that perhpas they were not so small after all. It brought buried things to light and made one wonder what need there had been to bury them’
What does the narrator seek to prove?
must prove ‘she was not a skimmer of surfaces merely, but had looked beneath into the depths’
‘no abundance of sensation or fineness of perception would avail’ until she proved this
What does the narrator determine was necessray to achieve successful writing?
‘a hungred years….a room of one’s own and five-hundred a year’ – material circumstances and historical epoch
What is the min’d power and nature?
‘clearly the mind has so great a power of concenrtrating at any point at any moment that it seems to have no single sense of being…always altering its foucs, and bringing the world into different perspectives’
What does the ‘fusion’ of masculine and feminine create?
;the ‘fusion’ measn ‘the mind is fully fertilized and uses all its faculties…the androgynous mind is resonant and porus…trasnmits emoition without impediment…naturally crative, incandescent and undivided’
WHat must ‘the whole of the mind’ do?
‘the whole of hte mind must lie wide open if we are to get the sense that the writer is communicating his expereince with perfect fullness’
‘there must be freeodm and there must be peace…the curtain must be close drawn. the writer…must not look or question wht is being done. Rahter, he msut pluck the petal rom a rose or watch the swans float…’
