A Room of One's Own: Chapter 1 Summary & Analysis

From the outset of her lecture, we are made aware of the pressure that has come upon Woolf since she was asked to impart wisdom on the subject of women and fiction. The first pages are full of her wondering how to begin, what method to use, and with her doubts that she will be able to impart anything at all. This all reveals how important the subject is to her, and how personal, and implies that what we are about to read is a personal story and not a political debate.

Woolf is open about how she plans to approach her argument—through fiction rather than overt argument claiming to impart truth. By explicitly stating that she is not attempting to state the truth but rather to describe her own personal journey, she creates a sense of intimacy with the reader, as if she has no more wisdom on the subject than they do. So, by approaching the issue through fiction, where her narrator represents every woman, Woolf gives her audience the sense that they are joined together in a collective narrative.

The narrator uses the image of the fish to visualize the process of thinking. The fish is both a concrete thing and yet slippery and hard to grasp. The way she treasures the thought, pursues it with determined excitement, striding across the lawn in order to keep the thought safe until she can write it down, shows how she values thoughts—and thought—above all else. Yet her efforts to catch and hold onto the thought are thwarted by the beadle—who is both a man and a guard of the university, and who therefore represents the way that the institution of the university is protected by men for men (the scholars and fellows), excluding women in the process, and how this exclusion stops women from being able to pursue their thoughts as men can.

The narrator's thoughts roam across literature, a literary history with which she wants to immerse herself both for the pure enjoyment of pursuing her thoughts and to investigate those works as a way of delving into the minds of those authors and, in so doing, improve her own mind and writing. But again her status as a woman stands against her and she is shut out, not only from the physical library building, but from the literary history that she so much wants to be a part of.

The narrator's initial anger turns to a kind of grudging acceptance as she now decides not even to enter the Church and so to avoid being stopped once again because she is a woman. In choosing to remain outside she does gain a certain perspective that the men who can enter don't have, but she has given in to being an outsider to this culture (and a somewhat bitter outsider at that for all the exclusion she has experienced).

The college is described like a perfectly functional, self-preserving organism or machine. It has flourished for so long that it seems to renew itself, fuelling itself by taking in funds and workmanship from its male members and churning out the educated male brains that are able to then fund and work to keep preserving it. Women have no access to a cycle like this, no foundation on which to base it.. Consequently, the narrator is astonished and delighted by the feast of food and conversation she finds.

The tailless Manx cat is a symbol of how society has been transformed since the horrors of the First World War, and despite the pleasures of the party the narrator senses this same lack in the conversation around her. By defining this lost something as poetic or musical—the artistic humanities—seems to indicate that Woolf sees the terrible mechanization of the war, which took so many lives like a kind of great killing machine, has cut off the present from the more idyllic, more human past.

The narrator's thoughts about Tennyson seem so ludicrous to her that she can't possibly share them with her friends despite her love of good conversation. Yet, it is obvious from her thoughts that she herself hums and thinks in verse and does things in a melodious way, connecting her to that past before the war. Meanwhile, it's worth noting that there are colleges for women, separate from those for men.

The difference between the nostalgic effect of the poetry of the past and the challenge of modern poetry leaves the narrator feeling disillusioned and detached from the art form that she loves so much. Again she shows poetry to be a direct product of the life and times of its poets. While she is thinking generally about society here—about how the suffering of the war has affected people's ability to write and connect to poetry—she is also setting the stage for much of the exploration of the rest of the book: if suffering and stupidity of war have affected society's ability to create poetry, then is it any wonder that women—who have for so long been treated as inferior—have produced difficult, twisted poetry.

The narrator initially depicts the fictional women's college here as an almost mythical place, a utopia of natural beauty from the gardens and twilight, all associated with the powerful figure of feminism, Jane Harrison. But that image is compromised when the narrator is confronted with the meager supper of prunes and custard and lacking conversation at dinner. The men's college's bright conversation and rich meal stands in stark contrast to the women's situation even in an atmosphere of progress for women, which the mere existence of the women's college represents. At the same time, the fact that it is a women's college, separate, again shows how women are kept outside of that male society.

The image of the superior men's college—in construction and in finances-- haunts the narrator's experience at Fernham. In contrast, the narrator and Mary Seton recognize that their own college is just trying to tread water—that it lacks the tradition that could provide a foundation for the women to focus on what they want to. Instead, they must focus on just keeping the college alive with fundraising efforts.

And now the narrator comes to the crux of it, to the source of the difference between the men's college's rich intellectual history versus the relative paucity of the women's college in those things. Family life: having and raising kids. Women must bear and care for children, and doing so takes so much time and energy that there simply is no way for women to have the time to build the same intellectual and financial tradition as men. And then the narrator adds the kicker: not only do women not have the time because of their domestic duties, society doesn't allow them to occupy roles that make money. Even if Mary Seton's mother had wanted to forgo having a family and focus on building a legacy, she couldn't—because she has no way to make enough money to earn the money needed to allow the independence required for such legacy-building work.

As she predicted, the narrator has found that truth, cause, and blame are difficult to attribute in the case of women and fiction. This brings her very early on in her argument to the realization that she will have to find some other way to reconcile the question. So, gazing at the scene of her subject, she lets her feelings and sensations come to the fore.