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Satire
Definition of Setting
Setting is where and when a story or scene takes place. The where can be a real place like the city of New York, or it can be an imagined... read full definition
Setting is where and when a story or scene takes place. The where can be a real place like the city of New York, or... read full definition
Setting is where and when a story or scene takes place. The where can be a real place like the... read full definition
Chapter 1
Explanation and Analysis:
A Room of One’s Own is broadly set in Oxbridge (a fictionalized blend of the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge) and London, England. These surroundings serve as a backdrop for the narrator's internal musings, catalyzing her unstructured but nonetheless profound thoughts on “women and fiction.”
The architecture in these place settings often serves as a means of materially reinforcing heteronormative patriarchy—hence, their efficacy in sparking the narrator's ruminations on female poverty and oppression. In Chapter 1, for instance, the narrator admires the beauty of Oxbridge’s buildings and the elaborate nature of their luncheons, only to find the women’s college down the road sadly lacking in such luxuries:
Briefly, then, I told Miss Seton about the masons who had been all those years on the roof of the chapel [at Oxbridge], and about the kings and queens and nobles bearing sacks of gold and silver on their shoulders [...]. All that lies beneath the colleges down there, I said; but this college, where we are now sitting, what lies beneath its gallant red brick and the wild unkempt grasses of the garden?
The narrator asks, in this excerpt, why Fernham College does not rest upon the same foundation of wealth as Oxford or Cambridge. The narrator's juxtaposition of these university settings—and their clear difference in financial resources—leads her to contemplate the causes of female educational poverty.
Related Themes:
