Virginia Woolf "A Room Of One's Own" Chapter 6

Chapter 6

On the morning of 26th October 1928 Mary Benton looked out of her window, watching the flow down on the street. It brought a girl in patent leather shoes, a young man in a maroon coat and a hackney cab. The girl and the man got in the hackney cab and it slid away like being carried away to another place. Mary Benton sensed a spirit of a natural merger.
She raised the question whether every human being did possess both genders which must be unified.

Maybe her query was in line with Coleridge’s[1] opinion who stated that a great spirit has to be androgynous. A spirit reaches its full prosperity and uses his entire potential only through the merger of the male and female side.

The narrator opened a contemporary book written by a man termed by her as Mr. B and discovered that through the feminist movement the men themselves had become more gender-conscious. Throughout Mr. B’s book she was confronted with his ego. It was like an obstacle that blocked the source of his creative power. Then she realized that the author was focusing on his manliness, as a sign of protest. He protested against equality of the other gender by insisting on his superiority.

Unlike Coleridge’s sentences which after reading exploded in the spirit and caused a bunch of new personal ideas, Mr. B’s sentences simply fell to the ground. According to the narrator’s opinion it was deadly to think of the personal gender while writing. A kind of collaboration had to take place between the spirits of both genders.

Then Mary Benton stopped talking about the requirement of a room with a lock at the door and 500 pounds per year when women wanted to wrote novels or poems. The necessity of financial security was not only stated by her but also by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch[2] who proved by referring to several male poets that money and higher education were essential for their success. The mental freedom depended on pecuniary security and the art of poetry depended on mental freedom. Therefore a poor poet in Mary Benton’s time had not the slightest chance.

Mary Benton pointed out that after women had reached access to higher education, after married women had gained the right to possess assets and after they had received the right to vote the lack of opportunity, education, encouragement and money were only invalid excuses any more. Of course women had to give birth to children but only to two or tree and not to ten to twelve. Women should write all kinds of books in order to revive Shakespeare’s imaginary younger sister, the embodiment of creativity in Mary Benton’s mind.

[1] Samuel Taylor Colderidge (1772-1834) in his table talk an 1st of September 1832)
[2] Sir Athur Quiller-Couch (1863-1944) extraordinary influential literature historian, critic and publisher