The Three W’s for the World: Wit, Wine and Woolf!

The Three W’s for the World: Wit, Wine and Woolf!

Books formed my early feminist perception when I was pursuing my undergrad

7 years ago. It was just another mundane day in the college library; I was

strolling around in search of some essays listed by my professor from “A Room

of One’s Own” by Virginia Woolf. I found only the sixth out of the six essays

from the collection. We were to read “Mrs. Dalloway” in that semester; the

same Mrs. Dalloway who said that “she would buy the flowers herself”.

When I started reading the sixth essay concerning the ‘androgynous mind’ of

writers, I realized that so far in one and a half years of my graduation, I have

read very few books by women- Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, Jane

Austen, Charlotte Bronte and now, Virginia Woolf. Women and Fiction have

been missing entirely before the 19th century. Men were writing women,

killing them in their books, took their voice presenting them as mad, hysterical

or naïve who only seek love and marriage in their life. Woolf said, “Any woman

born with a great gift in the sixteenth century would certainly have gone

crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the

village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at.” Did you just recall the

famous 1617 Finspång Witch Trials? After further reading of the essay, I read

this: “Doubtless Elizabethan literature would have been very different from

what it is if the women’s movement had begun in the sixteenth century and

not in the nineteenth.” and it left me gluttonous for the entire collection for

which I pestered the librarian to find it the same day.

The world knows that Shakespeare is the greatest wit in literature but no

women writer was fairly famous for their wits at that time. Now, I ask you the

question that Woolf asked- “What would have happened if Shakespeare had a

wonderfully gifted sister, called Judith, let us say? ...his extraordinarily gifted

sister, let us suppose, remained at home.” Do you think she would have

survived or do you think she would have disguised herself as one of the

Shakespearean women Viola in “Twelfth Night” ...much like George Eliot?

Fast forward to the 20th century, the arrival of the Modernism and the Jazz

Age, we again see men overshadowing women in fiction. Male writers were

romanticized for drinking wine and smoking while women were still supposed

to be homebound or judged for being, say, Daisy and Myrtle in “The Great

Gatsby”. Fitzgerald’s wit in showing the treatment of women in modern

America was commendable. But again, in the bygone epochs, if a woman

would have considered telling their story, how the world would have

responded, we all are aware. That is exactly why Woolf’s “A Room of One’s

Own” becomes a necessity for the world to understand why “a woman must

have money and a room of her own if she is to write a fiction”. A new slogan

should be welcomed: use your wits, pour a glass of wine and read some Woolf!

-Aayushi, I'm a book reviewer and share my love for books on Instagram:

@_penandpapers. When I'm not reading or photographing books I journal and

write. I also work as a part time Editor for www.bookishsanta.com.