A man and his room

I’m going to be completely honest and say that when I heard Chappy had picked a Virginia Woolf book I was disappointed. I know just enough about Woolf to realize that I was going to be reading something that wasn’t specifically for me, a man. In fact, I immediately emailed Ex and told him, “thanks a bunch for giving Chappy the pick”!

After I got over it, my (happily) typical rationality set in. Here is a classic American writer who I have never experienced in any way. If Chappy hadn’t picked it, I probably never would have on my own. I’m going to read it, so read it with the right attitude, I told myself.

First of all – I can’t remember the last time I read such excellent writing. I could open to any random page in the book, read it, and be sure to find at least one turn of a phrase that I would greatly admire. Had she been writing about a bowling league, it would have been worth it just for the opportunity to read someone who, unlike me, really knows how to write. If I was insecure, it would have broken my heart to read a woman from 80 years ago who could compose circles around me today.

Here’s an example of what I’m talking about. I’m going to pick up the book right now and flip through the page and stop it with my thumb.

Page 96 –

"There are so many new facts for her to observe. She will not need to limit herself any longer to the respectable houses of the upper middle classes. She will go without kindness or condescension, but in the spirit of fellowship into those small, scented rooms where sit the courtesan, the harlot and the lady with the pug dog. There they still sit in the rough and ready-made clothes that the male writer has had perforce to clap upon their shoulders. But Mary Carmichael will have out her scissors and fit them close to every hollow and angle. It will be a curious sight, when it comes, to see these women as they are, but we must wait a little, for Mary Carmichael will still be encumbered with that self-consciousness in the presence of “sin” which is the legacy of our sexual barbarity. She will still wear the shoddy old fetters of class on her feet".

But that wasn’t the best thing I took from this way-too-short book. We become so complacent in society, thinking that all the issues of inequality are in the past and that everyone today has an equal opportunity. Certainly it’s true that we have come a long way, baby. It’s not the world Virginia lived in, and her world was much better than that of her grandmother. But, let’s be real – even the time of Woolf’s grandmother is less than a couple of hundred years ago!

Thus, this book is a terrific reminder of how difficult life is for any group that has faced discrimination, even a number of generations later. Woolf is brilliant in showing us why this is a truism and does so without whining. She simply sets up the facts and makes analogies and she is spot on with every one of them.

I couldn’t help but think, even decades after her death, things were still pretty bad. As a child, I lived in a world where one never saw female doctors, lawyers, police, fire, professors, bankers, real estate agents, soldiers. It’s become such a normal feeling to deal with females in these occupations that I can (far too easily) forget that even in my lifetime, it was not always so.