A Room of One’s Own’s (Resistance to) Feminist Interpretations and Feminism

• Main Author: Valérie Favre
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée 2020-03-01
• Series: Études Britanniques Contemporaines
• Subjects: Woolf (Virginia); A Room of One’s Own; feminism(s); feminist literary criticism; reception; influence
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/ebc/9184

This article focuses on A Room of One’s Own’s ambivalent relationship with feminism and feminist literary criticism. Its twofold ambition is to reexamine the essay’s feminist appropriations by mapping out a panorama of the contradictory feminist interpretations of the text and of Woolf’s feminist stance, and to explore by what means A Room of One’s Own, this highly feminist text, paradoxically resists feminist interpretations and feminism itself. Woolf develops a textual strategy which ‘resists (feminist) direction’ and precludes any definitive feminist interpretations or appropriations of the essay, but also she openly, if partly ironically, disavows feminism, and sketches out an elusive feminism of her own.