Virginia Woolf
published her extended essay, the sixchapter, 'A Room of One's Own', in
1929, based on a series of lectures she had delivered the preceding year
at Girton and Newnham, both women's Schools at the University of
Cambridge. By then, an established and esteemed novelist, the theme she
was researching was 'Women and Fiction'. Released just ten years after
women had obtained suffrage in Britain, the book is undoubtedly a
precursor to the voluminous feminist literary activity in the later
years of the twentieth century.
In
spite of the shortage of a formal academic heritage, Virginia Woolf was
a well read autodidact. She uses a narrative type of an imaginary young
woman named Mary given any of three surnames, researching the topic of
'Women and Fiction'. She concludes that minimally a girl desires 'a room
of her own' (lockable) and some cash to live on (500 a year in Mary's
case).
The intention of this essay will be to analyse, and comment
upon the author's extensive use of binary types beginning with the
central, historically loaded, compartmentalization of the differences
between women and men. Although two sets of binaries, reason/emotion,
and fiction/fact, are delved into in this essay, Woolf's recognition of
the complexities of evident binary categories is far more extensive and
will be examined more closely in the following paragraphs.
Although
there doesn't appear to be 'opposites' in nature, dualism seems to be
deeply rooted in language and human thinking. Binary opposites or
polarizations are not always plausible opposites but are necessary for
the units of language to possess value and meaning. Following Saussurean
structuralism, it's usually held that 'binary opposition is one of the
very most important principles regulating the construction of language',
while 'paired contrasts' are not always 'opposites', in any precise
sense, they are considered to be required as a method of ordering the
'dynamic complexity of experience'. Most linguists consider that 'binary
opposition is a kid's first logical operation'. Another powerful
influence on opciones binarias estrategias thinking in the West was Descartes' head-body dualism.
