Review of Virginia Woolf’s “Shakespeare’s Sister Essay Example

sure how they were educated or whether they were taught to write, “Whether they had sitting rooms to themselves”. She therefore concludes that “it would have been extremely odd, even upon this showing, had one of them suddenly written the plays of Shakespeare…” (p. 448). Virginia Woolf remembered a comment made by a particular bishop. He declared that “it was impossible for any woman, past, present or future, to have the genius of Shakespeare”. However, with the power of imagination, Woolf created a mythical character named Judith who played the role of Shakespeare’s sister.

Virginia Wolf outlines the possible course of Shakespeare’s life from grammar school where he learnt Latin-Ovid, Horace and Virgil, his marriage, work at a theatre in London, acting, getting access to the queen’s palace and so on. Judith, on the other hand, did not attend school and her family discouraged her from studying on her own. She is rather told to “mend the stockings and mind the stew and not moon about books and papers”. She is later married to someone against her will. As a teenager, she flees to London. She planned to be an actress but the men at the theatre denied her the chance to work and learn the craft.

She is impregnated by Nick Greene. The sad part of Judith’s life is that she commits suicide. Woolf believes this is how such a female genius could have fared in Shakespeare’s time. However, she goes on to explain “It was unthinkable that any woman in Shakespeare’s day should have had Shakespeare’s genius. For genius is not born among labouring, uneducated, servile people”. In that age, women

who were genius were regarded as witches and lunatics. Woolf therefore argues that writings which had the signature of “Anonymous” were likely to be that of a woman. Finally, Woolf questions what state of mind is responsible to creativity.

She finds out that creating a work of art is very difficult, privacy and money are scarce and the world is generally indifferent to whether or not someone writes. For women in the past, the conditions were very unfavourable because they did not have any “privacy or a private room” also, vacations were rare for them. Moreover, the world was only not interested in female writers but actively opposed their creativity. Overtime, the effect on a budding female writer was very detrimental as she explains “It was a relic of the sense of chastity that dedicated anonymity to women even so late as the 19th Century.

Currer Bell, George Elliot, George Sand, are all the victims of inner strife as their writings prove, sought ineffectively to veil themselves by using the name of a man. In conclusion, the purpose of creating this imaginary character is to draw a parallel comparison between an Elizabethan male writer and an Elizabethan female writer. The former could enjoy all the facilities. Their fame and popularity was easier as compared to a female writer. Virginia Woolf has proved in A Room of One’s Own that Shakespeare’s sister could not be as popular as Shakespeare.

It would be severely impossible for her to be known by all throughout all ages and times. EVALUATION OF THE TEXT Invited to speak on “Women in Fiction,” Woolf indicates in the first chapter

that although she found the subject global and endless, she can state one fundamental point: “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction. ” This view that Virginia Woolf holds is the plight she bemoans for the non-existence of women writers in the era of the Elizabethan period. In this light, it can be stated that Woolf’s assertions are true.

Very characteristic of the 18th century or the Elizabethan era, women were objectivized as they were considered as objects of men, were not allowed to go to school to be educated and were not allowed to go on stage or play any role in drama. Even when they were schooled, it was to train them to improve their domestic skills and the ability to serve as a husband’s helpmate. Woolf asserts that women, during the Elizabethan era, were virtually denied of every right. Therefore in that era, as in Shakespeare’s plays, women who were portrayed to have defied a male dominated society were at the end confined to the role of women in such a society.

This happens to be the fate suffered by Rosalind in As You Like It, Antigone in Antigone, and Desdemona in Othello. Woolf’s essay therefore points out that it would have been impossible for a woman to have written the plays of Shakespeare in the age of Shakespeare and also unthinkable that a woman would be of Shakespeare’s genius given all the dire circumstances they are to encounter. From the above discussion, we agree to the assertion made by Virginia Woolf that it would have been impossible for any

woman to have written the play of Shakespeare in his time.

She attributes this to the fact that if a woman should write a fiction of her own, she should have money and most important of all a room of her own. She supports this with the fact that women in the Elizabethan era lacked financial resources to support and embark on their own quest of writing any kind of fiction (A Room of One’s Own). This was so because women in the Elizabethan era were regarded to be properties of the men and everything that they had were owned by the men.

Also, in saying a woman should have a room of her own if she is to write a fiction, it could metaphorically mean that the woman should be given the personal freedom and the liberty to create art. However, this was not the case during the Elizabethan era as women in this age were subjected to hostility and indifference attitudes in the hands of men and in a male dominated society. These factors, coupled with other dictates of the society as far as the development of women was concerned, deem it right for Woolf to claim that there was no way a woman would have been able to write the plays of Shakespeare in the age of Shakespeare.

An example Woolf sites in her essay in one Nick Greene who is reported to have said that “a woman acting put him in the mind of a dog dancing” (p. 453). This concern by Woolf is also supported by a group by name “Paper Makers” which agrees with Virginia Woolf

that women were very much second class citizens as they were not given the chance to be educated and also, were not taken seriously by a male dominated society. Therefore a woman who possesses such genius as Shakespeare could not have developed her talents in the age of Shakespeare.

This assertion is irrefutable. However, Alice Walker disagrees with Woolf on the basis that Phyllis Wheatley, the first AfricanAmerican poet and the first African American woman to publish a book was sold into slavery at the age of 7 or 8 and was transported to North America, yet she was able to write and publish. She was purchased by the Wheatley family. She owned not herself? Walker recognizes that Wheatley is in the position far different from the narrator of Woolf’s essay, in that she does not even own herself, much less a room of her own.

Wheatley and other women existed outside of this room and space Woolf sets aside for women writers. Though she calls attention to the limits in Woolf’s essay, Walker, in uniting womanist prose, pays homage to Woolf’s similar endeavour of seeking space and “room” for women writers. CONCLUSION In conclusion, it must be noted that Woolf’s Shakespeare’s Sister is a feminist essay as she bemoans the plight of the Elizabethan woman who is dominated and “objectivized” by a male dominated society.

Woolf disproves the ideology that men are more intelligent than women and that when given the equal rights women, with a room of their own, would have matched the genius of Shakespeare in his writings. Woolf therefore believes that gender identity is a social construct and

thus, even if nothing can be done to empower women to height achieved by men, gender identity can be challenged and transformed in order to give women rooms of their own for them to write fiction or anything of art.

REFERENCES Bowlby, R. (1997). Feminist Destinations and Further Essays on Virginia Woolf. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Briggs, J. (2005). Virginia Woolf, an Inner Life. London: Penguin. Marcus, J. (1987). Virginia Woolf and the Languages of Patriarchy, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Woolf, V. (1929). A Room of One’s Own. UK: Hogarth Press. Woolf, V. (1929). Shakespeare’s Sister. UK: Hogarth Press.