Publication Date
2-9-2018
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Arts in English (MA)
Committee Chair
Scaggs, Deborah M.
Abstract
Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, embodies her vision, her imagination of what society would be like if women were in possession of money and a room of their own. Her essay has a reassuring effect on the future of women and fiction, for she aspires the female “genius” to acknowledge their realities for what they truly are, the pain of not existing. She declares that when the female engages in the act of writing, it is crucial to dismiss all the hesitations that may impede her ability to write, despite the social conventions she may be detaching herself from. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl, and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, convey Woolf’s vision that the female identity can only be realized when their hearts and minds open up to confess what is real through the act of writing. When the writer is communicating her experience with perfect fullness, which further attests that freedom and peace coexist within the writer’s spirit in order to give rise to a new identity. Through the supreme act of writing, a sense of the self, with time, results in the emancipation of a newfound persona. Women have actually gained a room, and that space must not be wasted; it ought to be “put in the form of fiction” (Woolf 115) because true beauty lies in the ways that the female persona writes herself—it is those creative forces that invigorate a whole new way of being, of existing, and there is nothing in the universe that can ever take its place.
Recommended Citation
Vela, Monica, "Therefore I Am: Virginia Woolf's Finished Business in "The Yellow Wallpaper," The Diary of a Young Girl, and The Color Purple" (2018). Theses and Dissertations. 60.
https://rio.tamiu.edu/etds/60
