DECONSTRUCTING THE CLASS POLITICS IN VIRGINIA WOOLF’S A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN

Abstract

This article aims to investigate A Room of One’s Own from Marxist feminist standpoint in order to point out that while Virginia Woolf has upheld the cause of the liberation of the upper middle class women necessitating for them to have a room of their own where they could sit and think and write independently, she has ignored the laboring or the proletariat women of her times primarily because her own upper middle class status and distance from the working classes made her focus upon her own class only inculcating bias in her mind against the lower class women. The study explores how Virginia Woolf focuses on the continuation of the discriminatory treatment of the women of her subsequent deprivation of her human, social, legal, economic and existential rights. She uses very skilful, ironic, sometimes bitter, emotive as well as subversive language to challenge the authority of the discursive nature of many gendered norms of society communicating a very clear message that women can no more be kept alienated from the main stream cultural and existential rights, and they must struggle to make the demand of room of their own a material reality in order that can achieve the true freedom and emancipation for which woman has been longing since time immemorial and emancipated human beings like their fathers, husbands and brothers, their privileged counterparts. Although she champions the rights of women in her fiction and faction, and through her lectures as well as feminist activism, she seems to have done unprecedented work about the emancipation of women, yet her prominent stature in Victorian society and her alliance with white (upper) middle class society seems to have precluded her from incorporating working class women’s issues in her fiction and faction, that has resulted in a torrent of criticism against her from the Marxist Feminist critics whose foremost indictment of her work is that she has voiced the concerns of white, upper middle class English women only.