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 a Marxist feminist standpoint 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 upper-middle-class status and distance 
from the working classes made her focus upon her 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  skillful, 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 mainstream cultural and existential rights, and they must struggle to make the demand of room of their own a material reality so that they may 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.