Reading A Room of One's Own, it is difficult to say whether Virginia Woolf cares more passionately about her gender or her craft. Guiding the future of the art of fiction, rather than despising men or even fighting for justice, seems to be the purpose of its rather sad portrayal of women throughout history. This isn't to say that Room is simply about writing; rather, Woolf's love of art allowed her to use the interplay between genre and writing as a microcosm for a principle that underlies every aspect of human society: creativity, industry, politics, love, and even mind itself. It argues that human beings – both individual and collective – cannot reach their full fulfillment unless both sexes are equally fulfilled and united together. “A Room of One's Own” thus prescribes two things to women: first, the actual independence needed to write, and second, a sovereign sense of female identity that will only come from female freedom. It seems that the company has already granted the first "room"; Nearly eighty years after Woolf's writings, much of modern society accords women the kinds of provisions that Woolf indicated were necessary for an independent mind. However, although modern society has largely achieved Woolf's material goal, there is no fundamental dichotomy between the sexes. Relationships between men and women have not become marriages of equal but distinct parties. Instead, society has largely dissolved the dichotomy itself. Women have indeed gained the social and economic independence that describes one aspect of “one's own room,” but this independence has not created a separate and distinctly feminine standard. Rather, it reduced the genre itself to a kind of subjective and cultural aspect that, according to Woolf, hinders the expression of true genius. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Woolf begins her commentary on the plight of women writers by advocating the literal definition of “a room of one's own.” She claims that man has left woman without material, social, or emotional independence, conditions necessary for a writer to thrive. Woolf argues that material independence is the most basic requirement for individual independence, but in her failed attempt to discover the cause of female poverty, Woolf's narrator realizes that the answer is largely irrelevant: society it gave women no social independence with which to employ labor. wealth denied them. Rather, it viewed women as nothing more than accessories to the male population, depriving them of a history and actively discouraging them from pursuing any independent occupation (i.e., writing). A woman cannot be independent if she always measures her abilities against men, nor if she writes out of contempt for injustice. Such personal emotions have marred the works of great authors such as Charlotte Bronte, whose writing is tainted by her own hatred of male oppression (69). Women's writing has lacked purity and integrity, as the female mind has been tied to man - to his money, his standards and his flaws - and tainted by myriad male influences. Women writers have been forced to see the world through a male lens and standards. True humanity, Woolf argues, is “incandescent” and cannot be fully perceived if it is clouded from the outside. In fact, it is the need to liberate the female mind from a defined, male-dominated exterior that makes it so importantfor women to have their own room. The second meaning of “a room of one's own” is much more symbolic and indicates an entirely new, distinctly feminine creative identity that will equal and complement the masculine one. To create this second stanza, Woolf argues that the writer needs to express some sort of truth intrinsically contained in her mind. One holds every sentence, every scene to the light as one reads - for Nature seems, very strangely, to have provided us with an inner light by which to judge the integrity or disintegrity of a novelist. Or perhaps it is rather that Nature... has traced with invisible ink on the walls of the mind... a drawing that simply needs to be brought close to the fire of genius to become visible. (72) Woolf argues that when the female mind is free from male oppression, an entirely new and distinctly female form of narrative will flourish: a room of their own. Woolf calls it something that “differs greatly from the creative power of men” (87). Like the hypothetical author of Woolf's Life's Adventure, the fully realized female creative power must exist unaware of her own femininity, lest she bind herself once again to the external and alien standard of masculinity. Woolf explains in Chapter V that establishing the second type of “own room” will bring out the missing piece of humanity and create a cultural dichotomy in which the male and female complement each other. Neither genre can be fully realized without the stimulation of the other. Therefore, Woolf places gender, in any form, as a fundamental aspect of being human. In light of this point of view, since femininity establishes a room of its own, the dichotomy between genders should have a great impact on society; Looking back almost 80 years, was Woolf's prediction true? She predicts that in a hundred years women and men will be socially equal (40). His descriptions of the current context in 1929 are also quite optimistic. Given the level of independence women enjoy today, Woolf was probably right in her early definition of “a room of one's own” as a requirement for such female independence. In many contemporary societies, women have access to monetary and social independence. They can lead lives and careers of their own without men, and the feelings of indignation against the men who harmed writers like Bronte have almost cooled. They have the first kind of “room of their own,” and this has actually enabled the highest level of female independence in history. With this independence, has society, as Woolf is convinced, under the filth of male oppression discovered a new branch of humanity, a missing spouse whose absence has ruined human creativity throughout history? On the contrary, it seems that instead of fixing the second half of a dichotomy, the dichotomy itself is falling apart. Woolf argues that female independence would lead to two distinct forms of fiction, however the foundations of women's literature have increased greatly over the last century and the styles of male and female writers have become less distinct. Ayn Rand wrote of the epic, Mark Twain of the banal. If Woolf is right when she argues in chapter III (40) that all fiction is necessarily tied to reality, then surely the current body of gender-neutral fiction demonstrates an increasingly gender-neutral culture. Modern society has granted women independence, but they have done everything but create a distinctly feminine space. Given these achievements of a society that has not promoted a distinctly feminine mode of creativity but has nevertheless granted women independence, what state does this leave us in? The argument ofWoolf? Was Woolf simply wrong? Has there never been a fundamental gender dichotomy? Have women of the last century simply become what men have always been? Although she overestimates the impact of gender on the natural state of humanity, Woolf was perhaps right that women must break away from male standards to be free. There is no new female identity; rather, the old male identity is dead. The old male standard was forged by generations of men who experienced generations of gender oppression and would therefore be more favorable to men and conditions of gender oppression. This is the same standard that Woolf's narrator encounters in Chapter II, the ambiguous "professor" who studied, evaluated, and judged women by comparing them to himself. Woolf's solution was to even the scales by introducing a counterweight: a standard feminine sovereign and equally powerful. However, modern society has instead destroyed the male standard itself. While today a woman can exist without a husband, a man can exist without a wife. In such developed societies, a man is able to manage his domestic concerns (“conventional women's work”) in the same way that a woman is able to provide herself with a monetary income. Modern society has introduced a third, gender-neutral standard. Woolf tried to change women, but both sexes changed, moving towards the center and adopting a single human identity. Certainly there are still many distinctions between the two sexes, but society is rapidly reducing them to mere subcultures rather than the core tenets of Woolf's identity. , transforming them into the kind of subjective and personal qualities that Woolf herself says the writer must avoid in Chapter IV. As explained above, one of the key external influences that cloud the writer's genius is what Woolf considers “private prejudices” (71). On the one hand, we feel that You – John the hero – must live or I will be in the depths of despair. On the other hand we think: Alas, John, you must die, because the form of the book requires it. Life comes into conflict with something that is not life. (71)The situations in which gender is most clearly noticeable are decidedly superficial lifestyle differences, such as social rituals and clothing preferences. We often see a distinct feeling of brotherhood or sisterhood in groups of men or groups of women, but isn't a similar relationship also present in those of ethnic culture? And what is culture if not a set of personal preferences, of "private prejudices"? Isn't culture "life" in conflict with "non-life"? Indeed, in the following paragraphs, Woolf praises books such as War and Peace which have preserved their integrity despite translation and export. Gender does not usually influence modern, developed societies in fields such as art, industry or politics, and if it does, only in a very covert way. Rather, the two sexes are more distinct in matters of love, courtship, and sex – the same areas glorified by Woolf's Elizabethan poets. It almost seems as if society has not aligned fiction with genre, but rather genre with fiction. Woolf may not have foreseen it, but modern society has degraded the genre to something that even Woolf would have considered harmful if acknowledged by the writer. As late as 1929, Virginia Woolf noted the liberation of female creativity. The foundation of the female standard has yet to be established, but Charlotte Bronte and the fictional Mary Carmichael have grasped it, and Jane Austen has even grasped it and is now blinking in its splendor. The site was marked, the ground broken and excavation begun. Woolf claims that under the mud..