what does it mean to have a room of one’s own?

i think virginia woolf was trying to say a woman needs money and the time to stay sane if she is to write fiction

The material room of one’s own

Virginia Woolf famously writes in A Room of One’s Own: “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction” (1). I always pictured this in the most literal sense. I imagined myself living in a room filled with natural light, a desk in the corner with a view that allowed me to people watch, and of course, a bookshelf filled with inspiration.

After I received my bachelor’s degree, I was torn between two paths: pursuing a literary or writing career and continuing to be broke, or going into a more lucrative field and making the money that could support me moving out of my parents’ house. At the time, the only people I knew working in arts-related fields as their primary source of income had financial support from their families, which was not an option for me. After months of interviewing and graduating without any job prospects, I eventually received a job offer to be a qualitative researcher at a financial institution.

Actually, that’s an oversimplification. I was rejected at first. Desperate to find something that could pay rent, I emailed the hiring manager reaffirming my interest in the job. I guess they liked my perseverance—really, my desperation dressed up as persistence—and offered me the job. I considered the upsides: I had a job, supposedly this job could combine my love for writing with a more “practical” career, I could afford to live in New York, where my job was based. I would finally have the material room of my own—even if my job wasn’t my dream career, I theoretically had the money to support my literary pursuits in my free time.

I moved into my first real apartment in August of 2018, just a few days before my first day of work. I had prepared for months, envisioning exactly what my room would look like: a royal blue-and-white patterned carpet, white bed sheets, modern art adorning the walls, a Maison jar of flowers and a pile of books on my nightstand. My grandma’s wooden bookshelf hosting all of my favorite books, my most beloved possessions. My desk next to the window, allowing me a view of downtown Manhattan and the passersby in the tiny park below. I spent time and money on curating my room—time and money that I did not have. But as an introvert, I believed it was important to cultivate this space, the space where I would be spending the majority of my time the next few years.

The temporal room of one’s own

There was the problem of time. I had overlooked perhaps the most important aspect of Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, the very key which wills into existence all the other rooms necessary for the writer. This is where I now realize the heart of Woolf’s argument lies. The temporal room unlocks the other metaphysical rooms—the ability to have a mental and social room of one’s own.

When Woolf wrote A Room of Ones Own in 1929, the largest hurdle as a woman writer was finding the time to focus and write in spite of the interruptions that were obligations at the time. Women were first and foremost caretakers, whether it be for a father, husband, children, or the house itself. Woolf writes: “All the conditions of her life, all her own instincts, were hostile to the state of mind which is needed to set free whatever is in the brain” (41). Of course, I was lucky in many senses. I didn’t have any of the pressures of marriage, children, taking care of family, or societal limitations on the kind of job I could pursue. But still, time presented its own challenges.

Once I started my job, I had no time. 20 minutes to myself a day was considered a luxury. I worked late into the night and peeled myself out of bed at 6 am the following morning, my eyes bloodshot and eyesight blurry from exhaustion. I spent the majority of the weekend working to meet a weekly 11 am Sunday morning deadline. At one point, my manager made us record how we spent our time each day by 15 minute increments. By the time I was done, I wanted nothing more than to crawl into bed, pull the sheets over my head, and sleep for 20 hours. Or to meet friends for more than a few glasses of wine to forget the 6 and a half days behind me and prepare for the 6 and a half ahead.

The lack of time had a very material impact on my physical room. Clothes were strewn across the ground, used mugs, cups, and bowls laid vacant on every surface. Boxes and shoes on the ground become hurdles I would constantly trip over. Crumbs scattered the floor under my desk as I snacked to stay awake late into the night. The flowers in the Maison jar slowly died, crisp and withered, with a strange, spoiled scent emanating from them. The books that had once been my most used, most loved, possessions laid untouched for months on end. At the end of a long week I had tried to wash my sheets and ended up not having the time nor energy to put them back on, and instead, slept on a bare mattress for months.

The mental room of one’s own

It became clear the problem was not just that I didn’t have time, but also that all vitality had been sucked out of me. I recently read David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs, and his discussion of the spiritual violence bullshit jobs can induce completely resonated with me. Graeber writes: “Bullshit jobs regularly induce feelings of hopelessness, depression, and self-loathing. They are forms of spiritual violence directed at the essence of what it means to be a human being” (104). I was pulled back and forth between two thoughts at my job: I am so lucky to have a job that pays decently and lets me live in New York, and I need to quit because I am dying inside. Because this was my first full-time job in an office environment, I was not able to set boundaries—I assumed this was how corporate America worked. It didn’t matter, later I would go on to watch people with more job experience than me set boundaries at this company which would result in their termination. I grew to subconsciously envy their fate, and became part of my own cycle of self-loathing.

Woolf talks about the importance of keeping the room of the mind clean. The narrator explains how prior to her aunt’s deadly accident, she was not privy to this $500 a year she received from her and had to work for her living, unable to focus on her writing. She writes how these jobs bred a bitterness in her:

But what still remains with me as a worse infliction than either was the poison of fear and bitterness which those days bred in me. To begin with, always to be doing work that one did not wish to do, and to do it like a slave, flattering and fawning, not always necessarily perhaps, but it seemed necessary and the stakes were too great to run risks (…) all this became like a rust eating away the bloom of the spring, destroying the tree at its heart. (Woolf 30)

To write from this place of bitterness—the rust that is eating away and destroying the tree—is to write from a clouded headspace that conceals and distorts the work within it. Woolf believed that Shakespeare was the perfect encompassment of an incandescent mind: “All desire to protest, to preach, to proclaim an injury, to make the world the witness of some hardship or grievance that was fired out of him and consumed. Therefore his poetry flows from him free and unimpeded” (46). My mind was far from incandescent, blocked with obstacles at every turn.

The mess of my mental state fed into my social life. I avoided inviting people over. When people came over, I begged them not to look in my room. If they did, I would shove the mess into my closet. But they could still see the piles of clothes beginning to seep out, an explosion that could happen at any second. I couldn’t open up and write when it felt too messy inside to let anyone in at all.

Finding a room of my own

I refused to give up hope though. I began to prioritize attending literary events when I could. I always felt anxiety churning in the pit of my stomach as I went to these events alone, as if I were entering a world I no longer belonged to. I once sat next to a group of MFA students from NYU at a reading and felt a mix of excitement and jealousy as they discussed poetry. But every time, I walked out renewed and recharged, remembering why I loved literature. I started looking at graduate school programs online and lingered by the New School buildings longingly when I went on walks.

It wasn’t until two years after starting this job that I knew it couldn’t do it anymore, when I began to train new hires. I tried to in a way that protected their work-life balance. But every time, I was pushed by my higher-ups to stop doing that, that I should be making new hires work into the late hours of the night, showing up to work with puffy, grey under eye circles the next day. In Bullshit Jobs, Graeber speaks of the horror of watching yourself turn into the person sustaining and continuing the toxic system, keeping it alive and breathing:

It’s hard to imagine anything more soul destroying than (…) being forced to commit acts of arbitrary bureaucratic cruelty against one’s will. To become the face of the machine that one despises. To become a monster. It has not escaped my notice, for example, that the most frightening monsters in popular fiction do not simply threaten to rend or torture or kill you but to turn you into a monster yourself: think here of vampires, zombies, werewolves. They terrify because they menace not just your body but also your soul. This is presumably why adolescents in particular are drawn to them: adolescence is precisely when most of us are first confronted with the challenge of how not to become the monsters we despise. (104)

I saw my future there and I hated it. I realized the only way I could not be responsible for sustaining and passing on the generational trauma of my job, if you will, was to no longer be a part of it. I quit.

Of course, the company didn’t let me get away easy, slapping me with a noncompete that did not allow me to transition into my new job for months after the fact. But this provided time to travel for the first time in a long time. I met my fiancé traveling, who backed my best friend’s encouragements and motivated me to apply for master’s programs in English literature. Now in graduate school, I would have never posted my first Substack essay if my professor hadn’t provided me the encouragement. And I work a part-time job that pays the rent and isn’t necessarily my dream job or nearly as lucrative, but it gives me experience in copywriting and provides the balance to focus on school and literary pursuits in my free time.

In “Women Artists: The Creative Process”, bell hooks writes of her metaphorical room of her own:

I was determined to create a world for myself where my creativity could be respected and sustained. It is a world still in the making. Yet each year of my life. I find myself with more undisturbed, uninterrupted time. When I decided to accept a smaller salary and teach part-time, it was to give myself more time. Again, this choice required sacrifice, a commitment to living simply. Yet these are the choices women artists must make if we want more time to contemplate, more time to work. Women artists cannot wait for ideal circumstances to be in place before we find the time to do the work we are called to do; we have to create oppositionally, work against the grain. Each of us must invent alternative strategies that enable us to move against and beyond the barriers that stand in our way. (130)

bell hooks reminds me that a room of one’s own is not granted but carved, slowly and deliberately. It is a practice, a devotion to one’s voice and to oneself. The room is never perfect. It asks for sacrifices. But I open one door, then the next, and my room slowly expands.

I had been chasing the room as if it were a final, material destination. But now I see that rooms are something more metaphysical, interior spaces we have to tend to and nurture over time. The material and mental rooms collapse without the temporal room, and vice versa.

Still, I think of all the women who don’t have the luxury of the hours to create, who create anyway, and those who still cannot. All we can do is write within the rooms we’ve built, however small, and keep opening doors for others to build theirs.

Sources:

Graeber, David. Bullshit Jobs: A Theory. Simon & Schuster, 2018.​

hooks, bell. “Women Artists: The Creative Process.” In Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black, South End Press, 1989, pp. 125-131

Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own (1929). Penguin Books, 2004.