Reading A Room of One's Own, it is difficult to say whether Virginia Woolf cares more passionately about her gender or her profession. Guiding the future of the art of fiction, rather than looking down on men or even fighting for justice, seems to be the aim of its rather dismal portrayal of women throughout history. This is not 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 all aspects of human society: creativity, industry , politics, love and even the mind itself. It holds that human beings – both individual and collective – can only achieve their full realization if both genders are equally realized and united. “A Room of One's Own” therefore prescribes two things to women: first, the real independence necessary to write, and second, a sovereign sense of female identity which will only arise 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 characterized as necessities 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 separate parties. Rather, society itself has largely dissolved the dichotomy. Women have indeed acquired the social and economic independence that describes an aspect of “one's own space,” but this independence has not created a distinct, distinctly feminine norm. On the contrary, it reduced genre itself to a kind of subjective and cultural aspect which, according to Woolf, inhibits the expression of true genius. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essayWoolf begins her commentary on the plight of women writers by arguing for the literal definition of "a room of one's own." She asserts that man has left woman without material, social or emotional independence – necessary conditions for a writer to flourish. Woolf argues that material independence is the most fundamental condition of individual independence, but in her unsuccessful attempt to discover the cause of female poverty, Woolf's narrator realizes that the answer is largely irrelevant : society has not granted women any social independence with which they could employ work. wealth was denied to them. Rather, it viewed women as mere accessories to the male population, depriving them of a history and actively discouraging them from independent activity (namely writing). A woman cannot be independent if she always measures her abilities against men, nor if she writes in defiance of injustice. Such personal emotions tainted the works of great female authors such as Charlotte Brontë, whose writing is tainted by her very hatred of male oppression (69). Women's writing has lacked purity and integrity because the female spirit has been tied to man—to his money, his standards, and his flaws—and polluted by a myriad of masculine influences. Women writers have been forced to see the world through men’s perspectives and standards. True humanity, Woolf asserts, is “incandescent” and cannot be fully perceived if it is obscured from without. Indeed, it is the need to free the feminine spirit from an exterior defined and dominated by menwhich makes it so important for women to have their own room. The second meaning behind "a room of one's own" is much more symbolic and indicates an entirely new and distinctly feminine creative identity that will equal and complement the masculine. To achieve this second play, Woolf asserts that the writer must express some kind of truth that is intrinsically contained within his or her mind. We bring each sentence, each scene to light while reading - for Nature seems, very curiously, to have provided us with an inner light allowing us to judge the integrity or disintegration of a novelist. Or perhaps it is rather that Nature... has traced with invisible ink on the walls of the mind... a sketch which it is enough to submit to the fire of genius to become visible. (72) Woolf argues that when the female mind is freed from male oppression, an entirely new and distinctly feminine form of fiction will flourish – a play in its own right. Woolf calls this something that “differs greatly from the creative power of men” (87). Like Woolf's hypothetical author of Life's Adventure, the fully realized feminine creative power must exist unconscious of its own femininity, lest it bind itself once more to the external, alien model of masculinity. Woolf explains in Chapter V that establishing the second type of "room of one's own" will bring out the missing piece of humanity and create a cultural dichotomy in which man and woman complement each other. Neither sex can fully actualize itself without the stimulation of the other. Thus, Woolf places gender, in whatever form, as a founding aspect of being human. In light of this view, as femininity establishes its own place, the gender dichotomy is expected to have a great impact on society; Looking back almost 80 years, has Woolf's prediction proven true? She predicts that in a hundred years, women and men will be socially equal (40). Even his descriptions of the current context in 1929 are rather optimistic. Given the level of independence women enjoy today, Woolf was probably correct in her early definition of "a room of one's own" as a condition for such female independence. In many contemporary societies, women have access to monetary and social independence. They can lead their own lives and careers without men, and the feelings of outrage against men that harmed writers such as Brontë have mostly subsided. They have the first type of “room of one’s own,” and this has indeed allowed for the greatest level of female independence in history. With this independence, society, as Woolf is convinced, has discovered, beneath the filth of male oppression, a new branch of humanity, a missing wife whose absence has blighted human creativity to throughout history? On the contrary, it seems that rather than the second half of a dichotomy being put back into place, it is the dichotomy itself that is crumbling. Woolf argues that female independence would lead to two distinct forms of fiction, but the foundation of women's literature has grown significantly over the past century and the styles of male and female writers have become less distinct. Ayn Rand wrote about the epic, Mark Twain about the trivial. If Woolf is correct when she asserts in Chapter III (40) that all fiction is necessarily linked to reality, then the current body of non-sexist fiction certainly proves an increasingly gender-neutral culture. Modern society has granted women independence, but they have done everything except establish their own distinctly feminine space. Given the results of a society that did not favor a modecreative that was distinctly feminine but nevertheless granted women independence, where does this leave Woolf's argument? Was Woolf simply wrong? Was there never a fundamental dichotomy between the sexes? 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 may have been right in her argument that women must break away from masculine norms to be free. There is no new feminine identity; on the contrary, the old masculine identity is dead. The old masculine norm was forged by generations of men who experienced generations of gender oppression and would therefore be most supportive of men and conditions of gender oppression. This is the same standard encountered by Woolf's narrator in Chapter II, the ambiguous "professor" who studied, evaluated, and judged women by weighing them against himself. Woolf's solution was to balance the scales by introducing a counterweight – a sovereign and equally powerful feminine standard. However, modern society has rather destroyed the masculine standard itself. If today a woman can exist without a husband, a man can also exist without a wife. In these developed societies, the man is able to manage his own domestic concerns (conventional “woman's work”) in the same way that a woman is able to provide for her own monetary needs. Modern society has introduced a third, gender-neutral norm. Woolf sought to change women, but both genders changed, moving toward the center and adopting a unique human identity. Certainly, there are still many distinctions between the two sexes, but society is quickly reducing them to simple subcultures rather than the founding principles of Woolf's identity. , transforming them into the kind of subjective and personal qualities that Woolf herself claims the writer must avoid in Chapter IV. As explained earlier, one of the fundamental external influences that obscures 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, for the form of the book demands it. Life comes into conflict with something that is not life. (71) The situations in which gender is most clearly noticed are distinctly superficial differences in lifestyle, such as social rituals and clothing preferences. A distinct feeling of brotherhood or sisterhood is often seen in groups of men or groups of women, but is not such a 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" which comes into conflict with "non-life"? Indeed, in the following paragraphs, Woolf praises books such as War and Peace which have retained their integrity despite being translated and exported. Gender generally does not affect modern developed societies in areas such as art, industry or politics, and if it does, only very covertly. Rather, the two genders are more distinct when it comes to love, courtship, and sex—the very areas that Woolf's Elizabethan poets glorify. It almost seems like society hasn't aligned fiction with genre, but rather genre with fiction. Woolf may not have predicted it, but modern society has demoted gender to something that even Woolf would have considered harmful to the writer. Even in..