Alice Walker's Readjustment of Virginia Woolf's a Room Of

A House of Her Own: Alice Walker’s Readjustment of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own in The Color Purple

Turgay Bayindir

Virginia Woolf has been widely recognized as one of the most influential feminist writers of the twentieth century. In fact, Woolf’s book length essay, A Room of One’s Own (1929)1, is still studied as one of the constituting texts of the early twentieth century feminism; it has been productively used within the various twentieth century feminist movements in eliminating the common prejudice that women are by nature inferior to men and also in exploring the real reasons why prior to the beginning of the twentieth century, women have not contributed to the arts and sciences as much as men have. In this lengthy essay, addressing the specific issue of the scarcity of women writers in canonical literature up to her own time, Virginia Woolf argues that “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction” (4). Several contemporary American women writers have adopted Woolf’s feminist rhetoric in their fiction, and it has been especially popular among minority women writers. For example, famous Mexican American writer Sandra Cisneros titles the second to last section of her novella, The House of Mango Street (1984)2, as “A House of My Own,” a vignette in which the main character Esperanza ruminates over the possibility of one day living in a house of her own: “Not a flat. Not an apartment in back. Not a man’s house. Not a daddy’s. A house all my own” (108). Another American woman writer to adopt Woolf’s polemical strategies in her own fiction is the African American writer Alice Walker. An especially salient connection can be traced between the feminist ideas presented in Woolf’s essay and Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Color Purple (1982). Writing in early 1980s, Walker reformulates Woolf’s idea of “a room of one’s own” in this historical novel. 210 Turgay Bayindir Through the example of her female protagonists, Alice Walker demonstrates that a room of one’s own is not sufficient for African American women to truly free themselves from the stifling influence of patriarchy. Almost identical to Esperanza’s thoughts in Cisneros’ novella, the only solution Walker offers in The Color Purple to black women’s independence from patriarchy is a house of their own where they can live free from the confines of men regardless of whether that man is a father or a husband. In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf sets out to answer the questions ‘Why was one sex so prosperous and the other so poor? What effect has poverty on fiction? What conditions are necessary for the creation of works of art” (25). Through an ingenious historical analysis and her trademark rhetorical strategies, Woolf proves that the lack of equal female involvement in arts and sciences is not due to their inherent inferiority to men as had been claimed by many male scholars, but instead can be attributed to the fact that, throughout the centuries, they have been kept at a socially disadvantaged position by men. From these premises, Woolf arrives at the conclusion that in order for women to create genuine works of art, they need not only a stable income enough to live on, but also a room of their own where they can free their minds of the mundane works of domestic life such as cooking, cleaning, taking care of children, and most of all, serving the male members of their family, so that they can concentrate all their creative energies on writing. Later on in the essay, Woolf also argues that the myriad of powerful female figures in canonical western literature might give readers the wrong idea about the position and role of women in western society. Giving a long list of heroines from classics of western literature ranging from Antigone and Medea to Lady Machbeth and Madame Bovary (all created by male writers), Woolf remarks that, “[i]ndeed, if woman had no existence save in the fiction written by men, one would imagine her a person of the utmost importance; very various; heroic and mean; splendid and sordid; infinitely beautiful and hideous in the extreme; as great as a man, some think even greater” (45). “But” Woolf adds, “this is woman in fiction” and in reality, she asserts, “she was locked up, beaten and flung about the room” (45). Therefore, she concludes that it seems “pure waste of time to consult all those gentlemen who specialize in woman and her effect on whatever it may be—politics, children, wages, morality—numerous and learned as they are. One might as well leave their books unopened” (31).