Who’s Afraid of “A Room of One’s Own”?
Virginia Woolf’s notion of a “room of one’s own” in which women could be freed from the responsibilities of domestic life had a good deal of resonance when she postulated it in the first half of the 20th Century. It could easily be argued that women, who still perform the bulk of housework, still need to hear Woolf’s message in the first few years of the 21st. But I wonder if we have problems finding and creating writing spaces now that go beyond questions of gender and that threaten the basis of fine writing itself.
What we lack now that Woolf did not as much is the rapid shrinkage of private space both physical and psychic. While the bulk of the building boom of the ’90s was in single family dwellings, many of them of substantial proportions, all “family” space implies a shared domain, not space freed and individual. This has been good for children, many of whom have been able to take advantage of their parents’ own need for space by holing up in their rooms to cruise the web and watch DVDs and play endless games of Grand Theft Auto. But the privacy is not reciprocal, as parents may seek their own space but have been programmed by the powerful “family values” movement to be open to juvenile invasion and be attentive to their children’s expressed needs. The responsible parent, we are told, focuses on the family, as indeed a conservative pressure group is named. This parental guilt cuts out a lot of domestic activities not directly related to child-rearing; writing then becomes selfish and irresponsible.
Then there is the set of expectations inherent in the socially acceptable ideas of marriage. In order to be honest, open, respectable partners, we must give up a good chunk of our sense of self in terms of money, time, personality. Only dysfunctional couples have separate bedrooms, we are told, and many would be very suspicious of a partner wishing to keep her own quarters exclusively for the purpose of writing.
Temporal space is the most frustrating loss, and as experienced it’s a form of psychic space created by sociological expectations much more than it is a problem for contemporary physics. Productivity is a dear asset to our economy—more dear than the people who perform the jobs, actually, as outsourcing has shown. But that pressure also means we have to work like drones to be part of the hive. In the aircraft industry, a very important part of the economy of my region, one is considered a slacker if she works just the mandatory 40 hours a week. 50 or 60 hour workweeks are not just the norm but the only way to get ahead. When one factors in grocery shopping, housecleaning, church or social obligations, one is left with precious little time for her esoteric scribblings. Even more than we are told we owe the family, we are told we owe the boss.
As space-invasive (the specter of a certain arcade game from the early 1980s wells up when I write that—and who over the age of 30 hasn’t wasted substantial time and quarters at one of those?) as our families and jobs tend to be, the bulk of incursion into our physical and virtual rooms we bring upon ourselves. The telephone began the trend, and Woolf would have been familiar with that. But as ease of communication has increased since then, so has frequency decreased its quality. Since we can communicate so much more, and in so many more ways, now, we disrupt both the sustained attention writing requires and the quality of thought needed to accomplish writing of any merit.
The telephone’s placement in the home literally hardwires invasion into one’s literary space, but the television exacerbates matters. TV invades space insidiously: its friendly reliability helps us pretend to overcome loneliness (and writing is the most lonely of professions), but it also chips away at the very idea of private space. Any one installment of the Jerry Springer show will illustrate how little we think of TV space as public space. Here, as in any number of similar talkshows from Dr. Phil to Oprah and back, “guests” bare all figuratively and sometimes literally in an attempt at—what? Confession? A solution to their Oreo fetishism or their goldfish bigotry? It isn’t ever exactly clear what motivates these people to seek the lighted stage instead of the therapist’s couch. But what is clear is that they see little or no distinction between the public and the private, and, endlessly modeled and piped into what was once our own private space, neither do we.
The World Wide Web, of course, with its blogs and chatrooms and webcams and YouTubes, has utterly annihilated the wall that TV tore down and that the telephone put a door in. The advent of e-mail alone produced new and invasive avenues into personal space. How many of us write (or rewrite) using a word processor at the same time that we have at least one e-mail program running and/or a web browser open and logged onto a web-based e-mail program or favorite blog? Just the fact that we use the same tool, the computer, for all these things proves that our space—that space of our own that Woolf considered so vital—has essentially disappeared.
Cellular phones, of course, mean that we cannot even take our space with us and create a room of our own away from the shared, wired spaces of our homes. No more can we find solace in a restaurant or cafe, a library or a shady nook at the local botanical park. Worse yet, our cells and PDAs now come equipped to surf the web and access our space-breaching e-mail as well.
Naturally, all of these technologies are also equipped with “off” switches. But it isn’t so much the existence of them that poses a problem than the expectations we and others have of their use. Try to function very long without either e-mail or cell phone. It could be done, of course, but not without the loss of some serious social ties. Besides, access implies use: we’ve paid the bills for the cell and the high-speed hook-up, so we figure we might as well use them. We can access all our friends all the time, so we figure we should. We live in the Information Age, after all, and information must therefore have some kind of value, as people seem to be making a lot of money off it.
But writing, even the most straightforward kind of journalism, is not about information; it’s about concepts and contexts and ideas. The creation of those, the making sense of the information we’re awash in, takes both space and time, and we’re not willing to begrudge it that when raw footage is perceived as so much more “real.”
It’s probably ironic that this essay was written in a rather public place: in front of a classroom as my students wrote essay tests about Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own.” But there, in front of those 20 people, there was psychic space: all who were there were there to write, either of their own volition or to meet a requirement for a General Ed. credit. And so we created a writing space, one in which the relationship between the writer and the page is inherently respected, at least for as long as the exercise continues or the class is in session. We essentially created a room of our own, however temporary it may have been.
The difficult question now is this: how can we allow ourselves this necessary space outside the confines of the educational artifice?