How to write in a Room of Our Own: Woolf’s guide to writing next to a Glass Window

I would recommend a room of one’s own, with a glass window.

It is an actual window from where one can see and understand without being interrupted, without being isolated, all of a sudden, and also have room for imagination. I got to know the immensity and smallness of a room for the first time when I lived in a rented room. Therefore, it also became one’s life by extension. With this glass window, a room did not turn into an all consuming vacuum that it could be sometimes.

Woolf notes;

“It was in the narrowness of life imposed upon her...but perhaps it was the nature of Jane Austen not to want what she had not.”

You shut a door, and on many things. So, under one’s given circumstances and choices, this window functions as a kind of mental mobility that a door does not allow, making the glass window one of the most important accessories of a room. It is clear even from Woolf’s writing, though not stressed on. Unlike a door, this glass window creates a connection with the outer world. It undoes the fragmented nature, both in the self and the writing. What I mean to say is that this glass window protects her private thinking. However, this is not the private of the home, but rather the private of an individual in the act of thinking. At the same time, it also helps her think in a more complete way by keeping an eye on a whole world that exists outside of her room. Through this window then, an entire world is visible to her with all its complexity, along with the times when she is not in it.

Though the room is a space where she is revealed to herself and her writing , it is only when she looks through the window, that she becomes a true product of the private and the public; a person fully aware of the social position and relations that exist around her.

I used to sit, or rather I still sit in a closed lobby with a big picture window as I relate to myself the circumstances of all the people on the other side of the window. Their bodies, movements, laughters, frowns, keep making and remaking my thoughts. They are never stuck in the immensity or the smallness of my room.

Later on, this would lead me to an interesting question; what did it mean to sex one’s writing?

Is it acknowledging the “limitations” of our own sex (their circumstances) and then writing what one thinks?

Or

Is it acknowledging what one thinks, and then writing given the limitations of her circumstances?

Woolf helps raise this important question about women novelists, writers and thinkers. She asks them about what they should write and what it meant to write as a woman. Regardless, to write, the woman must go out. She must get out of her given conditions at home which is generally a shared room, for in a country like India, one may hardly have a room of their own.

Thus, she would have to let her mind wander into the world defined by a masculine sense. A sense that has as yet betrayed her own confidence and thoughts. A window into all thoughts, if I may. So, when one talks about the sensibility of writing as a woman, one might also ask; what would it be like for a woman to write about a man. Woolf rightly says that women have been written about by almost every great man/writer, but there are hardly any portraits of men by women. If women are made up of complex emotions that rarely show up, then is a man’s world the one that one can write about in a much simpler way? It is ,after all, a predefined world. It is accepted as a certain sense that is universal. For isn’t the whole air around men deeply steeped in confidence, assertion, and a world that they fully understand, and perhaps almost a half of the population does not?

I said to myself as I stood at a distance from me, moving towards adulthood in the world, that our mind seems to have become sexed.Therefore, this glass window can be the place where the fragmented mind of the woman can bring a complete synthesis of her own and her sexed thoughts to write a poetry that is not an artefact of an idea of the female. It would rather allow the female to revel in the “I” of the universal.

In fiction women hold power and speak through the writer’s and the readers’ imagination. In real life, however, writing for women, like many other occupations, remains a hobby. Shyam Benegal’s Charulata comes to mind. She writes only on the inside, as a hobby, and for the longest time it seemed to me as well that writing was like that. Everything that needed to be written about was already written. Thus, it was an entirely pleasurable activity that featured on one’ personal instagram or facebook page only. I still have not found out the moment when an entry into a journal or a blog becomes poetry, but it does turn out that I was grossly wrong about everything having been written.

Fiction until transmitted through media remains inside, away from other occupations. In a women’s life, it is largely an act of surplus, an unwanted surplus along with many other works done by them. It never is an economic, or a profitable project. Even today a woman is a supplement, visibly in India and other parts of south Asia, and perhaps not so visibly in the West. All good fiction means that it has a voice, but Charulata barely speaks in the entire movie until moved to the precipice by the various literary male voices around her. Fiction makes her speak, but reality makes her stay put with her husband. Later, however, she is allowed to be part of the literary world in partnership with her husband to supplement his business.

A question while reading about Woolf’s thesis on Judith, Shakespeare’s sister, cropped up — why did I choose to read about how I should feel as a person or a woman who has dedicated a greater part of her life to art? Why was I reading, and even more importantly, who was I reading as — a woman or a person? The doubt, the lack of courage to write exactly what I thought or meant, which sex did it all belong to?

But then, subsequently, I couldn’t decide whose questions were these; a person’s or a woman’s.