A Room of Her Own: Space for Creating
by Susan Ioannou
"A Room of Her Own". It's a phrase that women writers,
especially, find very comforting. Also, it comes with excellent
credentials. It was given prominence by British novelist Virginia
Woolf in 1928, in a lecture given at Newnham and Girton Colleges.
She said: "A woman must have money and a room of her own if she
is to write fiction."
Although she never had children, Virginia Woolf did understand
what women writers were up against. In fact, to illustrate, she
hypothesized that William Shakespeare might have had a sister.
Why, she asked, did that sister never write great plays, or
became famous? The answer was simple, Woolf suggested. The poor
girl was too busy, forever "washing up the dishes and putting the
children to bed." (Newnham/Girton lecture "Women and Fiction")
Of course, Shakespeare's imagined sister was not exceptional.
Women's lives have always been filled with such duties to others:
to parents, husbands, children, community--and nowadays,
colleagues and clients. What a luxury it is for a woman to have a
separate, physical space, tucked away from runny noses, telephone
canvassers, and a husband who can't find a matching sock. But, I
wondered, how did Virginia Woolf herself picture such a "room"?
To find out, I leafed through A Writer's Diary, her journals
edited and published after her death by her husband Leonard.
Here, Virginia Woolf often recounted her frustrations and joys in
writing. I learned that in 1919 she bought her summer home Monk's
House in Rodmell, Sussex, and behind it, overlooking the South
Downs, stood a separate small building which she called the
Writing Lodge. However, she did not give a full description of
its interior or, for that matter, of any other spots in which she
wrote. Instead, there are only occasional glimpses. For instance,
on September 13, 1925, she described herself writing in a bedroom
in the main house:
A disgraceful fact--that I am writing this at 10 in the morning
in bed in the little room looking into the garden, the sun
beaming steady, the vine leaves transparent green, and the leaves
of the apple tree so brilliant that, as I had my breakfast, I
invented a little story about a man who wrote a poem, I think,
comparing them with diamonds and the spiders' webs, (which glance
and disappear astonishingly) with something or other else. (p.
82)
During her travels, she also found space to write, although it
was often less agreeable. For example, on May 21, 1933, her diary
recorded:
To write to keep off sleep--that is the exalted mission of
tonight--tonight sitting at the open window of a second rate inn
in Draguignan--with plane trees outside, the usual single noted
bird, the usual loudspeaker. Everybody in France motors on
Sunday; then sleeps it off at night. . . . This is the tax for
travelling--these sleepy uncomfortable hotel nights-- sitting on
hard chairs under the lamp. (p. 205)
Regardless of where a room of her own may be, in it a woman
writer can sit by herself, and scratch her pen across paper. In
blocking out the practical world, her room serves as a kind of
bunker. In fact, its very lack of comfort often fulfills an
important purpose. In his memoir Author! Author! Encounters with
Famous Writers, contemporary Canadian novelist and playwright
Dave Williamson tells of visiting the home of Winnipeg novelist
Susie Maloney:
She then took me downstairs to a dark, dank basement chock full
of used and broken furniture and other people's stuff. . . . She
pointed to a dingy corner under a beam too low to allow her to
stand up straight . . . in keeping with her belief that you
couldn't get your head into a book if you were in beautiful
surroundings--they were too distracting. Put her in a room with a
view and she wouldn't write a line. (p. 250)
Frankly, many writers, including myself, do prefer a room with a
view. Green fields springing with crickets, or a rackety downtown
street--anything other than solid brick. Yes, walls can lock out
boisterous children and bleeting telephones. But a writer needs
something beyond herself to look toward--doesn't she?
I ask the question for a reason. I have often wondered how much
the physical space a woman chooses to write in is a reflection of
her aesthetics. For instance, many novice poets write as if they
are crouching in a match-lit closet. The poems are self-absorbed,
deep in private loves, disappointments, and fears. The whole
focus is inward, more personal record or therapy, than art.
Such poets have no interest in windows.
Over the years, a poet may grow bored with the dark cell of her
ego and begin to let in technicolour and Dolby sound. As the
window opens wider, sniffing adventure, she sticks out her head,
her shoulders, then swings one leg through. Off into imagination
she leaps. And if she returns whole, her art may develop to a
third stage. I say "may" because of one crucial point. For her
art to grow, she must use the experiences she brings back to
enlarge her writer's vision of the real world.
So you see, in aesthetic terms, a window can be significant
indeed. Most writers do need light and air for inspiration, and
Virginia Woolf, too, records their generative powers. On August
18, 1921, as she sat at her desk in the Writing Lodge at Monk's
House, she looked out the window over the South Downs and wrote:
The sun streams (no, never streams; floods rather) down upon all
the yellow fields and the long low barns; and what wouldn't I
give to be coming through Firle woods, dirty and hot, with my
nose turned home, every muscle tired and the brain laid up in
sweet lavender, so sane and cool, and ripe for tomorrow's task.
How I should notice everything--the phrase for it coming the
moment after and fitting like a glove; and then on the dusty
road, as I ground my pedals, so my story would begin telling
itself. (pp. 38-39)
Without such a window, what would inspire the sensuous details as
bold as Virginia Woolf's streaming sunshine, or the pastel
insights a poet discerns at dusk, or a silvery romance illumined
by the moon? On a practical level, a writer needs a window also
for inspiration in the purely physical sense--to circulate fresh
air. Anyone gets dull from recycling her own carbon dioxide.
And here lies the paradox. The very walls that lock out the
everyday world, must at the same time throw open the
boundlessness of imagination. In other words, the writer's
physical containment is exactly what makes her artistic freedom
possible. But juggling such opposites remains tricky indeed.
Growing older helps, because age gives a woman the gift of
ruthlessness. In contrast, like Shakespeare's imagined sister,
young women with small children find it particularly hard to step
back from the day's hurly burly. As writers, they fret about
twenty minutes snatched from their babies. If they can manage any
retreat in which to work, it is often only a few feet of borrowed
space.
I remember how taxing it was. When my children were very small,
of necessity I wrote only poems. Poems were short. I could piece
them together much as a beaver builds its one-room lodge--a twig
here, another there. Every evening after supper, my husband sat
with the children, while I--as slowly as I could get away
with--cleaned up the kitchen. At last, between washing and drying
the dishes, I had a few precious minutes for writing. And write I
did, a phrase at a time, on soggy pink scraps of
telephone-message paper, which magnets stuck to the metal
cupboards above my sink.
Among those old poems, I found one in which a writer's room--or
rather, multiple "rooms"--actually serve as the central image.
These rooms, however, are dark with maternal guilt at stealing
time from my offspring. Architecturally, they feel less like
Virginia Woolf's Writing Lodge than a nun's cell of conscience.
There, I must do penance for poems that are not composed, so much
as "committed" like sins, and from which my neglected children
have run away. To win my little ones back, there is no other
recourse. I must get down on my knees and scrub the family
threshold clean.
MEA CULPA
Into quiet rooms I go,
locking out the dark
and looking in.
Penance must be done:
such poems committed
while my children wild,
unwanted and alone
ran--a hundred years away
for all I cared
then.
I shall efface myself
scrubbing thresholds.
I shall unravel
beneath mounds of mending.
I shall wash my hands white
in hot waters.
I shall breathe mother-love
into loaves.
I shall recite picture books,
offer up rhymes,
do ring-around-rosies
till I fall down . . .
Until children, calm, cherished,
my only, again,
come running
home.
Such heavy psychological baggage! Its implication is clear: while
temporary access to a room for writing is good, owning the place
outright is even better. Just borrowing or renting space offers
no long-term security. The human cost can skyrocket at any time.
The property manager may threaten eviction. In her poem "The
Landlady", Margaret Atwood vividly describes the pitfalls of
rented space. No doubt the poem was based on Atwood's
flesh-and-blood encounters with actual landladies in her youth.
Yet, I can't help reading her landlady as a powerful metaphor. I
thought maternal guilt was harsh. What psychic havoc would
Atwood's landlady have added?
This landlady is not just a presence in the background, but a
feral creature who ranges up and down in her "lair". Set "loose"
from civilized constraints, she is small, mean, and dangerous, a
noisy predator darting like a weasel into a henhouse. Her role is
a "continuous" stirring up of unease, whether the loud "squabble"
below, or the steady and irritating "bicker" intruding on the
thoughts of those upstairs. Imagine the tenant-writer seeking
retreat in such a rented space. Constantly on edge, she would
wait to be ambushed by the nightmare figure, who "is everywhere,
intrusive as the smells / that bulge in under my doorsill" and
who even stalks her dreams.
. . . a bulk, a knot
swollen in space. Though I have tried
to find some way around
her, my senses
are cluttered by perception
and can't see through her.
She stands there, a raucous fact
blocking my way:
immutable, a slab
of what is real,
solid as bacon.
(The Animals in that Country, pp. 14-15)
The last thing any writer craves is "a slab / of what is real //
solid as bacon" scaring off the imagination. What Atwood
presents--and perhaps what makes her poem so compelling--is a
dramatic, archetypal image. The landlady is not just some
annoying harridan, but, for me, she has a special symbolic
meaning. She represents that dreaded menace: Writer's Block,
personified!
Despite the inherent dangers, there are times when a writer
chooses to leave a room of her own at home in favour of a more
public writing space. Packing up a notebook or a laptop computer,
she composes on park benches, or in coffee shops. In fact, I'll
wager that every Starbucks in Toronto has its own unacknowledged
writer-in-residence. Ironically, the surrounding hustle and
bustle is not a distraction, but serves three purposes. First, it
can prime the creative pump. Watching young lovers embrace, or a
bag lady shuffle along the sidewalk, may start a poem flowing.
Second, the swirl of white noise--the espresso machine, chairs
scraping back, muffled voices--acts as a buffer zone. It keeps
the tug and shove of a woman's private life at a manageable
distance from the work of creating. Third, a public space anchors
the writer's body in the real world, as her mind leaps into the
limitlessness of imagination.
For have no illusions. The imagination is exciting, but also
dangerous territory, from which some never return. As Virginia
Woolf pointed out in her essay "Women and Fiction",
... with memoirs and letters to help us, we are beginning to
understand how abnormal is the effort needed to produce a work of
art, and what shelter and what support the mind of the artist
requires. (Granite and Rainbow, p. 78)
She knew whereof she spoke. Virginia Woolf herself went mad, more
than once. A first sign of a coming breakdown was hearing the
sparrows outside her window talking in Greek.
Just how frightening the images outside the window can become is
shown in a poem I wrote right after my father's death from
emphysema. Called "The Green Room", it gives architectural
expression to my angst. The title refers to my own living room,
both as a physical part of the house and, with its deep green
walls, as a symbol of life itself. From the first through the
third and fifth stanzas, as the speaker grows dizzy with grief,
the room spins faster and faster, pulling her into its desperate
dance. In contrast, the second, fourth, and sixth stanzas switch
to the view through imagination's picture window. However, what
lies outside is no comfort at all. It is the silver, frozen world
of death, made visible only by warm breath blowing a small circle
in the ice-covered glass. Throughout the poem, the two views are
pitted against each other in counterpoint. The activity in the
green room reflects not only the upheaval in the family's life,
but also the writer's psychic balance knocked askew. The vision
of a wider world revealed through the window of imagination is
terrifying. "Mooncold", its stars stud the blackness like
ice-picks--that scratch.
THE GREEN ROOM
(after the death of my father)
Walls hung high with tilted dreams
that reach into the dark and dance,
the green room breathes
out, in,
sucks the corners smooth of dust.
The silver world outside is cracked.
Do not block the frozen glass.
Blow a bigger circle back.
Tonight no squat brown china lamp
pokes light through a broken shade.
The whole house swings,
one darkened lung,
swaying the children over their beds,
rolling them into sleep.
Outside the mooncold world grows twigs.
Do not pin the curtains fast.
Let the ice-pick stars scratch.
The green room breathes
deeper and deeper,
pumping the furniture round.
Pictures jiggle frame upon frame,
cushions poof, the dust twirls high.
Dreams spin fat with sound.
The silent world outside is sharp.
Not one escapes its waiting edge.
Breathe deep--oh, dance, dance.
(Familiar Faces/Private Griefs, p. 57)
Over the past three decades, Virginia Woolf's phrase, a room of
her own, has appeared repeatedly in literary criticism. It has
became a watchword for feminists. It has comforted many a
struggling woman writer. A little over a year ago, it took a
fresh twist for me. My mother was about to turn 90. Before her
gala birthday party, she made an announcement. She was tired of
mowing her lawn and harvesting bushels of fruit every summer. She
had painted her last wall. Forget the bundle-buggy and oven
mitts. Her decision was made. She was going to retire to a
seniors' high-rise downtown.
Being the eldest daughter, I was elected to "help". Of course,
that word was a euphemism--for "take charge". Step one would
begin forthwith: disposing of her house of 28 years. The months
ahead, I realized, were going to be very, very long.
As a writer, I have always been a loner. I need dream-time. I
enjoy my solitude. By temperament, I have no patience with
arranging practical matters in the real world. My mother is the
opposite. She has never put much truck in imagination, and until
her retirement, she throve on physical activities. Resettling her
happily downtown was something she looked forward to, and I
dreaded. Nonetheless, I was sympathetic to her desire for change.
Why be a slave to a house that was too big and a garden that
annually overshot her production quotas? Like Virginia Woolf, she
wanted, quite literally, "a room of her own" in which to catch
her breath. After 90 years, she deserved it. With no choice but
to help her, I rolled up my sleeves and began.
First, came the puzzle. How would her favourite furnishings fit
into a bedsitting room? I drew up a floor plan and made paper
cutouts to scale. Let's see: maybe the chest here, an armchair
there, her desk at an angle by the window. Shifting the imaginary
furniture pieces this way and that gave me the illusion of being
efficient and in control. In this silent white world, there
loomed no spectre of the endless sorting, packing, negotiations,
e-mails, telephone calls, foot-stamping, and growls in the
stomach that lay in wait ahead. On paper, everything took its own
time and found its best order.
Little by little, my spirits brightened. Indeed, my mother would
have a fine new room of her own. Of course, she would never write
fiction there. She had no interest. But what about me? If these
cutouts could symbolize her new home, what hideaway might other
paper bits represent for me? The more I daydreamed, the more its
plan became clear. Indeed, its dimensions were very modest: my
hideaway would be less than a foot square, its white walls
decorated with neatly spaced black lines. It would not be in a
high-rise downtown, but much closer to hand, and as portable as a
tortoiseshell. If you haven't already guessed, the "room" I
planned for myself was a manuscript. I was going to live
part-time in a nonfiction book.
For over a decade, I had been gathering thoughts on the art of
writing poetry. I had revised the text off and on several times.
For a few years, it lay forgotten in the proverbial bottom
drawer. Now, after a long hiatus, of course it would need fresh
thinking. Even better, I'd have to rewrite large sections. In
other words, as a project it was perfect: sufficiently complex
and absorbing to carry me through the many long months ahead.
Every time the lawyer, the banks, Bell Canada, the real-estate
agent, the auction house, or the movers frayed my nerves and
patience, the snowy pages would give me an hour's peace in which
to recover. In that world of imagination, there would be none who
were rude, or forgot appointments, or neglected to return calls.
Impatience would melt away, as I lost myself in the pleasures of
rephrasing a clumsy sentence, or savouring a new quotation. A
whole book--Yes! That would become my own room of my own, to
disappear inside whenever the chores of resettling my mother
became frustrating.
And I did. For the next nine months I slipped inside its quiet
pages almost daily. Instead of popping antacid pills, I reworked
a key idea. Miffed by a rude clerk or a broken appointment, I
mailed out another dozen requests for reprint rights and felt in
charge again. With every rephrasing that made a murky sentence
sparkle, my ruffled spirit hummed a ditty. Write, read, research,
revise; type, read, revise again. What a wonderful rhythm there
was to the process. It reminded me of dropping pebbles into the
water, each fanning out yet another circle of calm, as the long
days wore on.
That manuscript eventually became A
Magical Clockwork: The Art of Writing the Poem. As I mentioned
earlier, a writer's aesthetics will often reflect the room she
chooses to write in. Since the book itself had become the room of
my own, the similarity between the role it played in my life and
my own theory of art described in its pages is hardly surprising.
Both were based on the same idea, that of the parallel world. At
the beginning of Chapter One I explain:
First, I assume that art of any kind is neither life nor its
direct imitation. Art, whether narrative, antinarrative, or
nonnarrative, is made; life just happens. The outside world is
fluid and resists all attempts to pin it down, as philosophers
over the centuries have discovered. For writers that should be a
dead issue, since their creations inhabit a separate make-believe
space. Art never has, and never will, become the outside world;
it exists apart, a parallel world created by the imagination.
Within the boundaries of that parallel
world, the author can choose to play god, whose power is
exercised through the word. (p. 1)
Play god? Yes, I had rediscovered that thrill when I first moved
my paper cutouts over the floor plan of my mother's bedsitting
room. And by having the manuscript to work on, I had extended
that same symbolic control to my own creative life, when
threatened by the chaos of moving. What I preached from cover to
cover in the book was exactly how I myself was managing. In the
long months it took to complete A Magical Clockwork, I sold my
mother's house, manoeuvred through countless logistical
complications, and finally got her settled into her own new room
of her own downtown. I prevailed by the very grace of having the
manuscript to slide into. I even scheduled my writing deadlines
to match each step in her move. By the time she'd completed her
first month in the seniors' high-rise, my finished manuscript,
right on schedule, was on an airplane
out west to the printer. Indeed, her retirement and my art had
rooms of our own in parallel worlds.
Virginia Woolf was fortunate to achieve financial independence
early in life. By age 22, she was receiving an allowance of 50
pounds a year from her father's estate. Of greater monetary
significance, five years later she also inherited an income of
500 pounds a year from her role model and aunt, the Quaker writer
Caroline Emelia Stephen. Since it made such a difference in her
own life, Virginia Woolf saw material security as the gift that
would free a woman writer to realize her full potential. In
"Women and Fiction", she predicted, "With money and leisure at
their service, women will naturally occupy themselves more than
has hitherto been possible with the craft of letters." (p. 84)
Money and leisure, she believed, would open a space for the mind.
There it could play freely, as quoted earlier from her diary,
like "coming through Firle woods" or "looking into the garden,
the sun beaming steadily."
As a woman writer, I am grateful for Virginia Woolf's insights on
the challenges we face. Nonetheless, I believe that she was
partly wrong. Yes, money can help to free us from everyday chores
and concerns. It does buy leisure. However, money and leisure are
no guarantee that a woman will write more often, or better--or,
for that matter, that she will even write at all. When an
afternoon can be spent playing tennis, or enjoying the ballet,
who wants to drudge all alone over a manuscript? Only we women
who write because we must--and we do so not by benefit of
material circumstances, but in spite of them.
Which brings me to September 11. The day after the terrorist
attacks on the United States, American Poet Laureate Billy
Collins was asked if he was composing a poem for the nation. No,
he said. The events had stripped him of words, as they had
countless other poets, including myself. How could a few lines
scrawled on paper come to terms with such evil? In its wake, our
work felt utterly trivial. Was art, we agonized, now meaningless?
Certainly, the enormity of those monstrous acts will take time to
digest. After two months of soul-searching, however, I have been
able to accept that, yes, art does indeed matter, very much.
While terror destroys, art is the counterforce. The simple act of
writing a poem or a story, no matter how modest the result, in
itself is an affirmation. Out of nothing, something has been
created. Through its images and symbols, art celebrates our
ability to shape, to order, and to find meaning, and by so doing,
to nurture good. As Sir Winston Churchill said long ago, art
embodies the values of a civilized life that we are fighting for.
Within this new context, I am going to repeat what I said a few
moments ago. We continue to "write, because we must--and we do so
not by benefit of material circumstances, but in spite of them."
Whether novelists, essayists, or poets, women shall go on as
before, to scribble on dripping pink pieces of paper in the midst
of washing the dishes, or hunch over a notebook in a noisy
Starbucks, even compose on a crowded subway train.
In short, for the woman writer, especially now, a room of her own
exists not just as a physical structure, owned or borrowed, in
the real world, out there. It also exists inside her skull, as a
frame of mind. It is, if you will, a virtual castle--or cubby
hole--in the air. An inheritance, or a nine-to-five pay cheque,
or a generous husband are not the only means to creative housing
for a woman writer. To inhabit that room of our own, independent
of bricks and wallboard, we can construct it of our very words.
SOURCES
Atwood, Margaret. The Animals in That Country. Toronto: Oxford
University Press, 1968.
Ioannou, Susan. Motherpoems. Toronto: Wordwrights Canada, 1985.
Ioannou, Susan. Familiar Faces/Private Griefs. Toronto:
Wordwrights Canada, 1986.
Ioannou, Susan. A Magical Clockwork: The Art of Writing the Poem. Toronto: Wordwrights Canada, 2000.
Kronenberger, Louis. "Virginia Woolf Discusses Women and
Fiction."
http://partners.nytimes.com/books/00/12/17/specials/woolf-room.html
Lewis, Alison M. "Caroline Emelia Stephen (1834-1909) and
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941): A Quaker Influence on Modern English
Literature". QUEST: Quaker Ecumenical Seminars in Theology.
http://www.quaker.org/quest/issue3-3.html
Woolf, Virginia. A Writer's Diary, ed. Leonard Woolf. London: The
Hogarth Press, 1959.
Woolf, Virginia. "Women and Fiction," Granite and Rainbow.
London: The Hogarth Press, 1960.
Susan Ioannou is the author of A
Magical Clockwork: The Art of Writing the Poem. She recently delivered this essay as a talk for The Literary Table of The
Arts and Letters Club of Toronto.
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