The “room of one's own” in Virginia Woolf and Jean Rhys: looking for a “common ground”

Abstract

So many things seem to oppose Virginia Woolf and her contemporary Jean Rhys, as critics have amply stressed, despite some rare exceptions. Nevertheless, this article offers to explore a literary and political “common ground”, by reading the treatment each of these authors makes of the “room of one’s own” claimed by the title of Woolf’s famous essay, in their interwar fiction. Their “common ground” does not lie so much in the subjective or bodily occupation of a “room” by the characters, as in the perpetual absence of such a place. In their different though comparable ways, Rhys’s and Woolf’s “room of one’s own” remains constantly out of reach, whether it evades any form of emotional or subjective adoption by the characters, or whether the characters themselves eschew such a sense of belonging or ownership. “Space” then takes over, rather than the stability of place, according to the meaning Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier gives it in Écrire l’espace. What lies there, this article argues, is a common ethical and critical “ground”, based on Woolf’s and Rhys’s chosen marginal postures and refusals to belong, on the threshold of this forever non-existent “room of one’s own” which, in turn, becomes the place, or rather “non-place”, of an imaginary and evanescent dialogue between them.

Keywords : place, space, city, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, belonging, appropriation, subjectivity, room, threshold, A Room of One’s Own