The female space : a paradox

This final-year essay aims to explore the contradictions that are present when we compare the texts Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own”, Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” and Charlotte Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”. The term “female space” is defined in this essay as the space that is imposed onto females by a patriarchal society, and how the females in the imposed space try to transform this space to express themselves. In Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own”, Woolf advances the thesis that “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction” (1). What I would like to put forth in this final year essay is the contradictions that are inevitable with the transformation by women of the imposed spaces that they are stuck in. While some critics may argue, like Virginia Woolf, as she has put forth in her essay “A Room of One’s Own”, a woman needs to have a “room of her own” (1) to write fiction, and as women successfully navigate their female space, this could eventually lead to them having more power and ultimately being on equal footing with men – to be seen as equals and to have equal access men do to the same resources. However, this final year paper attempts to shed light on the negative effects of having a female private space on women, such as on their position in society relative to men. Because women are empowered in their female space, this final year essay seeks to prove that the existence of this female space ironically serves to limit the powers of women in society as well because of the fact that they do not have the same access to the same amount of resources that men do. In addition, this final year essay will also seek to prove that women, as they transform these spaces in order to express themselves, are in turn succumbing to patriarchal pressures that led them to be stuck in these gendered spaces in the first place. Moreover, women may be so used to dominating in only the female space, the restricted space they are expressing themselves in, that this results in them not knowing how to navigate their way in a typical masculine space. This masculine space is defined in this essay as spaces that are dominated by men, such as the business world, which is seen in the marketplace as in Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market”. I will be using these three primary texts as the main basis of my analysis, namely Virginia Woolf’s essay “A Room of One’s Own”, Christina Rossetti’s poem “Goblin Market”, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper”.Bachelor of Art