A Room of One’s Own and the Erasure of the Gender Binary in Literature Anonymous College

A Room of One’s Own explores the relationship between women and literature, and offers advice to aspiring female authors. According to Virginia Woolf “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction” (4). Woolf’s opinion stems from the presence of the educational, financial, and social disadvantages that hinder the success of women aspiring for careers during her lifetime and throughout the course of history. Woolf advocates for women to obtain the rooms of their own and financial stability necessary for the realization of the feminine literary potential and the transformation of literature into an art form free of the constraints of the gender binary. Woolf feels that the presence of this binary hurts the quality of literature as a whole, stating that “it is fatal for anyone who writes to think of their sex” (104). In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf notes how the gender binary system serves as the main cause of the lack of feminine success in literature and believes that the erasure of this oppressive construct would improve the overall value of the art of literature by allowing for works to be judged by quality rather than through the lens of gender.

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