You Go, Girl!          

          I think it has been interesting to see how woman have gained their voice through the different literary eras. From Mary Wollstonecraft who politely asserted that women had the right to own their own property to Elizabeth Barrett Browning who poetically implied that women were being smothered by the empty Victorian way of life to Virginia Woolf. Virginia Woolf, who very clearly claims that women not only have the right to do something productive and meaningful, but also that they need to be able to provide for themselves. In her essay, “A Room of One’s Own”, Woolf writes about the fictional Oxbridge and Fernham as a way of showing the unfair treatment of women in English laws and practices. We can see by looking at the different ways that the colleges were built how Woolf was criticizing traditional views about property and education for women.

          Oxbridge, which was actually a common slang term for Oxford and Cambridge, represents the men’s college. The way that Woolf describes it, we can see a large and looming group of group of buildings which was built on what was once a marsh. Teams of horses and generations of men dedicated time and energy hauling stones, staining glass and puttying the roofs – Woolf writes, “An unending stream of gold and silver, I thought, must have flowed into this court perpetually to keep the stones coming and the masons working.” She writes even more about all of the gold and silver that has gone into the building and maintaining of Oxbridge; kings, queens, manufacturers, merchants and wealthy families have all donated money to the education of men. Everyone gave willingly, of course, because there was clear value in educating men; no one questioned that men had a right to education – after all, they held sole rights to money and property. This passage makes me think of the bible passages that describe the building of Solomon’s temple with the flowing gold and silver and the hours of labor that went into it. It also emphasizes the long practiced and enthusiastic support, both theoretical and financial, of the basic necessity of education . . . for men.

          The women’s college, Fernham, has a much different history; it has been recently established, and just barely at that. Women formed committees, wrote letters, addressed envelopes, drew up circulars and held meetings; they were forced to hold fund-raisers and bazaars “and it was only after a long struggle and with the utmost difficulty that they got thirty thousand pounds together.” This is a stark contrast from the ever-flowing stream of money that ran into the men’s college. In Woolf’s notes she quotes Lady Stephen who said – concerning the thirty thousand pounds – “considering how few people really wish women to be educated, it is a good deal.” Not only did the women’s college not have the financial support that the men’s college did, they did not even have theoretical support; much of the population believed that educating women was futile – after all, they had no rights to either earn or keep their own money. Woolf mentions that women from past generations were unable establish a college for their daughters because of these restrictions on them; their money legally belonged to their husbands, who saw no purpose in female education. Therefore, any backing – financial or otherwise – had to be earned through hours of hard work and fighting for a basic right to learn.

          When Virginia Woolf says that “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction” she is boldly claiming that women have the same rights as men to education and property. For years, women had been treated as possessions; they were traded by their families for titles and position; their money was taken from them and given to their husbands, who kept them in the dark by refusing to educate them. During these same years, women were speaking out against this oppression – first politely, then poetically and finally boldly. Virginia Woolf . . . you go, girl!

Paths of Progress:
Commerce and Industry through the Eyes of a Poet

Industry and commerce are necessary evils in a modern world and it’s hard to imagine life without them. But there was a time that widespread industry and commerce was fairly new. Some of the poetry from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries addresses this change. “September 1913”, “God’s Grandeur” and “The World is too Much With Us” are all poems that convey a feeling of loss; they all also seem to suggest that it is man’s growing obsession with money and industry that has created a separation from what matters.

All three of the poems describe industry as dreary and dirty. In “The World is Too Much with Us” Wordsworth writes, “Getting and spending we lay waste our powers;/ Little we see in nature that is ours;/ We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!” The words ‘getting and spending’ suggest a repetition; that this is something that happens day after day after day. He describes the fact that man has given his heart away for this “progress” as a ‘sordid boon’ – or a filthy gain. In “God’s Grandeur” Hopkins echoes the same sentiment; he writes, “Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;/ And all is seared with trade; bleared smeared with toil; And wears men’s smudge and shares men’s smell. This poem, being written sixty-some years later, creates a bleaker image of what man’s “progress” has done. After many years man has managed to soil all with their filthy gain; everything has been affected by industry. Nearly forty years later Yeats wrote “September 1913” which focuses more on the monetary side of commerce:

What need you being come to sense,
But fumble in a greasy till
And add the halfpence to the pence
And prayer to shivering prayer, until
You have dried the marrow from the bone?
For men were born to pray and save:
Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone,
It’s with O’Leary in the grave.

Yeats also describes industry as monotonous and dirty with the second line in this stanza; the words ‘fumble’ and ‘greasy’ lend to this idea and echo Wordsworth and Hopkins. The next line, however, suggests a level of obsession with money that the other two poems do not.  

                These three poems, while they do all express frustration with the path of progress, differ in how they portray the thing that was lost and in the reconciliation of this loss. Wordsworth expresses this loss as a disconnection from Nature; he personifies the Sea and the Moon, an indication that they are important to the speaker and of them writes, “For this, for everything we are out of tune.” Man has lost touch with the nature and to reconcile it we must return to nature—which the Wordsworth does when he expresses his desire to return to a more pagan lifestyle. Hopkins, being a man of God, would naturally feel that it is God whom with man has lost touch; he writes “The world is charged with the grandeur of God.” For Hopkins, nature and God are one being; God is in everything. And God, being all powerful, will take care of Himself and man; at the end of the poem he writes, “And for all this, nature is never spent;/ There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.” Hopkins’ reconciliation suggests that no matter what man does , God will always be a present force, bending over his creation in protection. Yeats’ poem suggests that there is a kind of separation from ourselves; that mankind has lost what it means to be “man”; in the above stanza he mentions that men were “born to save and pray” and repeatedly says “Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone”; there is a sense that man has fallen too far to bring themselves back and there does not seem to be any real resolution. The final lines of the poem read, “They weighed so lightly what they gave./ But let them be, they’re dead and gone,/ They’re with O’Leary in the grave.” Yeats’ poem reflects the disillusionment that the whole world was experiencing at this time in history; he is mourning the loss of a past and simpler time, and at the same time expressing frustration with the greed and death that man’s obsession with industry has caused. The subject – the evils of industry and commerce – is the same one that Wordsworth and Hopkins addressed in their poetry, the difference is the lack of reconciliation.