Is it a room for its own for a woman enough?:)

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Edyta Puchalska
10 May, 2015
The dead angel in pursuit of its own room.
Female writers such as Virginia Woolf, Doris Lessing or Jean Rhys stress the
importance of having a room of one’s own in a woman’s life. Every of them arrive at
different conclusions regarding this topic, even if the general thought remains the
same – it is important for a woman to have a room, a private one or in a hotel. I
partly agree with this statement, but I assume that if the “angel” in a woman
is already dead, the woman’s “devil’ does not help her to obtain desired freedom.
The most positive idea about the role of own room in woman’s life has
Virginia Woolf who suggests in her speech Professions for Women that “killing
the Angel in the House was part of occupation of a woman writer” ( 3). Woolf
claims that women should fight for intellectual and personal freedom because
the traditional role of the “angel in the house” kills women’s creativity and prevents
their development as a human beings. “For all the dinners are cooked; the plates
and cups washed; the children sent to school and gone into the world. Nothing
remains of it all” (49) stresses Virginia Woolf in her essay The Room of One’s Own.
Especially harmful for women is their “lack of privacy” (1) at home where “women
could not produce creative works like their male counterparts” (1) states Jenelle
Krise in her blog about Virginia Woolf. So that to prevent this limitation, suggests
Woolf, woman should have “In the first place…a room of her own, let alone a quiet
room or a sound-proof room” (28). The room where a woman could develop
her intellectual skills and strengthen power of her self-confidence.

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After years of struggle some women were able to rent a room in hotel, which
turned out not to have much beneficial influence on feminine psyche because of
usual anonymity and sadness of most of the hotel rooms. Women don’t swallow
loneliness easily. Let us look at Sasha Jensen, the heroine of Doris Lessing novel
Good Morning, Midnight. Sasha booked hotel rooms in Paris, Amsterdam, Brussels
but after all her life experiences she did not feel happy in any of them, “A terrible
hotel, this - an awful place….All rooms are the same…have four walls, a door,
a window or two, a bed, a chair… A room is a place where you hide from the wolves
outside” (33), explains Sasha, but what she does entering this secluded place is: “I’ll
lie in bed all day, pull the curtains and shut the damned world out” (67).
Her acquaintance, the gigolo, notices ironically that “It’s a shame to waste this hotel,
and this room. Very, very good to make love in”. Sasha could not make reasonable
use (even only to rest in them or just to live temporarily) of any of those hotel rooms
because she was haunted by demons of her past life “her inner vision as a space
that transcends the walls of her hotel room to encompass all the rooms she ever lived
in” (8) claims Gina Maria Tomasulo in her essay Out of the Deep, Dark River;
Rhys’s Underground Woman in “Good Morning Midnight”; just as Rhys writes
“This damned room – it’s saturated with the past…” (Rhys 10). It means that if
a woman is haunted by the demons of her past life the room alone will not protect
her.
Quite similar and urgent need of having “a room of one’s own” has
the heroine of Doris Lessing story “To Room Nineteen”, Susan Rawlings, seemingly
happy married, intelligent woman with good looking husband and healthy kids,
living in a big house with a garden. Susan was supposed to be the most happy angel
of the most beautiful house located in prestigious part of London. Instead of being

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the happy angel, Susan felt caged by this beautiful house and loving family. So that
to ensure her a bit of privacy the family decided to organize the “Mother’s room”
for her where nobody would have had free admittance, but because of constant
discussion about this supposed “privacy” Susan “felt even more caged there than in
her bedroom”. Susan decided to rent a room in hotel. She found the room near
Victoria which was “ordinary and anonymous” (536). This room did not meet her
expectations because of curious behavior of land woman Miss Townsend. The next
room in “Fred’s Hotel” was what she wanted “She was free…she was alone and
no one knew where she was”. and “the room had become more her own than
the house she lived in” (542). The price Susan paid for the escape from her
“domestic demons” was very high, “The demons were not here. They had gone
forever, because she was buying her freedom from them…soft hiss of the gas that
poured into the room, into her lungs, into her brain, as she drifted off into the dark
river” (Lessing 549). “To be an angel in the house or to be a devil, this is
the question”, asks Kun Zhao in an essay An Analysis of Three Images in Doris
Lessing’s “To Room Nineteen” (4). Susan chose to be a dead angel haunted
by devils.
To have a room of one’s own or nor to have seems nearly a Shakespearian
question to which an answer sometimes is: to have a choice and freedom. For every
person, not only for woman, important is freedom of creation, freedom of escaping,
freedom of just being free. Additionally, it is crucial for women be self-confident,
“Without self-confidence we are as babes in the cradle”(19) writes V. Woolf
in “The Room of One’s Own”. Which means that it is not enough “to kill an Angel in
the house” and to give to a fresh born “Devil” own room. Self-confidence is needed

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so that the new woman could know how to make use of gained space in a positive
way.
Works Cited
Rhys, Jean. Good Morning, Midnight. London: Penguin books 1969. Print.
Web Sources
Krise, Jenelle. Susan’s Modernism Blog
Web. 20 April, 2015. http://jenellesmodblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/virginia-
woolf.html
Lessing, Doris. To Room Nineteen. Web.23 April, 2015
Web.23 April, 2015.
http://litandplacesp2011.qwriting.qc.cuny.edu/files/2011/02/To-Room-19-
Lessing.pdf
Tomasulo, Gina Maria. “Out of the Deep, Dark River’ :Rhys’s Underground
Woman in Good Morning, Midnight”
Web. 20 April, 2015.
http://www.otherness.dk/fileadmin/www.othernessandthearts.org/Publications/Journ
al_Otherness/Otherness_2.2_new/Gina_Maria_Tomasulo_-
_Out_of_the_Deep_Dark_River.pdf
Woolf, Virginia. Professions for Women
Web. 19 April, 2015. http://s.spachman.tripod.com/Woolf/professions.htm
Zhao, Kun. ”An Analysis of Three Images in Doris Lessing’s To Room Nineteen”

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Web. 18 April, 20015.
http://ojs.academypublisher.com/index.php/tpls/article/viewFile/tpls020816511655/5
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