Comparing The Essay A Room Of One's Own

“Being rich is not about how much money you have or how many homes you own; it’s the freedom to buy any book you want without looking at the price and wondering if you can afford it” (John Waters, Role Models). In this quote, Waters associates wealth with the ability to readily acquire literature. While it is true that opulence grants individuals more opportunities and resources, Virginia Woolf provides a strict correlation between the two in her essay A Room of One’s Own and thus suggests it is impossible to be a successful woman without money. Adrienne Rich argues, “Virginia Woolf is addressing an audience of women, but she is acutely conscious—as she always was—of being overheard by men… She drew the language out into an exacerbated thread

However, in the process of persuading upper class women in addition to the men who overhear, she constructs and perpetuates a rigid class system, in which only the moneyed listeners may achieve. Continuing to contemplate in the beginning of her essay, Mary says, “I thought how it is worse perhaps to be locked in; and, thinking of the safety and prosperity of the one sex and of the poverty and insecurity of the other and of the effect of tradition and the lack of tradition upon the mind of a writer” (24). Once again, she is addressing the few literature upper class women who didn’t meet the model Mary describes. In her cogitation, she reveals the detriment caused by poverty and lack of resources. However, she fails to acknowledge the ability of success to arise out of such adversity. Rather, she is advocating prosperity for wealthy women as opposed to poor women. She wishes to support her thesis that a woman must have a private working space and money to write fiction, but inherently rejects the ability of lower class citizens to become accomplished. Although she recognizes a middle-class woman (while completely disregarding the lowest of classes), Aphra Behn, who faces adversity and earns money on her own, she emphasizes the point of her money over the nature of her literature. She introduces her as