She sits lackadaisically on the green grass at the edge of the bank, peering at her velvet reflection.  Appearing passive, emotional, oppressed, she turns to her notepad, sketching the lines and curves of her very essence in her native tongue.  She returns often, writes often, at her desk, in her bed, under a tree near the lake.  One day she sets down her notepad and approaches the water, leaves crunching beneath her feet.  A smooth stone flees her hand and releases ripples that seem to go on forever.  As the ripples subside, she catches yet another glimpse of her reflection.  An active, thoughtful, triumphant woman gazes back at her.  She looks up and notices a young girl across the lake contemplating her own refection victoriously. 

Like the woman, Virginia Woolf, during the 20^th Century shows us a world in which women have grown away from the identity that they have been formed or shaped by a patriarchal society.  Femininity has been constructed by a culture in the hands of men, and they have shaped the idea of what women ‘should be.’  Society had perpetuated the idea that women, in essence, are inferior to men, and both men and women bought into this idea.  Woolf along with many other women writers was part of a movement during this time to “make it new.”   She was determined to do something different that had never been done before.

Woolf’s ideas carry us forward by focusing on what women can and will do rather then what has been done.  She desires and foresees a future when women can recreate their feeling which is written and shared.  She states: 

 “If we have the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think; if we escape a little from the common sitting-room and see human beings not always in their relation to each other but in relation to reality; and the sky too, and the trees or whatever it may be in themselves….” (Woof 114).

By: Alisha Nottingham

      alishannott@yahoo.com