Feminism

The main ideas of the stories by Virginia Woolf are women struggling in society. In ‘The New Dress” Mabel arrives at Clarissa Dalloways party and immediately feels inadequate and inferior. She feels that her dress is not appropriate which makes her self-conscious. There are feelings of alienation, insecurity and estrangement present. She constantly puts herself down and compares herself to a fly as in this quote, “I feel like some dowdy, decrepit, horribly dingy old fly”. These are extreme feelings of lack of self-confidence. The concentration in this story is the main character and how she looks at herself because of her awareness of how people around her see her in their eyes. She gets through this by reading which makes her feel she is in a different, better realm.
However, in “A room of one’s own” there are specific events that occur that point out the discrimination women face such as getting kicked out of the library and not being allowed to sit on the grass. Woolf says, “One can only show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does hold” which is illustrated in this story, which is designed to explain how Woolf arrived at her thesis.
Simon de Beauvoir says, “This one, the myth of woman, sublimating an immutable aspect of the human condition-namely, the ‘division’ of humanity into two classes of individuals-is a static myth. Virginia Woolf gives a good example of this in “A room of one’s own” by demonstrating the division of man and woman throughout her experiences while forming her opinion.