Abstract

Certainly the most famous comments writing as a material act occurring in material conditions are those of Virginia Woolf in A Room of One's Own. When Woolf says it is necessary to have five hundred [pounds] a year and a room with a lock the door if you are to write fiction or poetry, she means to be taken quite literally; women cannot write unless they have both a place to go that is away from unwanted intrusions and an income that makes them independent from men and thereby grants them time to write. lock the door means that the writer literally cannot be interrupted by a child in need, a husband with a question, a neighbor with a story. Woolf indicates, of course, that the room and the lock are also symbolic; the five hundred a year, she says, stands for the power to contemplate, the lock the door means the power to think for oneself' (110).' Almost sixty years later in The Fisherwoman's Daughter, Ursula Le Guin revisited Woolf's argument about the necessary material conditions for women writers. Le Guin begins by documenting the experiences of women who did not have rooms of their own. She describes, for example, the experiences of Harriet Beecher Stowe, who wrote in the dining room where, she says, there was all the setting of tables and clearing up of tables and dressing and washing of children, and everything else going on (qtd. in Le Guin 220). In contrast, points out Le Guin, Joseph Conrad benefited from a wife whose conscience was engaged to the full, hour after hour, after day in meeting the writer's needs (223). Le Guin acknowledges the gross inequity in the writing situations of male and female writers, but she argues that women need not have rooms of their own-material conditions for composing that are free from domestic intrusions-in order to write. She describes, for example, the writer Margaret Oliphant who felt that writing profited from the difficult, obscure, chancy connection between the art work and emotional/manual/managerial complex of skills and tasks called 'housework,' and that to sever that connection would put the writing itself at risk, would make it, in her word, unnatural (222). Le Guin argues that to write about being a woman is to write about the very experiences of disruption and chaos that constitute the material environment for composing. In other words, one can write and bring up children at the same time; in fact, the raising of children enriches the writing.