Historical, cultural and gender readings of space metaphor in Virginia Woolf's "A room of one's own"

The article focuses on the metaphorical meaning of private space in the canonical essay by Virginia Woolf A Room of One's Own (1929). This most influential feminist text reveals the reasons for women's failure in the literary field and concludes that such an insufficient number of women writers in the 19th century can be explained by their material circumstances, such as unavailability of private space (their own room) and independent income. The paper aims to analyze the space metaphor "one's own room" as women's space of privacy, compared and contrasted to men's socially approved spaces (the study and library) in terms of the knowledge and self-expression available within those spaces to both sexes. The article identifies the systems of juxtaposition and opposition between the space of "one's own room" and other socially and gender-marked spaces. It also demonstrates the wide range of meanings of the room trope within historical and cultural context, and develops the idea that the imagery of a room serves as a metaphor of female self and as a starting point for raising "the woman question". The paper concludes that the metaphor of "one's own room" conveys multiple meanings. On the one hand, it establishes a complex set of standards for women's creativity, especially through writing. On the other hand, the room imagery becomes the manifestation of women's experience of privacy, their worldview, and their otherness. Examination of space metaphor in critical theory, culture and historical studies proved to be rather productive. The metaphor of one's own room is transformed by feminist criticism into a powerful tool, acquiring the meaning of the very possibility of women's discourse.