A Room of One's Own

I spent the early part of yesterday evening rearranging the furniture in my flat to readjust the feng shui, which I had felt was particularly poor. Over the vacation, I had purchased two posters of Vanessa Bell's frontcover artwork for two of Virginia Woolf's novels: To The Lighthouse and Mrs Dalloway. They are enjoying newfound prominence in this room and appropriately so: this room is my own and it is designed to help me plough through my thesis on those days that I study from home. I take this photo from my computing desk, which looks into the room (rather than towards the wall as it did before) and I have created two further work spaces & a more convincing living area. In Woolf's infamous feminst manifesto, she writes that access to appropriate resources and comfortable economic conditions underpin high levels of creative esteem. If women are to write, and to write well, they need a room of their own (a privilege denied to women at the time-- generally regarded as 'the second sex'): 

'All I could do was to offer you an opinion upon one minor point—a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction; and that, as you will see, leaves the great problem of the true nature of woman and the true nature of fiction unsolved. I have shirked the duty of coming to a conclusion upon these two questions—women and fiction remain, so far as I am concerned, unsolved problems. But in order to make some amends I am going to do what I can to show you how I arrived at this opinion about the room and the money.'-- (Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own 1929)

This is, of course, defending the link between elitism and artistry, but she raises a well-formed point that in order for the arts & humanities to flourish, we need sufficient funds. It defends the centrality of Individualism to the arts: that is, Woolf defends the private interest of individuals so that we might create a coherent understanding of our national history and culture.

What might Woolf write in response to the Labour government's dramatic funding cuts to arts councils, the British Library and (soon) Universities? Britain seems intent on thwarting the link that Woolf promotes. This is bleak for whilst the link is underscored with elitist implications, there are plenty of social engagements at stake. The government is ill-prepared to put money into research projects or creative endeavours that are not tied directly to industrial investment: simply because its value does not translate into £££ with immediate effect does not mean it is not valuable to society at large. Its socially-engaged values bear long-term benefits for society and these (because they are so intricate, implicit, conceptual) are often overlooked...This debate is often reduced to a polemical overview of what is monetarily most important to us: the NHS might save your life, reading a book won't. Polemical accounts form a rhetoric which bids to silence the complexity of art's social-engagements.