Multi-voicedness and the Female Mind in Virginia Woolf's Essay A Room of One's Own

Abstract

In Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, Mikhail Bakhtin defines multi-voicedness as a
method ‘’constructed not as the whole of a single consciousness, absorbing other
consciousnesses as objects into itself, but as a whole formed by the interaction of several
consciousnesses…and this consequently makes the viewer also a participant’’. In the present
paper, the examination of Virginia Woolf’s'' A Room of One’s Own'', an essay divided into six
chapters, exhibits how Woolf manipulates the essay form in a new manner to create a multivoiced
world and dispenses with the established forms of the fundamentally monologic European
novel. In her long essay, Woolf uses many narrators, direct speech, indirect speech, quasi-speech
and her own voice, interwoven with the arguments of her opponents and supporters, to represent
multiple levels of authority or what may be described in Bakhtinian terms as ‘’voice
interference’’. Woolf’s new construction proves an appropriate medium to discuss the condition
of women in general and women writers in particular. Virginia Woolf is completely aware of the
fact that she lives in an era preceded by successive eras of anti-feminism. Hence, women and
fiction is the main idea in'' A Room of One’s Own'', an intricate theme in which Woolf addresses
women as narrators as well as readers whose voice as participants serves in forming the multivoiced
world of her piece.
Mikhail Bakhtin defines multi-voicedness in problems of Dostoevsky's poetics as a method "
constructed not as the whole of a single consciousness, absorbing other consciousnesses as
objects into itself, but as a whole formed by the interaction of several consciousnesses… and this
consequently makes the viewer also a participant."(Bakhtin,1984,p.18) In the present paper, the
examination of Virginia Woolf's'' A Room of One's Own'', an essay divided into six chapters,
exhibits how Woolf manipulates the essay form in a new manner to create a multi-voiced world
and dispense with "the established forms of fundamentally monologic European
novel"(Bakhtin,1984,p.8) In her long essay, Woolf uses many narrators, direct speech, indirect
speech, quasi-speech and her own voice, interwoven with the arguments of her opponents and
supporters, to represent multiple levels of authority or what may be described in Bakhtinian
terms as " voice interference" (Bakhtin,1984,p.xxxvi).