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How To Write Literature 101

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In the final chapter of “A Room of One’s Own” Virginia Woolf closes by returning from her story to real life. She tells us what the purpose of her whole story was, what will give women the power of literature. She says that for anyone to write great literature they need to be unencumbered by outside motivations, emotions, and agendas. She says that women have to stop approaching literature as a “woman” meaning thinking that she is writing as someone with an agenda to fight societies notions of female writers, and even more than that an emotional agenda at all. For a writer to be successful they need to be unhindered by outside motivations, that’s why she believes that an androgynous mind would be the ideal for authors. And that’s why an author needs a room and money to be left alone without the reliance or hindering of others.

Woolf says that the ideal literature is an incandescent light — a light bright and unmolested. This goes beyond a feminist ideal it’s an essential for all literature. In her essay Woolf uses this as the platform for women to strive for because women don’t have it. They don’t have it because they are either writing with an agenda to fight the chains that they are out into or left without the space to develop their own thoughts and ideas. Instead of telling her audience that it’s terrible that women are held down and that we see a few that rode up and we have to emulate and learn from them, she shows us the core of the problem. With only two adjustments at the base of the issue all of the problems of women in literature would be fixed. Women — really anyone — needs to have their own save to develop ideas without any disturbance, and their own independence without having to rely on others or fight for freedom. She says at the end “What is your excuse?” (p. 112) Women have the opportunity to learn on their own today and to make money if they wishes why don’t they go and write.

One thing I found challenging about the author’s point of view is that so many great works have come from authors writing what they know; works based on personal experiences, from unique and individual viewpoints. I find it difficult to understand how Woolf idealizes a sterile mind and a sterile environment as the perfect background for powerful storytelling.

A Peaceful Death?

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Poem 465 treats the subjective experience of death, a recurring theme in Dickinson’s poems. Her fascination with death could be a product of a depression or a deeper attraction.  Perhaps she wanted to study death, what it was like, and more importantly what it meant to die. In poem 465 Dickinson is trying to show us what dying is like from the perspective of the one dying, which is unique in literature because dying people aren’t around to write about their deaths.

In the opening stanza, “I heard a Fly buzz—when I died…” , we are invited to the narrator’s death bed, setting up our study of death (1).  There was a “Stillness in the Air”; the moment of death is somber as with heavy silence (3). There was a fly in the room.  What was it doing there? And what does it signify?

The second stanza introduces us to the audience of the death, who already accepted this fate. The spectators had finished crying: “Eyes around—had wrung them dry” (5).  They were waiting for the death to ensue. They were waiting for the “King”, meaning God, to arrive and take the soul (7). Dickinson is painting a picture of a serene, holy, and special moment.

In the third stanza, we see that all of the mundane matters have been handled.  The dying one has disposed of worldly possessions, and is seemingly finished with this world and its trivialities. The death is going to be a divine moment, special and extraordinary.  Then “There interposed a Fly,” getting in the way of the special moment (12).

In the final stanza, we see the fly and its “stumbling Buzz” annoying and ruining the special moment (13). The fly blocks the “light”, meaning the fly is blocking heaven. The narrator sees this fly and realizes that death is no more special than any other moment.  The fly signifies the mundane and the normal, and that the moment of death is not as holy as it seems. The window doesn’t open and the fly can’t leave because the mundane is never over. Death isn’t a stepping stone to heaven, but just the last step of life.

Dickinson shows the apparent completeness of death by having a perfect rhyme in the last stanza, “me” and “see”, which gives closure to the poem, but then she ends the poem with a dash, telling us that maybe it isn’t over, maybe death isn’t the end (14, 16).