Virginia’s story, a room of one’s own, is great. Since she chose to not make a conclusion about gender inequality herself but give the liberty to draw conclusion into readers’ hands, there are so many things to discuss. I’d like to talk about one simple incident taking place at the beginning of her story. That is her upsetting experience at Oxbridge.

Virginia is a woman. Yes, she is a woman. It’s plain and true. So what? What makes a woman’s feet unfit to walk on Oxbridge’s turf? I’m trying to be very understanding here. The society at that time was not ready to accept women as equal to men. I cannot change the history, so I let it be the case here. But what I’m more concerned about is the reason for the discrimination against woman walking on the turf. Were they afraid that the grass would get hurt? by a woman’s feet? As far as I know, the number of women possessing finer heels far exceeds that number of men’s heels. So a woman stepping on the turf couldn’t and shouldn’t hurt the grass that much, at least not so much more than the pain the men’s feet would do. So it shouldn’t be that the well-being of the grass was their concern. Grass doesn’t discriminate. Then why?

It surely doesn’t; because I see a human’s emotions much more clear than that of the grass. The Beadle’s “face expressed horror and indignation” (Woolf 341) as he approached Virginia when she walked on the turf. She is smart, sharp, and a professor. Her intelligence might be of a quite distance from some men. But she is a woman; and women’s feet were unfit to walk on the grass, just like women were unfit for all sorts of things. That must have been it.

I feel pretty relaxed reading Walt Whitman’s poems, a feeling which never before did I feel when reading poems. I have admitted it and here I admit it again that poems always scare me because they are difficult to read, to understand. They seem too academically high and out of rich. In short, they are selective of readers, of which I am not one. Whitman’s poems show me another world. His poems are very absorbing and accepting of the mass.

First, the expressions are casual where sentences are said as we normally speak. There are usually not this “weird” switching between words to create rhymes so it is pretty easy to follow his thought. Personally, I do not need rhymes to read poems. They bother me a little as it rhymes too well, it slips through my head. I bet many people find it easy reading Whitman. Isn’t it great feeling that you are included in such a world usually preserved for those of high-leveled education?

Second, song of myself is a revolution about the focus and understanding of self, a revolution set forth by an individual. Song of Myself – the title sounds immodest and bragging. Certainly, Whitman matched the content with its title. Everything said in the poem is his view, his thoughts, his way of looking at the world, his way of leading his life, nothing else but him, himself, and his own. What takes the arrogance of the seemingly self-centeredness in this poem is that the view and thought are about others, care about others, and love for others, especially those ignored, belittled, and boycotted from “civil” society. For me, it is more of a voice of acceptance to those who need love the most. It means unconditional generosity rather than seemingly selfishness.

I love unconventional poetic styles.

Discuss how/in what ways Sor Juanna crossed the border of gender discrimination.

It can be argued that Douglass became free the day he new A, B, C. Discuss how and why it can be so..