When "A Room of One's Own" Is in the Convent
Is that enough?
I’m intrigued by Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own” because I think it has both literal and symbolic meaning. Woolf read her essay at Cambridge University in 1929, as one of several lectures about “Women and Fiction”. She gave literal meaning to a room of one’s own, by calling for a private space to write in as well as money to support a woman’s writing life.
I could spend hours (and probably have) imagining and even creating rooms of my own, wherever I’ve lived. Haven’t you? It’s the imagining part that leads to a symbolic room of one’s own. It comes from the desire to fit your space to your nature, to provide for yourself what you need.
But it could also be thought of as a shelter, a place of peace and healing. It’s a place to be yourself, to realize and perhaps to express what means the most to you. Then you can go out and be fully present to others.
I’m guessing that throughout history for many girls of large families, security has meant a small, spare room of their own in a convent.
I had a friend a little older than I, who as a young woman thought she could find fulfillment as a nun. She almost became one.
I think Joan was a little too strong-minded to stay in the convent, although she wanted to. After a few years the mother superior advised, no, she directed, Joan to take her outspoken, generous spirit back out into the world. When I knew her, she was a nun in disguise, loving life, adventure and cars, constantly and quietly responsive to others’ spiritual and material needs.
The British-Mexican artist Leonora Carrington was expelled from convent schools several times. She was too wildly creative for so small a space, imagining, for example, that she was a levitating saint. A nun wrote in her end-of-year-report, “This girl will collaborate in neither work nor play.”
For the writer Karen Armstrong, too, the room of her own turned out to be the whole world. In the 1960’s she left her life in a convent and turned her experience there into a lifetime study of comparative religions and how people live them. While she was in the convent, could she have said, “God is neither he nor she”, as she did to Terry Gross on NPR and to all of us?
It’s the spirit of the space you create that matters, wherever you are. Sometimes when I think of a woman’s room of her own, I picture this photo of the dancer, philosopher and film maker Maya Deren.
She is confined, as were the three women I just mentioned. But see how she’s looking out the window; at the same time, she’s looking inward. Isn’t this what we do in a room of our own? We learn about ourselves through free, adventurous self-expression. Then, knowing ourselves better, we have the chance to go back out into the world with a more aware, generous spirit and perhaps even with the words to express it.
By the way, my friend Joan’s own room in her house was small and spare.
Thank you, Deda! I needed this today!