MY VIEW
Sarah T. Schwab: Room helped to fill a hole in my heart
“For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.~
— Virginia Woolf
Most people grow attached to objects or people. For me, it has always been rooms. A few examples: my childhood bedroom where, as an infant, my parents would tuck me in before bed, and later as a teenager, when it became a haven away from them; my first dorm room at college where I (an only child) lived with a roommate; the hospital room where I said “goodbye” to my father.
I am sitting in another one of these rooms. It is a room like any other: four windowless walls, a black tiled floor and a fluorescent-lit ceiling. And yet, it filled an aperture within myself — a void developed after my father’s death that deterred my ambition to become an author.
This room is the women’s studies office at Fredonia State College. For the past two years, I have resided in this space as the graduate assistant for the program.
It was in this room that I read my first book as a graduate student in English literature: Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own” (1929). Addressing her thoughts on “the question of women and fiction” through the examination of women’s historical experiences, Woolf argues, “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”
The text opens with a part-fictionalized narrator doing research at the British Library in the hopes of reading scholarship on women. Yet she quickly learns there is little writing on their everyday lives. Any information is male-authored. Since women have no female-written literary existence, the narrator reconstructs their lives imaginatively, most famously, through the figure of Judith Shakespeare — an imaginary sister of William.
According to Woolf, Judith is talented like her brother but receives no education. Her family expects her to embody a conventional feminine role. Even though she secretly writes in her spare time, Judith hides or burns her work for fear of punishment.
At a young age her father forces her to become engaged. Judith runs away and attempts to act. After constant rejection, she takes up with a theater manager who impregnates her. Eventually she commits suicide.
Because Judith had no financial or moral support in her life, her prose remained undiscovered or anonymous. The implications of this imaginary woman’s life did not occur to me at the time.
Instead, my attention was focused on learning and performing the duties of graduate assistant: coordinating and publicizing program events, speaking with students about the history and goals of women’s studies, contributing to the annual production of “The Vagina Monologues” and writing, organizing and publishing the monthly newsletter EMPOWER.
Most of these tasks were completed in the office. This room also provided a space to think and write — requirements needed for academic, journalistic and creative writing. As the year progressed, my writer’s block dissolved.
On a whim last May, I went through scribblings written during the year and submitted a column proposal to the Dunkirk Observer. One week later, I became a weekly Sunday columnist.
It is May again: final papers are written; women’s studies events and graduation are over; my personal belongings are out of the office. Sitting here for the last time, I cannot help but consider my attachment to rooms and Judith Shakespeare. I am not the same person when I first entered this room. I wonder whom present-day Judiths might be if they had one of their own.
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