New discoveries and exciting breakthroughs are all made at the expense of contradicting old rules and ideas. In order for Earth to be round, it could no longer be flat. Revolutions in literature, science, and countries are always filled with conflicts and contradictions to traditional conventions. In this sense, Virgina Woolf’s essay A Room of One’s Own can be called a revolution. Woolf breaks nearly all the rules of essay writing in her argumentative essay. She addresses the reader in the first person, tells the reader that she is lying, focuses on unnecessary details, and even contradicts herself from time to time. Why does Woolf, a competent writer, decide to write this way? Perhaps, her unorthodox style supports her perception on the difficulties that exists in women becoming serious writers. Her writing style constructs a relationship between her essay and women writers; it shows the reader that for women to become a writer without a “a room of one’s own” is just as unconventional as her writing style. With both her words and her unique writing style, Woolf presents her view on women’s writing.
In a serious essay, a point or an argument should be made. This is why a writer writing a serious essay finds it necessary to shower his reader with logical reasons and facts. A typical writer wants the reader to examine, if not accept, the writer’s point of view; however, Woolf claims that “lies will flow from [her] lips” in her essay.(720) Not too many writers will come right out and tell their readers that they intend to lie in their essays. The persuasiveness of an essay is not going to be enhanced by having the writer admit that he is lying. Because writers want to be as factua…
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… as an intellect. Woolf has set up the essay so that the argument is presented in the essay but conveyed to the reader through the subtle messages hidden in the stylistic and the structural set up of the essay. And perhaps she has one more intention for setting up her essay in such a way; perhaps she wants to remind women that they can turn their disadvantages into advantages, as she did with the presumably awful style in her essay. Since women have not had a voice in this make dominated would for so long, it is almost certain that they will have a different voice from the men. This different voice, that has been oppressed for so long, is bound to carry novel ideas, and women, the source of this hidden voice, are the only ones capable of sharing these new views with the world.
Works Cited:
Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. San Diego: Harcourt, Inc., 1929.
Dangerous Secrets Exposed in Susan Griffin’s Our Secret
Dangerous Secrets Exposed in Griffin’s Our Secret
Secrets are apart of every human being. Even children, in their earliest years in this world, learn how to bury secrets in their hearts. In Susan Griffin’s “Our Secret,” she explores the subconscious, aiming particularly at the dark secrets that lie in the abyss of the human heart. Griffin claims that the darkest secrets of each person are similar in the sense that these secrets are perverted and prejudiced thoughts. These concealed evils are so deeply imbedded that people forget or choose to forget the existence of these malicious thoughts. However, these are often the thoughts that will encourage a person to take to violence. Griffin believes that people share similar forms of hidden desires, biases, and savageness. The effects of keeping these evil human characteristics deeply buried also have similar effects on the different individuals. Even the way of countering the negative effects caused by these locked up secrets are common among the “family” and the “statesman and bombers.”1
Although each person has an element of individuality, people are not all that different from one another in their basic desires. Everyone is a product of the “DNA molecule,” and everyone has been a “fertilized egg” (Our Secret 363, 365). There are numerous traits shared by everyone, and one of which is people’s capacity to have and hide their perverted thoughts. Everyone is capable of having depraved thoughts, and these thoughts are not so different from one person to another. Griffin’s grandfather keeps “a stack of magazines” of “women or girls uncovered in ditches, hacked to pieces or other wise mutilated” that he does not allow Griffin to look at (335). These magazines indicate that Gr…
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…o realized too late.
Like Griffin says, “family secrets mingle with the secrets of statesman and bomber” in the sense that the secrets may vary among individuals in context, but many different secrets share the same effect on people. These secrets and desires that people keep inside are dangerous sources of violence and malice, and there is virtually no way to be rid of these hidden evils. People may often be provoked to hurt, and these are the times when people need to look into their anger and see the pain that they can cause by releasing their rage physically. This is perhaps the only way to stop violence in a person, whether he is just a simple man, the president, or an emperor.
Works Cited:
Griffin, Susan. “Our Secret”. Ways of Reading Eds. David Bartholomae and Anthony
Petrosky. Sixth edition. Boston. New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2002.