A Room of One's Own

The most salient theme of A Room of One’s Own is the importance of accurate representation of women in media, especially literature. Woolf investigates how women characters are represented in fiction by both women and men authors. The main discussions surrounding the topic of women and fiction concern three conceptualizations: (1) how women write fiction, (2) the women characters that exist in works of fiction, and (3) the fictions that men write about women. In examining these three concepts, Woolf establishes the primary argument that the ways women are represented in fiction are shaped by patriarchal systems of oppression.

When a marginalized group is underrepresented, misrepresented, or omitted entirely from depictions of real life in media, this can lead to symbolic annihilation: the sense that belonging to a marginalized group is bad because media representations invalidate the marginalized experience via erasure. In Woolf’s era, the discussion of representation in media was just beginning. Much of Woolf’s criticism about representations of women in media describe how this leads to the symbolic annihilation of the female experience. Woolf’s claim that the relationships between women depicted in English literature “are too simple” highlights that the common representations of women in literature invalidate the experiences of women in the real world (97).