Wednesday, February 3, 2016

Virginia Woolf: A.K.A. The Author Who Made A Speech As Interesting As Your Favorite Novel

 

I personally love Virginia Woolf. She writes about depression so eloquently and people actually understand what she's talking about. It's not pretentious. It's not trying to gain sympathy. It's understandable. She was a brilliant writer and any commentary on her would simply not do her justice, but I'm going to give my best shot at it. 

Her rhetorical strategies in this essay not only prove her point, but interest her audience. She personifies everything to make it more understandable. She talks about her herself in the third person, which not only makes her involved in the story she is creating, she makes it easier to identify with her and her fight against the Angel of the House, which is also conveniently personified as the, Victorian-era doting wife. Thus she sets the scene for her feminist battle in which she kills the gender role she was assigned to and if she did not kill it, it would have killed her. 

Everything about her argument was subtle. It was clear but it wasn't grand and flashy and trying really hard to be an argument. She wanted to paint a picture and that's exactly what she did. I pictured the ghost that she describes as depression. From my own personal experiences, I can say that I took to this very realistically because it is exactly that. It is a ghost. She does not present things in a grand way but rather as they really are by calling them something else.