Flights of Fancy: Spatial Digression and Storytelling in A Room of One’s Own

Abstract

I begin with two epigraphs which suggest my central lines of inquiry: the idea that in pursuit of one kind of truth, one might lose one’s way; and that ‘many varieties of error’ might give us a better sense of direction. Woolf’s meandering navigation in A Room of One’s Own begins by giving up the first pursuit, of handing over a ‘nugget of pure truth’ (4). Instead, she will show how she arrived at her opinion (and it’s just an opinion) ‘about the room and the money’ (4). To show ‘how she arrived’ is to trace an itinerary, and that itinerary, the trajectory of an argument and a map of ‘errors/is the focus of this essay. Woolf travels over some hundred plus pages, spinning out a digressive, meandering, anecdotal, interrupted, fiction-entangled thread of what may be the least straightforward argument ever in English about women’s need for money and space. Woolf’s strategy, which I argue is purposefully evasive, depends not on the logical structures of classical argument, but on the illogic of tropes.

for truth… those dots mark the spot where, in search of truth, I missed the turning up to Fernham. (R0O 19)

…truth is only to be had by laying together many varieties of error. (R00 137)