Female Representations in Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own / Woolf’un Kendine Ait Bir Oda’sındaki Kadın Temsilleri

Abstract

Due to the increasing popularity of digital reading, e-readers have been the focus of a number of research over the last few years. Reading is a multifaceted cognitive activity comprising reader-text interaction, derivation of meaning and relating the inferred meaning to life experiences. Sometimes the reader has to put extra effort to a text and read between the lines to get the implied meaning. As in Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, women’s representations are not directly stated but implied through the portrayal of the British patriarchal society. Woolf explores how material aspects affect women rendering them dependent and turning them into the victims of material circumstances. It is posed that women’s oppression is not universal or natural but culture specific. Different societies interpret the ‘sex’ of women differently to fit the discourse of gender that suits men. Drawing on this, this qualitative study was designed to determine the perceptions of fifteen graduate students from different cultural backgrounds of female representations in A Room of One’s Own. The data were elicited through group chatting on Messenger and thematically .analyzed to reveal the themes, namely dependent wives, worthless human beings and vulnerable creatures.

Keywords

• digital readers
• gender inequality
• feminism
• women studies