Virginia Woolf, money, and “the world’s oldest profession”

a close reading

Resumen

This paper aims at tracing Woolf’s references to money and its relation with prostitution in her essays A Room of One’s Own, Professions for Women, Three Guineas and in her novels Orlando and The Years. Woolf’s references to money are explicit from the start; indeed, the titles themselves suggest the importance of money. In A Room of One’s Own, the narrator states the title in the first sentence. To have a private room, one must have money or some other privilege. As the narrative evolves, it becomes clear that, to be free, an educated woman who is a fiction writer or a poet really needs is £500 a year (one may assume that it is this stable source of income that ensures the privacy of having one’s own room). In “Professions for Women” (a title that is clearly associated with paid work and income), the “Angel of the House” intrudes on the narrator and advises her “‘Never [to] let anybody guess that you have a mind of your own. Above all, be pure.’” At this moment the narrator, a financially independent woman having inherited “five hundred pounds a year” and thus does not “depend solely on charm for [her] living,” realizes that she must kill this Angel who is trying to force the narrator back into the private sphere of subordination and subservience to men. Since the Angel would destroy the narrator’s intellectual freedom, the death would be justifiable. In Three Guineas, the narrator’s focus on money is even more blatantly obvious since the title is a direct reference to a currency, the guinea was originally a coin.