Rooms of Our Own

by Susan Gubar

With a little help from Virginia Woolf, Susan Gubar contemplates startling transformations produced by the women's movement in recent decades. What advances have women made and what still needs to be done? Taking Woolf's classic A Room of One's Own as her guide, Gubar engages these questions by recounting one year in the life of an English professor. A meditation on the teaching of literature and on the state of the humanities today, her chapters also provide a crash course on the challenges and changes in feminist intellectual history over the past several the influence of post-structuralism and of critical race, postcolonial, and cultural studies scholarship; the stakes of queer theory and the institutionalization of women's studies; and the effects of globalism and bioengineering on conversations about gender, sex, and sexuality. Yet Rooms of Our Own eschews a scholarly approach. Instead, through narrative criticism it enlists a thoroughly contemporary cast of characters who tell us as much about the comedies and tragedies of campus life today as they do about the sometimes contentious but invariably liberating feminisms of our future.

256 pages, Paperback

First published August 30, 2006

About the author

Susan D. Gubar (born November 30, 1944) is an American author and distinguished Professor Emerita of English and Women's Studies at Indiana University. She is best known for co-authoring, with Sandra M. Gilbert, a standard feminist text, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (1979) and a trilogy on women's writing in the 20th century.

Reviews

[Jeanette · Rating 3 out of 5]

In Rooms of Our Own , Susan Gubar combines a narrative approach with an exploration of the ideas, conflicts and agendas of different feminisms - from the first wave feminism of the 19th century to the second wave feminism of the later half of the twentieth century, to the third wave and post-feminist, post modernist feminisms of the twenty-first century. Her protagonist Mary Beton is a middle-aged, single, childless academic who interacts with students and other academics that often bear refractions of her own name and perhaps persona (Mona Beton, Marita Wheaton, Marta, Melissa etc).

To be honest, I had to wade through the book as I found the protagonist somewhat irritating and the narrative arc mired down in stream of consciousness vacillations about laundry lists of theorists and their theories interspersed with concerns about burning casseroles, faculty politics, and the tragic though uncertain fate of one troubled student (Chloe). I found that some level of familiarity with the theories covered as part of graduate studies in creative writing and reading a couple of introductory works of feminist literary theories were of only minimal help in navigating the meandering soliloquy though every so often the fictional Mary Beton would arrive at a point of lucidity. I particularly like her balanced and irenic tone - her ability to see from different sides of the argument and find common ground.

I do appreciate what Gubar is trying to achieve and I believe that it has potential - as for instance in Umberto Eco's Name of the Rose . Gubar herself anticipates that some would believe Rooms of Our Own would fall between two stools - which in fact was precisely what I had been thinking - it is too cumbersome to be a good novel yet too sketchy and obscure to be an adequate introduction to feminist (literary) theories. I believe that a second or third reading would probably yield more riches and greater understanding - but that is work I'm just not willing to expend. I'd rather spend the mental effort on reading the theorists themselves.

Having said that, if you want to take your theory with a couple of spoonfuls of narrative - you might well enjoy this book.

[Melissa · Rating 3 out of 5]

An odd mix of rumination, review of feminist theory, campus novel, and stream-of-consciousness. It reads quite well once you adjust to Gubar's conceit of her alter ego commenting on a department like her own as well as the very Woolf-like style. I enjoyed the thoughts on theory (found a whole raft of new names to read) but it won't be for everyone.

There's also a delicious faculty meeting where the various academics are compared to the inhabitants of a menagerie complete with mannerisms. Quite funny.