An open sky of one's own

Rereading Woolf's A Room of One's Own for my theory seminar. First, it's a delightful essay: Woolf neatly mirrors abstract argument and embodied journey, walking her readers through the British Museum, where her quixotic distance from male influence takes shape in her caricatured doodle of Professor Von X and her catty disdain for the researcher next to her, even as she recognizes their unwarranted superiority over her and other women. But the lively part, for my purposes, lies with her discussion of money, and how it frees her to see an open sky instead of a statue. Male knowledge, here and elsewhere, is figured as ordered, organized by looming statues that warp and bend the space around them, creating their own aura of authority. It's facile, perhaps, but that's just what conspiracy theory makes visible: the urgent desire to be meaningful, to represent one's knowledge as essential firmament, when it is, in truth, as arbitrary as the strained logic of conspiracy. Woolf sets the statue in contrast to the unstriated open sky, a space without division or hierarchy. For all her urging about private room, this essay revels in open spaces, spaces where movement is unimpeded.