Locating Sites of Negations and Denegating “Negative Essentializing”: Rereading Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own

Abstract

This essay examines how Virginia Woolf uses writing as a tool to locate sites of negations, such as women’s exclusion from places of power and knowledge, and to expose negative essentializing that permeates patriarchal structure in A Room of One’s Own. Whereas scholarship on the book has explored a wide range of issues including sex, gender, and history, Locating offers a new perspective to the book as an example of “dewriting,” where Woolf confronts the stereotypical images of women, challenges gender and sexual ideologies, and restores dignity to women, thereby constructing a counter-narrative to misogynist masculine aesthetics.