No Room of One’s Own: Rethinking the Idea of Female Domestic Space in India during the Pandemic of COVID -19 through Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One's Own

Abstract

Women have fought for their right to have their space: physical, intellectual and political. Privacy is important for women;to think, to create and just to rest from hours of paid and unpaid (domestic) labour. Virginia Woolf's 1929 essay, A Room of One's Own, argues for this space. Through a Marxist lens, she argued that for women to end patriarchal hegemony they need to re-write their own 'fiction' (their narratives), and for that, they need money and space. But today, amid the pandemic, one's need for their own room has become extremely significant. The idea of self-quarantining, however, remains a privilege in countries, like India, due to its massive population and extreme poverty. And this leads to a very important question, has the pandemic robbed women of their personal space and privacy in their households, more than ever? The present pandemic has forced us to rethink the politics of postcolonial feminism and how women find themselves in conflict with their limiting space. The pressing problems in the postcolonial world such as domestic abuse, lack of financial independence and education, a huge family and unending domestic labour, have been heightened in the pandemic. Thus, Woolf's call for space (both physical and political) for women is significant. In this paper, I would like to analyse how the pandemic has affected the domestic space of women in India, through Woolf's politics of feminism. And perhaps how there will be a need to re-define the politics of postcolonial feminism, post the pandemic.