Virginia Woolf has two very different dining experiences while visiting a men's and women's college. The manipulation of language, selection of detail, and tone that Virginia Woolf uses, when describing these two meals, shows hers and society’s view on women.
“No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself. We are all going to heaven…” writes Virginia Woolf after eating a meal at a men’s college. She describes the full course meal and experience in this one sentence. It was heavenly. She also insists that the pudding is spectacular, “To call it pudding and so relate it to rice and tapioca would be an insult.” The men have great meals, in great dining halls, and have a great time. She shows this through her writing style. Her sentences are long, descriptive, and poetic. Her words flow and describe food that sounds like it would be fit to serve to Gods. Virginia Woolf insists that “…their potatoes, thin as coins but not so hard; their sprouts, foliated as rosebuds but more succulent.” She raves that even the men’s sprouts are delectable. The meal that Virginia Woolf writes about sounds like what you would eat if you were wealthy. She describes the wine:”…the wineglasses had flushed yellow and flushed crimson; had been emptied; had been filled.” and you feel as if this meal is a meal of heavenly beings. The dinners are drinking together, laughing together, and eating together. It’s all a grand experience. That in the end even life seems better. Virginia Woolf writes”…how good life seemed, how sweet its rewards.” After eating this heavenly feast life just seems perfect, she couldn't be happier to be there.
When Virginia Woolf sits down at the women’s college to eat everything is dull and plain. “It was a plain gravy soup. There was nothing to stir the fancy in that. One could have seen through the transparent liquid any pattern that there might have been on the plate itself. But there was no pattern. The plate was plain.” This is what...