You are a spy who holds the power to travel into different universes.
Here, your mission is to converse with author Virginia Woolf and character Eleanor Vance to achieve your goal of discovering and delineating discrete utopian ideals throughout their verbage.
It is your job to complete this mission, as the numerical grade and descriptive feedback of a twenty-first century, Earth student named Katelyn is riding solely on your performance.
Your argument is that, through descriptions of a no-place, critiques on current society, and providing theoretical utopian visions, both Virginia Woolf and Shirley Jackson (through Eleanor Vance) engage with utopian thought and ideals.
You may now enter [[The Haunting of Hill House]]
OR
You may journey to [[A Room of One's Own]]
Once you have finished this ENTIRE journey, meaning every action in The Haunting of Hill House AND A Room of One's Own, you will open this [[envelope]] which will tell you status...success or failure. You have traveled to 1959.
In order to receive information, you are posing as a brief visitor of Hill House, the elusive and seemingly sentient old mansion tucked in the peaks of Hillsdale.
Here, you meet Eleanor Vance, a strange, quiet young woman who tells you about her experience.
Do you hear about [[her description of Hill House]]
Or do you ask about [[her journey]]
Examined everything in Hill House? Time to take the portal to [[A Room of One's Own]] You have traveled to 1929, where you experience a rather quiet existence at Monk's House; three miles south of Lewes, in East Sussex, England.
Here you will join Virginia Woolf on a cool, Autumn day, as she contemplates the nature of women and fiction.
Do you listen to Virginia [[theorize utopian vision]]
OR
Do you listen to Virginia [[critique her current society]]
Gone down every rabbit hole? Take the portal to [[The Haunting of Hill House]] As you sit with Virginia, she tells you about a book she read. In this book, two women liked each other, which led her to contemplate how men rarely portray women truly liking each other.
Virginia asks you:
"Suppose, for instance, that men were only represented in literature as the lovers of women, and were never the friends of men, soldiers, thinkers, dreamers; how few parts in the plays of Shakespeare could be alloted to them; how literature would suffer!" (83).
She continues:
"Literature would be incredibly impoverished, as indeed literature is impoverished beyond our counting by the doors that have been shut upon women" (83).
Do you [[comment on her vision]]
OR
Do you [[connect her ideas with previous utopian literature]]
In this gloomy cottage, you and Virginia sit and sip herbal tea.
Both lovers of literature and admirers of women, you discuss the negative manner in which the world is male-centric and unjust. While you converse about the discomfort of having a quite misogynistic, male professor, Virginia states:
Hence the enormous importance to a patriarch who has to conquer, who has to rule, of feeling that great numbers of people, half the human race indeed, are by nature inferior to himself" (Woolf 35).
Do you [[comment on the nature of patriarchs]]
OR
Do you [[discuss systemtic sentiments on female-inferiority]]
Moved by Virginia's critique of toxic, male power in the education system, you take a moment to digest her comments.
You state:
"Your ideologies on individual patriarchs are integral in understanding how men adopt the mindset of a collective society, which is built to teach men to perpetuate inequalities against women. Your understanding of the patriarch is important, as understanding how a society should not operate is the first step to discovering how it should. Note, too, that the sentiment you are discussing falls under the category of essentialism. Ultimately, that means our Western society has ideas on how each sex operates socially, emotionally, and biologically. This professor we are discussing holds an essentialist ideology, in his notion of female inferiority.
Go back to [[A Room of One's Own]]
If you have completed your entire mission, take the portal to [[A Journey through Utopian Visions]] Intellectually engaged in Woolf's acknowledgement of sexist, male professors, this leads you to make connections between individual bigots and a society which creates them.
You argue:
"But it is not just the patriarch, the head of house, or the leader of classroom. No. It is our world which conditions men to hate women. They do not always think they hate women. Sometimes, they believe that they love them, but what they love about them are only the benefits women provide. It is built in to our systems. An institute which allows any man, any Professor von X, to publish material which condemns the power of women is a society which encourages female inferiority.
Virginia responds:
"While I understand your sentiment, that is just my point. That any Professor von X, the name I have chosen to represent the patriarchal perspective, is allowed to disrespect female authors and scholars. To call Rebecca West an arrant feminist for a simple statement about men shows the side in which our world takes: the male."
Go back to [[A Room of One's Own]]
If you have completed your entire mission, take the portal to [[A Journey through Utopian Visions]] It is quite true, now that you think of it. When was the last time you read a book where a women truly loved another women as often as we do?
You lament:
"Your vision is showing us a world that does not exist. Though negative for men, you are showing me a universe in which it is men that suffer, instead of women. The reversal of roles reflects a new world."
Go back to [[A Room of One's Own]]
If you have completed your entire mission, take the portal to [[A Journey through Utopian Visions]] Hmm...Virgnia's comment reminded you of a piece you read in The Forerunner, an American magazine.
You recall and tell her:
"You are not the first to flip the image around of man and woman. I read a story like that, about a faraway land where women ruled. It was supposed to be a utopia--a world where everything was created by women. Infrastructure, architecture, education. No more Professor von X's. Your question regarding men existing for the sole purpose of a woman's love is understood as a utopian thought, considering the idea that it is reflecting inequality in our own world."
Go back to [[A Room of One's Own]]
If you have completed your entire mission, take the portal to [[A Journey through Utopian Visions]] Only a visitor, you ask Eleanor about what it's like--briefly living in Hill House.
While you're certain her response has something to do with the charms of this house...its spectral energy and sense of...aliveness, with brightness in her glazed over eyes, she tells you:
"I have broken the spell of Hill House and somehow come inside. I am home, [I] thought, and stopped in wonder at the thought. I am home, I am home" (171).
You [[analyze her vision]]
Upon meeting Eleanor, you inquire on her journey to Hill House.
After asking her how her trip was, she replies:
"The journey itself was [my] positive action, [my] destination vague, unimagined, perhaps nonexistent" (Jackson 11).
You [[comment on this nonexistence]]
Though Hill House is a place, surely, you are standing in it--its bricks and its wood and its doors which lead from one room to the next posit its reality, yet Eleanor seemed to view her drive as leading nowhere.
You say:
"You discuss the roads which led you to Hill House as unimagined and nonexistent. What you are describing is a no-place. Though I'm unsure if Hill House is the utopia you dreamed of, your diction points towards it being idealized in your mind--a world far from your own that has unique ideals."
Not finished, Detective? Return to [[The Haunting of Hill House]]
If you have completed this journey, take the portal to [[A Journey through Utopian Visions]] Slightly shocked at her excitable expression, especially for such an old, frightening house, you still acknowledge that her perception of this place is both positive in this moment, yet rejects a heightened sense of reality.
You respond:
"I was unaware this world had magic, but it seems that Hill House is a place like no other. Difficult to get to and...its powers holding unrealistic enchantment the longer one stays...it reminds me of another world. Though I do not see the perfection in your opinion, I can see that you believe it is perfect. Your own...perfect...place."
I know the presence of Hill House is overwhelming, but remember, it is your job to complete this mission. If you haven't, go back to [[The Haunting of Hill House]]
If you have completed this journey, take the portal to [[A Journey through Utopian Visions]] Success!
Your work on discovering covert utopian visions has been met with approval.
The agency noted you received evidence from Virginia Woolf that, through her commentary on the reversal of gender roles, she showed the introduced the reader to a world that is unlike her own, and even reminded you of Charlotte Perkins Gilman Herland, which is a utopian piece that operates on the reversal of male/female societal power.
Your work also revealed how Woolf critiqued her current society, which is the first step to building a utopia: discovering what is not.
In a fictional 1959, your detection with Eleanor Vance led to crucial and insightful information regarding Hill House as a no-place.
You also discovered this strange functionality of Miss Vance's perception of Hill House as certain utopian ideals. Though you did not agree with Miss Vance, it is enough evidence to add to your file.
Our work on examining utopia and dystopia is far from over, but I have the utmost confidence that you are up for job.
Attached below are the physical pieces of evidence you acquired along your mission.
Jackson, Shirley. The Haunting of Hill House. Pp. 11, 171.
Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One's Own. Pp. 35, 83.