Exposure to Light: Virginia Woolf's Work in Illuminating Women's Complex Interiority as Conforming to and Deviating from Notions of Traditional Femininity
In A Room of One’s Own (1929), Woolf faults male authors for depicting women solely in terms of their relationships with men, rather than giving them a three-dimensional, full subjectivity. This thesis posits that Woolf’s characters contrast with the male author model and that through her novels, she attempts to discover women in all of their complexities, which often contrast, but still sometimes conform, to normative notions of femininity. These normative notions include those in which women are not generally thought of as psychologically or philosophically attuned, as being closely intimate with other women, or as existing well, or at all, in metaphorical or literal spaces without men. I argue that women in Woolf’s novels encompass all three of these traits, and that she purposefully creates subversive characters in order to show that women are much more multi-faceted and elaborate than stereotypes of womanhood and femininity would suggest. Simply put, I argue that Woolf creates women characters as complex, yet who still sometimes conform to normative notions of femininity. By focusing on three of Woolf’s novels, briefly on A Room of One’s Own and more deeply in chapters on Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927), I will use close readings of several female characters in order to show Woolf’s practice of creating a new genre of complex women in literature. In Mrs. Dalloway, Clarissa Dalloway is a wife and society woman, yet sustains an incredibly active psychological life, and dreams of a past love with another woman. In To the Lighthouse, Lily Briscoe temporarily longs for a traditional family life, and reveres Mrs. Ramsay, a pinnacle of traditional femininity, and yet is a budding artist who ultimately rejects marriage and chooses a life of individuality and creativity. These women are thus most complex in their intimacies with other women and in spaces without men, who systemically serve to limit them in each novel. Significantly, Woolf does not provide an easy or explicit answer to what, exactly, these women are, if they are not normatively feminine: she refuses to label them. When these women characters do not conform to traditional notions of femininity, Woolf resists labeling them, because, as Judith Butler theorizes, Woolf refuses to introduce new normalizing categories that would in turn participate in new or further oppressive structures. CONTENTS Short Titles ......................................................................................................