“nothing is known”: The Labelling of Things and Misfits as a Critique of the Great War in Virginia Woolf’s “The Mark On The Wall” and Mrs. Dalloway
Date
2021-08-31
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Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
ORCID
0000-0002-0044-7430
Type
Thesis
Degree Level
Masters
Abstract
There has been substantial work done by critics over the years into the materiality of Virginia Woolf’s writings, which has in turn shaped and influenced the ways in which readers come to understand the often-complex ways Woolf presents the material world. This project will not only explore the ways Woolf depicts the power structures through which patriarchal definitions of human subjects and of non-human objects exist in “The Mark on the Wall” (1917) and Mrs. Dalloway (1925), but also in how Woolf further complicates that divide by revealing the difference between object and thing. Chiefly using Bill Brown’s “Thing Theory” and Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, this project will demonstrate how both texts suggest the ways in which the thingness of the mark and of Septimus operates in terms of their excessive states, which resist containment by established logic or language and in turn challenges the anthropocentric thinking that privileges human over nonhuman existence. From this challenge of human superiority, Woolf’s texts ultimately offer a judgement on war and violence as it stems from the former, a critique presented in the internal monologue and thoughts of the narrator of “Mark on the Wall” and of Lucrezia and Clarissa Dalloway’s limited third-person points of view in Mrs. Dalloway. Through the perspectives of her female characters, Woolf suggests a vision for a proto-ecopacifist society where the disruptive potential of vital materialism is recognized by female characters and represented in the text as an alternative to the patriarchal institutions that rely on subject-object relationships. This project will not only expand on the already well-established scholarly work done on the materiality of Woolf’s writing, but also use a combined material, ecocritical, and feminist approach to Woolf in order to explore the power of nonhuman matter and the differences between object and thing that are central to women’s perspectives on social norms in “The Mark on the Wall” and Mrs. Dalloway.
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Keywords
Virginia Woolf, Modernism, Materiality, British, War, The Great War, Feminism, Ecofeminism
Citation
Degree
Master of Arts (M.A.)
Department
English
Program
English