"I make it real by putting it into words": Negotiating the Subjective, Mutable, and Interpersonal in Virginia Woolf’s "A Sketch of the Past"
Date
2022-09-22
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Journal ISSN
Volume Title
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ORCID
0000-0003-2161-8267
Type
Thesis
Degree Level
Masters
Abstract
Posthumously published in her autobiographical collection, Moments of Being, Virginia Woolf’s unfinished essay, “A Sketch of the Past” is largely a meta-autobiography, as Woolf works through not only her formative memories, but the implications of representing those memories in a work of life writing. Integral to Woolf’s memories and conception of the self are her transcendent “shocks” of experience, elsewhere called “moments of being.” Nearly every scholarly essay on “A Sketch" engages with and attempts to define these shocks in relation to Woolf’s writing practises. However, there has been no scholarly work published on the shock as it relates to the “memoir writer’s difficulties” Woolf enumerates at the beginning of her essay (65). These difficulties can be grouped into three general categories: representation of subjectivity, the possible movement and change, and negotiation between the personal and interpersonal. Taking into consideration the unfinished nature of the text, it becomes not just a meta-autobiography, but also a text caught in the midst of creation, illuminating the relationship between learning about the self and the practise of representing that self in writing. Thus, in this paper I analyze “A Sketch” for its treatment of shocks and their relationship to autobiography. In conversation with other Woolf scholars, I attempt to detail the shock as a site of contention between unity and stasis and multiplicity and movement, two sets of oppositional states which underlie the majority of Woolf’s reservations about the autobiographical genre. Ultimately, I demonstrate that the shock as represented in “A Sketch” incites the movement and interpersonal connection that are necessary to an understanding of multiple selves and the ever-changing world we are all unified within, and that are reflected in the continued research on Woolf’s unfinished and ambiguous autobiographical text.
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Keywords
Virginia Woolf, life writing
Citation
Degree
Master of Arts (M.A.)
Department
English
Program
English