scholarly journals The Female Künstlerroman in the Writing of Virginia Woolf

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Rebekah Galbraith
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Primary Source ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
Narrative Development ◽  
To The Lighthouse ◽  
Three Guineas ◽  
Non Fiction ◽  
Creative Identity ◽  
Between The Acts ◽  
Future Potential

<p>The defining features of the female Künstlerroman in Virginia Woolf’s writing suggest a revision of the narrative form to accommodate, navigate, and interrogate the artist’s gender and origins of her creativity. This thesis plots the birth of the female artist and the conditions of her artistic development within Woolf’s writing by first examining the construction of Rachel Vinrace, the rudimentary artist of the equally embryonic text, Melymbrosia (1912-1982). Rachel’s failure to privately self-identify as an artist is contrasted with her reluctance to accept her future potential as a wife and mother, suggesting that “woman” and “artist” are two mutually exclusive identities. For this reason, Woolf’s use of the female Künstlerroman examines the complexities of the female artist’s ability and, indeed, inability to acknowledge and inhabit her creative identity.  But how, exactly, the narrative form develops in Woolf’s writing relies upon a reading of the relationship between the figure of the artist and the novel she occupies: Rachel Vinrace in Melymbrosia; Lily Briscoe and Mrs. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse (1927); Orlando in Orlando: A Biography (1928); Miss La Trobe and Isa Oliver in Between the Acts (1941). Each of these works present a modification of the female Künstlerroman, and, in doing so, a markedly different artist-as-heroine. Moreover, in Woolf’s later writing, the narrative development of the female artist incorporates aspects of historical non-fiction, the biographical and autobiographical, and epistolary and essayistic fictions. An analysis of the intertextual relationship between A Room of One’s Own (1929) and Orlando: A Biography, and Three Guineas (1938) and Between the Acts, is therefore critical to the argument of this thesis.  The following is an exploration of how a variety of female artist-figures are constructed within Woolf’s writing: a musician, a painter, a social artist, a poet, and a pageant-writer-director. Through Woolf’s diverse expositions on the creative process, her heroines embody the personal difficulties women encounter as they attempt to realise their artistic potential. In this way, the female Künstlerroman is used by Woolf to examine, often simultaneously, the aesthetics of failure, as well as the conditions of success. But that a multitude of creative mediums appear in Woolf’s writing suggests there are universal obstacles when the artist in question is a woman, an implication in the narrative of the female Künstlerroman that the gender of a protagonist is the primary source of complication. Therefore, the degree to which each heroine achieves a sense of creative fulfilment is dependent on her ability to recalibrate her identity as a woman with her self-authorisation as an artist.</p>

scholarly journals The Female Künstlerroman in the Writing of Virginia Woolf

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Rebekah Galbraith
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Primary Source ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
Narrative Development ◽  
To The Lighthouse ◽  
Three Guineas ◽  
Non Fiction ◽  
Creative Identity ◽  
Between The Acts ◽  
Future Potential

<p>The defining features of the female Künstlerroman in Virginia Woolf’s writing suggest a revision of the narrative form to accommodate, navigate, and interrogate the artist’s gender and origins of her creativity. This thesis plots the birth of the female artist and the conditions of her artistic development within Woolf’s writing by first examining the construction of Rachel Vinrace, the rudimentary artist of the equally embryonic text, Melymbrosia (1912-1982). Rachel’s failure to privately self-identify as an artist is contrasted with her reluctance to accept her future potential as a wife and mother, suggesting that “woman” and “artist” are two mutually exclusive identities. For this reason, Woolf’s use of the female Künstlerroman examines the complexities of the female artist’s ability and, indeed, inability to acknowledge and inhabit her creative identity.  But how, exactly, the narrative form develops in Woolf’s writing relies upon a reading of the relationship between the figure of the artist and the novel she occupies: Rachel Vinrace in Melymbrosia; Lily Briscoe and Mrs. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse (1927); Orlando in Orlando: A Biography (1928); Miss La Trobe and Isa Oliver in Between the Acts (1941). Each of these works present a modification of the female Künstlerroman, and, in doing so, a markedly different artist-as-heroine. Moreover, in Woolf’s later writing, the narrative development of the female artist incorporates aspects of historical non-fiction, the biographical and autobiographical, and epistolary and essayistic fictions. An analysis of the intertextual relationship between A Room of One’s Own (1929) and Orlando: A Biography, and Three Guineas (1938) and Between the Acts, is therefore critical to the argument of this thesis.  The following is an exploration of how a variety of female artist-figures are constructed within Woolf’s writing: a musician, a painter, a social artist, a poet, and a pageant-writer-director. Through Woolf’s diverse expositions on the creative process, her heroines embody the personal difficulties women encounter as they attempt to realise their artistic potential. In this way, the female Künstlerroman is used by Woolf to examine, often simultaneously, the aesthetics of failure, as well as the conditions of success. But that a multitude of creative mediums appear in Woolf’s writing suggests there are universal obstacles when the artist in question is a woman, an implication in the narrative of the female Künstlerroman that the gender of a protagonist is the primary source of complication. Therefore, the degree to which each heroine achieves a sense of creative fulfilment is dependent on her ability to recalibrate her identity as a woman with her self-authorisation as an artist.</p>

Reverend Gentlemen and Prophetesses

2018 ◽  
pp. 88-113
Author(s):  
Jane de Gay
Keyword(s):  
Church Of England ◽  
Social Criticism ◽  
Women's Ministry ◽  
To The Lighthouse ◽  
Three Guineas ◽  
Between The Acts ◽  
The Waves ◽  
The Church ◽  
Critical Interest ◽  
English Heritage

This chapter reveals the extent of Woolf’s critical interest in the clergy. It demonstrates that the clergy remained important within middle-class life during Woolf’s lifetime and that Woolf reflected this in her novels. It draws attention to the element of social criticism in Woolf’s novels The Voyage Out, Jacob’s Room, Mrs Dalloway, The Waves, The Years and Between the Acts, as she represents the variety of roles played by the clergy: the cure of souls, the conduct of worship, the burial of the dead, and conserving English heritage and historical buildings. The chapter also examines Woolf’s detailed critique in Three Guineas of the decision of the Church of England to continue to exclude women from ordination in the Church Commissioners’ 1936 report The Ministry of Women. It also shows that Woolf was supportive of women’s ministry, both in her examination of the historical precedent for this in Three Guineas, and in her representation of Mrs Ramsay in To the Lighthouse as a prototype female priest.

“After all, anybody is as their land and air is … ”

2020 ◽  
pp. 37-69
Author(s):  
Vincent P. Pecora
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
George Eliot ◽  
Joseph Conrad ◽  
Gertrude Stein ◽  
To The Lighthouse ◽  
English Novel ◽  
Howards End ◽  
Tess Of The D'urbervilles ◽  
Between The Acts ◽  
Plumed Serpent

Both Robert Frost and Gertrude Stein confront the need for belonging with a certain American ambivalence, one that can also be found in the novelistic tradition, but their complicated attitudes toward the land of their birth puts the English attitude that we find in George Eliot in sharp relief. The English novel after George Eliot turns increasingly to what has been called questions of agro-romantic values. The chapter looks specifically at such values in Thomas Hardy (Tess of the d’Urbervilles); Joseph Conrad (Lord Jim); D. H. Lawrence (The Rainbow and The Plumed Serpent); E. M. Forster (Howards End and A Passage to India); and Virginia Woolf (To the Lighthouse and Between the Acts).

Woolf, (Adeline) Virginia (1882–1941)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bryony Randall
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
Bloomsbury Group ◽  
To The Lighthouse ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Leonard Woolf ◽  
Story Writer ◽  
Literary Output

Virginia Woolf was one of the foremost literary innovators of the early twentieth century. A novelist, essayist, short-story writer and literary critic, she was also instrumental in disseminating the work of other key modernist writers, through the Hogarth Press which she ran with her husband Leonard Woolf. Author of such major works as Mrs Dalloway¸ To the Lighthouse and A Room of One’s Own, she was a key figure in the Bloomsbury Group of writers, artists and intellectuals active in the early twentieth century. Although her bouts of mental illness (culminating in her suicide by drowning in March 1941) for many years overshadowed appreciations of her literary output, she is now recognized as one of the most important figures in the literature and culture of the period, whether in terms of the feminist politics of her work, or her ground-breaking experiments with narrative form and technique.

“Such a Mix of Beauty and Horror”

2020 ◽  
pp. 37-56
Author(s):  
Lesley Higgins
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Narrow Range ◽  
Prose Poetry ◽  
Gerard Manley Hopkins ◽  
To The Lighthouse ◽  
Important Resource ◽  
Between The Acts ◽  
The Waves

T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf demonstrate contrasting modes of Modernist response to the work of Gerard Manley Hopkins. While Eliot grudgingly acknowledged Hopkins’s innovations even as he dismissed him as a writer of narrow range and limited importance, Woolf’s response was robust and lasting. Close readings and textual analyses of To the Lighthouse, The Waves, and Between the Acts, as well as Woolf ’s diaries and letters, reveal that from 1919 onwards, Hopkins is never far from Woolf ’s modes of discourse, becoming an important resource as she developed her theory of “prose poetry” and worked to develop her own singular rhythms.

Generic images, gendered responses: Virginia Woolf and the representation of belligerent violence

2021 ◽  
Vol 51 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 228-238
Author(s):  
Naomi Toth
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
Affective Reactions ◽  
World War ◽  
Domestic Sphere ◽  
To The Lighthouse ◽  
The Past ◽  
Three Guineas ◽  
Susan Sontag

In Three Guineas (1938), Virginia Woolf voluntarily discusses images of the Spanish Civil War in generic terms. Susan Sontag famously criticized Woolf’s position, claiming that her decision to generalize ‘dismisses politics’, preventing the adoption of a clear anti-fascist stand on the Spanish conflict. I argue, on the contrary, that Woolf’s recourse to the generic turns the spotlight away from the Spanish front in order to make a very political point about the violence of patriarchy that structures the British viewers’ own society. Woolf does this by highlighting the role gendered experiences of the past play in shaping the viewer’s present perception of, and affective reactions to, images of warfare. This allows readers of Woolf’s fiction to more clearly identify the feminist thrust of her depictions of World War I’s impact on the domestic sphere in her novels of the 1920s, To the Lighthouse in particular.

Virginia Woolf and Christian Culture

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jane de Gay
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Literary Text ◽  
Feminist Critique ◽  
Contextual Approach ◽  
Political Movement ◽  
To The Lighthouse ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Three Guineas ◽  
Christian Culture ◽  
The Waves

This wide-ranging study demonstrates that Woolf, despite her agnostic upbringing, was profoundly interested in, and knowledgeable about, Christianity as a faith and a socio-political movement. Jane de Gay provides a strongly contextual approach, first revealing the extent of the Christian influences on Woolf’s upbringing, including an analysis of the far-reaching influence of the Clapham Sect, and then drawing attention to the importance of Christianity among Woolf’s friends and associates. It shows that Woolf’s awareness of the ongoing influence of Christian ideas and institutions informed her feminist critique of society in Three Guineas. The book sheds new light on works including Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and The Waves by revealing her fascination with the clergy, the Madonna, churches and cathedrals; her interest in the Bible as artefact and literary text; and her wrestling with questions about salvation and the nature of God.

scholarly journals Glimpsing Truth and “[Making] it whole”: Art as Personal and Social Unity in Virginia Woolf

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Megan Fairbairn
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Internal Process ◽  
To The Lighthouse ◽  
Works Of Art ◽  
Social Unity ◽  
Between The Acts ◽  
The Subject

Multiplicity and unity echo throughout Virginia Woolf’s work, especially as related to art and its function. All three intersect in Woolf’s conception of moments of being, which induce a state of heightened perception and cognition, allowing the subject to transcend everyday modes of thinking and being. These moments are integral to art, as they inspire artists to create in order to unify intangible and fleeting experiences. Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse follows painter Lily Briscoe along her journey from experiencing moments of being to exacting her vision on the canvas, focusing particularly on the hegemonic obstacles that interrupt this process. Woolf’s later novel Between the Acts narrativizes the playwright and director Miss La Trobe, focusing less on her internal process of creating art and more on how her art operates socially and ethically, as it necessarily involves the participation of human beings and nature itself. Through artist characters, both novelsshow how moments of being, as glimpses of higher unity, inspire works of art which in turn unify on both personal and socioethical levels.

Virginia Woolf

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Sellers
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Three Guineas ◽  
Non Fiction ◽  
Politics And Culture ◽  
Room Of One's Own

This chapter traces Virginia Woolf’s development as a writer of non-fiction, focusing on her prolific output as an essayist. It sees close links between her ongoing experimentation with the novel form and the evolving form of her essays, and argues that her alterations in style were an integral aspect of her attempt to articulate a response to her largely Victorian inheritance, to the seismic shifts taking place in society and understanding in the early decades of the twentieth century, and to the politics and culture of the 1930s dominated by the rise of fascism. While the chapter ranges across all of Woolf’s essays, there is particular discussion of her 1920 A Room of One’s Own and her 1938 Three Guineas.

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