Being-at-home and Homelessness

In Chapter 3, the previous focus upon place is narrowed to that of ‘home’, an element of Being-in-the-world that is granted particular significance throughout Woolf’s writings. Heideggerian understandings of ‘not-Being-at-home’, ‘thrownness’, and ‘theyness’ are drawn upon in order to explore Woolf’s representations of women in the private space as ‘homeless at home.’ From her autobiographical accounts, to her essays and her fiction, Woolf emphasises the ways in which the physical spaces of the home – including its objects, and architectural features such as doors and rooms – are representative of the social order. Reflecting a recurrent preoccupation throughout her writings, Woolf also explores the sense of homelessness and deep unease experienced by social ‘outsiders’ such as Septimus Smith in Mrs Dalloway, and Louis and Rhoda in The Waves, each of whom unveil, question and reject society’s call for conformity and compliance.

Introduction

The Introduction includes an overview of the content of each of the following chapters. This chapter explores the context of war and modernity that provided a shared backdrop for Woolf and Heidegger. An explication of Woolf’s sustained engagement in the critique of the social order throughout her writings is included, and is compared with Heidegger’s largely apolitical approach to Being-in-the-world in his 1927 book, Being and Time. A review of potential philosophical influences upon Woolf’s writings is provided, as well as a survey of published literature that touches upon the connections between Woolf’s writings and Heidegger’s Being and Time.

Confluences, Divergences and Future Directions

This chapter explores the confluences and divergences in the approaches of Woolf and Heidegger to the notion of Being-in-the-world. Throughout this study, textual representations of the connections between self, world and the Other are afforded a perspective that has been largely unexamined in previous Woolfian studies. In Woolf and Heidegger’s textual representations of Being-in-the-world, the central concern for both is the question of how each of us responds to those influences and forces that direct members of a society to order their lives in a particular manner. The question for each of us is not how we might permanently evade these forces; rather, as Woolf and Heidegger both attest, each individual’s mode of Being-in-the-world is ultimately measured by the balance that he or she finds between the inevitable sway of societal requirements and restrictions, and the pursuit of his or her personal aspirations and convictions.

Moments of Being and the Everyday

This chapter examines the most convincing affinities in terms of Woolf and Heidegger’s understandings of Being-in-the-world. Drawing attention to Woolf and Heidegger’s respective notions of ‘moments of Being’ and ‘moments of vision’, the ways in which such moments are triggered by particular moods that are experienced by the individual are discussed. Disrupting the individual’s everyday inauthentic immersion in the preoccupations and prescriptions of the present, such moments provide the potential for the disclosure of the typically concealed extraordinary nature of the ordinary. This chapter begins with a discussion of the significance and history of the literary epiphany, and draws attention to the influence of precursors such as Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad and William Wordsworth upon Woolf’s writings. In the second section, attention is directed to a number of Heideggerian notions – including ‘anxiety’, ‘nothingness’, ‘boredom’, ‘wonder’ and the ‘numinous’ – in terms of their relations to the Woolfian ‘moment’.

Historical Dasein

Chapter 4 details Woolf’s treatment of the relationship between self and world from the perspective of ‘time’, a subject that is a predominant area of concern in Heidegger’s Being and Time. Specifically, attention is drawn to both Woolf and Heidegger’s critiques of the metaphysical perspective that defines time as linear, successive and dominated by a homogeneous present. In contrast to such understandings, for Woolf and Heidegger, time is defined by the heterogeneous unity of past, present and future. It is from this perspective that the individual is viewed as a temporal – and therefore historical – being insofar as the basis of his or her present and future possibilities is founded upon both the personal and collective past. Woolf reflects upon the individual’s average everyday unquestioning immersion in the concerns and preoccupations of the present at the expense of an acknowledgement of his or her inherent temporality.

A Sense of Place

In this chapter, the significance of the notion of ‘place’ throughout Woolf’s oeuvre is explored. Sharing affinities with the Heideggerian perspective, Woolf’s writings both demonstrate and reinforce the significance of place as an essential aspect of the individual’s state of Being-in-the-world. For both Woolf and Heidegger, place becomes the means by which individuals form connections not only with the Other, but also with the past. Throughout her oeuvre, Woolf privileges an existential understanding of place insofar as setting is rarely represented as an inert backdrop or a geographic co-ordinate on a map. Woolf demonstrates that the individual’s everyday involvements are always already inextricably connected to particular physical contexts. Diverging from the focus of Heidegger’s analysis in Being and Time, for Woolf, place is understood as both a literal and figurative representation of the prevailing social order.

Being-in-the-world

In Chapter 1 a comprehensive overview of the Heideggerian understanding of Being-in-the-world is presented, placing particular emphasis upon the ways in which this notion relates to Woolf’s writings. Providing a foundation and context for the discussions that are to follow in the remaining chapters, key Heideggerian concepts relating to Being-in-the-world are defined and discussed, including ‘Being-with-Others’; the average everyday mode of ‘theyness’; and ‘authentic’ and ‘inauthentic’ modes of Being. Emphasised throughout this chapter are the ways in which Woolf and Heidegger’s understandings of the relationship between self and world lie in sharp contrast to the Cartesian dualism that separates subject and object, and self and Other.