"... Till the visionary became a part of the fictitious ...": Feminine discourse in Virginia Woolf's final decade
Description
From the years 1930-1941, the work of Virginia Woolf reveals a 'writing I' deeply involved in a crucial philosophical issue--the engagement of the self with its others in the construction of identity, hardly a new quest. Yet Woolf was a woman, working in her texts to disrupt the masculine image of woman and to dismantle the primacy of male ego. Thus, what Woolf would uncover as she caught her stride in her most mature years was a feminine identity in her texts which seeks to bond with other voices, other lives, and which finds its form in feminine language What Woolf marks most clearly during her last eleven years is the other side of a feminine rite of passage; by 1930, having written To The Lighthouse, Woolf had witnessed and transcended the death of her mother in her texts. Once she had cleared from her writing her obsessive need to resurrect her long-dead mother, Woolf was free to reconstruct in that space a model of feminine discourse based on woman as artist, mystic, writer, in a word, active. Woolf thus confronted and revised within the field of her writing the discourses of patriarchy as she searched for the place, language, and history of women in her late texts, and she anticipated the work of current feminist and postmodern theorists regarding the slipping away of meaning and being through the sieve of language. Her practice combines forms and emerges as a blurring of genres into autobiography, her major vehicle for meaning and perhaps the most suitable form for women's writing. The work of her last decade most fruitful for such a reading includes the memoir, 'A Sketch of the Past,' Roger Fry: A Biography, The Waves, The Years, Between the Acts, and Three Guineas. These texts demonstrate that in finding a feminine voice, Woolf also found the communal voice combining the self and others--narrative itself, to remake in her visionary texts