Virginia Woolf Victorians

3 Credits · Level: Graduate

In the 1970s and 80s, an influential strand of feminist criticism represented Virginia Woolf primarily as a forward-looking literary modernist, for whom “Victorianism” signified a set of conventions ripe for critique and a system of subordination she had to escape. Even as critical understanding of the late Victorian period has been utterly transformed by recent scholarship, much of the received wisdom about the nineteenth century that underpins modernist studies still depends on Woolf’s autobiographical and critical constructions of the immediate past, the time and place in which she came to young adulthood, as irretrievably “Victorian.” This perspective has consequently had a lasting impact on literary studies and installed a series of misconceptions about Woolf’s career that the course will aim to dislodge. The materials we study will be organized under three headings. First, we will read and discuss Woolf’s most autobiographically-based writings: the unfinished memoir known as “A Sketch of the Past,” which appears in the posthumous collection Moments of Being (2d. ed, 1985); her second novel, Night and Day (1919), in which the female protagonist is the granddaughter of a “great” Victorian poet; and To the Lighthouse (1927), which both returns to and radically departs from Woolf’s Victorian familial and aesthetic “inheritance.” Taking these three together, we will examine some of the key questions around time, place, and perception that structure Woolf’s thinking about the relations of past and present. Second, we will explore the mapping of time in her fiction, with special emphasis on Mrs Dalloway (1925), Orlando (1929), and Flush (1933), all of which explore the past in relation to urban and rural geographies, with particular attention to scholarly models that consider location as a material factor in and of literary production. Finally, we will consider representative texts from Woolf’s extensive archive as shaped not only by her investments in feminism and modernism, as evidenced in A Room of One’s Own (1929), but also by the mid- and late-Victorian contexts that persistently structured those investments, with specific attention to Woolf’s ambivalent relations to late-Victorian feminism and the woman writers of that era. Building on our earlier inquiries, we will read The Years (1937) and Three Guineas (1938) as part of her effort to revisit and thus to revise the positions she had taken from the new perspectives of later life. Students can expect to prepare discussion questions for each class, submitted in advance, that they hope the class to entertain. A short (5pp.) paper due before spring break will synthesize their thinking about course materials to that point, while the prospectus for a longer seminar essay, with a working bibliography, will be due before Easter. Everyone will complete a draft of that seminar essay (10 pp.) for an in-class workshop, with a more polished version (15-20 pp.) due during finals week.