The shallow bond: the profit motive figuring into Virginia Woolf’s feminist message
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.22161/jhed.3.3.10Abstract
Woolf’s vocabulary of feminist emancipation was the vector of her migration towards the genre of the novel. For all the vindictiveness it bears against gender inequality, exploring feminism as potential (i.e., as future-oriented) was not untouched by the writer’s inward-turned contradictions despite her choice of the variety of the narrative to intercept the strain of reminiscence (therefore the sentimentalism) of her poetry. “After being ill and suffering every form and variety of nightmare” (Letters IV, 231), Virginia Woolf “by the light of reason, tr[ies] to put into prose” (ibid) her idea of female empowerment to “keep entirely off” (ibid) the danger of patriarchy. Proving the efficiency of her feminist message as an author was within Woolf’s battle against a stretched life of introversion with a view to explore the broader opportunity presented by prose. However, a conspicuous part of her mental instability was Woolf’s unclear relation to the profit motif behind the project of female authorship which acquired a significance that always threatened to frustrate her very feminist concept.
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