Political Vision And Personal Conviction: The Ideal Of Bildung For Virginia Woolf

This paper undertakes to tackle the dialectics of Virginia Woolfs aesthetics and politics, a topic that has been discussed for several decades but continues to arouse keen interests in the Woolf scholarship, especially in the context of ever deepening modernist studies. Drawing upon Christine Froula's analytical framework, which convincingly depicts Woolf and Bloomsbury artists and thinkers as intellectual inheritors of 'the Kantian idea of Enlightenment as unending struggle for human rights, self-governance, and peace in the name of a "sociability" conceived as humanity's highest end,' the present study nevertheless departs from Froula's homogenous reading of the Bloomsbury intellectuals and instead argues for the two different entry paths toward the same Enlightenment goal: the value-building approach adopted by Virginia Woolf on the one hand, and the institution-building approach by Leonard Woolf and John Maynard Keynes on the other.This thesis further explicates that the two categories of value and institution are relational rather than oppositional, and the distinction between them is more of a manner than matter. However, the tension between value-building and institution-building is likely to emerge at a time when the priority has to be chosen, on individual or institution, on idea or action, on criticism or involvement, as the two approaches are characterized by the respective qualities.Situating Virginia Woolf within the coordinates of value and institution, the present study proceeds to analyze the dynamics of her aesthetics and politics by invoking the German concept of Bildung originating in the eighteenth century as well as its institutionalized variation throughout the nineteenth century, with a view to investigating the palpable affinity between Woolf's value-building inclination and the classical aesthetico-spiritual ideal of Bildung by German thinkers like Schiller and Humboldt. The subsequent juxtaposed reading of three novels-The Voyage Out. Jacob's Room and Orlando, all of which can arguably be classified as Bildungsroman-proposes a fresh perspective of the quintessence of Woolf's ideal of Bildung in connection with the classical one, and illuminates how the ideal of Bildung mediates Virginia Woolf's aesthetics and politics in a subtle and profound way.