A Study On Virginia Woolf From The Perspective Of The Space Theory

Henri Lefebvre, a forerunner of the Theory of Social Space, has claimed in his The Production of Space published in1974that "around1910a certain space was shattered". The shattered space Lefebvre mentioned refers to the space of classical perspective and geometry, developed from the Renaissance onwards on the basis of the Greek tradition and bodied forth in Western art and philosophy. Lefebvre states that with the disappearance of the reference systems, other former ’commonplaces’ such as the town, history, paternity, music, traditional morality, and so forth have also disappeared. As for such great change, Virginia Woolf has made the similar announcement fifty years earlier that "Let us agree to place one of these changes about the year1910." According to Woolf, about the year1910all human relations have shifted, hence a change in religion, conduct, politics, and literature. Woolf, so to speak, has been aware of the shift in social space woven by all human relations and the instrumentalness of space at very early time and devoted her whole life to seeking new ways of writing to fit the social change, whereas Lefebvre introduced the concept of space into the analysis of the social change dozens of years later and attempted to construct a theory to describe and analyze the essence of the change and its effect. Therefore, while Lefebvre’s Theory is seeping into the literary criticism with its great potential of inclusiveness and applicability, the hidden features of spatiality and sociality in Woolf’s writing are manifest. The present dissertation aims at analyzing the spatialized structure of narration and the political significance implicated by social spaces in Woolf’s writings by using Lefebvre’s concept of social space and his triad dialectic of space. Virginia Woolf, as one of the famous modernist writers, went through the urbanization, the industrialization and the First World War in the first half of the twentieth century, which brought about the change in her outlook and experience of space and time and influenced her aesthetic experiment. In addition, Woolf’s way of dealing with space in writing is resulted from her marginal identity as a woman writer which enabled her to be sensitive to the social oppression embodied by geographical places and the unequal power relations in the practice and discourse of everyday life. Woolf’s writings not only represent the broken world, the chaotic space and the relentless reality by means of the spatialized narration, but also disclose and criticize the social authority’s oppression on the disadvantaged groups or the heterogeneous forces by using space as constructed, contradictory and dynamic.The introduction of the dissertation briefly introduces the reasons for choosing the subject and the perspective of the study. The body part consists of three chapters. The first chapter analyzes the feasibility of studying Woolf and her writings from the perspective of social space. Firstly,’the spatial turn’ in literary criticism is simply introduced; secondly, how Lefebvre’s theory fits into the study of Woolf’s writings is analyzed; and lastly, the complexity and openness of the study space about Woolf is presented and the feasibility of the space study about Woolf is proved. The second chapter focuses on the spatialized narration of Woolf s novel writing. The first section of this chapter points out that Woolf’s writing innovation is a kind of literary spatial practice which can be considered as part of the social spatial practice. The new way of writing transfers the concern from the grand historic narrative to the everyday life space, the Dasein space and the perceptual social space, which reveals the subversion of the other in the literary space against the literary narrative tradition. The second sector points out that the spatialized narration in Woolf’s novel innovation represents the recollection of the past spaces in the temporal fragments by analyzing such novels as The Mark on the Wall, Mr. Dalloway and Olando. The untraditional way of writing reflects the fragmentization, heterogeneity and disorderedness of the modern urban life and embodies Woolf s own living experience and philosophy. It is not only a break through the modern narrative predicament, but also a construction of the literary space in the development of the capitalist modernity. The third chapter is mainly about the spatial politics in Woolf s writings. In the spatialized narratives, spaces are no longer the static, neutral and passive story settings but rather the dynamic, active and open social spaces both producing and being produced. People in the social spaces, who are disciplined by the representations of space in terms of gender, class and nation, make challenges to the representations by means of spatial practice, questioning and subverting the discourses of sexism, nationalism and class hegemony. This chapter concerns with such works as A Room of One’s Own, Three Guineas, A Sketch of the Past, The Voyage out, Night and Day, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Flush, The Waves, The Years, etc. By analyzing the functions of spaces in these writings, this chapter expounds the spatial politics criticism in terms of gender, class and nation. The epilogue of the dissertation is not just an ending that concludes the core thoughts and contents of the previous chapters, but a very beginning of the subsequent studies related to the present one.The present dissertation combines the literary ontology study with the political and cultural criticism in light of the theory of social space, presenting Woolf’s otherness power both from the internal structural level and from the external social level of the texts. The study on the one hand subverts the traditional image of Virginia Woolf whose only interest is the inner world, whose thought is narrow and whose writings are "empty and meaningless", and on the other hand, it turns out that the Woolf study space is open and there exists more possibilities to be explored.