Beyond borders: The politics of the margins in Woolf, Joyce, and Hall (Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Ireland, Radclyffe Hall)

The purpose of this research was to examine and discuss the dynamics of feminine and feminized communities, the latter comprising both women and men, in Mrs. Dalloway, Ulysses, Orlando, The Well of Loneliness, The Voyage Out, and To the Lighthouse. These selected texts present a fluid and diverse range of gender experiences that empower those men and women whom society often chooses to ignore.; Although I focused on Woolf as my primary author, I carefully paired her novels with Joyce's Ulysses and Hall's The Well of Loneliness in an attempt to examine the many ways that the margins of society, represented by women, emasculated men, and lesbians, negotiated spaces for themselves within patriarchy. Both Mrs. Dalloway and Ulysses demonstrate the importance of the space of the street in the protagonist's journey toward self acceptance and empowerment. The Well of Loneliness and Orlando, however, exemplify two different narrative approaches to gender confusion and clearly reflect each author's respective attitude about sexuality.; In addition to comparing Woolf's texts with other examples of modernist experimentalism, I additionally examined the similarities and differences in the mother-daughter relationships depicted in The Voyage Out and To the Lighthouse. These two works, written twelve years apart, exemplify Woolf's transition from a negative and defeated idea of female communities to a more hopeful and inclusive view. Additionally, this chapter further expands the unconventional definition of community that I described in my discussion of Orlando and The Well of Loneliness .; This research serves not only as a survey of the many ways that powerless people made themselves visible, but also as an example of the ambiguity contained within the labels "feminine" and "masculine." Therefore, the majority status of middle-class men does not guarantee them unrestricted freedom any more than the minority status of women and feminized men limits their potential for agency.