The art of natality: Virginia Woolf's and Kaethe Kollwitz's aesthetics of becoming

Channeling their losses into their creative endeavors, Virginia Woolf and Kathe Kollwitz appropriated events from their pasts that were nothing short of identity-shattering for moments of personal and cultural edification. This dissertation explores Woolf's and Kollwitz's representations of maternity, nostalgic desire, and creativity as interwoven life forces that counteract the ubiquity of degradation and death. Their aesthetics are governed by a principle of connectivity that affirms reverence for interrelation as fundamental to addressing personal and cultural ills. Woolf and Kollwitz establish maternity as exemplary of the human need for mutuality and maternal desire as a search for interrelation that must be exercised imaginatively. Charting the cataclysms of modernity evident in thought, technology, and warfare, Chapter I demonstrates modernity's collective sense of homelessness. Chapter II situates theoretically the presences Woolf and Kollwitz assert as potentializing a rediscovery of home. Svetlana Boym's reflective nostalgia proves foundational to understanding their worldviews, as does Grace Jantzen's ethic of natality. Chapters III, IV, and V interpret Woolf's "A Sketch of the Past" and To the Lighthouse as manifestations of Woolf's creative memory work, of her search for her mother and her lost home. Sketching her mother as an artist, Woolf identifies Julia Stephen as the source of her daughter's creativity and suggests art as a regenerative expression of love. Chapters VI and VII transition to a consideration of Kathe Kollwitz's autobiography and diaries, and of her War series and Mourning Parents memorial. These chapters illuminate her alignment of the sensuality of mothering with the sensuality of creation, and establish that she experienced her son's death in World War I as a death of becoming. Chapter VII in particular probes the depths of Kollwitz's grief and describes the creative process as a means through which she soothed herself. Creating art enabled her to work toward a world that does not desecrate interconnectivity, imagination, and childhood, a world worthy of her deceased son and of her own mothering. Ultimately, this dissertation illustrates that Woolf and Kollwitz extend mothering to incorporate all acts undertaken in love for the world and the natals who inhabit it.