The artist as outsider: Loss and creativity in the novels of Virginia Woolf and Toni Morrison

In this dissertation, I compare how Virginia Woolf and Toni Morrison create narrative structures that problematize the very existence of the female artist. While Woolf and Morrison are working within vastly different cultural contexts, the themes of female sexual initiation, female bonding, and personal memory and history are linked to their construction of artist figures. I examine the dialogic nature of their aesthetic in order to show how they are both critiquing and pioneering language in order to express female subjectivity. At the same time, the dissertation compares the contrasting circumstances of black and white female artists in these novels. These themes are rigorously investigated in The Voyage Out, The Bluest Eye, Mrs. Dalloway, Sula, To the Lighthouse, and Beloved.