The Qualities Of Feminist Comedy In Virginia Woolf's Novels

Comedy is said to mock some norms and to some extent, affirm others. This is also true to feminist comedy. But Virginia Woolf believes that there exists a prominent difference between feminist comedy and the comedy written by male writers in that what feminist writers violate or oppose to are rightly the norms and institutions male writers affirm and support. Based on this idea of Virginia Woolf's and borrowing the anthropological term liminality, this paper is to analyse the qualities of Woolf's feminist comedy: the comedy of mythic archetype in her early comic novels and the festive comedy in her later comic novels. Liminality refers to a phase that the identity of holiday participants always stays in a blurred state and inversions are not turned upright. Yet in this phase, human society will be revolutionarily pushed for great development if individuals can commune with new social norms and values instead of the traditional ones. With the practice of liminality, Woolf mocks the male archetypal mythic imagery and affirms a new female one in her early comic novels. She even mocks the archetypal mono-mythic structure in her novel Jacob's Room. In her later comic novels, Woolf mainly manifests the comic nature in two aspects: politics of holiday and festive androgyny. Especially in her novel Orlando the extravagant ecstasy of holiday prevails. These above-mentioned qualities of Woolf's feminist comedy evoke great revolutionary power and creativeness, for when Woolf uses liminal imagery to mock the long-standing social and psychological institutions, she has violated the tradition of the round-off comic novels. And the lack of the resolved ending that "everyone is happy"has transformed holiday into politics for reconstructing a new society in which men and women live in a harmoniously equal state.