Space And Women’s Quest For Selfhood In Virginia Woolf’s Fiction

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) is well-known for her modern avant-garde writing and stream-of-consciousness technique. Throughout her life, she experienced substantial changes in relation to time and space brought about by urbanization, industrialization and the First World War in 20th century England.Upon examining her life and literary works, the paper maintains that Woolf is deeply concerned with matters of space, which distinguish her from many of her contemporaries. In this regard, this paper aims to explore the space represented in Virginia Woolf s fiction in light of Henri Lefebvre’s theory. By tackling with the distinction between public space and private space, the paper investigates women’s persistent quest for selfhood in Woolf’s novels. Women who lived in the late Victorian and Edwardian eras were largely trapped in the private spaces. Woolf indicates that women were repressed by the binary opposition between public and private sphere and thus were unable to fulfill their self-construction. However, Woolf does not simply provide entering the public sphere as a solution to women’s problem; instead, she discusses extensively about women’s education and work in her writings.By locating Woolf in the social and cultural context of her time, this study provides a new perspective on Woolf’s exploration of women’s construction of selfhood in the early decades of twentieth century. It will also shed some light on the interaction between space and modern life at the turn of the century.