The Politics Of Space In The Years

Virginia Woolf, the prestigious modernist writer, has realized that space dynamically embodies social reality instead of being a static and passive milieu. The Years presents the correlations between space and politics, and the power relations within the spatial relations. Research on this novel is rare at home and abroad, and tends to focus on the critical perspectives of form and subject, and feminist ideology. Although several scholars have analyzed some middle-class women’s spatial behavior in this novel, these studies seldom probe into the ethnic space or Woolf’s pursuit of ways out, and meanwhile fail to reveal the specific working mechanism and practice system of multi-dimensional spatial politics in a comprehensive way. Therefore, taking Henry Lefebvre’s "spatial triad" as the theoretic framework, this thesis aims to offer further exploration of the spatial politics in The Years.Based on "spatial triad", this thesis probes into the ways in which the characters disciplined by sexual, class and ethnic "representations of space" undertake "spatial practice" and construct the "spatial representations" to obey or challenge "representations of space", and simultaneously analyzes Woolf’s pursuit of ways out. In this way, this thesis aims to reveal that in The Years Woolf not only clarifies multi-dimensional spatial problems and criticizes sexism, hierarchy and racism, but also examines the challenge to or even subversion of spatial orders as the main way out.