Transcending Otherness: Construction Of Females' Self-Identity In Woolf's Three Stream-of-Consciousness Novels

As a British female modernist writer,Virginia Woolf(1882-1941)makes unremitting efforts in her presentation of females' exploration of status and construction of self-identity with her feminist feelings in her representative works.This thesis takes her three stream-of-consciousness novels,Mrs.Dalloway,To the Lighthouse and Orlando,as the objects of study,trying to make a comparative study of the three female protagonists' spiritual worlds,their dilemmas as well as the similarities and differences in their self-construction,so as to bring to light females' marginalization or status as the Other under the patriarchy and Woolf's unique feminist thoughts.For many years,critics have been studying the three novels from different perspectives.In addition to the studies of modernist techniques and relevant themes in them,analysis of females' identity from the feminist perspective is also made with increasing attention.However,the relation between self-construction and Otherness still remains untouched upon.According to the theories of the Other,the Self is inseparable from the Other whose functions prove the existence of the Subject,namely,the Self.And the exclusion of Otherness is the foundation of the construction of self-identity.So,it is significant to study the construction of females' self-identity from the perspective of the Other.This thesis combines the theories of the Other and Woolf's feminist thoughts to make a comparative analysis of the processes and results of the three females' exploration of self-construction,revealing the three females' different attitudes in facing Otherness and different efforts in getting rid of it.As a forerunner of feminist literature,Woolf takes her unique perspective to focus on characterizing female protagonists who make efforts to transcend Otherness and make self-construction.In Mrs.Dalloway,Clarissa Dalloway relies on her husband both physically and spiritually.She travels between the center and the margin and gets converted as the Other.So,she fails to get out of Otherness,thus becoming a soulless person.Mrs.Ramsay in To the Lighthouse is in the same dilemma of Otherness as Clarissa.Yet she is different from Clarissa on that she is attached to her husband only physically.Her spiritual independence makes her negotiate with patriarchy willingly,but she is still confined to her family of a private realm.Fortunately,her spirit successfully transcends the death of her body,making herself a lighthouse to enlighten her family and her friends in their memories and getting for herself out of the status and attaining to subjectivity in spirit.Orlando in Orlando views gender differences with an active attitude.She breaks through the bondage of gender orientation of the patriarchal society through blending the two genders,transcending the limits of the single-gender perspective and becoming successful in transcending Otherness on the basis of sufficient material conditions.She finally finds her true self and realizes the construction of self-identity.Through a comparative analysis of the three novels,this thesis finds that,though the three protagonists seem unrelated with each other in their self-construction,they actually represent the three stages in the historical development of females' self-construction,namely,from passive reliance to willing compromise,and then to active exploration and implementation.This process also represents the development of Woolf's feminist thoughts,which is embodied altogether in her A Room of One's Own.It can be said that Mrs.Dalloway and To the Lighthouse are the novels in which Woolf is making explorations of her feminist ideas,and Orlando is an example of Woolf's theory of androgyny.And A Room of One's Own is a summary of the female experiences of the three protagonists as well as the integration of Woolf's feminist thoughts.With a comparative study of the three female protagonists in Woolf's representative stream-of-consciousness novels,this thesis draws the following conclusion: the patriarchy is the root of females' status as the Other,and the process of females' self-construction can never be accomplished in one stroke.With Orlando's life experiences in almost 400 years,Woolf tries to imply that the exploration of females' self-construction is quite a difficult task,and that it's a long time before women can get out of the control of patriarchy.