Autonomy, self-creation, and the woman artist figure in Woolf, Lessing, and Atwood (Zimbabwe, Margaret Atwood, Virginia Woolf, Doris Lessing)

This thesis traces the self-creation and autonomy of the woman artist figure in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook, and Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye. The first chapter conveys the progression of autonomy and self-creation in Western-European philosophy through contemporary thinkers such as Charles Taylor, Robert Pippin, Alexander Nehamas, and Richard Rorty. This narrative culminates in a rift between public and private, resulting from the push--especially by Nietzsche--toward a radical, unmediated independence. Taylor and Rorty envision different ways to resolve the public/private rift, yet neither philosopher distinguishes how this rift has affected women by enclosing them in the private, barring them from the public, and delimiting their autonomy. The second chapter focusses on each woman artist's resistance to socially scripted roles, accompanied by theories about resistance: Woolf with Rachel Blau DuPlessis on narrative resistance, Lessing with Julia Kristeva on dissidence, and Atwood with Stephen Hawking and Kristeva on space-time. The third chapter contrasts the narratives of chapters 1 and 2 and reveals how the woman artist avoids the problematic public/private rift by incorporating the ethics developed within the private into her art; she balances her creative goals with responsibility to others. Drawing on the work of women moral theorists, this thesis suggests that women's self-creation and autonomy result in an undervalued but nevertheless workable solution to the public/private rift.