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Woolf’s Contradictory Thinking
Abstract
This chapter examines Virginia Woolf's “contradictory thinking” and argues that her thought is resolutely “dialectical.” It begins by discussing some of the modalities of the presence of contradiction in Woolf's thinking about being, history, art and even thinking itself in their various inter-articulations and ethico-political implications. It then cites a number of Woolf's essays including “How it Strikes a Contemporary” (1923) and “On Not Knowing Greek” (1925) to demonstrate how Woolf works through oppositions between the classics and the moderns, the present and the past, continuity and change. It suggests that even though Woolf politically contests historical contradictions which point to and sustain various forms of oppression, she equally employs contradiction as a means of thinking about a subject, especially in her essays. It also considers how Woolf seems to line up with the Marxian tradition of dialectical materialism which recognizes in identifying contradictions a political task, a revolutionary chance against a history of oppression.
... As a method, reparative psychoanalytic criticism draws from Woolf 's attunement to readerly investments and from her skepticism toward all-encompassing forms of theorization. 21 First, it reviews and analyzes previous psychoanalytic engagements with a given text, striving to uncover and historicize the implicit psychosexual narratives that underpin them. In the case of Woolf 's psychoanalytic receptions, what emerges is a combination of theoretical and psychobiographical narratives that preexist the critical encounter with her texts and reinforce one another: the highly gendered and phallocentric matrix of Oedipal psychoanalysis (which is not remedied by reading Oedipus and consorts as metaphors), and the enduring (albeit covert) tendency to retrospectively interpret Woolf 's works in light of her death by suicide. ...
From the complexification of relations between fact and fiction, through Orlando’s queered androgyny, to her staging of ambivalence and her stylistic uses of tensions, Woolf’s craftswomanship bears witness to what we can call the ‘irreducible heterogeneity’ of lived experience and embodiment. Her accommodation of manifoldness and contradiction materialises a resistance to elucidation that is as much ethically as it is aesthetically provoking.
Psychoanalysis has been interested in Woolf’s treatment of ‘that queer conglomeration of incongruous things – the modern mind’ from the 1930s. From the 1970s onwards, feminist critics of Woolf reinvested various psychoanalytic frameworks such as Freud’s, object-relation theory and, from the 1980s, Lacanian, and post-Lacanian interpretation. It is the latter set of intersections that my thesis investigates. To what extent have Woolf’s 1980s-2010s psychoanalytic receptions been hospitable to her propositions?
Referring to emblematic examples of Woolf’s Anglophone and Francophone psychoanalytic receptions, this paper argues that, more often than not, her feminist and non-binary ethics have either been obscured, othered, or commodified, by oedipal perspectives. In turn, what does an ethical conversation between Woolf’s work and psychoanalysis look like? Drawing on metacritical approaches, I make the case for a reading method that starts from, addresses, and incorporates, what oedipal theory has participated in othering. Expanding on Woolf’s dream of a ‘fluid’ criticism, André Green’s call for a ‘subjective epistemology’, and on recent investigations of ‘reparative’ reading in queer practices, I explore the possibility of a reparative psychoanalytic criticism.
In the worlds of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, both protagonists are defying, exploring or subverting traditional gender roles much to the worrying eyes of society within their individual eras. Through a postmodern lens, these individuals come to light as fluidic and plural selves generation by stripping in addition of the core concept of self-built onto them creates resistance against conformity and ossified identities. Orlando biographically travels from male to female, over a number of centuries in the book Orlando: A Biography and messing with each morningside gender roles. The transformation raised questions of stable and fixed identity; fluidity and performativity in gender thus reflect postmodern notions of fragmented identity and rejection of grand narratives. Characters in The Hours also reject conventional gender roles. Virginia Woolf, the protagonist of the novel, places importance on her writing career above all other things and explicitly discusses how she resists domestic and social expectations of women in her day. It depicts Laura Brown, a typical 1950s housewife, who is frustrated with her domesticated role in the home and deeply attracted to another woman named Kitty. Living in the 1990s, Clarissa Vaughan also keeps a non-heteronormative relationship with her partner Sally, thereby disobeying conventional gender expectations and postmodern critiques of fixed identities and societal norms. Therefore, the characters in Orlando and The Hours resist social norms of their times with their acts and identities with their own way and give a rich exploration of identity, authenticity and resistance through a postmodern lens. Their stories problematize the individual identity and constructed nature of societal norms, hence making these works very significant in the study of gender and and identity in literature. Gender is explained as those roles, behaviors, activities, expectations and attributes that a given society deems appropriate for men, women and people of other gender identities. “The fact of living in the world shared by two sexes may be interpreted in an infinite variety of ways; these interpretations and the patterns they create operate at both the social and individual levels. The production of culturally appropriate forms of male and female behavior is a central function of social authority and is mediated by the complex interactions of a wide range of economic, social, political and religious institutions” (Conway, Bourque, Scott, 1987, p.22). It means both social and cultural aspects of being male, female or non-binary, and the personal sense of one’s own gender identity. This article will argue that the characters in the novels Orlando and The Hours challenge the social norms of the time through their gender roles. Gender is created to a big extent by society; thus, all the roles and expectations of males and females are culturally and historically ignited. Do the characters in the novels Orlando and The Hours, go against the social norms of the time with their gender roles?
When it comes to the ambivalence of Woolf’s androgyny—is it or is not a ‘feminist’ vision?—the crux of the problem generally lies in definitional problems. What discourse does it hold with respects to the relation between what is called ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’? While some critics have argued that Woolfian androgyny engulfs the woman’s perspective within a pretence of universality/ neutrality/ objectivity which only hardly hides a hegemonic masculine vision, others side for a productive undecidability which acknowledges the generative aspect of Woolf’s oxymoronic writing. Psychoanalytic critics tend to view Woolf’s androgyny not as a simultaneous combination of the ‘feminine’ and the ‘masculine’, but as a dialectic, a constant play between roles that are themselves highly contextual and never immanent. The irreducibility of Woolf’s writing reads as protective against master discourses. Woolf’s writing displays a form of Lacanianism avant la lettre, her practise of the not-all disrupting all systematic frameworks.
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