Virginia Woolf’s Poetics of Revolt

• Main Author: Elsa Högberg
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée 2014-06-01
• Series: Études Britanniques Contemporaines
• Subjects: Virginia Woolf; Kristeva; feminist criticism; poetics; intériority; deconstruction
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/ebc/1170

This article revisits the claim that Virginia Woolf’s critique of inter-war Britain as a patriarchal, militaristic and patriotic society is conveyed through her critique of the masculine subject. Woolf saw subjective autonomy as the origin of nationalist aggression, and like Julia Kristeva, she imagines a textual politics which unsettles the autonomous self and nation. In a reading of Mrs Dalloway and The Waves, this article proposes that Woolf’s critical poetics enacts an aesthetic practice of revolt in Kristeva’s sense: the “reuniting with affect” attained through poetic writing. Her aesthetic practice raises a question: what forms of revolt can be considered productive if confrontational and angry writing ends up duplicating the aggressive discourses of the inter-war years? Woolf’s sensual, metaphoric writing counters the assertive masculinity of patriotism and fascism by affirming interiority, and forces us to revise our expectations around the aesthetic expression of dissensus and political commitment.