Feminism and the Quest for Selfhood in Virginia Woolf’s Fiction and Nonfiction: A Case Study of Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927) and A Room of One’s Own (1929)
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Date
2014
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university Mouloud Mammeri of Tizi-Ouzou
Abstract
The following dissertation studies feminism and the quest for selfhood in Virginia Woolf’s
fiction and nonfiction: Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927) and A Room of One’s
Own (1929). It demonstrates how resistance to tyranny in a male-dominated society can lead
Woolf’s female characters to the quest for affirming their identity through their disruption of
the patriarchal traditional discourse. This research relies on Josephine Donavan’s Feminist
Theory: The Intellectual Traditions of American Feminism (1992) in which she studies the
concept of class-consciousness that raises against the ideology of the ruling class. In other
words, it is through Woolf’s female character’ confessions that we understand Marx’s
concepts of “governing ideology” in The German Ideology. The outline of this study
comprises a discussion of four important sections that include: Woolf’s cultural context and
origins, patriarchy and the quest for the self in Mrs. Dalloway (1925), otherness and cultural
marginality in To the Lighthouse (1927), and feminism and selfhood in A Room of One’s Own
(1929). The final conclusion that can be drawn from this study shows Woolf’s feminist
commitment in both fiction and nonfiction. Her aim is the construction of the feminine
identity through a self-destruction of the masculine dominion and patriarchy and the
rehumanization of the British woman. This assumption has been demonstrated and
consolidated in the thematic analysis of Woolf’s sociological essay A Room of One’s Own
which demonstrates her feminist stance. I close my dissertation with a suggestion that both
Woolf’s fiction and nonfiction can be read as a feminist approach to women liberation.
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65p.;30cm.(+cd)
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Cultural and Media Studies