The mirror effect: Virginia Woolf's war writings

Abstract

Born in England in 1882, in the course of her lifetime Virginia Woolf witnessed the end of the Victorian Age and the rise of the Modem Period. She observed firsthand the horrors of World War I and the birth and expansion of Fascism. Her last days were spent in fear of a Nazi invasion of her native England. Woolf experienced the cruelty and inhumanity of war in her personal life, losing friends and family members in service, and devoted much of her work to the examination of the causes and consequences of warring sentiment. This research project approaches the means by which Woolf links the personal and political to suggest that violent and tyrannical attitudes, easily recognizable in the authoritarian states and leaders that dominated the first half of the twentieth century, bear an uncanny resemblance to the patriarchal gendered relations of her own society. Woolf expresses this argument clearly in her revolutionary text Three Guineas. This project locates the foundations of her argument in other prose texts by Woolf: the experimental novels Mrs. Dalioway, To the Lighthouse, and Between the Acts; and the book-length lecture/essay A Room of One's Own.