A Study Of The National Narrative In Virginia Woolf’s Fiction

The present dissertation argues that, due to the combining effects of social milieu, gender and race, Virginia Woolf s body of work exhibits a national identity complex and confusion similar to that of the postcolonial writers, immigrant writers and diaspora writers living in an increasingly globalized world.The decline of the British Empire galvanizes Woolf’s psychological mechanism of self-defense, driving her to operate a textual construction of Englishness similar to that of other metropolitan modernists like Forster and Lawrence. Woolf s construction of Englishness is embodied in Englishmen’s expression of cultural superiority and longing for homeland in an exotic environment on the one hand (as in The Voyage Out and Orlando), and the highlighting of an expanding and centripetal imperial space centered around a metropolitan environment on the other (as in Mrs Dalloway and The Years). These two models incorporate the identity logic that foregrounds the Self in opposition to the Other, reflecting the colonialist connotations of Englishness.But, as a female writer, Woolf is instinctively resistant to the imperial national narrative, and therefore seeks to deconstruct Englishness while constructing it. Woolf deconstructs Englishness by dismantling the colonial vision of the travel and adventure literature, carving out a pastoral space in metropolis characteristic of an authentic and original England, and rewriting the official history of England, giving voice to the obscured and the marginal (as in Orlando, The Years and Between the Acts).However, a further contextualization of Woolf s work discloses that Woolf s relationship with Englishness goes beyond the clear-cut opposition between construction and destruction, featuring a more innate and delicate resistance to and compromise with England’s imperial identity. England’s imperial history from the mid Victorian age to the Second World War suggests that women and the British Empire are in most cases cooperative, rather than confrontational. On the one hand, the evolutionary and eugenic discourses in the context of imperial contraction empowered the females to be the spiritual and biological guardians of the race and the nation. On the other, the imperial administrators took advantage of women’s privileges, creating "Mother-Country" to ensure the Empire’s authority and domination. Mrs Dalloway in Mrs Dalloway and Mrs Ramsay in To the Lighthouse, depicted as eugenic mothers, are responses to these privileges; while offering insights into Woolf s feminist stance, they suggest also Woolf’s racial and national superiority as a white metropolitan female writer. Yet, the association with Empire didn’t uproot the patriarchal social system that maltreated women, denying them full citizenship. This inadequacy compels Woolf to create masculinized female characters and female imperialists in her works, taking advantage of the colonial rhetoric to make literary compensations for the political power women lack in reality. The eugenic discourse and "Mother-Country" image in Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, and the masculinized female characters and female imperialists, demonstrate once again Woolf s resistance to and compromise with Englishness.On the whole, Woolf’s writing of the English national identity is expressed as the imagination of a female community, which conditionally appropriates the imperial identity of England, the purpose of which is to ensure women’s full citizenship, to provide them with platform and capital for survival, and finally, to establish women’s cultural and political authority. Woolf s writing of English national identity bespeaks her works’ high social relevance, and her democratic notion of the "nation", which favors neither nationalism nor cosmopolitanism, is undoubtedly revealing for us to get a clearer view of the geopolitical issues in today’s world.