| This dissertation examines the political significance of literary discourse about space. Drawing on recent interdisciplinary discussions of social space, modernism, and utopia, my study argues how the works of Lawrence and Woolf simultaneously reflect, reverse, and disrupt dominant spatial discourses and practices. Despite their numerous differences in temperament, background, and relationship with modernist experimentalism, Lawrence and Woolf shared a keen sense of the constructedness and changeability of self, space, and social relations. Their works reflected their experience of an era that saw epistemological, psychical, and psychological changes in spatio-temporal perspectives and experiences. More importantly, their marginality by class or gender often provoked them to challenge the ideological implications of the contemporary symbolic, physical, and discursive spatial topoi associated with the social system, and to search for a more inclusive and liberating human geography.; Reading both well-known novels and less-noted stories and essays, this study explores three aspects of social space: private and public spaces; home and nation; and utopian spaces. Examining Lawrence's Sons and Lovers and The Rainbow, and Woolf's A Sketch of the Past, and The London Scene, Part I demonstrates that these works render domestic and public spaces as heterogeneous, constructed, contested, and hence alterable, in a way that dismantles various "place myths" that functioned to maintain gender and class hegemonies. Part II contends that the works of these writers demolish and deconstruct the imperial home/nation by exposing the history of domination and exclusion that was tied up with the formation of the Victorian rhetoric of home and nation as the epitome of safety and enclosure; here I focus on Lawrence's "England, My England," The Virgin and the Gipsy, and Kangaroo, and Woolf's "The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn," The Waves, and The Years. Drawing on recent theories of utopia, Part III discusses Lawrence's letters, essays, "A Dream of Life," and Women in Love, with Woolf's "The Moment: Summer's Night," Mrs. Dalloway, and Between the Acts. It argues that utopian spaces in these writings emerge through the eruptions of the here and now that shatter the illusory stability of self, time, and the social order. |
