Virginia Woolf and the nineteenth-century domestic aesthetic: Poetry the wrong side out (Elizabeth Gaskell, Margaret Oliphant)

This dissertation reassesses Virginia Woolf's use of the nineteenth-century cult of domesticity to figure a modernist aesthetic and the proper stuff of fiction, especially “women's fiction,” in the early twentieth century. It argues that the novels of Elizabeth Gaskell and Margaret Oliphant provide Woolf with rich examples of ways to negotiate the feminine in fiction and ways to valorize the unrecorded lives of women through a subversive elevation of the very domestic detail that for Woolf damages the integrity of the lesser nineteenth-century women's novels. The introduction assesses Woolf's role in the production of women's writing as a disciplinary field and identifies inconsistencies in Woolf's selective “thinking back through her mothers,” inconsistencies which underscore the tensions between the public and private spheres, represented in particular for Woolf by the house of fiction and “The Angel in the House.” Chapter One examines how Woolf's modernist projects merge with her feminist projects though her dialogic engagement with nineteenth-century “conventions” in her discursive essays on modern fiction and the woman writer's particular impediments. Chapter Two juxtaposes Woolf's critique of Gaskell's fiction—her apparent inability to create interesting characters and her excessive use of detail—with Gaskell's Wives and Daughters (1865) to argue that the details themselves develop a psychological complexity that prefigures Woolf's own ideals for women's future writing. Chapter Three examines the family and professional connections between Oliphant and Woolf that inform Woolf's anger at Oliphant's intellectual prostitution in Three Guineas. Chapter Four examines Oliphant's Miss Majoribanks (1865–6), a narrative that inverts nineteenth-century conceptions of artistry and high cultural production with conceptions of domesticity and low cultural production. Chapter Five then reads Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927) to demonstrate how Woolf's deployment of the spiritual and material dimensions of nineteenth-century descriptions of femininity contributes to her creation of modern subjectivity, of feminine retreat, and of feminine creativity. The conclusion argues that Woolf's work dialectically inscribes questions about the enduring value of domestic practices even as it reclaims feminine creative power in the domestic sphere for women's use.