| Virginia Woolf’s aesthetics of the body originated from her critical thinking about the confinement of modern British people’s bodies under the influence of Cartesian dualism,which is mainly reflected in her treatment of gender,illness,the senses,and nature.Woolf’s aesthetics of the body emphasise the body’s role in cognition.For Woolf,the body is constitutive of the self,identity,and subjectivity.This dissertation is an attempt to conduct an analysis of Woolf’s aesthetics of the body by studying her representation of the body in her novels published between 1925 and 1941.It seeks to examine Woolf’s aesthetics of the body in her novels and to examine how the representation of the body determines her experiments in both language and form.Many critics have keenly observed that Woolf’s preoccupation with the body is consistent throughout her writings.The earliest studies on Woolf and the body were carried out in the light of feminism.However,the feminist analysis of the body is inadequate in relation to Woolf’s aesthetics of the body,as Woolf not only pays attention to the constrained female body,but also concerns herself with the constrained male body.In addition,treating the body in Woolf’s novels as a separate entity would lead to an impasse in any analysis that seeks to examine the liberation of the body.Some critics point out that paying attention to the openness of the body in Woolf’s novels helps us to understand the interaction between the subject and people/things in daily life.From this perspective,some research has concluded that the body in Woolf’s writing is intrinsic to the self,identity,and subjectivity,and is closely related to nature.However,little attention has been paid to Woolf s aesthetics of the body of becoming in the context of time and space.Indeed,for Woolf,the body is not only defined by gender;it is also defined by illness.Much attention has been paid to Woolf’s essay On Being Ill(1926)when analysing the body and illness in Woolf’s writings.Since the early twenty-first century,a few critics have noticed the indispensable role that the ill body plays in Woolf’s aesthetics of the body.Some of the latest research also reveals that the illness narrative is made use of by Woolf in some of her novels.In On Being Ill,Woolf also proposes that experiments in novels’ plots and language need to be carried out to represent the body.Some research has been carried out from the stylistic perspective to examine the body’s relationship with Woolf’s writing.This dissertation concludes,after reviewing this scholarship,that only the analyses based on the mind-body unity can achieve a reasonable assessment of the style of Woolf’s writing.This dissertation holds that Woolf’s aesthetics of the body have been formed by the time she finished her essay On Being Ill in 1926.Woolf’s novels from around the year 1926(including 1925),when she published her essay On Being Ill,to the end of her writing career are all composed in line with her aesthetics of the body,which she puts forward in the essay.No research has yet been conducted to analyse Woolf’s novels in tandem with her aesthetics of the body from the combined perspectives of gender,illness,senses,and nature.Based on former studies,this dissertation aims to extend the time range of the illness narrative from the late 1920s to early 1930s to 1925 to 1941,as well as to challenge the conclusions reached by some criticsThis dissertation examines Woolf’s aesthetics of the body in three aspects:the liberation of the body from the constraints of gender,the reconstruction of an embodied epistemology with a sensory subject,and the concept of the body of becoming in the flux of time and space.Drawing on the above-stated lack of existing research on Woolf and the body,this dissertation attempts to undertake a fuller study of Woolf’s aesthetics of the body by probing into her novels Mrs Dalloway(1925),Orlando(1928),Flush(1933),and Between the Acts(1941),as these are works that help to conceptualise Woolf’s aesthetics of the body.This dissertation applies close reading and archival research to the four texts in the context of gender studies,animal studies,and ecocriticism,while also referring to the theories of Sigmund Freud,Martin Heidegger,and Michel Foucault,with the aim of making this dissertation’s analysis more convincing,as well as to highlight the depth of Woolf’s th oughts in her novels.Chapter One of this dissertation probes into Woolf’s representation of the constraint and resistance of the gender-confined body,and her deployment of stream of consciousness and appropriation of poetic lines in Mrs Dallo way,in the light of gender studies by drawing on close reading and archival research.In Mrs Dalloway,Woolf reveals that gender,redefined by the combined forces of imperialism,patriarchy,commercialism,and modern medical science in early twentieth-century Britain,constrains modern British people’s bodies and causes splits between their bodies and their sense of self.Woolf reveals,through the androgynous Orlando,that gender identity is socioculturally constructed and is consolidated through repetitive performance in a patriarchal society.Woolf also indicates through Orlando that identity is closely related to the body and is fluid with a core of an unyielding true self.Thus,Orlando is analysed as a supplementary text to Mrs Dalloway in order to examine Woolf’s concept of gender performance,which serves to explain her deconstruction of gender norms in Mrs Dalloway.In Mrs Dalloway,Woolf for the first time draws on the ill body as the disruptive and creative power through which to subvert gender norms Septimus and Clarissa are strongly driven by their bodily senses in illness,and this enables them to realise the restrictions and confinements placed on their bodies by their society.Septimus escapes social constraints by committing suicide,while Clarissa gains her revelation of being-towards-death through the empathy she feels in response to Septimus’s death.Clarissa releases her passions and regains her sense of true self by rebuilding the intersubjectivity between herself and the people she has known since her adolescence at Bourton(Peter,Sally,and Sylvia).Woolf describes a body that registers life and death,the past and the present.For Woolf,passions are essential in establishing intersubjectivity between people and other people,and people and things.The analysis conducted in Chapter One of this dissertation helps to reveal an experiencing body,or a sensory subject more specifically.Chapter Two of this dissertation examines the sensory body’s role in perceiving the world through a close reading of Flush in the light of animal studies,viewing Flush the dog as the tamed body of the human being and the metaphorical projection of the human being’s ideology.Woolf attaches great importance to the bodily senses’ role in perceiving the world,as they are vital if one is to gain true kno wledge of reality.In the novel,Woolf reveals-through the constrained and liberated sensory bodies of Barrett Browning,Flush,and Wilson the maid-how the sensory body is prevented from perceiving the world and under what circumstances it can function well in relation to perception.Woolf reveals that the sensory body’s perceptions in the world will be determined by certain factors,especially the subject’s ideology,emotions,the body’s physical condition,and the sociocultural environment.By treating Flush as a projection of human being’s internalised ideologies,this dissertation also uncovers the mechanism through which the sensory body is constrained through the analysis of Flush’s internalisation of his bedroom lessons.Woolf reveals that sympathy and fear will lead to the subject’s internalisation of gender norms.What is more,by pairing Barrett Browning and Flush within the framework of mind-body dualism at the metaphorical level,this dissertation discovers that Woolf reveals that the separation of the mind and the body will affect the subject’s grasping of the truth in the process of perceiving reality,and also implies the importance of the unity of the body and the mind in perceiving truth.Through her description of Flush(with his senses)and Barrett Browning(with her rational mind)’s different ways of making judgements about people and things,Woolf conveys that knowledge perceived with a rational mind is less reliable,on occasion,than that perceived with the senses.Woolf emphasises the interaction between the mind and the senses during the process in which the subject perceives the world.In addition,Woolf reveals the poverty of language in describing the physical sensations.Through the description of Flush’s senses of smell and touch,Woolf experiments with a new poetic language,which is more primitive,more sensual,and more obscene.Chapter Three of this dissertation analyses Woolf’s aesthetics of the body of becoming in the flux of time and space from the perspective of ecocriticism.Close reading is applied to Woolf’s last novel Between the Acts.In the novel,the British rural landscape and the pageant,which embody abundant elements of time and space,offer Woolf a means of conveying her concept of the body of becoming.Woolf envisions the body of becoming as encompassing a wide range of interrelationships between men and women,human beings and non-human beings,human society and non-human society,and individual and community that register both time and space,history and reality,and foresee the upcoming future.In Between the Acts,Woolf expands people’s physical movement to the whole landscape of Pointz Hall,which is an act of breaking the boundary between the patriarchal space and the feminine space in the context of ecocriticism.Woolf considers that the landscape is the background for people to live in,which embodies Woolf’s aesthetic revelation experienced on viewing a flower in a flower bed.Woolf believes that the landscape provides energy for the body that enables it to change constantly,just as the earth provides energy for the flower to support it change seasonally.Sensations,which are the cognitive processes of individuals triggered by the influence of external stimuli on the bodily senses,play an essential role in connecting the subject with the landscape and the pageant at the temporal and spatial level.Thus,in Chapter Three,the body is inconspicuous and is mostly represented in the fluid form of sensations.Woolf tries to stimulate dual changes to the characters’bodies at the sensory and spiritual level through the sense of movement and change that the British rural landscape embodies,thereby driving the generation of the concept of the body of becoming.For Woolf,time and space are altered subjectively by sensations,which render the reality that the subject experiences dynamic:the subject registers the past and the present,and is able to foresee the upcoming future.To rehabilitate people’s sensations in Between the Acts,Woolf tries to bring their bodies into movement across the landscape through the pageant in three dimensions;namely,the spatial,temporal,and emotional.In the process of engaging with these three dimensions of movement,Woolf appropriates visual art and sound art by drawing on these art forms’ effect of arousing the body’s senses.The three dimensions of movement evoke the synaesthetic effect of the landscape on the people in the novel;it helps them release their constrained bodies both physically and spiritually.In Between the Acts,Woolf experiments with the novel’s form by drawing on the sub-genre of the theatre-novel to represent her concept of the fluid and interlacing nature of time and space under people’s sensations.Woolf’s deployment of poetic language and imagery to stimulate emotions and sensations culminates in the depiction of Isa and Lucy in Between the Acts.In addition,Woolf challenges the conventional concept of British history and British national identity through the pageant by performing British history with actors revealing genuine emotions in the everyday scenes.The bodily movements in the three dimensions and the immersive pageant situated in the British rural landscape work together to liberate the audience’s bodies from the constraints of their conventional minds by arousing their self-awareness about their subjectivity and identity.Woolf also traces the continuity between human nature and animality from the perspective of history to reveal that human nature is in the process of changing and developing.Woolf’s aesthetics of the body of becoming also brings both individual identity and British national identity into a state of becoming.The analysis in this dissertation draws the conclusion that for Woolf,the body is a site full of conflict:on the one hand,it is the site of suppression;on the other hand,it also registers the dynamic power of disruption and resistance.It is a lived body that is constantly changing while experiencing the world.The body’s openness helps establish intersubjectivity between its subject and other people,and the subject and other things.It registers both life and death,the past and the present,and history and reality,and is constitutive of the self,subjectivity,and identity.The body is constantly changing during its interactions with the external world,which brings the subject’s identity into a state of becoming.Thus,the body in Woolf’s aesthetics is not only about the individual body but also the net of the relationships that the body weaves in the process of living.In her writing,Woolf aims to capture the passions and physical process of sensations to reveal the interrelationships between subjects and objects,and how people’s consciousness revitalises their unconsciousness.Woolf’s experiments in both language and form,specifically,her appropriation of multimediality and her deployment of the poetic imagery in her novels,are all driven by her aesthetics of the body.From the mid-1920s onwards,Woolf constantly seeks out methods from other popular art forms,such as visual art and sound art,through which to achieve similar effects by representing passions and sensations in her writing.This dissertation makes some contributions to Woolf studies.First,it extends the analysis of the gender-constrained body to include both male and female bodies and examines the resistance and liberation of the gender-constrained body by focusing on the ill body;second,it conducts an analysis of Woolf’s aesthetics of the body in her novels from the combined perspectives of gender,illness,senses,and nature;third,it pays attention to Woolf’s aesthetics of the body’s influence on her experiments in both form and language.This dissertation also has practical significance in relation to arousing people’s mindfulness of the body in contemporary society. |
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