Virginia Woolf’s Female Identity Construction In The Years

Virginia Woolf (1882—1941) is generally renowned for her remarkable writing, whichhas established her status among the foremost novelists and critics of the twentieth century.Practically, Woolf has shown constant concerns over the human values in modern society, theexperience and consciousness of modern people in particular, of which the accounts areusually interwoven with her fluid, buoyant and elegant writing style. The Years is a fiction ofthe Pargiter family about their affections, tensions, estrangements and fulfillments, which isportrayed against the hustle and bustle of modern London life over some fifty years. WithWoolf’s successful employment of distinctive narration devices, the psyche and mindmovements of the characters are revealed; and the relationships between modern people infamily and even in the whole modern society are demonstrated in the fiction. Therefore, theproblems with regard to age and youth, change and fixedness, fact and fiction reflected on thebroad canvas of time and generation painted by Woolf are fairly thought-provoking to thereader.This thesis attempts to unmask the presence of a strong sense of multi-stranded identityon the part of Woolf in this fiction. At the outset, Woolf has carried out feminine writing byspeaking the speakable through her narrative schemes. In order to avoid illustrating herovertly polemical points and refuse preaching didacticism and dogma, Woolf has struggled tofree herself from the polemical impulse and dropped the overt arguments, yet she hasinterwoven her ideas into the fiction, which results in the narrative seeming not so polemicaland blunt; and the traces of didacticism vanished. Nonetheless, there is a shadow of “she”which run through the pages of this novel. The Years also profoundly engages with history byconstantly calling the meaning of history to individual caught within it into question. Thehuman experience and emotions of the individuals in history have been explored in adistinctly aesthetic way. In addition, the coordination of the lyrical rhythms of natural world with the bustling rhythms of modern London life is subtly examined.What’s more, Woolf’s another strata of being has been probed. Apparently, Woolf hasmade full use of the material history of women in narrating women’s lives in the Pargiterfamily, especially the lives of the daughters. Apart from examining how insidious the socialprescriptions and how strong the conventions that suppress women’s imaginations, Woolf hasshown her deep concerns about the differences concerning education and profession betweenthe two different genders. Hence, Woolf has spoken the unspoken with comparative narrationbetween the sons and the daughters in the Pargiter family. Still the social and economicpositions of women from different ages like Kitty and Peggy are explored as well. It is plainthat The Years has made a criticism on the “imperial patriarchal culture” of themale-dominated public sphere.Finally, a pacifist Woolf of the multi-layered being in The Years is illustrated. AlthoughWoolf has afterwards re-examined her preconceptions about history and politics in thecreation of this novel, she has made use of the material history of war in an indirect andcovert narrative way. As a pacifist of male war world, Woolf speaks the unspeakable withregard to the horrible First World War and plays covertly with authorial forms to refusesimply being an “author-historian”. In The Years Woolf has hardly ever dramatized thenarrative of war in an open way.In spite of the fact that Woolf has employed several intriguing and delicate narrativeschemes in The Years, it is obvious that through the effort of unmasking the presence of herfemale subjectivity, there are various underlying generalizing consciousnesses on the surfaceof the narrative texture. Woolf refuses to turn oblivious to the marginalized fates of womenand makes effort to rescue those ordinary women by her writing. Moreover, Woolf is muchmore concerned about the fate of human beings as a whole which is in accordance with heraesthetic appeals, artistic aims and literary ideology in general.