On De-gendering Writing In Virginia Woolf’s Fiction

Virginia Woolf(1882-1941)is a famous modern British novelist and a pioneer of feminist literary criticism.Her works express distinct feminist ideas.Woolf’s fiction has a distinct tendency of feminism.Through deconstructing male chauvinism,she constructs the identification of women’s self-identity,endowing her fiction de-gendering characteristics.There are few researches on the de-gendering of Woolf’s novels and short stories.Therefore,there is still much room for interpretation in this thesis.Based on feminist narratology,this thesis explores the de-gendering writing in Woolf’s fiction from the perspectives of narrative discourse,narrative voice and narrative focalization,that is,how the writer reveals the de-gendering theme through the various narrative forms.First,in her fiction,Woolf uses free indirect discourse and free direct discourse to highlight the authority of women’s discourse and overturn the gendered cognition in male texts,achieving the de-gendering writing.Second,Woolf adopts the authorial narrative voice and women’s personal narrative voice to explore the construction of female identity and the awakening of female consciousness.It also disintegrates the hegemony of male narrative and dispels the binary opposition between men and women.Finally,Woolf employs nonfocalization to objectively present the true self of female characters,breaking the stereotype of women under male gaze.She also relies on diverse internal focalization to break the single character’s narrative perspective and highlight women’s experience and subjective consciousness,achieving de-gendering writing under narrative focalization.In short,Woolf applies diverse narrative techniques to express the de-gendering writing in her fiction,revealing her feminist thoughts and exquisite narrative art.This thesis will supplement the current study of Woolf’s fiction and feminist narratology.