Snaith, Anna Lucy; (1996) Virginia Woolf, contingency and the concepts of 'public' and 'private'. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

The concepts of 'public' and 'private' recur throughout Virginia Woolf's life, work and feminism and the division itself was one to which she often referred and which she continually reworked on its many levels. To date, the division of 'public' and 'private' in Woolf's work has only been considered at any length in terms of the influence of politics on her work. Using as a model Richard Rorty's work on 'public' and 'private' vocabularies, primarily for the idea of the incommensurability of 'public' and 'private', I explore the division as it appears in several aspects of Woolf's work. In addition, I use Rorty's notion of contingency as a way of approaching Woolf's own resistance to finality, as well as allowing for the flux and changing contexts of her negotiations between the 'public' and the 'private'. Chapter One introduces the importance of a 'public'/'private' division for Woolf, explores its simplification in the hands of past critics, outlines Rorty's ideas on contingency and the 'public' and the 'private' and shows how they relate to Woolf. Chapter Two offers a historical account of the changes as women entered the 'public' sphere in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and places Woolf's own experience within such an account. In Chapter Three I discuss Woolf's extensive use of indirect interior monologue as a negotiation between 'public' and 'private' voices. Chapter Four looks at various generic divisions in terms of the 'public' and the 'private', focusing on the evolution of The Years from an essay-novel to a novel. In Chapter Five I continue the exploration of The Years, focusing on the interplay of 'public' and 'private' in the content of the novel, and the final chapter examines the increasing tension between 'public' and 'private' in the last three years of Woolf's life, caused by the onset of WWII. I argue that a 'public'/'private' dichotomy was a central one for Woolf, a distinction which she consistently maintained, but that it manifested itself on many levels therefore an approach is needed which allows for those changing meanings.

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