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Gender and the City: Virginia Woolf’s London Between Promise of Freedom and Structural Confinement

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Exploring the Spatiality of the City across Cultural Texts

Part of the book series: Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies ((GSLS))

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Abstract

If the spatial organization of narrative fiction is a model of its semantics, then Virginia Woolf’s city of London can be read as a model of her notions of gender relations. The city promises freedom for women, which they cannot find in the traditional family home, a space in which femininity is first and foremost constructed. At the same time, urban life poses a threat to individual identity, a concern Woolf shares with her fellow modernists. In order to explore this ambiguity, this paper examines the metaphorical structure of the city and the movement of characters through this space. It focusses on Woolf’s work around the time of the final success of the suffrage movement in England, when this ambiguity was perhaps felt most sharply.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Jurij Lotman, The Structure of the Artistic Text, trans. Gail Lenhoff and Ronald Vroon (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1977), 217.

  2. 2.

    Lotman, Structure, 229–230.

  3. 3.

    Rachel Bowlby, Virginia Woolf. Feminist Destinations (Oxford and New York, NY: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 20f.

  4. 4.

    Wendy Gan, Women, Privacy and Modernity in Early Twentieth-Century British Writing (Basingstoke and New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 4.

  5. 5.

    Dorothy Brewster, Virginia Woolf’s London (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1960), 55, 67.

  6. 6.

    Bowlby, Virginia Woolf, 86.

  7. 7.

    Brewster, Virginia Woolf’s London, 39.

  8. 8.

    Virginia Woolf, Night and Day (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 46.

  9. 9.

    Woolf, Night and Day, 76.

  10. 10.

    Woolf, Night and Day, 4.

  11. 11.

    Brewster, Virginia Woolf’s London, 34.

  12. 12.

    Woolf, Night and Day, 46.

  13. 13.

    Susan Merrill Squier, “Tradition and Revision: The Classic City Novel and Virginia Woolf’s Night and Day,” in Women Writers and the City. Essays in Feminist Literary Criticism, ed. Susan Merrill Squier (Knoxville, TN: The University of Tennessee Press 1984), 114–133 (125).

  14. 14.

    Brewster, Virginia Woolf’s London, 35.

  15. 15.

    Woolf, Night and Day, 76.

  16. 16.

    Brewster, Virginia Woolf’s London, 28.

  17. 17.

    Brewster, Virginia Woolf’s London, 36.

  18. 18.

    Woolf, Night and Day, 93.

  19. 19.

    Woolf, Night and Day, 93f.

  20. 20.

    Brewster, Virginia Woolf’s London, 32.

  21. 21.

    Woolf, Night and Day, 329f.

  22. 22.

    Woolf, Night and Day, 178f.

  23. 23.

    Woolf, Night and Day, 9ff.

  24. 24.

    Woolf, Night and Day, 77.

  25. 25.

    Brewster, Virginia Woolf’s London, 40.

  26. 26.

    Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room (London: Penguin Classics, 1992), 34.

  27. 27.

    Woolf, Jacob’s Room, 55f.

  28. 28.

    Woolf, Night and Day, 415f.

  29. 29.

    Woolf, Jacob’s Room, 36.

  30. 30.

    Woolf, Jacob’s Room, 22.

  31. 31.

    Woolf, Jacob’s Room, 52.

  32. 32.

    Woolf, Jacob’s Room, 34.

  33. 33.

    Brewster, Virginia Woolf’s London, 47, who, however, only states the fact without interpreting it.

  34. 34.

    Woolf, Jacob’s Room 53.

  35. 35.

    Bowlby, Virginia Woolf, 100.

  36. 36.

    Bowlby, Virginia Woolf, 107.

  37. 37.

    Woolf, Jacob’s Room, 82.

  38. 38.

    Woolf, Jacob’s Room, 82.

  39. 39.

    Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (London: Penguin, 1992), 167.

  40. 40.

    Jeremy Tambling, “Repression in Mrs Dalloway’s London,” Essays in Criticism 39, no. 2 (1989): 137–155 (138).

  41. 41.

    Woolf, Jacob’s Room, 151.

  42. 42.

    Kristina Groover, “Taking the Doors off the Hinges: Liminal Space in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway,” Literary London: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Representation of London 6, no. 1 (2008) http://www.literarylondon.org/london-journal/march2008/index.html (accessed May 28, 2012): n.p.

  43. 43.

    Brewster, Virginia Woolf’s London, 48f.

  44. 44.

    Woolf, Jacob’s Room, 135.

  45. 45.

    Woolf, Jacob’s Room, 24.

  46. 46.

    Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (London: Penguin Classics, 2000), 83f.

  47. 47.

    Brewster, Virginia Woolf’s London, 48.

  48. 48.

    Groover, “Liminal Space.”

  49. 49.

    Groover, “Liminal Space.”

  50. 50.

    Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, 7.

  51. 51.

    Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, 167.

  52. 52.

    Anne Collett, “Sex and the City: Eliot and Woolf’s Vision of Post-WWI London,” Virginia Woolf Miscellany 75 (2009): 10–13 (12).

  53. 53.

    Bowlby, Virginia Woolf, 83.

  54. 54.

    Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, 148ff.

  55. 55.

    Bowlby, Virginia Woolf, 98.

  56. 56.

    Bowlby, Virginia Woolf, 87.

  57. 57.

    Bowlby, Virginia Woolf, 97.

  58. 58.

    Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, 151.

  59. 59.

    Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, 167.

  60. 60.

    Christine W. Sizemore, “The ‘Outsider-Within’: Virginia Woolf and Doris Lessing as Urban Novelists in Mrs Dalloway and The Four-Gated City,” in Woolf and Lessing. Breaking the Mold, ed. Ruth Saxton and Jean Tobin (New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), 59–72 passim.

  61. 61.

    Brewster, Virginia Woolf’s London, 53.

  62. 62.

    Woolf, Room of One’s Own, 64.

  63. 63.

    Bowlby, Virginia Woolf, 35.

  64. 64.

    Woolf, A Room of One’s Own 41.

  65. 65.

    Woolf, Room of One’s Own 28.

  66. 66.

    Woolf, A Room of One’s Own 41.

  67. 67.

    Woolf, Jacob’s Room, 98.

  68. 68.

    Brewster, Virginia Woolf’s London, 43.

  69. 69.

    Brewster expresses a similar sentiment when she writes that Orlando “is both himself and the long tradition he inherits” 56.

  70. 70.

    Virginia Woolf, Orlando. A Biography (London: Penguin Red Classics, 2006), 192f.

  71. 71.

    Woolf, Orlando, 194f.

  72. 72.

    Woolf, Orlando, 199.

  73. 73.

    Woolf, Orlando, 272.

  74. 74.

    Woolf, Orlando, 273.

  75. 75.

    Bowlby, Virginia Woolf, 142f.

  76. 76.

    Woolf Orlando, 160f.

  77. 77.

    Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 50.

  78. 78.

    Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 95.

  79. 79.

    Bowlby, Virginia Woolf, 41f; Brewster, Virginia Woolf’s London, 70.

  80. 80.

    Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 112.

  81. 81.

    Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 68f.

  82. 82.

    Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 309ff.

Works Cited

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    Google Scholar 

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    Google Scholar 

  • Gan, Wendy. Women, Privacy and Modernity in Early Twentieth-Century British Writing. Basingstoke and New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

    Google Scholar 

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Independent Researcher, Hamburg, Germany

    Claudia Heuer

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  1. Joseph Carlebach School Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany

    Martin Kindermann

  2. University of Flensburg (EUF), Flensburg, Germany

    Rebekka Rohleder

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Heuer, C. (2020). Gender and the City: Virginia Woolf’s London Between Promise of Freedom and Structural Confinement. In: Kindermann, M., Rohleder, R. (eds) Exploring the Spatiality of the City across Cultural Texts. Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55269-5_12

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