“Killing the Angel in the House”: feminism and gender politics in Virginia Woolf

Abstract

The aim of this dissertation is to carry out a feminist approach to the work of Virginia Woolf, exploring the relevance of themes such as gender and feminism in the literary production of this writer. I will focus on the manner in which Woolf conveys her ideas concerning women and literature, and particular attention will be given to those formal and ideological aspects of Woolf’s feminist agenda. In order to serve this purpose, I will depart from a close study of the writer’s work, paying special attention to Woolf’s essayist production, a genre which she conceives (both from a formal and an ideological standpoint) as the expression of personal opinion and subjectivity, thus radically departing from hegemonic views on the essay as scientific prose, as held by most of her male contemporaries, such as TS Elliot or Desmond MacCarthy. Such a deviation from male tradition standards, along with Woolf’s advocation of women’s visibility in the public sphere, may account for the ostracism she experienced in her lifetime, especially after the publication of her seminal essay “A Room of One’s Own” (1929). However, and as this dissertation aims to show, Woolf’s work continues to provide an inspiration for twentieth-first-century writers, who write in her wake