This thesis explores a psychoanalytic understanding of depression from the perspective of Fairbairn’s object relations theory, something Fairbairn did not himself undertake. Highlighting the historical and political contexts of the development of psychoanalysis in Fairbairn’s time, I underline the marginalization of Fairbairn’s theory, which I attribute primarily to his lifelong endeavour to challenge the orthodoxy of the time: instinct theory. I chart a theoretical trajectory from the instinct theory (Freud, Klein) to object relations theory (Fairbairn), to contextualise my argument for the potential of Fairbairn’s theory. My argument aligns with Rubens’ (1994, 1998) view that an extension of Fairbairn’s theory beyond what Fairbairn himself originally proposed on the subject of depression is not only advantageous but also necessary. The Fairbairnian understanding of depression at the heart of this inquiry is illustrated through my personal engagement with psychoanalytic theory and framed by my subjective experiences and interpretations. Contending that theory requires personal voices to make sense and be relevant, I engage creatively and personally using the method of letter-writing to an imaginary companion - Virginia Woolf. The Virginia Woolf I construct and with whom I engaged in the research process is based on factual information about Virginia Woolf along with her published texts. In this process I blur the boundary between the real Woolf and my imaginary Woolf. Troubling the edge of reality and fantasy, I use the Woolf of my imagination to stage a process of getting to know Woolf personally, working to develop a trusting relationship and engaging her in a conversation about theory. My letters to Virginia Woolf trace an unfolding dialogue in which we tell and hear each other’s most intimate stories, once unthinkable and unsayable. The letters trace the transformation of my own understanding of the nature of depression, and through them I seek to establish a line of theoretical argument about depression running through the claims of Freud and Klein before turning to the Fairbairnian version of object relations theory. In so doing this thesis complicates psychoanalytic knowledge of the nature of depression, and argues that, framed in Fairbairn’s system, depression can be understood as an actively organised psychic manoeuvre to defend against changes to the endopsychic structure. In other words, and as elaborated through the letters constructed in this thesis, I argue that depression can be understood as a defence against the disintegration of a particular sense of self sponsored by internal object relationships.

Modernism is a popular topic for diverse kinds of scholarship and theories, yet the possibilities of its contribution to education have been neglected. This thesis is an attempt to illustrate modernism's utility in forming a theory of education through examining the thoughts of two prominent modernists, Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster. In reviewing both their fiction and nonfiction, we not only gain valuable insight into and contextualization of modernism, we are also introduced to possible (theoretical) solutions to problems that continue to plague our classrooms. By evaluating modernist themes of form, narration, becoming a reader and a critic, and time, I hope to illustrate modernism's capacity to contribute to the educational conversation in unique and valuable ways. As we channel the values Woolf and Forster lived by and demonstrated in their writing into an adaptable educational theory, we will be able to produce generations of better readers, better thinkers, better learners, and ultimately better individuals.

<p>This essay focuses on female identity formation in patriarchal society in Virginia Woolf’s <em>To The Lighthouse </em>and Sylvia Plath’s <em>The Bell Jar</em>. Both authors portray female characters who struggle with the normative gender identity. As the novels represent different eras and locations, the two characters examined in this essay, Woolf’s Lily Briscoe and Plath’s Esther Greenwood, have very little in common on the surface. However, both authors deliver similar feminist social criticism concerning the negative impact of patriarchal norms on female identity formation. This study analyzes some of these external constraints, or norms, and aims to prove that the two female characters’ ideas of womanhood and identity collide in a similar manner with those norms. Schachter’s study on identity constraints in identity formation and Sanchez and Crocker’s research on gender ideals work as the theoretical background in the study. The negative influence on Lily’s and Esther’s identity formation is similar since both characters live under a symbolical bell jar, unable to form their identity according to their own preferences. Patriarchal conventions remain a constant constraint and the two women keep struggling to find a balance between their own ideas and those of their societies. Both Lily and Esther grow to understand their own traits, desires and abilities in their respective stories, but fail to reach their preferred identity. Their resistance to adapt to gender conventions helps them to form a stronger identity, but it is an identity that remains profoundly and negatively influenced by the patriarchal norms of their societies.</p>

This essay focuses on female identity formation in patriarchal society in Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. Both authors portray female characters who struggle with the normative gender identity. As the novels represent different eras and locations, the two characters examined in this essay, Woolf’s Lily Briscoe and Plath’s Esther Greenwood, have very little in common on the surface. However, both authors deliver similar feminist social criticism concerning the negative impact of patriarchal norms on female identity formation. This study analyzes some of these external constraints, or norms, and aims to prove that the two female characters’ ideas of womanhood and identity collide in a similar manner with those norms. Schachter’s study on identity constraints in identity formation and Sanchez and Crocker’s research on gender ideals work as the theoretical background in the study. The negative influence on Lily’s and Esther’s identity formation is similar since both characters live under a symbolical bell jar, unable to form their identity according to their own preferences. Patriarchal conventions remain a constant constraint and the two women keep struggling to find a balance between their own ideas and those of their societies. Both Lily and Esther grow to understand their own traits, desires and abilities in their respective stories, but fail to reach their preferred identity. Their resistance to adapt to gender conventions helps them to form a stronger identity, but it is an identity that remains profoundly and negatively influenced by the patriarchal norms of their societies.

Not available / text

This dissertation rethinks textual images of the other’s beauty, depicted in works by D. H. Lawrence, Muriel Spark, and Virginia Woolf, whose fascination with the other, called by this dissertation the beloved, urged them to inscribe the beloved’s original beauty in texts. Their works make perceptible the singularity of the beloved, while revealing the writers’ predicament in translating the beloved’s ineffability in texts. Taking the untranslatability of the beloved into consideration, this dissertation traces the ways in which these writers’ texts capture the beloved’s original beauty at moments of revelation, related to epiphanies entering the terrain of literary modernism. My study thereby scrutinizes the dynamics of images of beauty and their impacts on art and politics in the context of modernism. In doing so, I argue that the texts I consider express the beloved’s singularity in challenge of the beautified images that many other artists invented for self-directed purposes in the early and mid-twentieth century. First, I explore Lawrence’s creation of aesthetic spaces in Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) in keeping with his desire for making palpable visual spectacles through the text. Analyzing how this ambition helped to create the novel’s aesthetic scenes, I would like to define Lawrence as an aesthete whose aspiration lay in expressing the beauty of things. Then, I discuss Spark’s affection for her characters and her desire to visualize the figure’s originality in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) and The Girls of Slender Means (1963). Considering Spark in relation to both modernists and Fascists, I propose that her making of the image of her character breaks away from Fascism’s aestheticization of human figures. Finally, I investigate Woolf’s love for words by focusing on “The Duchess and the Jeweller” (1938), a short story written for expressing various modes of beauty in words. Drawing to the represented link between words and smell, considered the most “wasteful” sense, I examine how the sensory medium makes perceptible intrinsic qualities of words, and argues that her depiction of words, linked to smell, reveals the anti-utilitarian nature of words, unconstrained by a craftsman’s manipulation of words.

Modernism is often connected to the public sphere due to its associations with urbanity and technological changes. But interiority and private life was as important to modernity and, in particular, in Virginia Woolf’s writing. This essay explores the protagonists’ access to and experience of privacy in Woolf’s novels To the Lighthouse (1927) and Mrs Dalloway (1925), which both centre on women in a domestic environment. The reading combines modernist reactions against Victorian domesticity, which was structured on the private/public dichotomy and which limited women’s access to privacy, and combines it with modernist views of interiority, informed, more specifically, by Freud’s model of the unconscious and the spatial features of it. Privacy and interiority are imagined with spatial metaphors, but privacy is not necessarily connected to physical place and being alone, but rather having the ability to control the social situation and to choose what one reveals about oneself. Both novels re-imagine privacy and its ties to physical as well as mental space. This essay argues that To the Lighthouse is centred on a traditional Victorian home which reflects how its protagonist experiences interior privacy, and Mrs Dalloway explores a more modern domesticity that challenges Victorian organisation of the home and in turn, women’s access to privacy and solitude. With modernity public life was made available for women to a larger extent, but just as public life is coded by power relations, so is private life, which determines what sort of life could be lived by, for example, women.

Thesis (M.A.)--Georgia State University, 2008. / Title from file title page. Randy Malamud, committee chair; Meg Harper, Paul Schmidt, committee members. Electronic text (61 p.) : digital, PDF file. Description based on contents viewed Oct. 3, 2008. Includes bibliographical references (p. 58-61).

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 1989.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 1989. / Also available in print.