With the posthumous publication of Moments of Being, Virginia Woolf afforded her readers an intimate view of her childhood in late Victorian England. The signal event in that childhood was the death of Woolf's mother, Julia Stephen. By Woolfs own admission, her lost parent "obsessed" her until the completion of To the Lighthouse. Using the psychoanalytic theory of Melanie Klein, which stresses the primacy of mother-child relations, and the more recent "identity theory" of Hans Lichtenstein, which postulates that one's "way of being" is dictated by early maternal experience, this study contends that Woolf's obsession never ends. Indeed, maternal loss, coupled with what Klein calls "the urge towards reparation," are central motivating factors in Woolf's continuing creative process. This reading considers the author's nine novels, in order to highlight Woolf's lifelong, recurrent "vision" of Julia Stephen. Woolf's vision is encoded in several symbolic variations of her "identity theme," including the use of the mother figure as writer, as moral progenitor, and as prognosticator of a twofold philosophy of resignation and melancholy. Virginia Woolf writes to recreate the lost figure of Julia Stephen, and to recapture the love denied by her mother's death.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UMASS/oai:scholarworks.umass.edu:dissertations-7258 |
| Date | 01 January 1996 |
| Creators | Gilman, Bruce Edward |
| Publisher | ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst |
| Source Sets | University of Massachusetts, Amherst |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Source | Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest |
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