The rhetoric of space in early twentieth century women’s writing : writing places, making spaces in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and Jean Rhys’ Good Morning, Midnight
Modernist writing is fundamentally about experiencing the new spatial phenomena of the city that mushroomed in the early twentieth century- how facilities such as lavabos, hotels, automobiles, urban structures and streets, encroach on the unsuspecting modern individual. While spatiality expanded in the early 1900s, strategic spatial arrangements were concurrently invested to fortify gendered power structures. Gender stratification reinforced the urban polis as a masculine, public center while the countryside and home were respectively the fecund Mother garden and the private, nurturing realm. Such spatial setups problematized existing gender politics that spatially and socially segregate.
The paper will analyze specific places such as the home, parks, streets, omnibuses, salons, hotel rooms, cafés and lavabos in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and Jean Rhys’ Good Morning, Midnight. In the context of this paper, place would consider the physical localities while space examines the philosophical form and social relations that underpin. Through these architectural spaces, it strives to elucidate the concept of a potentially transgressive philosophical space- a coalescence of all tangible place, social space and abstract space that reaches beyond mere physical, capable of exploring multiple spatial dimensions and spheres.
Mrs Dalloway will provide the general physical cityscape as an overarching masculine and affluent place while Good Morning, Midnight allows the examination of liminal places of the city. This paper is interested in extricating the ways in which these protagonists wander into streets and places of the metropolis and how consciousness can be etched upon places. It seeks to investigate the different modes in which the Modernist subjectivity infiltrates the narratives, transforming place to space. Above all, it will look into the Modernist novel as a whole- how the narrative functions as a textual and creative space where places and spaces are in dialogue, ever progressing achronologically and multi-dimensionally.Master of Arts (HSS
