Virginia Woolf escreve a paternidade

Abstract

This dissertation investigates how Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) writes father-hood throughout her work, departing from the androgynous turn proposed at the end of A Room of One’s Own (1929) and expanded in Three Guineas (1938), which disarticulates the cultural codifications of masculine and feminine as ends in them-selves. Therefore, I follow professor Davi Pinho (2020), when he comprehends Woolf’s writings as the perpetual converse that she sustains with the world around her. Establishing this conversation as a philosophical “method” (PINHO, 2020), Woolf weaves a pattern of human relationships which sometimes uses life, some-times death, as the raw material for the construction of a vital community – making the positive encounter with difference an indispensable element for this construc-tion (BRAIDOTTI, 2011). Thus, relevant questions arise about the figuration of the father in Woolf’s texts departing, on one hand, from the confrontation with the sov-ereign and self-sufficient patriarchal subject, and, on the other, from the acknowl-edgement of our constitutive vulnerability as bodies positioned between the possi-bility of being wounded by and taking care of one another (BUTLER, 2019; CAVARERO, 2009). These are the (im)possible conversations which will rearticulate Woolf’s biographical father in her memory in order to rearrange figurations of fa-therhood throughout her work – especially in the conversations established be-tween her diaries, her posthumously published collection of memories, Moments of Being (1976), and her novel To the Lighthouse (1927). Ultimately, it is necessary to point out that the perpetual converse this dissertation intends to recognize and en-gage with started back in Woolf’s own writings – in her impulse to write this father as a closed and self-sufficient subject, yet always embedding in her texts the desire to open him up to the discovery of his inevitable exposure to the other