Imagens do feminino na vida e obra de Virginia Woolf

Abstract

In her 1924 essay, "Mr Bennett and Mrs. Brown , Virginia Woolf states that human character had changed by 1910. The present thesis, following Woolf s assertion, aims at understanding the changes promoted in the first two decades of the twentieth century in England through the lives of the artists and friends that would later be immortalized as the Bloomsbury Group. In the first part of our study, when we discuss the importance of Post-Impressonism to Bloomsbury Art, we will point out the ways in which the Bloomsburries surpassed the then current discussions on the theory of knowledge, which stemmed from Cambridge. Analogous to the silence of paintings, which were now fully formalist, we will point out that the language of resistance of Bloomsbury seems to have been anticipated by the lives of two of their artists: Virginia Woolf and her sister, Vanessa Bell. From this assumption, that there is a connection between the lives of the Bloomsbury women and the refractory nature of the Bloomsbury Group, we will start a discussion, already in the second half of our thesis, on how the silence that marks historically-constructed femininity reaches the status of a new language in the prose of Virginia Woolf. At this point, we will argue that the silence of this new prose seems comparable to the nature of poetic language itself, and here Virginia Woolf speaks to the future represented by Jean-Paul Sartre. After we point out what Woolf s poetic prose, or prosaic poetry, would be, we will finally establish a dialogue between this language of silence and what Woolf defined as the androgynous mind; this shall be articulated under the lens of the movement now known as écriture féminine, represented by francophone Hélène Cixous, among others