“Am I All of Them?”
Virginia Woolf’s The Waves as Autobiography
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.35699/2317-2096.2025.55128Palavras-chave:
Virginia Woolf, autobiography, fiction, subjectivityResumo
In this essay, we depart from Virginia Woolf’s overtly autobiographical writings, such as “A Sketch of the Past” (1976), in order to think through the writer’s experimental literary stance towards autobiography as a genre and to investigate how the transgressive aspects of such a stance would appear in her fiction, notably in The Waves (1931). We argue, with Woolfian scholar Christine Froula (2005), that the novel could be read as an autobiography not in terms of Woolf’s material, empirical life, but of the birth of a fluid and fragmented subjectivity of the writer as artist. We turn to theorists of autobiography as a genre in order to understand how the traditional autobiographical gesture was erected on the belief in truth and in an indivisible, knowable, and masculine “I”. By doing so, we discuss how modernist and Woolfian texts defy such authoritative ideas of the autobiographical author. We shall point out examples of genre (and gender) transgressions in Woolf’s memoirs and diaries to finally depict how it also mobilises her fiction.
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